Colin Barrett - Young Skins - Stories

‘Christ, can I have a smoke then?’

‘In a minute,’ Arm said.

‘There’s no time!’ Fannigan said. He had the blinky, nervous energy of a dreamer jilted suddenly awake. Fannigan looked urgently left and right, then up into the sky, at the scratchy stars and that cute old sphinx-faced cunt of a moon, up there watching and still keeping schtum after all these years. He let out another growl, a scouring phlegm-clearer, boggy and granulated and liquidly rich. He hocked and spat at Arm’s feet.

‘What time is it?’ he said.

‘Must be three,’ Arm said.

‘That’s right, that’s right,’ Fannigan said, wiping his mouth with his forearm. ‘You feeling okay?’ he said to Arm.

‘I am,’ Arm said.

Arm hunkered down where Fannigan had spat and dragged the boots over and piled the shirt and jumper on top of them. Fannigan, standing, still had his jocks and socks on. The socks were a particularly sad affair, Arm noted; once white, they were grimed to grey, cheap and nubbled and flecked with holes. Arm looked up at Fannigan.

‘Put the trousers down here with the rest,’ Arm said.

Fannigan was upright and had the upright’s advantage of height. A part of Arm wanted to scream at him to take his chance. To push Arm over, or run, or smash Arm’s skull with whatever conviction he could channel into his fists; just to try. But the acquiescent fucker only did as he was told, crouching down to Arm’s level and placing the folded jeans on top of the other clothes.

‘Douglas,’ he said. It was dark, but Arm could feel Fannigan’s eyes on him. Fannigan had been tuning in and out of this scenario, but he was back now, emphatically here, a lucid and crawlingly beseeching note in Arm’s name as he mouthed it. A plea.

‘Douglas,’ he said it again. ‘Listen. Listen. When I was a boy—’

It was right there, half sunk in the mud. Arm snugged his hand around it, a smooth, weighty oval, and aimed for Fannigan’s temple, where a delta of veinwork tremulously pulsed. The rock crushed into his head with a flat thud. His eyelids fluttered and he flopped bonelessly down onto the grass.

Arm had his arms in under Fannigan’s frame as quick as he could manage, and hefted the man up. Fannigan’s body was warm, and felt as if it might be convulsing a little. Arm waded into the river, moving deeper and deeper until the cold was cutting across the tops of his thighs, through his jeans. Arm puffed out his chest and threw Fannigan out towards the middle. He hit the water, sent up a plume of spray and was promptly spooled away on the current.

Arm clambered back up onto the bank and watched him go. Facedown and arse up, Fannigan’s body was periodically sucked under the surface before bobbing into sight again. Soon it was nothing more than a diminishing speck in the narrowing turbulence, and then it was gone, baywards to the open sea.

Arm considered the wilted totem of clothing piled by the water’s edge. He figured these leavings would make it appear all the more premeditated, would tell the story of how Fannigan, in a suicidal funk, had ritualistically shed his shitty gear before throwing himself in the Mule. Arm picked up the rock he’d hit Fannigan with and pocketed it. He told himself that the dent on Fannigan’s head would be explained as him dashing against rocks as he was carried to sea. He was a drunk and a waster, Fannigan, and save for his mother Arm didn’t think anyone, neither the guards nor the coroner nor any other soul, would look to pursue an explanation beyond the apparent when it came to piecing together the why of his end.

Arm clambered back up towards the road, stepping on stones where he could, smooshing the impressions his feet had left in the softer ground on the way down, leaving Fannigan’s bootprints intact. He squeezed his runners back on and inched his nose out over the wall’s lip; no traffic or souls about. He slipped over. His iPod was still going in his jacket. There were thorn ends and snarls of sap-coated twigs stuck to his clothes. He batted down the shoulders and sleeves of his jacket.

Arm plugged in the buds, slipped his hood up, and resumed walking right out of town. His trousers, wringing, dried as he went. Eventually he found himself following the familiar wrought-iron railings that looked out over the strand. The railings were eaten through, thinned to crusted spindles of rust at their most exposed points. Beyond them lay the rush-topped hillocks and sandbars, the sand milk-blue in the moonlight. Arm scanned the boiling surf for a long time, watched the way each wave rose, evolved like a fortification, and then collapsed.

It was nearing four in the morning as Arm headed back into town. A couple of teenage lads were coming the opposite way, on the other side of the road. Arm took out his earphones and listened as one vociferated to the other about almost bating the head off a third lad back in the pub or club or wherever they’d been, the boaster milling his fists around, clumsily shadow-boxing the air and his cohort cackling along. They were oblivious to Arm. He was on the riverside of the road, and could hear the Mule, and couldn’t help but listen out for a voice or scream or roar, because even though Arm knew the man was almost certainly already dead he was still susceptible to the dreamlike dread that Fannigan had somehow eluded the laws of the perishable world and staged a resurrection.

But Ssshhhhhhhhhhh went the water.

And Haaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh went the wind.

And from off in the nearing distance of the town centre came the calm hum of the taxis as they made their appointed circuits through what was left of the night.

Arm’s folks had him late, and only him. A single-child family was a rarity around here, where households teemed with ever-expanding factions of brothers and sisters. Arm’s mother was a schoolteacher, forty-two at the time of his birth. His da was already fifty. The da ran a delivery truck out of the local bun factory along the western seaboard for thirty-two years straight and when he walked through the door in the evenings he trailed in his wake a fragrance of cinnamon and currants. His parents’ hair was grey by the time Arm started primary school, and though they raised him right and raised him well, Arm sometimes wondered if he wasn’t just a late concession to the perennial babymaking thriving away about them. Good old Maye and Trevor Armstrong. Arm and they had always got on and maybe too much. Too much civility, too much mellowness; though it was clear to them that there was an aspect to the run of his life Arm kept from them, they refrained from prying. They doted on Jack, and doted on the idea of Ursula; they chided Arm for not sticking with a girl that lovely.

They saw Arm with Dympna and said nothing at all.

It was their only real fault, this enduring inability to ever think the worst of their son.

When Arm came to the next morning he could hear them downstairs in the kitchen, making breakfast. The noise of their domestic routine got Arm to dwelling on Fannigan’s mother, old and frail and alone in this world for good now, though she did not yet know it. He pulled a naggin of Jameson’s from the foot of his bed and took a few scouring hits, looking to snap himself out of such useless, malign sentiments.

Arm showered, put on a white vest, his good denim shirt, and made his way down to the Dorys. The low sky was slabbed with rifts of cloud the colour and texture of raw animal fat. Ursula’s mother was out front, unloading groceries from the backseat of the family Vauxhall.

‘Can I help?’ Arm asked, hovering at the foot of the driveway with his hands in his pockets. He had the stone flecked with Fannigan’s blood with him. He had not yet decided where or how best to dispose of it, and figured in the interim he should keep it close.