Rob Doyle - Here Are the Young Men

In the town, me and Cocker feared we wouldn’t get served because none of us had remembered to bring our fake IDs. But Kearney strolled into the first offo we saw and emerged moments later with another bottle of whiskey in his hands. ‘Yis owe me four quid each,’ he said.

We walked on through the genteel coastal town, vaguely in the direction of the DART station.

Cocker said, ‘I’ve to go for a piss, lads. I’m burstin. I’m leggin it back to that pub down there. Go on and I’ll catch up with yis in a few minutes.’

‘Alright,’ I said as Cocker trotted back the way we’d come.

Kearney started singing, though it was more like roaring. Up ahead a woman was walking along with her two little girls, who both had curly blonde hair. The woman looked harassed, weary, the way parents always looked — people were crazy to want to have kids, I reckoned, or, more likely, they just didn’t think about it, they simply did it. She was telling one daughter to hurry up, stop lagging behind, while trying to restrain the other from running too far ahead. The girls were cheerful and oblivious.

Kearney kept up the singing and I joined in. The mother trotted on a few paces, calling in an annoyed way at the taller of the two girls, the one who kept running ahead. As she did so, the younger girl behind her stepped on to the road.

There was a squeal of brakes and the scream of a horn, and then it had already happened.

I saw it clearly, we both did: the car bounced over the little girl with a crunching double-thud, one for each set of wheels. It skidded to a halt a few metres ahead of where the girl now lay. Tracks of gore ran through her smashed head, branded into her golden crown and the tar.

Then the mother was screaming, everyone was screaming, running about with hands to mouths, crying, not knowing what to do, or knowing there was nothing to do but not accepting it.

We had frozen in the road. I felt myself going cold all over. I was transfixed by the sight, the horror of it. I couldn’t look away, though seeing it made me want to crawl off into some pit, renounce life as something brutal and wrong. The dead girl was still, her wine-coloured life force pulping out of her, one eye open in what looked like wonder, the rest of her face flattened and smashed into a horrible mess.

Then I had to look away. When I did, my eyes passed slowly over the calamity of the scene, on to Kearney’s face.

Kearney was smiling. Despite my shock I saw this clearly. It wasn’t a showy smile but one that looked instinctive and natural, almost innocent in some terrible way. He looked like he was in a state of ecstasy. Then he became aware of me and his eyes locked on mine. His face was radiant — I had never seen him looking so alive. I couldn’t turn away.

The spell broke. Kearney looked back at the dead girl, no longer smiling. The trance-mask vanished from his face, as if it had never been there.

An ambulance had arrived. The mother was howling and shrieking like some animal being ripped apart by predators. Other people on the street were doing the same; it was like a scene from the Bible.

I felt my legs taking me off the road. I bumped into Kearney and heard myself say ‘Excuse me’ in a hysterical voice. My legs were weak and I dropped to a crouch. Then my guts heaved and I threw up all over the concrete.

Later, we had to give a police statement. The guards spoke to us in gentle, weary voices and sent us home, telling us we’d be contacted if they needed us.

‘Do ye think yee’ll be okay?’ said the sergeant, a ruddy, friendly man from the country somewhere.

I nodded and so did Cocker, who had accompanied us even though he hadn’t seen the accident itself, only the broken, bloodied body that remained. He’d hardly said a word since, and was as pale as I imagined I was.

‘And you, Joseph,’ said the sergeant. ‘How are ye feeling about all this? Nobody should have to see such a thing. I hope to God yee’ll get over it somehow, lads.’

Kearney answered: ‘It was terrible, I don’t know how I’m ever goin to sleep again without seein her face, like, the way her head burst open like that, the blood everywhere and all.’

The sergeant shook his head in anguish and sympathy, closing his eyes and breathing slowly — and the very moment he closed them, Kearney turned and stared at me. His stare seemed to demand something, an acknowledgment or admission.

And, to my disgust, I realized that I was smirking at him, too cowardly to remain stony-faced or glower at him like I wanted to.

Before the sergeant led us out of the station with soft pats on the back and murmurs of compassion, I had to go to the toilets and throw up again.

Snapshot Number 6: A History of Violence

Kearney had always loved the slaughter, always loved to watch. The news was great for that: there was no shortage of carnage broadcast for Kearney’s delectation. Already he had lived through the twilight years of the Troubles — kneecappings, bombings and reprisal shootings — various wars set against various backdrops, atrocities here and there, the occasional terror attack that sent little joy-twinges through his cock and balls. There were hijackings and high-school slaughters, genocide and outrage, nerve gas and the nuclear threat. When there was a dearth of these things in the news Kearney felt empty, deprived, like a football fan in the summer months with no matches to watch.

But what he’d got back then was never enough. Riveted to the screen, gorging on bloodshed, Kearney had always willed the body count to rise higher, to multiply, to soar . He had craved nothing less than the apocalypse, an atrocity that would end history itself. Kearney, in his way, had yearned for the Absolute, with all the earnestness of a desert-hard mystic.

He had waited, knowing something big was coming. And sure enough, when he was fifteen, there came the day when his patience was rewarded: 11 September 2001. Like everyone else, Kearney would always remember where he was when the planes hit the towers and offcial reality became so suddenly, blindingly interesting.

He remembered where he was: he was at home, playing Grand Theft Auto .

‘Joseph!’ came his mother’s cry from downstairs.

Kearney’s initial assumption was that she wanted to berate him over something he’d done that she had taken exception to, like forgetting to flush the toilet after taking a shit. That was why she usually roared his name. After three more cries of ‘Joseph!’, Kearney slid down the ladder from his bedroom, cursing under his breath. He bounded down the stairs and into the living room — and found the camera eyes of the planet fixed in awe on the blackly billowing New York skyline.

He dropped instantly to the floor, legs folding automatically beneath him like some meditating sadhu , and his eyes didn’t stray from the screen for many hours. When the second plane hit, he became very quiet, very still. A great peace came over him. All his restlessness melted away in the radiance of tranquillity that infused him, brighter by the second, brighter as each flailing stick-man fell from the sky-high roofs, as the Gemini spires combusted and crumpled, and clouds of cinema-smoke tumbled through the filmic canyons of Manhattan.

Kearney couldn’t look away. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep; he didn’t think of sex or games or anything, for days. The news channels played the clips again and again, from every possible angle: the planes whacking into the buildings; the huge, liquid-flame explosions bursting from their sides. It was worthy of any movie, undisappointing even to senses jaded from a lifetime of sleek, carnage-dense blockbusters. Kearney felt dwarfed, humbled by this mighty event. This awesome twenty-first-century breed of atrocity offered Kearney his first glimpse of what others called the sacred, the numinous, the unsayable.