Rob Doyle - Here Are the Young Men

‘A mate of yours, Scag, is a mate of mine,’ said Frank.

Everyone was cheerful now, opening beers and cutting out lines. We stayed for half an hour. Then Frank gave us our pills. Me, Scag and Dowdall swallowed one each. We said our goodbyes and wandered back towards Dún Laoghaire.

When we were away from the house Cocker said, in a deflated voice, ‘Listen, I’m gonna head home.’

‘Ah come on, we only met up an hour ago. The day’s just gettin started. What’s wrong? It’s gonna be deadly.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t feel up for it any more. You can hang on to those pills. Just throw us a few quid whenever ye have it.’ I tried to persuade him to stay out but he was adamant. ‘What were we doin in there, Matthew?’ he said quietly, letting the other two walk ahead. ‘This isn’t our scene at all. These people are horrible. Why don’t ye stall it home as well? Or just come for a pint in town.’

But I wasn’t ready to go home or even to have a normal night. I left a pale, diminished Cocker at the bus stop, then hurried to catch up with Scag and Dowdall.

‘Is there anything decent on at this festival?’ Scag was saying as I fell in step beside them. ‘What about this bird ye mentioned earlier, where is she? She might have a few mates for me and Matthew here. Oul Matthew, he’s a bit of a fuckin sex-hound, you’d wanna see the fuckin cracker of a Norwegian he scored last night.’

‘No, man. The Spanish bird’s on her own,’ said Dowdall. ‘I’ve to meet her here and then we’re goin back to her place, that’s the plan. I’m goin to drop a few more yokes and nail her to the wall. That’s if I can even get it up. But are ye not throwin it into that big jungle-momma ye were with last time I saw ye?’

‘Not any more,’ replied Scag. ‘It was alright for a while but I started gettin fed up. She had this big fanny on her as wide as the bleedin Congo. Ye couldn’t get a bit of friction in there at all. It was like throwin a sausage up O’Connell Street.’

Dowdall chuckled. ‘Still and all, fine set of mangoes on her. But right, I’ll have to love yis and leave yis, lads. Have a good one, don’t stop till ye get enough.’

When Dowdall disappeared into the crowd, heading towards one of the smaller stages, Scag turned to me and said, ‘What a wanker. I really doubt there is a little Spanish bird he’s goin to see. He’s fucked off now and he’s goin to be yoked out of it on his own all day, just cos he had to pretend that he was meetin some bird to impress me. What a tosser.’

I could feel the ecstasy coming up on me, bleaching through the tiredness and the jerky, frazzled anxiousness that had crept in across the weird hours.

For a while we smoked spliffs with black lads who were watching a reggae band in a beer garden. Then we gave up on the festival and took the DART back into town, attaching ourselves to a bunch of Poles who sang and guzzled litre bottles of Paulaner and Lech. We swallowed our second pill each as the train was pulling out, and I lost all sense of where the highs and comedowns from the various drugs — ecstasy, cocaine, alcohol, grass — began and ended.

We blathered with the Poles all the way into town, punctuating our rants with peals of madcap laughter and slugs of lager. Scag gave up on the farcical attempt at meaningful dialogue and took to leaping up and down the length of the carriage, swinging from the metal bars between ceiling and floor, screaming ‘COME ON YEE BASTARDS!’ over and over. People laughed and cheered him on, but everyone looked tense whenever he got close to them. He was all loved-up on the pills, though, and meant no harm.

The Poles invited us to see a Polish DJ. It was in a club on the city-centre fringes of the northside that I’d never been to before called McDargle’s.

In the club I felt invincible. Strobe lights pulsed; hard techno tracks broke down in the middle, then built up to prolonged, obliterating climaxes. We swallowed more pills. Scag was kissing a girl, a punky, blonde Pole who was like a boy. Then he was at my side, screaming into my ear that there was a guy who had microdots, did I have a tenner and we’d trip our bollocks off. I passed him my last note and danced some more. There was a different DJ now, or maybe not. Then Scag was dragging me into the hallway leading to the toilets, his face a cackling devil-mask. ‘Let’s drop this fuckin acid!’ he yelled.

‘Are ye sure it’s a good idea, with all this other stuff we’ve been takin?’

‘Relax, man. It’ll be fuckin cool.’

‘I’m a bit nervous. I’ve never done acid before.’

‘Don’t worry, it’s deadly. Remember I’m here — if you’re gettin paro or it seems a bit full on, talk to me. I’ve been takin acid for decades. I was takin it when you were in nappies. I was takin it when I was in fuckin nappies. There’s nothin about it that can faze me, man.’

‘Okay, thanks.’

We put the tabs under our tongues and let them dissolve.

The walls were spilling with the colours of music, and there he was, Matthew, standing in the middle of the dance floor, knowing what was to come, moving without moving, zooming through the cosmos while his body stayed very still, and all the surfaces bled together.

After the club we went back to a house on a dark, narrow street near Christ Church with the Poles, where the party continued. The acid was incredible; it must have been six hours after taking it and I was still tripping hard. The DJ from the club had come back to the house. At one point the techno got more intense and there was this Polish girl dancing in front of me. I could see that there was something wrong with her face. I peered at her through the smoke and noise — and then it was little Becky’s face and it caved in on itself, spurting out gore and crushed bones as the one eye peered at me from hell. I screamed and leapt back, falling to my knees and covering my head with my arms. Scag had seen what happened and took me by the shoulder and guided me to my feet. I was shaking and babbling as he pulled me aside, away from staring revellers. ‘Relax, Matthew, it’s only the acid. Don’t fight it, nothin ye see can hurt ye, it’s only Samsara, don’t fight it.’ I smoked a cigarette and tried to calm down. I started to cry. I turned my face to the window so no one could see. Later I wrote Jen a text that scrolled on for three pages, but I deleted it.

The techno thumped all night. Even the Poles dropped out before we did. Some time after dawn most of them had retired to the bedrooms to sleep, or have sex; or come down in more intimate groups, or gone home; or laid out on the floor of the sitting room, front room and kitchen to pass out.

Scag was sitting on an armchair, peaceful-looking, a roll-up dangling easy from his left hand. He was gazing out the window, emanating thoughtfulness even as the veins in his temples bulged to the point of rupture. I sat down on the carpeted floor at his feet — there were no empty seats — and listened to the ambient waves of soothing, vaporous silver that dissolved around us, the DJ’s gentle-comedown set. I felt sleepy and my head dropped forward a few times, eventually coming to rest against Scag’s leg. I closed my eyes and let darkness flood over me, thinking as I blacked out that dying would not be unpleasant at all.

‘I reckon it’s time to split, Matthew,’ Scag said after a while. I stood up and rubbed my eyes.

We took four cans of lager from the heaps of unconsumed alcohol that lay scattered around the various rooms, and left.

‘Fuckin hell,’ I said when we were out on the grey, early-morning street. ‘I’m still trippin.’

We let our legs carry us, hiding the cans in our pockets between swigs, in case the police were around. We walked down Dame Street and crossed the Liffey, then followed the river past the long, imposing hulk of the Custom House, which now seemed to have a face and a real personality — it struck me that the building only looked so stern and intimidating because it was insecure about who it really was. It was all a front. The thought triggered another fit of giggles.