Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

“Are you going to introduce me?” Simon asked.

“Aye. Simon, this is Kit; Kit, this is Simon.”

The two of them shook hands.

“How do you know Sean?” Simon asked Kit.

“Sean and I go way back,” Kit said with a beautiful, sweet smile.

“Yeah, we do,” I agreed. “We backpacked around Africa together. Boy, we had some times. Remember Clarence from Australia? Eaten by a lion.”

“It was shocking,” Kit agreed. “It only left the head.”

“No way,” Simon said, pretending to believe us.

“Way,” Kit assured him.

Simon looked at the pair of us. Kit could barely contain her giggles.

“You’re having me on,” he said.

Kit burst out laughing. Slapped Simon on the back.

“Got ya,” she said.

By this time we were up off the beach, walking along the seafront in the direction of the End of the State Bar.

The town sprawled in a long line all the way from the Mer-rimack River to the New Hampshire border. But the beach strip was the worst. A desperate air hanging over everything. A grim, worn sadness that coated the half-drunken people in their shapeless T-shirts and denims. I tried to ignore it all as we walked toward a fish-and-chip stand.

“Are you hungry?” Simon asked Kit.

Kit nodded, which was a relief because Simon and I were famished. In the mornings we did beach clearance, picking up rubbish and the occasional dead thing, and in the evenings we performed the pageant for the Greek Fair. It was hard work for shit pay and we hadn’t eaten anything since lunch. We stopped at the fish-and-chip stand and I bought her a cod.

“Our first meal,” she said coyly. She ate and the food perked her up. Now she looked healthy, happy, pleased to see me.

“You mentioned that you were looking for me,” I said between mouthfuls.

“I was. You told me you were working up here, you didn’t tell me what you were doing.”

“Would you?”

“No, I suppose not,” she said, looking at my outfit.

“What are you doing up here?” I asked, and she explained to me that her dad and her stepmum, Sonia, were at the End of the State Bar. She’d come with them, but it was karaoke at the moment, so she had decided to go for a walk and accidentally caught our act on the beach. Not, of course, knowing that I was Hector until I took my helmet off.

Simon asked her about the nuances of our performance. Kit, being polite, told him it was a terrific show.

“You know, when Sean got the job of Hector he knew next to nothing about sword fighting; there’s a technique to the stage fight, choreography, much more difficult than you would think. I taught him everything he knows,” Simon said.

“It’s true,” I admitted.

“Well, it was very impressive, I liked the javelin bit,” she said. “It seemed to get very close.”

“Oh, that was improvised,” Simon said proudly.

“Yeah, you nearly improvised me into the emergency room,” I said and winked at him, nodded at Kit, and somehow made clear that now was the time for Simon to make himself scarce.

“Oh yeah, well, Sean, I must be heading along, see ya in the pub,” he said and scarpered with a look of ironic jealousy playing across his face.

I binned the rest of my dinner and walked with Kit a little farther along the strand. The End of the State Bar was a good mile up the beach and we had to thread our way through the amusement arcades, go-cart tracks, taffy stands, fortunetellers, cotton candy sellers, and a plastic-duck shooting range. A lot going on but Kit wasn’t talking, there was something on her mind. I tried a few conversational openings and got monosyllabic answers.

“Ok, go on, just say what’s cooking in that brain of yours. You’re plotting something,” I finally demanded.

She stopped, looked at me, and nodded.

“Sean. I’ve been thinking about you. And, like, this is the deal. I think you should meet Dad,” she said.

“So I can ask his permission for your hand?”

“Jesus, Sean, be serious for a minute,” Kit demanded, blushing in a way that Winona Ryder would have killed to be capable of.

“I am being serious,” I said with increasing gravity the more I looked at her. Her blush deepened and Winona, to extrapolate the analogy, would have been well on her way to the electric chair.

“No, I want you to meet my dad. It’s for your own good. But you can’t go like that. You’re going to have to change into your regular clothes. He and Sonia won’t mind, but Jackie and Touched are going to be with him and they’d take the piss out of you,” Kit said without any levity at all. I smiled at her. Her lips narrowed.

“Good news and bad news. The good news is that I’d love to meet your dad. The bad news is these are my regular clothes. The costume was the gear I had on in Revere. I dress like this all the-”

“Sean, stop fucking around, I’m not kidding,” she interrupted, starting to get exasperated. I leaned back on my heels and smirked at her. She was fuming a little and her face had transformed into a delicious pout.

“So you’ve been looking for me and thinking about me. Can’t get me out of your head, huh?” I declared.

“Don’t get ideas. I wasn’t thinking about you in that way. I just want you to do well in America. My dad could really help you out. If you want to make a good impression you’re going to have to change your outfit. Look at the state of you.”

“And now you can’t keep your eyes off me.”

“Stop saying that.”

“I’ll stop saying it but I won’t stop noticing it.”

“Come on, Sean, they’re going to be waiting at the End of the State, you won’t get an opportunity like this again,” she pleaded.

“Ok, fine. I’ll change. No big deal. Why don’t you come back to my flat; I’ll shower, get dressed, you can look through my CD collection and make snotty remarks about it,” I said.

“Sounds like fun,” Kit replied.

“Everything we’ll do together is going to be fun,” I said, and if that wasn’t the lie of the year I don’t know what was.

In the time it had taken me to shower, a thunderstorm had rolled down the Merrimack River valley. A common occurrence in the week I’d been here. Hot during the day, thunderstorms at night. Sometimes Simon and I would go on the roof, drink Sam Adams, watch lightning hit the dome of the nuclear power station and half hope for some kind of atomic emergency to relieve the tedium.

I toweled off, changed into a shirt and jeans. Kit was looking at my bookshelves. She ignored the books, barely pretending to skim through them, but she couldn’t conceal how much she coveted my CDs, which were cool English music, a year or two ahead of similar American trends. The covers she found to be fascinating objects. I stared at her for a minute and she caught me looking. I pretended to be checking out the weather behind her head.

“It’s raining,” I said.

Kit hadn’t noticed. She peered out the window, nodded absently.

The apartment was small. Two tiny bedrooms, a living room that connected to a minute kitchen. A sofa, a couple of deck chairs. No air-con but a bit of a breeze from the Atlantic out the window.

“What are these like?” she asked finally, holding up a handful of the CDs.

“They’re good,” I said.

“What type of music?”

“It’s a thing called Britpop, somewhere between pop and rock, I don’t think there’s really an American equivalent. I suppose REM would be the closest thing,” I said.

“I like REM,” she said, her big eyes shadowed black, blinking slowly, seductively, without meaning to be seductive.

The blue of cornflowers in a black orchid bouquet, you could say, if you were so inclined. And I wasn’t. It wouldn’t do to get carried away.