Colin Barrett - Young Skins - Stories

‘So he’s a nice buck, but not nice enough, or maybe too nice,’ Joan opined sagely.

‘It’s like just chill , man, I’ll see you when I see you, y’know,’ said Martina.

‘Oh, I hate when it’s like that.’

‘I don’t even like his band. He’s in a band and I don’t even like them.’

‘Well, relationships are. . dicey propositions at the best of times,’ said Joan and laughed. She must have surely figured out what the story was between himself and Martina by now, Val thought.

‘He’s so excitable. Laps at my neck, like a dog. Pants ,’ Martina said, sticking out her tongue and going hah hah hah . Joan started shrieking.

Val came up off the Nissan’s bonnet and walked down to the edge of the water. He was keyed up, as he always was after a Saturday-night shift. Light from the main road threw a little illumination across the river’s breadth, catching the innumerable dimples of the black waves as they pushed by.

‘It’s nice isn’t it.’ Martina was up and behind Val now. She pressed the mouth of the bottle of rum into his back, ran it over the notches of his spine.

‘What?’ said Val.

‘The water. Looks nice. Moving along there, like a. . well-trained creature.’

‘You pissed?’ said Val.

‘Thought a man like you wouldn’t need to ask that question,’ she said.

‘I can’t see your face,’ said Val.

‘Kissy, kissy,’ Joan groaned, supine on the tartan.

‘Down here reminds me of Groningen,’ Martina said.

‘Groningan?’ Val said.

‘It’s in Holland. I was there for a bit last summer with the crew from college, when we were doing Europe. We stayed in these wood cabins in a big park outside of the town, more like a forest really, with a pond and a bunch of swans living on it. At night we used to take mushrooms and go sit by the water and watch the swans glide around, and wait for old Father Time to swing by.’

‘Father Time?’ Val said.

‘Father Time,’ Martina said, and Val could hear the smile in her voice. ‘He was this tramp, I guess, lived on the grounds apparently, though no one was sure where. He looked about two hundred years old and had this mountainous shaggy white beard that trailed down to his crotch. He used to tool around the woods at all hours on the oldest, creakiest bicycle you’ve ever seen. We’d be sitting there, out of our gourds, chilling with the swans at two in the morning, and then you’d hear the squeaking of the wheels and the clanking of the chain, and we’d start nudging each other and saying here comes old Father Time , laughing our asses off, and then he’d go whizzing by, and we’d shout and wave at him but he’d never stop or say anything, just give us the same wide-eyed spooky stare he’d always give us. He had a dog, a dinky little Jack Russell that’d come trotting along after him. The dog had a leash clipped to the collar around its neck, and it used to chase after the bike carrying the end of the leash bundled up between its jaws.’

‘It’s a clever dog can take itself for a walk like that,’ Val said, watching as a pair of headlights approached and pulled in on the other side of the river. The far bank was relatively built up; there was a lit parking lot, a boardwalk and a wooden pier where a few townsfolk keep their rowboats and one-mast sailboats tethered.

‘Look now,’ he said.

Two men got out of the car. They were toting fishing rods and tackle boxes, and were dressed in waders, those shoulder-strapped, breast-high waterproof leggings. The pair plodded along the boardwalk, encumbered and inelegant, like men in spacesuits. At the edge of the riverbank, they checked their lines and stepped carefully out into the current.

‘You like this place, don’t you, Val? You like everything about it,’ said Martina.

‘That sounds like an accusation.’

‘Not at all. Someone has to stay put, hold the fort.’

‘You’re not going anywhere that far.’

‘Galway’s not that far,’ said Martina, ‘but it might as well be the moon for people like you.’

One of the fishermen drew his rod up over his shoulder and pitched it forward in a fluid stroke. The baited hook buried itself in the skin of the water.

The following Saturday, the first in September, Martina blew off her final scheduled shift in the Peacock to head back to Galway early. No valedictory fuck for Val, not even a farewell text. It was a busy night. Val spent the evening resisting the urge to check his messageless mobile. Just before 2 am, Mossy radioed in from the dance floor. Val and Boris waded in through the crowd to find two young lads going viciously at it beneath the DJ booth. Mossy attempted to prise them apart and received a shot to the kidneys from the taller one for his troubles. He doubled over and went to ground. Without a word, Val came up behind the tall kid and wrapped him in a headlock. The kid swung an arm back, trying to claw at Val’s face. Val pressed his forearm up into the kid’s neck until his knees obligingly buckled.

Later that night, at home, undressing for the shower, Val realised the kid had got him after all. He touched the back of his head. In the flesh behind his right ear were a row of narrow crescent indents where the kid had dug his nails in; the skin was broken but not bleeding. After his shower, Val walked into the kitchen in nothing but his boxers, secreting a trail of sloppy wet footprints onto the lino, and fished a bottle of beer from the bottom of the fridge. The moon, bright and engorged, shone down through the window above the sink. Val sat at the table for what seemed like a long time. After a while, he picked up his mobile.

The text he eventually sent Martina was so long, he had to dispatch it in four separate messages. He didn’t think it likely that Martina would reply, or reply in any meaningful way. Still, he asked her how she was, was Galway as lively as ever, was she intent on dumping the drummer or was she going to give the lad another shot. Val said that he was sitting in his kecks in his kitchen at four in the morning with nothing but the usual shite having gone down at the Peacock, no change there and there likely never would be, and that no matter what had or had not happened between them he was looking forward to seeing her the next time she made it back from the moon.

Bat is hungover, Bat is late. At the rear of the Maxol service station he heels the kickstand of his Honda 150 and lets the cycle’s chrome blue body slant beneath him until its weight is taken by the stand. Bat dismounts, pries off his helmet — black tinted visor, luminescent yellow Cobra decal pasted to the dome — and a scuzzy cascade of dark hair plummets free to his ass.

Bat makes for the station’s restroom. The restroom is little bigger than a public telephone box. Its windowless confines contain a tiny sink and cracked mirror, a naked bulb and lidless shitter operated by a fitfully responsive flush handle. There is not a single sheaf of bog roll anywhere.

A big brown daddy-long-legs pedals airily in the sink basin. Bat watches the creature describe a flustered circle, trapped. He could palm-splat the thing out of existence but with a mindful sweep of his hand instead sends it unscathed over the rim.

Bat gathers his mane at the nape, slinks a blue elastic band from his wrist and fashions a ponytail, as Dungan, his supervisor, insists. Bat handles his hair delicately. Its dense length is crackly and stiff, an inextricable nest of flubs, snarls and knots, due to the infrequency with which Bat submits to a wash.

Bat’s head hurts. He drank six beers on the roof of his house last night, which he does almost every night, now. The pain is a rooted throb, radiating outwards, like a skull-sized toothache, and his eyes mildly burn; working his contact lenses in this morning, he’d subjected his corneas to a prolonged and shaky-handed thumb-fucking. A distant, dental instrument drone fills his ears like fluid. Hangovers exacerbate Bat’s tinnitus.