Colin Barrett - Young Skins - Stories

He runs the H and C taps. Saliva-temperatured and textured water splurge from both. He splashes his face and watches the water drip like glue from his chin.

Bat was never a good-looking lad, even before Tansey cracked his face in half, he knows that. His features are and always have been round and nubby, irremediably homely, exuding all the definition of a bowl of mashed-up spuds. His eyes, at least, are distinctive, though not necessarily in a good way; they are thick-lashed, purplishly-pupiled and primed glintingly wide. They suggest urgent, unseemly appeal. You look constantly as if in want , his old dear chided him all up through childhood. Even now she will occasionally snap at him— what is it, Eamonn ? — apropos of nothing, Bat merely sitting there, watching TV or tuning his guitar or hand-rolling a ciggie for her.

Nothing, Bat will mutter.

You are a mutterer, Eamonn , the old dear will insist. You always were , she’ll add, by way of implying she does not ascribe all blame for that to the boot to the face.

The boot to the face. Nubbin Tansey, may he rest in pieces. Munroe’s chipper. Years gone now.

Bat jabs his cheek with his finger, pushes in. His jaw still clicks when he opens it wide enough.

Six separate operations, ninety-two percent articulation recovered and the brunt of the visible damage surgically effaced but for a couple of minute white divots in his left cheek, and a crooked droop to the mouth on that side. It’s slight but distinct, the droop, a nipped outward twisting of the lip, an unhinging, that makes him look always a little gormless. Damage abides beneath the surface. Bat can feel by their feelinglessness those pockets of frozen muscle and inert tissue where the nerves in his face are blown for good.

Bat had been known as Bat for years, the nickname derived from his surname, Battigan, but after the boot and the droop a few smartarses took to calling him Sly, as in Sly Stallone. Sly didn’t take, thank fuck; he was too entrenched in the town consciousness as Bat.

None but the old dear call him Eamonn now.

Bat palms more water onto his face, slaps his cheeks to get the blood shifting. The beers don’t help of course, but the fact is the headaches come regardless, leadenly routine now. In addition there are the migraines, mercifully rarer though much more vicious, two-day-long blowouts of agonising snowblindness that at their worst put Bat whimpering and supine on the floor of his bedroom, a pound of wet cloth mashed into his eyesockets to staunch, however negligibly, the pain.

The doctors insist the head troubles have nothing to do with it, but Bat knows they are another bequeathal of the boot to the face.

He leaves the restroom and keys himself through the service door into the staff room. He deposits the bike helmet on the couch, unpeels his leather jacket, registers with a pulse of mortification the spicy whang peeling off his own hide.

On the staff-room counter he spies, amid a row of other items, a stick of women’s roll-on; must be Tain’s. He picks it up, worms his fist into each sleeve of his Maxol shirt and hastily kneads his pits with the spearminty-smelling stuff. As he places the roll-on back on the counter he notices a curled black hair adhering to the scented ball. He tweezes it off and flicks it to the floor.

Out front Dungan, the store manager, mans the main till.

Dungan is old. Fifties, sixties, whatever. He’s the sole adult and authority figure in a work environment otherwise populated by belligerently indolent youngsters.

‘Bat,’ Dungan says.

‘Yeah?’

‘Take your particular timepiece. Wind the big hand forward fifteen minutes. Keep it there. You might show up on the dot once in your life.’

Humped above the cash register, Dungan resembles nothing so much as his own freshly revived corpse. His skin is loose and blanched, its pigmentation leached of some vital essence, and what remains of his thin grey hair is drawn in frailly distinct comb lines across his head, mortuary neat. His glasses are tinted, enshading the eyes. But you can tell Dungan is alive because the man is always snufflingly, sputteringly ill, his maladies minor but interminable; head colds, bronchial complaints and dermal eruptions hound him through the seasons’ dims and magnifications.

‘What needs doing?’ Bat sighs.

Dungan looks over the rims of his glasses. The white of one eye is a blood-splatter of detonated capillaries.

‘Sleeves. Sleeves, Bat. What did I say about sleeves?’ He nods at Bat’s arms. ‘The tattoos can’t be on display, lad. Plain black or white undershirts in future, please.’

‘But everyone knows me,’ Bat says.

‘Professionalism is an end in itself,’ Dungan opines. ‘Now. There’s six pallets of dry stock out back that need shelving and the rotisserie wants a scrub after that. We’ll just have to try and keep you out of sight as much as we can.’

First break. Ten minutes. Bat is first out to the lot, peeling chicken-fat slicked marigolds from his hands. The lot is a three-quarters-enclosed concrete space done up to suggest a picnic area, where, the idea is, road-weary motorists can eat or stretch their limbs in what appears to Bat to be a rather bleak simulation of pastoral seclusion. There are rows of wooden tables and benches bolted into the cement (the obscenities carved into their lacquered surfaces only visible close up) and a ring-fenced aluminium wreck of a play area for children. Scruffy clots of weeds have grown up and died in the fistulas along the crumbling perimeter of the lot’s paving. A mural painted onto the lot wall depicts a trio of cartoon rabbits in waistcoats and top hats capering against a field of green dotted with splotch-headed blue and red and yellow flowers. The untalented muralist had not been able to set the pupils of the rabbits’ eyes into proper alignment, afflicting all three with various severities of cross-eye.

Bat perches atop the fat plastic lid of an empty skip, guzzles a Coke and regards the rabbits. The longer you look the more subtly crazed their expressions appear.

Presently Bat is joined by Tain Moonan and Rob ‘Heg’ Hegardy.

Tain is fifteen, Hegardy eighteen.

Both are summer recruits, and both will soon be finished up; Hegardy is returning to college in Dublin as a second-year computer science student and Tain will be heading into Junior Cert year in the local convent.

Hegardy ducks out into the morning air whistling a jaunty tune. He flashes a grin at Bat as he approaches, snaps a thin white spindle from his breastpocket and sketches an elaborate bow as he proffers what turns out to be a perfectly rolled joint.

‘Nice,’ Bat snorts.

‘Let’s start the morning and kill the day,’ Hegardy says.

Tain rolls her eyes.

‘Alright Tain,’ Bat says.

Tain only grunts. She studies Hegardy frankly as he crooks the joint between his lips, sparks his lighter and with a forceful, fish-face sucking motion pipettes a trail of purple smoke-wisps into the air.

‘Busy out front?’ Bat asks. Tain and Heg are on forecourt duty.

‘Quiet enough,’ Hegardy says, and passes the joint to Bat. Hegardy has a foot in height on Bat, a handsome, olive-oil complexion inherited from his half-Iberian mother, the wingspan and streamlined solidity of an athlete though he takes no interest in sports, and a pretty wad of crinkly black hair, like a black lad’s. He’s about the most laid-back lad Bat has ever encountered; nothing fazes or riles him.

Tain hops onto the skip beside Bat, scoots over until she’s right beside him. She picks up one of his marigold gloves and tugs it down over her hand. She jabs Bat with her elbow, nods at the joint.

‘Pass it on,’ she says.

Bat gives her his best look of grown-up disapproval.