Colin Barrett - Young Skins - Stories

Dympna told Arm to stay in the car while Dympna gave Fannigan a chance to plead his case. This wasn’t the way it usually went, but Arm nodded okay . Arm watched Dympna stalk up the lawn and politely hammer on the front door of the council house Fannigan shared with his mother. Eventually Dympna was let inside.

Arm slid in his earphones and sank in the passenger seat. The car was originally Dympna’s Uncle Hector’s, a battered cranberry Corolla Dympna dubbed the shitbox, its interior upholstered in tan vinyl that stank of motor oil, cigarette ash and dog. Recessed into the dash was a dead radio, its cassette-tape slot jammed with calcified gobs of blue tack, cigarette butt-ends and pre-euro-era Irish coins. The dash smelled of fused electricals. Above Arm’s head, a row of memorial cards, their laminate covers wilted by age and light, were tucked into the sun visor and a red beaded rosary chain was tangled around the inverted T of the rearview mirror.

Three houses down, two schoolgirls were sitting on a garden wall, talking and smoking. They were in their teens, their figures swollen to shapelessness by puffa jackets and the voluminous skirts of navy-and-green convent plaid heaped up in their laps. It was ten on a Wednesday morning, and the girls, Arm figured, were mitching from school. They were sharing the one cigarette, passing it back and forth and gabbing and rocking their feet from side to side in insistent tandem. Their heads were bent low, they covered their mouths as they spoke, each the other’s confidant, and Arm could have happily sat and watched them for the rest of the morning but he sensed movement from Fannigan’s house. Dympna was stomping back down the lawn in a way that reminded Arm of his own little boy, Jack. Dympna loomed by the passenger window, made a gun shape with his finger and pointed at Arm’s head. Arm popped out his earphones. Dympna’s features, which always looked too small for his wide face, were pinched, consternated. His trackie top was zipped right up to his neck, and Arm watched the zipper shiver tautly against the protuberant knot of his Adam’s apple. Dympna let out a long sigh, like a mammy.

‘Arm, get in there and beat the fuck out of that daft man.’

‘What about the mother?’

Dympna held up and opened his left hand. A key adhered to his clammy palm.

‘I put her in the bathroom. Fannigan agreed that was best, gave me a hand getting her in there. He’s waiting for you in the sitting room.’

‘Is he going to make it awkward, you reckon?’

Dympna ran his right hand over the ginger stubble on top of his head, shaved so tight it shone like vapour in the morning light.

‘You never know, but I don’t think so. He knows it’ll go over easier if he just takes it.’

‘How easy should it go?’ Arm asked.

Dympna smiled wanly, ‘Well, don’t kill him.’

The story came out last night, when Mary Rose, the third eldest of Dympna’s seven sisters, discovered Charlotte — Charlie they all called her — the youngest, weeping hysterically in the upstairs bathroom. Charlie had to be given a cup of warm milk chased by a sedative jigger of whiskey before she calmed down enough to tell what happened.

‘It’s myself I blame,’ Dympna had confided on the drive over. ‘Letting uncivilised fucking animals like Fannigan past my front door.’

Dympna Devers was twenty-five, a year older than Arm. Dympna sold marijuana, fat green ziplocked bags of the stuff, all over town. The town was small, and Dympna held a monopoly on such business. Fannigan was the eldest of the crew of five dealers currently in Dympna’s employ. Fannigan sold out of the industrial estate, where he worked evenings as a production-line stiff in the Allgen medical prosthetics plant.

The Friday evening gone, as he periodically did, Dympna had invited over the crew, Fannigan included, for drinks at the Devers’s family home, where his mother June and three of his seven sisters still lived. The Devers were a sociable breed, and liked crowding the house up. The parties tended to putter amicably on into the early hours, and attendees were encouraged to crash on the couch or floor if they had drank, snorted or smoked away the wherewithal to get home in one piece. The problem was that on that last night, Fannigan, completely pig-eyed, had at some point found his way up to young Charlie’s bedroom, let himself in, and attempted to stick several parts of himself in under her bedcovers. Charlie had only turned fourteen a couple of weeks ago.

Dympna told Arm all this on the way over. Arm was amazed that Dympna had put the lock on his initial impulses, had waited out the night before taking action; amazed again that Dympna had gone in there and given Fannigan an opportunity to explain himself instead of just caving the man’s skull in.

‘So did he offer another side, then?’ Arm said.

Dympna rolled his little eyes.

‘First he claimed he couldn’t remember a thing at all. Then he started swearing blind that in the state he was in he thought Charlie was Lisa.’

Lisa was Dympna’s second oldest sister, twenty-four, by general consensus the prettiest of the Devers girls; that Fannigan’s molestations were intended for another of Dympna’s siblings, albeit one of legal age, would have done little to mollify the big man.

‘Jesus,’ Arm said, ‘fair play.’

‘No,’ Dympna said, ‘no fair play at all.’

Arm wound the wires of his iPod neatly about the device and placed it on the dash. When he stepped out of the car, Dympna handed him the bathroom key.

‘Light damage,’ Dympna said, ‘lesson damage.’

Fannigan was on the couch in the sitting room, in front of a low wooden coffee table. A shining black plasma hung on the wall, a talk show on, switched to mute. It was a Yank show; tanned people with bleached teeth and sports jackets mooing and grimacing at each other like pantomimes. Arm could hear a clock, an old-fashioned mechanical tick-tocker in the hall, and faint scrabbling noises from behind the bathroom door.

‘I don’t want to keep her too long in there,’ Fannigan said, nodding towards the hall. He was a bit drained- looking, but there was no tremor in his voice. His limbs were pinned to the couch. Fannigan was somewhere in his fifties. He was gaunt, with dirty silver-tinged rocker hair. He wore a bushy grey moustache he presumably considered distinguished, the whited ends tamed into tapered points by regular, finger-tipped applications of spittle, and he might once have been a handsome man. All Fannigan had on were jeans and a vest. His ropey arms were decorated with the murky green-blue blotches of old tattoos, their original shapes and lines mottled into illegibility by age. The lack of clothing was on purpose, Arm decided. Fannigan wanted to advertise the frailty of his scrawny frame.

‘Have a seat,’ Fannigan said.

Arm stepped forward.

‘Arm—’ Fannigan said and raised an open hand.

Arm grabbed the back of Fannigan’s head and flipped him off the couch onto the floor. Fannigan’s cheek smacked the coffee table. He moaned, and a dark rivulet, meaty and viscous, slipped from his mouth. Arm stepped back and guided his foot up under the old man’s ribs.

‘Up,’ Arm said, ‘look, Fannigan. Look.’

Fannigan raised his face as requested. Arm hit him two, three, four times. To his credit, Fannigan was still conscious after that, though swimming on his elbows on the carpet. It was often hard to tell if a person was crying in that state — there was usually a lot of liquid running from their face, necessitating all manner of soggy expulsions and clogged snorkelling noises. But Arm thought Fannigan was crying. Certainly, Fannigan was struggling to say something.

‘I–I—I didnnnn efffin ged, ged haa nnnnnnickers off!’