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.
It was knocking on midnight when Nubbin Tansey, town tough and marginal felon, manifested on the premises. Matteen was up against Killian Weir as Tansey beelined our way, flanked by a couple of big units; ask the gods for henchmen and this is what they would send, twin slabbed stacks of the densest meat, their breezeblock brows unworried by any worm of cerebration. Tansey himself was short, at twenty already balding. He had gaping, thyroidal eyes, the broad skull and delicately tissued temples of a monk or convalescent. He had a tight T-shirt on, exposing veined biceps as tough and gnarled as raw root vegetables. He was chewing his own jaw and vibrating faintly in place, a bundle of seeping excess energies. He was likely on several substances.
‘Judgeboy, the Judgeboy,’ he said, slapping Matteen across his bent back as Matteen stooped for a shot. Unperturbed, Matteen maintained his low forward-bent stance, discharged his cue in a steady stroke. The central clot of stripes and solids unbunched, a swarm of balls scuffling thickly back from the cushions. The stripes—Matteen was always stripes—were hypnotic in their tumbling banded flicker. A stripe rolled into the top-left pocket, gone in a clean gulp, and the topside spheres slowed and stilled into a new arrangement on the green.
‘Sweet,’ Nubbin said, ‘sweet, Judgeboy.’
‘You’ll be wanting a game, Tansey?’
‘Maybe now,’ Tansey said. ‘Though I’ve a notion you’ll beast me.’
Matteen raised his Coke, took a sip. The crowd was beginning to thin. The meeker lads were leaving while they could still leave unobtrusively.
‘Can I apologise in advance?’ Matteen said.
The girls had not yet turned around but he knew they were listening.
‘Don’t condescend,’ Tansey said, and smacked his lips. He studied the table’s stationary scatter of balls. He picked up the white, rotated it in his hand. Matteen cleared his throat. Tansey put the ball back in place. He pulled the cue from the grasp of the boy Killian. One of Tansey’s goons loaded the coin slots. The potted balls churned down out of the table’s gut. The goon put the triangle on the baize, clonkingly set the balls in place.
I heard the bark of chairlegs. Sarah and Jenny had twisted in the pool table’s direction, interested now.
‘C’mon so to fuck,’ Tansey said.
‘Be nice, Tansey,’ Jenny said.
‘I know you?’ Tansey to Jenny.
Jenny shook her head. There was an amused uncowardly venom in her eyes, watching Tansey as Tansey’s eyes crawled down her, then up Sarah.
‘The Dignan girl. I know you, but. I know your brothers. You’re attached to this set?’ he said, nodding at Matteen and me.
‘Tonight I am,’ Sarah said.
‘I know your brothers, Dignan. Christ, you’re some diamond pulled from a coal bucket, you know that?’
‘She knows that,’ Matteen said, ‘everyone knows that.’
‘You’re with him?’ Tansey asked, eye rolling in Matteen’s direction.
Sarah looked at Matteen. There is nothing worse than being pitied.
‘Well, he’s looped on you,’ Tansey smiled, nodding again at Matteen, ‘plain to see.’
‘We playing or what?’ Matteen said.
‘Alright, alright. Go,’ Tansey said, almost apologetically.
Matteen broke, potted a stripe from the break and then two more. His fourth shot he hit so viciously the stripe convulsed back up out of the pocket, spun confusedly on its own axis, and died into place a foot from the hole.
‘You hit that one too well,’ Tansey said.
‘You want to come off into the night with us once I thrash your buck?’ he said to Sarah.
‘It doesn’t work like that,’ Sarah said.
Tansey turned, the cue’s end rested on the toe of his boot, the cue tip stabbed up under his chin. He considered Sarah. There were beads of sweat all over him. Tansey was looking right into Sarah’s face. Not many do, or can.
‘Don’t ask, don’t get,’ he smiled.
Then he turned and bent low to the table, planted the fingers of his leading hand on the baize and placed the stick
wobblingly on a knuckle-ridge. Tansey seemed to be sincerely puzzling the shot, but when he fired forward the cue he drove the tip down and sliced a long rip through the cloth.
‘Whoops,’ he said, and stooped to shoot again. Again he gouged the baize.
‘Ah would you just fuck off and leave us alone, Tansey,’ Matteen said, paling in the face.
‘There’s no winning with some folk,’ Tansey said.
He handed the cue back to the Killian boy.
‘C’mon,’ he said to Sarah, striding over to her and grabbing her hand. Tansey dragged her to her feet, but Sarah had a good foot on him. She loomed, she threw her head forward, down onto Tansey’s chest. Tansey yelped like a pup. He stepped back from the tall girl. There was a dark blotch running from the chest of his T-shirt.
‘Jesus, she bit him,’ the Killian boy sniggered.
Tansey considered his wound, chin buried in his neck to see. He looked up at Sarah. He did not look upset, exactly.
Matteen glowered.
Tansey cupped the bit part of his chest.
‘My titty,’ he said.
Jenny got up, and now she grabbed Sarah’s wrist.
‘Let’s go,’ Jenny said, dragging Sarah out into the bar.
‘Wait,’ Matteen said, but the girls did not.
‘Go on,’ he said to me, ‘get them back.’
‘Me?’
‘Catch up after them and attach yourself to the sole of one of them bitches’ boots, like a good lad,’ he said.
Matteen was clammy and pallid again. He reversed onto a bench, and leant his weight upon his cue.
‘This thing ain’t stopping,’ Tansey said. The blotch was running, widening.
‘Stitches,’ said one of the big units with him, ‘stitches and a tetanus shot.’
A rupture of laughter as I headed through to the bar, but the girls had already bolted from the premises.
Young Skins Page 3