Colin Barrett - Young Skins - Stories

This was a thing to worry about. But not yet.

He drove, trying to keep his right side still. His hamstring burned. Arm had to take periodic gulps of the blood leaking from his tongue. The gorse bushes in the bog fields juddered in the wind. Arm joggled switches until the headlights snapped bright, and kept his eyes locked on the immediate section of macadam refreshing itself in the windshield.

No other cars appeared. Arm assured himself that Paudi was not in pursuit. How could he be? The uncles had only the one road vehicle, a Hiace van, and it was in Ballintober where Hector was dallying with his widow.

Arm tried to assess the situation, but what was there to assess? Things had got fucked, precipitously and in multiple ways, and for little reason. Arm had come to this place with Dympna. Arm and Dympna had entered Paudi’s house. Arm had informed Paudi he had done away with someone Paudi and his brother had asserted they wanted done away with, and Paudi had interpreted this as what? A dry-run for what he thought Arm and Dympna were about to do to him? The paranoid fucks. It was always going to come asunder like this.

The homely glimmer of the town lights appeared ahead. Arm eased in along the main road. Coming up ahead was the turnoff for the town farm. Arm could not risk driving the beat-up shitbox through Main Street. He figured the farm would serve as well as anyplace to stow the shitbox and consider his damage. The rider, Rebecca, would surely be gone by now, along with whatever other staff there was.

Arm swung up the lane into the farm parking lot. He parked in a corner, far as he could from any streetlights. He cut the engine, rested his forehead against the wheel, careful not to set off the horn. Midges moved in through the window and strafed his scalp. It was getting cooler. When Arm lifted his head the evening seemed darker again. He experimentally tried his right arm. Bringing his elbow to the level of his collarbone made the pain squeeze Arm’s chest so hard he had to catch his breath. The seat was wet, and squelched as Arm peeled himself from it.

He hobbled across the lot, a hunchbacked crook to his gait that sufficed to dampen, just a little, the pains in his torso and leg. The moon was out, a little early, it seemed to Arm. At the cottage door a sensor light ticked on. He knocked the pansies from the sill as he squinnied through the window. Empty.

Arm shouldered the door until it gave, and stepped into the tiny office. There was a foldout chair behind a plywood desk only a little bigger than a bedside locker, a kitchenette in the corner. There was a microwave on the counter, a waxy braid of noodles slopped in a plastic beaker. On the desk was a ring-bound ledger, a row of identical ledgers lined a shelf behind the desk, and a fashion magazine with a cigarette dook scorched through a model’s face. Arm sat. He pulled off his shirt and inspected the back. It was drenched in a swathe of syrupy, sticky stuff turned dark plum against the denim, and perforated by a scatter of grim little holes. He climbed arm by arm back into the shirt and sat back down into the chair. He closed his eyes and waited to see if he would die or at least pass out. Five minutes later and nothing had happened. In fact Arm was feeling only hungry, ravenous. He nuked the stale noodles for twenty seconds in the microwave and ate them with his bare hands, fingerpainting the polystyrene container with his blood.

There was a locked drawer attached to the desk. Arm held the table to keep it steady and pulled the drawer right out of its fixture. Inside was a quantity of the rider’s effects. Her full name, Rebecca Mileacre, appeared over and over on a folded stack of crumpled wage slips, along with the pittance they were paying her.

‘Mileacre,’ Arm said.

There was a small red tin box. Arm split it open against the table. It contained a pile of coppers and one hundred and seventy-five quid in loose notes. Petty cash. On a hook behind the door was an army surplus coat. It smelled of hay, dung, horsehide, the rider.

Arm stepped out into the air. He thought about the first time he came here and why, and felt a pang of remorse that he had never seen Jack on horseback as he’d originally intended.

In an open-topped sty a dozen pigs were crammed contentedly together, slumbering. Their plump pale bodies shuddered as snores ripped ebulliently from their blunt, electrical-socket-shaped snouts. There was a chicken coop with a mesh perimeter, the coop completely silent by contrast, and beyond that the barn the horse was kept in. Arm unlatched the gate and retreated a respectful distance. The barn was a cubular blot of darkness, of uncertain depth and reeking of oats and horseshit. After a moment, the horse itself clackingly emerged from its nest of shadows.

‘Not so spooked now?’ Arm said.

He proffered a hand, held it neutrally in the air. The beast twitched its head then went still. Its stillness was its consent. Arm brushed his palm against the grain of its snout, felt the heat fluming from the vents of its nostrils. A vein thick as a garden hose pulsed among the muscles of its white neck.

‘You know me, now,’ Arm said.

He opened the gate and the animal drifted out into the middle of the field. Arm followed at a respectful distance. It hurt to breathe and it hurt not to breathe, and it was getting harder to register the distinction. The horse snuffled, swished its tail and pricked its ears, sifting the air for emanations beyond Arm’s ken. Eventually he cottoned that it was looking right at Nephin Mountain.

Arm thought of Dympna genuflecting, the sudden teetering ruin of his body. He thought of Dympna sliding into the grass. Arm could not imagine the moment beyond that moment; because there was none, none he could stand.

It seemed years ago that the sun was in the sky and he and Dympna had tooled out to the uncles in the faithful shitbox of the Corolla, cool and contained and helplessly complacent in their schemes. Thinking all along they had sufficient quantities of neck, gall and brains to treat with those odd birds, to bend the uncles to the inclination of their wills.

Dympna in the grass. Arm thought of the seven sisters, the mother June, formidable as a mountain range, watching their men go away. Arm wanted to tell them all sorry, and saw himself standing in their front room, empty-handed and dripping blood into the carpet; trying to get the words out, each utterance dropping from his mouth like a dead black wasp.

The horse trotted off and came back. Arm put out his hand. The horse’s snout skimmed in along the flat of his palm, muzzle steaming. Bands of moon sheen slid across its hide.

‘Come on,’ Arm said, and led the creature back to its stable. He returned to the cottage and took the rider’s surplus jacket from the door. It just about fit. Arm buttoned it up, took the petty cash and went out to the shitbox.

It was a half-hour drive to Ballintober along a see-sawing, pothole-pocked road. Rows of reflective white stakes flanked the tight verge. The shitbox held up, and Arm came to feel as a reprieve the night blasting in through the shattered window. He did not know where the widow lived, knew only the family name, Mirkin, but figured he would not have to turn up too many stones before he happened upon her and Hector. Ballintober was a junction, a football pitch, a petrol station, post office and butchers, eight pubs, and a brushed aluminium road sign arrowed at the Dublin road. Arm selected the shabbiest looking pub, lurched inside, and the very first fellow he talked to was only too happy to supply directions. The rider’s petty cash, which Arm thought he might require for a conversational sweetener, never left his pocket. The fellow was a pensioner in crusted wellies and an angling jacket, bright feathered fishhooks lining his breast pocket like army medals. He even offered to sketch out a map as the barman, an overweight bald lad in black, observed silently. Arm thanked the fellow and offered to buy him a pint, but the old sot demurred.