‘A suicide pact,’ Shaved-Head announces, ‘for two little Seabrook queers who can’t take it any more. I don’t think the cops will be too surprised. They’ll just be glad it’s two less faggots.’
Spots has made the blue rope into a noose. Now he puts it over Barry’s head. Barry is just staring into space, it’s like he is watching something horrible happening somewhere far away that none of the others can see yet – but then, as Shaved-Head calls, ‘Do it!’ and Spots steps behind him he wakes up again – making the noise, his body shaking so hard it looks like he might shake to pieces, his eyes full of panic and tears flinging themselves at Carl and clutching at him, begging him to do something – but what is Carl supposed to do? When all of this was Barry’s great idea? Barry who knows all the answers, who thinks he is so smart? Who tricked Carl into coming down here so he could die here too? Suddenly Carl’s body floods with anger, and inside although a part of him is going Oh fuck another part is thinking Die –
‘Wait!’ Bad-Teeth calls sharply. Spots stops with his hands right at Barry’s shoulders. Bad-Teeth runs over and pulls down Barry’s pants. Everyone laughs at Barry’s wang, shrivelled white and pea-like and squirting floods of yellow piss. They laugh and laugh, the knackers, the trees, the garbage, the black and steel skips behind the Doughnut House, the people inside eating their doughnuts, the boarders in the Tower, the sky overhead, and Carl laughs too, or maybe he cries, it could be he is crying, it’s impossible to tell, and now Spots runs forward with his hands stretched out –
And Barry goes tumbling to the ground.
Carl doesn’t know what’s going on. Then he understands. The rope wasn’t tied to anything. The knackers are laughing their heads off. Ha ha, the face on him, a-ha-ha-haaaa…
Barry is on his hands and knees. ‘Take that thing off him before he fuckin strangles himself,’ Shaved-Head says. Bad-Teeth goes over to him and lifts the rope over Barry’s head. Barry tries to get up, but gets caught in his trousers and falls flat on his face again. The knackers are rolling around the ground with tears on their cheeks. At last, Shaved-Head stops laughing enough to say, ‘Ah here, Deano, give ’em a fuckin can.’
Bad-Teeth takes a couple of cans out his bag and throws one to Carl and one into the bushes where Barry sits pulling his trousers up and crying. ‘You thought you were goin to die!’ Spots hoots. After a second Carl starts to see the funny side too. When he hears Carl, Barry comes out of the bushes, now he is laughing as well, a little bit, everyone is laughing, except for Greasy-Hair who is more sort of staring at Carl and Barry and smiling in this wolfy way.
‘No hard feelings,’ Shaved-Head says. He sticks out his hand to Barry. Barry shakes it and then Carl does. ‘We wouldn’t kill two good customers like youse,’ Shaved Head says. ‘Bit fuckin cheeky, though, dealin on someone else’s patch.’
‘Sorry,’ Barry said.
‘You were fuckin clever bastards, though, comin up with a nice little earner like that. Shame to let the whole fuckin thing go tits-up.’
Everyone is sitting down now on the circle of black burned ground. Bad-Teeth has skinned up a joint, it’s superskunk or something, just the smell is enough to get you destroyed. ‘You never sold us this stuff,’ Barry says.
‘Always keep the best shit for yourself,’ Bad-Teeth grins. His mouth is like a car crash.
Then it could be a minute later or it could be an hour. Carl and Barry are both wrecked. The sky is spinning all around them, the ground is sucking them down like it’s full of magnets. Bad-Teeth leans on his elbow, chuckling, playing with the dirt. Shaved-Head and Spots lie on their backs like someone tipped them over. Now Barry starts to move. Spinning in front of him he tells Carl he has to go home. ‘Hang on’ – Carl crawls about to find a direction that leads upwards. The ground is throwing itself around, it’s like being on a ship.
‘See you lads,’ Barry says to the knackers.
‘Cheers, amigos,’ Spots says. ‘Talk to you.’
Carl and Barry lurch over the bumpy ground, tripping over cans and springs and glass, they giggle because it is taking them so long to get anywhere. Then something hard hits them from behind and they fall to the ground.
Hands grab them and turn them on their backs. Greasy-Hair’s breath that smells of shit is in their faces and through stars Carl sees Shaved-Head standing over them with his smile gone and a long metal bar in his hand. ‘Sorry, lads,’ Spots says. ‘But we do still have to punish you.’ Greasy-Hair rolls up Barry’s shirtsleeve over his white arm.
‘It’s just business,’ Shaved-Head says. He swings the bar back over his head.
Beneath the scream the snap of Barry’s arm is one short flat crack like breaking a Kit-Kat in two. When Bad-Teeth and Greasy-Hair climb off him he lies there twitching like a fish taken out of its bowl.
Then it’s Carl’s turn. He tries to push them away, but he’s too monged. They pin him down, the bar lifts –
But it doesn’t come down. After a bit Carl opens his eyes. The four knackers are all staring at Carl’s arm. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ Spots says. ‘This cunt’s a fuckin mentalist.’
It’s November.
The laneway down to the side-gate is slick with fallen leaves, beaten flat and sodden with rain and grit; it’s no longer so much fun to have them wedged down your jumper or, indeed, covering your sheets when you turn back the duvet in your dorm. Everything smells of decay, although the frost in the morning hides this nearly till noon, when the watery sun reaches its feeble peak.
The boarders begin trickling back Saturday morning, and on Monday classes resume for all. Initially, the dejection of return is partly offset by the excitement of reunion. A single week in the Outside – that tilt-a-whirl of flux and adventure! – provides more stories than a whole term in this dump where time stands still. People have chugged a lot of beers and gotten really, really drunk. They have accidentally or deliberately set fire to things. They have visited Disneyworld, they have been bitten by dogs, they have watched 18-cert movies. There have been tonsillectomies, orthodontal work, sexual awakenings, haircuts. Vaughan Brady has had his ears bandaged after getting his head stuck in railings attempting to reach a five-euro note; Patrick ‘Da Knowledge’ Noonan comes back from Malta with a mahogany-like tan with which he almost passes for black, much to the dismay of Eoin ‘MC Sexecutioner’ Flynn, around whom Patrick has taken to making pointed remarks about ‘the Man’ and ‘Whitey’.
With each passing second, though, the school’s morbid gravity reasserts its controclass="underline" the old familiar inertia sets in, and soon encounters with the world outside have become little more than dim dreams, wild jumbles of shapes and colours quickly fading like Patrick Noonan’s tan, until by the end of the first day’s classes, it’s as if the boys have never been away at all.
‘It’s as if we’ve never been away, except worse,’ Dennis amends, stretched out in the attitude of a corpse on Ruprecht’s bed. At the window it’s already getting dark; the clocks have gone back, and from now until Christmas the slim supply of sunshine available to them will dwindle daily to a sliver.
‘Ha ha! I have got you now, little treasure-stealing leprechaun,’ emits Mario, gathered over a tiny, futuristic-looking phone.
‘I wish I was dead.’ Dennis is in especially bad form after a week in Athlone being dragged to novenas by his stepmother. ‘I wonder why I don’t die. It’s not like I have any reason to live.’ He settles back and closes his eyes. ‘Maybe if I just lie here quietly enough, I can just… stop… being… alive…’