Four cans later, Kearney looked at his watch. He didn’t actually have a watch, but he knew the tramp wouldn’t notice. Then he said, ‘Shit, I have to go in a minute. Late for business. Ye know how it is.’
He reached into the knapsack, fumbled for a moment, then pulled out the bottle of cheap red wine, which had its cork reinserted into the neck.
‘I suppose you could probably hang on to this. I don’t need it, there’ll be plenty of drink when I meet me mate later. Do ye want it?’
The detail about meeting the friend was superfluous, for the alco didn’t care about excuses, only booze, and he snatched the bottle of wine, clutching it to him like it might be taken away at any moment.
‘Remember the Alamo!’ Kearney called back with a cheery wave as he walked away. The tramp had already taken a couple of hefty swigs before Kearney reached the end of the lane, thrust his hands in his pockets and turned on to Dame Street, blending into the indifferent city-centre crowds. Heading towards Trinity College, he wondered how long it would take for the rat poison to snuff out the tramp’s filthy, hilarious life.
37 | Matthew
The Saturday after Rez came out of hospital, there was to be a house party at Grace Madden’s, on the northside. None of us would have been able to throw a party then — it wouldn’t have looked right — but Grace and her crowd didn’t really know Rez, so it was innocent. And we saw no great reason to sit at home and mope. Grace’s family was rich — compared to me and my friends’ families, at least. I never felt comfortable around Grace or her friends, with their Trinners accents and their smug banter. I didn’t care, though: I would go along to her party and get annihilated and who really gave a bollocks.
I knew Jen would be there. She and Grace had been friends for years. I considered calling her to say I’d be there too, but in the end I didn’t bother.
I met Cocker and Kearney in town beforehand. We bought cans, vodka and an excess of cigarettes and skins, then hopped on a DART at Pearse Street Station. The summer was past its best — a best that had never come — and it was already getting dark as the train rumbled out of the station in a choral tantrum of hisses and screeches. There weren’t many people on board, only a few oul ones with bags of shopping and teenagers silently looking out the window, taking in the grimy fringes of the city with wide, vacant eyes. Human beings have died out. There are only echoes left. They’re not real and neither are we. Most people were coming into rather than leaving the city centre as we were doing. Trainfuls of them hurtled past, a Saturday-night blitzkrieg on the vomit-splattered streets of Temple Bar and town. I cracked open the first can as we came to Fairview, cutting free of the centre, tracing the coast. I looked at the sea and remembered the abyss that Scag had shown me, and I knew that it was real, that the drugs and exhaustion had only made visible what was already there, what was still there.
‘Cheers, lads,’ said an excited Cocker, raising his can. ‘To Rez.’
I winced; he sounded so corny and sentimental. I knew Kearney would take the piss, and so he did, sneering and raising his can high in the air, with a look of mock-tragic feeling. ‘I knew him, Fellatio,’ he declared — the only Shakespeare quote he’d remembered from the whole school year, albeit in his own, modified way. He waved Cocker’s remark aside and said, ‘Look, let’s just forget about Rez for tonight, okay? We’ve been goin on about him all week, and he’s grand now, he’s out of hospital, that’s the end of it. Let’s just get fucked and have a laugh.’
For once I was inclined to agree with him. After he spoke, Kearney went quiet again, like there was something he was mulling over. I’d noticed it since meeting him at the station. He was distracted, broody. I wondered what was going on.
The train trundled ahead, past the now-empty beaches as the lights of the city came on in amber clusters to our side. ‘Here,’ said Cocker with a grin, pulling something from his pocket. ‘Look what I’ve brought.’
‘Poppers!’ I said, seeing the little brown glass bottle. Any high was welcome tonight, even more than on other nights.
‘Shhh,’ he warned. ‘Some oul one will give us grief. Who’s first?’
Kearney went first. He passed me the bottle and I sniffed deeply, letting the brain-zapping vapours obliterate pressure, thought, tension.
The lights were on in every room as we approached the large, coastal house, and music spilled out the doorways and windows, on to the street, disturbing the peace. Neighbours would be knocking to complain; police might even be called. Despite the drinking we’d done I was in a black humour and almost wished I’d stayed home. I hated everyone.
Grace Madden answered the door. She threw her arms up in the air, smiling broadly, and said with an exaggerated cheeriness that irritated me, ‘Oh hi! You’re all here. I’m so glad you’ve come.’
She insisted on hugging each of us, though I was hardly what you’d call a close friend. She wore a shimmering silver dress that pushed her breasts up; I saw Kearney looking down it when he leaned in to receive her hug. His eyes narrowed with predatory lust; alligator eyes.
There were a lot of people at the party. Some lads from school; Aido the Death Metaller, for some reason, and a gawky, Trenchcoat Mafia friend of his I’d never spoken to. I thought his name was Jonathan. The two of them sat under a cloud of gothic doom, drinking cans and ignoring everyone, even each other.
I didn’t know most of the people in the sitting room. They all had these D4 accents and they shouted and laughed loudly, some of them sprawling over beanbags strewn across the floor. Smoke hung in the air but it was bright in the room, the orange wallpaper and bulbous lamp warming everything. A group squatting on the floor were talking about the big rave that was set to take place in a couple of weeks, on the night of the lunar eclipse. It sounded like it was going to be a fairly big deal.
‘We should put our cans in the fridge,’ said Cocker as I was listening in.
‘Here, give us them, I’ll do it,’ I said.
Jen was standing there when I stepped into the kitchen. Her back was against the counter and she was talking to a guy I didn’t know. The first thing I thought was how pretty she looked. I felt like turning around, leaving the house and going home. It was going to be too painful to be here with her, and not able to touch or kiss her. But maybe I could talk to her, see if everything wasn’t completely wrecked between us.
‘Oh, hi,’ she said, coldly, when she saw me.
‘Hi,’ I replied. But she had already turned away, back to the guy she was chatting with, breezy and cheerful as anything. So much for trying to fix things. I flung the cans in the fridge and walked out, cursing to myself and resolving not to say a word to her, not even to look at her, all night.
In the green-carpeted room between the kitchen and sitting room Kearney had already found the games and was absorbed in Manhunt, breaking out of his trance only to swig from his can and accept a joint. Cocker came in and sat with me on the couch. We drank our cans and talked, but my attention wasn’t on what either of us said; I was wondering where Jen was, who she was talking to, what she was doing at every moment. I watched the girls that came and went, giggling and calling back over their shoulders. Mostly they ignored me.
Jen entered the room. She smiled at Cocker, who beamed up at her and asked her how she was. She ignored me.
After her pleasantries with Cocker, Jen sat down on the floor beside Kearney. What the fuck was this all about? She was talking to him, smiling, looking at his face while he hammered on the joypad. Kearney seemed confused, suspicious of why Jen was lavishing her attention on him. I simmered with hate. It was like she was trying her best to hurt me. She was laughing at Kearney’s jokes; he was making her laugh. Sickened, I remembered something he had said once, while we were smoking with Rez in the industrial estate: making a girl laugh, he’d said, is a symbolic way of making her come. You started by making her laugh — or by dancing with her, that was symbolic too — and it went from that to fucking. If you could make a girl laugh, he’d said, you could be fairly sure she was going to gush for you when you got her clothes off.