Young Skins (2 page)

‘Too late,’ I chuckle, ‘I saw it. Nice aul’ hunk of rock.’

‘It is,’ Cuculann says.

‘Very pretty alright,’ Tug says.

I can feel him behind me, the looming proximity of all that mass, restored to my side and prepped to go ballistic at my word.

Marlene’s bottom lip does something to the top, and she fixes me with a look that says:
pay attention
.

‘Jimmy, I’m gone very happy,’ she says. ‘Now, please, fuck off.’

Outside Dockery’s the evening sun is in its picturesque throes, the sky steeped in foamy reds and pinks. The breeze has grown teeth. Shards of glass crunch underfoot like gravel. There are cars parked in a line along the road, and one of them is the tiny, faded silver hatchback Cuculann boots around in. It sits there bald as an insult on the kerb, a wrinkled L-sticker pasted inside the windscreen.

‘Look at the state of it,’ I say.

I wallop the flat of my palm against the pockmarked bonnet.

Tug looks at me wonderingly.

‘It’s Cuculann’s car,’ I say.

‘The thing’s a lunchbox,’ Tug says and laughs.

‘A pitiful thing to be chauffeuring your bride-to-be around in,’ I say.

‘Awful, awful, awful,’ Tug agrees.

‘Tug, are you off your meds?’ I say.

‘No,’ he grunts.

He places the palm of one huge hand on the hatchback’s roof and begins to experimentally rock the vehicle back and forth, the suspension squeaking in protest. Tug has never been a competent liar; his size, his physical advantage, means he’s never needed to develop the ability to dissemble. You can always tell the truth, always say what you mean, if you’re big enough.

‘Be awful if you were to tip that thing onto its head,’ I say.

‘Easy,’ Tug says.

He rocks and rocks the car until it is squeaking madly on its wheels and bouncing in place. It is parked at an angle, parallel to the lip of the kerb which is a couple of inches off the street, an angle that favours Tug. At just the right moment Tug bends down and digs his hands in under the springing hatchback’s bed and pulls up with all his might. The wheels leave the kerb. For a moment the car hangs on its side in the air—I see the vasculature of blackened pipes that run along its underside—then Tug lurches forward and the hatchback goes over onto its roof with an enormous crunching sound. The passenger window shatters, the glass skittering in diamonds around our feet. The wheels judder in the air and Tug reaches out and stills the one closest.

‘Well done, big man.’

Tug is puffing, his cheeks inflamed. He shrugs his shoulders. A car drifts by in the street. Child faces jostle in the rear window for a look at the overturned hatchback. An old codger ambles out of Dockery’s, fitting and refitting a wilted porkpie hat onto his trembling head. His loosely knotted tie flaps at his flushed, corrugated face. The codger grins yellowishly.

‘How are the men?’ he says.

‘Fucking super,’ Tug says.

The codger salutes us and wanders right by the wrecked car, not seeming to notice it at all.

I look down and see, half in and half out of the shattered window, a brown leather handbag, its contents scattered in the gutter. There’s wadded tissues, loose coins, crumpled sweet wrappers, a ballpoint pen, receipts, a roll-on stick of underarm antiperspirant, a gold-rimmed black cylinder of lipstick. I pick up the lipstick, unsnap its cap. I go to work on the passenger door. In bright red capitals I spell out my plea:

M A R R Y M E

‘Shit,’ Tug says, and clicks his jaw. ‘Hardcore, Jimmy.’

I shrug and pocket the lipstick. I pick up all the other things and put them in the handbag. I pass the bag through the broken window and tuck it into the passenger-seat footwell.

‘Back to yours, big man?’ I say.

‘Sound,’ Tug says.

Tug lives on the other side of the river, in Farrow Hill estate with his mam. Like Marlene, his da is gone, in the ground ten years now. Big Cuniffe’s heart burst ushering yearling colts from a burning barn. Tug’s mother is a sweet old ruin of an alcoholic who spends her days rationing gin on their ancient, spring-pocked settee, lost in TV and her dead. You say hello and she offers an agreeable but doubtful smile; half the time she has no idea if you’re part of the programme she’s engrossed in, a figment of memory, or actually there, a live person before her. Sometimes she’ll call me Tug or Brendan, and she’ll call Tug Jimmy. She’ll call Tug by his father’s name. Tug says there’s no point correcting her. These distinctions matter less and less as she settles into her dotage.

We pit-stop at Carcetti’s fast-foodery and chow down on chips as we take the towpath by the river. Slender reeds brush against one another as cleanly as freshly whetted blades. The wet shore-stone, black as coal, glints in its bed of algae. Crushed cans of Strongbow and Dutch Gold and Karpackie are buried in the mud like ancient artefacts. Thickets and thickets of midges waver in the air. They feast on the passing planets of our heads.

Up ahead a wooden bridge traverses the river.

The bridge is supposedly off limits. During a spring storm earlier this year a tree was swept downstream and collided with the bridge and there it still resides, the great gnarled brunt of the trunk rammed at an upward forty-five degree angle amid ruptured beams and splintered fence posts. The bridge sags in the middle but has not yet collapsed. Instead of removing the tree’s corpse and fixing the bridge, the town council erected flimsy mesh fences at both shores and harshly worded signage threatening
a fine and risk of injury/death
to anyone attempting to cross.

But the fences have been trampled down, for the bridge is a handy shortcut to Farrow Hill and, despite the council warnings, is still regularly used by estaters like Tug to get in and out of town.

As we approach we see that there are three kids playing by the bridge: two very young girls and a slightly older boy. The girls look five or six, the boy nine, ten.

The boy has white hair—not blond, white. He’s wearing a cotton vest dulled to taupe and a pair of shiny purple tracksuit bottoms, one leg ripped up to the knee. The girls are in grubby pink short-and-T-shirt combinations. The boy’s face is decorated with what looks like tribal warpaint—a thumb-thick red-and-white stripe applied under each eye, and a black stripe running down his nose. He’s wielding an aluminium rod—it could be a curtain rail, a crutch, the pole of a fishing net. One end of the rod is crimped into a point.

‘What are you, an injun?’ Tug asks him.

‘I’m a king!’ the boy sneers.

‘What class of a weapon is that? A lance, a sword?’ I say.

‘It’s a spear,’ he says.

He stamps up along the flattened fence and hops back onto the towpath. He goes through a martial arts display: slashing the air with the rod then spinning it over his head, fluidly transferring it from one twisting hand to the other. He finishes by leaning forward on one knee and brandishing the crimped end of the rod at Tug’s sternum.

‘This is my bridge,’ he says, baring his teeth.

‘And what if we want to pass?’ Tug says.

‘Not if I don’t say so!’

Tug proffers his crumpled bag of chips.

‘We can pay our way. Chip, King?’

The boy reaches into the bag and takes a wadded hand
ful of vinegar-soaked chips. He examines the clump, sniffs them, then peels the chips apart and divides them between the girls. The girls eat them quickly, one by one. They tilt their heads back and make convulsive swallowing move
ments with their necks, like baby chicks.

‘Good little birdies,’ the boy says, and pats each girl on the head.

They giggle to each other.

‘You shouldn’t take things from strangers,’ Tug says.

‘
I
gave them the chips,’ the boy says, tapping his vested breast with his spear. ‘What business do you have across the bridge?’

‘We’re looking for someone. A boy. A little blondie-haired fella,’ Tug says, ‘a little bit like you. He went away but nobody knows where.’

The boy knits his brow. He steps back up onto the fence and peers along the curvature of the river.

‘There’s no one like that here,’ he says finally. ‘I would’ve seen him. I’m the King, I see everything.’

‘Well, we have to try,’ Tug says.

Leave it be, Tug, I want to say, but I say nothing. So much of friendship is merely that: the saying of nothing in place of something.

I turn and take a quick look beyond the towpath, along the way we came. A hill leads up to the road and beyond that is the squat, ramshackle skyline of the town. I hear—or think I hear—sounds of distant commotion, shouting, and I picture Mark Cuculann outside Dockery’s, raging at the inverted wreck of his car. Marlene will be by his side, arms folded, and I can envisage the look she’ll be wearing, the verdigris glint of her narrow-lidded eyes, a smile flickering despite itself about the edges of her lips, lips painted the same shade as the proposal I scrawled for her on the passenger door. I feel for the cylinder of lipstick in my pocket, take it out, give it to one of the girls.

‘More gifts,’ I say. ‘Well, let’s get going then, Tug.’

Tug goes to step past the boy. The boy draws up the rod and jabs the crimped end into Tug’s gut. Tug grasps the rod, twists it towards himself. He mock-gasps, and claws the air.

‘You’ve killed me,’ he croaks.

He staggers back, and folds his big creaking knees, and puddles downward, dropping face forwards flat into the grass, arse proffered to the sky like a supplicant.

‘You’ve done it now,’ I say.

I toe-nudge the fetal Tug in the ribs. He jiggles lifelessly. The boy steps forward, mimics my action, toeing the loaf of Tug’s shoulder. The girls have gone silent.

‘How are you going to explain this to your mammy?’ I say.

The boy’s eyes begin to brim, even as he tries to keep the jaw jutted.

‘Ah, he’s set to start weeping,’ I say.

Tug, softhearted, can’t stay dead. He sputters, raises his head, grins. He eyes the boy. He hoists himself up.

‘Don’t be teary now, wee man,’ he says, ‘I was dead but I’m raised again.’

He lumbers up over the fence and out onto the bridge and I follow.

‘Goodbye King!’ Tug shouts.

As I pass him the boy scowlingly studies us, arms folded, aluminium spear resting against his shoulder.

‘If ye fall in there’s nothing I can do,’ he warns.

The bridge creaks beneath us. Halfway across, the thin gnarled branches of the dead tree spill over, reach like witches’ fingers for our faces, and we have to press and swat them out of our way.

‘So tell me, Tug,’ I say.

‘What?’

‘Tell me more about the Clancy kid. About these German lesbians.’

And Tug begins to talk, to theorise, and I’m not really listening, but that’s okay. As he babbles I take in the back of his bobbing head, the ridges and undulations of his shaven skull. I take in the deep vertical crease in the fat of his neck like a lipless grimace, and the mountainous span of his swaying shoulders. I think of the picture of the Clancy kid, scissored from a Sunday newspaper, that Tug keeps tacked to the cork board in his room. The picture is the famous, familiar one, a birthday-party snap, crêpe birthday crown snugged down over the Clancy kid’s fair head, big smile revealing the heartbreaking buck teeth, eyes wide, lost in the happy transport of the instant. I think of Marlene. I think of her sprog, so close to being mine. I think of her sundial navel, her belly so taut I can lay her on her back and bounce coins off it. We all have things we won’t let go of.

The beams of the crippled bridge warp and sing beneath us all the way over, and when we make it to the far shore and step back down onto solid earth, a surge of absurd gratitude flows through me. I reach out and pat Tug on the shoulder and turn to salute the boy king and his giggling girl entourage. But when I look back across the tumbling black turbulence of the water I see that the children are gone.

BAIT

This was a summer night about a thousand years ago and myself and my cousin Matteen Judge were driving round and round and round the deserted oval green of Grove Park estate, waiting to see what we would see. It was another bath of a summer’s night, the moon low and full and hazed at the edges, as if the heat of the long day had thickened the medium of the air.

As was our custom, I manned the wheel while Matteen rode in rear, heaped like a flung coat in the far corner of the backseat. Nose glommed against the glass, he watched the rows of mute, single-storey houses slide by. There was a glaze on his forehead, a blue nauseated tinge to his pallor. Matteen was not well; inside, in his skull and chest, he was beset, I know, by that dolour of recollected feeling that can afflict any man who once loved some daffy yoke.

I knew something was up as soon as Matteen stepped out the door of his house. Cue case in hand, I could see it, the thick wade to his gait, like he was walking through setting concrete. At the window of the car, the chest of his T-shirt already clouded with sweat-sop, he looked at me as if he did not know me and said one word.

‘Sarah.’

‘What about her?’

‘Spin us up round Grove Park,’ he commanded.

Sarah Dignan. The daffy yoke Matteen once loved. Grove Park was where she was out of.

We’d been circling the estate for nigh on half an hour. Sometimes Matteen twitched at his trouser pocket, withdrew his phone, but he sent no message and made no call. I pictured nervous estate mothers eyeing us through the slit of their curtains.

Sarah’s house Matteen knew well, as did I of course, and Matteen was making a particular effort to pay it no particular mind.

They had been barely together, really, Matteen and Sarah. The series of fragile public excursions that constituted their official relationship lasted barely a fortnight. They began in Bleak Woods, where the boys and girls too young or too poor for the clubs gathered most Fridays, in the carpark adjacent to the woods. The point of the nights in Bleak Woods was to get the shift. Music chugged from the open door of a parked car and there were tinnies and smokes as those to shift were determined and paired off. Shifting was a curiously bloodless, routinised ritual, involving lengthy arbitration by the friends of the prospective pairings, who, as in arranged marriages, did not so much as get to say hello until they were shoved into each other’s arms and exhorted to take the dark walk into the maw of the woods. There, with that hello barely exchanged, each couple would find a sheltering bole to lean against or beneath, and commence their bodily negotiations.

Every lad wanted Sarah and it was Matteen got her. They went into the woods and when they came back he was pale with elation and, out of sight of the others, vomited with excitement.

I asked him what happened, how far did he get.

He just shook his head.

They went out on a few dates thereafter, Matteen with his hand gripped about Sarah’s wrist, his eyes brimming with the terror-tinged delight of a man who has gotten exactly what he wants. Nobody knew what to say to them. Unanimously flummoxed were we, Matteen’s pack, and envious. Matteen did not know what to say to Sarah either, and she, characteristically, said almost nothing. Soon enough, to our relief, it ended. Sarah euthanised it, proffered no explanation. Matteen, crushed, did not pursue one. Its demise was built into the thing’s inception, was the way he considered it at first; good things do not last, blah, blah. That was a year ago. And Matteen was fine for a bit, clinging to this stoic philosophical read, but the loss was hitting him constitutionally now.

Matteen rode in back for in addition to his burdens of sentiment he suffered acutely from travel sickness; the gentlest spin, no matter how brief or clement the run, was enough to upset his inner equilibrium and turn his complexion oyster. The sickness was made worse in passenger, watching the world quail and judder at close quarters through the windscreen. The roomy seclusion of the backseat, part bed, part carriage, with his frame pitched nearly horizontal, was the only way Matteen could travel and not feel overwhelmingly ill. Hence this arrangement, and me as chauffeur.

On the seat beside Matteen was his cue case. The case was customised, a pebbled leather and stainless steel-clasped affair in which Matteen spirited about his disassembled cues.

We were usually elsewhere by now. We were usually in town. We had a routine and the routine was this: each night I picked Matteen up from his home and conveyed him to Quillinan’s pub of Main Street, where Matteen made his money. He was the town’s premier pool shooter, nightly dispatching several challengers. Matteen’s reputation ensured a continuous supply of competitors, most of whom he had already beaten multiple times, all eager to stake a sum and watch in agonised reverence as he cleaned them out once more. Matteen was canny enough to lose now and then, purely to keep the flow of hopeful adversaries from petering out altogether, though he found it was those he destroyed most emphatically that were keenest to get back on the baize, to be destroyed all over again.

‘Look, now,’ he said, his voice drifting out of the back.

I squinted. The estate road was a trackless blot, but I saw them, the rakey flit of their darked-out shapes moving over the knoll. Girl shapes, one distinctly tall and one not, a pair.

‘It’s her,’ I said.

‘Of course it is,’ said Matteen.

He said that and I thought I saw a flame, a flicker, but it was only her hair, high on her high head. Sarah Dignan was unnervingly tall for a girl, taller than me, clearing even Matteen who was six two. She was blonde, pale, unquestionably captivating in the face. Her beauty was anomalous, sprung as she was from an utterly mundane genetic lineage. Certainly there was no foresign, no presage of her beauty or her height, in her family, in her hair-covered pudding of a father and squat, rook-faced mother, nor in her older siblings. She was the youngest and only girl. Three older Dignan boys existed—broad, blunt and ugly. Temperamentwise, she was different too; the Dignan clan was country affable, ready to talk benign bullshit at the drop of a hat. Sarah was frosty, unpredictable, spoiled by the fact that attention never glossed over her; even when she tried to be reticent, she remained a relentless point of contention.

Given the incongruity in semblance and substance, theories concerning the Dignan girl’s true origins and nature had regularly bubbled forth. Talk was Sarah was a foundling from Gypsy stock or an orphan from Chernobyl. That during her birth her umbilical cord tangled round her neck, asphyxiating and rendering her brain dead for five minutes, thirty minutes, an hour, but that she had inexplicably come back. That she suffered from Asperger’s or ADHD or was bipolar. That she was either, by the textbook definitions, a moron, or possessed a genius-level IQ. That she had gone through puberty at six, hence her inordinate height.

‘Who’s with her?’ I asked.

‘Jenny Tierney,’ Matteen confirmed. Jenny Tierney was Sarah’s shadow, her tightest friend. Lookswise, Jenny had no chance against the hogging nimbus of Sarah’s beauty, but I liked Jenny, with her pageboy haircut, freckles and prosaic legs. She had these gaps between her teeth.

‘What are we to do?’ I asked Matteen.

‘Slow for them. We’ll talk.’

This I did, crawling up along them, pig-flashing the lights to persuade them to linger. This they did. Matteen buzzed down his window.

‘Hello creatures,’ he said.

‘Hello,’ Sarah said. She was holding a naggin of vodka, a black straw sticking from it, handbag dangling from the other arm. Jenny had a naggin too.

‘Haven’t seen you in an age,’ Matteen said.

‘You look poorly,’ Sarah said without actually looking at Matteen.

Matteen blinked his wet, heavy eyes. ‘When don’t I? What are you two up to tonight?’ he asked. 
Jenny said, ‘None of your business.’

‘Well, that’s true,’ Matteen said.

Sarah shrugged.

‘Trawling for cock,’ Jenny said.

‘Hah,’ Matteen said hahlessly, ‘well-well-well, we can furnish you with a lift, at least.’

‘You heading into town?’ Sarah asked.

‘Where else?’ Matteen said. He opened the door on his side, shuffled across the backseat to permit ingress. Sarah stepped instead around to the front of the car, opened the passenger door. She stooped in, smiled at me, addressed Matteen across the headrests.

‘I’m not sitting with you.’

‘Why’s that?’ Matteen croaked.

‘Because you’ll try something,’ she said, then looked again at me, ‘but Teddy is harmless.’

‘Teddy is a gentleman,’ Matteen said.

‘Teddy is too afraid to be anything other than a gentleman,’ Sarah said. She had a short skirt on. She lifted the hem, and slid one long leg after another into the footwell, careful neither to expose a square inch of knicker nor spill a drop of naggin. Her hairline dinted the rotting vinyl of the car’s ceiling, necessitating a drawing down of her shoulders. She lifted her long-fingered hand into the vicinity of my head. I looked at the lined pink of her palm. She walloped me across the face, but playfully.

‘Say thank you, Sarah,’ she said.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

She giggled, and fixed me with her blue eyes, a calculated simper.

‘Oof,’ Matteen said in a mildly impressed voice.

Jenny bustled in beside Matteen.

‘So Quillinan’s it is, then?’ Matteen said. ‘Come watch me crucify a few?’

‘Naaaaaawww,’ Sarah said.

‘Yeah,’ Matteen said.

‘Naaaaaawww,’ Jenny said.

‘You’re in the car,’ Matteen said, ‘that’s where the car’s going.’

‘You offered the lift,’ Jenny said.

‘You got in,’ Matteen said, ‘that’s what passes for consent these days.’

Matteen led the way into Quillinan’s, and I followed with the cue case, Sarah and Jenny behind. The irrelevantly elderly lined the bar, mostly fat men with dead wives, hefting pints into their bloated, drink-cudgelled faces. They did not seem to see us, certainly did not acknowledge us. We continued on into the pub’s rear, into the adjoining extension where the pool table and a pile of young skins waited. There was a game ongoing. The
in-situ
players saw Matteen and raised their cues. Eyes caught sight of Sarah and Jenny and lads quickly retuned their postures, snapping into more assertive shapes.

I placed the cue case on a table and hurried back into the main pub to order our group a round of Cokes and ices—Matteen did not drink when he played. The girls did as girls do; panned the room, drew inscrutable conclusions behind inviolable expressions, and click-heeled it to the sanctum of the women’s toilets.

Matteen flipped locks. From the case’s velveteen interior he removed the split cue parts. He screwed one end into the other and worked the joint to a seamless squeak. He dabbed a speck of oil onto a muslin cloth and swabbed down the stick. There were a dozen lads around the table. Those who were to become that night’s opponents rolled shoulders, flicked fingers by their sides.

Matteen addressed them.

‘Five spot for a one-off game. Twenty for a best of three. Fifty for five. I am in no mood for fuckery,’ he announced, the colour and conviction returned to his face, his voice assured, fluently cocky in this domain.

Brendan Timlin went first and lost his fiver in four minutes. Peter Duggan next. Best of three, gone in two rounds and eleven minutes. Doug Sweeney, best of three, gone in two rounds and fourteen minutes. So it went. An hour in and Matteen was up fifty-five quid even after the twelve Cokes he’d bought me, himself and the two girls.

The girls, meanwhile, reappeared from the jacks midway through Matteen’s second game and took a table facing conspicuously away from the action. Jenny was leaning into Sarah’s shoulder. The gaps in her teeth gleamed as she talked. Sarah was meditating on a noticeboard mounted on the far wall, a flock of expired circulars advertising manure storage solutions and faith-healing sessions tacked to it. The pinned circulars palpitated whenever a body went in or out of the pub’s back door, and Sarah flinched with them, even though the breeze from outside was as warm as the air inside.

The body of boys teetered away from Jenny and Sarah, cramping itself tight around the pool table; it was respect of a kind, this physical relinquishment of a defined space to the girls. Only I broached that space, and did so with prompt servility, replenishing the girls’ Cokes as required and then withdrawing. The girls produced their naggins from their handbags and liberally dosed each new glass of Coke with vodka. They did not turn their heads to the games, even as the spectators grew more rowdy and voluble. Matteen from time to time sauntered by their table, to casually disclose how smoothly things were running.

‘Well, well done,’ Sarah said.

‘It’s thrilling, isn’t it?’ Jenny said.

‘These nights could go on forever,’ Sarah said.

‘And if they did, you’d be a millionaire, boy,’ Jenny said.

‘It pays, these nights,’ Matteen said, his cue slanted against his shoulder like a marching rifle.

‘And they just keep coming,’ Jenny said, ‘they just keep coming, and they go on for so long.’

Sarah smiled. A single vertical wrinkle-pleat appeared in the centre of her forehead as she considered Jenny’s statement.

‘It’s the heat,’ Sarah said, ‘the heat in the air makes the night last longer. You ever hear about dead bodies in the Sahara, in its hottest extremes? The sun cures the skins; they don’t rot. The heat preserves them, mummifies them of its own accord.’

‘Is it that hot out there?’ Matteen chuckled, nodding toward the back door, our town’s staid concrete heart beyond.

‘We’re not used to it,’ Jenny said.

‘I am,’ Sarah said, yawning. ‘Where we going after, anyways?’

Matteen kept his reaction to Sarah’s question tamped down tight, though even I felt a small thrill of approval.

‘We’ll see,’ he said softly, and returned to the table.

‘The woods,’ Jenny said, ‘the woods.’

Matteen walked past the money. He never touched the money. The defeated cast it onto the baize, crumpled notes and coins. It was me who snuffled the lucre up, who kept the running tally.