‘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.
‘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 par
t 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 handful 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 movements 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 ro
und 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.
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