Young Skins
Authors: Colin Barrett
Praise for
Young Skins
“Justly acclaimed for his lyrical, deadpan style by some of the giants of contemporary Irish literature, including Anne Enright and Colm Tóibín, Barrett offers an extraordinary debut that heralds a brutal yet alluring new voice in contemporary fiction.”
—
Library Journal
(starred review)
“Many fiction writers are attracted to nonexistent but identifiable settings. Thomas Hardy created Wessex, Robert Musil transformed Austria-Hungary into Kakania, and in
Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner literally mapped his Yoknapatawpha County. At once Lafayette, Mississippi, and not Lafayette, Mississippi, Yoknapatawpha offered readers a familiar setting without the danger of their imaginations snagging on the join between reality and fiction. Colin Barrett confidently secures this same blend of familiarity and freedom with the first line of his debut short-story collection . . . his stories invite second readings that . . . seem to uncover sentences that weren’t there the first time around. Chekhov once told his publisher that it isn’t the business of a writer to answer questions, only to formulate them correctly. Throughout this extraordinary debut, but particularly in the excellent stories that bookend it, Colin Barrett is asking the right questions.”
—
Guardian
(UK)
“A stunning debut . . . all seven tales converge towards one singular theme: the failure constantly lurking in the shadows of the human condition. The timeless nature of each story means this collection can—and will—be read many years from now.”
—
Sunday Times
(UK)
“Barrett simply outwrites many of his peers with a chilling confidence that suggests there is far more beneath the surface than merely the viciously effective black humor.”
—
Irish Times
, Fiction of the Year
“A sustained and brilliant performance by a young writer of remarkable talent, and confirmation that Colin is a writer of significance with something important to say.”
—Short Story Ireland
“Raw and affecting . . . Barrett’s use of language is powerful and surprising . . . These stories are moving and memorable.”
—
Irish Independent
“It isn’t necessarily the job of fiction writers to explain our social landscape, but sometimes the best of them do. Colin Barrett’s short, brutal collection of stories presents clearly and without sentimentality a picture of the young Irish small-town male, in his current crisis of hopelessness and alienation.”
—
Irish Times
“Superbly observed . . . Every sentence counts in these mesmerizing stories from an exciting literary author.”
—
Irish Examiner
“Sharp, edgy, heartrendingly provocative. Colin Barrett is a distinctive, exciting new voice out of Ireland.”
—David Means
“
Young Skins
knocked me on my ass. It’s moody, funny, vibrant, and vivid. It’s beautifully compressed and unafraid to take a bruising or lyrical leap. Colin Barrett has, as they say, talent to burn, but I really hope he doesn’t waste a drop.”
—Sam Lipsyte
“Colin Barrett, like all great storytellers, has the ability to weave a broader chronicle of Ireland out of stories that remain intimate, powerful, and regional. Out of the local, the universal appears. He defines the many shades of the present time and suggests a compelling future. He is a writer to savor and look out for.”
—Colum McCann
“Colin Barrett’s sentences are lyrical and tough and smart, but there is something more here that makes him a really good writer. His stories are set in a familiar emotional landscape, but they give us endings that are new. What seems to be about sorrow and foreboding turns into an adventure instead in the tender art of the unexpected.”
—Anne Enright
“A writer of extraordinary gifts. I loved this compelling and utterly persuasive collection, the strongest debut I’ve read in some years.”
—Joseph O’Connor
“How dare a debut writer be this good?
Young Skins
has all the hallmarks of an instant classic. Barrett’s prose is exquisite but never rarefied. His characters—the damaged, the tenderhearted and the reckless—are driven by utterly human experiences of longing. His stories are a thump to the heart, a mainline surge to the core. His vision is sharp, his wit is sly, and the stories in this collection come alive with that ineffable thing: soul.”
—Alison MacLeod
“Incredible. Human violence, beauty, brilliance of language—this book reminds you of the massive things you can do in short fiction.”
—Evie Wyld
“A new fabulous and forensic voice to sing out Ireland’s woes.”
—Bernard MacLaverty
“Colin Barrett is a young man in the town of the short story, but it’s fair to say he has the run of the place. This is a joyously fine collection, crackling with energy and verve, fit for the back pocket of anyone who loves a good story well told.”
—Jon McGregor
“Should you be surprised that yet another superbly articulate and word-drunk writer has come out of Ireland? Perhaps not, but when that writer’s work is as moving, as funny, as spectacularly evocative as
Young Skins
, you should be astonished, and amazed, and grateful. Some of the stories in this debut collection are amongst the best in the language. That a young writer possesses a talent this great is a cause for celebration, matched only by his ability to control and harness it. A minute after finishing this book I was itching to read Colin Barrett’s next.”
—Niall Griffiths
Young Skins
Young Skins
Colin Barrett
Black Cat
New York
Copyright © 2014 by Colin Barrett
Cover adapted from an original design by James Jones
Author photo © Lucy Perrem
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or
[email protected]
.
First published in Ireland in 2013 by Stinging Fly Press.
This edition published in Great Britain in 2014 by Jonathan Cape
an imprint of Random House Group Limited.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 978-0-8021-2332-9
eISBN 978-0-8021-9210-3
Black Cat
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
Contents
Young Skins
THE CLANCY KID
My town is nowhere you have been, but you know its ilk. A roundabout off a national road, an industrial estate, a five-screen Cineplex, a century of pubs packed inside the square mile of the town’s limits. The Atlantic is near; the gnarled jawbone of the coastline with its gull-infested promontories is near. Summer evenings, and in the manure-scented pastures of the satellite parishes the Zen bovines lift their heads to contemplate the V8 howls of the boy racers tearing through the back lanes.
I am young, and the young do not number many here, but it is fair to say we have the run of the place.
It is Sunday. The weekend, that three-day festival of attrition, is done. Sunday is the day of purgation and redress; of tenderised brain cases and seesawing stomachs and hollow pledges to never, ever get that twisted again. A day you are happy to see slip by before it ever really gets going.
It’s well after 8
pm
, though still bright out, the warm light infused with that happy kind of melancholy that attends a July evening in the West. I am sitting with Tug Cuniffe at a table in the alfresco smoking area of Dockery’s pub. The smoking area is a narrow concrete courtyard to the building’s rear, overlooking the town river. Midges tickle our scalps. A candy-stripe canvas awning extends on cantilevers, and now and then the awning ripples, sail-like, in the breeze.
Ours is the table nearest to the river, and it is soothing to listen to the radio static bristle of the rushing water. There are a dozen other people out here. We know most of them, at least to see, and they all know us. Tug is one many prefer to keep a tidy berth of. He’s called Manchild behind his back. He is big and he is unpredictable, prone to fits of rage and temper tantrums. There are the pills he takes to keep himself on an even keel, but now and then, in a fit of contrariness or out of a sense of misguided self-confidence, he will abandon the medication. Sometimes he’ll admit to the abandonment and sell me on his surplus of pills, but other times he’ll say nothing.
Tug is odd, for he was bred in a family warped by grief, and was himself a manner of ghosteen; Tug’s real name is Brendan, but he was the second Cuniffe boy named Brendan. The mother had a firstborn a couple of years before Tug, but that sliver of a child died at thirteen months old. And then came Tug. He was four when they first took him out to Glanbeigh cemetery, to lay flowers by a lonely blue slab with his own name etched upon it in fissured gilt.
I am hungover. Tug is not. He does not drink, which is a good thing. I’m nursing a pint, downing it so slowly it’s already lost its fizz.
‘How’s the head, Jimmy?’ Tug caws.
He is in a good mood, a good, good, good but edgy, edgy, edgy mood.
‘Not so hot,’ I admit.
‘Was it Quillinan’s Friday?’
‘Quillinan’s,’ I say, ‘then Shepherd’s, then Fandango’s. The same story Saturday.’
‘The ride?’ he inquires.
‘Marlene Davey.’
‘Gosh,’ Tug says. ‘Gosh, gosh, gosh.’
He worries his molars with his tongue.
Tug is twenty-four to my twenty-five, though he looks ten years older. As far as I’m aware, his virginity remains unshed. Back in our school days, the convent girls and all their mammies were goo-goo-eyed over Tug. He was a handsome lad, all up through his teens, but by sixteen had begun to pile on the pounds, and the pounds stuck. The weight gives him a lugubrious air; the management and conveyance of his bulk is an involved and sapping enterprise. He keeps his bonce shaved tight and wears dark baggy clothing, modelling his appearance after Brando in
Apocalypse Now
.
‘Well, me and Marlene go back a ways,’ I say.
Which is true. Marlene is the nearest thing I’ve had to a steady girlfriend—and if we’ve never quite been on we’ve never quite been off, either, even after Mark Cuculann got her pregnant last year. She had the baby, just after Christmas, a boy, and named him David for her dear departed da.
I ran into her in Fandango’s on the Friday. There was the usual crowd; micro-minied girls on spike heels, explosively frizzed hair, spray-tan mahogany décolletage. There were donkey-necked boys in button-down tablecloth-pattern shirts, farmers’ sons who wear their shirtsleeves rolled up past the elbows, as if at any moment they might be called upon to pull a calf out of a cow’s steaming nethers. Fandango’s was a hot box. Neon strobed and pulsed, dry ice fumed in the air. Libidinal bass juddered the windowless walls. I was sinking shots at the bar with Dessie Roberts when she crackled in my periphery. She’d already seen me and was swanning over. We exchanged bashful, familiar smiles, smiles that knew exactly what was coming.
There is the comfort of routine in our routine but also the mystery of that routine’s persistence.
Marlene lives with her consenting, pragmatic mother, Angie, who even at three in the morning was up and sat at the kitchen table, placidly leafing through a TV listings magazine and supping a cold tea. She was happy to see me, Marlene’s ma. She filled the kettle and asked if we wanted a cuppa. We demurred. She told us wee David was sound asleep upstairs, and be sure not to wake him. In Marlene’s bedroom I bellyflopped onto the cool duvet; her childhood menagerie of stuffed animals was piled at the end of the bed. I was trying to recall the names of each button-eyed piglet and bunny as Marlene tugged my trousers down over my calves.
‘Boopsy, Winnie, Flaps . . . Rupert?’
Now my calves are paltry things, measly lengths of pale, undefined muscle all scribbled with curly black hairs; their enduring ugliness startles me anytime I glimpse them in a mirror. But Marlene began to knead them gently with her fingers. She worked her way up to my thighs and hissed, ‘Flip over.’ You have to appreciate a girl who can encounter a pair of calves as unpleasant as mine and still want to get up on you.
‘She’s a nice one,’ Tug says.
A fly lands on his head and mills in the stubble. Tug seems not to notice. I want to reach out and smack it.
‘That she is,’ I say, instead, and take another sup of my pint.
And just like that Marlene appears. This happens frequently in this town; incant a body’s name and, lo, they appear. She comes through the double doors in cut-off jeans, sunglasses pushed up into her red ringlets, zestfully licking an ice-cream cone. She’s wearing a canary-yellow belly top, the better to show off her stomach, aerobicised back to greyhound tautness since the baby. A sundial tattoo circumscribes her navel. Her eyes are verdigris, and if it wasn’t for the acne scars worming across her cheeks, she’d be a beauty, my Marlene.
Mark Cuculann follows her in. Marlene sees me and gives a chin-jut in my direction; an acknowledgment, but a wary one; wary of the fact that Cuculann is there, that big Tug Cuniffe is by my side.
‘There’s Marlene,’ Tug says.
‘Uh huh.’
‘So is she
with
the Cuculann fella then or what?’
I shrug my shoulders. They have a baby so it’s only fair they play Mammy and Daddy; it’s what they are. Whatever else she does or does not do with Cuculann is fine by me, I tell myself. I tell myself that if anything I should feel a measure of gratitude towards the lad, for taking the paternity bullet I dodged.
‘She’s looking fair sexy these days,’ Tug says. ‘You going to go over say hello?’
‘I said hello enough Friday night.’
‘Better off out of it alright, maybe,’ Tug says.
I slide my palm over my pint like a lid and tap the rim with my fingers.
‘D’you hear the latest about the Clancy kid?’ Tug says after a lapse of silence.
‘No,’ I say.
‘A farmer in Enniscorthy reckons he saw a lad matching the Clancy kid’s description with, get this, two women, two women in their thirties. They stopped into a caff near where this farmer lives. He talked to one of them. Get this, she was—well, German, he reckons. Talked with a kind of Germanic accent, and they—she—was enquiring about when the Rosslare ferry was next off. Little blondie lad with them, little quiet blondie lad. That was a few weeks back though, only the farmer didn’t put two and two together till after.’
‘A Germanic accent,’ I say.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Tug says.
His eyebrows flare enthusiastically. The Clancy kid has become something of an obsession for Tug, though the wider interest has by now largely run its course. Wayne Clancy, ten, a schoolboy out of Gurtlubber, Mayo, went missing three months back. He disappeared during a school excursion to Dublin. One moment he was standing with the rest of the Gurtlubber pupils and two teachers on a traffic island at a city-centre Y junction—the lights turning red, the traffic sighing to a halt, the crowd of boys and girls crossing the road—and then he was gone. At first the assumption was that wee Wayne had simply wandered off, disoriented by the big-city bustle, but it soon became apparent he was not just lost but missing. His disappearance haunted the front pages of the national papers for all of May. The established theory was that Wayne was snatched, either right at the Y junction or shortly after, by persons unknown. A national Garda hunt was launched, Ma and Da Clancy did the tearful on-camera appeals . . . but nothing happened, and nothing continued to happen. No boy, no body, no credible lead or line of enquiry could be unearthed.
Everyone’s interest was piqued, for a while, given the proximity of Gurtlubber parish to our own town. But things go on, and bit by bit we began to care less and less.
Tug can’t let the Clancy kid go. He can’t resist the queasy hypotheticals such an open-ended story encourages.
What-ifs
proliferate like black flowers in the teeming muck of his imagination. Left unchecked he’ll riff all evening about unmarked graves packed with lime, international rings of child traffickers, organ piracy, enforced cult initiation.
I tell him, lighten up.
‘They could be lesbians,’ Tug says. ‘German lesbians. Who, you know, can’t have a child. Can’t get the fertilisation treatment, can’t adopt. Maybe they got desperate.’
‘Maybe,’ I say.
‘The Clancy kid looked Aryan. You know? Fair-haired, blue-eyed,’ Tug says.
‘All children look Aryan,’ I say, irritated.
Marlene’s laughter, a high insolent cackling, carries down the yard. She and Cuculann have joined another couple, Stephen Gallagher and Connie Reape. Cuculann is tall, underfed and rangy, like me; Marlene has a type. She is cackling away at something Gallagher has said. Everyone else, including Gallagher, looks abashed, but Marlene is laughing and batting Gallagher on the shoulder, as if pleading with him to stop being so hilarious.
‘But it wouldn’t be the worst end for the lad. It wouldn’t be an end at all, really,’ Tug says.
A waitress comes through the double doors, bearing a quartet of champagne flutes on a tray. Marlene waves her over and distributes the drinks, stem by stem, a strawberry impaled on the rim of each flute. Cuculann pays, and as Marlene drops the napkin that held her ice-cream cone onto the tray I catch the telltale twinkle on her ring finger.
‘Wouldn’t it not be?’ Tug says.
He reaches over and drops his paw on my forearm, shakes it.
‘Be fucking super, Tug,’ I say.
He cringes at the snap in my voice. My mind, I want to say, has been enlisted in the pursuit of other woes, Tug, and I can’t be dealing with the endless ends of the Clancy kid right now.
‘Oh,’ Tug says.
He tucks his hand under the opposite armpit, like he’s after catching a finger in a doorjamb.
‘You’re in a mood and it’s—’ he looks over, sniffs the air, ‘—it’s Marlene. It’s that loose cunt Marlene,’ he says.
I make a disapproving click with my tongue. I jab my finger at him.
‘I’m easy as the next man when it comes to getting his end away, but Tug, there’s no need to be throwing round them terms.’
He leans back and his span thickens.
‘I’ll say whatever I want. About whoever I want.’
‘You really are an enormous fucking child, aren’t you?’
Tug grabs the sides of the table and I feel it shudder and float up from under me. I snatch my drink and lean back as the coasters go twirling off the edge. Tug sways and the table follows his sway, crashing against the concrete. People nearby yelp and jump back.
I daintily disembark from my stool, one foot then the other, keeping my eyes on Tug’s eyes. His lips are hooked up into a sneer, his breathing fast and gurgled.
‘I’m sorry, Tug,’ I say.
His nostrils pucker and flare and pace themselves back to an even rhythm.
‘That’s alright,’ he says, ‘that’s alright.’
He rubs a palm over the dented round of his skull and looks at the capsized table with an expression of broad mystification, like he had nothing to do with it.
‘Come on,’ I say, ‘let’s head.’
I drain the sudsy dregs of my pint and plant it on a nearby table.
Everyone backs away as we pass by, me in Tug’s wake.
I know what they’re thinking. Manchild gone mad again. Manchild throwing another fit. Oddball Manchild and his oddball mate Jimmy Devereux.
‘Hi Marlene!’ Tug says cheerfully as we trundle by her table.
Marlene is unfazeable as ever. Cuculann beside her is hunched and close-shouldered, braced for action.
‘Well, big man,’ Marlene says.
She looks at me.
‘And not-so-big man.’
‘Are congratulations in order?’ I say.
I lift up the ends of her fingers, straightening them out for inspection. Marlene slips her hand from mine and covers it over with the other.