Colin Barrett: Young Skins: Stories

‘Well, well done,’ Sarah said.

‘It’s thrilling, isn’t it?’ Jenny said.

‘These nights could go on forever,’ Sarah said.

‘And if they did, you’d be a millionaire, boy,’ Jenny said.

‘It pays, these nights,’ Matteen said, his cue slanted against his shoulder like a marching rifle.

‘And they just keep coming,’ Jenny said, ‘they just keep coming, and they go on for so long.’

Sarah smiled. A single vertical wrinkle-pleat appeared in the centre of her forehead as she considered Jenny’s statement.

‘It’s the heat,’ Sarah said, ‘the heat in the air makes the night last longer. You ever hear about dead bodies in the Sahara, in its hottest extremes? The sun cures the skins; they don’t rot. The heat preserves them, mummifies them of its own accord.’

‘Is it that hot out there?’ Matteen chuckled, nodding toward the back door, our town’s staid concrete heart beyond.

‘We’re not used to it,’ Jenny said.

‘I am,’ Sarah said, yawning. ‘Where we going after, anyways?’

Matteen kept his reaction to Sarah’s question tamped down tight, though even I felt a small thrill of approval.

‘We’ll see,’ he said softly, and returned to the table.

‘The woods,’ Jenny said, ‘the woods.’

Matteen walked past the money. He never touched the money. The defeated cast it onto the baize, crumpled notes and coins. It was me who snuffled the lucre up, who kept the running tally.

It was knocking on midnight when Nubbin Tansey, town tough and marginal felon, manifested on the premises. Matteen was up against Killian Weir as Tansey beelined our way, flanked by a couple of big units; ask the gods for henchmen and this is what they would send, twin slabbed stacks of the densest meat, their breezeblock brows unworried by any worm of cerebration. Tansey himself was short, at twenty already balding. He had gaping, thyroidal eyes, the broad skull and delicately tissued temples of a monk or convalescent. He had a tight T-shirt on, exposing veined biceps as tough and gnarled as raw root vegetables. He was chewing his own jaw and vibrating faintly in place, a bundle of seeping excess energies. He was likely on several substances.

‘Judgeboy, the Judgeboy,’ he said, slapping Matteen across his bent back as Matteen stooped for a shot. Unperturbed, Matteen maintained his low forward-bent stance, discharged his cue in a steady stroke. The central clot of stripes and solids unbunched, a swarm of balls scuffling thickly back from the cushions. The stripes — Matteen was always stripes — were hypnotic in their tumbling banded flicker. A stripe rolled into the top-left pocket, gone in a clean gulp, and the topside spheres slowed and stilled into a new arrangement on the green.

‘Sweet,’ Nubbin said, ‘sweet, Judgeboy.’

‘You’ll be wanting a game, Tansey?’

‘Maybe now,’ Tansey said. ‘Though I’ve a notion you’ll beast me.’

Matteen raised his Coke, took a sip. The crowd was beginning to thin. The meeker lads were leaving while they could still leave unobtrusively.

‘Can I apologise in advance?’ Matteen said.

The girls had not yet turned around but he knew they were listening.

‘Don’t condescend,’ Tansey said, and smacked his lips. He studied the table’s stationary scatter of balls. He picked up the white, rotated it in his hand. Matteen cleared his throat. Tansey put the ball back in place. He pulled the cue from the grasp of the boy Killian. One of Tansey’s goons loaded the coin slots. The potted balls churned down out of the table’s gut. The goon put the triangle on the baize, clonkingly set the balls in place.

I heard the bark of chairlegs. Sarah and Jenny had twisted in the pool table’s direction, interested now.

‘C’mon so to fuck,’ Tansey said.

‘Be nice, Tansey,’ Jenny said.

‘I know you?’ Tansey to Jenny.

Jenny shook her head. There was an amused uncowardly venom in her eyes, watching Tansey as Tansey’s eyes crawled down her, then up Sarah.

‘The Dignan girl. I know you, but. I know your brothers. You’re attached to this set?’ he said, nodding at Matteen and me.

‘Tonight I am,’ Sarah said.

‘I know your brothers, Dignan. Christ, you’re some diamond pulled from a coal bucket, you know that?’

‘She knows that,’ Matteen said, ‘everyone knows that.’

‘You’re with him?’ Tansey asked, eye rolling in Matteen’s direction.

Sarah looked at Matteen. There is nothing worse than being pitied.

‘Well, he’s looped on you,’ Tansey smiled, nodding again at Matteen, ‘plain to see.’

‘We playing or what?’ Matteen said.

‘Alright, alright. Go,’ Tansey said, almost apologetically.

Matteen broke, potted a stripe from the break and then two more. His fourth shot he hit so viciously the stripe convulsed back up out of the pocket, spun confusedly on its own axis, and died into place a foot from the hole.

‘You hit that one too well,’ Tansey said.

‘You want to come off into the night with us once I thrash your buck?’ he said to Sarah.

‘It doesn’t work like that,’ Sarah said.

Tansey turned, the cue’s end rested on the toe of his boot, the cue tip stabbed up under his chin. He considered Sarah. There were beads of sweat all over him. Tansey was looking right into Sarah’s face. Not many do, or can.

‘Don’t ask, don’t get,’ he smiled.

Then he turned and bent low to the table, planted the fingers of his leading hand on the baize and placed the stick wobblingly on a knuckle-ridge. Tansey seemed to be sincerely puzzling the shot, but when he fired forward the cue he drove the tip down and sliced a long rip through the cloth.

‘Whoops,’ he said, and stooped to shoot again. Again he gouged the baize.

‘Ah would you just fuck off and leave us alone, Tansey,’ Matteen said, paling in the face.

‘There’s no winning with some folk,’ Tansey said.

He handed the cue back to the Killian boy.

‘C’mon,’ he said to Sarah, striding over to her and grabbing her hand. Tansey dragged her to her feet, but Sarah had a good foot on him. She loomed, she threw her head forward, down onto Tansey’s chest. Tansey yelped like a pup. He stepped back from the tall girl. There was a dark blotch running from the chest of his T-shirt.

‘Jesus, she bit him,’ the Killian boy sniggered.

Tansey considered his wound, chin buried in his neck to see. He looked up at Sarah. He did not look upset, exactly.

Matteen glowered.

Tansey cupped the bit part of his chest.

‘My titty,’ he said.

Jenny got up, and now she grabbed Sarah’s wrist.

‘Let’s go,’ Jenny said, dragging Sarah out into the bar.

‘Wait,’ Matteen said, but the girls did not.

‘Go on,’ he said to me, ‘get them back.’

‘Me?’

‘Catch up after them and attach yourself to the sole of one of them bitches’ boots, like a good lad,’ he said.

Matteen was clammy and pallid again. He reversed onto a bench, and leant his weight upon his cue.

‘This thing ain’t stopping,’ Tansey said. The blotch was running, widening.

‘Stitches,’ said one of the big units with him, ‘stitches and a tetanus shot.’

A rupture of laughter as I headed through to the bar, but the girls had already bolted from the premises.

I passed through the front door, into the street. It was warm out; warm and getting warmer, it seemed. We were enduring a marathon hot snap, a thirteen-day stretch of rainlessness unheard of in our otherwise perennially sodden clime. Water shortages bedevilled the farmsteads surrounding our town. Pasture had paled and browned and in the open country you could stand by the side of an empty road and hear the massed dry ticking of the bramble ditches that fringed the fields. Cows grouped in the shadow patch thrown by a lone dollop of cumulus and followed that patch as the cloud drifted across the sky. Dogs nuzzled the undersides of stones, seeking the moisture clinging there. In town, pensioners staggered in a sunstroked trance from street to street and tried to recall their destination.