Colin Barrett - Young Skins - Stories

The girl, who was no longer Arm’s girl, Ursula Dory, lived with Arm’s son in her parents’ house in the Drummond Rise estate, up the other end of town. Arm booted it on foot out the main road. Traffic was sparse but steady; the whoosh of a mammy hatchback or transit van trundling in off the state road sounded like lazy waves breaking on a shore just out of sight.

When Arm got there Ursula was ironing and Jack was up on the kitchen table. Jack was in a T-shirt and nappy, his toes hooked tightly around the table’s ledge, like talons. He was gouging apart a slice of bread with his fingers. The position looked precarious, but Jack was a practised indoor climber and percher.

‘Well, shameen,’ Arm said.

Jack fluted his lips, made a subdued hooting noise, and went back to working on his bread. Jack ate fitfully, with a lot of incidental wastage. He tore off a piece of the bread, put it in his gob, and worked it about until it was a tight wee wad. Sometimes he swallowed, and sometimes he took the wad out and flicked it onto the lino, as he did now. There were half a dozen such wads already littering the floor.

‘Stop that,’ Ursula said.

Arm snapped two fifties from his snakeskin, added the two June gave him. He folded the notes into a tight tube and waved the tube in front of Jack.

‘Hey, Jack, here you go, go buy your mammy something nice,’ Arm said, and put the money in his son’s hand. Jack was about to put the notes in his mouth when Ursula snatched them away.

‘Thanks,’ she said unenthusiastically. She pocketed the money and went back to the laundry. The unfolded pile gave off a damp heat, pinkening her whey complexion. There was a fat textbook on the table beside the iron. Ursula was taking evening classes in the community college.

Jack was five. Arm had put the boy in Ursula’s belly when she was just gone eighteen, and Jack and Ursula had lived here, with Ursula’s ma and da, since he was born. Arm came round perhaps less than he should, but he found it wearying to be in a place where he would only ever be tolerated. Ursula’s folks, entirely reasonably, Arm thought, hated him. They hated what he and Ursula’s recklessness had thwarted, though they were helpless to do anything other than love the little boy.

‘How’s he sleeping?’ Arm asked.

‘Well enough, these days,’ Ursula said.

‘Will we go to the park, monkey-bar boy?’ Arm chucked Jack under the chin.

Arm liked to get the kid out of Ursula’s hair, though she was wary of him taking Jack anywhere unfamiliar. Anything other than the usual routine unnerved Jack; new people and places had to be introduced to him in slow stages, or he’d shy, or worse. The boy was in the main docile but capable of ferocious turns, instantaneous eruptions. It had taken several attempts but Arm had got him down to the playground out by the new road, and Jack loved it there now, as long as there were no other kids around. Jack loved to climb and loved the blue-painted jungle gym they’d thrown up. He liked the back-and-forth tacking of the swings and the looping simplicity of the slide; up the steps, down the dented tin chute, repeat, repeat.

‘If you can get him into his trousers, sure,’ Ursula said.

Jack preferred to go bare-legged, and if left to his own devices would shed any trousers and footwear as soon as possible. Arm shrugged. ‘Sure I’ll take him like this. Don’t think Jack’ll be bothered.’

‘You will not!’ Ursula said and smiled. She had the same sandy blonde hair and blue eyes as Jack, and her face ignited when you could coax a smile onto it, which had never been easy. Ursula was smart, and Arm wondered if he wasn’t still in love with her half the time, but she was a wincy, moribund bitch when she wanted to be.

‘Serious. I’ll take mine off too. Solidarity.’

Jack stuck out his tongue and blew a raspberry, and added a garbled yip as a period. It was clear to Arm that the doctors hadn’t a notion about Jack, or his prospects, and were taking the long route in admitting as much. Before Jack was two he had actually picked up a few baby words, but they went away again soon after, like toys he had tired of and abandoned. Jack had talked, and now did not, and the doctors could not tell if he would ever get back to talking again, or when that day might come.

But still, Jack had his noises, and Arm could read the colour and shape of his moods in those noises as plain as day. There were the moos and coos of contentment, the squawks and trills of delight, the stream of burbles that attended his absorption in some odd task, the injurious kitten mewling for when things weren’t going his way, and then there was the deep, guttural screaming that stood for itself and nothing else. His tantrums were infrequent, but came on abruptly, and often without identifiable cause. He could become violent, usually to himself, knocking his head against a wall, trying to kick through glass frames or wooden doors, mauling his own fingers until they bled. Anyone who got in his way was fair game for a savage swick. The violence was an undirected venting of pressure, and meant nothing beyond the compulsion of its expression — so hazarded the doctors. It was what it was, like the weather. Intervention was risky, but still, Ursula, tiny-framed and stick-armed herself, would put on oven gloves and tackle the boy every time. Arm told her not to, to let her oul fella grab Jack if anyone was going to, but she kept doing it. She would get him into a bear hug on the couch or floor and hold tight and wait for the rage to drain away.

But today Jack was happy, burbly and sweet-eyed. Arm chucked him under the chin again and Jack playfully snapped his teeth.

‘He’s going to see the horses later,’ Ursula said. ‘So don’t be gone too long.’

The horses were therapy, recommended by the county hospital shrink. There was a small public-access farm in town that received a state grant in exchange for letting the very young, the very old, and the mentally and physically infirm bother the animals. Jack was scared of creatures smaller and quicker and noisier than him — cats and toddlers disconcerted him, dogs outright terrified him — but he liked the horses. He had gone three or four times now, and on the last visit had consented to be mounted on one of the smaller beasts and trotted gently around a paddy, and had remained calm and composed the entire time, according to Ursula.

‘Tiger cub, hup, hup. You’re a strange kid,’ Arm said, and could feel Ursula watching, listening. ‘You’re a strange kid and getting stranger.’

In his runners Jack was a stomper. All his shoes were runners, all had Velcro straps, laces were an unnecessary complication. As he and Arm headed to the park he smashed the pavement with the flats of his soles like he was stomping on cardboard boxes. It seemed to give him immense satisfaction.

Ursula had helped Arm get Jack into his Spider-Man jacket — the cuffs, like the cuffs of all Jack’s jackets, mutilated and raggy with chew marks — and trackie bottoms, and then the pair had set out. Jack knew exactly where they were going, and Arm was proud of the ease with which his son discerned the route, though even a dog could learn to do that.

The park was empty. Jack tore across the tarmac, leapt up onto the jungle gym, and zigzagged his way to its summit, negotiating the levels with hurling simian dexterity. Up top, he hooted triumphantly and bent his head and started tonguing the blue metal bars, lustily French kissing the things.

‘Stop that!’ Arm said.

Jack registered the sharpness in Arm’s tone and looked up. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and appeared almost guilty for a moment. Arm sunk onto the bench and waved at his boy, sorry . Instantly Jack appeared content again, and began to low and bark happily to himself. The sky behind Jack wasn’t any colour at all really, just banded with watery shade lower to the horizon, where distant weather was stirring.