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.