Here Are the Young Men (11 page)

We lit cigarettes and felt the kick of smoke in our throats, laughing and looking down on the city. It didn't feel like it was our city, or our country, or our people. I scrolled my blurring eyes over the sprawl and felt a loathing for all of them, the fuckers who lived down there and raised their families, worked their jobs, asked no questions and listened to Joe Duffy or Gerry Ryan or whoever-the-fuck-else.
As
the whiskey pulsed into my brain, the hatred kept gushing out of me, laying waste to the city in a crescendo of contempt. Ecstatic, I wanted to drink myself into the ground, into total oblivion, and let all those cunts do what they wanted.

‘What are ye up to this weekend?' I asked Cocker some time later. Kearney was off throwing stones towards the town. ‘Do ye want to meet up tomorrow?'

‘I'm workin tomorrow,' he said.

‘Yeah, but after that?'

‘Eh, actually I'm goin out …'

I waited.

‘I'm headin out to meet another couple of friends. I mean, like, ye wouldn't really know them.'

‘What, is it a party or something?'

‘Sort of. Not really a party, just a little thing. It'll probably be crap.' He laughed weakly and looked at the ground. He said nothing more.

Now Kearney was standing a bit down the hill, pissing and waving it from side to side, giggling to himself. It looked like he was pissing all over Dublin. ‘God is in his church!' he roared. ‘God is in his church! How does yer garden grow?'

Turning to me, Cocker pointed at Kearney with his thumb and said, ‘Here, this boy is really off his nut, do ye know that?'

‘Of course I know that.'

‘No seriously,' he said, grinning, eyes wide. ‘He's even worse than I thought. Listen to this. I was around at his gaff this mornin, before we went into town. We were havin a spliff up in his room, and then he had to go downstairs for a while. So I started havin a look at his computer, and I found all these videos he's been makin. He's been recordin himself – just him sittin there talkin into the webcam. Just fuckin rantin away, like, makin all these mad voices like some actor. But it's real weird stuff, what he's sayin. All these fantasies of him killin people. Like, he's even talkin about his own ma and all, and weird stuff about homeless people. It's fuckin mental. And there's
one
of the videos that's different, where he's just sittin there dead still, not sayin a word, just starin into the camera, starin right at ye. I skipped forward and that video is the same all the way through, and it lasts, like, fifty-six minutes. What the fuck? I was goin to rip the piss out of him when he came back up to the room, but when he climbed the ladder and saw that I'd found the videos he started screechin his head off and havin a total fuckin mickey-fit, like pullin his hair out and screamin at me and everything. What a fuckin nutjob.'

‘Jesus Christ,' I said, laughing. Cocker was laughing too, so much he couldn't talk any more. Kearney was coming up the hill, watching us.

‘What's so funny, Cocker?' Kearney asked.

Cocker pointed at him. ‘You are!' he replied, still shrieking with laughter. ‘You and yer home videos. What the fuck is all that about, Kearney?'

Kearney stood looking at him, saying nothing. He stayed like that for a long time, while we laughed till our stomachs hurt. Eventually, Kearney sat back down beside us. I poured a shot and passed it to him. ‘We're only havin a laugh, Kearney,' I said.

We stayed up there for a good while. We drank the whole bottle of whiskey and then, all of us pissed, we wanted more.

In the town, me and Cocker feared we wouldn't get served because none of us had remembered to bring our fake IDs. But Kearney strolled into the first offo we saw and emerged moments later with another bottle of whiskey in his hands. ‘Yis owe me four quid each,' he said.

We walked on through the genteel coastal town, vaguely in the direction of the DART station.

Cocker said, ‘I've to go for a piss, lads. I'm burstin. I'm leggin it back to that pub down there. Go on and I'll catch up with yis in a few minutes.'

‘Alright,' I said as Cocker trotted back the way we'd come.

Kearney
started singing, though it was more like roaring. Up ahead a woman was walking along with her two little girls, who both had curly blonde hair. The woman looked harassed, weary, the way parents always looked – people were crazy to want to have kids, I reckoned, or, more likely, they just didn't think about it, they simply did it. She was telling one daughter to hurry up, stop lagging behind, while trying to restrain the other from running too far ahead. The girls were cheerful and oblivious.

Kearney kept up the singing and I joined in. The mother trotted on a few paces, calling in an annoyed way at the taller of the two girls, the one who kept running ahead. As she did so, the younger girl behind her stepped on to the road.

There was a squeal of brakes and the scream of a horn, and then it had already happened.

I saw it clearly, we both did: the car bounced over the little girl with a crunching double-thud, one for each set of wheels. It skidded to a halt a few metres ahead of where the girl now lay. Tracks of gore ran through her smashed head, branded into her golden crown and the tar.

Then the mother was screaming, everyone was screaming, running about with hands to mouths, crying, not knowing what to do, or knowing there was nothing to do but not accepting it.

We had frozen in the road. I felt myself going cold all over. I was transfixed by the sight, the horror of it. I couldn't look away, though seeing it made me want to crawl off into some pit, renounce life as something brutal and wrong. The dead girl was still, her wine-coloured life force pulping out of her, one eye open in what looked like wonder, the rest of her face flattened and smashed into a horrible mess.

Then I had to look away. When I did, my eyes passed slowly over the calamity of the scene, on to Kearney's face.

Kearney was smiling. Despite my shock I saw this clearly. It wasn't a showy smile but one that looked instinctive and natural,
almost
innocent in some terrible way. He looked like he was in a state of ecstasy. Then he became aware of me and his eyes locked on mine. His face was radiant – I had never seen him looking so alive. I couldn't turn away.

The spell broke. Kearney looked back at the dead girl, no longer smiling. The trance-mask vanished from his face, as if it had never been there.

An ambulance had arrived. The mother was howling and shrieking like some animal being ripped apart by predators. Other people on the street were doing the same; it was like a scene from the Bible.

I felt my legs taking me off the road. I bumped into Kearney and heard myself say ‘Excuse me' in a hysterical voice. My legs were weak and I dropped to a crouch. Then my guts heaved and I threw up all over the concrete.

       

Later, we had to give a police statement. The guards spoke to us in gentle, weary voices and sent us home, telling us we'd be contacted if they needed us.

‘Do ye think yee'll be okay?' said the sergeant, a ruddy, friendly man from the country somewhere.

I nodded and so did Cocker, who had accompanied us even though he hadn't seen the accident itself, only the broken, bloodied body that remained. He'd hardly said a word since, and was as pale as I imagined I was.

‘And you, Joseph,' said the sergeant. ‘How are ye feeling about all this? Nobody should have to see such a thing. I hope to God yee'll get over it somehow, lads.'

Kearney answered: ‘It was terrible, I don't know how I'm ever goin to sleep again without seein her face, like, the way her head burst open like that, the blood everywhere and all.'

Th
e sergeant shook his head in anguish and sympathy, closing his eyes and breathing slowly – and the very moment he closed them, Kearney turned and stared at me. His stare seemed to demand something, an acknowledgment or admission.

And, to my disgust, I realized that I was smirking at him, too cowardly to remain stony-faced or glower at him like I wanted to.

Before the sergeant led us out of the station with soft pats on the back and murmurs of compassion, I had to go to the toilets and throw up again.

18
|
Kearney

Snapshot Number 6: A History of Violence

Kearney had always loved the slaughter, always loved to watch. The news was great for that: there was no shortage of carnage broadcast for Kearney's delectation. Already he had lived through the twilight years of the Troubles – kneecappings, bombings and reprisal shootings – various wars set against various backdrops, atrocities here and there, the occasional terror attack that sent little joy-twinges through his cock and balls. There were hijackings and high-school slaughters, genocide and outrage, nerve gas and the nuclear threat. When there was a dearth of these things in the news Kearney felt empty, deprived, like a football fan in the summer months with no matches to watch.

But what he'd got back then was never enough. Riveted to the screen, gorging on bloodshed, Kearney had always willed the body count to rise higher, to multiply, to
soar
. He had craved nothing less than the apocalypse, an atrocity that would end history itself. Kearney,
in
his way, had yearned for the Absolute, with all the earnestness of a desert-hard mystic.

He had waited, knowing something big was coming. And sure enough, when he was fifteen, there came the day when his patience was rewarded: 11 September 2001. Like everyone else, Kearney would always remember where he was when the planes hit the towers and
offcial
reality became so suddenly, blindingly interesting.

He remembered where he was: he was at home, playing
Grand Theft Auto
.

‘Joseph!' came his mother's cry from downstairs.

Kearney's initial assumption was that she wanted to berate him over something he'd done that she had taken exception to, like forgetting to flush the toilet after taking a shit. That was why she usually roared his name. After three more cries of ‘Joseph!', Kearney slid down the ladder from his bedroom, cursing under his breath. He bounded down the stairs and into the living room – and found the camera eyes of the planet fixed in awe on the blackly billowing New York skyline.

He dropped instantly to the floor, legs folding automatically beneath him like some meditating
sadhu
, and his eyes didn't stray from the screen for many hours. When the second plane hit, he became very quiet, very still. A great peace came over him. All his restlessness melted away in the radiance of tranquillity that infused him, brighter by the second, brighter as each flailing stick-man fell from the sky-high roofs, as the Gemini spires combusted and crumpled, and clouds of cinema-smoke tumbled through the filmic canyons of Manhattan.

Kearney couldn't look away. He couldn't eat, couldn't sleep; he didn't think of sex or games or anything, for days. The news channels played the clips again and again, from every possible angle: the planes whacking into the buildings; the huge, liquid-flame explosions bursting from their sides. It was worthy of any movie, undisappointing even to senses jaded from a lifetime of sleek, carnage-dense
blockbusters.
Kearney felt dwarfed, humbled by this mighty event. This awesome twenty-first-century breed of atrocity offered Kearney his first glimpse of what others called the sacred, the numinous, the unsayable.

Everyone else, he noticed, was as fascinated as he was. Day after day, week after week, the telly pulsed with decimation. It was planetary death-porn, the greatest show on earth.

Then the global focus had shifted to Afghanistan where Kearney gorged on the carpet-bomb ejaculations, the rapacious ground offensives, and all the delicacies heaped on for mass consumption, for Kearney consumption. The way some people are fanatical about Man United or Liverpool, Kearney became fanatical about Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. He read everything he could find about what the papers called the ‘Islamic death cult', Al-Qaeda. Soon his attic bedroom became transformed into a shrine to 9/11. Posters and photos of the exploding buildings, of New York and Washington staggering under attack, gradually filled every available inch of wall, creating a cocoon of holy violence to block out any seepage from the mundane world, from dull, squalid reality. Never a day passed that he didn't look, with undimming awe, at footage of the World Trade Center attacks. They had even begun to feature in his dreams: erotic dreams of curvaceous boom-clouds, bulging red-black orbs like bums, like body-curves; dreams of belly-dance carnage; of screams of indistinguishable terror and ecstasy – an orgasm of hate.

19
|
Matthew

My alarm clock was going off. I pulled the covers over my head and whimpered, wanting to stay there forever. I only got up when my ma's calls from downstairs got too angry to ignore.

Five minutes later I was staring into my bowl of cornflakes, watching them float on the surface, turning soggy. I heard the house phone ringing, then my ma stuck her head into the kitchen. ‘It's Joseph on the phone for ye,' she said. ‘Come on out and take it.'

I cursed under my breath, stood up wearily, and went into the hallway.

‘Alright,' I muttered into the phone.

There was silence on the other end. I listened to the electric hiss, waiting. In my black humour it was easy to resist the pressure to speak.

Eventually, in a quiet voice Kearney said, ‘Matthew, ye can't pretend that wasn't unbelievable.'

‘The girl fuckin died, Kearney. She fuckin died. That was real. That was her mother there, screamin cryin. And she'll be cryin for a long time.'

‘
I know all that, Matthew,' Kearney said softly, placating me. ‘I know all that. I do. I'm not sayin it was a good thing that she died – no way. It's terrible, you're right. But the fact is, we didn't do it. It wasn't our fault. We just happened to be there to see it. It would've happened anyway. How we feel about it doesn't affect anything. People die all the time. Right now it's happenin, all over the world. I'm just sayin, actually
seein
it with me own eyes – it was … I've never felt like that before. Do ye know what I mean?'