Colin Barrett - Young Skins - Stories

‘Nubbin Tansey,’ Tain says. ‘I don’t know him.’

‘You wouldn’t,’ Minion says. He was actually inspecting his nails now. ‘He’s dead. Been dead three years.’

‘How’d he die?’

‘Rigged a rope round the crossbeam in his folks’ shed and—’ Minion takes his feet up off the floor. He hitches each shoe into the bottom rung of his stool and leans forward until the stool tips over. He fires out the feet to land standing, twists and catches the stool before it clatters to the ground.

‘Jeez,’ Tain said. She has placed the silver parcel flat on the counter and is now steadily picking away at a bit of sellotape on the wrapping.

‘No, no,’ Minion insists. ‘None of that. Tansey — he was one of those ones with nothing good in him. He was a fucking headcase. Paranoid, devious, a temper he couldn’t turn down. Would kick the shit out of you at the drop of a hat — and I mean you . The mother of his kid wouldn’t let him see the baby — he beat her to a pulp, cracked a bottle over her skull. He was one of them couldn’t stand being in his own skin, and couldn’t stand the rest of us neither.’

Tain takes a sip of her vodka and lime.

‘Saddening?’ Luke Minion says.

Tain bunches her lips together, shakes her head.

‘Did Bat not get the guards on him?’

‘The mother wanted to, and half the Minion clan wanted to kill the lad, they were just waiting on Bat’s say-so. But Bat never said nothing, didn’t even press charges. Tansey was one of them ones in and out of the county court every other day anyway — another stint wouldn’t have bothered him. There was a manner of settlement — the Tanseys footed the bill for the surgery Bat had to have after. But that was it, as far as retribution went, on Bat’s side. You’re his friend, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Tain says.

‘You know him, then. I used to pick on him a lot when we were kids. We all did. And if I wanted an excuse I could say he was the type that asked for it, or didn’t know how not to ask for it. Slap him in the face nine times and he’d come right back for number ten.’

There’s a silence. Luke turns out from the bar, angles a sidling look at Tain.

‘What age are you?’ Luke says.

‘Eighteen.’

‘You with Bat?’ he says, and flicks a brutal gesture with one hand.

Tain colours. ‘It’s. . it’s nothing like that.’

‘Well,’ Luke drawls, ‘we could go somewhere and have you just sit on my face for an hour?’

‘What the fuck,’ Tain blurts, then bursts out laughing.

Minion cackles.

‘Just a suggestion,’ he says and offers a trivially unfussed shrug of the shoulder.

Tain looks towards Heg’s party. The dark beauty has collapsed in a despicably graceful heap on Rob, who can’t help but look like the smuggest prick in the world.

‘That fella then, is it?’ Minion said.

‘Huh,’ Tain says.

‘That curly-headed faggot with the ride welded to him. He’s what has you doleful. I can see.’

He has his hand now on her thigh, up under the hem and on the bare flesh.

‘If it helps, this’ll be nothing other than meaningless,’ he says.

So when Bat emerges from the jacks he stomps back towards Tain and this is what he sees; Minion, wrapped round her, mouth on hers. She’s rolling her shoulders in tandem to Minion’s impassioned flinchings, though there’s something mechanistic and barely controlled in her reciprocation. It looks coercive, Bat thinks sadly, but with a kind of concluding satisfaction. Tonight was a mistake, emphatically so, and this display of frankly felonious lechery is a fitting cap. Bat waggles the big stupid shovels of his hands.

Last words present themselves.

He could say: Bye Heg, thanks for nothing, hope you and your fucking college buddies got a good laugh out of tonight.

He could say: Why Tain, why be that fucking pathetic, you’re cleverer than that, and you’re cleverer than Heg too.

But he’ll say nothing, of course. His jaw throbs. It throbs with nothing. All he wants is a drink, but he can get that at home.

Bat puts the head down, hair enfolding him like a screen, and leaves the humans to the humans.

In the lane where his bike is parked Bat runs a hand round the inside of the helmet to make sure no kids have pissed in it or stuck it with chewing gum. The helmet’s grotty foam lining slips tight as a callipers round his head. Ignition and Bat takes a moment to listen: the engine’s rumble, overlapping with its own echo, crashes like surf back off the lane’s narrow walls.

On the way home he zips by the Maxol station and for the fuck of it he does a lap of the premises. He slows to a stop out back. In the scanty, grained moonlight and with his iffy sight he can still just about decipher the trio of painted rabbits on the wall. He thinks of the stoic mania of their botched gazes and it is unnerving, now, to consider them presiding over the bleak emptiness of the lot, night after night after night.

Bat realises he is silently mouthing Tain’s name over and over.

At home the old dear is in the dark, in the sitting room, TV light the only illumination. In repose, half asleep, her face looks embalmed. It is not a restful expression. She has a wool blanket clutched up to her throat.

‘I can smell you from the hallway,’ she says.

‘Thanks, Ma,’ Bat says. In the kitchen he pulls a six-pack from the fridge.

He cracks one open, wolfs it down. Around him Bat can hear the incessant creaking of the house fixtures, like a field of ice coming apart in increments. A draught runs from several accesses and converges in the kitchen, frigidly whistling by Bat’s ear. He hears the fretful scrawlings of rats behind the walls, under the pipes. .

‘How was the town?’ the old dear asks.

‘Fine,’ Bat groans.

‘I bet it was.’

‘Who’d you see?’

‘Luke Minion. Couple of work folk. Hegardy, the Moonan girl. Saw Peter Donnelly’s youngest, Danny Duffy. ’

‘Sounds like they were all out, so.’

When Bat does not answer she says, ‘Was it alright?’

‘I survived,’ Bat says.

The pksssh of a can’s tab getting popped. The old dear shifts in her seat. She listens to her son’s effortful ascent, the lumbering clop of each step up the squeaking stairs and then the succession of fainter percussive pulses travelling the sitting-room ceiling as he moves from the landing into, and then across, his bedroom. She’s sure she can hear the shunt of the window and then he is out and up onto the roof; though she must make this assumption on faith.

She has dreams of him falling, of Eamonn letting himself fall. She has dreams of his bike leaving the road, his body a red rent along the macadam of some bleak country lane and the massive, settling silence afterwards. This is what a mother must do: preemptively conjure the worst-case scenarios in order to avert them. She never considered or foresaw that little shit Nubbin Tansey and his boot, and he happened. She cannot make that mistake again.

There is a part of her that hates her son, the enormous, fatiguing fragility of him.

She watches the TV and listens, without intentionally listening, for the creak and thud of his return through the window. On the TV her favourite host and his guests. Entire passages of conversation slip by. She falls asleep and jolts abruptly to, not knowing she’s been asleep.

The TV screen is extinguished, a minute blue dot levitating in its dark centre. The draught whistles, far above her, through the black; there is no noise and it is dark everywhere. For a long moment she does not know who she is, or where she is. When it comes back to her, she calls out for her son.