Here Are the Young Men Page 18

  ‘No! I …’

  No more words came out. Cocker looked at the ground, his mouth open, brow still creased. He couldn’t handle this and neither could I.

  ‘I bet you couldn’t really give a fuck. You’re like a pack of fuckin hyenas, loomin over the bed. I bet yis can’t wait to tell all the lads about it. Piss off, would yis? Yis are nothin but a pack of hypocrites.’

  I struggled to respond, stunned by his outburst. All I could manage was: ‘Jesus, Rez. I can’t believe this. We worry about ye, even if ye don’t believe it.’ I couldn’t meet his eyes. They were huge, a pair of moons in his skull.

  Then he started roaring: ‘Piss off out of here, would yis! Such fuckin hypocrisy. Go on back home and don’t be so full of shit. Just get lost.’

  ‘Jesus, man.’

  ‘Piss off. I mean it. I don’t want yis in here. Fuck off and leave me alone.’

  I’d never heard him like this before – the weird thought came to me that he was like the little girl in The Exorcist, possessed by the devil, growling obscenities at priests and women. But it wasn’t the devil, it was only Rez.

  I resented his reaction and wanted to retaliate, but I couldn’t. It was out of bounds, laying into someone who was hospitalized after trying to kill himself.

  ‘Okay Rez, fair enough man, we’re goin. C’mon, Cocker. Sorry ye feel this way, Rez. Mind yourself.’

  ‘Off yis go,’ he sneered as we walked out the door. One of the men in the ward with Rez groaned. I didn’t see his face.

  That evening I was sitting in front of the TV with my parents and Fiona, scarcely aware of what was on. Fiona kept looking at me from the corner of her eye. I glowered at her to make her stop. The phone rang. My da went out to get it.

  I heard him talk in the soft, appeasing tone that everyone seemed to adopt as they got older, as if all they wanted now was to let the world know they meant no harm, they would agree to anything, sign any paper, as long as they were left alone and not tormented. Eastenders came on. It was all grey and sombre, as if they were trying to rub the working classes’ noses in how drab and joyless their lives were.

  My da was standing in the door, still talking into the phone. ‘Okay, Trisha. We’ll be thinking of ye. Just keep an eye on yer ma now, okay?’ He trailed off in a flutter of byes.

  ‘That was Trisha Tooley,’ he said. ‘She says Richard really wanted to say sorry to ye for today. He said ye’d know what it’s about.’

  They all looked at me with blatant curiosity, but I just nodded and said, ‘Okay,’ and nothing else.

  33 | Matthew

  On Saturday afternoon, after I’d come home from work, I was called to the phone. I knew who was waiting on the other end: Kearney had got back from the States the day before, after a month away. Reaching for the phone, I felt heavy, listless. I wished Kearney had stayed away for even a while longer.

  ‘Alright Matthew.’

  ‘Alright Kearney.’

  ‘How’s things, man?’

  ‘Not bad. How was America?’

  ‘Fuckin great. Jesus, some mental shit happened. Come out and have a smoke with me and I’ll tell ye all about it.’

  The suggestion wearied me. At the same time, I was curious about what he’d gotten up to. Maybe a bit of a laugh would be good for me. Besides, there was nothing else to do. I hadn’t heard any more from Jen and nor had I called her. It was two weeks now since the night in her house. I thought she’d have gotten in touch with me since what happened to Rez, but she hadn’t. My ma told me that when she was entering the hospital to visit Rez, Jen had been on her way out. ‘She looked devastated,’ she said. I had my doubts about this.

  I told Kearney I’d meet him at the industrial estate by the school in half an hour. Then I said, ‘Listen, Kearney, something’s happened with Rez.’

  ‘Yeah, I already knew,’ Kearney said.

  There was a silence, only the static hiss of the receiver in my ear.

  ‘Anyway, see ye in a little while,’ I said. ‘I haven’t got any hash, so bring enough for a few spliffs, okay?’

  The factories and yards of the industrial estate were as deserted as ever. Once or twice we’d seen a truck roll in and men shuffle out to conduct gruffly voiced business outside factory entrances. But usually there was no one here. You always had the feeling you were going to be mugged, but not even muggers hung around this place. Only teenagers drinking and getting stoned. It was a graffiti free-for-all. We had personally sprayed slogans like Don’t Be Such a Fucking Sheep to the Slaughter and Say No to Everything, Even to This, but soon got bored and stopped bothering. There seemed little point writing graffiti where no one would see it.

  When I hopped over the wall and stepped through the rubble of litter, chalky stone and broken glass, I saw Kearney standing fifty metres ahead, silhouetted against the hulk of two warehouses. As I came closer, I could see that he had a leather jacket on, which made him seem bulkier, not scrawny like he had been before. He was smoking a cigarette, watching me as I approached. He flashed his devil-grin and waved.

  ‘Alright Connelly.’

  ‘Alright.’

  Now that I was standing beside him, the change in his stature was even more apparent. He had a kind of presence now; he was very still and somehow he unnerved me, maybe because of that stillness. I had always been a little uneasy around Kearney and now the feeling was intensified. There was something in him that hadn’t been there before, a kind of magnetism. I realized then that Kearney fascinated me. I put my hands in my pockets and looked away.

  ‘So Rez tried to do himself in,’ he announced. ‘That’s fuckin mental.’

  I resented his tone. ‘He nearly died,’ I said. ‘It was only a fluke that his brother came in when he did. He came home on his lunch break to pick up some document he’d forgotten to bring to work.’

  ‘I hadn’t heard that part of it. So he really meant it?’

  ‘It seems like he did. It wasn’t one of those cries for help.’

  Kearney said nothing for a moment. Then: ‘In that case he must feel like a real failure: he couldn’t even kill himself properly.’

  I looked away, across the warehouses and yards, into the copse of dark trees past the high steel fencing at the far periphery. There was a sewerish little stream out there where we used to look for radioactive fish, which we never found, and frogs, which we did. Kearney had delighted in finding ever more inventive ways to mutilate and kill them.

  ‘That’s a fuckin horrible thing to say, Kearney.’

  He put his hands up, grinning. ‘Relax man, it was only a joke. Ye can’t be takin all these things so fuckin seriously.’

  ‘What do ye mean, can’t take it seriously. He tried to fuckin kill himself. What’s not serious about that?’

  ‘I know he did. But he only did it cos he was takin things too seriously. Himself, for example. He needs to tone it down a bit, that’s all I’m sayin.’

  ‘Do ye even have any idea what yer talkin about? Do ye know why he did it, even?’

  ‘Yeah, I do. Because he’s too into himself and he can’t deal with real life.’

  Surely the irony was blatant: Kearney, who tolerated reality only because it allowed him to play Medal of Honour and Grand Theft Auto, criticizing someone else for being out of touch with the real world. But he jabbered away as if oblivious.

  ‘I went in to see him yesterday, did ye know that? His ma was there ballin cryin, but she left when I arrived. She sat out in the waitin area. But Rez wouldn’t speak to me. He just sat there on the bed like a fuckin zombie, starin at me, like I was behind dark glass and I couldn’t see him. I tried to talk to him but he totally ignored me. I didn’t care at first, but then it really fuckin pissed me off. Cos I was tryin to be nice, I really was. I was doin all the normal stuff. I would’ve just said a few things and left. But he started actin like that, so I goes fuck it. And I started tryin to get a rise out of him.’

  ‘What did ye do?’

  ‘I says to him, “Listen, Rez
, I only came here cos I was expected to. I know ye don’t like me, and I’ve never liked you either. In fact, nobody really likes ye.” I says, “Most people think yer a fuckin knob-jockey. The only one who can make herself cry about ye is yer ma. If anyone else does any cryin, it’s because ye didn’t manage to do yerself in.”’

  I stared at him, astonished. ‘Are ye takin the piss?’ I asked, genuinely unable to tell.

  ‘Nope. I said all that to him, and more. But he just kept sittin there, just fuckin gawkin at me. I was gettin really angry with him at this point. I says to him, “Rez ye fuckin spa, ye should do both yerself and the whole fuckin world a big favour and give it another shot as soon as ye get the chance. It’d be a much better world without ye.”’

  Kearney laughed. I stared at him, still wondering whether he was making it up.

  ‘You’re fuckin sick, Kearney.’

  ‘Do ye reckon?’

  Suddenly I felt deflated. It was no use. Kearney stood there chuckling away beside me, sparking up a joint.

  He watched me for a while. Then he said, quietly, ‘I’m only buzzin with ye, Connelly. Yer so fuckin gullible. I made all that up. I didn’t even go in to see him yet. I’ve to go in tomorrow. I wouldn’t say any of that stuff to him. Do ye think I’m totally fuckin sick in the head? I wouldn’t say that stuff. He tried to kill himself. He’s me friend.’

  I stayed till the joint was finished, neither of us saying much. Then I climbed out of the industrial estate and went home.

  34 | Kearney

  He spent even more time in his attic bedroom. Sometimes his ma shrieked up at him and he would lie there, stoned, hearing her hateful noise, wanting to slice her face up till it looked like mince. After he had been back a few days she gave up trying to call him. No one bothered him any more.

  Rez and his suicide attempt was only a sideshow, a diversion. Kearney had other things on his mind. He had a plan now; he knew what he had to do.

  The idea had come to him in Boston, after the night Stu had called around. It had been suggested to him by a video they’d watched.

  Throughout his stay with Dwayne, Kearney had slept on the floor of the apartment, with only a pungent, multi-stained sheet between his body and the bare and dusty boards. His brother was one of eleven young Irishmen sharing the ghetto-zone flat for the summer, and space was at a premium: they slept three or four to a room, like refugees, laid out close enough to smell each others’ bodies and emissions, hear each others’ heat-fever gasps and moans. Th ere had been an infestation: cockroaches. By night they’d seemed to multiply, appearing in hordes to maraud with nocturnal arrogance, scuttling over every surface and over Kearney’s sticky, skinny limbs as he contorted and jerked in the throes of heat-insomnia. And it had been hot: maddeningly, feverishly hot. Kearney and the others could do nothing but endure this relentless heat alongside the hosts of glistening bugs that had occupied their crowded home.

  The night of the video, they were sitting in the dark room on cushionless armchairs and couches with springs sticking out of them, or on plastic stools or the grimy floorboards. All twelve of them huddled around the sickly flicker of a TV that, like every item of furniture in the apartment, had been dragged in from the street after anonymous neighbours dumped it as they fled this ghetto full of crackhead blacks and drunken young Irish.

  Stu came just after midnight. Dwayne stood up to greet him at the door with a hip-hop-style slapping handshake. He flicked the light switch and Kearney recoiled from the sudden glare. Stu, Dwayne had assured his younger brother, could not only get the best drugs in Boston, but was ‘heavily connected with some really hardcore motherfuckers’. (Dwayne had started using words like mother-fucker and asshole since coming to America.)

  Certainly, Stu’s hardcore credentials were confirmed that night; he was the one who brought along the video they watched, as well as the weed, coke and speed the lads had ordered from him.

  ‘Gedda loada this shit, man,’ Stu said, waving the video in the air as he stepped into the room and commanded the group’s complete attention. He wore a sleeveless basketball shirt and baggy jeans, with a faceful of stubble, peakless cap and eyebrow piercing – full hip-hop regalia, only he wasn’t black. He did look like the kind of person you wouldn’t want to fuck with, though.

  Lankily he sat on the edge of the least tattered armchair, dishing out little plastic bags of drugs as he said, ‘I got this video from a buddy in LA. I ain’t never seen shit like this, man. It’s real, ain’t no doubt. Fuckin heavy West Coast shit. You gonna see what I mean, dog. Here.’ He chucked the tape to Dwayne and ordered him to turn off the single, bare lightbulb and the shitty stereo. Dwayne complied, and Stu cut out a line of coke for everyone from his personal stash. ‘This one’s on me,’ he said.

  They snorted the coke and Stu said, ‘Shit, someone gonna roll a J?’ Kearney was thinking that Stu talked a bit like Fallen Henry the Titan.

  Dwayne got the video player going and retreated quietly to a spot on the floor, Stu having taken his place on the armchair.

  The cockroaches kept pouring into the room, big oily things with scuttling legs. Kearney watched them crawl over the feet and legs of the lads on the ground – no one even bothered crushing them any more. He felt a tingle on the back of his neck and flinched, brushing nervously at his collar. But there was nothing there, it was all in his mind.

  Kearney was stoned. Very stoned. This grass they smoked here, it was ferocious, completely unlike the stuff they got back home, which he now realized really was just ‘crap Dublin hash’; something he had long declared but without any real basis for comparison. As the stoned murmurings in the room died down and the spasms of static resolved themselves on-screen, Kearney reflected that this US skunk was as far advanced over Dublin hash as the Xbox was over the Amstrad he’d played as a kid. He liked this analogy, and hoped he’d remember to use it when he got back home to tell those queer little fuckers how clueless they were about life in general and dope in particular.

  But now the film was starting. It began conventionally enough, with two brawny, crewcut guys fucking a trashy, hard-faced slut. They fucked her in the arse and fisted her cunt at the same time. Then she played with her tits while one of them fucked her cunt and the other tongued her arsehole. Next she sucked them both off at once, then let one fuck her from behind while the other pulled himself off and sneered down at her. Eventually they both came in her face.

  Kearney was starting to wonder what all the fuss was about, why Stu would get so worked up about a fairly standard porno.

  But then, very rapidly, it all changed. Right after the pair of men had come, one of them punched the woman in the face. It was a hard, driving, downward punch, pounding her to the floor. Kearney flinched at it, tensing up all over – there was no way that could have been faked. And the woman clearly hadn’t expected it; now she was crying, shrieking, between panic and shock.

  The men slung her up from the doorframe, wrists bound by a black leather strap, the first of numerous macabre props that now started appearing on-screen in quick proliferation. The men worked quickly, looking tense and concentrated but managing to turn several times to the camera to flash conspiratorial grins.

  For the next twenty minutes Kearney watched the nameless woman being tortured and dismembered. Throughout, she emitted a prolonged, almost unbroken scream and, increasingly bloodied and mutilated, she remained conscious right up to the very end. Her face a gory pulp, teeth smashed in or ripped out, nipples sliced off and hair set on fire, the gapless scream – now more a shrill gurgling – was silenced when the man who had punched her at the beginning drove a screwdriver through her wide-opened eye, impaling her brain.

  The screen went black, then buzzed static.

  There was no other sound in the room.

  ‘Whaddaya think? Hardcore shit, huh,’ said Stu, still gazing into the dead television.

  There was a silence. The only things that moved were the cockroaches scuttling across the floor, and the static
on-screen. Then Dwayne said, ‘Yeah man, hardcore. Hardcore.’

  Mumbles and grunts of vague endorsement rose up around the darkened room like the yeas in a house of parliament; there were no nays.

  Kearney remained quiet, pensive. When the torturing had commenced, there was a moment when something in him had recoiled from it. Momentarily he’d wanted to stand up and walk out of the room, run down the stairs and out on the streets, jump into the Atlantic and let the ocean swallow him up.

  But he had looked around him as the film played on: a roomful of impassive faces, dull with interest, condoning through inaction. Kearney told himself that it made him fierce, edgy, strong; watching this stuff and, what’s more, liking it. And he did like it, in a hesitant way at first, but more and more as he willed himself to embrace the horror of what he was seeing.

  Then the quiver of protest in him died out, like the SOS of a forgotten submarine going down in cold, black waters.

  Very clearly, right before the woman on the screen died, it had come to him: he could do this. He could watch this stuff and enjoy it, and no one was going to stop him.

  The next day, the images from the snuff movie were still fresh and bloody, superimposing themselves over Kearney’s mundane American reality. That was when the idea surfaced. It was a logical progression, like that which he’d gone through after first watching porno: the viewing, then the wanting to do it for himself.

  The woman’s death fascinated him: it was the moment it happened, the precise instant when the life force – whatever it was that made the body move, speak, fear, think, know – when whatever it was that did all that, vanished, was snuffed out. It was there, and then it wasn’t. And when it wasn’t there, all you had was what the woman in the film had become at the end, when the screaming stopped: a heap of meat, an inert sack of mess that was something, but that wasn’t human. It fascinated Kearney. He needed to explore this. He needed to know how it felt.