Rob Doyle - Here Are the Young Men

Late on Tuesday evening Kearney took the house phone up to his attic bedroom and called his girlfriend, Rachel. (Kearney thought of Rachel as his girlfriend, but she didn’t see it that way and neither did anyone else. What she thought was that Kearney had shagged her one night — or tried to shag her, but shot his load before he’d even got it fully into her — and she’d avoided talking to him ever since.) He vaguely realized that he hadn’t spoken to Rachel in months, but that wasn’t important: he was eager to share an idea he’d had while off his face on ecstasy, for a follow-up to Sleeper Cell , provisionally titled Sleeper Cell Command: Call of the Prophet . He knew she would be keen to hear.

‘Ye play this mad fuckin preacher over in London,’ he said when she picked up. ‘Ye have to recruit these young Islam lads with propaganda and all, but without gettin caught by the filth or MI5 or whatever. Then —’

‘Joseph,’ Rachel said.

But Kearney was absorbed in his account and kept going, ‘— ye plan the attacks and send the suicide bombers out on the right buses and Tube trains to earn Max Kills and Max Carnage, and —’

‘Joseph.’

‘— and ye eventually move on to bigger things: WMDs; spectacular attacks, like 9/11 but even better; assassinations; cyber-crime. Maybe ye can, like, gravitate the moon towards New York or something. And ye can join up with different groups, the Palestinians or Pablo Escobar or whoever. Maybe even the IRA.’

‘Joseph!’

He had been speaking with increasing fervour but now he stopped, confused.

‘Wha?’

‘Why are ye tellin me all this?’

He shrugged into the phone. ‘I dunno. I just thought ye’d be interested. I —’

‘Well I’m not. What do I care about yer bleedin sick ideas? Games are for children.’

‘No, they’re not. Not any more.’

‘They are, even if the children are seventeen or twenty or thirty-four. They’re for children. Why did you even ca—’

Kearney cut her off by calling her a fucking minger, then hung up.

He played a therapeutic game of Grand Theft Auto , laying waste to a massive swathe of urban geography, being particularly brutal to a brunette slut with big tits he named Rachel, finally pounding her face in with his bat. Then he took out his notebooks and worked on some of the finer details of Call of the Prophet . He could feel it: if only he knew how to get these ideas out there, they would be hits. Rachel couldn’t be expected to understand — Rachel was a silly cunt.

He put away his notes and lay on the bed. Time for a wank. First he thought of Miss Nolan, then of Christina Aguilera, and finally of Rachel getting her face kicked in by a metal boot as Kearney rode her out of it from behind. Wank concluded, he lay there looking at the ceiling for around fifteen minutes. Then he thought he’d have another wank because the first one had been crap. He got to it, only to give up almost immediately because, in fact, he had no desire at all — for anything. The problem with Rachel, he reflected, was that she was a ridiculous fucking cunt. The other problem was that she thought he was stupid. So did all the others — particularly Rez, the pretentious arsehole. Rez seemed to think that walking around with a book in his hand meant he wasn’t a fuckhead, which is precisely what he was. Books, mused Kearney — what was the use of them?

He turned his head to regard the lone volume lying amid the CDs, magazines and Rizla packets cluttering the room. There it was: The Novel, which Kearney had been forced to study in sixth year. For all that he detested it, Kearney had had to concede that The Novel was a formidable creation. On the day Mr Foley stood before them and read aloud its opening line (something about marriage, manners and money — the typical shit of literature), Kearney’s eyes widened in a sudden, powerful realization of the colossal boredom they were about to be put through. And indeed the boredom had been both severe and relentless. The Novel was so radically, suffocatingly boring that it became, paradoxically, an object of fascination for Kearney. He hated reading it, but the very fact of its existence was astonishing to him. The fact was that The Novel was not only regarded as a classic, it was popular as well — people actually liked this shit. Whenever Kearney tried to read even a paragraph, his brain would short-circuit, feelings of rage and inadequacy would consume him, and he would have an unnervingly vivid sense of how utterly different he was from the rest of the species, from offcial humanity.

It wasn’t that he didn’t like reading. He regularly devoured not only Gamer, Gamezone, Extreme-Gaming, Nintendo Hardcore and Ultragame , but also a fair portion of the more sophisticated and specialist literature: Strategy Gaming, The RPG Magazine and the wonderful Shoot-’Em-Up Heritage .

Reading these magazines gave Kearney the sense that when he closed the hatchway to his attic bedroom and sat down in front of the screen he was aligning himself with a proud tradition, an illustrious video-gaming heritage. Playing games was not just exciting and absorbing but something grander, almost a spiritual activity. One Saturday afternoon he had found himself instinctually rising to his feet and pushing his chest out with pride, having finally completed Call of Duty . He never would have admitted it to anyone, but a lone tear even wetted his cheek as he heard the swelling victory music, saw the flag of freedom fluttering over a blackened Europe, and watched the end-of-game credits scroll away to the very end. It was a landmark moment in Kearney’s young life.

But just try telling Rachel about such grandeur, he concluded, still fondling his now-flaccid prick. The problem with Rachel was that she just didn’t get it — Rachel was a moron. Rachel had no fucking soul .

Kearney banished her from his thoughts. Soon he fell asleep in sweet anticipation of the havoc to be wreaked tomorrow night at the school: scene of the trauma, focus of his purest loathing, nemesis to all that he was.

The graduation ceremony was about to take place in the church on the school grounds, inside the railings and next to the main building. We had converged outside the front gates at a quarter to eight. Kearney brought the bottle of vodka. None of us had seen or spoken to him since Monday morning, but tonight we were too excited to hold anything against him.

The church loomed in front of where we stood drinking and smoking, guarded by the high iron gate, like a castle under siege. We were a barbarian army. A phrase came into my head from the news: the Clash of Civilizations. By now, carfuls of family were rolling in, all dressed in their finery. We howled and jeered at them from a distance, sequestered — we were undesirables, the rogue element.

Then everyone was inside, the ceremony getting underway without us. We threw shapes and sneered and drank our filthy vodka. We had no plan of action, but inspiration would surely flare up before long.

‘Lads, do yis reckon Miss Nolan is in there?’ said Kearney.

‘I’d say so, yeah,’ I said. ‘I wonder if she’s wearin those boots.’

‘Primed for the fist,’ said Kearney. ‘Simply ready for the ride.’

Rubbing his hands together, Cocker said, ‘Lads, listen to me now. I would really enjoy havin sexual intercourse with her. Will I tell yis what I’d do? First I’d stimulate the vaginal region. I’d manipulate the nipples and breasts with me mouth and me hands so as to get Nolan primed for the sex act. By this stage it’s fair to say me own sex organ would be more or less engorged. But I’d keep stimulatin the nipples and the clitoris and the other erogenous zones until her vaginal passage was well and truly lubricated. I mean glistenin. Then I’d insert me erect member in there —’