Young Skins (4 page)

‘It’s a clever dog can take itself for a walk like that,’ Val said, watching as a pair of headlights approached and pulled in on the other side of the river. The far bank was relatively built up; there was a lit parking lot, a boardwalk and a wooden pier where a few townsfolk keep their rowboats and one-mast sailboats tethered.

‘Look now,’ he said.

Two men got out of the car. They were toting fishing rods and tackle boxes, and were dressed in waders, those shoulder-strapped, breast-high waterproof leggings. The pair plodded along the boardwalk, encumbered and inelegant, like men in spacesuits. At the edge of the riverbank, they checked their lines and stepped carefully out into the current.

‘You like this place, don’t you, Val? You like everything about it,’ said Martina.

‘That sounds like an accusation.’

‘Not at all. Someone has to stay put, hold the fort.’

‘You’re not going anywhere that far.’

‘Galway’s not that far,’ said Martina, ‘but it might as well be the moon for people like you.’

One of the fishermen drew his rod up over his shoulder and pitched it forward in a fluid stroke. The baited hook buried itself in the skin of the water.

The following Saturday, the first in September, Martina blew off her final scheduled shift in the Peacock to head back to Galway early. No valedictory fuck for Val, not even a farewell text. It was a busy night. Val spent the evening resisting the urge to check his messageless mobile. Just before 2
am
, Mossy radioed in from the dance floor. Val and Boris waded in through the crowd to find two young lads going viciously at it beneath the DJ booth. Mossy attempted to prise them apart and received a shot to the kidneys from the taller one for his troubles. He doubled over and went to ground. Without a word, Val came up behind the tall kid and wrapped him in a headlock. The kid swung an arm back, trying to claw at Val’s face. Val pressed his forearm up into the kid’s neck until his knees obligingly buckled.

Later that night, at home, undressing for the shower, Val realised the kid had got him after all. He touched the back of his head. In the flesh behind his right ear were a row of narrow crescent indents where the kid had dug his nails in; the skin was broken but not bleeding. After his shower, Val walked into the kitchen in nothing but his boxers, secreting a trail of sloppy wet footprints onto the lino, and fished a bottle of beer from the bottom of the fridge. The moon, bright and engorged, shone down through the window above the sink. Val sat at the table for what seemed like a long time. After a while, he picked up his mobile.

The text he eventually sent Martina was so long, he had to dispatch it in four separate messages. He didn’t think it likely that Martina would reply, or reply in any meaningful way. Still, he asked her how she was, was Galway as lively as ever, was she intent on dumping the drummer or was she going to give the lad another shot. Val said that he was sitting in his kecks in his kitchen at four in the morning with nothing but the usual shite having gone down at the Peacock, no change there and there likely never would be, and that no matter what had or had not happened between them he was looking forward to seeing her the next time she made it back from the moon.

STAND YOUR SKIN

Bat is hungover, Bat is late. At the rear of the Maxol service station he heels the kickstand of his Honda 150 and lets the cycle’s chrome blue body slant beneath him until its weight is taken by the stand. Bat dismounts, pries off his helmet—black tinted visor, luminescent yellow Cobra decal pasted to the dome—and a scuzzy cascade of dark hair plummets free to his ass.

Bat makes for the station’s restroom. The restroom is little bigger than a public telephone box. Its windowless confines contain a tiny sink and cracked mirror, a naked bulb and lidless shitter operated by a fitfully responsive flush handle. There is not a single sheaf of bog roll anywhere.

A big brown daddy-long-legs pedals airily in the sink basin. Bat watches the creature describe a flustered circle, trapped. He could palm-splat the thing out of existence but with a mindful sweep of his hand instead sends it unscathed over the rim.

Bat gathers his mane at the nape, slinks a blue elastic band from his wrist and fashions a ponytail, as Dungan, his supervisor, insists. Bat handles his hair delicately. Its dense length is crackly and stiff, an inextricable nest of flubs, snarls and knots, due to the infrequency with which Bat submits to a wash.

Bat’s head hurts. He drank six beers on the roof of his house last night, which he does almost every night, now. The pain is a rooted throb, radiating outwards, like a skull-sized toothache, and his eyes mildly burn; working his contact lenses in this morning, he’d subjected his corneas to a prolonged and shaky-handed thumb-fucking. A distant, dental instrument drone fills his ears like fluid. Hangovers exacerbate Bat’s tinnitus.

He runs the H and C taps. Saliva-temperatured and textured water splurge from both. He splashes his face and watches the water drip like glue from his chin.

Bat was never a good-looking lad, even before Tansey cracked his face in half, he knows that. His features are and always have been round and nubby, irremediably homely, exuding all the definition of a bowl of mashed-up spuds. His eyes, at least, are distinctive, though not necessarily in a good way; they are thick-lashed, purplishly-pupiled and primed glintingly wide. They suggest urgent, unseemly appeal.
You look constantly as if in want
, his old dear chided him all up through childhood. Even now she will occasionally snap at him—
what is it, Eamonn
?—apropos of nothing, Bat merely sitting there, watching TV or tuning his guitar or hand-rolling a ciggie for her.

Nothing, Bat will mutter.

You are a mutterer, Eamonn
, the old dear will insist.
You always were
, she’ll add, by way of implying she does not ascribe all blame for that to the boot to the face.

The boot to the face. Nubbin Tansey, may he rest in pieces. Munroe’s chipper. Years gone now.

Bat jabs his cheek with his finger, pushes in. His jaw still clicks when he opens it wide enough.

Six separate operations, ninety-two percent articulation recovered and the brunt of the visible damage surgically effaced but for a couple of minute white divots in his left cheek, and a crooked droop to the mouth on that side. It’s slight but distinct, the droop, a nipped outward twisting of the lip, an unhinging, that makes him look always a little gormless. Damage abides beneath the surface. Bat can feel by their feelinglessness those pockets of frozen muscle and inert tissue where the nerves in his face are blown for good.

Bat had been known as Bat for years, the nickname derived from his surname, Battigan, but after the boot and the droop a few smartarses took to calling him Sly, as in Sly Stallone. Sly didn’t take, thank fuck; he was too entrenched in the town consciousness as Bat.

None but the old dear call him Eamonn now.

Bat palms more water onto his face, slaps his cheeks to get the blood shifting. The beers don’t help of course, but the fact is the headaches come regardless, leadenly routine now. In addition there are the migraines, mercifully rarer though much more vicious, two-day-long blowouts of agonising snowblindness that at their worst put Bat whimpering and supine on the floor of his bedroom, a pound of wet cloth mashed into his eyesockets to staunch, however negligibly, the pain.

The doctors insist the head troubles have nothing to do with it, but Bat knows they are another bequeathal of the boot to the face.

He leaves the restroom and keys himself through the service door into the staff room. He deposits the bike helmet on the couch, unpeels his leather jacket, registers with a pulse of mortification the spicy whang peeling off his own hide.

On the staff-room counter he spies, amid a row of other items, a stick of women’s roll-on; must be Tain’s. He picks it up, worms his fist into each sleeve of his Maxol shirt and hastily kneads his pits with the spearminty-smelling stuff. As he places the roll-on back on the counter he notices a curled black hair adhering to the scented ball. He tweezes it off and flicks it to the floor.

Out front Dungan, the store manager, mans the main till.

Dungan is old. Fifties, sixties, whatever. He’s the sole adult and authority figure in a work environment otherwise populated by belligerently indolent youngsters.

‘Bat,’ Dungan says.

‘Yeah?’

‘Take your particular timepiece. Wind the big hand forward fifteen minutes. Keep it there. You might show up on the dot once in your life.’

Humped above the cash register, Dungan resembles nothing so much as his own freshly revived corpse. His skin is loose and blanched, its pigmentation leached of some vital essence, and what remains of his thin grey hair is drawn in frailly distinct comb lines across his head, mortuary neat. His glasses are tinted, enshading the eyes. But you can tell Dungan is alive because the man is always snufflingly, sputteringly ill, his maladies minor but interminable; head colds, bronchial complaints and dermal eruptions hound him through the seasons’ dims and magnifications.

‘What needs doing?’ Bat sighs.

Dungan looks over the rims of his glasses. The white of one eye is a blood-splatter of detonated capillaries.

‘Sleeves. Sleeves, Bat. What did I say about sleeves?’ He nods at Bat’s arms. ‘The tattoos can’t be on display, lad. Plain black or white undershirts in future, please.’

‘But everyone knows me,’ Bat says.

‘Professionalism is an end in itself,’ Dungan opines. ‘Now. There’s six pallets of dry stock out back that need shelving and the rotisserie wants a scrub after that. We’ll just have to try and keep you out of sight as much as we can.’

First break. Ten minutes. Bat is first out to the lot, peeling chicken-fat slicked marigolds from his hands. The lot is a three-quarters-enclosed concrete space done up to suggest a picnic area, where, the idea is, road-weary motorists can eat or stretch their limbs in what appears to Bat to be a rather bleak simulation of pastoral seclusion. There are rows of wooden tables and benches bolted into the cement (the obscenities carved into their lacquered surfaces only visible close up) and a ring-fenced aluminium wreck of a play area for children. Scruffy clots of weeds have grown up and died in the fistulas along the crumbling perimeter of the lot’s paving. A mural painted onto the lot wall depicts a trio of cartoon rabbits in waistcoats and top hats capering against a field of green dotted with splotch-headed blue and red and yellow flowers. The untalented muralist had not been able to set the pupils of the rabbits’ eyes into proper alignment, afflicting all three with various severities of cross-eye.

Bat perches atop the fat plastic lid of an empty skip, guzzles a Coke and regards the rabbits. The longer you look the more subtly crazed their expressions appear.

Presently Bat is joined by Tain Moonan and Rob ‘Heg’ Hegardy.

Tain is fifteen, Hegardy eighteen.

Both are summer recruits, and both will soon be finished up; Hegardy is returning to college in Dublin as a second-year computer science student and Tain will be heading into Junior Cert year in the local convent.

Hegardy ducks out into the morning air whistling a jaunty tune. He flashes a grin at Bat as he approaches, snaps a thin white spindle from his breastpocket and sketches an elaborate bow as he proffers what turns out to be a perfectly rolled joint.

‘Nice,’ Bat snorts.

‘Let’s start the morning and kill the day,’ Hegardy says.

Tain rolls her eyes.

‘Alright Tain,’ Bat says.

Tain only grunts. She studies Hegardy frankly as he crooks the joint between his lips, sparks his lighter and with a forceful, fish-face sucking motion pipettes a trail of purple smoke-wisps into the air.

‘Busy out front?’ Bat asks. Tain and Heg are on forecourt duty.

‘Quiet enough,’ Hegardy says, and passes the joint to Bat. Hegardy has a foot in height on Bat, a handsome, olive-oil complexion inherited from his half-Iberian mother, the wingspan and streamlined solidity of an athlete though he takes no interest in sports, and a pretty wad of crinkly black hair, like a black lad’s. He’s about the most laid-back lad Bat has ever encountered; nothing fazes or riles him.

Tain hops onto the skip beside Bat, scoots over until she’s right beside him. She picks up one of his marigold gloves and tugs it down over her hand. She jabs Bat with her elbow, nods at the joint.

‘Pass it on,’ she says.

Bat gives her his best look of grown-up disapproval.

‘This’ll stunt your growth, Missy.’

‘Listen to the voice of experience,’ Hegardy says.

Tain rolls her eyes, sneers but declines a retort. She pulls her peroxided hair out of her face. The roots are grown out, black as jet. Bat gives her the joint. She takes it with her yellow gloved hand. A brief toke and she is immediately seized by a bout of convulsive coughing. Hegardy’s eyes pop in delight and his mouth gapes in a mute O of impending hilarity. He leans in close so Tain can see. She swings a sneaker at his crotch, Hegardy bouncing backwards on his heels to elude the effort.

‘Handle your shit, Moonan,’ Hegardy barks in an American drill-sergeant voice.

‘It’s handled, dickhead,’ Tain says, holding her throat and working out a few clarifying grunts. Composure restored, she begins to pick absently at the small red nub of a zit on her chin.

Bat looks from Tain to Heg. For the past three months Bat has watched these two smile, joke, snark, preen and goad each other, with escalating intensity, up until three weekends ago, when the tone of their exchanges changed abruptly. For a few days the two were terse, even clumsy in each other’s company. Now, while things have relaxed into their original rhythm somewhat, their interactions possess an edge, a spikiness, that was previously absent. This worries Bat. Though Bat likes Hegardy, he is pretty sure the lad did something—and may perhaps still be doing something—with the schoolgirl. Because he likes Hegardy, Bat has shied from pressing the lad upon the matter, lest Hegardy admit he has in fact committed something perilously close to, if not in fact, full statutory rape. (Which is what it would be. Bat looked it up. With no little trepidation he ventured to the town library and at one of the terminal computers, hunched forward and glancing compulsively over his shoulder, googled what he considered the pertinent terms.)

‘When’s your last day?’ Bat asks.

‘Not till Sunday next,’ Hegardy says, ‘but college starts pretty much straight the week after. So I’m going to have a couple of going-away pints in The Yellow Belly this Friday. Don’t say you won’t be there, Bat.’

‘This Friday?’ Bat says.

‘This Friday.’

Caught off guard, Bat is too brain dead to temporise; no excuse presents itself through the double-daze of residual hangover and incipient dope high. Bat no longer socialises in town; no longer socialises full stop. He does not want to tell Hegardy this, though doubtless Hegardy has an inkling.

‘We’ll see,’ Bat says.

Tain is inspecting Bat’s arm on her side.

‘This one’s boss,’ she says, dabbing a yellow finger upon Bat’s kraken tattoo, etched in the hollow of his forearm. It depicts a green squidlike monstrosity emerging from a bowl of blue water circumscribed by a fringe of froth, an old-time ship with masts and sails encoiled within the creature’s tentacles, about to be torn apart.

‘Boss,’ Bat says.

‘Yeah,’ Tain says. She traces a circle in the crook of his arm, and Bat feels a pinch as she nips with her fingers at his flesh.

‘Ow.’

‘You got good veins, Bat,’ she says, then holds out her own arms for display. ‘Big hardy cables of motherfuckers. You can’t barely even see mine.’

Bat hesitates, leans in for a look. The down on Tain’s arms glints in the morning light. Her skin is smooth and pale. Tain’s right—her veins are barely there, detectable only as buried, granular traces of blue in the solid white of her flesh. There’s a whiff of spearmint coming up out of her sleeve. Bat tries to ignore it.

‘Why’s that?’ Bat says.

‘Tain must have a condition,’ Heg caws.

Tain ignores the sally.

‘Look. Your veins are blue or green, whatever. But why’s that, when your blood is red?’ she says.

Bat thinks about this. ‘That must be because of the lining or something. The veins’ linings are blue and the blood runs red inside.’

‘Blood ain’t red,’ Tain says. ‘It turns red when it hits air, oxygenates. You know what colour it actually is?’

Bat shrugs. ‘I’d be guessing, Tain,’ he says.

‘Bat’s blood runs one shade,’ Heg intones in a gravelly, film-trailer voice.

Bat looks from Tain to Heg and back.

‘Black as night,’ Tain growls in her version of the film-trailer voice.

Heg takes a final drag of the joint, drops it and sweeps it with his foot into a sewer grille, eliminating whatever tiny chance there might have been that Dungan would happen upon the incriminating butt and work out what it is they get up to out here—though that haggard bitch, as Tain refers to him, is nobody’s idea of a deductive savant. Bat nods appreciatively. Heg is a thorough lad, cautious. Maybe he is not up to anything with Tain.

‘Let’s get back,’ Heg says to Tain.

‘Fucksake,’ she mutters and pops herself off the skip. She heads in and Heg follows, turning at the last to catch Bat’s eye.