Rob Doyle - Here Are the Young Men

‘ Rez NEVER used to make me come .’

His feet took him back along the Liffey Boardwalk, over the Ha’penny Bridge, through the alley, under the archway and into Temple Bar. Already the pisshead crowds were out, singing and swinging from lamp posts with their crewcuts and football jerseys. On the cobblestones of Crown Alley he had to wade through an English hen party, drunk and leery, wearing devil-horns and policewoman uniforms. The women grinned at Rez and gave wolf whistles. ‘Ooh. Do you think I’d go to jail if I went home with him?’ said one in a pink wig.

‘Maybe, but he’d be worth it,’ replied her friend. They all laughed but Rez tore away from their trailing hands. ‘Ooh, feisty! I fink you need to relax, love. But we can help you with that, innit.’

There was another uproar of laughter as he turned the corner beside Purple Haze. He stomped up the few steps that led from the back of the Central Bank to the plaza. In the sheltered walkway was a young-looking homeless woman, sitting with her legs straight out and covered by a blanket. She shook her Styrofoam cup at Rez. Without thinking he shot her a look of bare derision, his mind crackling with sudden cruelty. But then he remembered Kearney smashing the junkie’s face and was overcome with shame. He fumbled in his pocket for all the coins he could find, and dropped them into the woman’s cup. He couldn’t meet her eye.

On Central Bank Plaza he scanned the clutter of grungers, skaters, Goths and rockers who fringed the severe black railings that had been erected to obstruct their loitering. He wasn’t conscious of who he was looking for until he saw him, sitting on a slab of stone in his full-length leather jacket: Aido the Death Metaller. Rez approached him. A couple of skater lads were trying, without much success, to perform jumps and tricks on the steps and along the steel railings. Aido looked on, either frazzled with contempt for the inept skaters, or just wasted. Rez stood by the stone slab and said, ‘Alright Aido.’

Aido looked up. He stared at Rez for many seconds, his face utterly blank. Then, in a deep-bass drawl: ‘Richard.’

‘How’s things man.’

‘Pretty good, pretty good,’ said Aido in an elongated American accent. Rez and Aido had been in the same year at school but already this was among the longest exchanges they’d ever had.

‘Listen,’ said Rez, ‘I know this is sort of out of nowhere. But I heard you might be able to get speed. I’m tryin to get some. Today I mean. Like, right now if possible. Do ye think ye can help me out?’

Aido didn’t respond at first. Then an expression of anguish came over him. He turned his face to the ground and shook his head violently. Finally he looked back up at Rez and said, ‘Yeah man. Do ye want to go and get it now?’

An hour later and Rez was feeling no pain. He paced the streets of town, filling up fast at the onset of Saturday night. His earphones were in, distortion raging in his skull.

He left Temple Bar and stepped on to Dame Street, inciting a barrage of car horns from taxi drivers who veered to either side of him. What would it matter, in the long view, if he went under their wheels? What did anything matter? He walked across College Green, towards the arched entrance to Trinity. From there he turned around and surveyed the traffic-filled expanse of the so-called Green at the end of Dame Street. They used to hang people here — he recalled learning this fact during some childhood jaunt with his da. The speed was running high, coursing through him in dark visionary waves: he imagined an alternative Dublin, one where public executions still took place. Looking over at the taxi ranks and the V where Dame Street forked either side of Trinity, Rez imagined huge black gallows rising up from the traffic island; he heard the screams of the victims, their agony drowned out by the clamour of consumer zeal, the shopping and the drinking; he saw necks breaking and bodies gasping towards death, and no one caring, barely even aware; he saw Stephen Horrigan being led to the gallows, a belt placed over his head like a garland, solemn children pointing at him from the cradles of their laughing fathers’ arms.

The vision passed. Rez spun on his heel and marched away, through the grounds of the college. He lit a cigarette. Now he was outside himself again, looking on, relishing the glamour of his alienation. Tonight he didn’t care how hollow he was, how non-human and insubstantial: in fact he revelled in his flimsy condition. Nothing could touch him; not the unreality of his world, not the void of space and time, not even Julie. He called up her image and, sure enough, he was unmoved by it. She couldn’t hurt him where he was now. This was splendid isolation. Rez was the king of infinite fucking space.

‘ Rez NEVER — ’

The words were incinerated before they reached his heart, fortified now like the Death Star. He reached into his back pocket and took out another of the bulges of speed wrapped in a cigarette paper. He swallowed it. Shoot speed kill light, he chanted in his head. Shoot speed kill light, shoot speed kill light. He came to the Long Stone pub across from the walls of Trinity and went in. The music blared as he pulled out his earphones and scanned the crowds: girls in clusters with shiny dresses and too much makeup, laughing too hard and watching to see if they were being watched; young men watching them, swaggering, broad-shouldered and nakedly aggressive. Shoot speed kill light. He ordered a whiskey and drank it down, basking in film noir glamour. Shoot speed kill light. He ordered another one and drank that. Then a third. The whiskey and drugs mingled inside him, like mercury fingers kneading his guts. That last speed-bomb was coming on strong. Tremblingly lucid, he walked downstairs with deliberate slowness and entered the Gents. He stood before the mirror above the sink and looked at his own face. Minutes passed. People came in to use the toilets and wash and dry their hands, but to Rez they didn’t exist. ‘Yeah bud yer gorgeous. Now go on back out there and don’t be so bleedin vain,’ said a drunk man, slapping Rez’s shoulder and looking into the mirror with him. But Rez gave no response and the guy left him there, muttering that Rez was some kind of weirdo. Still Rez stared: there was only him. There was nothing else.

He left the pub and paced the streets again. He came to a bridge and put his hands on the side rail. It was dark now and the Liffey shimmered with dollops of light from the quays above. He closed his eyes. His lower lip trembled as the speed pulsed out waves of rapture and awareness. Dublin was a den, a cauldron, a brothel, but he was beyond it all. He began to imagine the vastness of the universe, the silent darkness that stretched out forever, a limitless void. All that back there — the city, the lights and noise, the shopping and drinking, the music and roaring — it was a conspiracy, a cover-up in which everyone colluded and whose purpose was to deny it, the nothingness that Rez could feel now, crushing in from afar, burying the planet and all the creatures that scuttled across its surface. He revelled in the insignificance of human things, of sentiment, of self.

He opened his eyes and peered into the quick black swirls of the river beneath. Up ahead were the docklands and then the open sea. From here he could discern the ships and rigs and cranes of the port. It occurred to him that although he had lived his whole life in this city he had never followed the Liffey up there, to where it merged with the sea. He set off, pacing past hotels and pubs, and empty office blocks with lights still glowing inside their glass shells, until the noise of the city centre was behind him. Soon he was at the end of the river. The pathway was blocked by an iron fence, but Rez clambered out over the water and managed to swing himself around. Nearly slipping, he leapt on to the other side: a thin strip of rubble-strewn, overgrown wasteland, then the river’s mouth. Shards of rusted steel curled up from the darkness ahead. A rat scurried through the weeds at his feet. He walked across the strip of wasteland to the edge of the quay and looked down: a ten-metre drop, then the black rush of the river. The speed throbbed in his brain and body and he closed his eyes again. Then he thought: why not? Why not just step off, right now, and disappear in the black water? No one would see, no one would hear. He would simply vanish. He realized that his intent was serious, that he was indifferent to whether he lived or died.