Colin Barrett - Young Skins - Stories

‘Dearbhla,’ the old dear sighs. ‘Lord bless us and save us but you may not be yards off the mark there, Eamonn. HEADS DOWN,’ she barks, and the Minion boys, perfectly in sync, fire their chins into their chests.

Bat smiles. They can be tough and they can be rough, but there’s not a delinquent alive, budding or fully formed, the old dear can’t crone into submission.

Before the roof and beers and bed, Bat hits the road. A night spin, deep into the countryside’s emptinesses. The Honda is no power racer, but watching the dimpled macadam hurtle away beneath the monocular glare of his headlight, Bat feels he is moving too fast to exist; as he dips into and leans out of the crooks and curves of the road, he becomes the crooks and curves. A bristling silence hangs over the deep adjacent acres — the pastures, woodlands and hills sprawled out all around him. It goes up and up and up, the silence, and Bat can hear it, above even the hot scream of the engine.

His nerves are gently sparking by the time he lopes across the mossed asphalt shingles of the roof, cradling a sixpack. Bat plants his back against the chimney and drinks and drinks and waits for the moment the night becomes too cold, the air like a razor working itself to acuity against the strop of his arms; only then will he descend through the black square of his bedroom window.

The week rolls on. Friday night, the town centre. Bat in leathers, a pair of preliminary beers washed down to fortify the nerves. It’s been a while. He parks the Honda in an alley by the AIB branch. Shadowed figures linger outside The Yellow Belly’s entrance. Smokers. Bat approaches with his head lowered.

‘Fuckin’ Battigan. Bat,’ a voice says, surprised.

‘Man, Bat,’ the other says.

‘Lads,’ Bat says. The lads are a bit younger than Bat; little brothers to those who would have been Bat’s peers. One’s a Connolly, spotty face like a dropped Bolognese, the other’s a barrel-bodied, redheaded Duffy.

‘Which Duffy are you?’ Bat asks.

‘Jamie,’ the lad replies.

‘Michael was in my class,’ Bat says. ‘We called him Scaldyballs.’

Connolly’s face erupts in laughter. ‘We call this cunt the same.’

‘The ginger gene is dying out, so they say,’ Bat informs Duffy, darkly.

Duffy braces his shoulders, looks at Connolly, who communicates something back with his eyes.

‘What has you out anyway, Bat?’ Connolly asks.

‘Rob Hegardy’s fucking-off-back-to-college do.’

‘The brainboxes are off to brainbox land,’ Connolly sighs, ‘that time of year, I suppose.’

‘Leaving us thick fucks to this dump,’ Duffy scowls.

‘Alright,’ Bat says, stoppering the conversation. Inside he takes the couple of short steps up into the warm red heart of the bar. The main room is a long rectangle, half familiar faces eddying in its telescoped space. Some faces watch him; some don’t.

Bat thinks: I am here for Heg’s fucking thing, so I’ll go find Heg .

Heg is at the farthest point at the rear of the bar. He is surrounded.

‘Bat! Christ, good man!’ Heg roars, and his companions’ faces turn to take in Bat. Half a dozen lads Heg’s age, and the same number in girls again. The girls; a dark-haired one stands by Heg. Cheekboned and smokily glowering, from her emanates a demeanour of regal peevishness, nose pinned up in the air. There is the briefest shift of light in her irises; she fixes Bat with the penetrating impersonality of a security camera. Bat drops his eyeline to the floor. He wants to hurl his body at her feet, repent his hideous pelt.

‘Drink?’ Bat squeaks, hoping Heg hears.

‘C’mere. . lads, you know this fuckin’ legend of a man,’ Heg loafs an arm across Bat’s shoulders. He’s had a few, Heg, his gaze lolling and sliding like syrup as he tries to fix upon Bat.

‘Na na na na na na na na, BAT MAN!!!’ Heg roars. Bat winces, shucks off the dead weight of Heg’s arm.

‘Pint, Heg?’ he says.

Bat cuts a paddling diagonal through the crowd, riding up along the polished grain of the counter like a drowning man gaining the shore. He actually grips the counter. He orders two pints — one for himself, one for Heg — and downs the first in a single ferocious engorgement. He slams the empty onto the counter as a head rush ignites behind his eyes; he sees sparks and a wavelet of nausea migrates from the middle of his face into the pit of his stomach. Bat orders another pint.

When he turns, a girl who looks like Tain is facing him.

It is Tain, in makeup, in a dress. Bat’s eyes drop, in a skimming horizontal, compiling fugitive impressions before he can restrain himself. The dress is a shiny kind of silvery red thing, a square of absent material exposing a section of Tain’s chest. The dress’s hem ends midway down her thighs. Tain’s legs are bare. Bat has never seen Tain’s legs before. Her knees are miraculously, mundanely kneelike — blunt, knobby and flushed scaldingly red, as if in embarrassment at so public an exposure.

Bat gets a grip, forces eye contact with the girl.

‘I know, I know,’ Tain says mournfully. She’s blushing.

She has a parcel wrapped in silver paper under her arm.

‘Present for himself?’ Bat says.

Tain holds it out and rotates it assessingly in her grip.

‘Pretty gay of me, I think.’

‘Why would it be gay?’

‘It’s. .’ She glances across at the crowd surrounding Heg. ‘Who’s that one with him?’

‘Don’t know,’ Bat says. ‘His sister, maybe?’

‘Fuck, no, that’s not his sister. Are you being funny? I’ve seen his sister, she’s a trainee vet in London. That’s not his sister.’

The dimensions of the parcel and the way it bends in a U shape as Tain tortures it in her grip — Bat guesses it’s a book. Bat is no reader. His eyesight has always been poor; the other derivation of his nickname. He wears contacts now but as a kid he suffered for years, believing the scumbled, dripping appearance of text on a page was simply how words appeared to everyone. It seemed perfectly in keeping with the variform sadism of classwork that you had to try to prise sense from the unintelligible fuzz of type on a page. The teachers thought him thick — and Bat was thick — but it was only when some of the other kids dubbed him booksniffer on account of how close he put his face to the page that he realised something was up.

‘What you get him?’ Bat means the book.

‘Has anyone else got him anything?’ she says, still craning towards the group.

‘I got him nothing other than this pint,’ Bat says. ‘And I’d offer you one but you’re too young.’

Tain swivels, with slow decisiveness, back to Bat. She makes a fist and wedges it against her hip. ‘Christ sakes just get me a vodka and lime, Bat.’

‘In a tick,’ he murmurs, lowering his head and shouldering back into the crowd, brimming pint in either paw.

Forty minutes later and Bat has put away three drinks to the group’s single round. Tain is several bodies beyond his left elbow, stuck making small talk to a plump boy in black. The lad keeps placing and replacing on his ear the wire frame of his glasses. Most of the crowd are from out of town; Heg’s college mates, dropped down for the weekend. The dark beauty, as still and mute as a hologram, must be one of them too, though the rest of the party ignores her as she ignores them, even Heg; that she has deigned to stand in his proximity is the only suggestion of any association between them. But then, Bat, too, has largely kept his trap shut, his conversational contributions amounting to timed groans and dry whistles as one or another anecdote winds to its climax. They are all talking about and around college, the communal life they share there; the talk is an involved braid of in-jokes and contextual nuggets and back references. Bat feels doltish — too big, too bluntly dimensioned, a thickset golem hewn from the scrabbled, sodden dirt of Connaught. His jaw throbs — the teeth set into his jaw throb.