Here Are the Young Men Read online

  Scag saw them laughing and dancing with the men. He called them away and they came. I followed.

  ‘He doesn’t have any yokes, but he does have some charlie. What about it? He says it’s amazin stuff, and he wouldn’t lie to me.’

  The girls looked at each other.

  ‘How much is it costing?’ said Nicky.

  ‘Only eighty quid a gramme.’

  The girls conferred for a while. Then Lorna shrugged and said, ‘Okay, let’s get two grammes.’

  Scag took their money and returned to talk with his friend. I watched as the friend slipped him something at waist height whilst maintaining eye contact.

  ‘How have you known Scag?’ asked Lorna, who had moved up beside me.

  I tensed up once more. ‘Oh, I sort of met him through a friend, like. He’s … I haven’t known him very long. He’s cool though. He seems to know everyone in the city.’

  ‘I’m impressed.’

  ‘Yeah. He told me he’s never worked for more than two months in any job in his whole life. Usually he doesn’t work at all, he just gets the dole. He thinks work distracts him. Ye know, from his poetry.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Scag had wasted little time in telling the girls about Molesting Your Inner Child. After meeting him the last time, I’d bought a copy from a dusty, second-hand bookstore on Exchequer Street. Though I liked the poems – short, punchy verses about drugs or violence, or straight-up pornography – I suspected that all serious critics who knew about such things would regard them as shit.

  Scag came back with the coke. He slipped the wrap to Lorna.

  ‘Go on in, ladies, and do a line. Then we’ll go in when yis are finished. How does that sound?’

  ‘Okay, cool.’

  ‘And yis might get another round of drinks on yer way back, if ye don’t mind. Like I say, next time it’s all on me.’

  The girls merged into the crowd and Scag grabbed me by the shoulder.

  ‘Fuck me, did you see the arse on that Nicky? Jesus God, I can hardly keep me eyes away from it. I swear to good fuck, if we don’t end up with these girls tonight, I’m going to rip me own bollocks off.’

  Moments later he was grinning and saying, ‘How do you make a hormone, Matthew?’

  I grinned too, knowing something lewd was coming and enjoying it already. ‘I don’t know, how?’

  ‘Kick her in the gee!’ He roared with laughter at his own joke, and I giggled along.

  ‘Here they come,’ he said, alert again, anticipating drugs.

  We got the cocaine and went into the bathroom together. There was a black guy wearing a white waistcoat in there, standing by the sink with a silver tray full of lollypops and aftershave, and a container of donated coins. We stepped past him and into a cubicle. I closed the door behind us and Scag started scooping coke on to a glossy flyer placed on the cistern. He chopped out two enormous lines. They were almost novelty-sized, I reflected.

  He bent down and snorted the bigger of the pair through a €20 note that he’d had all along. ‘Get that into ye,’ he said, sniffing and handing me the note. I bent and sniffed. ‘Grand. Now I’ll just take a bit of commission for after.’ He expertly fashioned another wrap out of a piece of cardboard from a club flyer he’d had in his pocket. Then he put a heap of cocaine on the end of the key and hooshed it in. ‘There we go. Buyer’s cut. Patriarchy, Matthew – it might be on its knees but there’s life yet in the old whore.’

  I thought I should put up at least a half-arsed defence of ethical decency and said, ‘Ah, I don’t know, they’re nice girls. We’ve been bummin off them all day. Maybe we shouldn’t take some of it. They’re bein generous with it, anyway, so there’s no real need.’

  Scag laughed when I said that: a cheery, pleasant kind of laugh – he’d found what I’d said genuinely funny. Nor did he feel fit to respond, other than saying once more, as his laughter subsided: ‘The fuckin arse on that Nicky one, I swear to God.’

  When we came back out of the toilets we couldn’t see the girls. We pushed upstairs. The music was harder here, more frenetic. Green lasers cut through a fog of black ice. The smell of sweating bodies was thick and lusty. The girls were dancing near the DJ’s table, flailing their limbs, smiles streaked across their faces as they pulsed in the hectic lighting.

  We joined them. Then we all raised our drinks and clinked. ‘Sláinte!’ we roared over the din of music. I saw Lorna smile at me in a white flash of strobe lighting; she looked feral, her smile a bloodthirsty curl. But I was more confident on the coke and I danced beside her, leaning in now and then to shout something into her ear. I realized that she was slightly taller than me. Then Scag was kissing Nicky. I didn’t see any build-up to it – one moment they weren’t, and then they were kissing.

  Emboldened by Scag’s success and by the coke that continued to course through me, I danced closer to Lorna, and soon, unbelievably to me, we were kissing too.

  The girls’ room was on the third floor of a hostel on the south side of the quays, with tall windows looking out on the Liffey. Scag pulled open the curtains as soon as we all fell laughing through the door. The dark river glistened below with slivers of reflected neon. The walls in the room were blue, and the girls’ backpacks were on the floor, beside the double bed. There were a few notebooks on the floor, along with clothes including, I noted with a strange, heady emotion, more than one pair of knickers.

  ‘Crack on the tunes, ladies,’ said Scag, nodding towards the set of portable white speakers and the iPod beside the bed. Nicky put on something that was like punk and electro mixed together. I was about to ask what it was, but Scag said, ‘So are yis writers or wha?’ He was gesturing towards the notebooks on the ground.

  Lorna started dancing while we opened up the cans we’d bought with the girls’ money, behind the bar at inflated, post-offo prices. Nicky said, ‘Ah, yes. Yes and no. Mostly no. I write what I feel and think. It’s … I do it for myself. Poems, but not really poems. Feelings and impressions mainly, I guess.’

  ‘And you, Lorna?’ I said.

  ‘Me too. The same, I suppose. Feelings, memories. I try to write everything down so I can keep it with me when it’s over. When something is finished, how can you know it ever happened, apart from the memory it leaves you? I don’t like to take photos too much, so I write it down.’

  ‘Yis can write about us then, your two gentlemen hosts and guides for the night,’ put in Scag. ‘Make sure ye portray me as havin a smoulderin Byronic intensity. Use that phrase.’

  They laughed. ‘Yeah, we will, undoubting. Cheers. Sláinte.’

  Scag mooched over towards Nicky, who was sitting on the bed, and a moment later the two of them were kissing again, laughing, saying hushed, hurried things to each other. I sat on the chair by the bed. Lorna kept dancing. ‘I can’t sit still when I’m on the cocaine,’ she said. I watched her, horny yet anxious. She laughed a little, then stepped over, leaned down and kissed me. She took my face in her hands and guided me to my feet. We started kissing, more and more heavily, and her hands began sliding over my body. Behind me, from the bed, I heard rising groans from Scag and Nicky. He was hardly going to start shagging her here, in a room with one bed while we were here too, I thought. And then I thought: of course he is.

  Lorna was shoving me towards the bed, and then we were spiralling down on it. She ran her hands through my hair, bit my lip, and rubbed her groin against mine. I was hard as wood, but kept swerving between lust and distress. I looked to my side as she started kissing my neck: Scag was lying over Nicky, propped up on one hand, kissing the tops of her breasts whilst rubbing vigorously between her legs with his free hand. She was moaning loudly. As I watched, he undid her jeans and pulled them around her hips, then slid his fingers under her knickers.

  Lorna was getting more excited too. She clawed down my body and began to unzip me. Before I knew it my cock was freed, exposed to open air. She took it in her mouth. I closed my eyes and tried to forget there were four of us in the room. B
ut I couldn’t overcome my self-consciousness. I pulled her head away from me, which needed some perseverance, and grinned awkwardly at her quizzical look.

  ‘Em, can we do another bit of coke or something?’ I said.

  She smiled. ‘Sure.’

  I put my dick back into my trousers and zipped up. She looked like she was trying not to appear frustrated as she fixed her hair a little, then reached out for Nicky’s jeans, which were now completely off her and flung across the bed. Scag’s trousers were off as well, and now they were plainly screwing, he lashing into her, and she throwing her head back and grabbing the headboard behind her.

  We watched for a few moments. Scag and Nicky were oblivious to us. I turned to Lorna. She looked at me. There was a strange, wordless moment, the shagging noises intensifying beside us. Then we both erupted in laughter.

  She cut out the coke on a book that wasn’t in English.

  ‘What is it you’re reading?’ I said to dispel my nervousness with some conversation – an absurd intention, with Nicky now yelping in what I presumed to be an oncoming orgasm, right beside us.

  ‘In fact it’s Joyce, Dubliners,’ she said.

  I looked again at the book, where I now saw the author’s name. ‘So it is.’

  ‘Have you read it?’ she asked, finishing off trimming two thin, tidy lines.

  ‘No. Is it any good?’

  ‘It’s not bad. I always try to read about the places I go to. I was going to try to read Ulysses but I thought, maybe I’ll leave it until a longer trip.’ She laughed at this. I laughed too, though I had no idea what was supposed to be funny about that.

  She let me sniff up the first line. When she took the second, the two of us looked again at Scag and Nicky. He had hoisted her legs up behind her head and was banging into her with sweaty ferociousness. His grunts were now discernible as curses: Fuck, Jesus fuckin Christ, Holy Jaysus. Nicky started screaming like she was being raped.

  ‘Anyway,’ Lorna said, turning to me with a playful smirk.

  ‘Anyway,’ I replied. I didn’t know what to say after that. But she saved me.

  ‘How old are you?’

  I considered lying.

  ‘But be honest,’ she said with an encouraging smile. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Twelve.’

  ‘What!’

  I laughed a little. ‘No, I’m seventeen.’

  She nodded at this.

  ‘And what about you?’ I said.

  ‘Twenty-four.’

  ‘Right.’

  I knew I should have been feeling proud like a conqueror – I knew that I should also be shagging her, oblivious to all but the task at hand, just like Scag, who still hadn’t come. But I was feeling too weird, too nervy and fucked-up. I only wanted to talk to her.

  ‘You seem a little nervous,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, I suppose so.’ I gave a nervous little laugh.

  ‘Don’t you like me?’

  ‘Of course I do, you’re gorgeous.’

  ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’

  ‘No. It’s not that, I’m just … this is too weird. With Scag here, I mean.’

  ‘There’s nowhere else we can go.’

  ‘I know.’

  Her disappointment had vanished, if it had been there at all. She lay back on the bed, dangling her head over the edge.

  Finally Scag came. I didn’t know where to look; after trying out several options I settled on the bathroom door, draining my can in hefty gulps.

  ‘JAYSUS HOLY FUCKIN SHITE!’ roared Scag, bludgeoning out the screams issuing from Nicky, who he had now turned over and was banging from behind. ‘HOLY FUCKIN CHRIST ALMIGHTY, FUCK ME!’

  Lorna was shuddering with laughter at the situation, which must have been strange, even for these worldly Scandinavian girls. I started to laugh as well, and soon I was doubled over and hooting as Scag seemed to drop dead, slumping off the bed and out of Nicky with a final, prolonged moan. He crashed on to the floor out of our sight, as Nicky continued to groan and gradually came to her senses. Through my tears of laughter, she looked like she’d just suffered a harrowing and violent ordeal at the hands of some crazed molester, which I supposed she had.

  Me and Lorna laughed until we were spent. Then, from in behind the bed where we couldn’t see, came Scag’s voice, keen and collected as ever.

  ‘Time for another line, comrades, what do yis say?’

  30 | Matthew

  We left the girls in their one-bed room the next morning. It must have been about nine o’clock, a reassuringly grey Saturday morning in the city centre, Dublin waking up but not yet overrun by the shopping hordes that would descend upon it by noon. We helped ourselves to a free breakfast on the way out, in a dining area with ‘Breakfast is strictly for paying guests only’ printed on a sign on the wall.

  We hadn’t slept. Scag had had sex once more with Nicky, but this time Lorna and I had left the room, walking upstairs to the rooftop and looking out at the river and the buildings on the other quay, watching Dublin stumble home to bed, howling at taxis and vomiting on its shoes. We had kissed again, but that was as far as it went. Lorna had told me I reminded her of herself when she was my age. We’d taken a good bit of coke by that stage and I felt sure of myself once more. Then we’d gone back downstairs and the four of us danced, laughed and chatted as the river outside slowly ran a dull grey, then murky blue, and it was dawn. Before leaving, Scag had assured the girls that we’d be seeing them again, and taken their mobile numbers and email addresses.

  We stepped out on the street after breakfast, our dilated pupils stabbed by the sudden glare. Scag looked up and down the quiet street. ‘Sleep is for paedophiles,’ he said softly.

  ‘Where to?’ I asked, energized by the cool morning air.

  ‘Fancy another schniffle?’ he said, clapping his hands together vigorously, as if he’d just stepped out after a rejuvenating night’s sleep.

  ‘I’m okay for now,’ I said. ‘I’m still high as fuck.’ But as soon as I said this, I felt not quite as high as I had been. Coming down, I remembered Jen, the scene in her bed, the humiliation of it. Kissing Lorna had helped, but the pain was still there. ‘Actually, now that ye say it, I wouldn’t mind another whack.’

  ‘Come on over to the boardwalk.’

  We crossed the Ha’penny Bridge and sat on a bench on the wooden river walkway. A junkie staggered along and was about to pester us for smokes or money, but Scag shot him a look and he kept going. Then Scag took out the coke he’d siphoned off the girls’ purchase. He produced a key, put a little heap on the end and held it up to his nose to snort.

  ‘Puntitos, they call them in South America. That’s how they do it in Bolivia,’ he said after he’d taken the hit.

  He sorted one out for me and I sniffed it up. He looked at me and laughed. ‘We are all in the gutter, Matthew, but some of us are smoking crack.’

  Watching a pigeon on the handrail a while later he said, ‘So tell us about this bird ye were seein.’

  ‘Ah, there’s not much to it,’ I said. But I told him about Jen, how I’d liked her for years but already it was wrecked.

  ‘Yeah. I used to get like that about women,’ he said. ‘Not any more. There’s no point. Listen, the whole aim of a woman’s existence is to be impregnated, when it comes down to it. Seriously. I like them for their bodies, but that’s about it. Psychologically I’m pure faggot.’

  ‘I suppose,’ I said. ‘Some of them can be nice, though.’

  ‘I remember a girlfriend I had once, we were together for a couple of years and she started gettin hysterical for me to inseminate her. She said it was the next logical step in our relationship. Jesus Christ. The next logical step. I had to laugh at that. We were arguin about it one night and she goes to me, “But that’s what we’re here for!” And I says, “Yeah, maybe it is. But if bacteria could speak, they’d say the same thing.” And that was the end of us.’ He chuckled at the memory, untroubled by remorse.

  We sat and watched
the oily drift of the river for a spell. ‘Early house?’ he said.

  ‘Okay.’

  We got a few pints into us in a dim grime-pit of a pub called The Bald Goat, drinking amidst the usual haggard old bastards, surly alcos and darts players.

  Scag had gotten an Irish Times from the bar and after four pints or so he said, ‘Look Matteo, the Festival of World Cultures is on in Dún Laoghaire this weekend. Will we head out, just for the craic?’

  I said I was up for it. I texted Cocker to see if he would come too. The reply came seconds later: he had a day off so he’d meet me there in an hour.

  We finished our pints of Guinness. Then Scag rolled a spliff and we headed into the fully awakened city.

  Along the coast to Dún Laoghaire, the train was crammed full of young people heading to the festival. Within minutes of boarding the train, Scag had effortlessly commanded the attention and allegiance of the entire carriage. He held court for the whole journey, throwing out observational one-liners about fellow passengers, randomers outside the train windows, and the parts of Dublin we chugged past on our way.

  ‘SCAG!’

  The roar came from the back of the carriage. I jerked my head around, expecting confrontation. But it was a friend, one of Scag’s punk and junk companions from the eighties – the decade when, as he had told me earlier, ‘Everyone was poor as fuck and on the dole, but we all had a great time. The city wasn’t stuck up its own arse back then.’

  The wrinkled, leathery punk shoved his way from the back of the carriage to step into Scag’s court, where some Italian lads with dreadlocks had gathered to skin up and be entertained by his banter.

  ‘Howaya, Dowdall. Jaysus, it’s been a while, I thought you were dead.’

  ‘I am dead. I’m dead inside.’ Dowdall cackled at his own slurred wit and cracked open a can of Devil’s Bit. He had a nose ring and his dirty, grey-blond hair was spiked up with grease. There were metal studs on his leather jacket and Damned, Clash and Paranoid Visions badges sewn in drunken swerves along his arms. He looked ridiculous, a farce of all that punk once was.