Colin Barrett - Young Skins - Stories

‘He made me get that,’ she said, and she insisted there were over a hundred women in this wretched city bearing such a mark.

In my hotel room she scooped out her left tit and told me to say goodbye to it. She said it was riddled with tumours and was going to have to go. She said she almost certainly only had months to live. She saw me looking at her hair — it was bleached nearly white, and looked crispy in a dead way, like straw, but it was her real hair. She touched it self-consciously and said the doctors had assured her chemotherapy was pointless at this stage. I told her I was sorry, and she said that was okay; that she was putting everything that was the past, all the years of useless shit, behind her, and living only for now, for the moment, and that I was a part of the moment, and I should feel good about that.

And then she wanted to know my story.

It was dusk. There were crushed cans, empty miniatures and bottles littering the floor, stains soaked into the carpet, tangles of clothes. She was lying on the bed wearing nothing but my rumpled shirt. I was sitting in my underwear on the large wooden sill of the window. The radiators were on full blast and I had the window inched open.

I told her I was in town for just a few days, to check in on my ex-wife and kid, that I didn’t get to see all that much of them anymore because I worked overseas as a diamond miner. She perked up at that.

‘Diamonds,’ she said.

She said I must make a mint and the next round of drinks was surely on me, so.

I nodded my head in a way that suggested that just might happen. She wanted to know about the mine and I told her it was basically just a huge hole in the ground, so big you could pick up this entire city and throw it down there in one piece. I told her it was mostly done by machines now, the actual mining, with the men only required to operate the machines at a relatively safe remove, but that it was still sapping and inhospitable work. I told her that with all the drilling and pounding, enormous quantities of dust and grit and dirt were churned up into the atmosphere, so much that sometimes the sun was almost blotted out, and that no matter how many filters or masks we wore, we were still breathing in a certain amount of that poisonous shit. And there were of course the periodic on-site accidents, men getting injured, maimed, even killed. I told her how a good friend of mine, a tough old codger of a Ruski venerated as a legend by the other men, had lost three fingers on his right hand in an incident a few years back, and how now he had to make do with just a thumb and forefinger.

‘Jesus,’ she said.

‘But then every line of living has its hazards,’ I said kindly.

‘Don’t I know it,’ she said, and yawned and stretched and settled herself again amid the pillows.

Then neither of us said anything and through the window I listened to the noise of another city, growing already familiar. I slid from the sill, put on my trousers and belt. I checked my wallet. I picked up my dead mobile, consulted its blank screen, and told her it was time to go.

Owen Doran was sitting at the bar of The Boatman Tavern when his friend and former bandmate Eli Cassidy came through the door. By then Doran was the Boatman’s sole visible occupant; shortly prior to Eli’s entrance, Doran had witnessed the Tavern’s barman, a monosyllabic Eastern European with a sharp-planed face, extravagantly scarred Adam’s apple and skin-coloured crewcut, step into a trapdoor in the floor of the bar. The barman, hitherto a clipped, evasive presence, had raised a brow, established an instant of ferociously lucid eye contact, and dropped wordlessly out of sight.

Consigned so abruptly to his own company, Doran had felt exposed, on display. To stem his self-consciousness, he’d futzed with the extremities of his suit — pinching plumb his shirt cuffs and tamping securely under his chin the inexpertly folded knot of his tie. He had nipped restrainedly at his beer and tried his best to ignore the ticking of the clock above the bar.

When the Boatman’s door thrummed on its hinges, Doran turned to the source of the disturbance bearing an instinctive scowl; seeing that the intruder was Eli, his scowl deepened out of sheer surprise. But then it occurred to Doran why Eli was there. Wiping at his face with his fingers Doran permitted himself a glance at the bar clock — it was, finally, gone eleven, and it was a relief to know it was gone eleven. He turned back to Eli and modified his craggy, pug-dog lineaments into an expression someone who did not know Owen Doran might mistake for benign.

‘Welcome, fellow coward,’ he drawled.

Eli Cassidy blinked and frowned in his dark coat. A residue of the rained-through morning had trailed him in and now it was diffusing from his hatless head and thin, sloping shoulders like a contagion.

‘You on your own?’ Eli said, shaking off his coat. Underneath, a black suit.

‘The man will be back, he’s just belowground a spell,’ Doran announced. ‘Drink?’

‘Redundant question,’ Eli replied, stalking forward.

Eli’s rinsed brogues squeaked on the Tavern’s floorboards. He transferred his overcoat from one arm to the other. Limply piled and dripping, it resembled the lustreless corpse of a drowned animal. Eli heaped the coat on the stool adjacent to Doran’s, but remained standing himself. Eli looked good, a trim man in his forties in a well-cut suit, though Doran could detect the reek of tobacco beneath the crisp ozone scent of his wetness. And the suit, on second look, was not quite pristine; there were streaks and gobbets of something slick adhering to the trouser legs.

‘Is that shit on your knees?’ Doran asked.

Eli looked down.

‘Just mud.’

‘Did you fall?’

‘Yes,’ Eli admitted. His face mottling, Eli considered the row of bar taps, their black levers level in the air. A small vein throbbed above his right eye. ‘I’ll just wait for the fucking guy, I guess then,’ he sniffed.

Doran sighed, fitted his feet against the lowest rung of his stool and levered himself halfway over the bar, gut pressing into the counter’s bevelled edge. He eyed the trapdoor in the floor, its rectangular metal door yawning upward, resting at a forty-five degree angle against a shelf of soft drinks and no sign at all of the barman.

With no little dexterity, Doran contorted his right arm in under the bar, extracted a pint glass, and from his side of the counter pressed down a tap and held the glass angled in place as he evenly poured a pint. Doran watched in the bar mirror as the glass filled, as the pint’s head bubbled and bloomed. Pouring from the wrong side of the bar required the same queasy narrowness of concentration as writing with your weaker hand.

‘Well done,’ Eli said as Doran handed him the pint. ‘The staff don’t mind?’

‘What staff?’ Doran said, looking around and snapping two fivers from his wallet. ‘There’s one post, and it’s been abandoned.’ He put the money by the taps.

‘How are you, anyway?’ Eli said.

‘How am I? A tad dismayed to find I’ve as little a pair of balls on me as you.’

Eli took a mouthful of his pint. ‘Psychic of you to have the same notion, alright,’ he said.

‘Cravens think along the same lines. Though I was here first,’ Doran said, ‘which makes me definitively the cowardlier.’

‘You didn’t go up at all then?’ Eli asked, nodding towards the Tavern’s windows.

Doran shook his head. His dirty red hair was gathered and cinched into a small, Samurai-ish pigtail at the crown of his head, and he had tidied up his beard, Eli noted. Doran was a short man with a barrel chest lapsing into a greedy boy’s pot belly. He was wearing a cheap, boxy suit that was deep navy, not black, and his tie, unflatteringly wide and short, was patterned with what Eli now realised were tiny skulls. Such a flourish of gallows impudence was Doran’s style alright.