Here Are the Young Men (19 page)

He started off on what was sure to be a longwinded, regret-heavy explanation, but the blonde girl – we had by now learned that her name was Nicky, and her redhead friend's, Lorna – said, ‘Oh no, don't worry. I'll get this one.'

‘Are ye sure?' he said, as if it was a completely unforeseen, even bizarre idea.

‘
Oh yes, of course, no problem.'

I had barely said a word since the girls appeared. The truth was, I found them intimidating. They were a few years older than me, and surely far more interesting. No doubt they were hugely sexually experienced. As we sat down at a thick wooden table and sipped our pints, I remained silent but for a few nervy grunts, and imagined them screaming and sweating in the throes of mind-blowing orgasms administered by calm Jürgens, cool Tibors, handsome Tags.

We quickly finished our pints and then Lorna got another round in. Both of them had now settled into the idea of spending the afternoon with a Dublin junkie and his witless, wordless friend, and they loosened up, laughing and joking, telling us about themselves. They had just finished college, studying architecture (Nicky) and fine art (Lorna). Now they were ‘backpacking around Europe, staying with friends here and there, seeing what happens'.

‘How long have yis been in Dublin?' I asked.

‘Only two days. You're the first Irish people we've met since coming here, in fact.'

‘We're the only Irish people here,' said Scag. ‘I imagine your dormitory is crowded, is it? The summer and everything.'

‘Oh, we are not staying in a dormitory, we have a double room,' said Lorna.

‘I see. Well, how about another pint, girls? Like I say, next time it's all on me.'

‘Of course,' said Nicky with a grin.

We stayed in the pub all afternoon, getting progressively more wrecked. Every hour or so either Scag or I would roll a joint – at first in the toilets, but after a few pints, under the table – and go outside to smoke it.

The girls were drunker than we were, though they kept up the pace surprisingly well. Scag hardly seemed affected at all. I supposed that, with all the smack and other drugs he must have hurled into
his
body down the years, alcohol no longer had any effect on him at all, or not very much at any rate.

He was now educating the girls with one of what he called his ‘race theories'.

‘Ye see, drink pulls ye back into yer body. It anchors ye in yer physical experience, whereas marijuana on the other hand makes ye float further out into the cosmic realms, the non-visible reality.' He vaguely waved a hand in front of his face to suggest enigma and weirdness.

‘You mean the spirit world?' said Lorna.

‘Precisely. The fuckin spirit world. And that, ladies, is why the Irishman drinks so much: cos he's already far enough out in the other world, due to his inborn Irish nature. He doesn't need something to take him out there to the fairies and the spirits and the bleedin demons. He's already there, so the oul grog helps to keep him grounded, it doesn't let him drift too far out. The drink is better for the Irishman than the weed. That's why I never touch marijuana, girls, not so much as a single toke of the stuff.'

As he finished saying this, he slowly licked along the joint he was making, looking intently at Nicky all the while. He smoothed down the folded papers with his thumb and twisted the end of the joint to finish it. Then he put it behind his ear.

‘Very interesting, Irishman,' said Nicky with another playful smirk.

‘Mmm. You know, we were supposed to do some of the sightseeing today. So long to that,' laughed Lorna. The place was starting to fill up now, the Friday after-work crowd coming in with ferocious thirsts on them.

‘Ah, don't mind that,' replied Scag. ‘This is the most authentic bit of Dublin cultural experience yis are likely to get, drinkin all day with two bona fide Irishmen. When in Rome, ladies, do as the Greeks.'

They laughed and raised their glasses to us. Since she had started getting a little drunk, Lorna had begun giving me looks, smiling at
me
when someone else was talking. I grew tense whenever she did it, looking into the head of my pint and then taking a big, steeling gulp.

Nicky said: ‘So we were wondering, do you know anywhere that is good that we can go to, like for going out?'

‘Ye mean before or after we go back to yer hotel and have a bit of fun?' said Scag with a grin.

‘What!' Nicky protested. ‘I'll pretend I didn't hear that.' But she was laughing as she said it.

‘What's wrong? I wasn't implyin anything underhand, ladies. I just meant that we could go back there for a few cans and a smoke, like. Save a few sheckles, play some of our own tunes, far from the maddening crowd, know wharray mean? God almighty, ladies, what do yis take me for?'

‘Well, we'll see,' said Nicky, playfully. ‘But we want to go out in Dublin, what can you recommend?'

‘Well girls, the thing is, I thought I had me ATM card with me, but now it seems I've left it back at me gaff. But if yis wouldn't mind buying me another couple of pints, I'd be more than happy to show youse ladies a good night.'

‘And you, Matthew? I imagine you've got no ATM card either?'

‘No, I'm afraid not,' I said. I had bought one round, but decided to keep quiet about the twenty quid still in my pocket. I was playing it like Scag.

‘Well, we don't mind buying you a few more drinks, do we, Nicky?'

       

We went to a dingy, heaving club off Thomas Street that I'd never seen before. Scag said he knew the DJ and he could get us in for free; surprisingly, this turned out to be true. The bouncer asked me for ID, but Scag and the girls acted outraged and he let it pass. Inside the club, there were four different rooms, each with its own DJ. There was techno of various kinds, and trippy, mellow electro stuff, and
in
one room, this brutal noise-music, like pneumatic drills and chainsaws, all fucked up. I thought of
King of Pop
, wondering what Rez was doing. There was no point calling him. He rarely came out these days. Besides, every time I met him now I'd come away feeling drained, hollowed out, lethargic. In a different way than Kearney, Rez sucked the life out of you. He was a vampire.

‘Girls, listen, I see an old mate of mine over there. If yis like, I can get some yokes off him. They're always amazin from him, and he'll give me them for dead cheap as well cos I'm a pal. What do yis reckon?'

‘Yokes?' said Nicky.

‘Pills. Ecstasy. Yips. Fuckin disco biscuits.'

‘Ah! Okay. Go and ask him, I'll give you the money in a moment.'

The girls danced while I stood at the side of the floor, drinking my pint and feeling awkward. Scag went and talked to his friend, a wiry, paranoid-looking guy in a black Autechre T-shirt. Older guys than me confidently manoeuvred themselves closer to the girls, who laughed and threw back their heads, encircled by admirers, enjoying the attention.

Scag saw them laughing and dancing with the men. He called them away and they came. I followed.

‘He doesn't have any yokes, but he does have some charlie. What about it? He says it's amazin stuff, and he wouldn't lie to me.'

The girls looked at each other.

‘How much is it costing?' said Nicky.

‘Only eighty quid a gramme.'

The girls conferred for a while. Then Lorna shrugged and said, ‘Okay, let's get two grammes.'

Scag took their money and returned to talk with his friend. I watched as the friend slipped him something at waist height whilst maintaining eye contact.

‘How have you known Scag?' asked Lorna, who had moved up beside me.

I
tensed up once more. ‘Oh, I sort of met him through a friend, like. He's … I haven't known him very long. He's cool though. He seems to know everyone in the city.'

‘I'm impressed.'

‘Yeah. He told me he's never worked for more than two months in any job in his whole life. Usually he doesn't work at all, he just gets the dole. He thinks work distracts him. Ye know, from his poetry.'

‘Oh yes.'

Scag had wasted little time in telling the girls about
Molesting Your Inner Child
. After meeting him the last time, I'd bought a copy from a dusty, second-hand bookstore on Exchequer Street. Though I liked the poems – short, punchy verses about drugs or violence, or straight-up pornography – I suspected that all serious critics who knew about such things would regard them as shit.

Scag came back with the coke. He slipped the wrap to Lorna.

‘Go on in, ladies, and do a line. Then we'll go in when yis are finished. How does that sound?'

‘Okay, cool.'

‘And yis might get another round of drinks on yer way back, if ye don't mind. Like I say, next time it's all on me.'

The girls merged into the crowd and Scag grabbed me by the shoulder.

‘Fuck me, did you see the arse on that Nicky? Jesus God, I can hardly keep me eyes away from it. I swear to good fuck, if we don't end up with these girls tonight, I'm going to rip me own bollocks off.'

Moments later he was grinning and saying, ‘How do you make a hormone, Matthew?'

I grinned too, knowing something lewd was coming and enjoying it already. ‘I don't know, how?'

‘Kick her in the gee!' He roared with laughter at his own joke, and I giggled along.

‘Here they come,' he said, alert again, anticipating drugs.

We got the cocaine and went into the bathroom together. There
was
a black guy wearing a white waistcoat in there, standing by the sink with a silver tray full of lollypops and aftershave, and a container of donated coins. We stepped past him and into a cubicle. I closed the door behind us and Scag started scooping coke on to a glossy flyer placed on the cistern. He chopped out two enormous lines. They were almost novelty-sized, I reflected.

He bent down and snorted the bigger of the pair through a €20 note that he'd had all along. ‘Get that into ye,' he said, sniffing and handing me the note. I bent and sniffed. ‘Grand. Now I'll just take a bit of commission for after.' He expertly fashioned another wrap out of a piece of cardboard from a club flyer he'd had in his pocket. Then he put a heap of cocaine on the end of the key and hooshed it in. ‘There we go. Buyer's cut. Patriarchy, Matthew – it might be on its knees but there's life yet in the old whore.'

I thought I should put up at least a half-arsed defence of ethical decency and said, ‘Ah, I don't know, they're nice girls. We've been bummin off them all day. Maybe we shouldn't take some of it. They're bein generous with it, anyway, so there's no real need.'

Scag laughed when I said that: a cheery, pleasant kind of laugh – he'd found what I'd said genuinely funny. Nor did he feel fit to respond, other than saying once more, as his laughter subsided: ‘The fuckin arse on that Nicky one, I swear to God.'

When we came back out of the toilets we couldn't see the girls. We pushed upstairs. The music was harder here, more frenetic. Green lasers cut through a fog of black ice. The smell of sweating bodies was thick and lusty. The girls were dancing near the DJ's table, flailing their limbs, smiles streaked across their faces as they pulsed in the hectic lighting.

We joined them. Then we all raised our drinks and clinked. ‘
Sláinte!
' we roared over the din of music. I saw Lorna smile at me in a white flash of strobe lighting; she looked feral, her smile a bloodthirsty curl. But I was more confident on the coke and I danced beside her, leaning in now and then to shout something into her ear.
I
realized that she was slightly taller than me. Then Scag was kissing Nicky. I didn't see any build-up to it – one moment they weren't, and then they were kissing.

Emboldened by Scag's success and by the coke that continued to course through me, I danced closer to Lorna, and soon, unbelievably to me, we were kissing too.

       

The girls' room was on the third floor of a hostel on the south side of the quays, with tall windows looking out on the Liffey. Scag pulled open the curtains as soon as we all fell laughing through the door. The dark river glistened below with slivers of reflected neon. The walls in the room were blue, and the girls' backpacks were on the floor, beside the double bed. There were a few notebooks on the floor, along with clothes including, I noted with a strange, heady emotion, more than one pair of knickers.

‘Crack on the tunes, ladies,' said Scag, nodding towards the set of portable white speakers and the iPod beside the bed. Nicky put on something that was like punk and electro mixed together. I was about to ask what it was, but Scag said, ‘So are yis writers or wha?' He was gesturing towards the notebooks on the ground.

Lorna started dancing while we opened up the cans we'd bought with the girls' money, behind the bar at inflated, post-offo prices. Nicky said, ‘Ah, yes. Yes and no. Mostly no. I write what I feel and think. It's … I do it for myself. Poems, but not really poems. Feelings and impressions mainly, I guess.'

‘And you, Lorna?' I said.

‘Me too. The same, I suppose. Feelings, memories. I try to write everything down so I can keep it with me when it's over. When something is finished, how can you know it ever happened, apart from the memory it leaves you? I don't like to take photos too much, so I write it down.'

‘
Yis can write about us then, your two gentlemen hosts and guides for the night,' put in Scag. ‘Make sure ye portray me as havin a smoulderin Byronic intensity. Use that phrase.'

They laughed. ‘Yeah, we will, undoubting. Cheers.
Sláinte
.'

Scag mooched over towards Nicky, who was sitting on the bed, and a moment later the two of them were kissing again, laughing, saying hushed, hurried things to each other. I sat on the chair by the bed. Lorna kept dancing. ‘I can't sit still when I'm on the cocaine,' she said. I watched her, horny yet anxious. She laughed a little, then stepped over, leaned down and kissed me. She took my face in her hands and guided me to my feet. We started kissing, more and more heavily, and her hands began sliding over my body. Behind me, from the bed, I heard rising groans from Scag and Nicky. He was hardly going to start shagging her here, in a room with one bed while we were here too, I thought. And then I thought: of course he is.