Read an Excerpt

Young Skins

Stories

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By Colin Barrett

Grove Press, Black Cat

Copyright © 2015 Colin Barrett
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8021-9210-3

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from "Stand Your Skin"

Bat is hungover, Bat is late. At the rear of the Maxol service station he heels the kickstand of his Honda 150 and lets the cycle’s chrome blue body slant beneath him until its weight is taken by the stand. Bat dismounts, pries off his helmet—black tinted visor, luminescent yellow Cobra decal pasted to the dome—and a scuzzy cascade of dark hair plummets free to his ass.

Bat makes for the station’s restroom. The restroom is little bigger than a public telephone box. Its windowless confines contain a tiny sink and cracked mirror, a naked bulb and lidless shitter operated by a fitfully responsive flush handle. There is not a single sheaf of bog roll anywhere.

A big brown daddy-long-legs pedals airily in the sink basin. Bat watches the creature describe a flustered circle, trapped. He could palm-splat the thing out of existence but with a mindful sweep of his hand instead sends it unscathed over the rim.

Bat gathers his mane at the nape, slinks a blue elastic band from his wrist and fashions a ponytail, as Dungan, his supervisor, insists. Bat handles his hair delicately. Its dense length is crackly and stiff, an inextricable nest of flubs, snarls and knots, due to the infrequency with which Bat submits to a wash.

Bat’s head hurts. He drank six beers on the roof of his house last night, which he does almost every night, now. The pain is a rooted throb, radiating outwards, like a skull-sized toothache, and his eyes mildly burn; working his contact lenses in this morning, he’d subjected his corneas to a prolonged and shaky-handed thumbfucking. A distant, dental instrument drone fills his ears like fluid. Hangovers exacerbate Bat’s tinnitus.

He runs the H and C taps. Saliva-temperatured and textured water splurge from both. He splashes his face and watches the water drip like glue from his chin.
Bat was never a good looking lad, even before Tansey cracked his face in half, he knows that. His features are and always have been round and nubby, irremediably homely, exuding all the definition of a bowl of mashed-up spuds. His eyes, at least, are distinctive, though not necessarily in a good way; they are thicklashed, purplishly-pupiled and primed glintingly wide. They suggest urgent, unseemly appeal. You look constantly as if in want, his old dear chided him all up through childhood. Even now she will occasionally snap at him—what is it, Eamonn?—apropos of nothing, Bat merely sitting there, watching TV or tuning his guitar or hand-rolling a ciggie for her.

Nothing, Bat will mutter.

You are a mutterer, Eamonn, the old dear will insist. You always were, she’ll add, by way of implying she does not ascribe all blame for that to the boot to the face.

The boot to the face. Nubbin Tansey, may he rest in pieces. Munroe’s chipper. Years gone now.

Bat jabs his cheek with his finger, pushes in. His jaw still clicks when he opens it wide enough.

Six separate operations, ninety-two percent articulation recovered and the brunt of the visible damage surgically effaced but for a couple of minute white divots in his left cheek, and a crooked droop to the mouth on that side. It’s slight but distinct, the droop, a nipped outward twisting of the lip, an unhinging, that makes him look always a little gormless. Damage abides beneath the surface. Bat can feel by their feelinglessness those pockets of frozen muscle and inert tissue where the nerves in his face are blown for good.

Bat had been known as Bat for years, the nickname derived from his surname, Battigan, but after the boot and the droop a few smartarses took to calling him Sly, as in Sly Stallone. Sly didn’t take, thank fuck; he was too entrenched in the town consciousness as Bat.

None but the old dear call him Eamonn now.

Bat palms more water onto his face, slaps his cheeks to get the blood shifting. The beers don’t help of course, but the fact is the headaches come regardless, leadenly routine now. In addition there are the migraines, mercifully rarer though much more vicious, twoday-long blowouts of agonising snowblindness that at their worst put Bat whimpering and supine on the floor of his bedroom, a
pound of wet cloth mashed into his eyesockets to staunch, however negligibly, the pain.

The doctors insist the head troubles have nothing to do with it, but Bat knows they are another bequeathal of the boot to the face.

He leaves the restroom and keys himself through the service door into the staff room. He deposits the bike helmet on the couch, unpeels his leather jacket, registers with a pulse of mortification the spicy whang peeling off his own hide.

On the staff-room counter he spies, amid a row of other items, a stick of women’s roll-on; must be Tain’s. He picks it up, worms his fist into each sleeve of his Maxol shirt and hastily kneads his pits with the spearminty-smelling stuff. As he places the roll-on back on the counter he notices a curled black hair adhering to the scented ball. He tweezes it off and flicks it to the floor.

Out front Dungan, the store manager, mans the main till. Dungan is old. Fifties, sixties, whatever. He’s the sole adult and authority figure in a work environment otherwise populated by belligerently indolent youngsters.

'Bat,’ Dungan says.

'Yeah?’

'Take your particular timepiece. Wind the big hand forward fifteen minutes. Keep it there. You might show up on the dot once in your life.’

Humped above the cash register, Dungan resembles nothing so much as his own freshly revived corpse. His skin is loose and blanched, its pigmentation leached of some vital essence, and what remains of his thin grey hair is drawn in frailly distinct comb lines across his head, mortuary neat. His glasses are tinted, enshading the eyes. But you can tell Dungan is alive because the man is
always snufflingly, sputteringly ill, his maladies minor but interminable;
head colds, bronchial complaints and dermal eruptions hound him through the seasons’ dims and magnifications.

'What needs doing?’ Bat sighs.

Dungan looks over the rims of his glasses. The white of one eye is a blood-splatter of detonated capilleries.

'Sleeves. Sleeves, Bat. What did I say about sleeves?’ He nods at Bat’s arms. 'The tattoos can’t be on display, lad. Plain black or white undershirts in future, please.’

'But everyone knows me,’ Bat says.

'Professionalism is an end in itself,’ Dungan opines. 'Now. There’s six pallets of dry stock out back that need shelving and the rotisserie wants a scrub after that. We’ll just have to try and keep you out of sight as much as we can.’


First break. Ten minutes. Bat is first out to the lot, peeling chickenfat
slicked marigolds from his hands. The lot is a three-quartersenclosed
concrete space done up to suggest a picnic area, where, the idea is, road-weary motorists can eat or stretch their limbs in what appears to Bat to be a rather bleak simulation of pastoral seclusion. There are rows of wooden tables and benches bolted into the cement (the obscenities carved into their lacquered surfaces only visible close up) and a ring-fenced aluminium wreck of a play area for children. Scruffy clots of weeds have grown up and died in the fistulas along the crumbling perimeter of the lot’s paving. A mural painted onto the lot wall depicts a trio of cartoon rabbits in waistcoats and top hats capering against a field of green dotted with splotch-headed blue and red and yellow flowers. The untalented muralist had not been able to set the pupils of the rabbits’ eyes into proper alignment, afflicting all three with various
severities of cross-eye.

Bat perches atop the fat plastic lid of an empty skip, guzzles a Coke and regards the rabbits. The longer you look the more subtly crazed their expressions appear.

Presently Bat is joined by Tain Moonan and Rob 'Heg’ Hegardy.

Tain is fifteen, Hegardy eighteen.

Both are summer recruits, and both will soon be finished up;
Hegardy is returning to college in Dublin as a second-year
computer science student and Tain will be heading into Junior Cert
year in the local convent.
Hegardy ducks out into the morning air whistling a jaunty tune.
He flashes a grin at Bat as he approaches, snaps a thin white
spindle from his breastpocket and sketches an elaborate bow as he
proffers what turns out to be a perfectly rolled joint.
'Nice,’ Bat snorts.
'Let’s start the morning and kill the day,’ Hegardy says.
Tain rolls her eyes.
'Alright Tain,’ Bat says.
Tain only grunts. She studies Hegardy frankly as he crooks the
joint between his lips, sparks his lighter and with a forceful, fish-face
sucking motion pipettes a trail of purple smoke-wisps into the air.
'Busy out front?’ Bat asks. Tain and Heg are on forecourt duty.
'Quiet enough,’ Hegardy says, and passes the joint to Bat.
Hegardy has a foot in height on Bat, a handsome, olive-oil
complexion inherited from his half-Iberian mother, the wingspan
and streamlined solidity of an athlete though he takes no interest in
sports, and a pretty wad of crinkly black hair, like a black lad’s.
He’s about the most laidback lad Bat has ever encountered; nothing
fazes or riles him.
Tain hops onto the skip beside Bat, scoots over until she’s right
beside him. She picks up one of his unsheathed marigold gloves
and tugs it down over her hand. She jabs Bat with her elbow, nods
at the joint.
'Pass it on,’ she says.
Bat gives her his best look of grown-up disapproval.
'This’ll stunt your growth, Missy.’
'Listen to the voice of experience,’ Hegardy says.
Tain rolls her eyes, sneers but declines a retort. She pulls her
peroxided hair out of her face. The roots are grown out, black as jet.
Bat gives her the joint. She takes it with her yellow gloved hand. A
brief toke and she is immediately seized by a bout of convulsive
coughing. Hegardy’s eyes pop in delight and his mouth gapes in a
mute O of impending hilarity. He leans in close so Tain can see. She
swings a sneaker at his crotch, Hegardy bouncing backwards on his
heels to elude the effort.
'Handle your shit, Moonan,’ Hegardy barks in an American
drill-sergeant voice.
'It’s handled, dickhead,’ Tain says, holding her throat and
working out a few clarifying grunts. Composure restored, she
begins to pick absently at the small red nub of a zit on her chin.
Bat looks from Tain to Heg. For the past three months Bat has
watched these two smile, joke, snark, preen and goad each other,
with escalating intensity, up until three weekends ago, when the
tone of their exchanges changed abruptly. For a few days the two
were terse, even clumsy in each other’s company. Now, while
things have relaxed into their original rhythm somewhat, their
interactions possess an edge, a spikiness, that was previously
absent. This worries Bat. Though Bat likes Hegardy, he is pretty
sure the lad did something—and may perhaps still be doing
something—with the schoolgirl. Because he likes Hegardy, Bat has
Stand Yo u r Skin
51
shied from pressing the lad upon the matter, lest Hegardy admit he
has in fact committed something perilously close to, if not in fact,
full statutory rape. (Which is what it would be. Bat looked it up.
With no little trepidation he ventured to the town library and at
one of the terminal computers, hunched forward and glancing
compulsively over his shoulder, googled what he considered the
pertinent terms.)
'When’s your last day?’ Bat asks.
'Not till Sunday next,’ Hegardy says, 'but college starts pretty
much straight the week after. So I’m going to have a couple of
going-away pints in The Yellow Belly this Friday. Don’t say you
won’t be there, Bat.’
'This Friday?’ Bat says.
'This Friday.’
Caught off guard, Bat is too brain dead to temporise; no excuse
presents itself through the double-daze of residual hangover and
incipient dope high. Bat no longer socialises in town; no longer
socialises full stop. He does not want to tell Hegardy this, though
doubtless Hegardy has an inkling.
'We’ll see,’ Bat says.
Tain is inspecting Bat’s arm on her side.
'This one’s boss,’ she says, dabbing a yellow finger upon Bat’s
kraken tattoo, etched in the hollow of his forearm. It depicts a green
squid-like monstrosity emerging from a bowl of blue water
circumscribed by a fringe of froth, an oldtime ship with masts and
sails encoiled within the creature’s tentacles, about to be torn apart.
'Boss,’ Bat says.
'Yeah,’ Tain says. She traces a circle in the crook of his arm, and
Bat feels a pinch as she nips with her fingers at his flesh.
'Ow.’
'You got good veins, Bat,’ she says, then holds out her own arms
for display. 'Big hardy cables of motherfuckers. You can’t barely
even see mine.’
Bat hesitates, leans in for a look. The down on Tain’s arms glints
in the morning light. Her skin is smooth and pale. Tain’s right—her
veins are barely there, detectable only as buried, granular traces of
blue in the solid white of her flesh. There’s a whiff of spearmint
coming up out of her sleeve. Bat tries to ignore it.
'Why’s that?’ Bat says.
'Tain must have a condition,’ Heg caws.
Tain ignores the sally.
'Look. Your veins are blue or green, whatever. But why’s that,
when your blood is red?’ she says.
Bat thinks about this. 'That must be because of the lining or
something. The veins’ linings are blue and the blood runs red
inside.’
'Blood ain’t red,’ Tain says. 'It turns red when it hits air,
oxygenates. You know what colour it actually is?’
Bat shrugs. 'I’d be guessing, Tain,’ he says.
'Bat’s blood runs one shade,’ Heg intones in a gravelly, filmtrailer
voice.
Bat looks from Tain to Heg and back.
'Black as night,’ Tain growls in her version of the film-trailer
voice.
Heg takes a final drag of the joint, drops it and sweeps it with
his foot into a sewer grille, eliminating whatever tiny chance there
might have been that Dungan would happen upon the incriminating
butt and work out what it is they get up to out here—though
that haggard bitch, as Tain refers to him, is nobody’s idea of a
deductive savant. Bat nods appreciatively. Heg is a thorough lad,
cautious. Maybe he is not up to anything with Tain.
'Let’s get back,’ Heg says to Tain.
'Fucksake,’ she mutters and pops herself off the skip. She heads
in and Heg follows, turning at the last to catch Bat’s eye.
'No, but come. It won’t be the same otherwise.’

Dinner is boiled spuds, beans and frozen fish. Bat bolts his supper
from a sideboard in the kitchen under the solemn surveillance of
two bullet-headed eight-year-old boys. The boys are seated side by
side by the opened back door, the old dear looming above them,
wielding an electric razor and comb; the old dear cuts hair on the
side, a home operation job, her clientele comprised mainly of the
youngest offspring of her extended family.
Tonight’s customers have the wide-spaced eyes and aggrieved,
jutting mouths hereditary to the Minions. The Minions are cousins
from the passed father’s side, a clan notorious locally for its
compulsive run-ins with the law and general ingenuity for petty
civil dissension. Bad seeds, though Bat suspects the old dear is
perversely proud of the association.
The old dear is shearing the boys simultaneously, in stages, not
one after the other; she does the left side of one lad’s head, then the
other lad’s left, then right/right, top/top and finally back/back.
Kitchen towels are draped across the boys’ shoulders and a tawny
moat of chopped hair encircles their chairlegs. The back door is open
so the old dear can smoke as she works, the draught escorting the
smoke of her rollie out into the evening, away from the boys’ lungs.
Above Bat’s head a wall-mounted TV plays the Aussie soap
Home and Away, but the boys’ eyes do not leave Bat as he works at
his dinner. The mane confuses little kids, who assume only women
have long hair (and there’s no woman in town with hair as long as
Bat’s). He’s conscious also they may be eyeing the balky hydraulics
of his jaw as he chews.
One of the boys slowly raises a hand, extends his forefinger and
begins boring at a nostril, a movement that necessitates a slight
shift in his posture.
'Don’t be moving,’ Bat says, 'or she’ll have your lug off,’
wrenching on one of his own earlobes for effect. 'She has a necklace
of severed ears upstairs, made out of the lugs of little boys who
wouldn’t stay still.’
The lad stops boring but keeps his finger socketed in his nose.
His eyes widen.
'That’s not true,’ the other lad puffs indignantly.
'Shut up the lot of you,’ the old dear says, though of course she
doesn’t refute Bat’s claim.
'What’s your name?’ Bat says to the lad who spoke.
'Trevor.’
A dim memory of a double christening, moons back, that Bat
didn’t go to. 'And that lad excavating his face beside you is JoJo,
so.’
'Yeah,’ Trevor says.
'And where’s your mammy gone, Trevor?’ Bat asks.
'The pub,’ JoJo says.
'Is she out looking for a brother or sister for youse?’ Bat says,
grinning at the old dear as the boys look on, puzzled.
'Dearbhla,’ the old dear sighs. 'Lord bless us and save us but you
may not be yards off the mark there, Eamonn. HEADS DOWN,’ she
barks, and the Minion boys, perfectly in sync, fire their chins into
their chests.
Bat smiles. They can be tough and they can be rough, but there’s
not a delinquent alive, budding or fully formed, the old dear can’t
crone into submission.
Before the roof and beers and bed, Bat hits the road. A night spin,
deep into the countryside’s emptinesses. The Honda is no power
racer, but watching the dimpled macadam hurtle away beneath the
monocular glare of his headlight, Bat feels he is moving too fast to
exist; as he dips into and leans out of the crooks and curves of the
road, he becomes the crooks and curves. A bristling silence hangs
over the deep adjacent acres—the pastures, woodlands and hills
sprawled out all around him. It goes up and up and up, the silence,
and Bat can hear it, above even the hot scream of the engine.
His nerves are gently sparking by the time he lopes across the
mossed asphalt shingles of the roof, cradling a sixpack. Bat plants
his back against the chimney and drinks and drinks and waits for
the moment the night becomes too cold, the air like a razor working
itself to acuity against the strop of his arms; only then will he
descend through the black square of his bedroom window.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Young Skins by Colin Barrett. Copyright © 2015 Colin Barrett. Excerpted by permission of Grove Press, Black Cat.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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