Young Skins (8 page)

‘Ah, these here are the ones I was waiting for,’ he said, cutting off the old man, who twisted round in his seat to take in Arm and Dympna.

‘Your young fellas?’ the man croaked.

‘The ginner’s the nephew, and his friend used box for the county. Fine stumps of men.’

‘They’re alright,’ the man said without enthusiasm.

‘Are we interrupting?’ Dympna said.

‘Not at all, Mick here was just telling me a fascinating theory he has about Jaysus.’

‘Jaysus?’ Dympna said.

‘Our Lord and Saviour,’ the man said.

‘His theory,’ Hector elaborated when the man did not go on, ‘is that Jaysus had a twin. A brother, and when they nailed the first one to the cross and buried him in that cave, his followers robbed the body and had the other lad show up three days later, claiming he was Jaysus come back.’

The old man watched Arm and Dympna as Hector talked. One eye was gummed near shut. He was wearing mud-caked, laceless Reebok runners, no socks, plum tracksuit bottoms shiny with filth, and a mustard sports jacket over a faded WORLD CUP ‘94 T-shirt. In his hand he clutched a plastic shopping bag with what appeared to be a bunch of other plastic bags folded up inside it.

‘Alright,’ Dympna said cautiously, ‘sounds okay. Sounds a lot more plausible, like, than coming back from the dead.’

‘It does,’ the man said curtly. He pressed his knuckles into the table and gingerly raised himself from his seat.

‘Nice talking to you, always good to meet a man with a cast of a brain in his head, always good.’ He turned and the skunky hum of piss turned in the air and departed with him.

‘What the fuck was that about?’ Dympna said, coughing and clearing his throat and taking the seat the man had vacated. Arm dragged a seat over from the next table along.

‘That wretched old boy’s harmless,’ Hector said. ‘His ilk aren’t what I’m worried about.’

‘And what is the worry now, Heck?’ Dympna said.

‘Don’t be sighing like a man who’s already got to the end of what he thinks I’m about to say. This one,’ Hector nodded at Arm, ‘understands the virtue of keeping his trap shut and letting a man get to the end of his own sentences.’

‘You sounded put out on the phone, Heck, that’s all,’ Dympna said, interlinking his stubby fingers and again clearing his throat.

‘I heard—’ Hector began, hauling himself upright in his seat, which caused his stomach to well against the lip of the table, ‘about this fella. What’s his name?’

‘Fannigan,’ Dympna said.

‘Fannigan. What he did to the young one.’

Dympna’s tongue skittered between his teeth.

‘You heard about what he tried to do. She’s okay. We’re taking care of it. We have taken care of it, as a matter of fact.’

‘Have you now?’ Hector said.

‘Yes,’ Dympna said.

‘I care about my family. About my brother’s family. Me and Paudi both,’ Hector raised an inclusive palm towards Dympna, then put out the other hand, like Paudi was right there, sitting beside him.

Paudi was the scarier seeming of the uncles. He was thin and very tall, with a briar patch of grey-black hair and a torrentially unkempt Taliban beard. He had hard black eyes that put Arm in mind of the taxidermied foxes and stoats his own Uncle Fred kept in glass display cabinets behind the bar of his pub.

‘So do I,’ Dympna said.

‘She’s a child,’ Hector said, ‘a child. What have you done about it?’

Dympna was about to say something but Hector put the hand up.
Stop
.

‘It’s my business to sort,’ Dympna said, looking levelly at his uncle.

‘Is it now?’ Hector said. The crinkle crept back into his mouth corner.

Dympna shifted in his chair.

‘If you can’t handle it you should’ve called us in.’

‘It’s. Fucking. Handled,’ Dympna said.

‘Is it now?’ A derisive whicker escaped Hector’s nose. ‘I don’t know about that at all, and Paudi doesn’t know about that. And your father, God bless him, would never leave it end there, either. Retribution wouldn’t have even begun, as far as he’d be concerned.’

Dympna closed his eyes and opened them.

‘Believe me,’ he said. ‘Fannigan won’t step out of line in his life ever again.’

Hector was silent for a moment. He plucked at a cuff link, apparently considering Dympna’s assertion, then turned his eyes on Arm.

‘The muscle,’ he said, ‘young Armstrong. Tell me, Douglas. If what happened to that child happened to yours, would you leave the matter as is?’

Arm said nothing.

Dympna sighed. ‘We can’t be attracting attention, Heck. It’s dealt with.’

Hector rapped the table with his hand.

‘Just be glad, lad, we don’t hold you more accountable. Just be glad we consider you a fool rather than a coward.’

Arm could see Dympna was on the verge of going over. Blood flooded the plains of his face. He nipped his bottom lip with his teeth and breathed out hard.

‘And so what do you think you’re going to do?’

Hector pushed back his chair and stood up. He surveyed the room, and the other patrons made sure they were looking some other way. Satisfied those within earshot were at least feigning obliviousness, Heck smiled sadly and leaned down close.

‘What we shouldn’t have to, cos it should already be done.’

Arm watched him go. Dympna stared hard at the wall, waiting for his simmer to abate, and Arm knew enough to say nothing.

Arm and Dympna parted ways for the afternoon. Arm took a walk through town and was struck by the notion of seeing Jack with the horses.

The town farm was a walled-off half acre of picture-book pasture tucked between the technical college and the swimming centre. Out front, Arm strolled past an empty whitewashed cottage, its door open, radio on inside, a row of wizened pansies keeled over on the peeling red sill. In back he sidestepped dried animal patties cratered with hoofmarks and followed a trampled track to the gate of a large fenced field.

There were two adults and half a dozen kids, Jack among them, at the far end of the field, all watching a woman on a slim white horse. She was goading the beast into brief gallop bursts, letting it bolt at full steam for a bit before bringing it back down to a jangling trot.

Watching along with Arm was a kid in a wheelchair and an older lad in rubber croc shoes. The older lad, tubby, was eating a fluorescent green candy bar. He was maybe in his twenties, with black framed glasses and a monastic looking, wispy beard circumscribing his blubbery face from lock to lock. He had those black tribal rings in his ears that stretched out the lobes. He was the kid’s minder, Arm guessed. The kid had an enormous head and a puny body pinned and bracketed by an elaborate metal frame built down over the wheelchair. A metal halo studded with screws and bolts encircled his skull and kept his oversized head and undersized neck firmly in place; further bolts, straps and supporting spokes attended his arms and legs. The modified wheelchair looked like a cross between a rally-car roll cage and a medieval rack, but Arm supposed it was alleviating the kid’s suffering in some way.

The minder caught Arm looking and smiled.

The rider led the way as the group started over towards Arm, the kid and the minder. The narrow barrel of the horse’s torso hitched from side to side in a lazy, sultry way. At the gate the horse turned sideways. Up close, Arm could see that its hide was not a uniform white, but a light, chalky grey, speckled with luminous patches of white. It lowered the suede derrick of its tremendous head and neck and began nipping at a spiky patch of grass.

‘See the horsey, Terry?’ the lad with the stretched lobes said to the caged kid.

The rider was young too, with an aquiline nose, freckles, and black curly hair. She opened her mouth and politely alarmed American came out.

‘Can I help you with anything?’

‘That’s my boy,’ Arm said, pointing at the group, ‘Jack Dory.’

‘Oh Jack,’ she said. The kids had caught up, swarming at the gates.

‘He loves his horseys,’ she said, dismounting.

Jack was looking at the rider out of the side of his face. He was wearing a crooked little grin, as if he were in the midst of some prurient calculation.

‘Jack!’ Arm shouted.

Jack considered Arm sceptically, fluttered his hands either side of himself, and hopped in place. Then a big drooler, a rock-skulled six-foot manchild with a pudding-bowl haircut and a ratty scrawl of hair on his upper lip dundered by, knocking Jack to the ground. Jack screeched and immediately became interested in something in the grass by his foot. The drooler bent over and commenced groaning into the ear of the horse as he ran his knuckles up and down its neck. The horse, evidently conditioned to such chaos, continued to chomp unperturbed at the grass.

‘Hey now, Kevin,’ the rider said, grabbing his arm and pushing the avidly molesting manchild gently back.

‘He’s autistic too,’ she said to Arm, bending down to swat away the cigarette butt Jack was about to start eating. She grabbed him by the elbow and dragged him to his feet, which was about the only way to get Jack to his feet. Jack coughed and laughed again. The other carers, two grey-haired women with windburned faces, were frantically corralling the rest of the kids. A girl, no more than ten, in a purple leotard onesie and battered fur-trimmed snow boots, hissed and snarled as one of the women secured her in a delicate arm-lock and frogmarched her out the gate.

‘This is some fucking zoo,’ Arm said.

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ the rider said to Arm, her smile fading, ‘these kids have a schedule.’

‘I just came to see the horses,’ Arm said.

Satan On Sabbatical was due onstage at nine. Arm got to Quillinan’s early, installed himself at the bar, nursed an ice water and lime, and kept an eye on the door traffic until the man himself walked in, Lisa on his arm. Dympna chin-jutted in greeting and checked his stride to cede right of way to a couple of young ones cutting across him. Arm watched him register their behinds and dolefully smack his lips. There was only a certain type of town female that would go with Dympna. Ranged against him were the taint of his tinker lineage and the spectre of his criminality, as well as the persistent low rumours that suggested he fucked his own beautiful sisters, which made the Fannigan business all the more galling, Arm figured; whatever his other flaws, Dympna was a knight to those girls.

They came his way, arm in arm.

‘How do,’ Arm said.

‘Let’s get this party started,’ Lisa chanted.

Quillinan’s was getting full, buzzy. Brandon and his bandmates had been tireless in dredging up interest. The little stage space was way in the back, and Brandon was out there already, sitting on a stool, an unplugged electric guitar resting faceup across his knees. He was scratching out the bare bones of a melody on the dormant instrument. Dympna gave Brandon a thumbs-up and then sculpted his palms in front of his chest, proffering the promised titties. Lisa whooped and clapped her hands above her head. Arm watched the bracelets and bangles adorning her wrists slide from her wrists and bottleneck at her elbows.

‘Self-expression,’ Dympna muttered.

‘Hah?’ Arm said.

‘I should’ve learned to play guitar. Who the fuck would need a mouth then?’

‘You’d need a mouth to sing,’ Arm said.

‘Fuck the water, it’s time to drink.’

Just after nine, sufficiently wired and amped, the band struck up an introductory instrumental rumble that got a bit of a crowd drifting towards the stage. Brandon stood before the mike bulb, chin fixed to his chest, his fingers writhing along the guitar’s fret as the thunderhead of noise roiling around him grew in intensity. He laughed nervously, muttered thanks for coming, and began to scream.

Lisa slipped into the crowd to mingle, and Arm and Dympna hung back at the bar, downing Jack Daniel’s and Cokes. Dympna cracked one set of knuckles, then the other.

‘Fuck them,’ he said finally.

‘Who, now?’ Arm asked.

‘Fuckin’ you know who. They want to get involved at this end fine. Get involved. Don’t just lecture me because I actually went ahead and dealt with a problem.’

Dympna looked at Arm. ‘I dealt with it.’

‘I know,’ Arm said.

There was a pinch on Arm’s arse and Lisa ranged up by his side. She smelled good, she smelled close. She hooked her arm around Arm’s neck and asked if there was a single man in here with the wherewithal to show a girl a good time. Arm slanted his eyes at her. She tweaked his cheek.

‘Solid but unspectacular, love, that’s you.’

‘More drinks. Go. Go,’ Dympna declaimed sourly, jabbing Arm’s shoulder. Arm shed Lisa with a brusque duck and backstep and adjourned to the bar.

The rider from the farm was there. She was flanked by a couple of girls Arm half recognised, town natives in bitty black dresses, sand-blasted with fake tan. The rider was tomboyishly functional by comparison, in high-top sneakers, jeans and a corduroy jacket with elbow patches. The affiliation with the natives seemed cursory. Possibly housemates, Arm speculated, or maybe the two worked with her on the farm in some capacity.

They were all drinking cocktails, red syrup and crushed ice concoctions that resembled slush steeped in blood. The natives were daintily sipping from straws and watching the room to see who was watching them. The rider, elbows on the bar, back to the din, fiddled in a desultory way with her drink, working her straw through its ice-clogged depths. She picked a larger lump of ice from the drink and slipped it in her mouth.

‘Well,’ Arm said.

She looked at him.

‘I was at the horses today,’ Arm explained.

‘Oh. Yeah. Planning any more unscheduled visits?’ she said, biting down on the ice.

‘Well, you know,’ Arm said, and cleared his throat.

‘I don’t know, actually. You guys have a way of saying that. You know. Saying nothing.’

‘I guess I didn’t think there’d be any harm to it.’

‘You just have to be careful, working with those kids,’ she said.

‘No doubt,’ Arm said.

‘You know, one of them is yours. You know they’re delicate.’

‘I don’t know if delicate is the word. The kid seems to like it there alright, though.’