‘Eileen saw you, David. So she must be being irrational too.’
‘Eileen – listen, we both know Eileen is a deeply disturbed person, a deeply unwell person with serious personal issues –’
‘She saw you, David, she saw you having dinner with a teenaged girl. A teenaged girl! Not much older than Carl!’
‘Would you like to know who that was, Lucia? Would you like to stop screaming for five seconds so I can tell you who that was? That was my fucking tennis coach.’
‘Oh, I see, was she helping you with your serve, in the restaurant? Were you having a few rallies together, sitting there in the fucking Four Seasons, you and your whore?’
In his room Carl turns up the stereo. He looks down at the book on the table. The economic success of the Netherlands was due in part to the man-made geographical structure called the _________.
Behind the right-hand speaker are he doesn’t know how many fives and tens and twenties. Behind the left-hand speaker are fireworks. Barry can’t keep them in his house because his mom searches his room. The last few days are like the part of the movie where the talking stops and over the music you see the money rolling in and the gangsters making deals and buying limos and doing coke. The kids are mad for fireworks, no matter how many Carl and Barry bring down to the mud-piles, it’s never enough. Every day there are more kids with their prescriptions, some of them aren’t even from Seabrook. Meanwhile, like in a mirror, the same thing is happening with the St Brigid’s girls. The first five told other girls, who told other girls, and now there are so many girls looking for pills that Carl and Barry have to split up.
So they go back and forth from the mud-piles to the girls, turning fireworks into pills and pills into money, so much money. Barry has already bought a new pair of Nikes (Vendettas) and a digital camera. Now he is talking about a scooter, he thinks he and Carl should buy matching Vespas, silver ones. He wonders if they should invest in just a little bit of coke, just to see if it sold. Now that we’ve developed a customer base, he says to Carl, that’s the hardest part of any business.
Carl is glad Barry is happy and trusts Carl again. But sometimes he gets worried. He keeps thinking of the scene in the movie where the gangsters get machine-gunned by the other gang.
What other gang? Barry says. Those fucking knackers that deal in the park?
Carl and Barry always buy their gear from these knackers in the park. Near the laneway to the train station there is a bench where one of them will always be. They wear tracksuits and have tattoos on their hands and one night last year they beat up Casey Ellington when he went to buy hash just because they didn’t like the look of him, so bad he had to get his jaw wired. On Thursday the one with the greasy hair said, Youse lads are buyin a fair amount of coke these days.
Carl didn’t say anything. Barry told him it was for mid-term break.
Don’t be a bender, Barry says to Carl now. How would those scumbags even know about us?
He puts his arm around Carl. Look, he says, what we have here is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. All of these individual events have come together, and we are in the exact perfect place to take advantage of them. It’s Hallowe’en, the kids want fireworks. There’s a school dance with St Brigid’s and all the girls are freaking out about fitting into their costumes. It’s like a slot-machine ready to pay out, see? And we’re the guys with the coin, Carl. We just happened to be in the right place at the right time. So we collect the money.
Carl has never been in the right place at the right time before. Maybe that is why it feels weird.
I’m not saying we have to do it for ever, Barry says. But we should keep going until the Hop at least. We’d be crazy to stop before then. Anyway, you wouldn’t want to lose your favourite little customer, would you?
Lollipop-Lips has bought pills from Carl every night this week. He doesn’t meet her with the others, not since that first time behind Ed’s. Instead she will text him and say she wants to meet up in an hour and he will head out with the pills. Or sometimes she doesn’t text him, he just goes out and finds her. There are not that many places to go, if you are not in Ed’s or one of the malls you are probably in the Leisureplex or LA Nites or hanging around outside Texaco. When she sees him she will smile secretly, like she has magically brought him there. Then they go somewhere quiet and measure out the pills.
This slut so hungry for cock she must apease her cunt with the fist!
Barry says if she was paying money for all the pills she takes he and Carl would both be millionaires. I don’t know how she gets through them so quick, he says, it’s not like she was even fat in the first place. He keeps asking Carl if he has fucked her. She must be fucking you ten times a day for that many pills! Ha ha, Carl laughs. But she won’t fuck him. She will only give him handjobs and let him feel her tits. Sometimes he tells her, you fuck me or else you pay cash like everyone else. But she just laughs and takes his hand and slips it under her shirt. In the cold damp leaves behind Ed’s, her body a tiny pocket of heat, her breath in his ear, the tips of her black hair tickling his neck, he forgets everything else.
In his room he turns up the stereo, unzips his trousers. Here on the screen is a little world of a black-haired girl on the stairs in a house. There are about twenty pictures to tell the story, which is, she takes off her top, she lifts her skirt to show her stockings and black see-through knickers, she unbuttons her shirt and slides the skirt up over her thighs –
Last night in LA Nites he met her with Crinkly-Hair and their friend the fat girl and the two of them went into the alcove beside the cigarette machine. He had his hand on her tummy with his fingertips just under the waistband of her jeans, he was slipping them downwards so slowly she didn’t seem to notice, he thought his boner was going to rip right through his trousers like the Incredible Hulk, down and down, was she going to let him? but then she said, Let’s go for a walk.
Maybe she wanted to go somewhere quieter to have sex he thought so he said okay. They walked along the dual carriageway under the orange lights. Cars shocked past them or waited behind the traffic lights growling smoke from under their wheels. Show me where you live, she said. He led her down the dark straight avenue. The ends of rain dripped from the trees. Dad’s Jag was back pulled up outside his house. Maybe there would be some way to get her inside without his parents seeing her. Or maybe Dad would just let him bring her in to fuck her. Do you want to go inside? he said. It’s okay, she said. He didn’t know if she meant yes or no but when he moved for the door and she did not he knew she meant no. Why not? he said. She didn’t say anything. Then he said, I will give you this whole tube of pills if you fuck me. She just looked at him. It was a week’s supply at least. Even a blowjob, he said.
The girl on the stairs pushes her tit up and bends her head down to lick her nipple. Carl’s balls are boiling, his cock is rock-hard, he would almost get up and stick it through the computer screen!
Instead they went to Ed’s. She wanted to go inside but he could not because he is barred. So he brought her around the back and showed her how to climb from the ledge of the skip up the drainpipe and onto the roof. The material of the rooftop is rough under your fingers, rippled like frozen waves, in the night in the pink light of the sign the flat grey rectangle looks like skin. There are empty beer cans, a johnny, a copybook someone threw up here with homework smeared into nothing by rain. She was looking up at the windows of the Tower. Who lives in there? she asked. Faggots, he said. Boarders. It looks like it’s from a fairy-tale, she said. Then she said, are you going to the Hallowe’en Hop?