Young Skins

by Colin Barrett

  ‘Nubbin Tansey,’ Tain says. ‘I don’t know him.’

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ Minion says. He was actually inspecting his nails now. ‘He’s dead. Been dead three years.’

  ‘How’d he die?’

  ‘Rigged a rope round the crossbeam in his folks’ shed and—’ Minion takes his feet up off the floor. He hitches each shoe into the bottom rung of his stool and leans forward until the stool tips over. He fires out the feet to land standing, twists and catches the stool before it clatters to the ground.

  ‘Jeez,’ Tain said. She has placed the silver parcel flat on the counter and is now steadily picking away at a bit of sellotape on the wrapping.

  ‘No, no,’ Minion insists. ‘None of that. Tansey—he was one of those ones with nothing good in him. He was a fucking headcase. Paranoid, devious, a temper he couldn’t turn down. Would kick the shit out of you at the drop of a hat—and I mean you. The mother of his kid wouldn’t let him see the baby—he beat her to a pulp, cracked a bottle over her skull. He was one of them couldn’t stand being in his own skin, and couldn’t stand the rest of us neither.’

  Tain takes a sip of her vodka and lime.

  ‘Saddening?’ Luke Minion says.

  Tain bunches her lips together, shakes her head.

  ‘Did Bat not get the guards on him?’

  ‘The mother wanted to, and half the Minion clan wanted to kill the lad, they were just waiting on Bat’s say-so. But Bat never said nothing, didn’t even press charges. Tansey was one of them ones in and out of the county court every other day anyway—another stint wouldn’t have bothered him. There was a manner of ­settlement—the Tanseys footed the bill for the surgery Bat had to have after. But that was it, as far as retribution went, on Bat’s side. You’re his friend, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Tain says.

  ‘You know him, then. I used to pick on him a lot when we were kids. We all did. And if I wanted an excuse I could say he was the type that asked for it, or didn’t know how not to ask for it. Slap him in the face nine times and he’d come right back for number ten.’

  There’s a silence. Luke turns out from the bar, angles a sidling look at Tain.

  ‘What age are you?’ Luke says.

  ‘Eighteen.’

  ‘You with Bat?’ he says, and flicks a brutal gesture with one hand.

  Tain colours. ‘It’s . . . it’s nothing like that.’

  ‘Well,’ Luke drawls, ‘we could go somewhere and have you just sit on my face for an hour?’

  ‘What the fuck,’ Tain blurts, then bursts out laughing.

  Minion cackles.

  ‘Just a suggestion,’ he says and offers a trivially unfussed shrug of the shoulder.

  Tain looks towards Heg’s party. The dark beauty has collapsed in a despicably graceful heap on Rob, who can’t help but look like the smuggest prick in the world.

  ‘That fella then, is it?’ Minion said.

  ‘Huh,’ Tain says.

  ‘That curly-headed faggot with the ride welded to him. He’s what has you doleful. I can see.’

  He has his hand now on her thigh, up under the hem and on the bare flesh.

  ‘If it helps, this’ll be nothing other than meaningless,’ he says.

  So when Bat emerges from the jacks he stomps back towards Tain and this is what he sees; Minion, wrapped round her, mouth on hers. She’s rolling her shoulders in tandem to Minion’s impassioned flinchings, though there’s something mechanistic and barely controlled in her reciprocation. It looks coercive, Bat thinks sadly, but with a kind of concluding satisfaction. Tonight was a mistake, emphatically so, and this display of frankly felonious lechery is a fitting cap. Bat waggles the big stupid shovels of his hands.

  Last words present themselves.

  He could say: Bye Heg, thanks for nothing, hope you and your fucking college buddies got a good laugh out of tonight.

  He could say: Why Tain, why be that fucking pathetic, you’re cleverer than that, and you’re cleverer than Heg too.

  But he’ll say nothing, of course. His jaw throbs. It throbs with nothing. All he wants is a drink, but he can get that at home.

  Bat puts the head down, hair enfolding him like a screen, and leaves the humans to the humans.

  In the lane where his bike is parked Bat runs a hand round the inside of the helmet to make sure no kids have pissed in it or stuck it with chewing gum. The helmet’s grotty foam lining slips tight as a callipers round his head. Ignition and Bat takes a moment to listen: the engine’s rumble, overlapping with its own echo, crashes like surf back off the lane’s narrow walls.

  On the way home he zips by the Maxol station and for the fuck of it he does a lap of the premises. He slows to a stop out back. In the scanty, grained moonlight and with his iffy sight he can still just about decipher the trio of painted rabbits on the wall. He thinks of the stoic mania of their botched gazes and it is unnerving, now, to consider them presiding over the bleak emptiness of the lot, night after night after night.

  Bat realises he is silently mouthing Tain’s name over and over.

  At home the old dear is in the dark, in the sitting room, TV light the only illumination. In repose, half asleep, her face looks embalmed. It is not a restful expression. She has a wool blanket clutched up to her throat.

  ‘I can smell you from the hallway,’ she says.

  ‘Thanks, Ma,’ Bat says. In the kitchen he pulls a six-pack from the fridge.

  He cracks one open, wolfs it down. Around him Bat can hear the incessant creaking of the house fixtures, like a field of ice coming apart in increments. A draught runs from several accesses and converges in the kitchen, frigidly whistling by Bat’s ear. He hears the fretful scrawlings of rats behind the walls, under the pipes. . . .

  ‘How was the town?’ the old dear asks.

  ‘Fine,’ Bat groans.

  ‘I bet it was.’

  ‘Who’d you see?’

  ‘Luke Minion. Couple of work folk. Hegardy, the Moonan girl. Saw Peter Donnelly’s youngest, Danny Duffy. ’

  ‘Sounds like they were all out, so.’

  When Bat does not answer she says, ‘Was it alright?’

  ‘I survived,’ Bat says.

  The pksssh of a can’s tab getting popped. The old dear shifts in her seat. She listens to her son’s effortful ascent, the lumbering clop of each step up the squeaking stairs and then the succession of fainter percussive pulses travelling the sitting-room ceiling as he moves from the landing into, and then across, his bedroom. She’s sure she can hear the shunt of the window and then he is out and up onto the roof; though she must make this assumption on faith.

  She has dreams of him falling, of Eamonn letting himself fall. She has dreams of his bike leaving the road, his body a red rent along the macadam of some bleak country lane and the massive, settling silence afterwards. This is what a mother must do: preemptively conjure the worst-case scenarios in order to avert them. She never considered or foresaw that little shit Nubbin Tansey and his boot, and he happened. She cannot make that mistake again.

  There is a part of her that hates her son, the enormous, fatiguing fragility of him.

  She watches the TV and listens, without intentionally listening, for the creak and thud of his return through the window. On the TV her favourite host and his guests. Entire passages of conversation slip by. She falls asleep and jolts abruptly to, not knowing she’s been asleep.

  The TV screen is extinguished, a minute blue dot levitating in its dark centre. The draught whistles, far above her, through the black; there is no noise and it is dark everywhere. For a long moment she does not know who she is, or where she is. When it comes back to her, she calls out for her son.

  CALM WITH HORSES

  Dympna told Arm to stay in the car while Dympna gave Fannigan a chance to plead his case. This wasn’t the way it usually went, b
ut Arm nodded okay. Arm watched Dympna stalk up the lawn and politely hammer on the front door of the council house Fannigan shared with his mother. Eventually Dympna was let inside.

  Arm slid in his earphones and sank in the passenger seat. The car was originally Dympna’s Uncle Hector’s, a battered cranberry Corolla Dympna dubbed the shitbox, its interior upholstered in tan vinyl that stank of motor oil, cigarette ash and dog. Recessed into the dash was a dead radio, its cassette-tape slot jammed with calcified gobs of blue tack, cigarette butt-ends and pre-euro-era Irish coins. The dash smelled of fused electricals. Above Arm’s head, a row of memorial cards, their laminate covers wilted by age and light, were tucked into the sun visor and a red beaded rosary chain was tangled around the inverted T of the rearview mirror.

  Three houses down, two schoolgirls were sitting on a garden wall, talking and smoking. They were in their teens, their figures swollen to shapelessness by puffa jackets and the voluminous skirts of navy-and-green convent plaid heaped up in their laps. It was ten on a Wednesday morning, and the girls, Arm figured, were mitching from school. They were sharing the one cigarette, passing it back and forth and gabbing and rocking their feet from side to side in insistent tandem. Their heads were bent low, they covered their mouths as they spoke, each the other’s confidant, and Arm could have happily sat and watched them for the rest of the morning but he sensed movement from Fannigan’s house. Dympna was stomping back down the lawn in a way that reminded Arm of his own little boy, Jack. Dympna loomed by the passenger window, made a gun shape with his finger and pointed at Arm’s head. Arm popped out his earphones. Dympna’s features, which always looked too small for his wide face, were pinched, consternated. His trackie top was zipped right up to his neck, and Arm watched the zipper shiver tautly against the protuberant knot of his Adam’s apple. Dympna let out a long sigh, like a mammy.

  ‘Arm, get in there and beat the fuck out of that daft man.’

  ‘What about the mother?’

  Dympna held up and opened his left hand. A key adhered to his clammy palm.

  ‘I put her in the bathroom. Fannigan agreed that was best, gave me a hand getting her in there. He’s waiting for you in the sitting room.’

  ‘Is he going to make it awkward, you reckon?’

  Dympna ran his right hand over the ginger stubble on top of his head, shaved so tight it shone like vapour in the morning light.

  ‘You never know, but I don’t think so. He knows it’ll go over easier if he just takes it.’

  ‘How easy should it go?’ Arm asked.

  Dympna smiled wanly, ‘Well, don’t kill him.’

  The story came out last night, when Mary Rose, the third eldest of Dympna’s seven sisters, discovered Charlotte—Charlie they all called her—the youngest, weeping hysterically in the upstairs bathroom. Charlie had to be given a cup of warm milk chased by a sedative jigger of whiskey before she calmed down enough to tell what happened.

  ‘It’s myself I blame,’ Dympna had confided on the drive over. ‘Letting uncivilised fucking animals like Fannigan past my front door.’

  Dympna Devers was twenty-five, a year older than Arm. Dympna sold marijuana, fat green ziplocked bags of the stuff, all over town. The town was small, and Dympna held a monopoly on such business. Fannigan was the eldest of the crew of five dealers currently in Dympna’s employ. Fannigan sold out of the industrial estate, where he worked evenings as a production-line stiff in the Allgen medical prosthetics plant.

  The Friday evening gone, as he periodically did, Dympna had invited over the crew, Fannigan included, for drinks at the Devers’s family home, where his mother June and three of his seven sisters still lived. The Devers were a sociable breed, and liked crowding the house up. The parties tended to putter amicably on into the early hours, and attendees were encouraged to crash on the couch or floor if they had drank, snorted or smoked away the wherewithal to get home in one piece. The problem was that on that last night, Fannigan, completely pig-eyed, had at some point found his way up to young Charlie’s bedroom, let himself in, and attempted to stick several parts of himself in under her bedcovers. Charlie had only turned fourteen a couple of weeks ago.

  Dympna told Arm all this on the way over. Arm was amazed that Dympna had put the lock on his initial impulses, had waited out the night before taking action; amazed again that Dympna had gone in there and given Fannigan an opportunity to explain himself instead of just caving the man’s skull in.

  ‘So did he offer another side, then?’ Arm said.

  Dympna rolled his little eyes.

  ‘First he claimed he couldn’t remember a thing at all. Then he started swearing blind that in the state he was in he thought Charlie was Lisa.’

  Lisa was Dympna’s second oldest sister, twenty-four, by general consensus the prettiest of the Devers girls; that Fannigan’s molestations were intended for another of Dympna’s siblings, albeit one of legal age, would have done little to mollify the big man.

  ‘Jesus,’ Arm said, ‘fair play.’

  ‘No,’ Dympna said, ‘no fair play at all.’

  Arm wound the wires of his iPod neatly about the device and placed it on the dash. When he stepped out of the car, Dympna handed him the bathroom key.

  ‘Light damage,’ Dympna said, ‘lesson damage.’

  Fannigan was on the couch in the sitting room, in front of a low wooden coffee table. A shining black plasma hung on the wall, a talk show on, switched to mute. It was a Yank show; tanned people with bleached teeth and sports jackets mooing and grimacing at each other like pantomimes. Arm could hear a clock, an old-fashioned mechanical tick-tocker in the hall, and faint scrabbling noises from behind the bathroom door.

  ‘I don’t want to keep her too long in there,’ Fannigan said, nodding towards the hall. He was a bit drained- looking, but there was no tremor in his voice. His limbs were pinned to the couch. Fannigan was somewhere in his fifties. He was gaunt, with dirty silver-tinged rocker hair. He wore a bushy grey moustache he presumably considered distinguished, the whited ends tamed into tapered points by regular, finger-tipped applications of spittle, and he might once have been a handsome man. All Fannigan had on were jeans and a vest. His ropey arms were decorated with the murky green-blue blotches of old tattoos, their original shapes and lines mottled into illegibility by age. The lack of clothing was on purpose, Arm decided. Fannigan wanted to advertise the frailty of his scrawny frame.

  ‘Have a seat,’ Fannigan said.

  Arm stepped forward.

  ‘Arm—’ Fannigan said and raised an open hand.

  Arm grabbed the back of Fannigan’s head and flipped him off the couch onto the floor. Fannigan’s cheek smacked the coffee table. He moaned, and a dark rivulet, meaty and viscous, slipped from his mouth. Arm stepped back and guided his foot up under the old man’s ribs.

  ‘Up,’ Arm said, ‘look, Fannigan. Look.’

  Fannigan raised his face as requested. Arm hit him two, three, four times. To his credit, Fannigan was still conscious after that, though swimming on his elbows on the carpet. It was often hard to tell if a person was crying in that state—there was usually a lot of liquid running from their face, necessitating all manner of soggy expulsions and clogged snorkelling noises. But Arm thought Fannigan was crying. Certainly, Fannigan was struggling to say something.

  ‘I—I—I didnnnn efffin ged, ged haa nnnnnnickers off!’

  Arm hit Fannigan again. There was the wishbone snap of his nose breaking and the old man was clean out. Arm wrenched the plasma from the wall and tucked it under his arm. In the hall, he dropped the key and toed it under the bathroom door. Arm could hear Fannigan’s mother scuffling on the other side, groaning, ‘Where’s my Billy, where’s my Billy?’

  Arm became friends with Dympna at fifteen. They were in the same school, but hung in different groups and it was not until Dympna showed up at Saint Ignatius Athletic, the local boxing club, that Ar
m got to know him. Dympna was a porky, eager boy back then, keen to transmute his flab to muscle and learn how to throw a punch. Boxing was Arm’s thing; at underage level he had fought his way to county, and briefly, provincial, distinction. Arm had the clear head and cold-bloodedness required by the ring, the knack of detachment. Arm could be buried in the moment of a fight, spun and dizzy and snorting sputum, his body bright and ringing, and yet at the same time occupy a little bubble of lucidity above it all. His punches travelled with just the right weight and restraint, and they had a bounce to them when they landed, the way raindrops splash. And Arm was relentless. If the ref did not intercede, he could pound equably away on a lad until his head fell off.