Colin Barrett: Young Skins: Stories

I thumbed the serrations of my car key’s teeth and tried to picture Anthony Maher, summoning up a quiet, pale, heavyset boy who did not stand out in any way. The others called him Anto, but even that generic diminutive — suggesting a lad possessed of a rudimentary streak of devilment or impishness or participatory vim — did not suit the ponderous, frumpy boy I had to verbally goad into an amble in the rare games of five-a-side he consented to partake in.

‘He holds his own,’ I lied.

I opened the driver door. A lock of snow crumbled down and shattered on the seat. The car was a rickety secondhand number the Sentimental Authoritarian had sourced for me. Its previous owner was a priest and former Carmichael’s faculty member, and the interior retained a smell I could only describe as holy , an aroma at once cloying and lightly sulphurous, redolent of thurified smoke or incense. It was a smell I could not eradicate no matter how much I scrubbed at the upholstery with solvents and sprays. Months later and it still made me gag.

When I looked up she was still there, standing by the taillights.

‘Are you okay?’

‘It’s a cold one, isn’t it?’ she said, like that was an answer.

‘You could get in.’

She slid into the passenger seat, into the fretwork of shadows thrown by the limbs of the elms.

‘I just live in Farrow Hill estate. If it’s on your way.’

‘It is alright.’

I turned on the engine and let the car tremble warmingly in place, then nosed us out onto the main road. I drove in second, mindful for black ice limning the macadam. There were long rumpled drifts of frozen snow choking the ditches, their ridges sooted with exhaust. Between us there was no talk for a little while, and there still wasn’t when she dropped her right hand on my leg and began kneading my thigh, pressing slow and hard, wincing and unwincing her fingers.

‘How long have you been going?’ she said.

‘Where? To the meetings? Five months, give or take.’

‘And you’ve been good all that time?’

‘Not all that time,’ I admitted.

‘Was it just drink?’ she said.

‘Mainly,’ I said. ‘There was everything at some point.’

‘And you were away before?’

‘In the city.’

‘And what did you do there?’

‘This and that.’

‘What kind of this and that?’

‘Bars. Clerking. The sites. Played in a band. Barwork was the best. Steady pay, all the drink you could drink on the sly. You could go a long time lying to yourself in there.’

‘And now?’

‘Now, I do what you said. I teach gym.’

‘It’s better,’ she said.

‘That it is,’ I said.

We moved down Main Street, past the lights of the Turkish takeaway, the flayed loaves of chicken and pork revolving on their spits in the window. We moved past one, two, three pubs in a row, smokers outside, some huddled, some affecting open-chested postures in defiance of the scouring subzero cold. I saw the drink in their faces, in the fuggy glower of their blood-bright expressions.

She directed me on to the quay road and we followed the river, a slash of brightness against the murk of the surrounding land. The water was freezing over again, growing scales.

‘Carmichael’s up ahead,’ she announced.

’Uh-huh,’ I said, and wondered if she knew I lived there.

On the riverside footpath, coming towards us, were two short figures. The boy on the inside had a scarf wound over the bottom half of his face, his hands in his jacket pockets, moving purposefully against the cold. The boy on the outside was not in so good a shape, tromping along with a pronounced crabwise stagger, listing to his left for three or four steps then lurchingly correcting. I looked again at the second boy and realised that the stocky, dough-faced features were those of Anto Maher. He was hammered, his face and head bared to the elements, his jacket unzipped and his trousers soaking wet from the knees down.

‘Oh Christ,’ she said. Her hand jumped from my thigh.

‘There’s your guy,’ I confirmed.

‘Him and that other eejit, Farrell,’ she said, ‘partners in crime.’

There was a section of waste lot, not far from the school grounds, some of the boys used for knacker drinking. I figured they were coming from there.

‘You want me to stop?’ I asked.

‘No, no,’ she said. ‘This is what boys do, right? He tells me he’s staying over at Farrell’s house, watching DVDs and playing video games, and no doubt Farrell gives his mother the same shit.’

In the dark, and given Anto’s condition, there was little chance that either boy would recognise me or my car or my passenger, but I stared straight ahead as we passed them.

‘Take care of yourself, you dope,’ she said in a low voice.

‘Who’s he more like?’ I said. ‘You, or his father?’

‘Both,’ she said. ‘Luck will knock you only so far from the tree.’

‘And where’s the father now?’ I asked.

‘Oh,’ she sighed. ‘He’s a thousand miles from here.’ She laughed as she said this. ‘No. Literally. He works in a mine in Africa, sorry, Siberia now, as big as any on earth.’

She looked across at me, still grinning.

‘It’s a huge hole in the ground that goes down almost a straight mile. You could pick up and drop this entire town into it in one piece. He comes back twice a year.’

‘How’s that suiting you?’ I said.

‘He’s a good man for the couple of weeks he’s around,’ she said. ‘He’s a good man for the small doses. But remind me to show you a picture of the mine. It is something.’

‘What are they after?’

‘Diamonds,’ she said.

‘A mile down,’ I said. ’It must get hot.’

‘Left here. . and a right.’

We slid into an estate, crested a hill. ‘Here,’ she said. I parked in the driveway. She said nothing as she got out. Beneath the porch light she held her handbag up close to her face and foraged for her keys. When she stepped inside she left the door ajar. I followed her in.

‘What about you?’ she said. ‘You on your own?’

‘I am.’

‘Left a girl in the city?’

‘Something like that,’ I said.

We moved down the dark hall, into the kitchen.

She opened the fridge and a rhomboid of chilled light spilled across the floor, revealing a kitchen island, a table with two chairs pried back from it, as if the previous occupants had bolted from the seats in a hurry.

‘Hi, moggy,’ she said, and a cat, white coat splashed with black, emerged from a shadowed corner and dabbed across the tiled floor.

I took a chair. The cat slid in under my feet and commenced grinding its tiny weight against each chair leg.

‘I think it likes me,’ I said.

There was the heavy resonant thunk of a full bottle on the counter of the kitchen island. She unscrewed the cap, poured a long measure, and gulped it down. I could smell the whiskey. My heart began to race, as if I’d glimpsed the averted face of an old lover on a crowded street. She poured again. She shucked off her jacket, let it fall to the floor the way kids do. She came on over, the bottle in one hand, the glass in the other. I didn’t wait for her to offer the drink — I spared her that — snatching the glass from her hand and downing it in one go.

‘They must rate you in the school,’ she said.

‘It was a kindness, the job. I played football back when Carmichael’s won stuff, and, you know, I was good. The old man didn’t forget.’

‘When I was in the convent, me and the girls would go down and watch some of the Carmichael’s games, back when the Sisters still let us. Maybe I saw you play,’ she said.

She was standing between the V of my legs. I returned the glass to her possession then rested my hand on the jut of her jeaned hip. She filled the glass again.