Here Are the Young Men (7 page)

He shook his head. ‘I don't think ye get what I'm sayin, I –'

‘I do get what yer saying, but I don't agree. I look at the sunset, and the sea, and I like it. I think it's gorgeous. It's very simple, Rez.'

‘Yeah,' he muttered, more unsure of himself than ever. Maybe it
was
just him, maybe his mind was fucked up. He felt terrible. He couldn't even enjoy a fucking sunset. Julie made everything so simple. That was why he liked her, he reflected. He drew her in and squeezed his body against hers. The evening was getting chilly. He kissed her cheek and she put an arm around his waist. He could feel her heat coming into him, protection from the chill that drifted in over the Irish Sea, cold and insidious as doubt, as questions.

He
spoke into her ear. ‘Julie, don't listen to me. I'm just … I just need to get me head clear, that's all. Don't mind me.'

She exhaled in frustration. ‘But Rez, you're always like this now. What's wrong with you? You're not the way ye used to be. You're like a different person. How come we never laugh when we're together any more? You always used to make me laugh, but now it's always this analysing, all this weird stuff. Jesus, Rez, I'm starting to feel lonelier when I'm with you than when I'm on me own. I –'

‘I know, Julie. I said I'll snap out of it, I'm just –'

‘But when are ye goin to snap out of it, Rez? It's ever since ye started gettin all those books from yer cousin. I know ye look up to him and ye think he's cool. And there's nothin wrong with that, but –'

‘I don't “look up to him”,' he said gruffly, pulling away. ‘Jesus. Just cos I like talkin to someone about books and films and stuff, ye have to make me out to be some kind of child. For fuck's sake, Julie.'

‘But it's not only that, Rez.'

He sighed and shook his head. ‘Here we go again.'

‘I know ye hate me sayin it. But I mean it, Rez, ye smoke too much. It's messin yer head up. Some people can handle it and some people can't, and you just can't. It's makin ye … it's makin ye into a different person than ye were before. And I don't like bein with ye as much.'

‘Don't say that, Julie. I don't smoke that much. Just a joint or two in the evenin, that's all. What else am I supposed to do? I just like it. Dope is my thing, it's not some big deal. It's just for listenin to music and helpin me think about things.'

Her voice was low and she looked dead ahead, across the sea. ‘Listen Rez, do whatever ye want. I'm sick of havin the same argument over and over.'

They fell silent. Most of the daylight had drained away. Rez felt Julie shivering at his side. He leaned into her again and buried his face in her hair, breathing her in. ‘I don't feel anything any more,' he whispered into the pulse of her neck, a dry sob caught in his throat.

‘Shhh,' she replied, stroking his head, looking out to sea.

10
|
Matthew

I groaned and pulled the covers over my head. It was Tuesday morning and I was still fucked from the long weekend. My ma was banging on my bedroom door. Dull light filled the room and I could hear the muffled tune of an ice-cream van out on the road. Eventually I willed myself into getting up.

I drank tea and watched telly for a while, though I couldn't concentrate and my ma kept at me to go and look for a job. Then she had to go out. Although I'd had a full night's sleep, I was still affected by the pills: little things irritated me more than usual, but I kept having these surges of euphoria and intense emotion, triggered by random memories or whatever happened to be on telly – even a car ad or the benign smile of a celebrity chef. I watched a few music videos, hoping Christina Aguilera would come on, or just some decent band. In one of the videos, from a rubbish American indie band, four tousle-haired guys were walking down a lane in slow motion as an apocalyptic sunset blazed behind them. There was an old woman standing nearby, with a trolley full of what looked like
chicken
heads and voodoo paraphernalia. A deranged grin crept over her cracked face. She started to giggle, then it looked like she was choking. An expression of horror came over her, as if she'd peered into the depths of hell. Then one of the band members put his hand on another's shoulder and looked intensely into his eyes. He smiled. His face turned into a frog. At that moment, I had a vision of Kearney smashing the junkie's face. I heard the crack, felt the surge of pain as if it were my own bones being broken. I scrambled to change the channel, calming down only when the screen glowed with a soothing Pringles ad.

My ma had come back. ‘I'm not tellin ye again, Matthew,' she said harshly. ‘Get on out there with them CVs and find something. There's no shortage of jobs, you'll have something by the end of the day if you want.'

What I wanted by the end of the day was to be drunk and stoned. To this end, I called Cocker.

‘Listen,' I said when Cocker picked up, ‘I need to get away from the gaff for a while. Me ma's houndin me to join the workforce. The only force I want to join is, like, Delta Force.'

‘Or Air Force One,' said Cocker dreamily. ‘That'd be alright. What
is
Air Force One? Is it the plane, or all the planes?'

We arranged to meet in town and head to the beach. Cocker rang Rez and I rang Jen. No one rang Kearney.

       

We took the DART to Portmarnock, already two cans in apiece by the time we got off at the station and walked across the bridge, then out on to the beach. It had turned into a sunny day, a brief opening in the grey cloud-wall that had hidden the sky for months. There were a lot of people making the most of it before the sky-blue was swallowed up again. Pasty parents laid out mats and kept an anxious eye on their children, who waded into the sea like a generation of
suicides.
Every father, no matter how young, seemed to have a beer belly, and all the mothers had flabby, cellulite-lined legs. The men stripped off their GAA or English football jerseys. The women wore bathing suits of pink or idiot-yellow. In the hazy sunlit drunkenness I felt deflated by the scene.

‘All the happy families,' said Cocker as we spread out a blanket and sat down.

‘Don't ye think ye'd ever like children?' asked Jen with a playful grin.

‘What, with you? You're off yer head.'

‘No, not with me!' she protested, taking the bait. ‘In general, I mean. I wouldn't let you put your seed into me, Cocker. In your dreams.'

I looked at her. ‘In your dreams' – did that mean Cocker and Jen hadn't actually had sex the other night? The dejection brought on by the sight of the milky sunbathers disappeared and I perked up.

‘No, I don't think I'd ever want to have kids. But who knows, ye know? What do ye reckon, Matthew, do ye see yerself as a da some day?'

‘No way.'

I meant it. Shrugging, I cracked open a can. ‘The thought depresses me. I don't see myself livin that kind of life. It just doesn't appeal to me. Once ye have kids, that's everything fucked. Ye may as well give up on yerself at that point. And as far as I can see, that's just what people do. They give up on themselves. They get these flabby bellies and start listenin to fuckin FM104 and they start to think that a visit to Atlantic Homecare on a Saturday is a great day out. Goin on about motor tax and fuckin wheelie bins. No way.'

Jen laughed. ‘Well, ye never know.'

‘I do know. I know very well. But what about you, Rez?'

Rez was staring at the sea, sipping his can. He turned to me, gazed for a few moments and said, ‘What?' He was scarcely with us at all. His face looked grey, sagged with worry. A surge of vicious
feeling
– hatred for Rez, the desire to see him suffer – flared up in me, and then was washed away by the blur of drunkenness. ‘Children?' he said eventually. ‘Jesus. The thoughts of it. I don't even know if I want to be in a relationship any more, let alone have kids.'

‘Well don't go tellin Julie that,' said Jen with a smile.

We sat there and drank until our heads felt fogged and heavy in the high afternoon sun, and all was hilarity. The fact that everyone else was sober made us feel drunker, and we sneered and denounced the beach, the humans, the whole wide world. Cocker announced that he'd ‘gotten the goo' on him and insisted we start doing shots of vodka, not that we needed any insisting.

When we had just downed our third shots, an inflatable ball plonked down into our midst, throwing a coating of sand over the fringe of our blanket. A little blonde girl trotted over, naked except for a vest. I looked at her, my head starting to spin. She reminded me of my sister Fiona when she was little, when I used to tell her stories in bed and feel big and strong, protecting her. I picked up the ball and smiled at the girl when she was beside us. She held out her hands with an impatient look, frustrated at every second spent away from her playmates. I held the ball out to her. She grabbed it and ran, shrieking with delight. It all made me feel sad.

‘I'm a bit fucked,' I said. ‘I think I'll take a swim.'

The water wasn't too cold, or rather it probably was cold, but the drunkenness acted as a kind of wetsuit. I crashed into the foam, exhilarated by the sudden sensation, opening my eyes underwater to a silty murk.

I flapped around for a few minutes, lying on my back and floating as low waves washed over my face, dissolving on my eyes to leave the vacant blue sky and the bare sun high above me.

When I came out of the water, Jen was sitting alone on the blanket. Rez and Cocker had gone off somewhere. Jen watched me approach, shivering as I grabbed a towel to wrap around me.

‘Have fun?' she said.

‘
Yeah. You should get in. Fuckin hell, that's sobered me up a bit. I need a drink.'

I sat down beside her, still shivering and pulling my towel tight around me. I wanted badly to lean against her, draw in her warmth. To my embarrassment, I noticed I was getting an erection. I tried to move my left leg in such a way as to hide it, but I thought she had noticed.

After a while she said, ‘So have ye worked out what ye want to do if ye don't get the points to go to college?'

‘Not really,' I said. ‘Get a job, I suppose. Which is actually what I'm supposed to be doin now, but, ye know … just something to keep me goin. I don't want a career or any of that crap. There's nothing here that I want to do. All I want to do is get drunk and hang around with me friends.'

‘Nothin
here
that ye want to do,' she said. ‘That's just how I feel. That's exactly why I want to go away. There's a lot going on out there, in the world. I mean, like, there has to be.'

‘Are ye really plannin to go away?'

‘Yep.'

‘But have ye worked out where ye want to go yet?'

She was gazing out at the sea. There seemed to be fewer people on the beach now. Clouds had stolen in from nowhere to swoop across the sun.

‘I don't really care where I go. Just somewhere far away, somewhere different. There has to be more in the world than, than
this
.' Leaning back on her elbows, she lifted her chin to indicate the beach, the Dubliners, the city.

‘I don't know if there is, though. I mean, I get the feelin it's the same everywhere. It's all America now. Everywhere ye go you'll probably still be in America. Ye can't really get away from it. Know what I mean? Fuckin shopping centres and parades, all that stuff. Cars and houses to buy, big furniture superstores. God, when I even think of it I just want to swim out to sea and drown. But then again, there's always Mexico. Where those weird pyramids are …'

I
turned to see if she was listening, and found that she was looking right at me, smiling faintly. Her eyes sparkled as the sun broke out from behind a bank of cloud.

‘You're nice, Matthew,' she said simply.

‘I'm not “nice”,' I protested. ‘What do you mean, I'm “nice”? Niceness is just fuckin blandness, just fuckin … just fuckin Dublin.' I was working myself up, using the outburst to hide my nervousness.

But she cut over me: ‘I'm only sayin you're nice, Matthew. It's true, ye are. You're angry and fucked up and a nervous wreck, but I think there's something a bit more to ye.'

I didn't know what to do, how to act. But as I was hesitating, she put her hand on mine and I blurted out, humiliatingly, ‘Can I kiss ye?'

She burst into laughter at the question. ‘My God. Why not send a formal written request next time, like applying for college or something. But yeah, go on, you can.'

We kissed for the first time in the weakening late-afternoon sun. I had wanted to do this for a long time, but now I found that the moment was in danger of being ruined – the drink was making my head swim. I felt her tongue on mine, tasted the vodka on her breath and saliva, felt my vodka mix with hers, an airlock of alcohol forming between our wet mouths. I had to open my eyes because the spinning was getting worse.

‘Uv to gsick,' I mumbled, pulling away.

I clambered to my feet and looked around for a discreet place to vomit, but there was nowhere because we were in the middle of a beach. In desperation I ran towards the sea. I was almost there when I threw up, dropping to my knees and spewing over the wet sand. For a few moments I was oblivious of everything but the sensation of vomiting, the gagging and nausea, the heaving and stench and the vile taste. Then I became aware of the people around me, the families and couples who were still on the beach. I looked to my side and saw the little girl with the ball, standing there, still wearing only a vest. She watched me quizzically, her little sister waddling towards her to
take
her hand. Then the girls' father hurried over to take them away, saying, ‘Come on, come on over here, let's go.' I started to laugh and let myself fall forward on the sand, my head thudding into the ground beside where my vomit lay in multi-coloured splatters.