Young Skins (17 page)

Doran said, ‘I loved her too.’

‘Yes,’ Eli said.

He was looking at the windows. The rain had stopped. The inner panes of the windows were layered with dust; what light came through appeared microbial, quivering with impurities. The Boatman faced onto a lane that ran along one side of the cemetery wall. The cemetery gate was at the end of the lane. The procession, both men knew, would pass right by the pub. They would not be able to avoid seeing it, Eli realised, or at least making out its long, aggregated silhouette in those same dirty windows.

‘I saw the family,’ Eli declared.

‘Oh?’ Doran said.

‘After I went up the hill I took a path down to the rear of the church. Curiosity, I guess. I hopped a fence and squinnied down behind a row of saplings. Hence the dirty knees. I hunkered down and watched through a bush, saw them going into the service.’

‘On your knees?’

‘So I wouldn’t be seen.’

‘Ah,’ Doran said.

‘I caught a glimpse of them, alright,’ Eli said.

Over the totality of the years Eli had met Maryanne’s father exactly once—a tense hotel dinner through which Eli suffered the thin, vertiginous feeling that everyone at the table, including himself, was being played by actors. Maryanne’s father, a retired barrister, was even then implausibly elderly, eighty-six to his daughter’s twenty-eight, though he was still hale and snappishly alert. The dashing woman in her fifties accompanying the father was very much not Maryanne’s mother. The actual mother was purportedly insane, certifiably so, and had been domiciled in an institution as far back as Maryanne could remember, and that’s all Eli ever got out of her about her mother. There was one sibling, an older brother who worked in Futures, in Hong Kong, and who never came home.

‘Furtivity is our natural state,’ she had told Eli when he asked why she always said so little about her family.

‘I saw the father,’ Eli continued. ‘Must be touching a hundred now. In a wheelchair, flunkies either side. Insane. I saw the brother. Had to be him, looks just like her. A double, disconcerting to see her in a man’s face. I saw—I think—the husband, and the kid, her girl. But they didn’t see me. And they wouldn’t know who I was if they did.’

‘But they would know
of
you,’ Doran said.

‘Maybe,’ Eli said doubtfully. He drained his drink. He put the glass down. He blinked, heavy-lidded. He was woozy after that single pint, and knew he would be on his ear if he went as far as three. He considered the door in the floor.

‘He’s down there? The guy,’ he said. ‘How long?’

Doran rubbed his chin. ‘He must be in fucking China by now. Fuck this noise, this is negligence. You want another bev?’

Eli grimaced, considered his constitution, and said, ‘Yes.’

‘Hup,’ Doran said, rising again over the counter and searching with his hand for more clean glasses.

‘Eh, hi,’ Doran heard Eli declare. Something moved in front of Doran. A package of refrigerated muscle encased his hand and commenced crushing his finger bones together. Doran looked up. The barman’s smile loomed above him, mild and indicting, and beneath that smile a second one, lividly concertinaing his neck.

‘No,’ the barman hissed.

Doran wrenched his hand free of the man’s pale grip.

‘A word would’ve achieved the same,’ he said, shaking his smarting hand in the air.

‘Can’t. Just. Take,’ the barman said with infinite reasonableness. Then: ‘What you want?’

Doran ordered the drinks and the barman picked out two clean glasses.

‘What were you doing down there anyway?’ Doran asked, nodding towards the door in the floor.

‘Inventory.’

‘Well now. That’s as good an excuse as any. What’s your name?’

‘Dukic.’

‘Do-kitsch?’

‘Dukic.’

Eli watched the barman top up the pints and dip each in turn, tipping away the runoff. The sloughed foam pumped down the outside of each glass and sank into the grated metal recess under the taps. The barman was tall, six four at least. His scars were hideous, a row of ragged, mortified grooves bright against the lines of his collar.

‘Well I’m Doran. And this is Eli.’

The barman gave an acknowledging grunt and distributed the pints, hooking away the empties in the same movement.

‘This,’ Doran said, and with his index finger circled his own Adam’s apple. ‘It’s a nasty fucking razor burn, Do-kitsch. How’d you end up with it, if I may ask?’

The barman drew himself up. His lips twitched. He seemed to be deciding whether to say anything at all. Then he grinned, politely, as if he was obliged to find the reminiscence fond, ‘I was in the war.’

‘The war,’ Eli said.

‘Of course,’ Doran said. ‘And which one was that?’

‘Bosnia. You recall?’

Doran waved a hand in the air. ‘There was a bunch of them down that neck of the woods, wasn’t there? Serbs, Croats, Sarajevans, all that noise, killing the shit out of each other.’

The barman nodded.

‘I mean, it was complicated, so forgive my ignorance,’ Doran said.

‘It was not your problem,’ the barman said.

‘Though evidently, it was yours,’ Doran said with some regret.

‘Now just excuse,’ the barman said and retreated deftly five feet down the bar. He stooped low, rummaged momentarily and returned to his full height brandishing a chequered blue-and-white terrycloth and a purple bottle of lemon cleaning spray. He turned a tap and ran the terrycloth beneath it, then twisted out the excess moisture. Onto the dark brown surface of the counter he dashed a succession of brisk, parallel jets of the lemon spray. He waited for the mist to settle before applying the damp terrycloth, bringing it in a neat rectangle around the sprayed section of the counter, then working inwards in diminishing, carefully nested rectangles.

‘Now continue,’ he said.

‘With the interrogation?’ Doran smiled. ‘Sorry. We just need our minds taken off the here and now. We’re drowning in morbidity here. You get a lot like us, I imagine, funeral-goers in their maudlin moods.’

The barman, eyes following the terrycloth, shrugged his shoulders. His English was good, but it was impossible to know how much of Doran’s talk the man was following. Without looking up he said, ‘We get everybody.’

Doran gripped the lapels of his suit, flick-wrenched them into tautness. ‘But not us, not us,’ he singsonged. ‘So you were in the army then? In the war, in Bosnia?’

‘Army. Yes. I was.’

‘And that’s when you got that collar?’ Doran said.

The barman grunted again. He put away the cloth and spray, and travelled back up to the spigots. To Eli, he said, ‘Your friend talks a lot of questions.’

‘That he does,’ Eli said, wondering if Doran was going to keep at the guy, and already knowing the answer. Something like fatigue swept over Eli; it would be his job to intercede, to referee or placate if Doran went too far with his escalating provocations, as he so often did.

‘I’m just interested in the world. I’m an interested person,’ Doran pleaded. ‘You must forgive me in advance, like all my other friends,’ and clapped Eli on the back.

The barman grinned again.

‘It was friends did this,’ he said.

‘Friends?’

‘Friends bombing friends. Our own men,’ he raised a hand over his head and whirled it around, miming either falling ordnance or debris or both. ‘Thinking we were not who we are.’

‘Some friends,’ Doran said. ‘Jesus, huh?’ He turned to Eli. ‘Well, Do-kitsch is opening up now, though I couldn’t prise two words out of him earlier.’ He raised his glass to the barman. ‘I’m sorry about your friends. But life goes on, huh? For us, at any rate.’

The barman smiled neutrally and tended to another task beneath the barline. Doran and Eli sipped their drinks. Eli looked to the windows again. It was becoming unbearable, the waiting. He felt a grainy runnel of dust in his throat and he could see, where the light was most acute, the motes scuffling in the bar’s sealed atmosphere. He wanted air. He wanted a cigarette but he also wanted air.

‘They’ll be coming this way any minute now,’ he groaned.

‘Stay put. Keep the head down and stay put,’ Doran said tightly, bolting what was left of his drink and whirling his finger for another.

‘You are not going to your funeral?’ the barman asked.

‘Doesn’t look like it,’ Doran said.

‘Why?’

‘Ah, because we’re scared,’ Doran said.

‘Scared,’ the barman repeated, huffing amusedly through his nostrils.

‘We’re not,’ Eli said, annoyed at Doran’s insistence upon this point, even if it was true.

There was a lapse into silence, and Eli waited for Doran to fill the void. But it was the barman who spoke next.

‘Well, I tell you,’ he said, ‘you made me a little strange when you come in?’

‘Me?’ Doran practically squealed with delight.

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’ Doran asked.

‘I tell you,’ the barman said. ‘You see you look like a man, exactly like a man I saw in the street. In the city, in the siege,’ he said.

Doran looked at Eli then turned back to the barman.

‘Good fuck, go on,’ he demanded.

‘This man, he was trying to get to a woman and child. This is with the shooting, the bombs, every day, all day. Snipers in their holes, up high. Shooting all day. The noise of the bullets whizzing and whizzing in the air. The woman and child—maybe his wife, his daughter? They were already gone. In the street.’ The barman held his hands vertically out, palms facing each other, then pressed them in close. ‘In a
thin
. . . ?
Alley
? One and one.’ Now his fingers pinched adjacent spots in the channel he had shaped in the air, placing the little bodies. ‘And after a long quiet time, he come out, running. To get them, this man, you see. Crazy. Running, but too slow. The bullets, whizzing, whizzing. And so,’ a jerk of the shoulder, ‘he is one of them too.’ He pinched a final spot in the air, like he was quenching a candle. ‘He look like you.’

‘He look like me,’ Doran cackled.

‘Yes,’ the barman said. ‘This is why, when you come in . . .‘ he raised a finger to his temple, corkscrewed it, ‘and I am back. I am there.’

‘He haunts you,’ Doran said.

‘Who?’ the barman said.

‘The man, the man, the man who looked like me?’

‘Ah!’ The barman hyphenated his brow in reproof of such a notion. ‘Nonono,’ he smiled, ‘I had forgot him. Like this,’ he snapped his fingers. ‘But you walk in today, and so he comes to me. It was a long time ago.’

He put out two more drinks.

‘A long time ago,’ Doran mused in a smooth, declaratory tone, as if he was about to start telling his own story. But all he did was scratch at the stubble on his chin.

‘Yes. Now please excuse, I must—‘ the barman forked two fingers in front of his lips and mimed exhaling, then pointed to the door.

‘I’ll join you,’ Eli said.

‘You’re going out there?’ Doran said.

‘It will be fine,’ the barman said. ‘Please, do not interfere again with the taps. I will be right back.’

Eli held the door. The barman strode through, so tall he had to duck to avoid the lintel. Doran watched them go over the rim of his glass.

Outside the sky was a dismal monochrome. The men arranged themselves side by side on the lane’s narrow pavement in front of the tavern. The cemetery wall ran tall. There were trees on the other side, their thickly leaved and shadowed branches jostling above the stone. The barman was watching them. He had conjured already from somewhere a cigarette into his mouth. Unlit, he ignored it and stared fixedly ahead, his face in profile intent yet expressionless. In fact not a part of his body was moving; it was as if he had switched himself off. Such self-effacing stillness, Eli thought, must be a useful trait in a barman, who was after all only required to exist at specific intervals.

Eli nervously bumped a pack of cigarettes from his suit jacket. When he proffered a light the barman became abruptly animate again, turning to Eli with an appreciative grin. Eli lit them up, one and one. Wisps of smoke zipped away on a wind he could barely feel.

‘I have a wife and child,’ Eli announced.

‘Yes,’ the barman said tonelessly, as if this disclosure was to him a drearily familiar fact.

‘Your story,’ Eli went on. ‘About the guy in the alley. His wife and kid. I have a wife and kid,’ and felt instantly facile for having invoked the comparison.

The barman said nothing. He began to rock curtly to and fro on his heels, lending the impression he was shivering, although it was not unusually cold. He looked up the lane, down it, and then back at the trees; the smaller branches were in a state of continual minor agitation.

‘It was a story,’ the barman said finally, with flat finality. ‘Your friend made me remember.’

‘Were you the one shooting?’ Eli said.

The barman looked at Eli’s eyes; not into, but at. Eli considered the possibility that this man deserved his scars—deserved worse, perhaps—but how would you ever know? Balanced against the doubt that his grievous little anecdote was either entirely fabricated or so extensively embellished as to be practically fiction was the doubt that it was not.

The barman took a dainty drag of his cigarette—he was smoking with such hallucinatory slowness that Eli was beset by the misimpression his cigarette had not diminished at all—and held the smouldering cylinder towards Eli.

‘I thank you for the light,’ he said.

‘That’s alright,’ Eli muttered.

Eli looked up, and beyond the barman’s shoulder he saw them coming. The long-bodied, shining black hearse, flanked and pursued by its trail of mourners, all moving together at a stately crawl. The procession came down the lane. Eli stepped into the doorway of the Tavern as the hearse went by.

Maryanne’s father, a grim wisp in a suit and wheelchair was at the centre of the group in immediate train behind the hearse. A pouting kid in her late teens had been assigned chair-pushing duties. A foreign-looking woman was holding the old man’s hand and leaning over him with a health-care professional’s solicitous disinterest as she paced carefully in step with the chair. There was the brother, paunchy, middle-aged but retaining an indelible vestige of Maryanne in his face. There and gone, and after him came the husband; at least ten years older than Maryanne, a bushy-browed man with a genteelly dissolute look to him, his cheeks rucked, a grey stripe running through his sandy hair. With his hands he was steering the shoulders of a little six- or seven-year-old girl. Eli knew who she was. Her face was mercifully veiled. None paid the least attention to the two men standing by the Boatman’s entrance. The crowd’s obliviousness filled Eli with relief, and made all his trepidation seem silly—for all this, he realised, had nothing to do with him.