Colin Barrett - Young Skins - Stories

Now even the nights were bringing little respite.

I thought I saw them drop beyond the hump of Main Street’s hill. I followed. I heard laughter, the clop of unsteady feet, I saw flickers of hair and shuttering legs. I followed them down Dandon Street, close but with a steady gap. They were talking, though I could not make out the words. They were letting me follow. They turned and vanished down Ridgepool Lane. Moss speckled the phosphorescent plaster of the lane’s walls. I felt its damp fur against my hand. When I emerged from the lane I looked left and right but could not see the girls. I went stock still, held my breath and in the weave of the breeze I picked up again their skeletal laughter. I foraged forward, and knew where they were going.

They were standing on the edge of the carpark of Bleak Woods, waiting. They were facing me but there was no light, the carpark was empty, and all I could make out were the disembodied ovals of what were their faces. The ovals floated in the dark and looked inchoate or on the verge of dissolution. Then they were turned from me and gone into the woods.

I had a horn by now, I’ll admit. The horn had oriented itself upwards and was snagged in the waistband of my jocks, which acted as a kind of garrote sawing on the upper portion of the horn as I made my way into the trees. Obscenities, graphic recommendations, crowded my throat, but I did not let them out.

‘Harmless,’ I blurted, ‘I’m harmless!’

And I was. Efficient deference was my singular mode of expression. I had never sought a status beyond that of sidekick or flunky, and in this way had achieved subtle indispensability. I was an adhesive creep to a degree, but Matteen needed me, as did the girls. I believed that. Who else would Matteen charge with pursuing these two into the night? Who else would these same girls permit to follow them into the woods?

There was no path. I moved from tree to tree and touched each trunk as I passed it. I had never been asked into these woods before. The trees felt like things that were alive and I had to remind myself that they were. Leaves depended from the fingerlings of branch ends and brushed my face like dry, frail-veined moths. I stumbled onward over stones, over monstrous hanks of rooted scrub. The smell of the woods in summer was heavy around me, and it stank of fucking.

They blindsided me, crashed into me from behind. I was on my face on the ground, in the dirt, and there was a measured vicious hailing of my ribs from either side. I got on my back and something shattered across my forehead, a wetness sliding all over my face, the precise fire of vodka seeping into however many cuts now decorated my skin. Then there was a weight on my chest and something squeezing straight down on my throat. I was looking up but I could see nothing through the burning wetness in my eyes. Consecutive wrenches at my thighs brought my pants down and the horn was out, sacked like a frowsy vagrant into the open.

I heard above me two-headed laughter and a voice, or voices:

Oh, Teddy,

Teddy,

Teddy, we are

We are going to

suck

suck

the eyeballs! The eyeballs!

right out of

suck them!

right out of your face.

And then more laughter, and I could not tell who had spoken and who was laughing, and if it wasn’t for the boot flat against my Adam’s apple I would have begged go ahead girls, I would have begged do your worst.

Valentine Neary, senior bouncer at the Peacock Bar and Niteclub, had something in his teeth. His tongue probed along his upper row, where something wiry and prickly had snagged itself between bicuspids. With quick, successive jabs of his tongue-tip Val dislodged it. He swabbed the inside of his mouth with his pinkie and held it up to the yellow eave light. Val studied the thing adhering to the glistening pad of his finger. Once he realised what it was, he couldn’t help but grin.

Boris, Val’s right-hand man, reversed out the side door tucked inside the club’s double-doored entrance, bearing two pint glasses of Lucozade bunched with knuckles of ice.

‘Credit that, Boris.’

‘Credit what, boss?’

‘I just pulled a wee length of pussy out of my gob.’

Boris searched Val’s face, not quite catching the sense.

‘Length of pussy. . what?’

Val looked back down at his cocked pinkie, at the vagrant filament stuck there; it was a cunt hair, electric red, and it belonged to Martina Boran, the youngest and fairest daughter of Davy Boran, the Peacock Bar’s proprietor.

‘Nothing, lad.’ Val smiled again, and with a flick of his fingers commended the hair to the North Mayo night.

‘Ta Boris,’ he said, taking his Lucozade.

‘No problem, boss.’

Val could make out the noise of a vehicle approaching the turnoff. He took a gulp of Lucozade, swished it round his mouth before swallowing, and checked his watch. One thirty-three am — the lights were going up in just over an hour but still they came, in a steady stream, discharged by taxis and minivans into the floodlit murk of the club’s gravel parking lot, the boys and girls of Glanbeigh town and environs.

The Peacock got a young crowd. Over the years it had acquired a reputation for its selective — and selectively lenient — door policy; the sign tacked to the wall behind the ticket booth said YOU MUST BE OVER 21 TO ENTER, but it was well known that a certain laxity was permitted. Fanny frequently got in without ID as long as they’d dolled themselves up to the due degree. Lads were also expected to make an effort; proper shoes, a shirt, and to try the door in groups no bigger than three. The main rule was no drunks. Val had been on the door for eight years, and could read the drink in people’s faces unerringly. Him and the rest of his crew — Boris and Mick and Mossy — brooked no bullshit. Anyone with even a notion of acting the prick got the boot.

‘Is busy, busy,’ said Boris, nodding as the taxi pulled into the carpark. From it emerged four girls. Val and Boris took them in, the four bare-legged, in miniskirts and heels and tops devised from impressively inadequate swatches of material. Val squared his shoulders and cleared his throat. Not a one of them was near eighteen. As they approached the girls became quiet under the cool wattage of the bouncers’ gaze.

‘Evening, ladies. How are we all doing?’

‘Alright.’

‘Grand.’

‘Super.’

Only one did not immediately answer Val’s question, and she was the prettiest. She drew her pale face up, tucked a dangling tendril of dark hair behind her ear and narrowed her brown eyes.

‘Well sweetlips?’ Val said, and smiled.

‘Not so bad, Val, no worse than yourself I’d say.’

So she knew him — but then most everyone in town did, at least by rep. Val couldn’t quite stick a name to her, but nursed an inkling she might be a Devaney.

‘Not long left in it tonight now, girls’—Val made a show of checking his wristwatch—‘mightn’t be worth your while, I’d say.’

Might-be Devaney grinned sourly, and sneaked a look off to the side of the building, where there was nothing but a couple of parked staff cars. She looked back at Val, kinked one perfectly etched eyebrow.

‘Ah no, Val,’ she said, ‘we’re still keen anyways.’

Val inclined his head and puffed out his cheeks, as if considering a revelatory piece of evidence, then stepped back and pulled open the door.

‘In you go, girls. Enjoy.’

The others’ faces lit up with relief.

‘Ta Val!’

‘Ta!’

‘Cheers!’

Val only nodded, impassive. Might-be Devaney held his eye for a moment, then brushed silently past. Val took a sup of his Lucozade and plainly assessed the girls’ behinds as they queued at the ticket booth. Hands stamped, they slipped one by one into the club’s hammering, strobe-lit interior.