Young Skins by Colin Barrett

wanted an excuse I could say he was the type that asked for it, or didn’t know how not to ask for it. Slap him in the face nine times and he’d come right back for number ten.’
    There’s a silence. Luke turns out from the bar, angles a sidling look at Tain.
    ‘What age are you?’ Luke says.
    ‘Eighteen.’
    ‘You with Bat?’ he says, and flicks a brutal gesture with one hand.
    Tain colours. ‘It’s . . . it’s nothing like that.’
    ‘Well,’ Luke drawls, ‘we could go somewhere and have you just sit on my face for an hour?’
    ‘What the fuck,’ Tain blurts, then bursts out laughing.
    Minion cackles.
    ‘Just a suggestion,’ he says and offers a trivially unfussed shrug of the shoulder.
    Tain looks towards Heg’s party. The dark beauty has collapsed in a despicably graceful heap on Rob, who can’t help but look like the smuggest prick in the world.
    ‘That fella then, is it?’ Minion said.
    ‘Huh,’ Tain says.
    ‘That curly-headed faggot with the ride welded to him. He’s what has you doleful. I can see.’
    He has his hand now on her thigh, up under the hem and on the bare flesh.
    ‘If it helps, this’ll be nothing other than meaningless,’ he says.
    So when Bat emerges from the jacks he stomps back towards Tain and this is what he sees; Minion, wrapped round her, mouth on hers. She’s rolling her shoulders in tandem to Minion’s impassioned flinchings, though there’s something mechanistic and barely controlled in her reciprocation. It looks coercive, Bat thinks sadly, but with a kind of concluding satisfaction. Tonight was a mistake, emphatically so, and this display of frankly felonious lechery is a fitting cap. Bat waggles the big stupid shovels of his hands.
    Last words present themselves.
    He could say: Bye Heg, thanks for nothing, hope you and your fucking college buddies got a good laugh out of tonight.
    He could say: Why Tain, why be that fucking pathetic, you’re cleverer than that, and you’re cleverer than Heg too.
    But he’ll say nothing, of course. His jaw throbs. It throbs with nothing. All he wants is a drink, but he can get that at home.
    Bat puts the head down, hair enfolding him like a screen, and leaves the humans to the humans.
    In the lane where his bike is parked Bat runs a hand round the inside of the helmet to make sure no kids have pissed in it or stuck it with chewing gum. The helmet’s grotty foam lining slips tight as a callipers round his head. Ignition and Bat takes a moment to listen: the engine’s rumble, overlapping with its own echo, crashes like surf back off the lane’s narrow walls.
    On the way home he zips by the Maxol station and for the fuck of it he does a lap of the premises. He slows to a stop out back. In the scanty, grained moonlight and with his iffy sight he can still just about decipher the trio of painted rabbits on the wall. He thinks of the stoic mania of their botched gazes and it is unnerving, now, to consider them presiding over the bleak emptiness of the lot, night after night after night.
    Bat realises he is silently mouthing Tain’s name over and over.
    At home the old dear is in the dark, in the sitting room, TV light the only illumination. In repose, half asleep, her face looks embalmed. It is not a restful expression. She has a wool blanket clutched up to her throat.
    ‘I can smell you from the hallway,’ she says.
    ‘Thanks, Ma,’ Bat says. In the kitchen he pulls a six-pack from the fridge.
    He cracks one open, wolfs it down. Around him Bat can hear the incessant creaking of the house fixtures, like a field of ice coming apart in increments. A draught runs from several accesses and converges in the kitchen, frigidly whistling by Bat’s ear. He hears the fretful scrawlings of rats behind the walls, under the pipes. . . .
    ‘How was the town?’ the old dear asks.
    ‘Fine,’ Bat groans.
    ‘I bet it was.’
    ‘Who’d you see?’
    ‘Luke Minion. Couple of work folk. Hegardy, the Moonan girl. Saw Peter Donnelly’s