‘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.
‘No, but come. It won’t be the same otherwise.’
Dinner is boiled spuds, beans and frozen fish. Bat bolts his supper from a sideboard in the kitchen under the solemn surveillance of two bullet-headed eight-year-old boys. The boys are seated side by side by the opened back door, the old dear looming above them, wielding an electric razor and comb; the old dear cuts hair on the side, a home operation job, her clientele comprised mainly of the youngest offspring of her extended family.
Tonight’s customers have the wide-spaced eyes and aggrieved, jutting mouths hereditary to the Minions. The Minions are cousins from the passed father’s side, a clan notorious locally for its compulsive run-ins with the law and general ingenuity for petty civil dissension. Bad seeds, though Bat suspects the old dear is perversely proud of the association.
The old dear is shearing the boys simultaneously, in stages, not one after the other; she does the left side of one lad’s head, then the other lad’s left, then right/right, top/top and finally back/back. Kitchen towels are draped across the boys’ shoulders and a tawny moat of chopped hair encircles their chairlegs. The back door is open so the old dear can smoke as she works, the draught escorting the smoke of her rollie out into the evening, away from the boys’ lungs.
Above Bat’s head a wall-mounted TV plays the Aussie soap Home and Away, but the boys’ eyes do not leave Bat as he works at his dinner. The mane confuses little kids, who assume only women have long hair (and there’s no woman in town with hair as long as Bat’s). He’s conscious also they may be eyeing the balky hydraulics of his jaw as he chews.
One of the boys slowly raises a hand, extends his forefinger and begins boring at a nostril, a movement that necessitates a slight shift in his posture.
‘Don’t be moving,’ Bat says, ‘or she’ll have your lug off,’ wrenching on one of his own earlobes for effect. ‘She has a necklace of severed ears upstairs, made out of the lugs of little boys who wouldn’t stay still.’
The lad stops boring but keeps his finger socketed in his nose. His eyes widen.
‘That’s not true,’ the other lad puffs indignantly.
‘Shut up the lot of you,’ the old dear says, though of course she doesn’t refute Bat’s claim.
‘What’s your name?’ Bat says to the lad who spoke.
‘Trevor.’
A dim memory of a double christening, moons back, that Bat didn’t go to. ‘And that lad excavating his face beside you is JoJo, so.’
‘Yeah,’ Trevor says.
‘And where’s your mammy gone, Trevor?’ Bat asks.
‘The pub,’ JoJo says.
‘Is she out looking for a brother or sister for youse?’ Bat says, grinning at the old dear as the boys look on, puzzled.
‘Dearbhla,’ the old dear sighs. ‘Lord bless us and save us but you may not be yards off the mark there, Eamonn. HEADS DOWN,’ she barks, and the Minion boys, perfectly in sync, fire their chins into their chests.
Bat smiles. They can be tough and they can be rough, but there’s not a delinquent alive, budding or fully formed, the old dear can’t crone into submission.
Before the roof and beers and bed, Bat hits the road. A night spin, deep into the countryside’s emptinesses. The Honda is no power racer, but watching the dimpled macadam hurtle away beneath the monocular glare of his headlight, Bat feels he is moving too fast to exist; as he dips into and leans out of the crooks and curves of the road, he becomes the crooks and curves. A bristling silence hangs over the deep adjacent acres—the pastures, woodlands and hills sprawled out all around him. It goes up and up and up, the silence, and Bat can hear it, above even the hot scream of the engine.
His nerves are gently sparking by the time he lopes across the mossed asphalt shingles of the roof, cradling a sixpack. Bat plants his back against the chimney and drinks and drinks and waits for the moment the night becomes too cold, the air like a razor working itself to acuity against the strop of his arms; only then will he descend through the black square of his bedroom window.
The week rolls on. Friday night, the town centre. Bat in leathers, a pair of preliminary beers washed down to fortify the nerves. It’s been a while. He parks the Honda in an alley by the AIB branch. Shadowed figures linger outside The Yellow Belly’s entrance. Smokers. Bat approaches with his head lowered.
‘Fuckin’ Battigan. Bat,’ a voice says, surprised.
‘Man, Bat,’ the other says.
‘Lads,’ Bat says. The lads are a bit younger than Bat; little brothers to those who would have been Bat’s peers. One’s a Connolly, spotty face like a dropped Bolognese, the other’s a barrel-bodied, redheaded Duffy.
‘Which Duffy are you?’ Bat asks.
‘Jamie,’ the lad replies.
‘Michael was in my class,’ Bat says. ‘We called him Scaldyballs.’
Connolly’s face erupts in laughter. ‘We call this cunt the same.’
‘The ginger gene is dying out, so they say,’ Bat informs Duffy, darkly.
Duffy braces his shoulders, looks at Connolly, who communicates something back with his eyes.
‘What has you out anyway, Bat?’ Connolly asks.
‘Rob Hegardy’s fucking-off-back-to-college do.’
‘The brainboxes are off to brainbox land,’ Connolly sighs, ‘that time of year, I suppose.’
‘Leaving us thick fucks to this dump,’ Duffy scowls.
‘Alright,’ Bat says, stoppering the conversation. Inside he takes the couple of short steps up into the warm red heart of the bar. The main room is a long rectangle, half familiar faces eddying in its telescoped space. Some faces watch him; some don’t.
Bat thinks: I am here for Heg’s fucking thing, so I’ll go find Heg.
Heg is at the farthest point at the rear of the bar. He is surrounded.
‘Bat! Christ, good man!’ Heg roars, and his companions’ faces turn to take in Bat. Half a dozen lads Heg’s age, and the same number in girls again. The girls; a dark-haired one stands by Heg. Cheekboned and smokily glowering, from her emanates a demeanour of regal peevishness, nose pinned up in the air. There is the briefest shift of light in her irises; she fixes Bat with the penetrating impersonality of a security camera. Bat drops his eyeline to the floor. He wants to hurl his body at her feet, repent his hideous pelt.
‘Drink?’ Bat squeaks, hoping Heg hears.
‘C’mere . . . lads, you know this fuckin’ legend of a man,’ Heg loafs an arm across Bat’s shoulders. He’s had a few, Heg, his gaze lolling and sliding like syrup as he tries to fix upon Bat.
‘Na na na na na na na na, BAT MAN!!!’ Heg roars. Bat winces, shucks off the dead weight of Heg’s arm.
‘Pint, Heg?’ he says.
Bat cuts a paddling diagonal through the crowd, riding up along the polished grain of the counter like a drowning man gaining the shore. He actually grips the counter. He orders two pints—one for himself, one for Heg—and downs the first in a single ferocious engorgement. He slams the empty onto the counter as a head rush ignites behind his eyes; he sees sparks and a wavelet of nausea migrates from the middle of his face into the pit of his stomach. Bat orders another pint.
When he turns, a girl who looks like
Tain is facing him.
It is Tain, in makeup, in a dress. Bat’s eyes drop, in a skimming horizontal, compiling fugitive impressions before he can restrain himself. The dress is a shiny kind of silvery red thing, a square of absent material exposing a section of Tain’s chest. The dress’s hem ends midway down her thighs. Tain’s legs are bare. Bat has never seen Tain’s legs before. Her knees are miraculously, mundanely kneelike—blunt, knobby and flushed scaldingly red, as if in embarrassment at so public an exposure.
Bat gets a grip, forces eye contact with the girl.
‘I know, I know,’ Tain says mournfully. She’s blushing.
She has a parcel wrapped in silver paper under her arm.
‘Present for himself?’ Bat says.
Tain holds it out and rotates it assessingly in her grip.
‘Pretty gay of me, I think.’
‘Why would it be gay?’
‘It’s . . .’ She glances across at the crowd surrounding Heg. ‘Who’s that one with him?’
‘Don’t know,’ Bat says. ‘His sister, maybe?’
‘Fuck, no, that’s not his sister. Are you being funny? I’ve seen his sister, she’s a trainee vet in London. That’s not his sister.’
The dimensions of the parcel and the way it bends in a U shape as Tain tortures it in her grip—Bat guesses it’s a book. Bat is no reader. His eyesight has always been poor; the other derivation of his nickname. He wears contacts now but as a kid he suffered for years, believing the scumbled, dripping appearance of text on a page was simply how words appeared to everyone. It seemed perfectly in keeping with the variform sadism of classwork that you had to try to prise sense from the unintelligible fuzz of type on a page. The teachers thought him thick—and Bat was thick—but it was only when some of the other kids dubbed him booksniffer on account of how close he put his face to the page that he realised something was up.
‘What you get him?’ Bat means the book.
‘Has anyone else got him anything?’ she says, still craning towards the group.
‘I got him nothing other than this pint,’ Bat says. ‘And I’d offer you one but you’re too young.’
Tain swivels, with slow decisiveness, back to Bat. She makes a fist and wedges it against her hip. ‘Christ sakes just get me a vodka and lime, Bat.’
‘In a tick,’ he murmurs, lowering his head and shouldering back into the crowd, brimming pint in either paw.
Forty minutes later and Bat has put away three drinks to the group’s single round. Tain is several bodies beyond his left elbow, stuck making small talk to a plump boy in black. The lad keeps placing and replacing on his ear the wire frame of his glasses. Most of the crowd are from out of town; Heg’s college mates, dropped down for the weekend. The dark beauty, as still and mute as a hologram, must be one of them too, though the rest of the party ignores her as she ignores them, even Heg; that she has deigned to stand in his proximity is the only suggestion of any association between them. But then, Bat, too, has largely kept his trap shut, his conversational contributions amounting to timed groans and dry whistles as one or another anecdote winds to its climax. They are all talking about and around college, the communal life they share there; the talk is an involved braid of in-jokes and contextual nuggets and back references. Bat feels doltish—too big, too bluntly dimensioned, a thickset golem hewn from the scrabbled, sodden dirt of Connaught. His jaw throbs—the teeth set into his jaw throb.
Heg is drunk, his expression adrift in some boggy territory between gloating and concussed. Abruptly the hologram substantiates itself—the tall beauty leans in and begins kissing Heg most vociferously on the mouth. He kind of writhes around in her grip. A girl with an overbite breaks into a braying laugh. Bat gently shoulders his way out of the group and wheels off towards the jacks. His nape bristles; he feels the drag, like a faint current, of someone’s attention and turns. Tain scowling, in hot pursuit.
She still has the present, jammed down into her handbag.
‘I feel like a wanker,’ she says.
‘Don’t,’ Bat says. ‘Heg has us all just standing around like gobshites.’
A hand on Bat’s shoulder. He flinches.
‘Fuck me, man, how’s it going?’
Bat’s grip tenses around a phantom pint. He gulps. But it’s only Luke Minion. As it goes Luke is one of the more congenial strands of that brood of cousins. Luke has always had time for Bat; was witness to the boot to the face.
‘Well, Luke.’
‘It’s been an age, lad.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Who’s this?’ Minion asks of Tain, an amused curl to the lip.
‘I work with her. Tain. This is Luke.’
‘You’re still out with the Maxol crowd.’
‘It’s a living,’ Bat says.
‘It is,’ Minion says through his teeth. He runs a hand through his crow-coloured cowlick of a widow’s peak. Most of the Minions are stocky and solidly hipped. Luke is rangy, with clear grey eyes. Last Bat heard the man was running up mountains; there was talk of a sponsored tackle of Kilimanjaro. It never happened. Before that Luke had been living in a mobile home on the farthest acre of his family’s farmplot. He’d had a Czechoslovakian girl and a baba stowed away there for a while, but one day the pair woke up and the baba was dead.
‘What you at these days?’
Minion’s eyebrows rise, ‘Bits and pieces.’
‘In the Minion fashion,’ Bat says, hearing the old dear in his tone.
‘This guy,’ Luke says to Tain. ‘You ever hear tell of how he wound up with that face?’
Tain looks to Bat.
Bat wonders if she can read the total misery in his visage.
‘No,’ she says brightly, looking more like a child, in her densely daubed mask of makeup, than ever before.
‘Yeah,’ Luke says, ‘sure you’re only a young one.’
‘Hitting the jacks,’ Bat says, his throat going tight, like he’s just swallowed a plum gourd.
The nausea has resurfaced in the other direction, a roiling ball of unpleasantness bubbling out of his gut. His mouth waters, and he tastes a flash of blood. He wipes his mouth with his sleeve. His head is sore; his head is always sore. The headaches tune down to a vestige, but they never truly go.
The drinking doesn’t help, Bat thinks, but it does help.
As he slams open a cubicle door the possibility of throwing up seems fragilely close. He gropes the door shut behind him. A pitifully loud retch doubles him over; nothing follows but a gutty hock, a hot trickle of bile. Bat retches until it plops from his lips into the jacks’ waiting mouth.
There in the cubicle, unbidden, floats up the remnant of a dream; a recurring dream, Bat knows intuitively, though this is the first time he has consciously recalled recalling it. The dream remnant is merely this, like a random, unfinished scene from a film: Bat is Bat, but in a different body. A Dungan-like body, wasted and bowlegged, older perhaps, though perhaps not. Certainly frailer, flimsier, and he, dream-Bat, is walking around what must be this town. It’s just a street, an undistinguished strip of concrete paving flanked by generic buildings—and he’s wearing a mustard-seed suit. That’s what his mother—in the dream—calls the suit. The suit does not fit. It’s several sizes too large and the superfluous material billows and flumps comically around his limbs. And in the dream all Bat is doing is walking around and around and crying and crying and somewhere to the back of him—he can’t precisely tell—his old dear’s voice pursues him like a vindictive raincloud, saying change the medication, change the medication.
How long has he been having this fucking dream, he wonders?
And then his thoughts turn to the boot to the face; the last thing Bat himself recalls of that night was staggering through the door of Munroe’s takeaway with a hunger in his belly, his head down and headphones in, music blaring and scrolling through his
playlist to see what song was cued up next. He woke up in hospital. The culprit was a five-foot-two sparkplug went by Nubbin Tansey, and Luke Minion was there, saw it all unfold.
And now Tain is outside. Tain is on a stool by the bar, waiting for Bat to return. Bat squinches closed his eyes.
How long have I been having this fucking dream?
Tain is on a stool and Minion, expert bar-grift, has inveigled her into buying him a drink—the first she’s ever ordered in a bar. The barlad didn’t look at her twice as she put in the round. It makes Tain feel pathetically proud of herself. She’s on her fourth vodka and lime and has no more money. The odour of limes—spiked and soured by the gelid see-through spirit—is all she can smell. She’s watching Minion—the lad finicks with his stool, skims his palm round the lip of the seat like he’s searching for the sweet spot. Finally he hoists himself into position. He looks at her and launches in.
‘It must’ve been up on the heels of four on a Saturday morning, Munroe’s being one of the few eateries still open at that hour so it was fairly packed. I was queuing at the counter, hangover already coming on, waiting on a kebab and batter burger. Nubbin Tansey was up on one of the tabletops, making a holy fucking show of himself. Now Tansey was a shortarse but he was built through; physique of a jockey on steroids. He was well oiled, as we all were, looking wild and dishevelled, his shirt hanging off him, buttons all burst off, Doc Martens scuffing the Formica as he whelped out a furious jig. His boys were crowing him on—there were five or six of them, big rowdy units—and the Turkish lads behind the counter weren’t going to risk stepping in, though good old Saleem, the manager, was threatening to call the pigs if Tansey didn’t get the fuck down fairly lively. Tansey, bald since seventeen to go with the height deficiency, was amped up, face gone red and every veineen in his skull popping, a solid wall of perspiration coming right off him and fizzing in the fluorescence as he jigged and jigged. Nervous little cheers coming up from all corners of the takeaway, hoping he’d stop. Then Tansey started out with these karate moves, firing the legs out and chop sockying the air, which brought up further cheers. He was moving fair graceful for a man as scuttered as he was. And then he stops, a tacky sling of spit flapping from his chin. He wipes the spit and says to the boys, ‘I’m taking the head, THE HEAD, off the next cunt comes through that door,’ and points at the entrance, a good six feet away from the edge of the tabletop he’s prancing on. Another cheer at Tansey’s declaration, though this time only from his boys. And for a while that was that, there was this little spell, thirty seconds, where everything got quiet, even Tansey seemed to be winding down. He’d gone into a squat and was sharing a private chuckle with one of his boys when the doorbell jingles, the jingle letting everyone know there’s a body coming through, and I saw the shock of jet hair, the leather jacket and Bat’s battered runners. Not a chance to say nothing. Not that I believed, I suppose, that Tansey was actually going to follow through on his boast; shite talk and no follow through, I had it diagnosed. But the bell jingles, and in steps Bat, oblivious that he was the next cunt, elected by fate, and without a hesitation, without even stopping to see who he was going for, Tansey up and leapt. It was some fuck of a leap, credit to the lad, his leg straight as a rod leading his body, clearing that six feet and stoving slap bang into the side of Bat’s head. Cleanest connect of a jaw you’ll ever see, Bat sent flying like a rag doll. Spun and flung. He smacked the wall and bounced back up off the floor and then down again in a buckled heap. And Tansey—Tansey landed perfectly on his feet. Some young wan had let out a scream but now there was no noise except for Tansey’s breathing. His eyes were lit, in a marvel at what he’d done. No noise but the air heaving in and out of him, and Bat facedown in a sprawl of hair and blood. Every last cunt there must’ve thought he was dead. I did.’
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