Cocker watched as I took out my phone. I dialled the number.
Half an hour later, having arranged to pick up the E in a couple of days, and then gone and bought a litre of cheap vodka, we left the leafy little suburb with the posh oul ones, walked back to the seafront, and sat on the pier. It was still deserted, windswept. A big fat rat scuttled up from the rocks down the side of the pier and vanished down a black crack. I imagined all the rats having some kind of meeting down there, like in a cartoon. In my mind all the rats spoke in Cockney gangster accents.
Cocker opened the bottle and poured a shot into the lid. He drained it and grimaced. Then I did the same.
We were running along the beach, roaring and waving our hands in the air. There was no one else around, but we wouldn’t have cared if there had been. I felt free, blissful. Anger flooded my nerves and limbs like the Rapture. I looked towards the city, blurry and overheated in pale afternoon drunkenness. That city, it was full of cunts. I stopped running and planted my feet apart and raised my two middle fingers towards the low coastal skyline.
‘CUNTS!’ I roared.
Later we took the DART the rest of the way to Killiney. I was on a great buzz and I thought Cocker was too. But when there was only one stop to go, he fell quiet, closed his eyes and leaned forward. ‘Hang on, Cocker,’ I said. ‘We’re almost there. Seriously, just hold on another couple of seconds …’
We were moments away from the station when he puked across the floor. People turned to look. I hid my eyes but my shoulders were shaking with giggles. There weren’t too many people in the carriage, but one oul one was sitting on her own in the back seat. She saw Cocker puking but then she fixed her gaze straight ahead, looking all serious and dignified. She pretended nothing was happening; no doubt she thought we were a threat, a violent urban menace. ‘Cocker ye nutcase,’ I said through the laughter as we stumbled off the train. ‘You’re such a fuckin lightweight.’ Cocker still heaved with nausea, but already he was seeing the funny side.
Out on Killiney beach we could see Rez and Kearney near the edge of the sea. I whistled to them and waved but Kearney didn’t notice because he was pacing about, waving his arms, in the middle of one of his rants. Rez was looking at the sea, with his sunglasses on and an inward expression, like he was only half listening. He was always like that, these days. When he heard my whistle he turned and smiled, absently.
I could hear what Kearney was saying as we came up behind him: ‘Ye have to start shootin loads of Proddy fuckers in the street in front of their families and everything. Then ye have to plant bombs in shoppin centres and all, and shoot yer way out if the RUC get wind of ye. And when yer comin up to the end of the game, it switches over to England, ye have to start takin the war to the Brits, like fuckin bombin pubs and trams and all that. The RUC have started torturin and decapitatin Catholics on the six o’clock news on the BBC and all, so it fuckin … deviates from history a little bit. And the last mission, listen to this, the last fuckin mission is ye have to assassinate the queen. And fuckin Prince Charles and the young princes as well. It’s a sniper-and-bomber co-ordinated job, ye have to —’
Rez was making a here-we-go-again face for me and Cocker. Now he turned and said, ‘But are ye takin the piss, Kearney?’
Kearney frowned. Only now did he notice me and Cocker. ‘No. What do ye mean?’ he said.
‘They made a game about the IRA? And ye have to plant bombs in shoppin centres and kill the fuckin queen? Are ye jokin or what?’
‘No. Jesus, Rez, were ye even listenin? It’s not a real game, this is a game that I want to invent. Provos! it’s called. Were ye even fuckin listenin?’
I laughed.
‘It’ll be a great fuckin game,’ Kearney went on, flashing me his alligator grin. He turned back to Rez. ‘But come on and make us another one of those spliffs. We deserve it after all those exams. The amount of study we put in!’
We laughed at that.
We finished the vodka and then Rez took another bottle from his tattered, heavily grafittied schoolbag. When Cocker and Kearney were off howling at these two girls who were walking past, Rez took a swig, passed me the bottle and said, ‘Did ye notice it?’
‘What?’ I said.
‘Kearney’s accent. Like I was sayin to ye before. Have ye not noticed? It’s not like a real accent any more. It’s like a caricature of an accent, like he’s doin an impression of someone doin an impression of an Irish accent. Someone from fuckin Sweden.’
I grinned and wiped my lips with my hand. ‘I don’t know. He still just sounds like Kearney to me. You’re just smokin too much. You’re such a weirdo, Rez.’
I was about to ask him how he’d done in the final exam, but my phone beeped in my pocket. I took it out and read the message. It was from Jen: ‘Hi am on the way. Hope u did well, c u in 10 xx.’
I wondered if she’d sent it to all the lads. I looked around; none of them were taking out their phones. She had only sent it to me. I put the phone away.
On his hunkers in the sand, looking out at the waves, Rez lit a cigarette. Then he swigged on the vodka and swung the bottle in front of him, tracing the horizon. ‘I love it out here. Seriously. That’s the best thing about Dublin, you’re never that far from the sea. All exiles are drawn to the sea — I read that somewhere.’
I watched Kearney in the distance. Cocker had come lurching over, cheerful again after the vomiting. ‘Yer always readin books, Rez,’ he said. ‘Yer mad, ye are. Who ever learned anything from a book?’
‘That’s a good point, Cocker. I’ll have to rethink my whole entire outlook on things, now that you’ve told me that,’ said Rez.
‘But this thing about the sea, it doesn’t work for us,’ I said. ‘How can we be exiles if we’re in our own country?’
Rez shrugged. ‘Well, ye can be an exile in your own body, or in your own family, or in your own fuckin century, so why can’t ye be an exile in your own country where ye were born?’
‘Ye can be an exile in yer own arse,’ said Cocker. He cackled and fell backwards to land with a thump on the damp sand.
But now Rez was warming to his theme. ‘Are ye seriously tellin me ye don’t feel like that here?’ he asked me.
I shrugged. ‘I suppose.’
‘I mean, what does it really mean to you to be Irish? I mean, like, growin up in the suburbs, which may as well be anywhere, and watchin American films and English telly and English football, and everyone you’re supposed to look up to, all they go on about is cars and mortgages, and these are supposed to be the most important things in life. The property ladder. Jesus. And now we’re expected to race out there and join in the fun? No thanks. I mean, at least we feel depressed about what we’re seein around us.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. I’d heard it a hundred times. I murmured something about the consumer wasteland and threw a stone into the sea. Really, I was thinking of Jen. I lit a cigarette and sat down, scanning the grey horizon, the waves.
Just then I heard a call and we looked around: Jen, walking towards us along the beach, waving. She was smiling and her dark-red hair was swept up in the wind.
When she reached us she said, ‘So here we are on the other side. It’s all over. We made it. We’re free. So how did it go?’
We made vague noises.
‘I see,’ she said, raising an eyebrow. Jen was the only one among us who’d done any real study.
After a while we went down to where there are caves cut into the bottom of the cliffs. We found a quiet spot and sat down on our jackets, putting the bottle and some cans on the ground beside us. Rez got a spliff together. While we were smoking, Jen asked, ‘So guys, have yis worked out what yis’re all goin to do now that the Leavin Cert is over?’