Here Are the Young Men Read online

  Each reflection triggered many more, my mind cascading with wonder and insight. Then I wanted to be with the others. ‘Try Rez again,’ I said to Jen, gurning my jaw, lighting perhaps my thirtieth cigarette of the night. ‘Rez is a great guy, pure fucking quality.’

  There were purrs of agreement, then Jen phoned him.

  ‘We’re in the Iveagh Gardens, come on around, we’re all waitin for you,’ she called into the phone. I could hear the crackle of speech on the other end. Jen laughed and put the phone in her pocket.

  When Rez arrived a few minutes later, we greeted him like he’d been away for years. There were hugs and cheers, roars of random approval and aggressive bliss.

  ‘The last I saw of you, Rez, you were chatting up some gorgeous girl at the bar,’ said Jen.

  ‘I saw her as well,’ said Cocker. ‘Fuckin cracker. That was just before Matthew got slammed by the bouncer. What happened to her, Rez?’

  ‘Ah, I don’t know,’ said Rez, looking a little sheepish. ‘I think I scared her away. It was a bit of a rant.’

  ‘What did ye say to her?’ I asked.

  ‘Ah, some stuff, I don’t know. I told her about how the music at the club, it wasn’t any good, most of it was ten or fifteen years old. I mean, the music was good, but it’s not of the here and now, it’s not our music. Ye know what I mean? All this is music that came out years ago. It’s like the epiphanies of other generations, in Manchester or wherever. Like, it’s great music, but I wish we could hear real music from now, instead of what people were amazed by fifteen years ago. It all feels second-hand. The music that they do play from now doesn’t count, cos it just sounds like the stuff they put out back then, regurgitated.’

  ‘No, I don’t agree with you,’ said Jen. ‘It’s not all like that. There’s some amazin stuff we listen to that’s just come out.’ She named some good bands from the here and now, a few electronica acts, some techno stuff.

  ‘I know, yeah, you’re right. But that’s only a little part. Mostly we’re listenin to The Clash or The Stone Roses or MC5 cos they came from times when things still meant something, or when it felt like there could be something new, or … ah, I don’t know. I mean, I’m only sayin.’

  ‘What about Joy Division? You’re obsessed with them,’ I said.

  ‘Even Joy Division. Even The Smiths. It’s amazin stuff but it’s not my music, it’s a different era.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jen, looking at Rez in a thoughtful way. ‘It seems almost like your brain is made like that, that you can only see what ye don’t have, or like you’re determined to believe that everything is corrupt.’

  ‘So this girl didn’t like what you were sayin?’ I said.

  ‘Well, no. But it wasn’t only about the music, I was really fucked and I started tellin her how everyone in the club, every person I saw as I looked around, was made up of bits of television and films. It was true – it was really fuckin incredible, I saw it all so clearly, with completely new eyes. We’re just not real people any more, we’re all just types, it’s like our personalities are these costumes we wear, and we choose them and mix and match from a fuckin pre-designed range of possibilities.’

  ‘I don’t really get you,’ Jen said. I saw that she was listening keenly, though; Rez had that power. He had started to cut through the air with tense, slicing hand gestures, and I imagined I could see veins bulging at the side of his head, but it might have been an hallucination. He drew people in, Rez; he could unnerve you. Talking to him was exhausting; you couldn’t do it for too long or you’d start to feel as lost as he was. But that was what made him so interesting. His mind was a vast, sinister labyrinth – I saw all this clearly, in a moment of deep chemical insight – and Rez was down there somewhere, running through it, looking for a way out but only losing himself more hopelessly. Maybe he wasn’t trying to run towards the exit, though, maybe he knew he was running away from it, deeper and deeper. Maybe he didn’t want to escape.

  Rez kept speaking: ‘What I mean is, everyone is a type. It’s like the replicants from Blade Runner. You’re an artificial personality construct who thinks it’s human. We’re not human any more, we don’t have any real feelings, we don’t have any depth. We’re just types, just fuckin reflections, echoes. Like, ye can be the cynical outsider, the slacker guy, kind of doomed and romantic, but it’s only an image, something that the fuckers let ye have to keep ye off the streets. Or ye can be, I don’t know, the family man, or the quiet, intellectual type in a white shirt, or whatever. Or the artist or the punk or the nihilist. They’re all images, outfits; they’re not real. Nobody is real any more.’

  I was becoming entranced by Rez’s monologue, which accelerated and intensified as he got into it. It was almost too much – there was the feeling of hurtling towards the edge of an abyss, with Rez screaming and leading the way with mad eyes and raised fist, dead set on hurling himself into the void.

  Cocker was the one who put the brakes on it: ‘Lads, I am off my fucking head!’ he declared.

  Rez seemed to snap out of it too: ‘Yeah, fuck, those pills are amazin. But have we still got the one left each? Please God tell me we do. It brought me down when I scared that girl away. I thought I was in there. I reckon if I can get with some other girl it will take the sting out of what Julie did.’

  A loved-up Jen groaned sympathetically and gave Rez a hug. ‘Aw, don’t worry Rez, there are plenty of gorgeous girls out there who’ll be crazy for you.’

  I said, ‘You’re right, Rez, we should take the last pills now. Where are they again?’

  ‘Here,’ said Jen, taking them out of her purse. ‘Who’s goin to be the priest this time?’

  ‘You do it, Jen,’ Rez said. ‘It’s about time we had female priests in this fuckhole of a country. Though I still wouldn’t go to Mass, obviously.’

  Jen took the first pill between thumb and forefinger and raised it in the air. ‘Body of Christ, Rez.’

  ‘Amen.’

  She put it on his tongue and he swallowed. I could see his face tensing in the thrill of anticipation, the forerunner to the actual effects of the drug.

  ‘Body of Christ, Cocker.’

  ‘Body of Christ.’

  ‘You’re supposed to say “Amen”, not “Body of Christ”.’

  ‘Amen.’

  Cocker swallowed his pill and washed it down with a bottle of water we’d bought in a 24-hour Spar, along with more cigarettes, chewing gum for our gurning jaws and a needless surplus of skins.

  When Jen said ‘Body of Christ’ to me, she put the pill on her tongue. I took it from her with mine, swallowed it, and then kissed her, though in an asexual kind of way.

  ‘You may go in peace to love and serve the Lord,’ said Jen.

  ‘Thanks be to God,’ said Rez.

  ‘Thanks be to fuck,’ said Cocker.

  We all sat down on the bench and drank some wine, and there was silence for a moment; a full, vibrant silence. Drugs, I thought, are fucking wonderful. Contrary to popular opinion. I thought of writing the phrase down, then decided it was better not to write anything down, nor even try to remember it.

  ‘Lads and ladies,’ said Cocker, standing up and taking a theatrical swig on the wine bottle. ‘Here we are tonight, us four. Here we are for evermore.’ He threw his arms out as if to embrace the sky. ‘Oh holy fucking Jesus Christ almighty, I swear to God this is UN-FUCKING-BELIEVABLE!’

  We lay down on the grass in a circle looking up at the sky. The world was starting, very faintly, to brighten, a galactic purple radiance seeping into the sky above the rooftops.

  We lay there, speaking occasionally, quietly, as the sky slowly became infused with dawn light, pale at first but galloping towards brilliance.

  ‘Lads,’ I said. ‘Lads and ladies, or one lady I should say, but listen, this is the best night of my life. I mean that. I couldn’t imagine a better night, and better people to be here with than youse.’ Usually this kind of talk would have been instantly ridiculed, but tonight there was
no question of that. We all felt it: the ecstasy, the city at dawn, the cool grass beneath our bodies. We lay there and watched, listened, breathed. A gust passed through the gardens, cool, making my skin tingle.

  A few moments later, Rez spoke. There was pain in his voice as it floated free of him, out into the universe.

  ‘This is all we have left,’ he said.

  I was going to say, what do you mean? I was going to contest him, not in an argumentative way, but only to try and show him that there was more, that things may have been bad but they weren’t that bad – even when he was high he thought that way. I was going to tell him that yeah, the world was fucked up beyond belief, that the times we were living in were atrocious, and maybe, as he put it, nothing was real any more, reality was a thing of the past. Maybe all of that was true, but that only meant there was nothing to hold us back, nothing left to lose, only sheer giddy freedom to do whatever the fuck we liked, to hell with everyone else.

  But I didn’t say anything. I watched what looked like a satellite tracing a lonely arc across the brightening city sky, but maybe I was hallucinating. It was hard to tell.

  25 | Rez

  Why I am Not Real and Happiness is Impossible in the Modern Age. To be read after my demise – by Richard Tooley

  Section 146: Forgetting Considered as Metaphysical Annihilation

  Consider the infinitely and profoundly troubling nature of our fundamental existential plight. No matter how intense, unique, beautiful or interesting your experience, it will be wiped away so fully that there will be no evidence it ever existed at all. This is a fundamental truth. I never forget it for a moment. It’s like when you go to a party and say something funny and clever. You feel good – but as the night wears on and people get stoned and wasted, your clever remark gets lost, sort of muddied out. People forget who said it, or what exactly was said. By the following morning, no one can remember it, except maybe one or two, but even their memories are already fading; and anyway you can’t even be sure they remembered at all, unless you call them up and ask. But that would be too embarrassing – you would be considered a weirdo.

  All humans are profoundly shocked to realize that everything vanishes: their loves, hates, passions, thoughts. Also how good they looked, and how unique their personalities were (or seemed to be – that in itself is a major question). Imagine if The Clash had played all that music but there was no way to record it. People would whisper about how amazing it had been but no one else would really get it and the ones who’d heard it would even begin to doubt their own memories – was it really as great as it seemed? Until all memories are washed away, like sandcastles in the tide.

  Yes, such is our human condition.

  26 | Matthew

  When the wine was almost finished we left the Iveagh Gardens and walked through the early-morning streets. It wasn’t cold, but there was a freshness in the air, a coolness that made us feel purer than we would have done, coated as we were in mingled smoke and sweat, reeking of drink.

  All was quiet as we passed Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre. We walked down Grafton Street where only a drunken tramp stirred outside HMV, lying on the paving stones. I wondered if it were possible for me to ever end up like that. I had to look away or the sight of him would have brought me down.

  Jen suggested we go into Bewley’s for cups of sugary tea. It seemed a good idea but then Cocker said, ‘Why don’t we go to an early house?’ and it was settled.

  The pub was on the quays. The four of us stepped from the bright morning into the wilful gloom of surly old-Dublin workers and resolute alcoholics. We felt self-conscious. There were maybe six people drinking there, all of them male, all greyed and dusty with life. We ordered pints of Guinness and sat down quietly in a corner, our movements jittery and our faces bright with ecstasy-wonder.

  We drank our pints, smoking cigarettes and talking in low voices; disjointed, keen conversations that bubbled over now and then into affectionate laughter. The feeling of being there together was so good it was almost painful – I wanted things to stay exactly that way, that one moment forever, but everything was always slipping away, nothing was fixed. I beamed at my friends, love and affection for them pulsing out of me. I wanted to express it and tried a few times, but settled for simply smiling, laughing, watching them.

  The old men and other drinkers didn’t bother us, bar the odd funny look. Mostly they played darts and left us alone, and when one white-haired old man was passing our table on the way back from the toilets, he leaned in and made a friendly joke in a gruff, heavily accented voice. We laughed and nodded to him.

  On the third pint the plunge came; the sudden, shattering emotional drop following the high that was so perfect you sometimes forgot you were high at all. It was like being pushed into icy water on a bitter-cold day, a horrible shock, all the grief and betrayals of a lifetime condensed into one instant – a feeling of sheer, desolating loneliness. It was as if the visible world vanished and you found yourself stranded on some cold dead moon, lashed by winds and darkness.

  Anguish breaking out on my face, my hand reached over for Jen’s. She turned to me slowly, gazing at me from across a gulf, locked into her own incommunicable grief. I smiled weakly at her and she tried to do the same; hers was a frail and frightened smile. I saw that we were both utterly alone and could never be otherwise. Rez had gone quiet, retreating from the front of his face into some sunless, barren place deep within himself. I realized it was beyond me to imagine how bad things got for him, but now I had some sense of it, the depth of his loneliness.

  It lasted maybe a minute or two – this exile on a faraway moon – and then it passed. The feeling level readjusted; I was no longer ecstatic, and no longer buried in anguish. I was somewhere in-between.

  We drank another pint and went outside. It was well after midday. We were drunk, and none of us wanted to go home or to be alone. Its primary effects worn off, the ecstasy continued to work on us, providing a moderate but constant bassline of enthusiasm and pleasure.

  ‘I wish we had more pills, just one more each,’ said Cocker. But I thought it was better that we didn’t; to take more now would be only to fuck ourselves up and it would mean that the crash, when it came, would be unbearable. Better to slow-drink our way through the day, listening to music if we could, and gradually come down together all the way, easing ourselves back to something like normality.

  Jen had told us that her house would be free for the afternoon. Her da was going away for a couple of days and her brothers would be at their girlfriends’ houses, or out on the lash.

  ‘What about drink?’ asked Rez.

  ‘We can get some at the offo near my house,’ she said.

  We took a bus along the coast. It was a lucid-dream kind of day; the people we saw on the streets, or walking along the strand, seemed hardly to be there at all, like pencil sketches. The sea out past Lansdowne Road was a thick blue, without lustre, drinkable-looking. We sat upstairs on the bus, wary of making eye contact with two crewcut lads in tracksuits in the last row, rolling joints and broadcasting their scorn in abrasive whines. The whiff of their hash filled our nostrils, queasy-making.

  We bought sixteen cans of Dutch Gold and drank them throughout the rest of the day, smoking joints from Jen’s ounce of hash, listening to Mogwai and Leonard Cohen and Radiohead. We were quiet whenever Padraig, Jen’s older brother, was in the room, and he ignored us but for a few surly grunts as he made sorties into the kitchen. When he left to go to his girlfriend’s we felt more relaxed.

  The light faded outside, sped-up like in a film, until eventually we turned on the lamp in the corner of the sitting room. Our conversations got more jangled and fragmentary, our outbursts of laughter more frayed and weird-sounding. Strange voices gabbled in my mind in the quiet between songs, and my eyes darted randomly, all fucked up and playing tricks on me. I remembered how I’d felt last night, all the grand thoughts I’d had about the universe, about how everything was ultimately alright, redeemed by
some immense mystery. Now, frazzled in the gloom, it was hard to connect with those ideas and emotions. A dead girl was just a dead girl, there was no grand solace to be found. My mind was clogging up with dark, confused thoughts and I started to nod off. Just as I was about to sleep I gasped: from the corner of my eye I saw that Kearney was in the room, dressed in black and silently watching me from the couch. I jolted upright, but now I could see that it was only the shape of Cocker’s jacket that had confused me.

  Sad, reflective music filled the room. Our talk gradually petered out, then Cocker stretched out on the couch and fell asleep. Rez was sitting up on an armchair, head resting in his hand, an image of desolation.

  ‘You alright, man?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ he rasped, in a way that made it painfully clear he wasn’t. I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Ye sure?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m grand. Just a bit … down.’

  He was making a massive understatement and he knew I knew it, and he wanted me to know it.

  ‘Okay. Well, em, it was a great day.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’m glad you were, ye know, here.’

  ‘Was I?’ he said, then laughed scornfully at his own pretentiousness. At least he was laughing.

  Rez sighed and turned away, back to his bleak thoughts, the labyrinth he was lost in.

  Jen was sitting beside me on the smaller couch, and she put her toe into my side and wiggled it. I turned to her.

  ‘Will we go to bed?’ she asked with a smile.