Rob Doyle - Here Are the Young Men

Kearney followed him down the stairs, into the sepulchral filth of the apartment. They stepped over bare mattresses and strewn clothing, dripping everywhere. The stench of beer, cigarettes and a million farts was repulsive even to Kearney. Dwayne found his own mattress in the corner and rooted out his money belt. From it he retrieved a little plastic pharmacist’s jar. He opened it and spilled the contents into his palm. Kearney leaned in to see as Dwayne held something up between his finger and thumb: a green plastic capsule.

Kearney started feeling excited. ‘What is it?’

His brother paused dramatically, then said, ‘Date rape, Joe. Rohypnol. Pour this into the drink of some young one and she’ll do whatever ye want. She’ll be as horny as fuck and then ye can do her whatever way ye fuckin like, and in the mornin she’ll just think she was drunk and mad up for it.’

‘Have ye tried it?’ said Kearney, fascinated by this drug he’d heard a lot about but never seen for himself.

Dwayne laughed. ‘What ye should be askin me is, how many times have I tried it. Trust me Joe, when ye have this stuff on yer side ye can punch well above your weight. Not that a brother of mine needs any help in that department. But still, why have cotton when ye can have silk, know wharray mean? But here, I’m only givin ye the one; I don’t have many of these. Save it for the right moment, when the romance is high.’ He handed Kearney the capsule.

‘Nice one, Dwayne.’ Kearney beheld the capsule rolling innocently in his palm. This truly is the land of opportunity, he thought — date-rape opportunity!

‘That’s what family is all about, Joe. Just never let it be said, d’ye hear me, never let it be said. Now c’mon upstairs and we’ll show this gang of mickey-swingers how to drink, wha?’

Kearney put the pill in his wallet and climbed the creaky wooden ladder, behind his brother, and together they re-emerged into the relentless rain, and the sky the colour of war machines.

On Monday my work shift passed like a sinister dream. The other staff kept looking furtively at me and turning away when I caught them. Customers made bizarre remarks and jokes I didn’t get. It all felt unreal. My body ached and I had no energy. I smoked a spliff around the corner but it just made the paranoia worse.

The next day I still felt dreadful. I wasn’t working so I stayed in my room with the door locked. Rez rang me in the afternoon.

‘Do ye want to come over for a while?’ he said when I answered. ‘I’ve something to show ye. We could have a smoke.’

‘Are your parents not there?’

‘No, they’re in work. Stall it over.’

‘Right, see ye in a little bit,’ I said, relieved at the chance of company.

Half an hour later we sat in Rez’s living room, skinning up and talking.

‘How was the comedown, man?’ Rez asked.

‘Not very good at all. I still feel down.’

‘Yeah man, suicide Tuesday. Do ye know about that?’

‘No. What is it?’

‘It’s like, after people started usin ecstasy in the eighties, Tuesday was the day when everyone started toppin themselves on. Ye go out droppin yokes on a Friday and a Saturday, and it takes a couple of days for the full lag to kick in, so ye feel shit on a Tuesday. Then ye go and hang yourself or drive your car off a pier or whatever.’

Music videos were playing on the telly. Christina Aguilera was simulating various sexual manoeuvres, wearing a skimpy denim miniskirt and thrusting her ass at the camera. I watched it and felt nothing. I thought of Jen and then reflected, for the thousandth time in two days, that I would never be able to satisfy a woman sexually. I pushed the thought out of my mind.

‘So what was it ye were going to show me?’ I said.

‘Me album,’ he replied. Rez had been talking about making an album for some time, but I hadn’t realized he had actually been working on it.

‘Ye mean it’s all done, you’ve finished it?’

‘Yeah, more or less. It’s not really an album, though, more one long track.’

‘What about the songs ye wrote, aren’t they on it?’

‘No. I can’t even look at them any more. They were totally fuckin delusional. What I’ve made now is more …’ He searched for an expression, licking the backs of the skins in the meantime. ‘More honest,’ he said eventually.

‘Well let’s hear it, then. I’m dead curious.’

He went up to his room and returned with a CD.

‘Let’s have a smoke first,’ he said.

We lit up and then he put in the CD and turned up the volume. Straight away, the peace of the room was violated by searing sheets of noise, screams of feedback and harsh metallic clanging. There was no rhythm or melody, and it was hard to even tell what instruments, if any, were being used. The noise constantly mutated but didn’t go anywhere; it sounded like a black, amorphous worry-cloud. Random shrieks flared up and then died. Drills and hisses rose in volume till they smothered everything, then dropped away again into more clanging and hammering. It was the most discordant, abrasive din I’d ever heard.

Then, emerging from the squall of noise, human voices could be heard, arising for a while before being swallowed back up by the black cacophony. I heard what sounded like a child weeping. Then there was a cold, deep male voice with an English accent. I strained to make out some of the words: ‘… took him out to the factory where we had the cameras and the equipment. It was three hours before he finally died …’

The voice fused into a steam-hiss of static noise and vanished, then there were more sobs, and screams of fear and pain, like the sound of people being tortured. There was a ranting voice in a foreign tongue, maybe Asian, furious like Hitler. Then it was Hitler himself, and more crying and wailing in the background. The screeching, metallic din kept warping, disfiguring itself further, slowing down and speeding up without any kind of pattern.

Now a racist thug was gloating about how he and his friends had beaten a Pakistani man to death in a public toilet in some deserted park. An American woman described how she had microwaved her baby. After several minutes, many voices, sobs and screams converged together, merging into a featureless panic of sound that rose in pitch until it was a single, shrill tone. The tone played out for a few seconds. Then, abruptly, everything stopped.

There was silence but for the whirr of the CD as it came to rest.

Rez exhaled smoke, looking ahead of him at the CD player. I studied the side of his face. Neither of us said anything for a few moments.

Then, stubbing out his joint in an ashtray on the arm of his chair, Rez said, ‘So, what do ye think?’

‘Well …’ I didn’t know what I thought. ‘It’s fairly fuckin powerful. I’ve never really heard anything like it. Do ye have a name for it?’

‘ King of Pop ,’ said Rez.

My stoned imagination was hurling out all kinds of speculations about the black sprawl of noise he had played me. I had a vivid, thrilling insight into just how fucked up Rez was getting, how lost he was. It occurred to me that this recording, this King of Pop , was Rez’s cry for help, the aural equivalent of a half-hearted suicide bid.

A few minutes later I awkwardly tried to respond to the appeal. ‘Listen, Rez, are ye alright these days? It’s just, ye seem different, you’ve changed a lot. Ye never seem happy any more.’

‘Of course I’m not fuckin happy,’ he snapped.

Stung, I proceeded more gingerly. ‘Right, relax, I’m only talkin to ye. It’s just, I mean, yeah. Ye need to relax man, you’re too wound up. Look, I know that the way things are in the world is horrible, and that life is meaningless, and all this stuff we’ve talked about. But … but there’s more than that.’