Colin Barrett - Young Skins - Stories

Arm hit Fannigan again. There was the wishbone snap of his nose breaking and the old man was clean out. Arm wrenched the plasma from the wall and tucked it under his arm. In the hall, he dropped the key and toed it under the bathroom door. Arm could hear Fannigan’s mother scuffling on the other side, groaning, ‘Where’s my Billy, where’s my Billy?’

Arm became friends with Dympna at fifteen. They were in the same school, but hung in different groups and it was not until Dympna showed up at Saint Ignatius Athletic, the local boxing club, that Arm got to know him. Dympna was a porky, eager boy back then, keen to transmute his flab to muscle and learn how to throw a punch. Boxing was Arm’s thing; at underage level he had fought his way to county, and briefly, provincial, distinction. Arm had the clear head and cold-bloodedness required by the ring, the knack of detachment. Arm could be buried in the moment of a fight, spun and dizzy and snorting sputum, his body bright and ringing, and yet at the same time occupy a little bubble of lucidity above it all. His punches travelled with just the right weight and restraint, and they had a bounce to them when they landed, the way raindrops splash. And Arm was relentless. If the ref did not intercede, he could pound equably away on a lad until his head fell off.

Because Arm was the best around, Dympna pestered after him to spar. Dympna was barely in shape, and had mediocre form, and both boys knew rightly that Arm would destroy Dympna, but Dympna insisted. After each session they would sit in the bleachers, Dympna staunching a pumping nostril with a wad of cotton or pressing an ice pack to a blown-up eye socket, and at his behest the two would go forensically back over whatever combination of moves Arm had used to demolish him that day. Dympna viewed the beatings as instructional in nature, a mapping out, bruise by bruise, of the vulnerable regions of the body. Arm intuited that even at sixteen Dympna had plans, and that Dympna would need to understand the dynamics of pain, its infliction and its absorption, in order to effect those plans. What Dympna couldn’t give a fuck for were the organised formalities and quaint codes of conduct that governed in-the-ring competition, and after he secured what he wanted — Arm, Arm’s friendship — he persuaded Arm that he shouldn’t either.

Dympna and Arm started smoking dope, lots and lots of dope, and Dympna, who had a connection through the uncles, started selling it. Arm lost his virginity to Lisa and additionally got his dick into Fatima and Christina, the twins. Dympna, who always deferred to the coven wisdom of his sisters, took their plural interest in Arm as a sign of clinching approbation, and brought Arm in permanently as his muscle. Arm’s name was Douglas Armstrong, but every creature around knew him as Arm ever since Dympna christened him such. Arm was what Dympna threatened to sic on you if you dared cross him. Don’t make me put the Arm on you , Dympna would say, though most of the time Arm was required to do little more than hover stone-faced behind Dympna’s right shoulder.

On the drive back to the Devers’s house Arm kept the window down. He looked in the wing mirror, imagining the ruination he’d dosed upon Fannigan’s face dosed on his own. Arm had been beaten badly a couple of times in the ring, of course — had to have ripped eyelids sewn up, the flopping cartilage of a disjointed nose wedged back into place — but nothing too serious, and in Dympna’s employ he had suffered little more than an occasional scratch.

Arm watched the Devers’s home appear. They lived in a big red-brick, two-storey house on the edge of Farrow Hill estate. The family was of traveller extraction, and though they’d been settled going back three generations, such origins, however distant, were enough for the house to be known locally as The Tinker Mansion, though no one called it that to Dympna’s face.

Dympna’s cousin Brandon was outside. Brandon was a slope-shouldered, paunchy lad in his twenties, with a round pale face and a shock of long, prematurely white hair that came right down to his arse. He seemed to wear only black T-shirts emblazoned with the name and artwork of various metal bands, and was himself a guitarist in a local band called Satan On Sabbatical. He was standing in the front lawn, his head bent forward, drawing a comb through his hair with girlish solicitude.

Brandon was originally from Guernsey. He’d become involved in some vague, not very serious trouble (vandalism, petty theft, a painted cow) after leaving school and his mother — Dympna’s aunt, an obese diabetic divested fairly recently of the toes on one foot — had sent the lad here, ostensibly to spend the summer. That had been a year ago. He was a docile lad, his only passion the pursuit of metal. White wisps of hair floated in the air around him.

Arm hefted the plasma from the backseat.

‘How do, Brandon,’ Dympna said, and Arm nodded at him.

‘Hi,’ Brandon said in his soft voice, ‘you lads coming to our gig tomorrow?’ Satan On Sabbatical was playing in Quillinan’s pub on the main street.

‘Sure,’ Dympna said, ‘we’ll be right up front with our tits hanging out.’

‘He know about what happened to Charlie?’ Arm asked Dympna as they went inside.

Dympna shook his head. ‘He knows she’s been poorly, that’s it. No sense sharing the gory details with him.’

They went through the hall, into the sitting room. Lisa and Charlie were on the sofa, watching TV. Charlie was in a bathrobe, her shins, thin as twigs, protruding from the bathrobe’s folds into pink-striped socks. She looked lamentably like what she was, a child, and Arm felt good for the throbs in the joints of his fingers.

Lisa was barefoot in shorts of battered denim, with one leg curled up under her, propped on a cushion. She was wearing fake gold earrings, her dark, streak-shot hair piled in a sloppy bun that listed enticingly. She was one of those women who were at their most physically eloquent in a state of casual dishevelment, though as always she had a thick layer of makeup applied to her face; hot pink lipstick, dusky orange foundation trowelled on and eyeliner as vividly black as cinders, and dense, as if each lash was magnified in bold type.

‘There’s the men,’ she said. Arm watched Dympna come round the back of the sofa, put a hand on Charlie’s shoulder and nuzzle the top of her head with his nose.

‘Grrrrrr,’ he said.

‘Get off!’ Charlie said.

Dympna looked up at Arm.

‘Do you not want that?’ he said, meaning the plasma. Wiring trailed from the back.

Arm shrugged.

‘I thought Charlie might like it.’

‘Well aren’t you the thoughtful one, Douglas,’ Lisa said.

‘Say thanks,’ Dympna said.

‘Thanks,’ Charlie said.

June Devers, the mammy, was in the kitchen. She had the breakfast cooked and waiting — sausages and eggs, tomato, soda bread and milky tea. June was a short, broad woman with a wide, freckle-ridden bosom. Her late husband’s name, Neddy , was tattooed in slender cursive on the inner slope of her left tit. She had the same ruddy face and dinkiness of feature as Dympna, and small, very yellow teeth. She kissed Arm on each cheek, and, as he and Dympna attacked the steaming grub, she asked Arm how his little lad Jack was.

‘You know,’ Arm said, ‘still ticking along in his own world.’

‘Such a gorgeous creature,’ June said. ‘You and that Dory girl, good genes.’

When Arm said he had to leave, Dympna looked up from his plate, ‘We’ll be talking soon, Arm.’

‘He has you at his beck and call,’ June said indulgently. On the way out she grabbed Arm’s wrist. She slipped two fifties into his hand.

‘Thanks for all this, Douglas. Buy some flowers for your girl.’