Colin Barrett - Young Skins - Stories

‘I remember that,’ I said.

The Sentimental Authoritarian had come up with the idea, and his equivalent number in the convent had consented to it. The idea was to expand local support, and so each game day a bunch of convent girls were bussed down to the grounds, bearing class-made banners in the Carmichael’s and Convent colours. The girls were tightly chaperoned, of course, but every boy in Carmichael’s staggered around in a humpbacked fever at the fact that live actual females were being permitted inside the school gates.

‘Did you like it?’ she said.

‘I was good at it, so I guess I did.’

‘I wonder if I noticed you,’ she said. ‘One of us probably did. We thought we were American high schoolers, in love with the quarterbacks.’

‘I had best friends I saw every day for five straight years I wouldn’t know now if I passed them in the street,’ I said. ‘So I won’t be offended if you don’t remember me.’

‘But you were there and I was there,’ she said. ‘In our young skins, though we didn’t know each other from Adam. Strange to think of it.’

‘It was a long time ago.’

‘Does it feel like that?’ she said.

‘How could it not,’ I said. I curled the three middle fingers of my right hand into my palm, and waggled the thumb and baby. ‘But what did you make of Mellick?’ I asked.

‘That terrified old cunt.’

‘He’s meant to be inspiring.’

‘I don’t want to end up like that,’ she said.

I uncurled my fingers and reached for her hair.

In the upstairs bedroom, she flicked on a lamp.

‘See.’

Tucked into the frame of her dresser mirror was a yellowing picture. The mine. I was expecting a photograph by or featuring Anto’s father, but it was only an image from a paper or magazine. The picture was full colour, with a column of text in a foreign language occupying the upper left corner of the page. The photo had been taken from altitude, not directly overhead but high enough to encompass the entire circumference of the mine, which was, quite literally, a big hole in the ground. There was a town, or at any rate a stretch of dinky building-like structures, spread out along its far rim. The surrounding landscape was suitably desolate, a lunar terrain of chalks and greys and indeterminate formations of rock and dirt, scrubbed clear of anything alive or green. The mine was widest at the surface and narrowed as it deepened, like a funnel. Carved along the exposed inner strata of the mine wall was a presumably machine-made channel or pathway that wound all the way down to its unseen centre.

‘It’s big,’ I said.

‘And far away,’ she said.

She knocked the light off, took my elbow and brought me to the bed. We undressed, and made an obligatory stab at fucking, our strivings ruddled by the whiskey. After, we sprawled in the foamy folds of the duvet and finished off the bottle. The whole time, I kept a portion of my attention perched out on a little ledge in the very back of my mind, straining for the telltale slam of the front door, the thunderous clomping of feet on the stairs, but the rooms beneath us were as still as the bottom of a lake.

‘So is this a thing you do?’ I said. ‘Go to meetings, pick up someone you scent the weakness in?’

‘I want to be better,’ she said. ‘ He was worse, a real demon for it, and this was the only way to live with him,’ she said, wagging the empty glass. ‘And then he went away, as far away as he could get. He said it was the only way any of us would get better.’

‘And is it? Better?’

‘It’s something you only do to yourself, they’re right about that,’ she said. ‘But I guess it’s worse if there’s someone else. And then there’s Anthony.’

‘He’ll make it,’ I said.

‘Maybe he will.’

There was nothing else to say or do so I leaned in and kissed her, chastely, on the cheek. She traced her finger around the rim of the glass, dabbed the finger to her lips, kissed away the last amber fleck of whiskey, then turned away. After a while I got up and quietly dressed. I made my way downstairs, shoes in hand. Coming off the final stair step, I stumbled and brought my knee down on some sort of glass fixture — something that tinkled as it shattered. I hobbled down the hall, stuck my feet in my shoes, and let myself out. The dead-of-night cold was of a purity that scorched my lungs as I sucked it in.

The next morning, a Monday, I rose at seven. I bundled myself into my drab olive overcoat, loaded a double handful of council-issued road salt into my pockets and crunched down to the front gates, scattering the salt ahead of me as I went. I felt good, despite the familiar tightening in the midsection of my face that would bloom into a full-blown headache as the day wore on. I unlocked the gates, though the first of the kids would not show up for another hour. I went across the road, onto the riverside path. The sky was lavender, and there was a bank of high white clouds moving in off the Atlantic as stately as glaciers. I decided to walk up the town for a coffee and paper.

Passing the station I saw a bus about to depart. I asked the driver where to. It wasn’t far, a little farther on down the west coast, but I hadn’t been to that particular city in years. I had enough cash on me for a ticket and clambered on. In the city I ransacked my ATM card and checked into a small hotel off the high street. They asked for a name and I gave them a name, reversing the natural slant of my cursive as I wrote it out. I drank at the hotel bar, and in the afternoon did a circuit of the high street pubs. I did the same thing the following day. In the seclusion of the bars I felt like a ghost becoming slowly corporeal again.

I considered the lay of the land. It was easy to pick out the chronic soak-heads from the tourists, the amateur drinkers. It had something to do with the way they conformed themselves to the planes of the bar, the way they aggressively propped an elbow and periodically lifted a haunch from their stool to get the blood flowing back into that leg. It had something to do with the way they every so often softly exclaimed or sighed or rebukingly clicked their tongue at nothing and no one. The way they stared down into the weathered grain of the counter, mulling their special soak-head grievances and depletions. The way they were invariably alone.

The city was right up on the Atlantic. I walked the quays, the convoluted knot of cobbled alleys that wound narrowly back and forth through the tight parcel of buildings that constituted the city centre. There were strings of festive lights everywhere, council employees in high-viz jackets and wool caps scrubbing sleet into the drains with cartoonishly large black-bristled brooms. There were swarms of shitfaced stags and hysterical hens, and masked artists draped in tinfoil smocks impersonating statues in the street — even the cold could not disturb their poised inertia. My mobile filled up with voicemails, several from the Sentimental Authoritarian’s secretary, and finally one from the man himself. His voice was mild and measured, shot through with a gorgeous note of presidential weariness. He was sure this was all some simple misunderstanding. He told me to ring just to let everyone know how long I’d be gone. He said to take care. At some point the battery of my phone died.

On the second or third or eleventh day I met a blond woman with a black tooth — a cap that hadn’t taken and become infected. In lieu of small talk she immediately embarked on a lengthy diatribe against a man she referred to only as The Spider. She said he was a coward and selfish and probably a sociopath; a spiteful, petty bully congenitally incapable of empathy for others, though he was a charmer of course. He collected women this Spider and left his brand upon them — she pushed back her hair and angled her head. A perfectly lifelike blue arachnid was tattooed just under her ear.