‘Well, we’ll see,’ said Nicky, playfully. ‘But we want to go out in Dublin, what can you recommend?’
‘Well girls, the thing is, I thought I had me ATM card with me, but now it seems I’ve left it back at me gaff. But if yis wouldn’t mind buying me another couple of pints, I’d be more than happy to show youse ladies a good night.’
‘And you, Matthew? I imagine you’ve got no ATM card either?’
‘No, I’m afraid not,’ I said. I had bought one round, but decided to keep quiet about the twenty quid still in my pocket. I was playing it like Scag.
‘Well, we don’t mind buying you a few more drinks, do we, Nicky?’
We went to a dingy, heaving club off Thomas Street that I’d never seen before. Scag said he knew the DJ and he could get us in for free; surprisingly, this turned out to be true. The bouncer asked me for ID, but Scag and the girls acted outraged and he let it pass. Inside the club, there were four different rooms, each with its own DJ. There was techno of various kinds, and trippy, mellow electro stuff, and in one room, this brutal noise-music, like pneumatic drills and chainsaws, all fucked up. I thought of King of Pop, wondering what Rez was doing. There was no point calling him. He rarely came out these days. Besides, every time I met him now I’d come away feeling drained, hollowed out, lethargic. In a different way than Kearney, Rez sucked the life out of you. He was a vampire.
‘Girls, listen, I see an old mate of mine over there. If yis like, I can get some yokes off him. They’re always amazin from him, and he’ll give me them for dead cheap as well cos I’m a pal. What do yis reckon?’
‘Yokes?’ said Nicky.
‘Pills. Ecstasy. Yips. Fuckin disco biscuits.’
‘Ah! Okay. Go and ask him, I’ll give you the money in a moment.’
The girls danced while I stood at the side of the floor, drinking my pint and feeling awkward. Scag went and talked to his friend, a wiry, paranoid-looking guy in a black Autechre T-shirt. Older guys than me confidently manoeuvred themselves closer to the girls, who laughed and threw back their heads, encircled by admirers, enjoying the attention.
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.