Here Are the Young Men

by Rob Doyle

  I flapped around for a few minutes, lying on my back and floating as low waves washed over my face, dissolving on my eyes to leave the vacant blue sky and the bare sun high above me.

  When I came out of the water, Jen was sitting alone on the blanket. Rez and Cocker had gone off somewhere. Jen watched me approach, shivering as I grabbed a towel to wrap around me.

  ‘Have fun?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah. You should get in. Fuckin hell, that’s sobered me up a bit. I need a drink.’

  I sat down beside her, still shivering and pulling my towel tight around me. I wanted badly to lean against her, draw in her warmth. To my embarrassment, I noticed I was getting an erection. I tried to move my left leg in such a way as to hide it, but I thought she had noticed.

  After a while she said, ‘So have ye worked out what ye want to do if ye don’t get the points to go to college?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘Get a job, I suppose. Which is actually what I’m supposed to be doin now, but, ye know … just something to keep me goin. I don’t want a career or any of that crap. There’s nothing here that I want to do. All I want to do is get drunk and hang around with me friends.’

  ‘Nothin here that ye want to do,’ she said. ‘That’s just how I feel. That’s exactly why I want to go away. There’s a lot going on out there, in the world. I mean, like, there has to be.’

  ‘Are ye really plannin to go away?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘But have ye worked out where ye want to go yet?’

  She was gazing out at the sea. There seemed to be fewer people on the beach now. Clouds had stolen in from nowhere to swoop across the sun.

  ‘I don’t really care where I go. Just somewhere far away, somewhere different. There has to be more in the world than, than this.’ Leaning back on her elbows, she lifted her chin to indicate the beach, the Dubliners, the city.

  ‘I don’t know if there is, though. I mean, I get the feelin it’s the same everywhere. It’s all America now. Everywhere ye go you’ll probably still be in America. Ye can’t really get away from it. Know what I mean? Fuckin shopping centres and parades, all that stuff. Cars and houses to buy, big furniture superstores. God, when I even think of it I just want to swim out to sea and drown. But then again, there’s always Mexico. Where those weird pyramids are …’

  I turned to see if she was listening, and found that she was looking right at me, smiling faintly. Her eyes sparkled as the sun broke out from behind a bank of cloud.

  ‘You’re nice, Matthew,’ she said simply.

  ‘I’m not “nice”,’ I protested. ‘What do you mean, I’m “nice”? Niceness is just fuckin blandness, just fuckin … just fuckin Dublin.’ I was working myself up, using the outburst to hide my nervousness.

  But she cut over me: ‘I’m only sayin you’re nice, Matthew. It’s true, ye are. You’re angry and fucked up and a nervous wreck, but I think there’s something a bit more to ye.’

  I didn’t know what to do, how to act. But as I was hesitating, she put her hand on mine and I blurted out, humiliatingly, ‘Can I kiss ye?’

  She burst into laughter at the question. ‘My God. Why not send a formal written request next time, like applying for college or something. But yeah, go on, you can.’

  We kissed for the first time in the weakening late-afternoon sun. I had wanted to do this for a long time, but now I found that the moment was in danger of being ruined – the drink was making my head swim. I felt her tongue on mine, tasted the vodka on her breath and saliva, felt my vodka mix with hers, an airlock of alcohol forming between our wet mouths. I had to open my eyes because the spinning was getting worse.

  ‘Uv to gsick,’ I mumbled, pulling away.

  I clambered to my feet and looked around for a discreet place to vomit, but there was nowhere because we were in the middle of a beach. In desperation I ran towards the sea. I was almost there when I threw up, dropping to my knees and spewing over the wet sand. For a few moments I was oblivious of everything but the sensation of vomiting, the gagging and nausea, the heaving and stench and the vile taste. Then I became aware of the people around me, the families and couples who were still on the beach. I looked to my side and saw the little girl with the ball, standing there, still wearing only a vest. She watched me quizzically, her little sister waddling towards her to take her hand. Then the girls’ father hurried over to take them away, saying, ‘Come on, come on over here, let’s go.’ I started to laugh and let myself fall forward on the sand, my head thudding into the ground beside where my vomit lay in multi-coloured splatters.

  I lay like that for some time. Then I got up and plunged into the water, washed all the vomit off my face and felt better.

  Sobered up with the vomiting and the cold water, I felt more embarrassed at what I’d done and kept my head down as I paddled about in the bobbing waves, watching the people onshore with a shaded gaze. But I laughed inwardly, looking forward to telling Cocker and Rez about it. I could see Jen lying on the blanket, still resting on her elbows, looking out at me. I waved. After a few minutes I emerged from the water and sat back down beside her.

  ‘That was so romantic,’ she said, putting her hand on my leg. ‘I’m glad ye enjoyed kissing me so much.’

  I smiled and put my hand on her thigh. She put her hand over mine, stroking my fingers. ‘Where are the lads?’ I said.

  ‘They said they were goin to walk down and find a shop to get some skins. All Cocker’s were ruined. A can burst open in his bag.’

  We watched the dwindling crowds depart. It started to get cold and we put on our shirts and tops. I kissed her neck. She put her hand on the inside of my leg, her fingertips near my balls. When I scanned around and saw no one was looking, I slid my hand up her thigh, letting it rest between her legs. She was wet and warm.

  A few moments later, I drew away from her.

  ‘What is it?’ she said.

  ‘Nothin.’

  ‘No, what is it?’

  ‘No, nothin. Never mind.’

  I gazed at the sea. She watched me for a while. Then she said, ‘Matthew, are you annoyed because you think I was with Cocker the other night? Is that it?’

  I didn’t respond.

  ‘Well, I wasn’t. Just so you know. Nothing happened, Matthew, I promise. Yeah okay, I was with him once before, but that was ages ago. The other night he slept in my brother’s room.’

  I turned to look at her. She met my gaze. ‘Seriously?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, seriously. I’ve been hoping something would happen with you and me for a while, Matthew. But ye never seem to do anything. Ye just, like, go into yerself, ye sit there scowling and smoking, ye never make a move. I was always just waiting around.’

  I was silent, wrestling with the question of whether I could believe her. Eventually I smiled. I put my head into her neck, kissing her hair.

  Some time later, Rez and Cocker appeared on the horizon, silhouetted against the rocks where seagulls squawked. Me and Jen were lying together, hand in hand. I waited to see if she’d take her hand away from mine when the lads got close enough to notice. She didn’t.

  ‘Jesus Christ, what are you two up to? Can’t leave yis alone for half an hour,’ said Rez with a look of mock disapproval when they reached us. He seemed cheerier than he had been earlier on. We smiled. Cocker didn’t seem at all bothered.

  ‘Let’s have a smoke, will we?’ said Jen. ‘Half past eight and we’ve only had a couple of joints. What’s goin on?’

  It was getting chilly and soon we decided to leave.

  When we got up and walked off the beach, there were still a few people remaining: a lone child building sandcastles, an elderly couple on deckchairs. They wore sunglasses even though the sun was waning, giving no more warmth.

  It was nearly dark by the time we got back to town. Jen stayed on the train for Blackrock. ‘Let’s meet up again in a couple of days, will we?’ she said as I was getting off.

  I tried to persuade the others to stay out with me for a
pint, but they said they had to go home. I thought about having one on my own, but suddenly the idea only depressed me, even more than the thought of going home to bed depressed me. I had been euphoric about getting with Jen but now the feeling had vanished. I kept thinking of the junkie’s broken face and feeling that I was to blame. I wandered around town for a while as the rain started falling on the twilight streets. I had enough hash left for a couple more joints, so I went into the jacks in McDonald’s on Grafton Street to roll one – a McSpliff, as Cocker had dubbed such efforts. Then I walked home along the canal, smoking on the way.

  The streets were unusually quiet and there was no one else on the canal-bank walkway. Loneliness and melancholy swirled inside me, thickening the more I started feeling stoned again. I paused near a bridge to watch a swan gliding over the oily-black surface of the water. The swan was quite small; probably it was very young, and everything about it gave off a sense of fragility. I looked up and down the canal but could see no other swans, no brothers or parents for the little thing.

  Deeply stoned now, I found myself captivated by the creature. Its long, slender neck seemed so delicate. I had a vivid, awed sense of all the ultra-fine nerve endings, bones, muscles and other parts that must have been in there, functioning in complex ways beneath its smooth white exterior. It seemed a miracle that the swan had survived this long without being mangled or smashed to death.

  Enchanted, I followed the swan as it floated downstream, its black eyes tilted towards the water. It was drifting closer to the dark mouth of the tunnel formed by the bridge’s arch.

  Suddenly I was overwhelmed by anxiety: I became convinced that something awful was going to happen to the swan. In an instant every muscle in me had tensed up, my heart started speeding and my palms sweating. I was breathing too quickly, staring through blurring eyes at the little white shell of life floating through the dark water. I wanted somehow to protect the bird from whatever horrible thing it was that was going to happen, but I felt I would never be able to. The swan was tiny and weak and the world it drifted through was brutal and pitiless like some awful machine. The crazy thought occurred to me that maybe I should bash the swan’s head in, just to get it over with as quickly as possible.

  I watched the swan drift towards the tunnel’s mouth. Just as it was about to be swallowed up in darkness I averted my gaze. I hurried away, badly disturbed and struggling with an anxiety that verged on outright panic. I crossed the road, getting away from the lonely canal, and forced myself not to look back, not even to think about it any more.

  11 | Kearney

  Late on Tuesday evening Kearney took the house phone up to his attic bedroom and called his girlfriend, Rachel. (Kearney thought of Rachel as his girlfriend, but she didn’t see it that way and neither did anyone else. What she thought was that Kearney had shagged her one night – or tried to shag her, but shot his load before he’d even got it fully into her – and she’d avoided talking to him ever since.) He vaguely realized that he hadn’t spoken to Rachel in months, but that wasn’t important: he was eager to share an idea he’d had while off his face on ecstasy, for a follow-up to Sleeper Cell, provisionally titled Sleeper Cell Command: Call of the Prophet. He knew she would be keen to hear.

  ‘Ye play this mad fuckin preacher over in London,’ he said when she picked up. ‘Ye have to recruit these young Islam lads with propaganda and all, but without gettin caught by the filth or MI5 or whatever. Then –’

  ‘Joseph,’ Rachel said.

  But Kearney was absorbed in his account and kept going, ‘– ye plan the attacks and send the suicide bombers out on the right buses and Tube trains to earn Max Kills and Max Carnage, and –’

  ‘Joseph.’

  ‘– and ye eventually move on to bigger things: WMDs; spectacular attacks, like 9/11 but even better; assassinations; cyber-crime. Maybe ye can, like, gravitate the moon towards New York or something. And ye can join up with different groups, the Palestinians or Pablo Escobar or whoever. Maybe even the IRA.’

  ‘Joseph!’

  He had been speaking with increasing fervour but now he stopped, confused.

  ‘Wha?’

  ‘Why are ye tellin me all this?’

  He shrugged into the phone. ‘I dunno. I just thought ye’d be interested. I –’

  ‘Well I’m not. What do I care about yer bleedin sick ideas? Games are for children.’

  ‘No, they’re not. Not any more.’

  ‘They are, even if the children are seventeen or twenty or thirty-four. They’re for children. Why did you even ca–’

  Kearney cut her off by calling her a fucking minger, then hung up.

  He played a therapeutic game of Grand Theft Auto, laying waste to a massive swathe of urban geography, being particularly brutal to a brunette slut with big tits he named Rachel, finally pounding her face in with his bat. Then he took out his notebooks and worked on some of the finer details of Call of the Prophet. He could feel it: if only he knew how to get these ideas out there, they would be hits. Rachel couldn’t be expected to understand – Rachel was a silly cunt.

  He put away his notes and lay on the bed. Time for a wank. First he thought of Miss Nolan, then of Christina Aguilera, and finally of Rachel getting her face kicked in by a metal boot as Kearney rode her out of it from behind. Wank concluded, he lay there looking at the ceiling for around fifteen minutes. Then he thought he’d have another wank because the first one had been crap. He got to it, only to give up almost immediately because, in fact, he had no desire at all – for anything. The problem with Rachel, he reflected, was that she was a ridiculous fucking cunt. The other problem was that she thought he was stupid. So did all the others – particularly Rez, the pretentious arsehole. Rez seemed to think that walking around with a book in his hand meant he wasn’t a fuckhead, which is precisely what he was. Books, mused Kearney – what was the use of them?

  He turned his head to regard the lone volume lying amid the CDs, magazines and Rizla packets cluttering the room. There it was: The Novel, which Kearney had been forced to study in sixth year. For all that he detested it, Kearney had had to concede that The Novel was a formidable creation. On the day Mr Foley stood before them and read aloud its opening line (something about marriage, manners and money – the typical shit of literature), Kearney’s eyes widened in a sudden, powerful realization of the colossal boredom they were about to be put through. And indeed the boredom had been both severe and relentless. The Novel was so radically, suffocatingly boring that it became, paradoxically, an object of fascination for Kearney. He hated reading it, but the very fact of its existence was astonishing to him. The fact was that The Novel was not only regarded as a classic, it was popular as well – people actually liked this shit. Whenever Kearney tried to read even a paragraph, his brain would short-circuit, feelings of rage and inadequacy would consume him, and he would have an unnervingly vivid sense of how utterly different he was from the rest of the species, from offcial humanity.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t like reading. He regularly devoured not only Gamer, Gamezone, Extreme-Gaming, Nintendo Hardcore and Ultragame, but also a fair portion of the more sophisticated and specialist literature: Strategy Gaming, The RPG Magazine and the wonderful Shoot-’Em-Up Heritage.

  Reading these magazines gave Kearney the sense that when he closed the hatchway to his attic bedroom and sat down in front of the screen he was aligning himself with a proud tradition, an illustrious video-gaming heritage. Playing games was not just exciting and absorbing but something grander, almost a spiritual activity. One Saturday afternoon he had found himself instinctually rising to his feet and pushing his chest out with pride, having finally completed Call of Duty. He never would have admitted it to anyone, but a lone tear even wetted his cheek as he heard the swelling victory music, saw the flag of freedom fluttering over a blackened Europe, and watched the end-of-game credits scroll away to the very end. It was a landmark moment in Kearney’s young life.

  But just try telling Rachel abou
t such grandeur, he concluded, still fondling his now-flaccid prick. The problem with Rachel was that she just didn’t get it – Rachel was a moron. Rachel had no fucking soul.

  Kearney banished her from his thoughts. Soon he fell asleep in sweet anticipation of the havoc to be wreaked tomorrow night at the school: scene of the trauma, focus of his purest loathing, nemesis to all that he was.

  12 | Matthew

  The graduation ceremony was about to take place in the church on the school grounds, inside the railings and next to the main building. We had converged outside the front gates at a quarter to eight. Kearney brought the bottle of vodka. None of us had seen or spoken to him since Monday morning, but tonight we were too excited to hold anything against him.

  The church loomed in front of where we stood drinking and smoking, guarded by the high iron gate, like a castle under siege. We were a barbarian army. A phrase came into my head from the news: the Clash of Civilizations. By now, carfuls of family were rolling in, all dressed in their finery. We howled and jeered at them from a distance, sequestered – we were undesirables, the rogue element.

  Then everyone was inside, the ceremony getting underway without us. We threw shapes and sneered and drank our filthy vodka. We had no plan of action, but inspiration would surely flare up before long.

  ‘Lads, do yis reckon Miss Nolan is in there?’ said Kearney.

  ‘I’d say so, yeah,’ I said. ‘I wonder if she’s wearin those boots.’

  ‘Primed for the fist,’ said Kearney. ‘Simply ready for the ride.’

  Rubbing his hands together, Cocker said, ‘Lads, listen to me now. I would really enjoy havin sexual intercourse with her. Will I tell yis what I’d do? First I’d stimulate the vaginal region. I’d manipulate the nipples and breasts with me mouth and me hands so as to get Nolan primed for the sex act. By this stage it’s fair to say me own sex organ would be more or less engorged. But I’d keep stimulatin the nipples and the clitoris and the other erogenous zones until her vaginal passage was well and truly lubricated. I mean glistenin. Then I’d insert me erect member in there –’