Colin Barrett - Young Skins - Stories

Hector took a step towards Arm. ‘You thick fucking daft cunt. You fucking loaf. Money! You think she has money!’

Arm dashed forward and grabbed Hector’s arm, pulling downwards. Hector went unbalanced to his knees and Arm stepped around behind him. With a push he sent Hector sprawling chest forward onto the carpet and planted the knee of his good leg between Hector’s shoulder blades, pinning him. Hector began shouting indecipherably into the carpet’s thick weave. Arm grabbed a wrist, dragged Hector’s arm clear of his body and brought the hammer whistling square down onto the back of his hand.

Hector screamed, a long guttural rent right into the carpet’s fur. He thrashed about, but Arm kept his knee wedged steadily, even as the hamstring of his placed leg tautened and burned. Hector’s convulsions jittered into sputtering stillness. He lifted his face up from the floor and twisted it sideways. His cheek was imprinted with pinpricks from the carpet fibres.

‘Maire,’ he sobbed.

Arm smacked him twice under the ear with the butt of the hammer’s handle and pressed his elbow down onto Hector’s neck. Arm still held Hector’s hand. A purple squash-ball-sized bruise was bloating up off the skin with incredible rapidity and the rest of it was trembling limply, a misshapen nest of crazed nerves and pulverised bone.

‘Now,’ Arm said. There was a space between the end of the couch and the wall, and the widow had folded herself in there like a child playing hide and seek. She was looking at Arm.

‘You want my money,’ she said.

‘That’s all,’ Arm said.

She unclasped the brooch on her dress and held it out to Arm.

‘That’s a start,’ Arm said, and motioned for her to place it on the ground in front of her.

‘The money,’ she said. ‘Mam only died a few weeks back. Mam was ill for a long time.’

‘Maire,’ Arm said. ‘Maire. Are you listening? Things have gone bad here but we are going to make them right.’

She nodded dumbly, her eyes quaking. Hector was moaning softly, and had ceased struggling, immobilised but for the galvanic sputtering of his smashed hand. Arm dropped it loose and Hector sobbed again.

‘Forget this fiend,’ Arm said. And behind the fear Arm could see in the widow’s eyes the beginning of an understanding. She knew Arm was not lying to her; the man on the floor had indeed brought him here.

‘Get up,’ Arm said. ‘Get up, Miss Mirkin, and let’s go get that money.’

‘The money,’ she giggled abruptly, scrambling to cover her mouth.

Arm disengaged his knee from Hector’s elbow and got up. The widow gathered her skirt in and climbed to her feet. Arm stepped out of the way of the door to let her pass.

‘No need for more commotion,’ Arm said.

She stepped mindfully over Hector and into the hall. Arm followed.

‘You cunts,’ Hector slurred from the floor. The widow winced in distaste.

‘Rest assured,’ Arm told her, ‘he brought this on himself.’

From the hall the widow regarded the sitting room, her expression moony, aqueous and fatigued. She turned to Arm. Very gingerly she reached for his torso. Her touch was ice cold, for all the time she had spent by the fire.

‘You’re hurt,’ she said, drawing back and displaying to Arm the tips of her blood-tipped fingers.

‘I’m in fucking bits,’ he admitted.

Now she looked towards the stairs, the steps ascending into the house’s upper gloom.

‘My mother passed up there,’ she said. ‘They let us take her home when she was close. Her room is still hers, all her things in it, exactly as it was.’

‘Is that where it is?’ Arm said. He had one eye on the stairs, one eye on the sitting room. Hector remained an inert heap on the floor.

The widow struggled to control her twitching lips. In a small voice she said, ‘What if there is no money?’

‘But there is,’ Arm said, ‘now take me up.’

‘It’s up there,’ she said.

‘Show me,’ he said.

Her eyes welled. She issued a prim sniff of her nose. ‘And this money,’ she said. ‘If I give it to you it will make something right? It will stop all this?’

Arm thought again of the moment to come, standing in the Devers’s house, facing the scrutiny of June and Lisa and Charlie and the others, admitting to Dympna’s fate and his abandonment of him. Something had to be done, one way or the other; something had to be done that Arm could stand to call reparation.

‘It will help,’ he said.

Hand on the banister, the widow took two uncertain steps up and turned back to him.

‘This isn’t you,’ she said. ‘It’s a path you’ve ended up on, but it’s not you.’

Arm sensed he had to be careful. The widow was brave enough to know she was imperilled and so was capable of audacity. He would have liked to believe her. Beyond the witchy severity, she had a kind face, and Arm realised who it was she reminded him of; the two women, the carers, fretting around trying to corral the kids the day he first went down to the town farm to see the horses. And that put Arm in mind of Jack. He thought of his son on the monkey bars, kissing the weathered painted metal and delightedly unleashing his eerie hoots and hollers, the ecstasy of the boy’s utter seclusion.

The widow was leaning close. ‘You are in bits,’ she said, with tender insinuation. ‘You need a minute. Lie down and take a minute, Douglas, you look like you are dying. Take a minute and think this through.’

‘All I do is think,’ Arm told her.

She seized his arm, ‘You’ve done nothing yet.’

Arm took her wrist and twisted back. The widow gasped and stumbled backwards onto the steps. Holding her hand she looked with gaunt toylike impassivity up into Arm’s face. He wanted to ask her what it was she saw there, but before he could she broke into a sob, and more sobs followed. She tried to choke them off but they prevailed in sputters, like raspy, tortured laughter. It is always an unseemly thing, Arm thought, to see someone you do not know break down crying.

‘We’re almost done.’

‘You’ve done nothing,’ she repeated, ‘you’ve done nothing can’t be turned back.’

Arm put out his hand, a politeness. He held it there and waited for her. What else could she do? The widow took it, and together they went up the stairs.

In the room the widow’s hand trembled over the switch and turned on the light. There was a wide bed with a thick cover of patterned brocade, a metallic shimmer to the weave. Arm stood over it and looked down into the pattern, like looking into a body of water. Minute rucks littered the cover’s surface.

‘Sit down, sit down,’ the widow’s voice said.

Arm did. He let the hammer trail from his hand. The bedcover was cool, though sitting engendered another explosive jolt of pain through his sternum. Arm gritted his teeth and the pain duly subsided, leaving him again with a feeling of popping, bristling light-headedness. Above everything else Arm was tired. He watched the widow bodily address a sturdy, thigh-high drawer by the bed. She leant down against an edge of the drawer and shunted it sectionally out of place to reveal behind it, in the wall, embedded in the actual plaster, a small black rectangle. The widow opened the top drawer of the displaced dresser and rooted for a moment, fishing out a small key set. She isolated a key and inserted it into the black rectangle. The rectangle swung open on hinges. From out of it she withdrew a long metal case. It was heavy, Arm deducted, as the widow clunkily guided the case onto the floor. She manoeuvred down onto her knees, using another key to open the case. The case was full of banded rolls of money. Lots of rolls, too many to quickly count, thirty, maybe more, and some coins, and other pieces of paper that were likely cheques or drafts, but mostly hard cash, notes and notes, held together in thick folds by rubber bands.