Young Skins

by Colin Barrett

  Winter came with a vengeance, as they say. The season felt like that, like a long, hard reprisal, exactingly meted. Snow whipped down in record quantities. The temperatures bottomed out, and the fallen snow stayed on the ground even as more fell. At night, the town river iced over in sections that came creakingly apart at dawn and floated downstream in jagged, table-sized panes. Cars fretted along at fifteen miles an hour on the high street and helplessly butted grilles. Now and then a lone pensioner was found frozen to death in their refrigerated council flat. I salted the lanes and macadam paths of the school, but every day a kid fell and pranged a knee or sprained a wrist. The stray cats died off and when the roads became impassable, the rubbish sat uncollected in frozen piles in the dumpsters, but no matter what I kept going to AA.

  She showed up the first Sunday evening in December.

  Mellick, the elder of our group, was up top, talking. The rest of us faced him, pitched and slumped in informal rows on foldaway chairs. The hall was large and bare. Along one wall was arranged a table bearing canisters of coffee, a bag of disposable plastic cups and a plate of inedibly stiff ham triangle sandwiches. Three ancient radiators clanked and burbled along the wall. Overhead, the ceiling lights buzzed, low and insinuating as a defect of the inner ear.

  Mellick was seventy. He had drunk for fifty years and been clean, now, five. He was short three fingers and looked like what he was, a survivor. Like many survivors he held himself up as his own worst example. He was telling us again about the fingers. As he talked, he held his maimed right hand in his undamaged left. Where index, ring and middle finger should be, there were only the abrupt drumlins of his knuckles, the scar tissue whited over. I was up in the first row, looking right into Mellick’s elongated, pitted face. I could see the battered horseshoe of his bottom row teeth, pocked with black metal fillings and rufous with rot.

  She was sitting to my left. She was pale, wrung-eyed, copying unconsciously or not Mellick’s arrangement of hands; one held in the other, fingers curled round showing bitten nails coloured with chipped blue nail polish. She was hunched over in her chair—head low, shoulders tucked in and braced—as if awaiting a blow to the nape. She was breathing through her mouth, eyes fixed to Mellick as he unpacked his old story.

  Mellick was forty-one when he lost the fingers, he said. He was in a shed on his farm, shearing planks of timber while drunk, drunk and angry, why he can’t remember, of course. He said he was hurling the lengths of wood into the spinning bandsaw, splinters going everywhere, into his hair and mouth and eyes, the blowbacking sawdust rendering him practically blind, when hand met saw.

  It was over in an instant, Mellick said. Before he knew what had happened he was staring at the pumping red mess of his hand. Mellick said he had no idea how many fingers were gone; the spewing blood and the luminosity of the pain made it impossible to get a tally straight in his head. The pain, he said, was like a presence, a separate body or entity, standing there in the shed with him. He was scared, staggering around, looking for however many fingers he could find and getting rapidly woozy, knowing this wasn’t a good sign, dazedly combing the straw and shaving-matted floor and all the time convinced he was going to bleed to death. And he did pass out, but he did not die, and by the time anyone knew what had happened the family cat (oh, Ruckles!) had already found the three severed fingers, eaten one until it was just a spur of bone with a nail attached by a thread of gristle, and stolen off with the other two.

  ‘And did I learn anything from this experience?’ Mellick asked.

  Nobody said anything. I finicked with the cuffs of my shirt, crooked my head and brought the woman into my peripheral field. She was my age, maybe, early thirties, maybe younger, depending on the degree of damage she’d inflicted upon herself.

  ‘I was back on it the second I was out of the hospital,’ Mellick answered. ‘It didn’t so much as dent my appetite. Not for years, not for years, not for years.’

  He cracked a mirthless smile. I did too. For this was what we were here for, the hardscrabble tutelage of those come out the other side of their damage.

  The meeting over, a few of the Anons hovered by the coffee table, husking themselves into their jackets. There was motiveless chatter about the weather. After an hour of intensive gut spilling, it was nice to impersonate normal people.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said to me.

  Her hair was a wan, unconvincing brown; one prompt spook away from turning completely grey. She had a round face, pale eyes and a faded scar on her nose, a blanched diagonal seam, neat, across the bridge, like a tiny rope burn. She was not good-looking, but there was a watery indefiniteness to her features, a pliancy, that just then appealed.

  ‘You’re Carmichael’s gym teacher, aren’t you?’

  I winced but admitted I was.

  ‘Siobhán Maher. My boy is in your class. Anthony. He’s a second year.’

  I didn’t say anything and she added, redundantly, ‘I’m his mother.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I didn’t know—I mean I don’t know if you’re allowed to say you know each other here?’ she said.

  ‘It’s supposed to be anonymous.’

  ‘That’s not really practical around this ways, is it though?’

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘This is my first time,’ she said.

  We stepped outside, into the bright white furnace of cold. I cupped my hands and blew. The hall was at the northern end of the church grounds. The church steeple, lit from below, loomed above a row of skinny elms. The snow had frozen into sparkling crusts upon the roofs and bonnets of our parked cars.

  ‘Anthony’s not the sportiest, I imagine?’ she said, trailing me as I crunched my way to my car.

  I thumbed the serrations of my car key’s teeth and tried to picture Anthony Maher, summoning up a quiet, pale, heavyset boy who did not stand out in any way. The others called him Anto, but even that generic ­diminutive—suggesting a lad possessed of a rudimentary streak of devilment or impishness or participatory vim—did not suit the ponderous, frumpy boy I had to verbally goad into an amble in the rare games of five-a-side he consented to partake in.

  ‘He holds his own,’ I lied.

  I opened the driver door. A lock of snow crumbled down and shattered on the seat. The car was a rickety secondhand number the Sentimental Authoritarian had sourced for me. Its previous owner was a priest and former Carmichael’s faculty member, and the interior retained a smell I could only describe as holy, an aroma at once cloying and lightly sulphurous, redolent of thurified smoke or incense. It was a smell I could not eradicate no matter how much I scrubbed at the upholstery with solvents and sprays. Months later and it still made me gag.

  When I looked up she was still there, standing by the taillights.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘It’s a cold one, isn’t it?’ she said, like that was an answer.

  ‘You could get in.’

  She slid into the passenger seat, into the fretwork of shadows thrown by the limbs of the elms.

  ‘I just live in Farrow Hill estate. If it’s on your way.’

  ‘It is alright.’

  I turned on the engine and let the car tremble warmingly in place, then nosed us out onto the main road. I drove in second, mindful for black ice limning the macadam. There were long rumpled drifts of frozen snow choking the ditches, their ridges sooted with exhaust. Between us there was no talk for a little while, and there still wasn’t when she dropped her right hand on my leg and began kneading my thigh, pressing slow and hard, wincing and unwincing her fingers.

  ‘How long have you been going?’ she said.

  ‘Where? To the meetings? Five months, give or take.’

  ‘And you’ve been good all that time?’

  ‘Not all that time,’ I admitted.

  ‘Was it just drink?’ she said.

  ‘Mainly,’ I sai
d. ‘There was everything at some point.’

  ‘And you were away before?’

  ‘In the city.’

  ‘And what did you do there?’

  ‘This and that.’

  ‘What kind of this and that?’

  ‘Bars. Clerking. The sites. Played in a band. Barwork was the best. Steady pay, all the drink you could drink on the sly. You could go a long time lying to yourself in there.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now, I do what you said. I teach gym.’

  ‘It’s better,’ she said.

  ‘That it is,’ I said.

  We moved down Main Street, past the lights of the Turkish takeaway, the flayed loaves of chicken and pork revolving on their spits in the window. We moved past one, two, three pubs in a row, smokers outside, some huddled, some affecting open-chested postures in defiance of the scouring subzero cold. I saw the drink in their faces, in the fuggy glower of their blood-bright expressions.

  She directed me on to the quay road and we followed the river, a slash of brightness against the murk of the surrounding land. The water was freezing over again, growing scales.

  ‘Carmichael’s up ahead,’ she announced.

  ’Uh-huh,’ I said, and wondered if she knew I lived there.

  On the riverside footpath, coming towards us, were two short figures. The boy on the inside had a scarf wound over the bottom half of his face, his hands in his jacket pockets, moving purposefully against the cold. The boy on the outside was not in so good a shape, tromping along with a pronounced crabwise stagger, listing to his left for three or four steps then lurchingly correcting. I looked again at the second boy and realised that the stocky, dough-faced features were those of Anto Maher. He was hammered, his face and head bared to the elements, his jacket unzipped and his trousers soaking wet from the knees down.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ she said. Her hand jumped from my thigh.

  ‘There’s your guy,’ I confirmed.

  ‘Him and that other eejit, Farrell,’ she said, ‘partners in crime.’

  There was a section of waste lot, not far from the school grounds, some of the boys used for knacker drinking. I figured they were coming from there.

  ‘You want me to stop?’ I asked.

  ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘This is what boys do, right? He tells me he’s staying over at Farrell’s house, watching DVDs and playing video games, and no doubt Farrell gives his mother the same shit.’

  In the dark, and given Anto’s condition, there was little chance that either boy would recognise me or my car or my passenger, but I stared straight ahead as we passed them.

  ‘Take care of yourself, you dope,’ she said in a low voice.

  ‘Who’s he more like?’ I said. ‘You, or his father?’

  ‘Both,’ she said. ‘Luck will knock you only so far from the tree.’

  ‘And where’s the father now?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh,’ she sighed. ‘He’s a thousand miles from here.’ She laughed as she said this. ‘No. Literally. He works in a mine in Africa, sorry, Siberia now, as big as any on earth.’

  She looked across at me, still grinning.

  ‘It’s a huge hole in the ground that goes down almost a straight mile. You could pick up and drop this entire town into it in one piece. He comes back twice a year.’

  ‘How’s that suiting you?’ I said.

  ‘He’s a good man for the couple of weeks he’s around,’ she said. ‘He’s a good man for the small doses. But remind me to show you a picture of the mine. It is something.’

  ‘What are they after?’

  ‘Diamonds,’ she said.

  ‘A mile down,’ I said. ’It must get hot.’

  ‘Left here . . . and a right.’

  We slid into an estate, crested a hill. ‘Here,’ she said. I parked in the driveway. She said nothing as she got out. Beneath the porch light she held her handbag up close to her face and foraged for her keys. When she stepped inside she left the door ajar. I followed her in.

  ‘What about you?’ she said. ‘You on your own?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Left a girl in the city?’

  ‘Something like that,’ I said.

  We moved down the dark hall, into the kitchen.

  She opened the fridge and a rhomboid of chilled light spilled across the floor, revealing a kitchen island, a table with two chairs pried back from it, as if the previous occupants had bolted from the seats in a hurry.

  ‘Hi, moggy,’ she said, and a cat, white coat splashed with black, emerged from a shadowed corner and dabbed across the tiled floor.

  I took a chair. The cat slid in under my feet and commenced grinding its tiny weight against each chair leg.

  ‘I think it likes me,’ I said.

  There was the heavy resonant thunk of a full bottle on the counter of the kitchen island. She unscrewed the cap, poured a long measure, and gulped it down. I could smell the whiskey. My heart began to race, as if I’d glimpsed the averted face of an old lover on a crowded street. She poured again. She shucked off her jacket, let it fall to the floor the way kids do. She came on over, the bottle in one hand, the glass in the other. I didn’t wait for her to offer the drink—I spared her that—snatching the glass from her hand and downing it in one go.

  ‘They must rate you in the school,’ she said.

  ‘It was a kindness, the job. I played football back when Carmichael’s won stuff, and, you know, I was good. The old man didn’t forget.’

  ‘When I was in the convent, me and the girls would go down and watch some of the Carmichael’s games, back when the Sisters still let us. Maybe I saw you play,’ she said.

  She was standing between the V of my legs. I returned the glass to her possession then rested my hand on the jut of her jeaned hip. She filled the glass again.

  ‘I remember that,’ I said.

  The Sentimental Authoritarian had come up with the idea, and his equivalent number in the convent had consented to it. The idea was to expand local support, and so each game day a bunch of convent girls were bussed down to the grounds, bearing class-made banners in the Carmichael’s and Convent colours. The girls were tightly chaperoned, of course, but every boy in Carmichael’s staggered around in a humpbacked fever at the fact that live actual females were being permitted inside the school gates.

  ‘Did you like it?’ she said.

  ‘I was good at it, so I guess I did.’

  ‘I wonder if I noticed you,’ she said. ‘One of us probably did. We thought we were American high schoolers, in love with the quarterbacks.’

  ‘I had best friends I saw every day for five straight years I wouldn’t know now if I passed them in the street,’ I said. ‘So I won’t be offended if you don’t remember me.’

  ‘But you were there and I was there,’ she said. ‘In our young skins, though we didn’t know each other from Adam. Strange to think of it.’

  ‘It was a long time ago.’

  ‘Does it feel like that?’ she said.

  ‘How could it not,’ I said. I curled the three middle fingers of my right hand into my palm, and waggled the thumb and baby. ‘But what did you make of Mellick?’ I asked.

  ‘That terrified old cunt.’

  ‘He’s meant to be inspiring.’

  ‘I don’t want to end up like that,’ she said.

  I uncurled my fingers and reached for her hair.

  In the upstairs bedroom, she flicked on a lamp.

  ‘See.’

  Tucked into the frame of her dresser mirror was a yellowing picture. The mine. I was expecting a photograph by or featuring Anto’s father, but it was only an image from a paper or magazine. The picture was full colour, with a column of text in a foreign language occupying the upper left corner of the page. The photo had been taken from altitude, not directly overhead but hi
gh enough to encompass the entire circumference of the mine, which was, quite literally, a big hole in the ground. There was a town, or at any rate a stretch of dinky building-like structures, spread out along its far rim. The surrounding landscape was suitably desolate, a lunar terrain of chalks and greys and indeterminate formations of rock and dirt, scrubbed clear of anything alive or green. The mine was widest at the surface and narrowed as it deepened, like a funnel. Carved along the exposed inner strata of the mine wall was a presumably machine-made channel or pathway that wound all the way down to its unseen centre.

  ‘It’s big,’ I said.

  ‘And far away,’ she said.

  She knocked the light off, took my elbow and brought me to the bed. We undressed, and made an obligatory stab at fucking, our strivings ruddled by the whiskey. After, we sprawled in the foamy folds of the duvet and finished off the bottle. The whole time, I kept a portion of my attention perched out on a little ledge in the very back of my mind, straining for the telltale slam of the front door, the thunderous clomping of feet on the stairs, but the rooms beneath us were as still as the bottom of a lake.

  ‘So is this a thing you do?’ I said. ‘Go to meetings, pick up someone you scent the weakness in?’

  ‘I want to be better,’ she said. ‘He was worse, a real demon for it, and this was the only way to live with him,’ she said, wagging the empty glass. ‘And then he went away, as far away as he could get. He said it was the only way any of us would get better.’

  ‘And is it? Better?’

  ‘It’s something you only do to yourself, they’re right about that,’ she said. ‘But I guess it’s worse if there’s someone else. And then there’s Anthony.’

  ‘He’ll make it,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe he will.’

  There was nothing else to say or do so I leaned in and kissed her, chastely, on the cheek. She traced her finger around the rim of the glass, dabbed the finger to her lips, kissed away the last amber fleck of whiskey, then turned away. After a while I got up and quietly dressed. I made my way downstairs, shoes in hand. Coming off the final stair step, I stumbled and brought my knee down on some sort of glass fixture—something that tinkled as it shattered. I hobbled down the hall, stuck my feet in my shoes, and let myself out. The dead-of-night cold was of a purity that scorched my lungs as I sucked it in.