Young Skins (11 page)

Jack lurched forward, impatient to cross. He could not see or register or interpret the flashing bodies of the passing vehicles, they were not even ghosts to him.

‘Nyyhhh,’ Jack was moaning. ‘Nyyhhh, NYYHHH.’

He was building up a head of steam, and slapped himself, openhanded, on the side of his head.

‘Stop,’ Arm said, and put his hand over that part of Jack’s head. Jack slapped again, hit the buffer of Arm’s hand, then dug his nails into Arm’s skin. After five seconds whatever possessed him subsided, he pulled his nails free, and within ten he was burbling happily again.

In Supermacs Arm and Jack took the booth nearest the entrance, the booth they always took. It was Saturday but the place was swarming with convent girls—they were in doing weekend study, Arm guessed, and had descended here on their lunch break, and now they milled and ate and chatted in a chaos of perfume and high voices, a chorus of mobiles chirping and bleeping around them. Jack ate his chips one by one, as he always did, before attending to his burger. Six girls were squished into the adjacent booth, practically spilling into each other’s laps. A couple of them were shyly watching Jack. He took the top bun from the burger, held the inside up to his face and, moving it circumferentially in front of his gob, licked every last particle of ketchup and grease from it, then replaced the bun back on the untouched patty. And that was that, that was Jack’s version of eating a burger. Arm heard the girls laugh then stop themselves, and without eyeing the culprits he managed a smile. Arm wanted them to know it was okay; they had permission to find Jack funny. Because he was, he was a funny fucker.

Arm told Ursula he would take Jack to the horses next time, to watch the boy ride firsthand. They were in the kitchen, Ursula smashing eggs against the porcelain lip of a mixing bowl, seesawing the yolk back and forth between each shell-half until the clear glop had run off.

‘I bet you will,’ she said.

‘Did I or did I not get up on that beast? I want to see Jack do it.’

‘Uh-huh,’ she said. ‘Standing there silent, with the legs out,’ she braced her hips and mimicked Arm’s stance. ‘You think you’re a solid block of charm, huh?’

Their exchange was accompanied by a succession of muffled bangs going off around their heads. Jack had shed his trousers, scaled the washing machine and was now taking a tour of the countertop that ran along two walls of the kitchen, skipping adroitly over the cutting board and microwave and toaster, attempting to pry open the safety-locked door of every wall-mounted cupboard and press.

‘Got to head,’ Arm said, ‘bye, Jack.’

Bang on four Arm was at the usual pickup spot, the pebble-dashed wall of the petrol station at the foot of his estate. He rested his tailbone against the wall, plugged in his headphones, and watched the road for the shitbox. After a while it appeared, the inimitable lump of Dympna’s silhouetted head rocking to and fro in the windshield. Dympna pulled up, popped the passenger door and sunk back into the driver seat. He was wrecked, scalp shining, cheeks mottled with lividity. A half-empty bottle of Fanta was wedged at an angle between the front seats, behind the hand brake. Dympna lifted it, took a guzzle, violently massaged his eyes and brow.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ Dympna lamented, ‘a drained head on me and then them women start up. Them women. Don’t even ask me to get into it. There’s always something.’

‘No worries,’ Arm said.

‘I’m in no humour for this,’ Dympna said. ‘But then I guess no humour at all is the best humour to be in to deal with these fucking Indians.’

They were clear of the town within minutes. They sped past the red-roofed, white-walled barns and holds of the farms just beyond the town limits, past lopsided fields where sheep drifted like flocks of grounded, flea-bitten clouds.

‘Maybe,’ Arm said. ‘Will Hector be back?’

‘From throwing the monthly length into the woman? Doubt that now.’

‘So it’ll just be the other fella.’

‘That’s what the maths’d tell us,’ Dympna said, letting rip a bassy, gaseous belch. He drove in the typical townboy manner, seatbeltless and slouched back in his seat, the heel of a palm propped against the wheel while with his other hand he alternated between palming open his mobile to check for texts and taking regular hits off the Fanta.

‘They’re gearing up for another bout of being difficult,’ he said. ‘Like fucking teenagers. Volatile.’

‘You might be right.’

‘That’s what the Fannigan business is about. Like they give a shit about Charlie or any of us. It’s an excuse to start up on me, on us. With that in mind, you might come in.’

‘Into the house?’

‘Yeah, sit down there with me and Paudi. Give him what you call a show a solidarity.’

‘You scared?’ Arm said.

‘Scared? Of a couple of auld lads?’ Dympna laughed. ‘Arm, you are the scariest man I know, considered coldly. You could put me in a coma, bare-handed, in two minutes flat, and most everyone else around. But I’m not scared of you, how could I be?’

Dympna glugged his Fanta.

They were beyond the farmsteads now, into reefs of bogland infested with gorse bushes. Bony, hard-thorned and truculently thriving, the gorse bushes’ yellow blossoms were vivid against the grained black sheen of the sump waters, the seamed bog fields. The sky was clearing itself of clouds. The day was on its afternoon wane, already.

‘It’s getting on,’ Arm said.

‘Just sit there and say nothing,’ Dympna said. ‘Just sit there and be, y’know, intimidating.’

‘I can manage that.’

The road into the farm was a narrow length of rutted dirt sunk low between haggard ditches. They had to crawl over the track, the shitbox pitching up and down as they went. The farm itself backed out onto a hill thick with heather. The house was a T-shaped unpainted wooden bungalow with a sagging front porch. A wrought-iron gate, hingeless, was tethered by an inordinate quantity of blue rope to the porch’s frame, though the gate still hung at a limp angle.

They parked in the clearing out front.

Paudi came round the side of the house. He had a baseball cap scrunched down over his head and his beard was as lush as ever, a streaked dark thicket that devoured his neck and three quarters of his face. He was standing in rakey profile, watching the car and cleaning his hands with the end of his T-shirt.

Dympna slapped the roof of the shitbox as he got out.

‘Well, Unk,’ he said, ‘fine cunt of a day and no mistake.’

‘Come see this,’ Paudi said, turning and disappearing back behind the house. Arm looked at Dympna, shrugged his shoulders. Dympna popped the shitbox’s boot, slung the satchel containing the uncles’ cut over his shoulder.

Behind the house a courtyard of cracked concrete led to the cattle shed. The shed was decently cavernous, a three-sided, aluminium-walled structure with a gated front and a corrugated roof. It was no longer used to house livestock, but was now a repository for an accumulation of all manner of weathered and defective shite—a capsized washing machine, two fat-backed cathode TVs with their screens smashed out, yards of dismembered PVC and metal piping, tyres of varying circumferences and vehicle type, cardboard trays containing broken, esoterically shaped glassware and fertiliser bags full of a mixture of wood shavings and small brown pellets of what might have been animal feed but could’ve been anything. To the rear of the shed was the cellar door that led down, Arm knew, to the nursery, and beside that door was the pair of wire cages in which were kept the Alsatians. One sprung to its feet and pressed its shining muzzle against the mesh, beads of slaver dropping from its teeth onto the mesh’s squares. The other creature remained curled into itself in the corner of its cage.

‘Look at this poor bastard,’ Paudi said.

The dog’s snout was buried under its front paws, its breath coming in rapid, shallow rasps. It was lying on a bath mat, the mat’s ends filigreed with chew-marks.

‘What’s up with it?’ Dympna said.

‘He ate a wasp. It’s a habit they’ve had since they were pups. Wasps do nest up in the eaves of the porch every summer, and after me or the other fella get round to killing them these boys love to snuffle round the deck and eat up the bodies. Think he ate one he thought was dead wasn’t dead. Stung him, it did, inside in his throat or deeper down. His tongue is all fucked up and he’s been wheezing and stuck lying there since yesterday. Can dogs be allergic?’

‘You have me there,’ Dympna said. ‘This happened yesterday?’

‘Correct. Did Hector not tell you?’ Paudi took ahold of one of the longer curls depending from the end of his beard and rolled it between his thumb and forefinger.

‘No,’ Dympna said.

‘Well fuck that goon,’ Paudi said, starting back around for the front of the house.

Paudi led them into the front room.

‘You put in a word to the vet yet?’ Dympna asked.

‘We’ll see,’ Paudi said. ‘Sit down.’

The front room was tiny. There was a fireplace in the wall, a copper bucket brimming with ashes by the hearth, a metal shovel sunk free-standing in the ash, so thick was the deposit of it. The flock wallpaper had warped and bubbled in the corners, like the room had been parboiled. Paudi’s chair had a layer of old newspapers tucked around the lining of the seat; the papers served as a kind of supplementary padding and crackled as he settled himself.

Dympna scooted onto the leather fainting couch, leaving Arm to a puny, three-legged wooden stool. Arm turned and descended upon it. Achieving a tremulous emplacement, he found he had nowhere to put his arms but heaped atop his thighs.

Paudi looked at him, snickered.

‘Sometimes a big man can’t do nothing but sit there and be fucking big, hah?’

The table was a small, fold-down plastic number. A shopping bag containing the latest consignment of weed sat on it. Dympna placed the satchel on the table, next to the shopping bag. Paudi did not unzip or otherwise inspect the satchel beyond giving the leather a gentle squeeze. He looked at Arm.

‘Is your boy better?’ he said.

Dympna raised his hand but said nothing. His eyes darted from Arm to Paudi, then back to Arm.

‘My boy?’

‘The little lad. Your little fella. The one can’t talk.’

‘It’s not a case of him getting better.’

Paudi considered this.

‘But he’s trainable, yes? If that’s the word.’

‘He is, I suppose.’

‘He’s a great lad,’ Dympna said blandly.

‘You never brought young Armstrong in before,’ Paudi said, addressing Dympna, ‘that’s a new thing.’

‘And what’s it matter?’ Dympna said.

‘It’s an observation,’ Paudi said. ‘Yes sir.’

Then he said, ‘I cannot believe Hector did not tell you about the dog. All that man cares about is his little bit snuck away in Ballintober.’

‘Women,’ Dympna muttered.

‘She has him under her spell,’ Paudi said. ‘He thinks he has her under his. But it’s the other way round. His brain is turning to mush, you know. The man has an unconscionable stack of sprays and perfumes sat in there by the bed.’ A horizontal crease spread in the middle of his beard. Paudi was smiling. ‘He baths himself every second day. He has these little nail clippers. He wants nothing to do with the silage. He forgets to feed the fucking dogs,’ he concluded coldly.

‘But sure the one out there will be fine anyway,’ Dympna said. ‘They eat anything, they have constitutions of iron.’

‘I will have to take it for a walk up the heather it if does not look like she’s improving,’ Paudi said. ‘It’s a pity. But that’s fucking that.’

‘That’ll be too bad,’ Dympna said.

‘But what’s this development about though?’ Paudi said. His hand returned to the satchel. He pinched a fold of the thin imitative leather between his yellow fingers. ‘You know I’m up here on my own. And in you bring the Arm.’

‘He’s just my lad,’ Dympna said. ‘A loyal skin.’

‘Loyal skin,’ Paudi repeated. ‘Loyalty among thieves, isn’t that the saying?’

‘Is it?’ Dympna said. ‘Well, say whatever you like, Paudi, consider me him and him me when it comes to our business.’

‘Speaking of projects, Valentino was on to you yesterday, yes?’ Paudi shifted his weight in his chair, the papers crackling around his thighs. ‘What’s the story with the molester?’

‘You mean Fannigan?’ Dympna said.

‘Another loyal skin, no doubt,’ Paudi smiled again. ‘You’re drowning in loyal skins, nephew.’

‘Fannigan is dead,’ Arm said.

Dympna laughed, a single dry bark.

‘Just so you know,’ Arm said.

Paudi tweaked the curl in his beard.

‘Really?’ Paudi said.

Arm stood up. He put his hand in his pocket and threw the blood-flecked stone out onto the table. It skittered to a stop against the satchel.

‘There you go. There’s a biteen of his fucking brains still stuck to that.’

Paudi picked up the stone. He turned it over in his hand.

Dympna forced out another laugh, this one huskier, faker. ‘He’s messing with you,’ he said, his voice on the verge of cracking.

‘Messing,’ Paudi said.

‘I’m not,’ Arm said.

Paudi looked up at Arm. ‘He’s not, either.’

Paudi oriented the stone until he had it set into the concave space between his thumb and forefinger. He held it like he was going to throw it, forefinger doubled tight against the stone’s curve, to maximise torque and spin. Then he threw it square between Arm’s eyes.

Dympna let out a yell. Arm snapped his head back and put his hand to the bridge of his nose. Dympna and Paudi stood up simultaneously and then all three men made their moves. Half-blind, Arm reached out and took a grip of someone’s shoulder. The shoulder recoiled from him and Dympna went facedown over the table. The table collapsed and his whirling foot snagged the handle of the bucket by the fireplace, launching it into the air. It crashed to the earth in a plume of flurrying brown ash. Arm stepped sideways, barked a shin against the table’s edge. He was coughing; Dympna was coughing. Arm was trying to get himself facing where he thought Paudi was when Paudi spoke, his breath against Arm’s ear.

‘Stop now.’

Dympna righted himself and got to his feet. Waving his hands, he attempted to bat clear the pall of flitting, granular ash. He squinted through the pall at his uncle.