Rob Doyle - Here Are the Young Men

‘No, I don’t agree with you,’ said Jen. ‘It’s not all like that. There’s some amazin stuff we listen to that’s just come out.’ She named some good bands from the here and now, a few electronica acts, some techno stuff.

‘I know, yeah, you’re right. But that’s only a little part. Mostly we’re listenin to The Clash or The Stone Roses or MC5 cos they came from times when things still meant something, or when it felt like there could be something new, or … ah, I don’t know. I mean, I’m only sayin.’

‘What about Joy Division? You’re obsessed with them,’ I said.

‘Even Joy Division. Even The Smiths. It’s amazin stuff but it’s not my music, it’s a different era.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Jen, looking at Rez in a thoughtful way. ‘It seems almost like your brain is made like that, that you can only see what ye don’t have, or like you’re determined to believe that everything is corrupt.’

‘So this girl didn’t like what you were sayin?’ I said.

‘Well, no. But it wasn’t only about the music, I was really fucked and I started tellin her how everyone in the club, every person I saw as I looked around, was made up of bits of television and films. It was true — it was really fuckin incredible, I saw it all so clearly, with completely new eyes. We’re just not real people any more, we’re all just types, it’s like our personalities are these costumes we wear, and we choose them and mix and match from a fuckin pre-designed range of possibilities.’

‘I don’t really get you,’ Jen said. I saw that she was listening keenly, though; Rez had that power. He had started to cut through the air with tense, slicing hand gestures, and I imagined I could see veins bulging at the side of his head, but it might have been an hallucination. He drew people in, Rez; he could unnerve you. Talking to him was exhausting; you couldn’t do it for too long or you’d start to feel as lost as he was. But that was what made him so interesting. His mind was a vast, sinister labyrinth — I saw all this clearly, in a moment of deep chemical insight — and Rez was down there somewhere, running through it, looking for a way out but only losing himself more hopelessly. Maybe he wasn’t trying to run towards the exit, though, maybe he knew he was running away from it, deeper and deeper. Maybe he didn’t want to escape.

Rez kept speaking: ‘What I mean is, everyone is a type. It’s like the replicants from Blade Runner . You’re an artificial personality construct who thinks it’s human. We’re not human any more, we don’t have any real feelings, we don’t have any depth. We’re just types, just fuckin reflections, echoes. Like, ye can be the cynical outsider, the slacker guy, kind of doomed and romantic, but it’s only an image, something that the fuckers let ye have to keep ye off the streets. Or ye can be, I don’t know, the family man, or the quiet, intellectual type in a white shirt, or whatever. Or the artist or the punk or the nihilist. They’re all images, outfits; they’re not real. Nobody is real any more.’

I was becoming entranced by Rez’s monologue, which accelerated and intensified as he got into it. It was almost too much — there was the feeling of hurtling towards the edge of an abyss, with Rez screaming and leading the way with mad eyes and raised fist, dead set on hurling himself into the void.

Cocker was the one who put the brakes on it: ‘Lads, I am off my fucking head!’ he declared.

Rez seemed to snap out of it too: ‘Yeah, fuck, those pills are amazin. But have we still got the one left each? Please God tell me we do. It brought me down when I scared that girl away. I thought I was in there. I reckon if I can get with some other girl it will take the sting out of what Julie did.’

A loved-up Jen groaned sympathetically and gave Rez a hug. ‘Aw, don’t worry Rez, there are plenty of gorgeous girls out there who’ll be crazy for you.’

I said, ‘You’re right, Rez, we should take the last pills now. Where are they again?’

‘Here,’ said Jen, taking them out of her purse. ‘Who’s goin to be the priest this time?’

‘You do it, Jen,’ Rez said. ‘It’s about time we had female priests in this fuckhole of a country. Though I still wouldn’t go to Mass, obviously.’

Jen took the first pill between thumb and forefinger and raised it in the air. ‘Body of Christ, Rez.’

‘Amen.’

She put it on his tongue and he swallowed. I could see his face tensing in the thrill of anticipation, the forerunner to the actual effects of the drug.

‘Body of Christ, Cocker.’

‘Body of Christ.’

‘You’re supposed to say “Amen”, not “Body of Christ”.’

‘Amen.’

Cocker swallowed his pill and washed it down with a bottle of water we’d bought in a 24-hour Spar, along with more cigarettes, chewing gum for our gurning jaws and a needless surplus of skins.

When Jen said ‘Body of Christ’ to me, she put the pill on her tongue. I took it from her with mine, swallowed it, and then kissed her, though in an asexual kind of way.

‘You may go in peace to love and serve the Lord,’ said Jen.

‘Thanks be to God,’ said Rez.

‘Thanks be to fuck,’ said Cocker.

We all sat down on the bench and drank some wine, and there was silence for a moment; a full, vibrant silence. Drugs, I thought, are fucking wonderful. Contrary to popular opinion . I thought of writing the phrase down, then decided it was better not to write anything down, nor even try to remember it.

‘Lads and ladies,’ said Cocker, standing up and taking a theatrical swig on the wine bottle. ‘Here we are tonight, us four. Here we are for evermore.’ He threw his arms out as if to embrace the sky. ‘Oh holy fucking Jesus Christ almighty, I swear to God this is UN-FUCKING-BELIEVABLE!’

We lay down on the grass in a circle looking up at the sky. The world was starting, very faintly, to brighten, a galactic purple radiance seeping into the sky above the rooftops.

We lay there, speaking occasionally, quietly, as the sky slowly became infused with dawn light, pale at first but galloping towards brilliance.

‘Lads,’ I said. ‘Lads and ladies, or one lady I should say, but listen, this is the best night of my life. I mean that. I couldn’t imagine a better night, and better people to be here with than youse.’ Usually this kind of talk would have been instantly ridiculed, but tonight there was no question of that. We all felt it: the ecstasy, the city at dawn, the cool grass beneath our bodies. We lay there and watched, listened, breathed. A gust passed through the gardens, cool, making my skin tingle.

A few moments later, Rez spoke. There was pain in his voice as it floated free of him, out into the universe.

‘This is all we have left,’ he said.

I was going to say, what do you mean? I was going to contest him, not in an argumentative way, but only to try and show him that there was more, that things may have been bad but they weren’t that bad — even when he was high he thought that way. I was going to tell him that yeah, the world was fucked up beyond belief, that the times we were living in were atrocious, and maybe, as he put it, nothing was real any more, reality was a thing of the past. Maybe all of that was true, but that only meant there was nothing to hold us back, nothing left to lose, only sheer giddy freedom to do whatever the fuck we liked, to hell with everyone else.

But I didn’t say anything. I watched what looked like a satellite tracing a lonely arc across the brightening city sky, but maybe I was hallucinating. It was hard to tell.

Why I am Not Real and Happiness is Impossible in the Modern Age. To be read after my demise — by Richard Tooley