Young Skins (15 page)

‘You want me to stop?’ I asked.

‘No, no,’ she said. ‘This is what boys do, right? He tells me he’s staying over at Farrell’s house, watching DVDs and playing video games, and no doubt Farrell gives his mother the same shit.’

In the dark, and given Anto’s condition, there was little chance that either boy would recognise me or my car or my passenger, but I stared straight ahead as we passed them.

‘Take care of yourself, you dope,’ she said in a low voice.

‘Who’s he more like?’ I said. ‘You, or his father?’

‘Both,’ she said. ‘Luck will knock you only so far from the tree.’

‘And where’s the father now?’ I asked.

‘Oh,’ she sighed. ‘He’s a thousand miles from here.’ She laughed as she said this. ‘No. Literally. He works in a mine in Africa, sorry, Siberia now, as big as any on earth.’

She looked across at me, still grinning.

‘It’s a huge hole in the ground that goes down almost a straight mile. You could pick up and drop this entire town into it in one piece. He comes back twice a year.’

‘How’s that suiting you?’ I said.

‘He’s a good man for the couple of weeks he’s around,’ she said. ‘He’s a good man for the small doses. But remind me to show you a picture of the mine. It is something.’

‘What are they after?’

‘Diamonds,’ she said.

‘A mile down,’ I said. ’It must get hot.’

‘Left here . . . and a right.’

We slid into an estate, crested a hill. ‘Here,’ she said. I parked in the driveway. She said nothing as she got out. Beneath the porch light she held her handbag up close to her face and foraged for her keys. When she stepped inside she left the door ajar. I followed her in.

‘What about you?’ she said. ‘You on your own?’

‘I am.’

‘Left a girl in the city?’

‘Something like that,’ I said.

We moved down the dark hall, into the kitchen.

She opened the fridge and a rhomboid of chilled light spilled across the floor, revealing a kitchen island, a table with two chairs pried back from it, as if the previous occupants had bolted from the seats in a hurry.

‘Hi, moggy,’ she said, and a cat, white coat splashed with black, emerged from a shadowed corner and dabbed across the tiled floor.

I took a chair. The cat slid in under my feet and commenced grinding its tiny weight against each chair leg.

‘I think it likes me,’ I said.

There was the heavy resonant thunk of a full bottle on the counter of the kitchen island. She unscrewed the cap, poured a long measure, and gulped it down. I could smell the whiskey. My heart began to race, as if I’d glimpsed the averted face of an old lover on a crowded street. She poured again. She shucked off her jacket, let it fall to the floor the way kids do. She came on over, the bottle in one hand, the glass in the other. I didn’t wait for her to offer the drink—I spared her that—snatching the glass from her hand and downing it in one go.

‘They must rate you in the school,’ she said.

‘It was a kindness, the job. I played football back when Carmichael’s won stuff, and, you know, I was good. The old man didn’t forget.’

‘When I was in the convent, me and the girls would go down and watch some of the Carmichael’s games, back when the Sisters still let us. Maybe I saw you play,’ she said.

She was standing between the V of my legs. I returned the glass to her possession then rested my hand on the jut of her jeaned hip. She filled the glass again.

‘I remember that,’ I said.

The Sentimental Authoritarian had come up with the idea, and his equivalent number in the convent had consented to it. The idea was to expand local support, and so each game day a bunch of convent girls were bussed down to the grounds, bearing class-made banners in the Carmichael’s and Convent colours. The girls were tightly chaperoned, of course, but every boy in Carmichael’s staggered around in a humpbacked fever at the fact that live actual females were being permitted inside the school gates.

‘Did you like it?’ she said.

‘I was good at it, so I guess I did.’

‘I wonder if I noticed you,’ she said. ‘One of us probably did. We thought we were American high schoolers, in love with the quarterbacks.’

‘I had best friends I saw every day for five straight years I wouldn’t know now if I passed them in the street,’ I said. ‘So I won’t be offended if you don’t remember me.’

‘But you were there and I was there,’ she said. ‘In our young skins, though we didn’t know each other from Adam. Strange to think of it.’

‘It was a long time ago.’

‘Does it feel like that?’ she said.

‘How could it not,’ I said. I curled the three middle fingers of my right hand into my palm, and waggled the thumb and baby. ‘But what did you make of Mellick?’ I asked.

‘That terrified old cunt.’

‘He’s meant to be inspiring.’

‘I don’t want to end up like that,’ she said.

I uncurled my fingers and reached for her hair.

In the upstairs bedroom, she flicked on a lamp.

‘See.’

Tucked into the frame of her dresser mirror was a yellowing picture. The mine. I was expecting a photograph by or featuring Anto’s father, but it was only an image from a paper or magazine. The picture was full colour, with a column of text in a foreign language occupying the upper left corner of the page. The photo had been taken from altitude, not directly overhead but high enough to encompass the entire circumference of the mine, which was, quite literally, a big hole in the ground. There was a town, or at any rate a stretch of dinky building-like structures, spread out along its far rim. The surrounding landscape was suitably desolate, a lunar terrain of chalks and greys and indeterminate formations of rock and dirt, scrubbed clear of anything alive or green. The mine was widest at the surface and narrowed as it deepened, like a funnel. Carved along the exposed inner strata of the mine wall was a presumably machine-made channel or pathway that wound all the way down to its unseen centre.

‘It’s big,’ I said.

‘And far away,’ she said.

She knocked the light off, took my elbow and brought me to the bed. We undressed, and made an obligatory stab at fucking, our strivings ruddled by the whiskey. After, we sprawled in the foamy folds of the duvet and finished off the bottle. The whole time, I kept a portion of my attention perched out on a little ledge in the very back of my mind, straining for the telltale slam of the front door, the thunderous clomping of feet on the stairs, but the rooms beneath us were as still as the bottom of a lake.

‘So is this a thing you do?’ I said. ‘Go to meetings, pick up someone you scent the weakness in?’

‘I want to be better,’ she said. ‘
He
was worse, a real demon for it, and
this
was the only way to live with him,’ she said, wagging the empty glass. ‘And then he went away, as far away as he could get. He said it was the only way any of us would get better.’

‘And is it? Better?’

‘It’s something you only do to yourself, they’re right about that,’ she said. ‘But I guess it’s worse if there’s someone else. And then there’s Anthony.’

‘He’ll make it,’ I said.

‘Maybe he will.’

There was nothing else to say or do so I leaned in and kissed her, chastely, on the cheek. She traced her finger around the rim of the glass, dabbed the finger to her lips, kissed away the last amber fleck of whiskey, then turned away. After a while I got up and quietly dressed. I made my way downstairs, shoes in hand. Coming off the final stair step, I stumbled and brought my knee down on some sort of glass fixture—something that tinkled as it shattered. I hobbled down the hall, stuck my feet in my shoes, and let myself out. The dead-of-night cold was of a purity that scorched my lungs as I sucked it in.

The next morning, a Monday, I rose at seven. I bundled myself into my drab olive overcoat, loaded a double handful of council-issued road salt into my pockets and crunched down to the front gates, scattering the salt ahead of me as I went. I felt good, despite the familiar tightening in the midsection of my face that would bloom into a full-blown headache as the day wore on. I unlocked the gates, though the first of the kids would not show up for another hour. I went across the road, onto the riverside path. The sky was lavender, and there was a bank of high white clouds moving in off the Atlantic as stately as glaciers. I decided to walk up the town for a coffee and paper.

Passing the station I saw a bus about to depart. I asked the driver where to. It wasn’t far, a little farther on down the west coast, but I hadn’t been to that particular city in years. I had enough cash on me for a ticket and clambered on. In the city I ransacked my ATM card and checked into a small hotel off the high street. They asked for a name and I gave them a name, reversing the natural slant of my cursive as I wrote it out. I drank at the hotel bar, and in the afternoon did a circuit of the high street pubs. I did the same thing the following day. In the seclusion of the bars I felt like a ghost becoming slowly corporeal again.

I considered the lay of the land. It was easy to pick out the chronic soak-heads from the tourists, the amateur drinkers. It had something to do with the way they conformed themselves to the planes of the bar, the way they aggressively propped an elbow and periodically lifted a haunch from their stool to get the blood flowing back into that leg. It had something to do with the way they every so often softly exclaimed or sighed or rebukingly clicked their tongue at nothing and no one. The way they stared down into the weathered grain of the counter, mulling their special soak-head grievances and depletions. The way they were invariably alone.

The city was right up on the Atlantic. I walked the quays, the convoluted knot of cobbled alleys that wound narrowly back and forth through the tight parcel of buildings that constituted the city centre. There were strings of festive lights everywhere, council employees in high-viz jackets and wool caps scrubbing sleet into the drains with cartoonishly large black-bristled brooms. There were swarms of shitfaced stags and hysterical hens, and masked artists draped in tinfoil smocks impersonating statues in the street—even the cold could not disturb their poised inertia. My mobile filled up with voicemails, several from the Sentimental Authoritarian’s secretary, and finally one from the man himself. His voice was mild and measured, shot through with a gorgeous note of presidential weariness. He was sure this was all some simple misunderstanding. He told me to ring just to let everyone know how long I’d be gone. He said to take care. At some point the battery of my phone died.

On the second or third or eleventh day I met a blond woman with a black tooth—a cap that hadn’t taken and become infected. In lieu of small talk she immediately embarked on a lengthy diatribe against a man she referred to only as The Spider. She said he was a coward and selfish and probably a sociopath; a spiteful, petty bully congenitally incapable of empathy for others, though he was a
charmer
of course. He collected women this Spider and left his brand upon them—she pushed back her hair and angled her head. A perfectly lifelike blue arachnid was tattooed just under her ear.

‘He made me get that,’ she said, and she insisted there were over a hundred women in this wretched city bearing such a mark.

In my hotel room she scooped out her left tit and told me to say goodbye to it. She said it was riddled with tumours and was going to have to go. She said she almost certainly only had months to live. She saw me looking at her hair—it was bleached nearly white, and looked crispy in a dead way, like straw, but it was her real hair. She touched it self-consciously and said the doctors had assured her chemotherapy was pointless at this stage. I told her I was sorry, and she said that was okay; that she was putting everything that was the past, all the years of useless shit, behind her, and living only for now, for the moment, and that I was a part of the moment, and I should feel good about that.

And then she wanted to know my story.

It was dusk. There were crushed cans, empty miniatures and bottles littering the floor, stains soaked into the carpet, tangles of clothes. She was lying on the bed wearing nothing but my rumpled shirt. I was sitting in my underwear on the large wooden sill of the window. The radiators were on full blast and I had the window inched open.

I told her I was in town for just a few days, to check in on my ex-wife and kid, that I didn’t get to see all that much of them anymore because I worked overseas as a diamond miner. She perked up at that.

‘Diamonds,’ she said.

She said I must make a mint and the next round of drinks was surely on me, so.

I nodded my head in a way that suggested that just might happen. She wanted to know about the mine and I told her it was basically just a huge hole in the ground, so big you could pick up this entire city and throw it down there in one piece. I told her it was mostly done by machines now, the actual mining, with the men only required to operate the machines at a relatively safe remove, but that it was still sapping and inhospitable work. I told her that with all the drilling and pounding, enormous quantities of dust and grit and dirt were churned up into the atmosphere, so much that sometimes the sun was almost blotted out, and that no matter how many filters or masks we wore, we were still breathing in a certain amount of that poisonous shit. And there were of course the periodic on-site accidents, men getting injured, maimed, even killed. I told her how a good friend of mine, a tough old codger of a Ruski venerated as a legend by the other men, had lost three fingers on his right hand in an incident a few years back, and how now he had to make do with just a thumb and forefinger.

‘Jesus,’ she said.

‘But then every line of living has its hazards,’ I said kindly.

‘Don’t I know it,’ she said, and yawned and stretched and settled herself again amid the pillows.

Then neither of us said anything and through the window I listened to the noise of another city, growing already familiar. I slid from the sill, put on my trousers and belt. I checked my wallet. I picked up my dead mobile, consulted its blank screen, and told her it was time to go.