Colin Barrett - Young Skins - Stories

‘Look, now,’ he said, his voice drifting out of the back.

I squinted. The estate road was a trackless blot, but I saw them, the rakey flit of their darked-out shapes moving over the knoll. Girl shapes, one distinctly tall and one not, a pair.

‘It’s her,’ I said.

‘Of course it is,’ said Matteen.

He said that and I thought I saw a flame, a flicker, but it was only her hair, high on her high head. Sarah Dignan was unnervingly tall for a girl, taller than me, clearing even Matteen who was six two. She was blonde, pale, unquestionably captivating in the face. Her beauty was anomalous, sprung as she was from an utterly mundane genetic lineage. Certainly there was no foresign, no presage of her beauty or her height, in her family, in her hair-covered pudding of a father and squat, rook-faced mother, nor in her older siblings. She was the youngest and only girl. Three older Dignan boys existed — broad, blunt and ugly. Temperamentwise, she was different too; the Dignan clan was country affable, ready to talk benign bullshit at the drop of a hat. Sarah was frosty, unpredictable, spoiled by the fact that attention never glossed over her; even when she tried to be reticent, she remained a relentless point of contention.

Given the incongruity in semblance and substance, theories concerning the Dignan girl’s true origins and nature had regularly bubbled forth. Talk was Sarah was a foundling from Gypsy stock or an orphan from Chernobyl. That during her birth her umbilical cord tangled round her neck, asphyxiating and rendering her brain dead for five minutes, thirty minutes, an hour, but that she had inexplicably come back. That she suffered from Asperger’s or ADHD or was bipolar. That she was either, by the textbook definitions, a moron, or possessed a genius-level IQ. That she had gone through puberty at six, hence her inordinate height.

‘Who’s with her?’ I asked.

‘Jenny Tierney,’ Matteen confirmed. Jenny Tierney was Sarah’s shadow, her tightest friend. Lookswise, Jenny had no chance against the hogging nimbus of Sarah’s beauty, but I liked Jenny, with her pageboy haircut, freckles and prosaic legs. She had these gaps between her teeth.

‘What are we to do?’ I asked Matteen.

‘Slow for them. We’ll talk.’

This I did, crawling up along them, pig-flashing the lights to persuade them to linger. This they did. Matteen buzzed down his window.

‘Hello creatures,’ he said.

‘Hello,’ Sarah said. She was holding a naggin of vodka, a black straw sticking from it, handbag dangling from the other arm. Jenny had a naggin too.

‘Haven’t seen you in an age,’ Matteen said.

‘You look poorly,’ Sarah said without actually looking at Matteen.

Matteen blinked his wet, heavy eyes. ‘When don’t I? What are you two up to tonight?’ he asked. Jenny said, ‘None of your business.’

‘Well, that’s true,’ Matteen said.

Sarah shrugged.

‘Trawling for cock,’ Jenny said.

‘Hah,’ Matteen said hahlessly, ‘well-well-well, we can furnish you with a lift, at least.’

‘You heading into town?’ Sarah asked.

‘Where else?’ Matteen said. He opened the door on his side, shuffled across the backseat to permit ingress. Sarah stepped instead around to the front of the car, opened the passenger door. She stooped in, smiled at me, addressed Matteen across the headrests.

‘I’m not sitting with you.’

‘Why’s that?’ Matteen croaked.

‘Because you’ll try something,’ she said, then looked again at me, ‘but Teddy is harmless.’

‘Teddy is a gentleman,’ Matteen said.

‘Teddy is too afraid to be anything other than a gentleman,’ Sarah said. She had a short skirt on. She lifted the hem, and slid one long leg after another into the footwell, careful neither to expose a square inch of knicker nor spill a drop of naggin. Her hairline dinted the rotting vinyl of the car’s ceiling, necessitating a drawing down of her shoulders. She lifted her long-fingered hand into the vicinity of my head. I looked at the lined pink of her palm. She walloped me across the face, but playfully.

‘Say thank you, Sarah,’ she said.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

She giggled, and fixed me with her blue eyes, a calculated simper.

‘Oof,’ Matteen said in a mildly impressed voice.

Jenny bustled in beside Matteen.

‘So Quillinan’s it is, then?’ Matteen said. ‘Come watch me crucify a few?’

‘Naaaaaawww,’ Sarah said.

‘Yeah,’ Matteen said.

‘Naaaaaawww,’ Jenny said.

‘You’re in the car,’ Matteen said, ‘that’s where the car’s going.’

‘You offered the lift,’ Jenny said.

‘You got in,’ Matteen said, ‘that’s what passes for consent these days.’

Matteen led the way into Quillinan’s, and I followed with the cue case, Sarah and Jenny behind. The irrelevantly elderly lined the bar, mostly fat men with dead wives, hefting pints into their bloated, drink-cudgelled faces. They did not seem to see us, certainly did not acknowledge us. We continued on into the pub’s rear, into the adjoining extension where the pool table and a pile of young skins waited. There was a game ongoing. The in-situ players saw Matteen and raised their cues. Eyes caught sight of Sarah and Jenny and lads quickly retuned their postures, snapping into more assertive shapes.

I placed the cue case on a table and hurried back into the main pub to order our group a round of Cokes and ices — Matteen did not drink when he played. The girls did as girls do; panned the room, drew inscrutable conclusions behind inviolable expressions, and click-heeled it to the sanctum of the women’s toilets.

Matteen flipped locks. From the case’s velveteen interior he removed the split cue parts. He screwed one end into the other and worked the joint to a seamless squeak. He dabbed a speck of oil onto a muslin cloth and swabbed down the stick. There were a dozen lads around the table. Those who were to become that night’s opponents rolled shoulders, flicked fingers by their sides.

Matteen addressed them.

‘Five spot for a one-off game. Twenty for a best of three. Fifty for five. I am in no mood for fuckery,’ he announced, the colour and conviction returned to his face, his voice assured, fluently cocky in this domain.

Brendan Timlin went first and lost his fiver in four minutes. Peter Duggan next. Best of three, gone in two rounds and eleven minutes. Doug Sweeney, best of three, gone in two rounds and fourteen minutes. So it went. An hour in and Matteen was up fifty-five quid even after the twelve Cokes he’d bought me, himself and the two girls.

The girls, meanwhile, reappeared from the jacks midway through Matteen’s second game and took a table facing conspicuously away from the action. Jenny was leaning into Sarah’s shoulder. The gaps in her teeth gleamed as she talked. Sarah was meditating on a noticeboard mounted on the far wall, a flock of expired circulars advertising manure storage solutions and faith-healing sessions tacked to it. The pinned circulars palpitated whenever a body went in or out of the pub’s back door, and Sarah flinched with them, even though the breeze from outside was as warm as the air inside.

The body of boys teetered away from Jenny and Sarah, cramping itself tight around the pool table; it was respect of a kind, this physical relinquishment of a defined space to the girls. Only I broached that space, and did so with prompt servility, replenishing the girls’ Cokes as required and then withdrawing. The girls produced their naggins from their handbags and liberally dosed each new glass of Coke with vodka. They did not turn their heads to the games, even as the spectators grew more rowdy and voluble. Matteen from time to time sauntered by their table, to casually disclose how smoothly things were running.