Colin Barrett - Young Skins - Stories

Back when he’d first encountered Martina Boran, she was just a kid, a mute, studious sixteen-year-old burdened with braces and baby fat. She’d sometimes drop in to the Peacock after school, when her father was tending bar in the lounge and Val was helping the floor staff set up for the evening run. Weekday afternoons in the bar were morgue quiet, the only regular customers a handful of the town’s senior pissheads, intent on drinking through their pension money by a respectable hour. Davy loved to talk his daughters up — the eldest was a teacher in Naas, the middle one a radiographer in Bristol — and was no different with Martina.

‘This one,’ he’d say, grabbing the girl by her shapeless shoulders, ‘is off to Trinity, boys. Medicine!’

Martina would only roll her eyes and sigh. She’d take a booth at the rear of the lounge, haul a brick-thick textbook out of her bag and bury her head in it for the next couple of hours, face set in an expression of miserable diligence, while her father happily pulled pints for the geriatrics pickling on their stools.

A couple of years passed. Martina seemed to drop off the radar altogether in her Leaving Cert year, and the next Val heard she was off at college; but in Galway, not Dublin, and doing Arts, not Medicine. She turned up again at the start of this summer, Davy having decided to put her to work in the Peacock on weekends. Now nineteen, Martina had grown up and into herself. First night on the job she showed up sporting a pair of knee-high leather boots and strategically gouged pink tights, hair dyed to a high orange flame, and a murderous glint in her eye that said the dowdy teenage bookworm of yesteryear was dead and gone.

Val found himself inventing excuses to hover in her vicinity. He’d lean against the edge of the bar as Martina stacked glasses into the washer, stall by a booth as she swabbed down tabletops sticky with spilled spirits. They traded banter, drolleries, exchanged knowing looks as the Saturday-night crowd heaved and swelled around them. One night a few weeks back Val offered her a lift home. Sequestered side by side in Val’s Nissan in a shadowed corner of the parking lot, they talked pleasantly and meaninglessly for a few minutes, until Martina cut across whatever anecdote or observation Val was unspooling and asked him to stop acting the bollocks and do what it was he wanted to do. Val’s knuckles tightened round the steering wheel as he mumbled something about not being sure what that was. Martina had only tutted, then shoved her hand decisively down the front of Val’s trousers.

Since then, they’d been meeting up in a casual way a couple of times a week, usually on those evenings their work shifts coincided. Because he was almost thirty and she was a decade younger, because she was heading back to college at the end of summer, and because of the complications that would inevitably ensue should her da ever get wind of who, exactly, was ploughing the apple of his eye, Val had proposed that the thing between them be kept to themselves. It would serve no useful purpose to have their business broadcast about town.

It won’t, Martina said.

The nightclub closed, the punters hounded out, Val went looking for Martina. She wasn’t in the lounge, where the other bartenders were inverting stools and hoisting them onto tables. He figured she was up having a crafty smoke. He climbed the stairs to the first floor, moved past the Ladies and Gents and tried the fire exit at the end of the corridor.

Martina and Joan Doody, a stout, pleasant girl Val had rode a couple of times last Christmas, were standing outside, at the end of the small fenced balcony that overlooked the carpark. Their backs were turned to Val. They were sharing a smoke, but the smell — heady and herby — told Val it was no ordinary cigarette.

‘Well,’ said Val.

The girls startled and turned, Martina almost dropping the joint.

‘Jesus, Val,’ Martina said. She jutted her lips, expelled a flume of silver smoke.

‘Hope that’s medicinal,’ Val said, and laughed. He then surprised both girls, surprised himself too, by casually forking his index and ring finger and gesturing for the roach.

‘Cheers,’ he said.

Val pinched the joint awkwardly between his fingers — it was already half gone — and jabbed its end into his pursed lips. He inhaled. The lit end brightened and stung his fingertips and the smoke tore at his throat.

‘Hold it long as you can, Val,’ Joan said, smiling.

Val tried counting to ten in his head, got as far as four then barked out a cough. His eyes sizzled with tears. He put his fist to his mouth, composed himself.

‘Didn’t know you partook, Val,’ Martina said, taking the joint back from him.

‘You’ve corrupted me now, girls.’

Val wondered if Martina knew that he and Joan once had a thing, but figured she didn’t. It wasn’t serious anyway, petered out equably, and Joan had since become reengaged to the lad she was having trouble with at the time. Val had a knack of staying on the right side of the women he slept with, a necessary skill when you operated in as tight a radius as Glanbeigh town. He looked down through the fence’s honeycomb of wire.

‘How’re things faring out down there?’ he said.

‘The hangers-on are hanging in,’ Martina said, and stepped forward, so she was standing shoulder to shoulder beside Val.

From their elevated niche, the three watched as the last of the night’s crowd slowly dispersed. Girls huddled together rubbing their bare, goosefleshed arms. Boys stood alone with their chests out, fists wadded into pockets, glowering at the dark with thwarted, bloodshot eyes. Other boys and girls leant into one another, tangling arms, laughing conspicuously. Numbers were being carefully fingered into mobiles. Girls lingered on the threshold of taxi doors as boys extorted a final kiss and hug, the accompanying grope — open palm grazing the curve of a buttock — so brief as to be plausibly inadvertent. And certain pairings had already slipped away alone together, leaving their friends to make their own way home.

‘Gobshites,’ Martina said.

‘He might have to go.’

‘He being the drummer,’ said Joan.

‘Aye. Might be time for me to deal in his chips.’

‘The lad on the course. Aiden.’

‘Yep,’ said Martina.

Val smiled.

Martina and Joan were lying side by side on a tartan blanket spread out on the grass in front of Val’s Nissan. Val was leaning against the car’s bumper, his tailbone knuckling the lip of the bonnet. His arms were folded across his chest, hands tucked pensively into his pits. They were on the bank of the Mule River, the car parked maybe ten feet from the water’s edge, at the end of a sanded driveway leading down from the main road. The Peacock was a quarter mile back up along the road. It was gone five in the morning. Just before lockup Martina sent Val a text. FANCY A DRINK DOWN BY THE MULE AFTER. USUAL SPOT 15 MINS;) Val left first, in his car, Martina following on foot, a bottle of rum filched from the supply room stuffed under her jacket, and Joan in tow.

The darkness was beginning to lift, but the girls, as Val looked down at them, remained blurry and indistinct in the gloom.

‘And what’s the fool done to warrant being got shot of?’ Val said.

Silence. Martina made a noise, a sharp, catlike cringe. Joan responded with a nasal snicker. Val shifted his weight from one foot to the other, feeling rebuked for daring to intrude into the girls’ flow.

‘He’s not a fool,’ Martina said eventually. ‘Well, not exactly. He’s nice , Val, nice . But we’ve been going out five, six months now. And he’s been on my tits all summer bugging me to head down to him or for him to come up here and hang, and. . I just couldn’t be arsed, either way.’