Island of Lightning by Robert Minhinnick

say, and he putters and phutters back round to his mum, the lady of the victories all right, her shrine where his balls should be, the bottom of his boat full of torn up tickets.
    Then there is David who lives on the ramparts above the yacht club in a room that once was a gun emplacement. Snug and dark. That’s the best that can be said for it. At night he will look out at the stations of the stars all the way to Tunis. David spends his money at the tattooist in Strait Street, that little entry between the Smiling Prince tavern and the Consulate of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. A story is unfolding upon his back and shoulders and it concerns his greatest dream. To catch a devil fish. David has heard many stories about them, but none of us, apart from our kingly African, will ever accompany him. Why? Because he sails out for days in an old motor-boat with an oildrum of drinking water and hardly a tarpaulin to hide from the sun. David, bless him, has read the great books and his hero is Odysseus.
    David, I say, beware the tales. The poets are never to be trusted. They are an eelish tribe. But that young man has decided he has a quest. We need such things, he says. A great work. A challenge and a life’s undertaking. And I nod and smile and say no more. Too soon David will sleep the iron sleep.
    Ciangura? His home is an attic behind the Palazzo Carafa, opposite the Societa Dante Alighieri. You must have seen it? Near the amateur football HQ. Ciangura is determined to net cerna to sell to the restaurants. His cousin is a chef and looks out for our catch. Well this Ciangura, he lives with a dumb woman, her hair is greasy as sump oil. A skinny cat, not bad looking. Or so I’m told. And jumpy as a hare. That’s a poor corner now, though much of the district has become offices for notaries and advocates. You know the type. Well, this woman plays the zither and that’s what you’ll hear if you ever climb to Ciangura’s apartment, someone’s transistor in the middle flat, then this slithery zithery thing at the very top, zinging and zanging, not an atrocious sound. Not an insult to the ear, I have to say. And the sky blue in the roof.
    Scibberas’s idea is always to go for ceppulazza, which doesn’t excite many of the others, though they sometimes agree. We always think he has an interesting life because next to him on Saint Christopher Street is a Moroccan trading company that claims to import furniture and musical instruments. But the door is covered in dust and there’s few have seen it open.
    Hey Skibbo, we say. What goes on?
    Then he will shrug and say ‘search me’ and pull his boat down the steps on a set of pramwheels. But we are suspicious of that smile. It is a dolphin’s smile. Because when the dolphin smiles it is thinking about something else. Well, we’ve heard that Scibberas and Aurelio and Ciangura sometimes help the Moroccans, lugging rugs out of vans. A bit of muscle. And as payment they are each given a pinch of hashchich.
    Skibbo, we say, any fool can smell that sweet smoke. The air about you is like a dolceria. And your eyelids, Skibbo, are heavy as a goshawk’s, and a dreamy look upon your face and no edge to you man, these days. No zip in your zobb.
    But Skibbo will pull the boat along on its wheels and laugh and stumble and tell us of his dreams and his girl friend’s dreams because they dream the same dream. And we always groan at that and shake our heads. We are experienced men. You must understand that. Men of the world. That kind of talk is bread dipped in tea. The same dream? Sop we call it here. Bloody sop.
    2. The Bells
    When I awake the Carmelites are chanting. Perhaps it is they who have broken my sleep. But that sound? I say to myself. That sound? I am born in bells. Their cast iron is this apartment’s walls. Green, I say. A green iron sound from which there is no mercy, no mercy from these bells that roar like bulls, green bulls