Colin Barrett - Young Skins - Stories

Heg is drunk, his expression adrift in some boggy territory between gloating and concussed. Abruptly the hologram substantiates itself — the tall beauty leans in and begins kissing Heg most vociferously on the mouth. He kind of writhes around in her grip. A girl with an overbite breaks into a braying laugh. Bat gently shoulders his way out of the group and wheels off towards the jacks. His nape bristles; he feels the drag, like a faint current, of someone’s attention and turns. Tain scowling, in hot pursuit.

She still has the present, jammed down into her handbag.

‘I feel like a wanker,’ she says.

‘Don’t,’ Bat says. ‘Heg has us all just standing around like gobshites.’

A hand on Bat’s shoulder. He flinches.

‘Fuck me, man, how’s it going?’

Bat’s grip tenses around a phantom pint. He gulps. But it’s only Luke Minion. As it goes Luke is one of the more congenial strands of that brood of cousins. Luke has always had time for Bat; was witness to the boot to the face.

‘Well, Luke.’

‘It’s been an age, lad.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Who’s this?’ Minion asks of Tain, an amused curl to the lip.

‘I work with her. Tain. This is Luke.’

‘You’re still out with the Maxol crowd.’

‘It’s a living,’ Bat says.

‘It is,’ Minion says through his teeth. He runs a hand through his crow-coloured cowlick of a widow’s peak. Most of the Minions are stocky and solidly hipped. Luke is rangy, with clear grey eyes. Last Bat heard the man was running up mountains; there was talk of a sponsored tackle of Kilimanjaro. It never happened. Before that Luke had been living in a mobile home on the farthest acre of his family’s farmplot. He’d had a Czechoslovakian girl and a baba stowed away there for a while, but one day the pair woke up and the baba was dead.

‘What you at these days?’

Minion’s eyebrows rise, ‘Bits and pieces.’

‘In the Minion fashion,’ Bat says, hearing the old dear in his tone.

‘This guy,’ Luke says to Tain. ‘You ever hear tell of how he wound up with that face?’

Tain looks to Bat.

Bat wonders if she can read the total misery in his visage.

‘No,’ she says brightly, looking more like a child, in her densely daubed mask of makeup, than ever before.

‘Yeah,’ Luke says, ‘sure you’re only a young one.’

‘Hitting the jacks,’ Bat says, his throat going tight, like he’s just swallowed a plum gourd.

The nausea has resurfaced in the other direction, a roiling ball of unpleasantness bubbling out of his gut. His mouth waters, and he tastes a flash of blood. He wipes his mouth with his sleeve. His head is sore; his head is always sore. The headaches tune down to a vestige, but they never truly go.

The drinking doesn’t help , Bat thinks, but it does help .

As he slams open a cubicle door the possibility of throwing up seems fragilely close. He gropes the door shut behind him. A pitifully loud retch doubles him over; nothing follows but a gutty hock, a hot trickle of bile. Bat retches until it plops from his lips into the jacks’ waiting mouth.

There in the cubicle, unbidden, floats up the remnant of a dream; a recurring dream, Bat knows intuitively, though this is the first time he has consciously recalled recalling it. The dream remnant is merely this, like a random, unfinished scene from a film: Bat is Bat, but in a different body. A Dungan-like body, wasted and bowlegged, older perhaps, though perhaps not. Certainly frailer, flimsier, and he, dream-Bat, is walking around what must be this town. It’s just a street, an undistinguished strip of concrete paving flanked by generic buildings — and he’s wearing a mustard-seed suit. That’s what his mother — in the dream — calls the suit. The suit does not fit. It’s several sizes too large and the superfluous material billows and flumps comically around his limbs. And in the dream all Bat is doing is walking around and around and crying and crying and somewhere to the back of him — he can’t precisely tell — his old dear’s voice pursues him like a vindictive raincloud, saying change the medication, change the medication .

How long has he been having this fucking dream, he wonders?

And then his thoughts turn to the boot to the face; the last thing Bat himself recalls of that night was staggering through the door of Munroe’s takeaway with a hunger in his belly, his head down and headphones in, music blaring and scrolling through his playlist to see what song was cued up next. He woke up in hospital. The culprit was a five-foot-two sparkplug went by Nubbin Tansey, and Luke Minion was there, saw it all unfold.

And now Tain is outside. Tain is on a stool by the bar, waiting for Bat to return. Bat squinches closed his eyes.

How long have I been having this fucking dream?

Tain is on a stool and Minion, expert bar-grift, has inveigled her into buying him a drink — the first she’s ever ordered in a bar. The barlad didn’t look at her twice as she put in the round. It makes Tain feel pathetically proud of herself. She’s on her fourth vodka and lime and has no more money. The odour of limes — spiked and soured by the gelid see-through spirit — is all she can smell. She’s watching Minion — the lad finicks with his stool, skims his palm round the lip of the seat like he’s searching for the sweet spot. Finally he hoists himself into position. He looks at her and launches in.

‘It must’ve been up on the heels of four on a Saturday morning, Munroe’s being one of the few eateries still open at that hour so it was fairly packed. I was queuing at the counter, hangover already coming on, waiting on a kebab and batter burger. Nubbin Tansey was up on one of the tabletops, making a holy fucking show of himself. Now Tansey was a shortarse but he was built through; physique of a jockey on steroids. He was well oiled, as we all were, looking wild and dishevelled, his shirt hanging off him, buttons all burst off, Doc Martens scuffing the Formica as he whelped out a furious jig. His boys were crowing him on — there were five or six of them, big rowdy units — and the Turkish lads behind the counter weren’t going to risk stepping in, though good old Saleem, the manager, was threatening to call the pigs if Tansey didn’t get the fuck down fairly lively. Tansey, bald since seventeen to go with the height deficiency, was amped up, face gone red and every veineen in his skull popping, a solid wall of perspiration coming right off him and fizzing in the fluorescence as he jigged and jigged. Nervous little cheers coming up from all corners of the takeaway, hoping he’d stop. Then Tansey started out with these karate moves, firing the legs out and chop sockying the air, which brought up further cheers. He was moving fair graceful for a man as scuttered as he was. And then he stops, a tacky sling of spit flapping from his chin. He wipes the spit and says to the boys, ‘I’m taking the head, THE HEAD, off the next cunt comes through that door,’ and points at the entrance, a good six feet away from the edge of the tabletop he’s prancing on. Another cheer at Tansey’s declaration, though this time only from his boys. And for a while that was that, there was this little spell, thirty seconds, where everything got quiet, even Tansey seemed to be winding down. He’d gone into a squat and was sharing a private chuckle with one of his boys when the doorbell jingles, the jingle letting everyone know there’s a body coming through, and I saw the shock of jet hair, the leather jacket and Bat’s battered runners. Not a chance to say nothing. Not that I believed, I suppose, that Tansey was actually going to follow through on his boast; shite talk and no follow through, I had it diagnosed. But the bell jingles, and in steps Bat, oblivious that he was the next cunt, elected by fate, and without a hesitation, without even stopping to see who he was going for, Tansey up and leapt. It was some fuck of a leap, credit to the lad, his leg straight as a rod leading his body, clearing that six feet and stoving slap bang into the side of Bat’s head. Cleanest connect of a jaw you’ll ever see, Bat sent flying like a rag doll. Spun and flung. He smacked the wall and bounced back up off the floor and then down again in a buckled heap. And Tansey — Tansey landed perfectly on his feet. Some young wan had let out a scream but now there was no noise except for Tansey’s breathing. His eyes were lit, in a marvel at what he’d done. No noise but the air heaving in and out of him, and Bat facedown in a sprawl of hair and blood. Every last cunt there must’ve thought he was dead. I did.’