Colin Barrett - Young Skins - Stories

‘D’you hear the latest about the Clancy kid?’ Tug says after a lapse of silence.

‘No,’ I say.

‘A farmer in Enniscorthy reckons he saw a lad matching the Clancy kid’s description with, get this, two women, two women in their thirties. They stopped into a caff near where this farmer lives. He talked to one of them. Get this, she was — well, German, he reckons. Talked with a kind of Germanic accent, and they — she — was enquiring about when the Rosslare ferry was next off. Little blondie lad with them, little quiet blondie lad. That was a few weeks back though, only the farmer didn’t put two and two together till after.’

‘A Germanic accent,’ I say.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Tug says.

His eyebrows flare enthusiastically. The Clancy kid has become something of an obsession for Tug, though the wider interest has by now largely run its course. Wayne Clancy, ten, a schoolboy out of Gurtlubber, Mayo, went missing three months back. He disappeared during a school excursion to Dublin. One moment he was standing with the rest of the Gurtlubber pupils and two teachers on a traffic island at a city-centre Y junction — the lights turning red, the traffic sighing to a halt, the crowd of boys and girls crossing the road — and then he was gone. At first the assumption was that wee Wayne had simply wandered off, disoriented by the big-city bustle, but it soon became apparent he was not just lost but missing. His disappearance haunted the front pages of the national papers for all of May. The established theory was that Wayne was snatched, either right at the Y junction or shortly after, by persons unknown. A national Garda hunt was launched, Ma and Da Clancy did the tearful on-camera appeals. . but nothing happened, and nothing continued to happen. No boy, no body, no credible lead or line of enquiry could be unearthed.

Everyone’s interest was piqued, for a while, given the proximity of Gurtlubber parish to our own town. But things go on, and bit by bit we began to care less and less.

Tug can’t let the Clancy kid go. He can’t resist the queasy hypotheticals such an open-ended story encourages. What-ifs proliferate like black flowers in the teeming muck of his imagination. Left unchecked he’ll riff all evening about unmarked graves packed with lime, international rings of child traffickers, organ piracy, enforced cult initiation.

I tell him, lighten up.

‘They could be lesbians,’ Tug says. ‘German lesbians. Who, you know, can’t have a child. Can’t get the fertilisation treatment, can’t adopt. Maybe they got desperate.’

‘Maybe,’ I say.

‘The Clancy kid looked Aryan. You know? Fair-haired, blue-eyed,’ Tug says.

‘All children look Aryan,’ I say, irritated.

Marlene’s laughter, a high insolent cackling, carries down the yard. She and Cuculann have joined another couple, Stephen Gallagher and Connie Reape. Cuculann is tall, underfed and rangy, like me; Marlene has a type. She is cackling away at something Gallagher has said. Everyone else, including Gallagher, looks abashed, but Marlene is laughing and batting Gallagher on the shoulder, as if pleading with him to stop being so hilarious.

‘But it wouldn’t be the worst end for the lad. It wouldn’t be an end at all, really,’ Tug says.

A waitress comes through the double doors, bearing a quartet of champagne flutes on a tray. Marlene waves her over and distributes the drinks, stem by stem, a strawberry impaled on the rim of each flute. Cuculann pays, and as Marlene drops the napkin that held her ice-cream cone onto the tray I catch the telltale twinkle on her ring finger.

‘Wouldn’t it not be?’ Tug says.

He reaches over and drops his paw on my forearm, shakes it.

‘Be fucking super, Tug,’ I say.

He cringes at the snap in my voice. My mind, I want to say, has been enlisted in the pursuit of other woes, Tug, and I can’t be dealing with the endless ends of the Clancy kid right now.

‘Oh,’ Tug says.

He tucks his hand under the opposite armpit, like he’s after catching a finger in a doorjamb.

‘You’re in a mood and it’s—’ he looks over, sniffs the air, ‘—it’s Marlene. It’s that loose cunt Marlene,’ he says.

I make a disapproving click with my tongue. I jab my finger at him.

‘I’m easy as the next man when it comes to getting his end away, but Tug, there’s no need to be throwing round them terms.’

He leans back and his span thickens.

‘I’ll say whatever I want. About whoever I want.’

‘You really are an enormous fucking child, aren’t you?’

Tug grabs the sides of the table and I feel it shudder and float up from under me. I snatch my drink and lean back as the coasters go twirling off the edge. Tug sways and the table follows his sway, crashing against the concrete. People nearby yelp and jump back.

I daintily disembark from my stool, one foot then the other, keeping my eyes on Tug’s eyes. His lips are hooked up into a sneer, his breathing fast and gurgled.

‘I’m sorry, Tug,’ I say.

His nostrils pucker and flare and pace themselves back to an even rhythm.

‘That’s alright,’ he says, ‘that’s alright.’

He rubs a palm over the dented round of his skull and looks at the capsized table with an expression of broad mystification, like he had nothing to do with it.

‘Come on,’ I say, ‘let’s head.’

I drain the sudsy dregs of my pint and plant it on a nearby table.

Everyone backs away as we pass by, me in Tug’s wake.

I know what they’re thinking. Manchild gone mad again. Manchild throwing another fit. Oddball Manchild and his oddball mate Jimmy Devereux.

‘Hi Marlene!’ Tug says cheerfully as we trundle by her table.

Marlene is unfazeable as ever. Cuculann beside her is hunched and close-shouldered, braced for action.

‘Well, big man,’ Marlene says.

She looks at me.

‘And not-so-big man.’

‘Are congratulations in order?’ I say.

I lift up the ends of her fingers, straightening them out for inspection. Marlene slips her hand from mine and covers it over with the other.

‘Too late,’ I chuckle, ‘I saw it. Nice aul’ hunk of rock.’

‘It is,’ Cuculann says.

‘Very pretty alright,’ Tug says.

I can feel him behind me, the looming proximity of all that mass, restored to my side and prepped to go ballistic at my word.

Marlene’s bottom lip does something to the top, and she fixes me with a look that says: pay attention .

‘Jimmy, I’m gone very happy,’ she says. ‘Now, please, fuck off.’

Outside Dockery’s the evening sun is in its picturesque throes, the sky steeped in foamy reds and pinks. The breeze has grown teeth. Shards of glass crunch underfoot like gravel. There are cars parked in a line along the road, and one of them is the tiny, faded silver hatchback Cuculann boots around in. It sits there bald as an insult on the kerb, a wrinkled L-sticker pasted inside the windscreen.

‘Look at the state of it,’ I say.

I wallop the flat of my palm against the pockmarked bonnet.

Tug looks at me wonderingly.

‘It’s Cuculann’s car,’ I say.

‘The thing’s a lunchbox,’ Tug says and laughs.

‘A pitiful thing to be chauffeuring your bride-to-be around in,’ I say.

‘Awful, awful, awful,’ Tug agrees.

‘Tug, are you off your meds?’ I say.

‘No,’ he grunts.

He places the palm of one huge hand on the hatchback’s roof and begins to experimentally rock the vehicle back and forth, the suspension squeaking in protest. Tug has never been a competent liar; his size, his physical advantage, means he’s never needed to develop the ability to dissemble. You can always tell the truth, always say what you mean, if you’re big enough.