Colin Barrett - Young Skins - Stories

‘Really?’ Paudi said.

Arm stood up. He put his hand in his pocket and threw the blood-flecked stone out onto the table. It skittered to a stop against the satchel.

‘There you go. There’s a biteen of his fucking brains still stuck to that.’

Paudi picked up the stone. He turned it over in his hand.

Dympna forced out another laugh, this one huskier, faker. ‘He’s messing with you,’ he said, his voice on the verge of cracking.

‘Messing,’ Paudi said.

‘I’m not,’ Arm said.

Paudi looked up at Arm. ‘He’s not, either.’

Paudi oriented the stone until he had it set into the concave space between his thumb and forefinger. He held it like he was going to throw it, forefinger doubled tight against the stone’s curve, to maximise torque and spin. Then he threw it square between Arm’s eyes.

Dympna let out a yell. Arm snapped his head back and put his hand to the bridge of his nose. Dympna and Paudi stood up simultaneously and then all three men made their moves. Half-blind, Arm reached out and took a grip of someone’s shoulder. The shoulder recoiled from him and Dympna went facedown over the table. The table collapsed and his whirling foot snagged the handle of the bucket by the fireplace, launching it into the air. It crashed to the earth in a plume of flurrying brown ash. Arm stepped sideways, barked a shin against the table’s edge. He was coughing; Dympna was coughing. Arm was trying to get himself facing where he thought Paudi was when Paudi spoke, his breath against Arm’s ear.

‘Stop now.’

Dympna righted himself and got to his feet. Waving his hands, he attempted to bat clear the pall of flitting, granular ash. He squinted through the pall at his uncle.

‘Is that a fucking gun?’ he said.

‘It is,’ Paudi said. Paudi had his back against the wall, the muzzle of a double-barrelled rifle pointing towards Arm and Dympna, its wooden butt tight against his hipbone. Arm looked at Dympna and tried to gauge from his expression how serious he should take the gun. Dympna was wearing a wan smile, as was Paudi, and for a moment it seemed as if the entire situation was no more than a momentary domestic awkwardness uncle and nephew were conspiring to prolong out of some pique of mutual amusement.

But Paudi kept the rifle levelled at them.

‘Easy, horse,’ Paudi said to Arm. Arm was rubbing his nose, blood coming from the bridge where the stone had hit.

‘Paudi. Come on. What the fuck?’ Dympna said, tight-jawed.

‘I know what this is,’ Paudi said.

Paudi’s black eyes were shiny, charged, grimly tabulating.

‘The Arm. The quiet man,’ Paudi spat. Whenever the muzzle passed Arm’s gut he felt everything inside him turn to air. ‘Ready to pounce at the drop of a hat.’

‘Ah now, what? What the fuck are you saying?’ Dympna said.

‘Step out, both of you,’ Paudi said.

They moved carefully backwards out onto the porch and onto the unevenly grassed earth. It was still warm and bright outside.

‘Hands up,’ Paudi said.

Dympna and Arm complied.

‘This is a mix up, Paudi,’ Dympna insisted, but there was no conviction in his voice. Arm knew that Paudi would not listen, or would listen, but not back down.

‘You’re out of your fucking mind,’ Arm threw in, anyway.

‘Nah,’ Paudi said mildly. He went quiet for a moment, then, addressing Arm: ‘You killed that Fannigan fella, just like that, hah? What do you think you are?’

‘I’m not anything,’ Arm assured him.

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’ve shown your hand,’ Paudi said.

‘It was you boys wanted Fannigan dealt with. It was the other fat cunt showed up yesterday saying how Dympna’s old man wouldn’t want to let this lie,’ Arm said.

‘Invoking the dead,’ Paudi tittered. ‘That’d be Heck alright.’

‘Fuck all that!’ Dympna shouted, ‘What about this? You thought, what? We came here to do you over and fucking what? Rob you?’

Paudi did not respond.

Arm was standing with his hands up and out either side of his head. Dympna had his fingers interlinked, palms on his crown, rocking his elbows demonstrably in the air as he spoke.

‘So what’s going to happen, Unk?’ Dympna said.

Paudi spat.

Arm looked above the porch, past the roof. Back of them, he estimated, there were thirty or more feet of open ground to cover to get to the shitbox. Arm could smell the heather and could see, beyond the house, the upper part of the hill, the graded billows of green and brown and purple fronds turning languidly in the wind, then turning back again. Beyond the hill’s crest a tiny plane slipped frictionlessly across the sky, shedding a wake of thin white exhaust that feathered apart as it hung there, in the grey.

Thirty feet. Give or take. It was too far, Arm knew. If this man was actually going to use the gun he’d get every chance no matter how lightning they ran.

And so the three stayed put, just silent and waiting. The uncle regarded the two. Arm heard Dympna let out a deep breath.

‘Ah now, Unk,’ Dympna said, ‘fuck all this for a game of soldiers.’

Dympna dropped his arms and started forwards, stepping right up to Paudi and closing the substantial meat of his palm over the barrel, nudging the muzzle downwards.

The noise was there and gone, a slap to the air that left it hot and thrumming. Arm was jarred, punch-drunk, blood droning thickly in his ears. The Alsatians were off, barking dementedly out back, one or both, maybe. The bridge of Arm’s nose throbbed. He blinked to water away the sudden flecks of grit inundating his eyes. His face was very hot. There was a smell. Dympna was genuflecting on one knee in the grass. His sleeve was mostly gone and a gouge of black and red smoked along the underside of his arm, wrist to elbow. Dympna’s sleeve was in tatters. He was still holding the double barrel. The smell was the smell of combusted flesh. Dympna’s arm was bad but there was also his leg. Paudi stepped back and the gun barrel slid from Dympna’s grip. Dympna made a fist with his other hand, his left, and bowled a hopeless swing in the direction of his uncle. The momentum brought Dympna keeling forward. The shot leg seemed to stay upright a moment longer, then it too capsized, dragged by the portion of it that was still connected to Dympna’s thigh.

Arm turned and ran, lunging so quickly from a standing position he felt his right hamstring tear within a couple of strides, but he kept going. He fell against the driver door. The keys were in the ignition. The engine whinnied like a piteous bitch. Arm was stepping on the clutch like it was Paudi’s windpipe. He put the shitbox in gear and commenced turning. Dympna was down so low on the ground Arm could not see him over the bonnet. But Paudi was moving, circling in behind the shitbox as Arm trundled for the gap to the track out of there. Paudi loped, the rakey fucker, right into Arm’s blind spot. The door window on Arm’s side caved in. Arm punched the shitbox through the gap and hit the lane. The ruts attacked the suspension with such violence his jaw slammed shut on his tongue. Brambles from the ditch threshed in through the window. Shards of glass bounced like loose change all over his legs.

Arm careened out onto the road, slew a vicious right angle towards town and ground into third. Away, away, he was away. Arm could not tell if he was going fast or slow.

He thought: Dympna .

He thought: I have got away .

He thought: Bullshit .

Keeping the lurching, shifting shitbox on the road was his immediate concern. The wind whistled in through the shattered window. He moved his right arm and a scalding pain lanced up through his torso. The pain stuck. Arm felt impaled, run through.