Here Are the Young Men Read online

  We sat in the dimness of Kearney’s room, the shutter pulled, his shit techno like a coma-pulse on the stereo.

  Already we were on the third joint. I lay back into the beanbag, half closing my eyes. It was a weird feeling, being stoned off your head in the middle of the afternoon. There was no way back, you had to deal with it for the rest of the day. I would have to sit there and eat dinner with my ma and da later that evening, tense with concentration, trying hard not to look stoned.

  Through the haze of smoke I studied the strips of paper sellotaped randomly across the bedroom walls. It was the same sentence, over and over: ‘You will never defeat us, because you love life and we love death.’

  The quote came from some Al-Qaeda warrior. Kearney had talked about getting it done as a tattoo that ran up his bicep, with death on the neck, but he couldn’t afford it. We played Kill-Tech: Obliteration for a while, not talking much. Kearney was already an expert. The triangular hover-fighter responded deftly to every flick of his thumbs and fingers: launching missiles through narrow cracks, obliterating command posts, incinerating enemy personnel. I flew clumsily, bouncing off walls, narrowly avoiding collisions with huge, floating Battlehulks as Kearney pursued me – toyed with me – above an elegant future city.

  After some time I flung down my joypad and said: ‘Fuck this, let’s play something else.’

  He didn’t respond at first, still fused with the game, the screen. ‘Hah?’ he eventually said, turning around. I had stood up and walked to the window, pulling aside the curtain and looking out over grey suburban nothing. You could see the girls’ school across the road. Kearney had boasted before of how he liked to wank while looking out at the girls, even though it was a primary school and the oldest of them no more than eleven or twelve. I didn’t know if he was making it up.

  Kearney changed the techno CD for one that sounded exactly the same, then started rolling another joint.

  ‘Guess what?’ he said as he twisted the end of the finished spliff.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can ye keep a secret?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Don’t just say “yeah”. Can ye seriously keep a secret? If I tell ye this, ye can’t tell anyone, okay?’

  ‘What is it? Yeah, okay.’

  I took the spliff from Kearney, getting curious.

  He paused for dramatic effect. ‘I killed someone,’ he said.

  Stoned, I burst into laughter. ‘Fuck off,’ I said, ashing out the window. ‘Don’t give me that bollocks. Ye didn’t kill anyone. Who did ye kill?’

  ‘Seriously, I did, I killed someone.’ He grinned, dispelling any notion that he was offering a confession.

  ‘Okay, who did ye kill, then?’ I said, making it obvious I was only humouring him.

  ‘I murdered this old wino in town. Have ye ever seen the oul lad who sits in that lane in Temple Bar, just off Dame Street? Ye know, the one in behind the Hot Chick?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ I pictured the laneway, but not the tramp.

  ‘The oul lad in there, do ye know him? He’s always in the same spot, total wino, like.’

  ‘Yeah, I think I know the one ye mean,’ I said, stoned and lazy, to hurry things along. Town was full of alcos and tramps. How was I to know which one Kearney was on about?

  ‘Well, go into town then, and go down the lane to his place, ye know that doorway he always sits in. And tell me what ye find there. I’ll tell you what ye’ll find: fuck all.’

  ‘Yeah, deadly,’ I said. I wasn’t in the mood to indulge Kearney – the image of him riding an eager Jen kept intruding on my mind, more so as my stone deepened. I wanted to butcher him. I decided that I’d fuck Kearney up. I didn’t know how, but I would do it. Meanwhile, I said, ‘Fair play to ye, ye killed him. How did ye do it, then?’

  ‘Ye don’t believe me. But I did. I poisoned his drink. He’s not there any more. I’ve been in to check a few times. The fucker’s dead.’

  He sounded triumphant. I began to consider that, just possibly, he wasn’t making it up. ‘Wait, so tell me: you’re sayin ye went into town and put poison in this guy’s drink, and now he’s dead?’

  ‘No, I brought the drink in meself, with the poison already in it. Rat poison. I gave him a few cans first, to get his trust and make sure his judgment was cloudy, then I gave him the poisoned bottle of wine. Not that I had to do that: the fucker would’ve drunk a carton of AIDS piss if I’d told him there was a shot of whiskey mixed in.’

  ‘And then he died?’

  ‘I’m fairly sure he did, yeah. I didn’t stick around to see it happen, it would’ve been too dodgy. But he was gone the next day.’

  I said nothing. I puffed on the joint and watched him. ‘Jesus,’ I said, experimentally.

  Kearney laughed. ‘Now don’t say a fuckin thing, okay?’

  I kept looking at him. Suddenly I felt way too stoned.

  ‘I mean it. Don’t say a word. Jesus, it was some rush, though. Nobody’s goin to give a fuck. Who cares if some old wino is off the streets? People would be delighted if someone wiped out all the alcos and junkies and all the rest of them.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well I do know. At the very least, nobody gives a fuck. So I’m goin to do it again. I’m goin to kill a junkie.’

  I stared, amazed that this was the conversation we were having. I tried to read Kearney’s face for signs of a joke. I could decipher nothing. I said, ‘Are ye serious, Kearney?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m serious.’

  Abruptly, I shook my head. I exhaled smoke, waved a hand and said, ‘Cop on, Kearney. You’re talkin bollocks. Ye didn’t kill anyone. But leave it before ye really do go off and do something stupid.’

  The words sounded unnatural in my mouth, like they only belonged on telly or in films.

  ‘It’s a buzz like ye wouldn’t believe,’ said Kearney. ‘I’m telling ye. Ye don’t have to believe me. I’m goin to kill a junkie scumbag. They’re better off dead. They are dead. Dawn of the Dead, it’s like, when ye see them in town. I’m doin it in a few days, after I get the plan sorted out. Stall it in with me.’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Why not? Ye don’t have to do anything, just come along for the craic. Look, let me just show ye how easy it is. We don’t actually have to do anything. If ye think it’s goin too far, I’ll stop and that’ll be that. It’ll be more of a recon mission, just to show ye. Alright?’

  I wanted to say something, say no, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak. What was this magnetism Kearney had, this weird new power? I felt like I should go along with it, even if only to impress him. For some reason, that was important now. But also there was the excitement, the wanting to see how far it could go, how deranged it could get.

  While I was wavering, Kearney said again, ‘Stall it. I’m tellin ye, it’s only a bit of a buzz. Ye don’t have to do anything. We don’t actually have to, like, execute him. We can go right to the very edge and stop there, if ye want to stop there. I just want to show ye what it’s like. I’m tellin ye, the buzz is like nothing ye’ve done before.’

  We were silent for a few moments. Then I said, ‘Alright. Fair enough. I’ll stall it in. Just to see. I know you’re talkin rubbish, though.’

  Satisfied, Kearney turned back to Kill-Tech: Obliteration, picking up the joypad from the carpet. I looked out the window again, over at the darkening red-brick walls and fences of the girls’ school, and the rows of houses and chimneys behind it, sullen and identical.

  40 | Rez

  Problems with Reality: Rez is on Drugs and they’re Messing with his Head!

  In his rare moments of lucidity, Rez saw that the medication the doctors had put him on, the way it affected his outlook, was yet another falsity, an airbrush job on the true face of things.

  He liked how the drugs made him feel, though: warm, satisfied, oblivious. This must be what it’s like to be a junkie or a cow, he thought dozily, sitting at home bathed in the amiable glow of the TV, his mothe
r hovering ever-near, watching him even when it seemed she wasn’t. Or it was as if he was enlightened, like the Buddhist monks he read about, as if he had attained a state of pure acceptance of the world. The medication made everything benign, friendly; it rendered all the razor-blade thoughts that cut into Rez’s in-growing brain soft as butter. In fact, he didn’t think very much on the medication at all. He was content to sit there in the softly lit living room, passively hearing the anxious whispers and murmurs of his parents, sister and brother.

  Days passed. Rez convalesced, if that was what you could call his state of drug-zapped torpor. Nourishing meals were prepared for him at regular hours. Films were rented, books bought and a PlayStation 2 borrowed from one of Michael’s friends, all for Rez’s amusement. I should have done this sooner, he told himself during one of the intervals of clarity that briefly appeared, only to be swallowed up again by the dreamy water-world of Xanax and diazepam, annulling all sardonic thought, all humour in general. The medicated world was a humourless one, like a totalitarian state. But Rez didn’t mind; he accepted everything. Everybody’s happy nowadays, he thought wryly, when he was capable of wryness and bothered enough to think.

  Nothing happened. Time flowed on, the great lazy river. This, too, was fine with Rez, who, medication notwithstanding, remained convinced that the causes of his despair were fundamental and insurmountable. He kept this conviction to himself.

  ‘You’re not goin to do it again,’ his mother said.

  They were sitting at the kitchen table. A bowl of barely touched cream-of-vegetable soup steamed its heat away between Rez’s elbows. Rez didn’t know if he was being asked a question or given an order.

  She repeated, ‘You’re not goin to try it again.’

  Rez decided it was a question. ‘No,’ he answered; even such a succinct response cost him tremendous effort. He wanted to be extricated from this conversation, planted back down in front of the Enlightenment Box, left alone to bask in its stupid radiance.

  His mother was silent, looking probingly at him. He noted that there were lines around her eyes. Crow’s feet – he recalled that that was the name for them: the results of age and decay and therefore not Rez’s fault. She was in her pale-green dressing gown, makeup washed off. She seemed withered with anguish, helpless and perplexed. That was how she seemed. Rez was not taken in.

  Rez thought, No doubt she thinks she’s worried about me.

  Rez thought, No doubt she believes that she really cares about me.

  Rez knew better. He knew she was merely playing the part of someone who loved another person. It was a decent performance, he conceded, probably enough to move someone who bought into all that shit, someone more naive than him. It didn’t touch Rez. Love was not something that existed any more. Love was the dodo or the velociraptor or the Mayan civilization.

  His mother was crying now, sobbing and shaking her head, not knowing what to say. A fluttering something – pity, anguish – arose from inside Rez and floated for a moment in the space between them. It was faint, tremulous and delicate, and lasted only for a moment; then Rez snuffed out the sentiment and denied it had ever been there.

  With the flicker of feeling eliminated, the null state resumed. Rez was stable again.

  It was his pride that had rebelled: if his feelings weren’t his own, Rez didn’t want them. This left him very little indeed. It left him nothing but pain. Rez had once seen a piece of anarchist street art: a stark, scratchy drawing of a morose little girl against a blackened, polluted cityscape. The girl had looked into Rez’s eyes, her predicament given eloquence in a question scrawled at the bottom of the picture: ‘If I Cleaned Away All the Filth, Would There Be Anything Left?’

  Rez could relate.

  He repeated to his mother that he wouldn’t do it again. Then he planted himself in front of the telly and thought about nothing.

  41 | Matthew

  I called around to Kearney’s at eleven o’clock that Thursday morning, as he had instructed. It was yet another moody, overcast day, the last of July. It felt like the sun hadn’t been out in months. Jen had started trying to call me again, since the party at Grace’s, but there was no way I would so much as talk to her now. It was wrecked forever. Cocker had called me as well but I ignored him too. I decided I had no real friends. I might just save up for a while and go away, travel or live abroad or something, maybe drink myself to death in Mexico, like some French novel that Rez would read – I would cut this whole crowd out of my life. But first I wanted to see if this shit that Kearney said was true. Kearney was the worst of the lot, but at least he wasn’t a hypocrite.

  When I reached his house, Kearney opened the door before I rang and met me with an eager grin.

  ‘Ready to go?’ he said with a clap of the hands, like we were setting off on a camping trip.

  All the way into town, Kearney was in high spirits. He chattered away about games, porno, telly, drugs and drug dealers we both knew. I considered that maybe it was the excitement of what we were about to do that had him so worked up, and I grew uneasy. Over the past couple of days, I had more or less convinced myself that this was all just one of Kearney’s fantasies, entertaining but unreal, and I was going along with it as a kind of joke. Now, I wasn’t so sure.

  We got off the bus and walked across O’Connell Bridge to the north side of the river, turning on to the Liffey walkway and heading towards Liberty Hall. This was the part of town where junkies usually congregated the most. And sure enough, here they were. Scagged out of it in broad daylight, in dirty shell suits and baseball caps, the junkies clustered and whined. They smoked cigarettes, snarled and hissed amongst themselves, insulted passers-by who didn’t give them money. The women were doglike, ravaged things, teeth all crooked or not there at all. The men were nicotine-coloured skeletons with sunken eyes, dried up and lustreless. Maybe Kearney was right: everyone would be secretly delighted if the junkies, winos and knackers were wiped out.

  ‘These are no good,’ said Kearney, gesturing towards the clustered junkies. ‘They’re all together, we’d only get noticed. We have to find one that’s on its own.’

  We smoked cigarettes as we walked on, getting off the board-walk and crossing the street, heading down a foul-smelling laneway leading through to Abbey Street. There were a few winos in pairs but no junkies. We came to Abbey Street, sidetracked up O’Connell Street and turned in again, on to Talbot Street. A pair of gypsy types played a flute and fiddle by the James Joyce statue, with tourists and the idle clustered around to watch.

  ‘I’d kill every busker in Dublin as well if I had the chance,’ muttered Kearney as we passed.

  We turned down a quieter street, more rundown and away from the mid-week shoppers. A group of maybe twenty chattering Spanish teenagers approached. They passed us by and the street was all but empty. Graffitied shutters lined one side, bracketed by shady passages and doorways. On the other side a high metal fence closed off an area of overgrown wasteland, with the rubble of a collapsed wall half hidden among the weeds and grass.

  Up ahead, staggering along towards us, was the wiry, scruffy figure of what I immediately recognized to be a junkie, on his own. I could feel the excitement coming off Kearney, whose pace quickened as he said, ‘Here we go. This is our man.’

  The junkie slumped against the fence several times as we approached. He didn’t look up till we were standing right in front of him. For a moment I thought it was the junkie who had insulted us back on the night of the Primal Scream gig. But it was just some other anonymous smackhead.

  ‘Hello there,’ said Kearney.

  The junkie gazed at us with smacked-out indifference. He mumbled something and tried to walk on. Kearney put up his hand and stopped him.

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ he said.

  The junkie looked up again, managing a frown, wondering what the hell we wanted of him. He looked youngish, in his twenties or thirties, it was hard to tell. His face had the yellow sheen they always had, his colourless hair and sallow
skin merging into one coating of greasy lifelessness.

  ‘Wha?’ he said.

  ‘Wha?’ Kearney aped, as if he couldn’t disguise his loathing, or wasn’t bothered to.

  I stood slightly behind Kearney, to his side. He was staring at the junkie in what looked like concentration, not saying anything.

  I looked around. An old man was crossing the road further down, and behind him was a mother with an old-fashioned shopping trolley, cursing at her young daughter in a heavy inner-city accent. The sight of the people reassured me: Kearney had no plan – unless he was willing to murder someone in broad daylight and spend the next forty years in prison, there was no way he was going to kill this junkie, who was now whining at us.

  ‘Spare us some change for a hostel, lads. I swear I’ve been robbed, me bird robbed all me stuff and me money. Lads, a hostel, I swear.’ He whined with the shrill accent of all the city’s junkies.

  Kearney’s voice seemed to gush with sympathy: ‘Aw I’m really sorry, pal, but we don’t have any change. I gave me last five euro to a homeless fella around the corner. If I did have money I’d absolutely give it to ye, no doubt about it. I’d love to help ye, I really would, I know what it’s like.’

  Confused, but thinking he had probably found a true sap, some bleeding heart who would believe anything, the junkie pushed his luck.

  ‘Yer a star, bud, yer a fuckin genuine man. Listen bud, I’m really in a bad way, I swear man, it’s cos of me bird. I’m broke I am, I have a baby to feed and everythin, but how can I if I haven’t got any money? I swear to ye I amn’t a scabby cunt, I hate to have to ask ye this pal, but will ye go and get some money for me out of the bank machine? I swear bud, you’d be really doin me a big favour. God bless ye bud.’

  Kearney rubbed his chin as if seriously considering the junkie’s request. I said nothing.

  ‘I’d love to help ye like that, but I’m sorry to say it’s just impossible,’ said Kearney. ‘I’ve only got twenty quid in there and I really need it cos I promised I’d give it to the blind mongo babies in Africa. Ye know what I mean?’