Colin Barrett - Young Skins - Stories

‘Hector was awful itchy on the phone. Short and itchy,’ Dympna said.

Friday afternoon. The sun had been shining and the rain had been falling all morning. Dympna and Arm were heading uptown in the shitbox, and Dympna, driving, was talking in a low voice out of the side of his mouth. Dympna, Arm knew, tended to go tight-jawed when apprehensive.

‘What about?’ Arm asked, though he could guess.

Dympna glanced at Arm. He squinched his lips and emitted a rhetorical tut.

‘How’d they find out?’ Arm asked.

‘The mammy, I reckon. Chief disseminator of all information in this world and the next.’

‘She seemed fine about it the other day.’

‘I thought so.’

‘You think they’re going to want something done?’ Arm asked.

‘Something, alright.’

Hector and Paudi Devers were the younger brothers of Dympna’s deceased father. They lived ten miles outside of town, on a secluded farm at the end of a barely navigable dirt track in the bogged and heathered foothills of the Nephin Mountains, and where, in conjunction with their regular farmerly duties, they cultivated an especially fragrant and potent strain of marijuana. They grew the plant hydroponically, in the permanent twilight of a temperature-controlled, UV-lit nursery built into the storage basement of a cattle shed. The operation was small but professionally appointed in scale, and the uncles produced enough weed to enable Dympna to service the appetite of every burned-out factory worker and delinquent schoolkid within the town limits. Arm was cool to them. The uncles were necessary to Dympna’s operation, but they were mercurial birds, easy to spook. Arm knew of at least two occasions inside the last couple of years where they had abruptly claimed they were going to give up growing, and Dympna had to beg and plead with them, and each time offer a bigger cut, to change their minds.

Arm and Dympna dropped out once a month to load up on a fresh supply and pay the uncles what they were owed. He and Dympna were, as far as Arm knew, the uncles’ only regular visitors.

Hector and Paudi kept the farm locked down, a holdout against the world. They had an in-house armoury stocked with several hand guns, a pair of shotguns, and a semiautomatic hunting rifle with a mounted telescopic sight. They had flak jackets and camo gear, and both men were adept at improvising small explosive devices from basic domestic and farming ingredients, or so they claimed. They had shown Dympna and Arm something called a siege cupboard, where they kept an eighteen-month supply of tinned soup and dry goods. They owned two hulking Alsatians trained to lock jaws around the jugulars of grown men on command. The basement in which they grew the weed was extensively rigged and booby trapped, to be razed at short notice in the worst-case scenario.

They rarely left the premises, and certainly never at the same time. Dympna and Arm’s trips out to them were short. Arm preferred to stay in the car while Dympna went inside to parley and complete the necessary exchanges.

Dympna and Arm were scheduled in fact to head to the farm the next day, and so would not have expected to hear from either of the uncles until then. But Hector had rung Dympna this morning, out of the blue, requesting a meet in Lally’s pool arcade on the main street, at two.

Lally’s was dim and cool, its gloomy space filled with six full-size pool tables. There were a couple of games in session, the players’ low talk lost beneath the overlapping reports of the balls colliding across each bright rectangle of baize, and now and then the prompt gurgle of a ball rattlingly sunk. The windows had fine mesh grilles over them, a penitentiary detail no regular much seemed to mind. There was no drinking licence for the premises, but the enterprising Mark Scriney sold cans and bottles out of a portable ice box at twice their supermarket prices. No woman had crossed Lally’s threshold in years, if ever.

Hector was in the back, sat at one of the flimsy chipboard tables arranged along the wall. An elderly man was with him, talking volubly while Hector only listened.

Dympna’s uncle was a squat, sturdy man in his fifties, with a paunch, wide forearms and a face rendered cracked and red from decades of working in the elements. He was spruced and prinked for his afternoon in civilisation, dressed in a cuff-linked white shirt and navy pullover. His black hair, as yet only negligibly tipped with silver, was boxily trimmed and waxed. He would be heading to Roscommon later that day, Arm knew. The more presentable and socially adroit of the uncles, Hector had a woman by the name of Mirkin squirrelled away in Ballintober, a widow with whom he’d been pursuing a glacially paced courtship for the last three years; the woman, also in her fifties, had until recently lived with her ninety-something mother and, fretful of scandalising the old crone, had only permitted her suitor to visit one night every few weeks. Though the mother had died a couple of months back, the frequency of Hector and the widow’s rendezvous had not, as yet, increased. Hector, though, did not seem to mind, and Arm suspected the bitty, piecemeal nature of the relationship was in fact one of its prime appeals. Dympna had his own theories concerning the courtship. He was convinced that the widow was sitting on a lot of money, a potential double inheritance, and that Hector was on its track, painstakingly working the slow grift.

As Arm and Dympna got closer, Arm copped the smell coming off the second man, the eye-wateringly ripe stench of dried-in adult piss, which explained why Hector was leaning back on the rear legs of his seat. Hector’s arms were folded across the shelf of his stomach and the wings of his nose were drawn narrow, a crinkle of supressed disgust edging his smile.

‘Ah, these here are the ones I was waiting for,’ he said, cutting off the old man, who twisted round in his seat to take in Arm and Dympna.

‘Your young fellas?’ the man croaked.

‘The ginner’s the nephew, and his friend used box for the county. Fine stumps of men.’

‘They’re alright,’ the man said without enthusiasm.

‘Are we interrupting?’ Dympna said.

‘Not at all, Mick here was just telling me a fascinating theory he has about Jaysus.’

‘Jaysus?’ Dympna said.

‘Our Lord and Saviour,’ the man said.

‘His theory,’ Hector elaborated when the man did not go on, ‘is that Jaysus had a twin. A brother, and when they nailed the first one to the cross and buried him in that cave, his followers robbed the body and had the other lad show up three days later, claiming he was Jaysus come back.’

The old man watched Arm and Dympna as Hector talked. One eye was gummed near shut. He was wearing mud-caked, laceless Reebok runners, no socks, plum tracksuit bottoms shiny with filth, and a mustard sports jacket over a faded WORLD CUP ‘94 T-shirt. In his hand he clutched a plastic shopping bag with what appeared to be a bunch of other plastic bags folded up inside it.

‘Alright,’ Dympna said cautiously, ‘sounds okay. Sounds a lot more plausible, like, than coming back from the dead.’

‘It does,’ the man said curtly. He pressed his knuckles into the table and gingerly raised himself from his seat.

‘Nice talking to you, always good to meet a man with a cast of a brain in his head, always good.’ He turned and the skunky hum of piss turned in the air and departed with him.

‘What the fuck was that about?’ Dympna said, coughing and clearing his throat and taking the seat the man had vacated. Arm dragged a seat over from the next table along.

‘That wretched old boy’s harmless,’ Hector said. ‘His ilk aren’t what I’m worried about.’

‘And what is the worry now, Heck?’ Dympna said.