Here Are the Young Men (2 page)

Rez was making a here-we-go-again face for me and Cocker. Now he turned and said, ‘But are ye takin the piss, Kearney?'

Kearney frowned. Only now did he notice me and Cocker. ‘No. What do ye mean?' he said.

‘They made a game about the IRA? And ye have to plant bombs in shoppin centres and kill the fuckin queen? Are ye jokin or what?'

‘No. Jesus, Rez, were ye even listenin? It's not a real game, this is a game that
I
want to invent.
Provos!
it's called. Were ye even fuckin listenin?'

I laughed.

‘It'll be a great fuckin game,' Kearney went on, flashing me his alligator grin. He turned back to Rez. ‘But come on and make us another one of those spliffs. We deserve it after all those exams. The amount of study we put in!'

We laughed at that.

We finished the vodka and then Rez took another bottle from his tattered, heavily grafittied schoolbag. When Cocker and Kearney were off howling at these two girls who were walking past, Rez took a swig, passed me the bottle and said, ‘Did ye notice it?'

‘What?' I said.

‘Kearney's accent. Like I was sayin to ye before. Have ye not noticed? It's not like a real accent any more. It's like a caricature of an accent, like he's doin an impression of someone doin an impression of an Irish accent. Someone from fuckin Sweden.'

I grinned and wiped my lips with my hand. ‘I don't know. He still just sounds like Kearney to me. You're just smokin too much. You're such a weirdo, Rez.'

I was about to ask him how he'd done in the final exam, but my phone beeped in my pocket. I took it out and read the message. It was from Jen: ‘
Hi am on the way. Hope u did well, c u in 10 xx
.'

I
wondered if she'd sent it to all the lads. I looked around; none of them were taking out their phones. She had only sent it to me. I put the phone away.

On his hunkers in the sand, looking out at the waves, Rez lit a cigarette. Then he swigged on the vodka and swung the bottle in front of him, tracing the horizon. ‘I love it out here. Seriously. That's the best thing about Dublin, you're never that far from the sea. All exiles are drawn to the sea – I read that somewhere.'

I watched Kearney in the distance. Cocker had come lurching over, cheerful again after the vomiting. ‘Yer always readin books, Rez,' he said. ‘Yer mad, ye are. Who ever learned anything from a book?'

‘That's a good point, Cocker. I'll have to rethink my whole entire outlook on things, now that you've told me that,' said Rez.

‘But this thing about the sea, it doesn't work for us,' I said. ‘How can we be exiles if we're in our own country?'

Rez shrugged. ‘Well, ye can be an exile in your own body, or in your own family, or in your own fuckin century, so why can't ye be an exile in your own country where ye were born?'

‘Ye can be an exile in yer own arse,' said Cocker. He cackled and fell backwards to land with a thump on the damp sand.

But now Rez was warming to his theme. ‘Are ye seriously tellin me ye don't feel like that here?' he asked me.

I shrugged. ‘I suppose.'

‘I mean, what does it really mean to you to be Irish? I mean, like, growin up in the suburbs, which may as well be anywhere, and watchin American films and English telly and English football, and everyone you're supposed to look up to, all they go on about is cars and mortgages, and these are supposed to be the most important things in life. The property ladder. Jesus. And now we're expected to race out there and join in the fun? No thanks. I mean, at least we feel depressed about what we're seein around us.'

‘Yeah,' I said. I'd heard it a hundred times. I murmured something about the consumer wasteland and threw a stone into the sea.
Really,
I was thinking of Jen. I lit a cigarette and sat down, scanning the grey horizon, the waves.

Just then I heard a call and we looked around: Jen, walking towards us along the beach, waving. She was smiling and her dark-red hair was swept up in the wind.

When she reached us she said, ‘So here we are on the other side. It's all over. We made it. We're free. So how did it go?'

We made vague noises.

‘I see,' she said, raising an eyebrow. Jen was the only one among us who'd done any real study.

After a while we went down to where there are caves cut into the bottom of the cliffs. We found a quiet spot and sat down on our jackets, putting the bottle and some cans on the ground beside us. Rez got a spliff together. While we were smoking, Jen asked, ‘So guys, have yis worked out what yis're all goin to do now that the Leavin Cert is over?'

There were various mumbles, nothing in particular.

‘Have you?' I asked her.

She shrugged. ‘Yeah. I mean I'm still plannin to go to college, but probably not straight away. In the meantime I know I can always work with my dad for a while, if I want to. I know he'd pay me well and I wouldn't have to do that much work. But I really don't know if I want to work for
daddy
.' She said the word in a piss-taking kind of way, which I liked. ‘I think I'm goin to go travellin, maybe. Before college. Maybe at the end of the summer. I'm thinkin of takin a year out.'

‘Oh yeah? Where are ye goin to go?' asked Cocker. ‘I'd love to go to Spain. They're mad fuckers over there. The way they smoke, they make us look like a bunch of ponces. I knew this Spanish guy last summer, he was a mate of me brother's, and I swear to Jaysus, he made me feel like a fuckin pioneer. He'd light up a bong first thing in the mornin and wouldn't move away from it, even to eat his breakfast, until the middle of the afternoon. He clung to the bong like it was his fuckin baby infant. If he had to leave his gaff at all,
even
just to go down to the shop for munchies, he'd roll about four joints, just in case. Or, as he said it, “just if case-ed”. Fuckin hell, now he was a
real
stoner.'

We were all laughing away. Cocker was probably exaggerating, if not making the whole thing up, but it didn't really matter. Even if the stories Cocker told were total bullshit, and they usually were, the fact that he'd bother to lie like that at all was funny in itself.

Jen was smiling too but she seemed far away, looking out at the sea. While we were still chuckling about the Spanish dope fiend, she said: ‘I don't really know where I want to go. Maybe Asia, or South America. Or Africa. I don't know. Somewhere really
different
. Where do people go? People travel these days, don't they? You don't have to be rich to do it, or –'

‘But ye
are
rich,' I interrupted.

‘– or some hardcore adventurer type. People go travellin all the time. But anyway, we'll see if I get into Trinity or UCD first of all.'

‘How come ye want to go travellin?' asked Cocker. ‘Doesn't Dublin do it for ye? It's the centre of the universe. Don't forget Gay Byrne lives here, and didn't Celine Dion play the RDS only last week? What more could ye want, Jen?'

‘Dublin is just so fuckin
dull
,' she said. ‘I mean, I love you lads, and Louise, and Gráinne and Michelle, and some of the others. But most people here, they hardly seem to be alive at all, do ye know what I mean?'

‘That's just what I was sayin to Matthew a few minutes ago,' said Rez.

‘All the yuppies,' I said. ‘They've taken over. We need to launch some kind of resistance.'

‘An insurgency,' said Rez.

‘Yeah, with roadside bombs and IEDs and stuff,' said Kearney. ‘And a war on knackers as well.
Dawn of the Dead
, it'll be like.'

‘It's not even that they're yuppies or whatever,' Jen said. ‘That's everywhere. They're just … I don't know, spiritless or something.
Th
ey've no real curiosity for life, they just want it the usual way. I'd be bored out of my mind if I stayed here. Don't yis feel the same, ever?'

‘Yeah, I do,' I said.

We all fell silent, thinking our own thoughts. After a minute or two Rez said, ‘What about you, Cocker, what's your plans?' He'd put on his dark glasses again, despite the cloudy sky.

Cocker took the spliff that Kearney passed him, pondering the question. ‘I haven't really got any idea. If I get enough points I'll study sound engineering, but I probably won't. I wasn't exactly at home burnin the fuckin midnight oil, was I? Haha. Porin over the books, like? I doubt I'll get enough points to get in anywhere.'

‘That's the spirit, Cocker,' said Kearney.

‘And what if ye don't get in anywhere?' I asked.

He shrugged. ‘Work for a while, I suppose.'

‘In Dunnes Stores where ye are now?'

‘Why not? It's not exactly a long-term plan or anything. One place is as good as another.'

‘As shite as another, ye mean.'

‘That's exactly what I mean.'

‘Stackin tins of beans and facin off on the jacks-roll aisle – Cocker, you're goin to be a credit to your parents, I'm tellin ye,' said Rez, chuckling.

‘Yeah, I know. I can just see me ma flushin with pride when she goes to do the shoppin and meets her thirty-year-old son, fuckin moppin the floor over by the meat counter.'

Stoned off my head, I got the giggles at the image of a shabbier, older Cocker, ruddy as ever, in a Dunnes Stores T-shirt with some oul one asking him where the tampons were.

‘And you, Connelly?' asked Cocker when my giggling subsided.

‘Well, I'm still hopin I'll be able to get into college,' I said. I had applied to study English in the few colleges in Dublin where you could do it. English meant literature; that was alright. Books weren't bad. I wasn't into them as much as Rez, but they were more
interesting
than studying business, for example. Business wasn't interesting at all. In fact I despised it. Besides, the reason I wanted to go to college didn't have much to do with the pursuit of knowledge; I wanted to go because it seemed like the only alternative was to work, and I hated work. I'd had part-time jobs before and it was a load of shit. The idea of working full-time filled me with horror.

‘Ye mean ye seriously reckon you'll get in when ye never lifted a finger to study for the exams?' Cocker asked.

‘I'll get enough marks,' I said. ‘I'm one clever bastard.'

‘We'll see about that,' said Cocker, grinning.

The wind picked up. The sea was getting choppier.

‘The future,' said Rez out of nowhere, somberly. We were silent for a while, the Irish Sea crashing cold against the cliffs. I was on a nice buzz and it was making me sentimental. I started feeling sad about everything, kind of nostalgic, and then anxious for what was coming next – real life, as everyone always called it.

I said to the others, ‘We should all stick together, though. I mean, we should all keep in touch. Not just keep in touch, like ringin each other up and shakin hands when we meet and all that crap, like a bunch of yuppies, but stay
close
, stay as mates, like. Ye know what I mean?' I wanted to tell them that they were like a family to me or something, but I was afraid they were going to rip the piss out of me.

They didn't take the piss, though, not even Kearney. They didn't really say anything, just nodded and murmured softly, like they'd been thinking the same thing before I said it.

A while later, Rez had one of the sudden bursts of energy he was still capable of now and again. He pounced to his feet, dark glasses on like Lou Reed and a spliff dangling from his mouth, and announced, ‘I know what we can do, lads! I've got it sussed. After we get the results we can all get our hands on a leprechaun suit each, and then we'll go into town and stand on Grafton Street and tell all the Yanks who come along that we're authentic fuckin Irish leprechauns. Can yis picture it? “Ah sure to be Jaysus, aren't we
only
a troupe of Irish leprechauns, innocently wanderin down this enchanted Grafton Street, but if yis'd like to throw a few of those silver American coins into me oul Paddy cap, sure it'd be no quare thing at all, at all. Sure aren't we only magic, us bleedin leprechauns, to be sure to be sure.”' He held the spliff out like a pipe and puffed on it with his brow furrowed. ‘Jen, you can be Molly Malone.'

Cocker's eyes lit up. ‘Did yis ever see the tits on Molly Malone, the one in town? Seriously, have a look next time you're in there. I always stare down at them until too many people are lookin at me. I can't help it, they're fuckin gorgeous. Ye can just tell she'd be total filth. Same as Miss Nolan.'

Jen was giggling. She looked up at me, sitting very close, her cheek resting on her knee. Her hair was curved like a wave. I looked away.

Jen went home around four o'clock, taking the DART the few stops back to Blackrock. We walked with her to the station. ‘Give my regards to Lord Bono,' she said. ‘Anyway, I'll see you guys on Saturday.' She flashed me a smile that was bright and sincere. My mind was warm and foggy with the drink. Jen is alright, I thought.

‘Right,' said Cocker when Jen had gone, clapping his hands together. ‘Are we ready to do this, or wha?'

       

We walked for twenty minutes before coming to Bono's house. Cocker knew the way. He had gotten the exact directions from his brother or someone, really keen on doing it, as we all were. Kearney remained quiet as we approached the coastal mansion. I wondered if he was building up to something. That was Kearney's style.

A wide gravel driveway led up to the black metallic gate. At the side there was one of those speakerphone things. ‘Here we are,' said Rez when we reached the gate. ‘The Bonosphere. This is as close as we can get without gettin shot by his lasers.'

‘
A-Bonomation,' I said.

We huddled around the electronic speaker and Rez pressed the button.