Rob Doyle - Here Are the Young Men

I stayed till the joint was finished, neither of us saying much. Then I climbed out of the industrial estate and went home.

He spent even more time in his attic bedroom. Sometimes his ma shrieked up at him and he would lie there, stoned, hearing her hateful noise, wanting to slice her face up till it looked like mince. After he had been back a few days she gave up trying to call him. No one bothered him any more.

Rez and his suicide attempt was only a sideshow, a diversion. Kearney had other things on his mind. He had a plan now; he knew what he had to do.

The idea had come to him in Boston, after the night Stu had called around. It had been suggested to him by a video they’d watched.

Throughout his stay with Dwayne, Kearney had slept on the floor of the apartment, with only a pungent, multi-stained sheet between his body and the bare and dusty boards. His brother was one of eleven young Irishmen sharing the ghetto-zone flat for the summer, and space was at a premium: they slept three or four to a room, like refugees, laid out close enough to smell each others’ bodies and emissions, hear each others’ heat-fever gasps and moans. Th ere had been an infestation: cockroaches. By night they’d seemed to multiply, appearing in hordes to maraud with nocturnal arrogance, scuttling over every surface and over Kearney’s sticky, skinny limbs as he contorted and jerked in the throes of heat-insomnia. And it had been hot: maddeningly, feverishly hot. Kearney and the others could do nothing but endure this relentless heat alongside the hosts of glistening bugs that had occupied their crowded home.

The night of the video, they were sitting in the dark room on cushionless armchairs and couches with springs sticking out of them, or on plastic stools or the grimy floorboards. All twelve of them huddled around the sickly flicker of a TV that, like every item of furniture in the apartment, had been dragged in from the street after anonymous neighbours dumped it as they fled this ghetto full of crackhead blacks and drunken young Irish.

Stu came just after midnight. Dwayne stood up to greet him at the door with a hip-hop-style slapping handshake. He flicked the light switch and Kearney recoiled from the sudden glare. Stu, Dwayne had assured his younger brother, could not only get the best drugs in Boston, but was ‘heavily connected with some really hardcore motherfuckers’. (Dwayne had started using words like mother-fucker and asshole since coming to America.)

Certainly, Stu’s hardcore credentials were confirmed that night; he was the one who brought along the video they watched, as well as the weed, coke and speed the lads had ordered from him.

‘Gedda loada this shit, man,’ Stu said, waving the video in the air as he stepped into the room and commanded the group’s complete attention. He wore a sleeveless basketball shirt and baggy jeans, with a faceful of stubble, peakless cap and eyebrow piercing — full hip-hop regalia, only he wasn’t black. He did look like the kind of person you wouldn’t want to fuck with, though.

Lankily he sat on the edge of the least tattered armchair, dishing out little plastic bags of drugs as he said, ‘I got this video from a buddy in LA. I ain’t never seen shit like this, man. It’s real, ain’t no doubt. Fuckin heavy West Coast shit. You gonna see what I mean, dog. Here.’ He chucked the tape to Dwayne and ordered him to turn off the single, bare lightbulb and the shitty stereo. Dwayne complied, and Stu cut out a line of coke for everyone from his personal stash. ‘This one’s on me,’ he said.

They snorted the coke and Stu said, ‘Shit, someone gonna roll a J?’ Kearney was thinking that Stu talked a bit like Fallen Henry the Titan.

Dwayne got the video player going and retreated quietly to a spot on the floor, Stu having taken his place on the armchair.

The cockroaches kept pouring into the room, big oily things with scuttling legs. Kearney watched them crawl over the feet and legs of the lads on the ground — no one even bothered crushing them any more. He felt a tingle on the back of his neck and flinched, brushing nervously at his collar. But there was nothing there, it was all in his mind.

Kearney was stoned. Very stoned. This grass they smoked here, it was ferocious, completely unlike the stuff they got back home, which he now realized really was just ‘crap Dublin hash’; something he had long declared but without any real basis for comparison. As the stoned murmurings in the room died down and the spasms of static resolved themselves on-screen, Kearney reflected that this US skunk was as far advanced over Dublin hash as the Xbox was over the Amstrad he’d played as a kid. He liked this analogy, and hoped he’d remember to use it when he got back home to tell those queer little fuckers how clueless they were about life in general and dope in particular.

But now the film was starting. It began conventionally enough, with two brawny, crewcut guys fucking a trashy, hard-faced slut. They fucked her in the arse and fisted her cunt at the same time. Then she played with her tits while one of them fucked her cunt and the other tongued her arsehole. Next she sucked them both off at once, then let one fuck her from behind while the other pulled himself off and sneered down at her. Eventually they both came in her face.

Kearney was starting to wonder what all the fuss was about, why Stu would get so worked up about a fairly standard porno.

But then, very rapidly, it all changed. Right after the pair of men had come, one of them punched the woman in the face. It was a hard, driving, downward punch, pounding her to the floor. Kearney flinched at it, tensing up all over — there was no way that could have been faked. And the woman clearly hadn’t expected it; now she was crying, shrieking, between panic and shock.

The men slung her up from the doorframe, wrists bound by a black leather strap, the first of numerous macabre props that now started appearing on-screen in quick proliferation. The men worked quickly, looking tense and concentrated but managing to turn several times to the camera to flash conspiratorial grins.

For the next twenty minutes Kearney watched the nameless woman being tortured and dismembered. Throughout, she emitted a prolonged, almost unbroken scream and, increasingly bloodied and mutilated, she remained conscious right up to the very end. Her face a gory pulp, teeth smashed in or ripped out, nipples sliced off and hair set on fire, the gapless scream — now more a shrill gurgling — was silenced when the man who had punched her at the beginning drove a screwdriver through her wide-opened eye, impaling her brain.

The screen went black, then buzzed static.

There was no other sound in the room.

‘Whaddaya think? Hardcore shit, huh,’ said Stu, still gazing into the dead television.

There was a silence. The only things that moved were the cockroaches scuttling across the floor, and the static on-screen. Then Dwayne said, ‘Yeah man, hardcore. Hard core .’

Mumbles and grunts of vague endorsement rose up around the darkened room like the yeas in a house of parliament; there were no nays.

Kearney remained quiet, pensive. When the torturing had commenced, there was a moment when something in him had recoiled from it. Momentarily he’d wanted to stand up and walk out of the room, run down the stairs and out on the streets, jump into the Atlantic and let the ocean swallow him up.

But he had looked around him as the film played on: a roomful of impassive faces, dull with interest, condoning through inaction. Kearney told himself that it made him fierce, edgy, strong; watching this stuff and, what’s more, liking it. And he did like it, in a hesitant way at first, but more and more as he willed himself to embrace the horror of what he was seeing.