My ma had come back. ‘I’m not tellin ye again, Matthew,’ she said harshly. ‘Get on out there with them CVs and find something. There’s no shortage of jobs, you’ll have something by the end of the day if you want.’
What I wanted by the end of the day was to be drunk and stoned. To this end, I called Cocker.
‘Listen,’ I said when Cocker picked up, ‘I need to get away from the gaff for a while. Me ma’s houndin me to join the workforce. The only force I want to join is, like, Delta Force.’
‘Or Air Force One,’ said Cocker dreamily. ‘That’d be alright. What is Air Force One? Is it the plane, or all the planes?’
We arranged to meet in town and head to the beach. Cocker rang Rez and I rang Jen. No one rang Kearney.
We took the DART to Portmarnock, already two cans in apiece by the time we got off at the station and walked across the bridge, then out on to the beach. It had turned into a sunny day, a brief opening in the grey cloud-wall that had hidden the sky for months. There were a lot of people making the most of it before the sky-blue was swallowed up again. Pasty parents laid out mats and kept an anxious eye on their children, who waded into the sea like a generation of suicides. Every father, no matter how young, seemed to have a beer belly, and all the mothers had flabby, cellulite-lined legs. The men stripped off their GAA or English football jerseys. The women wore bathing suits of pink or idiot-yellow. In the hazy sunlit drunkenness I felt deflated by the scene.
‘All the happy families,’ said Cocker as we spread out a blanket and sat down.
‘Don’t ye think ye’d ever like children?’ asked Jen with a playful grin.
‘What, with you? You’re off yer head.’
‘No, not with me!’ she protested, taking the bait. ‘In general, I mean. I wouldn’t let you put your seed into me, Cocker. In your dreams.’
I looked at her. ‘In your dreams’ — did that mean Cocker and Jen hadn’t actually had sex the other night? The dejection brought on by the sight of the milky sunbathers disappeared and I perked up.
‘No, I don’t think I’d ever want to have kids. But who knows, ye know? What do ye reckon, Matthew, do ye see yerself as a da some day?’
‘No way.’
I meant it. Shrugging, I cracked open a can. ‘The thought depresses me. I don’t see myself livin that kind of life. It just doesn’t appeal to me. Once ye have kids, that’s everything fucked. Ye may as well give up on yerself at that point. And as far as I can see, that’s just what people do. They give up on themselves. They get these flabby bellies and start listenin to fuckin FM104 and they start to think that a visit to Atlantic Homecare on a Saturday is a great day out. Goin on about motor tax and fuckin wheelie bins. No way.’
Jen laughed. ‘Well, ye never know.’
‘I do know. I know very well. But what about you, Rez?’
Rez was staring at the sea, sipping his can. He turned to me, gazed for a few moments and said, ‘What?’ He was scarcely with us at all. His face looked grey, sagged with worry. A surge of vicious feeling — hatred for Rez, the desire to see him suffer — flared up in me, and then was washed away by the blur of drunkenness. ‘Children?’ he said eventually. ‘Jesus. The thoughts of it. I don’t even know if I want to be in a relationship any more, let alone have kids.’
‘Well don’t go tellin Julie that,’ said Jen with a smile.
We sat there and drank until our heads felt fogged and heavy in the high afternoon sun, and all was hilarity. The fact that everyone else was sober made us feel drunker, and we sneered and denounced the beach, the humans, the whole wide world. Cocker announced that he’d ‘gotten the goo’ on him and insisted we start doing shots of vodka, not that we needed any insisting.
When we had just downed our third shots, an inflatable ball plonked down into our midst, throwing a coating of sand over the fringe of our blanket. A little blonde girl trotted over, naked except for a vest. I looked at her, my head starting to spin. She reminded me of my sister Fiona when she was little, when I used to tell her stories in bed and feel big and strong, protecting her. I picked up the ball and smiled at the girl when she was beside us. She held out her hands with an impatient look, frustrated at every second spent away from her playmates. I held the ball out to her. She grabbed it and ran, shrieking with delight. It all made me feel sad.
‘I’m a bit fucked,’ I said. ‘I think I’ll take a swim.’
The water wasn’t too cold, or rather it probably was cold, but the drunkenness acted as a kind of wetsuit. I crashed into the foam, exhilarated by the sudden sensation, opening my eyes underwater to a silty murk.
I flapped around for a few minutes, lying on my back and floating as low waves washed over my face, dissolving on my eyes to leave the vacant blue sky and the bare sun high above me.
When I came out of the water, Jen was sitting alone on the blanket. Rez and Cocker had gone off somewhere. Jen watched me approach, shivering as I grabbed a towel to wrap around me.
‘Have fun?’ she said.
‘Yeah. You should get in. Fuckin hell, that’s sobered me up a bit. I need a drink.’
I sat down beside her, still shivering and pulling my towel tight around me. I wanted badly to lean against her, draw in her warmth. To my embarrassment, I noticed I was getting an erection. I tried to move my left leg in such a way as to hide it, but I thought she had noticed.
After a while she said, ‘So have ye worked out what ye want to do if ye don’t get the points to go to college?’
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘Get a job, I suppose. Which is actually what I’m supposed to be doin now, but, ye know … just something to keep me goin. I don’t want a career or any of that crap. There’s nothing here that I want to do. All I want to do is get drunk and hang around with me friends.’
‘Nothin here that ye want to do,’ she said. ‘That’s just how I feel. That’s exactly why I want to go away. There’s a lot going on out there, in the world. I mean, like, there has to be.’
‘Are ye really plannin to go away?’
‘Yep.’
‘But have ye worked out where ye want to go yet?’
She was gazing out at the sea. There seemed to be fewer people on the beach now. Clouds had stolen in from nowhere to swoop across the sun.
‘I don’t really care where I go. Just somewhere far away, somewhere different. There has to be more in the world than, than this.’ Leaning back on her elbows, she lifted her chin to indicate the beach, the Dubliners, the city.