Colin Barrett - Young Skins - Stories

‘This’ll stunt your growth, Missy.’

‘Listen to the voice of experience,’ Hegardy says.

Tain rolls her eyes, sneers but declines a retort. She pulls her peroxided hair out of her face. The roots are grown out, black as jet. Bat gives her the joint. She takes it with her yellow gloved hand. A brief toke and she is immediately seized by a bout of convulsive coughing. Hegardy’s eyes pop in delight and his mouth gapes in a mute O of impending hilarity. He leans in close so Tain can see. She swings a sneaker at his crotch, Hegardy bouncing backwards on his heels to elude the effort.

‘Handle your shit, Moonan,’ Hegardy barks in an American drill-sergeant voice.

‘It’s handled, dickhead,’ Tain says, holding her throat and working out a few clarifying grunts. Composure restored, she begins to pick absently at the small red nub of a zit on her chin.

Bat looks from Tain to Heg. For the past three months Bat has watched these two smile, joke, snark, preen and goad each other, with escalating intensity, up until three weekends ago, when the tone of their exchanges changed abruptly. For a few days the two were terse, even clumsy in each other’s company. Now, while things have relaxed into their original rhythm somewhat, their interactions possess an edge, a spikiness, that was previously absent. This worries Bat. Though Bat likes Hegardy, he is pretty sure the lad did something — and may perhaps still be doing something — with the schoolgirl. Because he likes Hegardy, Bat has shied from pressing the lad upon the matter, lest Hegardy admit he has in fact committed something perilously close to, if not in fact, full statutory rape. (Which is what it would be. Bat looked it up. With no little trepidation he ventured to the town library and at one of the terminal computers, hunched forward and glancing compulsively over his shoulder, googled what he considered the pertinent terms.)

‘When’s your last day?’ Bat asks.

‘Not till Sunday next,’ Hegardy says, ‘but college starts pretty much straight the week after. So I’m going to have a couple of going-away pints in The Yellow Belly this Friday. Don’t say you won’t be there, Bat.’

‘This Friday?’ Bat says.

‘This Friday.’

Caught off guard, Bat is too brain dead to temporise; no excuse presents itself through the double-daze of residual hangover and incipient dope high. Bat no longer socialises in town; no longer socialises full stop. He does not want to tell Hegardy this, though doubtless Hegardy has an inkling.

‘We’ll see,’ Bat says.

Tain is inspecting Bat’s arm on her side.

‘This one’s boss,’ she says, dabbing a yellow finger upon Bat’s kraken tattoo, etched in the hollow of his forearm. It depicts a green squidlike monstrosity emerging from a bowl of blue water circumscribed by a fringe of froth, an old-time ship with masts and sails encoiled within the creature’s tentacles, about to be torn apart.

‘Boss,’ Bat says.

‘Yeah,’ Tain says. She traces a circle in the crook of his arm, and Bat feels a pinch as she nips with her fingers at his flesh.

‘Ow.’

‘You got good veins, Bat,’ she says, then holds out her own arms for display. ‘Big hardy cables of motherfuckers. You can’t barely even see mine.’

Bat hesitates, leans in for a look. The down on Tain’s arms glints in the morning light. Her skin is smooth and pale. Tain’s right — her veins are barely there, detectable only as buried, granular traces of blue in the solid white of her flesh. There’s a whiff of spearmint coming up out of her sleeve. Bat tries to ignore it.

‘Why’s that?’ Bat says.

‘Tain must have a condition,’ Heg caws.

Tain ignores the sally.

‘Look. Your veins are blue or green, whatever. But why’s that, when your blood is red?’ she says.

Bat thinks about this. ‘That must be because of the lining or something. The veins’ linings are blue and the blood runs red inside.’

‘Blood ain’t red,’ Tain says. ‘It turns red when it hits air, oxygenates. You know what colour it actually is?’

Bat shrugs. ‘I’d be guessing, Tain,’ he says.

‘Bat’s blood runs one shade,’ Heg intones in a gravelly, film-trailer voice.

Bat looks from Tain to Heg and back.

‘Black as night,’ Tain growls in her version of the film-trailer voice.

Heg takes a final drag of the joint, drops it and sweeps it with his foot into a sewer grille, eliminating whatever tiny chance there might have been that Dungan would happen upon the incriminating butt and work out what it is they get up to out here — though that haggard bitch, as Tain refers to him, is nobody’s idea of a deductive savant. Bat nods appreciatively. Heg is a thorough lad, cautious. Maybe he is not up to anything with Tain.

‘Let’s get back,’ Heg says to Tain.

‘Fucksake,’ she mutters and pops herself off the skip. She heads in and Heg follows, turning at the last to catch Bat’s eye.

‘No, but come. It won’t be the same otherwise.’

Dinner is boiled spuds, beans and frozen fish. Bat bolts his supper from a sideboard in the kitchen under the solemn surveillance of two bullet-headed eight-year-old boys. The boys are seated side by side by the opened back door, the old dear looming above them, wielding an electric razor and comb; the old dear cuts hair on the side, a home operation job, her clientele comprised mainly of the youngest offspring of her extended family.

Tonight’s customers have the wide-spaced eyes and aggrieved, jutting mouths hereditary to the Minions. The Minions are cousins from the passed father’s side, a clan notorious locally for its compulsive run-ins with the law and general ingenuity for petty civil dissension. Bad seeds, though Bat suspects the old dear is perversely proud of the association.

The old dear is shearing the boys simultaneously, in stages, not one after the other; she does the left side of one lad’s head, then the other lad’s left, then right/right, top/top and finally back/back. Kitchen towels are draped across the boys’ shoulders and a tawny moat of chopped hair encircles their chairlegs. The back door is open so the old dear can smoke as she works, the draught escorting the smoke of her rollie out into the evening, away from the boys’ lungs.

Above Bat’s head a wall-mounted TV plays the Aussie soap Home and Away , but the boys’ eyes do not leave Bat as he works at his dinner. The mane confuses little kids, who assume only women have long hair (and there’s no woman in town with hair as long as Bat’s). He’s conscious also they may be eyeing the balky hydraulics of his jaw as he chews.

One of the boys slowly raises a hand, extends his forefinger and begins boring at a nostril, a movement that necessitates a slight shift in his posture.

‘Don’t be moving,’ Bat says, ‘or she’ll have your lug off,’ wrenching on one of his own earlobes for effect. ‘She has a necklace of severed ears upstairs, made out of the lugs of little boys who wouldn’t stay still.’

The lad stops boring but keeps his finger socketed in his nose. His eyes widen.

‘That’s not true,’ the other lad puffs indignantly.

‘Shut up the lot of you,’ the old dear says, though of course she doesn’t refute Bat’s claim.

‘What’s your name?’ Bat says to the lad who spoke.

‘Trevor.’

A dim memory of a double christening, moons back, that Bat didn’t go to. ‘And that lad excavating his face beside you is JoJo, so.’

‘Yeah,’ Trevor says.

‘And where’s your mammy gone, Trevor?’ Bat asks.

‘The pub,’ JoJo says.

‘Is she out looking for a brother or sister for youse?’ Bat says, grinning at the old dear as the boys look on, puzzled.