Here Are the Young Men (13 page)

‘Yeah, maybe,' she said. But her mind wasn't on my speech or on
Logan's Run
– it was still on Rez. ‘You should go and meet him,' she said in a low voice. ‘In the article in the paper it said that the big reason most of these guys kill themselves is that they feel isolated, they can't talk to anybody about what's goin on in their inner lives. Maybe that's how Rez feels.'

‘But Rez does talk to us. He tells us all his ideas, all this stuff about why the world is so used up and he can't connect or whatever.'

Jen didn't reply. She watched a little girl playing on the grassy slope with a rubber dog. The girl reminded me of Becky.

My phone beeped again.

‘
never mind its fine just thought maybe u were around c u later
.'

I showed Jen and shrugged. ‘He must be alright.'

She made a vague noise, looking into the distance, thoughtful.

A while later she said, ‘I wonder what it was like to live hundreds of years ago.'

‘Why are you thinkin about that?'

‘I don't know, it just came into my head.'

I pondered for a moment. ‘It wouldn't have been very good, probably. I mean, ye wouldn't have been allowed to do anything, just get married and work and be poor.'

‘Yeah, but do ye think they were happier than we are?'

‘I don't know. It's possible. I remember talkin about this with Rez once. He reckoned that people were happier in the past, anyone who lived before these times, basically. He reckons it's impossible to be happy in the modern world, because we're not human any more. We're just, like, abortions of technology or something.'

‘Do you agree with him?'

I shrugged. ‘I don't know. I don't really get what he's talkin about. Or only sometimes I do. Rez can be kind of pretentious. I mean …' I hesitated, feeling bashful. ‘I mean, I feel kind of happy at the moment. Like, here with you.'

‘
Awww!' She laughed and jabbed her finger into my side. I grabbed her leg and tipped her over on the grass. She squealed in pleasure as she fell, pulling me down on top of her.

As we lay there I had an urge to tell her what had happened out at Killiney, how I had grinned for Kearney after the horror. But I couldn't do it. I leaned down and kissed her.

We lay quietly in the grass and put our sunglasses on. An expanse of cloud glided across the sun and in a few minutes we felt chilly. We got up and walked out of the park. We wandered around to George's Street Arcade and browsed the CDs. Jen bought me a Mercury Rev album that she had heard at a friend's place.

‘This will get you out of that punk-rock ghetto you've been living in,' she said. She kissed me and added, ‘There's more to life than only hate and rage, you know.'

       

When I got home that evening I put on the Mercury Rev CD, and lay down to listen to it. Life was better when Kearney wasn't around, I decided. Being with Jen was helping me see that. Kearney was a deadener, a nullifier. He talked things into nothingness and you got sucked in by his cynicism, drawn into a void where everything was at the same zero level, pointless and contemptible. Rez had said before that Kearney was a nihilist. I'd replied that we were all nihilists, that was why we were into punk and sabotage and all that stuff. Rez had said yeah, but Kearney was different: he loved death and hated everything else. I hadn't really seen it at the time, but now I felt stupid for having been so blind.

The music played on, strange and mysterious, as if floating in from some other, more magical realm. Soon I drifted off to sleep, into weird and enchanted dreams.

22
|
Rez

The instant before Rez opened the email, a shiver of dread ran through him. What if it was a premonition? Maybe he should just turn it off and never log on here again. But then he clicked the message and it was too late.

Before he even fully read it, the blood had drained from his face and his insides seemed to melt. He stood up, but his legs were weak and he had to sit back down – and then he saw them again, her words on the screen like atrocity footage. He clicked the browser closed but he knew it was too late: this would be with him for the rest of his life.

He grabbed some money and ran out of the house. The 151 took him to Parnell Street. He got off, went straight into an offo and bought a naggin of Jameson. The man at the register was about to ask for ID, but when he looked in Rez's eyes he just muttered the price and handed him the bottle. Then Rez was outside, swigging greedily.

He paced on to Parnell Square, outside the walls of the Garden of Remembrance – the very place where she'd dumped him. He
swigged
again on the whiskey. Why hadn't she changed her Hotmail password? She knew he knew it. Had she known he was going to look at the emails she sent to her friends? Did she get some kind of buzz out of it? A diving instructor, on a fucking Greek island! Rez could see him, this Marley, in his mind's eye: a hulking shadow-man, handsome, ruthless and predatory. He could see him boasting about it afterwards – how willing Julie had been, how eager, how
orgasmic
. It was all there in the few lines he'd read. Nothing could have made him feel more inadequate. He swigged long and deep but the words sliced into his most vulnerable parts: ‘
It's like I didn't even know what sex
was
before him. Last night he made me come twice before he even, you know, put it inside of me – after that I lost count! Rez NEVER used to make me come
.'

Outside the Hugh Lane Gallery he brought his hands to his face, clawing at the skin. He felt he was about to vomit. An old woman stopped to stare but Rez ignored her.

‘
Rez NEVER used to make me come
.'

The worst part was how she had capitalized the word ‘never'. He paced around Parnell Square to the front of the Ambassador. He crossed Parnell Street and headed down O'Connell Street. Outside Dr Quirkey's Good Time Emporium a teenager in a hoodie broke away from his gang to stand in Rez's way. He sneered and opened out his arms in challenge. Rez knocked him aside with his shoulder and didn't turn around when the teenager's mates jeered and called out threats. ‘He's a mad fuckin thing, did ye see the head on him?' the teenager screeched behind him, trying to save face.

‘
Rez NEVER used to make me come
.'

His feet took him back along the Liffey Boardwalk, over the Ha'penny Bridge, through the alley, under the archway and into Temple Bar. Already the pisshead crowds were out, singing and swinging from lamp posts with their crewcuts and football jerseys. On the cobblestones of Crown Alley he had to wade through an English hen party, drunk and leery, wearing devil-horns and policewoman uniforms. The
women
grinned at Rez and gave wolf whistles. ‘Ooh. Do you think I'd go to jail if I went home with him?' said one in a pink wig.

‘Maybe, but he'd be worth it,' replied her friend. They all laughed but Rez tore away from their trailing hands. ‘Ooh, feisty! I fink you need to relax, love. But we can help you with that, innit.'

There was another uproar of laughter as he turned the corner beside Purple Haze. He stomped up the few steps that led from the back of the Central Bank to the plaza. In the sheltered walkway was a young-looking homeless woman, sitting with her legs straight out and covered by a blanket. She shook her Styrofoam cup at Rez. Without thinking he shot her a look of bare derision, his mind crackling with sudden cruelty. But then he remembered Kearney smashing the junkie's face and was overcome with shame. He fumbled in his pocket for all the coins he could find, and dropped them into the woman's cup. He couldn't meet her eye.

On Central Bank Plaza he scanned the clutter of grungers, skaters, Goths and rockers who fringed the severe black railings that had been erected to obstruct their loitering. He wasn't conscious of who he was looking for until he saw him, sitting on a slab of stone in his full-length leather jacket: Aido the Death Metaller. Rez approached him. A couple of skater lads were trying, without much success, to perform jumps and tricks on the steps and along the steel railings. Aido looked on, either frazzled with contempt for the inept skaters, or just wasted. Rez stood by the stone slab and said, ‘Alright Aido.'

Aido looked up. He stared at Rez for many seconds, his face utterly blank. Then, in a deep-bass drawl: ‘Richard.'

‘How's things man.'

‘Pretty good, pretty good,' said Aido in an elongated American accent. Rez and Aido had been in the same year at school but already this was among the longest exchanges they'd ever had.

‘Listen,' said Rez, ‘I know this is sort of out of nowhere. But I heard you might be able to get speed. I'm tryin to get some. Today I mean. Like, right now if possible. Do ye think ye can help me out?'

Aido
didn't respond at first. Then an expression of anguish came over him. He turned his face to the ground and shook his head violently. Finally he looked back up at Rez and said, ‘Yeah man. Do ye want to go and get it now?'

       

An hour later and Rez was feeling no pain. He paced the streets of town, filling up fast at the onset of Saturday night. His earphones were in, distortion raging in his skull.

He left Temple Bar and stepped on to Dame Street, inciting a barrage of car horns from taxi drivers who veered to either side of him. What would it matter, in the long view, if he went under their wheels? What did anything matter? He walked across College Green, towards the arched entrance to Trinity. From there he turned around and surveyed the traffic-filled expanse of the so-called Green at the end of Dame Street. They used to hang people here – he recalled learning this fact during some childhood jaunt with his da. The speed was running high, coursing through him in dark visionary waves: he imagined an alternative Dublin, one where public executions still took place. Looking over at the taxi ranks and the V where Dame Street forked either side of Trinity, Rez imagined huge black gallows rising up from the traffic island; he heard the screams of the victims, their agony drowned out by the clamour of consumer zeal, the shopping and the drinking; he saw necks breaking and bodies gasping towards death, and no one caring, barely even aware; he saw Stephen Horrigan being led to the gallows, a belt placed over his head like a garland, solemn children pointing at him from the cradles of their laughing fathers' arms.

The vision passed. Rez spun on his heel and marched away, through the grounds of the college. He lit a cigarette. Now he was outside himself again, looking on, relishing the glamour of his alienation. Tonight he didn't care how hollow he was, how non-human
and
insubstantial: in fact he revelled in his flimsy condition. Nothing could touch him; not the unreality of his world, not the void of space and time, not even Julie. He called up her image and, sure enough, he was unmoved by it. She couldn't hurt him where he was now. This was splendid isolation. Rez was the king of infinite fucking space.

‘
Rez NEVER –
'

The words were incinerated before they reached his heart, fortified now like the Death Star. He reached into his back pocket and took out another of the bulges of speed wrapped in a cigarette paper. He swallowed it. Shoot speed kill light, he chanted in his head. Shoot speed kill light, shoot speed kill light. He came to the Long Stone pub across from the walls of Trinity and went in. The music blared as he pulled out his earphones and scanned the crowds: girls in clusters with shiny dresses and too much makeup, laughing too hard and watching to see if they were being watched; young men watching them, swaggering, broad-shouldered and nakedly aggressive. Shoot speed kill light. He ordered a whiskey and drank it down, basking in
film noir
glamour. Shoot speed kill light. He ordered another one and drank that. Then a third. The whiskey and drugs mingled inside him, like mercury fingers kneading his guts. That last speed-bomb was coming on strong. Tremblingly lucid, he walked downstairs with deliberate slowness and entered the Gents. He stood before the mirror above the sink and looked at his own face. Minutes passed. People came in to use the toilets and wash and dry their hands, but to Rez they didn't exist. ‘Yeah bud yer gorgeous. Now go on back out there and don't be so bleedin vain,' said a drunk man, slapping Rez's shoulder and looking into the mirror with him. But Rez gave no response and the guy left him there, muttering that Rez was some kind of weirdo. Still Rez stared: there was only him. There was nothing else.

He left the pub and paced the streets again. He came to a bridge and put his hands on the side rail. It was dark now and the Liffey shimmered with dollops of light from the quays above.
He
closed his eyes. His lower lip trembled as the speed pulsed out waves of rapture and awareness. Dublin was a den, a cauldron, a brothel, but he was beyond it all. He began to imagine the vastness of the universe, the silent darkness that stretched out forever, a limitless void. All that back there – the city, the lights and noise, the shopping and drinking, the music and roaring – it was a conspiracy, a cover-up in which everyone colluded and whose purpose was to deny it, the nothingness that Rez could feel now, crushing in from afar, burying the planet and all the creatures that scuttled across its surface. He revelled in the insignificance of human things, of sentiment, of self.

He opened his eyes and peered into the quick black swirls of the river beneath. Up ahead were the docklands and then the open sea. From here he could discern the ships and rigs and cranes of the port. It occurred to him that although he had lived his whole life in this city he had never followed the Liffey up there, to where it merged with the sea. He set off, pacing past hotels and pubs, and empty office blocks with lights still glowing inside their glass shells, until the noise of the city centre was behind him. Soon he was at the end of the river. The pathway was blocked by an iron fence, but Rez clambered out over the water and managed to swing himself around. Nearly slipping, he leapt on to the other side: a thin strip of rubble-strewn, overgrown wasteland, then the river's mouth. Shards of rusted steel curled up from the darkness ahead. A rat scurried through the weeds at his feet. He walked across the strip of wasteland to the edge of the quay and looked down: a ten-metre drop, then the black rush of the river. The speed throbbed in his brain and body and he closed his eyes again. Then he thought: why not? Why not just step off, right now, and disappear in the black water? No one would see, no one would hear. He would simply vanish. He realized that his intent was serious, that he was indifferent to whether he lived or died.