Over Our Heads

Manhood

The pit lies open before me and Puppy as though ready to swallow the sun. Briars swell behind and around us, and the bank slopes away at our feet. The air here is heavy with the tang of dirt and animals. And down there, where once they quarried ballast for the trawlers, are the lime lines and the goalposts and the shipping containers used for changing-rooms. The team that threw Puppy off for fighting are getting stuffed by some shower from Raheny. He speaks his mind:

‘You’re a donkey, Damo!’

‘Big banana feet on you!’

‘I’ve seen milk turn quicker!’

This is the life, panned out on the warm grass with a can and the last of the smokes Puppy got from his Da last week. The Big Dog’s a trucker, comes home only twice a month.

‘Look,’ he says and hunches forward, ‘check it out.’

This right here is an excitable lad at the best of times, so it could be anything he’s pulling from the inside pocket of his jacket. Still, I’m surprised by what he shows me. Of course, I’ve seen johnnies before.

‘What are you carrying that around with you for?’

‘To show you, you virgin prick.’

I try to concentrate on the match below, but Puppy won’t be stopped.

‘You’d think Karen was a quiet one, yeah? Well, I’m here to tell you, son — the noises out of her? My Jesus! Like nothing on earth, she was.’ He scratches his eyebrow with the back of a thumb and pauses. ‘Listen here.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘But are you hearing?’

‘Despite myself.’

‘She has a mate.’

‘Has she, now?’

Damo Daley belts one over the bar from the corner and I surprise even myself with the force of the cheer I let out, so keen am I to show my passion for a sport I’ve never been bothered with.

‘The fuck,’ Puppy says, ‘is your problem?’

‘Nothing, just … Good point, yeah?’

‘Oh, stellar,’ he rolls his eyes. ‘Christ. Get your yoke working and talk to me, yeah? Boys in shorts and here’s you delighted.’

I finish my smoke, grind it into the back of an ant in the wrong place at the wrong time.

‘So,’ I say. ‘Who’s the friend, then?’

Puppy sniffs and clears his throat.

‘Eits.’

Eits. When we were nine years old and kiss-chasing, Eithne Killeen let everyone catch her. Twelve and playing spin the bottle, she let anyone use the tongue. Fourteen, she was suspended from school for wanking off Mark O’Leary in the boys’ jacks at lunchtime. Fifteen, she discovered vodka and ended every party by puking her ring in your living room. She smells like baby powder, bleaches the shite out of her hair, wears thick eyeliner and thin shirts you can see her nipples through. She lives two streets away. Our fathers were friends until Eits’ da died. When I was five and starting school she held my hand in the yard. I always nod ‘hello’ whenever I see her. But she scares the living shit out of me.

Friday night, Puppy has a free gaff. I knock over and he answers the door shirtless, sockless — glowing ginger head on him. He leads the way upstairs towards his bedroom, where he has his stereo set up and where we’re allowed to smoke out the window. But when we get to the landing, he pauses, holds a finger to his grinning lips and flings the door open.

‘Fuck sake!’ Karen says and grabs for the edge of the sheet.

I can’t really see anything good, but what I can see is almost better. A long slope of rib and side-tit. Dark hair hanging in her face.

‘Turn your fucking eyes, yeah?’ she says. ‘The both of yous.’

We study the Scarface poster on the wall, Pacino blasting an M16 in black and white and red. Puppy winks when he catches my eye.

‘Okay, right,’ Karen says. ‘Look, so.’

She wears black jeans and a tight black jumper with fraying sleeves hooked over her thumbs. Her feet are bare, her toenails purple. She pulls her knees to her chest and hugs them. Puppy sits beside her and starts chewing at her neck.

‘Karen? Boyo here needs the lowdown on Eits. I’ve told him she’s gagging, isn’t that right?’

‘Well —’

‘There you go,’ Puppy says. ‘You’re on a promise, there. She doesn’t lie to her friends.’

‘She’d love it if you did,’ Karen says.

‘If I what?’

‘If … you know. I think she likes you.’

‘If he threw her the good length!’ Puppy bounces on the mattress. ‘You brought the big knob, yeah?’

Karen smoothes a hank of hair at her ear and fumbles behind her for Puppy’s cigarettes. She lights one, looks at the floor.

The sign outside says Riders Niteclub. A chunky cowgirl sits astride the belly of the ‘d’. Her spurs graze the ‘e’s kicker. She licks her lips and waves her hat and winks. This is not a classy place.

By now we’ve all got a bit on us. Me: a shoulder I drained on the harbour road. Karen: just the few snifters of Bacardi she’s been sipping from a Coke bottle. Christ knows about Puppy: he’s sniffling like a lunatic, licking his lips and chewing his gums. I’m still waiting for results from the yoke he palmed me in the hall.

The bass rumbles low in my chest as I approach the door. Karen lives just around the corner and can get us in for free, but me and Puppy do the sober walk past the bouncers just in case. We leave our coats, get our hands stamped and head through padded doors into thumping techno and epileptic strobe light and throat-clawing dry ice and wet heat. Bodies are everywhere, their smells mixed in the air with the reek of Jägermeister and Red Bull and whiskey and beer and cider. We do quick shots and shove on to the dance floor where Puppy and Karen rub their crotches together. And I bob and weave and stretch and give it socks now because, looking at myself in the mirrored walls and realizing that I am suddenly in love with everyone and that no one could possibly hurt me, I’m coming up pretty strong.

After a while I go to the back bar to catch my breath. ‘Whiskey and Coke!’ I shout and the bartender nods like, Yes! Here finally is someone who orders a man’s beverage.

A girl looks up from a few feet away and raises a glass coloured with the same drink. I pull a stupid face to make her laugh and she turns to face me and pushes out her chest. I sidle up, yipped to bits and cool as a cucumber. And I’m off:

What’s your name? That’s a nice name, unusual, exotic. I had a fish called that once. Only buzzing. No, it’s nice. Beautiful, yeah? You from around here? Course you are. Why else’d you be in a shithole like this? Stop, sure I know. But it’s what we have to work with, right? You play the hand you’re dealt, yeah? So, do you go to school around here? Course not. What am I saying? I’d have noticed someone like you. Couldn’t miss someone as gorgeous as you. I’m serious! What? You think I’m messing? I’m not messing at all! I wouldn’t bullshit you. I’ll always tell you the truth. Here, you’re something else. Really, now, really. So what do you want to be when you grow up? Really, zoology? Never knew anyone who did that before. Animals and shit, yeah? That’s cool. I like animals myself — for dinner! Only messing. But that’s great, no seriously. It’s good you know what you want to do. Me? Just chilling. Like a villain on penicillin, what? Just weighing the options, you know yourself. Yeah. Nah, it’s grand. Sure, I’ll figure it out. Course I will. Here, here you’re gorgeous. You are gorgeous! Do you want to dance? Would you like to dance with me? Really? Deadly. I mean, all right if you want to. Whatever. Lead the way …

And down to the dance floor we go. She actually takes my hand to guide me through the throng so we won’t get separated. We squeeze into the half inch of available space there is behind some lanky streak with sharp elbows and some diddy little looker all giggles and bounce — the weirdest couple in the world. And we’re hopping and bopping to the loud fast music on the tight hot dance floor. And I’m trying really hard to hold it together, breathing carefully and riding the crests and the troughs and gumming the face off myself but making sure she doesn’t notice, when I catch Puppy’s eye and he gives me the wink and a big ‘Surprise!’ face and licks his lips and grabs two enormous handfuls of Karen’s arse.

I look back at my bird and reckon I might just be on to a winner, here. Blondie. Tall. One of those special ones who people give space to and smile at without really knowing why. And true to form there’s room clearing around her as she pops those hips and swings that hair and lets it fall wherever. And of course there’s pretenders — it’s the law of the jungle out here, boys! Lads sidle up and try it on, and I think I might be finished just for a second each time, but she shrugs them all off and turns back to me where I’m scissoring the air in front of me like a maniac — stacking shelves, making boxes, mop that floor, big-fish-little-fish — because I haven’t the foggiest notion of what else to do. Sweating like a bastard. Breathing like a train. Chemicals fizzing and popping in my veins …

And. Now. Suddenly. I’m on the floor with my ears ringing. I stagger to my feet and blink the spots away from my eyes. And there’s my girl, crisp in strobe-light stop-motion, arguing with some monster who can only be her boyfriend. Shaved head. Scarred knuckles. Tricolour tattoo.

She legs it off to the jacks crying — thanks a bunch! — and he comes over to lean his head against mine and shout and spit all over my face. Then he rears back and nuts me on the bridge of the nose. The room explodes around me. When I come to I’m being held up by two bouncers, then being flung through a doorway clear and slow. And now Puppy and Karen are beside me. She kneels down to rub my head and hold a tissue to my nose to stop the bleeding, and her hand feels nice and cold, her breath feels nice and warm, and I almost think I hear myself say ‘I love you’ but I can’t be sure because she doesn’t even flinch.

Puppy’s been on his phone all the way down the street telling the story. There’s drink in the house, he says, but not enough to go around.

‘But don’t worry,’ he tells me, ‘I’ve got you covered.’

He goes to the fridge and comes back with two cans and a bottle of some neon-yellow alcopop. And for a moment I realize I miss like hell the times when it was just the two cans, just the two of us.

‘Get that into you, Cynthia,’ he says.

The rest follow soon enough: some girls Karen knows from the convent, a few of the boys looking the worse for wear. Mark O’Leary is telling a joke about an octopus. Eits trails in last. Her heels are about seven storeys high and her clothes are tight in the right places. Puppy sits beside me.

‘All right, chief,’ he says, ‘Karen’s had a chat and it’s all good to go. This is the long and the short of it: you fucked it up with your one in the club, so this is all there is.’

‘I didn’t fuck it up,’ I say, ‘I was on a promise there if it wasn’t for — ’

‘You have to. You have to. Look, you’re a man. But you’re not. And you need to be.’

‘You’re an idiot.’

Puppy throws a glug of his drink down his throat. ‘But I’m a man, though.’

Eits and Mark are exchanging words. I manage to catch: ‘… just a little one. Two minutes. I’ve balls on me like fucking melons.’

‘Fuck off, you.’

‘Here,’ Mark says, ‘Puppy, throw us a can there, yeah? And a pint of seawater if you have it for this beast here beside me.’

Eits storms through the double doors to the sitting room.

‘Follow her,’ Puppy says, his smile toothy and wolfish.

From across the room, Karen nods.

Eits says, ‘Do you have a condom?’

One thing has led swiftly to another, and here we are. She’s down to her pants, her tits enormous and run all over with pale blue veins. I lie on my back with my shirt off and my jeans and boxers around my ankles. Her mouth tastes like cigarettes.

‘No,’ I tell her.

‘It’s okay. I do.’

She opens her bag and takes out a condom, unwraps the foil with ease and tries and fails to put it on me. One thought does the revolutions around my brain and won’t leave me in peace. I’m thinking that neither of us, by a long shot, is the other’s first choice.

‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You’re nervous?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And drunk?’

‘Very.’

‘And yipped?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Okay.’

Eits throws the condom across the room, takes another from her bag and lays it on the couch beside me.

‘Jesus, you’ve some stock.’

‘You never know,’ she shrugs. ‘Relax.’

And now her chin and her teeth are on my stomach. She must get a hair in her mouth because she sits up gagging and spits.

‘Sorry.’

‘No problem.’

She goes back. And I can feel her lips on me again. I think of the taste of her breath. I remember her looking after me in school.

‘It’s not worth it,’ she says.

I can hear them all out there in the kitchen. The hush when she enters. And the roars of laughter when the story is told.

I lie in the dark and try to read the titles of Puppy’s Ma’s CDs, try to ignore the thick smells of old cigarettes and dust rising from the couch. I listen to the others getting drunker, to things breaking. And then I listen to the murmur of someone talking sense into someone else. I listen to the last of the music, to the phone calls and the goodbyes. I hear Puppy race heavily up the stairs, hear Karen say:

‘I’ll be up in a minute.’

The door opens. I pretend to be asleep. Karen sits on the couch beside me and puts her hand in my hair.

‘I’m asleep.’

‘Good dreams?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I can imagine.’

‘Am I a laughing stock?’

‘Oh, fuck them. Don’t worry about it.’

I sit up. Karen doesn’t move. My arm brushes hers.

‘But I do worry about it.’

‘I know.’

‘Puppy doesn’t worry.’

‘No,’ she laughs. ‘He most definitely does not.’

She tosses her hair out of her face. Her eyes are massive and shining and she won’t lift them from me.

‘You don’t like me very much,’ she says, ‘do you?’

‘I like you.’

‘You think I’m changing him.’

‘I don’t.’

‘You think I’m stealing him.’

‘I did. I don’t.’

‘Are you skagging?’

‘A bit.’

‘How’s your head?’

‘I think I’ll live.’

She bends to kiss my forehead. And the way she smells is something I know I’ll always save just for me.

‘It’ll work out.’

‘Will it?’

I watch her walk backwards, the blades of street light from between the blinds carving her body into sections. I expect her to turn and leave but she doesn’t. She just stands there and watches me for a moment.

And then she comes back.