Rob Doyle - Here Are the Young Men

Moments later he was grinning and saying, ‘How do you make a hormone, Matthew?’

I grinned too, knowing something lewd was coming and enjoying it already. ‘I don’t know, how?’

‘Kick her in the gee!’ He roared with laughter at his own joke, and I giggled along.

‘Here they come,’ he said, alert again, anticipating drugs.

We got the cocaine and went into the bathroom together. There was a black guy wearing a white waistcoat in there, standing by the sink with a silver tray full of lollypops and aftershave, and a container of donated coins. We stepped past him and into a cubicle. I closed the door behind us and Scag started scooping coke on to a glossy flyer placed on the cistern. He chopped out two enormous lines. They were almost novelty-sized, I reflected.

He bent down and snorted the bigger of the pair through a €20 note that he’d had all along. ‘Get that into ye,’ he said, sniffing and handing me the note. I bent and sniffed. ‘Grand. Now I’ll just take a bit of commission for after.’ He expertly fashioned another wrap out of a piece of cardboard from a club flyer he’d had in his pocket. Then he put a heap of cocaine on the end of the key and hooshed it in. ‘There we go. Buyer’s cut. Patriarchy, Matthew — it might be on its knees but there’s life yet in the old whore.’

I thought I should put up at least a half-arsed defence of ethical decency and said, ‘Ah, I don’t know, they’re nice girls. We’ve been bummin off them all day. Maybe we shouldn’t take some of it. They’re bein generous with it, anyway, so there’s no real need.’

Scag laughed when I said that: a cheery, pleasant kind of laugh — he’d found what I’d said genuinely funny. Nor did he feel fit to respond, other than saying once more, as his laughter subsided: ‘The fuckin arse on that Nicky one, I swear to God.’

When we came back out of the toilets we couldn’t see the girls. We pushed upstairs. The music was harder here, more frenetic. Green lasers cut through a fog of black ice. The smell of sweating bodies was thick and lusty. The girls were dancing near the DJ’s table, flailing their limbs, smiles streaked across their faces as they pulsed in the hectic lighting.

We joined them. Then we all raised our drinks and clinked. ‘ Sláinte! ’ we roared over the din of music. I saw Lorna smile at me in a white flash of strobe lighting; she looked feral, her smile a bloodthirsty curl. But I was more confident on the coke and I danced beside her, leaning in now and then to shout something into her ear. I realized that she was slightly taller than me. Then Scag was kissing Nicky. I didn’t see any build-up to it — one moment they weren’t, and then they were kissing.

Emboldened by Scag’s success and by the coke that continued to course through me, I danced closer to Lorna, and soon, unbelievably to me, we were kissing too.

The girls’ room was on the third floor of a hostel on the south side of the quays, with tall windows looking out on the Liffey. Scag pulled open the curtains as soon as we all fell laughing through the door. The dark river glistened below with slivers of reflected neon. The walls in the room were blue, and the girls’ backpacks were on the floor, beside the double bed. There were a few notebooks on the floor, along with clothes including, I noted with a strange, heady emotion, more than one pair of knickers.

‘Crack on the tunes, ladies,’ said Scag, nodding towards the set of portable white speakers and the iPod beside the bed. Nicky put on something that was like punk and electro mixed together. I was about to ask what it was, but Scag said, ‘So are yis writers or wha?’ He was gesturing towards the notebooks on the ground.

Lorna started dancing while we opened up the cans we’d bought with the girls’ money, behind the bar at inflated, post-offo prices. Nicky said, ‘Ah, yes. Yes and no. Mostly no. I write what I feel and think. It’s … I do it for myself. Poems, but not really poems. Feelings and impressions mainly, I guess.’

‘And you, Lorna?’ I said.

‘Me too. The same, I suppose. Feelings, memories. I try to write everything down so I can keep it with me when it’s over. When something is finished, how can you know it ever happened, apart from the memory it leaves you? I don’t like to take photos too much, so I write it down.’

‘Yis can write about us then, your two gentlemen hosts and guides for the night,’ put in Scag. ‘Make sure ye portray me as havin a smoulderin Byronic intensity. Use that phrase.’

They laughed. ‘Yeah, we will, undoubting. Cheers. Sláinte .’

Scag mooched over towards Nicky, who was sitting on the bed, and a moment later the two of them were kissing again, laughing, saying hushed, hurried things to each other. I sat on the chair by the bed. Lorna kept dancing. ‘I can’t sit still when I’m on the cocaine,’ she said. I watched her, horny yet anxious. She laughed a little, then stepped over, leaned down and kissed me. She took my face in her hands and guided me to my feet. We started kissing, more and more heavily, and her hands began sliding over my body. Behind me, from the bed, I heard rising groans from Scag and Nicky. He was hardly going to start shagging her here, in a room with one bed while we were here too, I thought. And then I thought: of course he is.

Lorna was shoving me towards the bed, and then we were spiralling down on it. She ran her hands through my hair, bit my lip, and rubbed her groin against mine. I was hard as wood, but kept swerving between lust and distress. I looked to my side as she started kissing my neck: Scag was lying over Nicky, propped up on one hand, kissing the tops of her breasts whilst rubbing vigorously between her legs with his free hand. She was moaning loudly. As I watched, he undid her jeans and pulled them around her hips, then slid his fingers under her knickers.

Lorna was getting more excited too. She clawed down my body and began to unzip me. Before I knew it my cock was freed, exposed to open air. She took it in her mouth. I closed my eyes and tried to forget there were four of us in the room. But I couldn’t overcome my self-consciousness. I pulled her head away from me, which needed some perseverance, and grinned awkwardly at her quizzical look.

‘Em, can we do another bit of coke or something?’ I said.

She smiled. ‘Sure.’

I put my dick back into my trousers and zipped up. She looked like she was trying not to appear frustrated as she fixed her hair a little, then reached out for Nicky’s jeans, which were now completely off her and flung across the bed. Scag’s trousers were off as well, and now they were plainly screwing, he lashing into her, and she throwing her head back and grabbing the headboard behind her.

We watched for a few moments. Scag and Nicky were oblivious to us. I turned to Lorna. She looked at me. There was a strange, wordless moment, the shagging noises intensifying beside us. Then we both erupted in laughter.

She cut out the coke on a book that wasn’t in English.

‘What is it you’re reading?’ I said to dispel my nervousness with some conversation — an absurd intention, with Nicky now yelping in what I presumed to be an oncoming orgasm, right beside us.

‘In fact it’s Joyce, Dubliners ,’ she said.

I looked again at the book, where I now saw the author’s name. ‘So it is.’

‘Have you read it?’ she asked, finishing off trimming two thin, tidy lines.

‘No. Is it any good?’

‘It’s not bad. I always try to read about the places I go to. I was going to try to read Ulysses but I thought, maybe I’ll leave it until a longer trip.’ She laughed at this. I laughed too, though I had no idea what was supposed to be funny about that.