We turned on to Parnell Street, which is where some of the dodgier offos were to be found, and looked around for someone to buy us a daddy-naggin and eighteen cans of Dutch Gold.
A few hours later I was sitting on the couch in Jen’s spacious living room out in Blackrock. Xtrmntr was playing loud on the stereo. The lights were low and the telly was jittery with late-night images. Kearney, who had come into town to meet us, was passed out on the floor. There was a joypad in his hand and dribble glistened under his lip. I watched him for a while. Then I opened the last of the cans and drank.
Jen’s da had gone away for the weekend, and her alcoholic ma had long since moved out, so she had a free house tonight. But in the sitting room there were only me and Kearney. Jen had gone upstairs with Cocker more than an hour ago. I kept thinking I could hear noises from them, and put the music up louder to drown it out. It was hate music, fast and vicious, and I relished how it made me feel, the rage and power. I drank more and felt a surge of omnipotence, but then I heard the creaking from above and it was like there was nothing inside me.
I wished I had something to get high with. I got up and went into Jen’s da’s garage, not sure what I was looking for until I stood beside the red petrol container. I hesitated for a moment because it could kill your brain or whatever. Then something that fella Scag had said on the phone came back to me: Do one thing every day that ye know yer goin to regret. I unscrewed the cap, cupped my hands over the hole, lowered my face, and inhaled slow and deep on the fumes.
My brain hurtled and I let out a shriek of laughter, then fell backwards, crashing through toolboxes and shelves before slumping on the cold concrete floor. A spanner clattered down beside me and I laughed again, sprawled out on the ground. I saw a weird image in my head: a line of silent abortions, all floating serenely down a sewer, being washed out to sea. It was sort of poignant. When the buzz wore off I got up and went back into the living room and sat down on the couch, beside where Kearney was passed out.
The sky had started to pale outside the window. I wasn’t ready to stop just yet. But I hated being there on my own, the only one still going. I wished Kearney would wake up. ‘Kearney!’ I called, kicking his shoulder. ‘Kearney! Are ye awake?’ He kept lying there, snoring into his armpit. I turned on the telly: Sky News. There was stuff about the insurgency and clips of soldiers returning fire from street corners and dusty alleyways, the camera shaking with the force of their guns. Nine Inch Nails was playing on the stereo, making the footage seem like an action film. Then I noticed that on the floor behind the telly there was a can of Dutch Gold that we had overlooked. I picked it up and cracked it open.
I drank the can slowly, because when it ended there wouldn’t be any more, and I smoked many cigarettes as the sky continued to brighten and my thoughts swirled and blurred together and I could get no more satisfaction from the music. Then I passed out.
6 | Kearney
Snapshot Number 3: A selection of titles, notes and sketches culled from Kearney’s sixth-year notebook
— Jihad: the Age of Outrage, a first-person shooter based on the War on Terror.
— Sleeper Celclass="underline" The Enemy Within, in which you play a young extremist, trying to climb the ladder to martyrdom.
— Towelhead Onslaught, a third-person shooter/fighter set among US commandos in Afghanistan. The climax takes place deep within the tunnel networks of the Tora Bora mountains, and involves a brutal fistfight with Osama Bin Laden himself.
— A historical saga called Baader-Meinhoff: Operation Apocalypse.
— A game called Sexkrime where you play a rapist in a squalid inner-city high-rise, and a related title, Hatekrime, where you play a member of a skinhead gang.
— Pusher: City Business, where you play a ruthless smack dealer.
— Alcoholocaust, merging autobiography and zombie-slaughter, an atmospheric first-person shooter set in Dublin.
— Nigga B Real, a GTA-style rape-’em-up where you play a crack-addicted gang-banger, betrayed by his ex-crew and now taking on the LAPD and the city’s underworld single-handedly.
— The London Cunt, another GTA-influenced pimp-sim with bitch-slap elements and a roaming, free-world environment.
— Slaughter High, an RPG/first-person shooter comprised of lovingly detailed, Columbine-styled atrocities. Defiantly plotless.
— Orgasm of Hate, Kearney’s ‘baby’, the project he felt most invested in, spiritually and intellectually. Though only sparse and enigmatic plot notes existed — the game seemed to involve some kind of Dublin-based, Fourth Reich genocide, possibly aimed at the homeless, the elderly and the itinerant community — Kearney felt sure that one day this game would make him the legend he knew he was born to be.
7 | Matthew
The next morning I was the first awake. I was still drunk, having slept only two or three hours on Jen’s couch. I played the PlayStation and waited for the others to get up. Later, Jen cooked a fry-up. I didn’t say much as we ate, ignoring Cocker but for a few muttered words. I wished someone would suggest we start drinking again. Instead I drank tonnes of coffee because it gave you a buzz as well. I had to take some Paracetamol, though, cos my head was killing me.
I told the others I’d see them that evening. Then I went into town to pick up the pills from Scag. I met him in a lane behind Dame Street. He looked around twenty years older than me, with a crewcut, black leather jacket, Doc Martens, and the All-Cops-Are-Bastards dots tattooed in uneven green ink across his knuckles. He looked like a serious punk. Or like he’d been a serious punk years before, but had evolved into some nameless, dangerous kind of outsider. I’d heard from Rez’s cousin that Scag was a junkie. Or ‘a former junkie who still liked to use’, as he allegedly labelled himself. I noticed that Scag’s black T-shirt had the word Wittgenstein! printed on it.
‘So what’s yer story, anyway?’ he said, rolling a smoke after he’d given me the pills.
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t have much of a story.
‘Are ye a workin man?’ he asked.
‘No. Not at the moment. I’ve just finished school. That’s why me and me mates are celebratin this weekend.’
‘Good. Fair play to ye, Matthew. Long have I fuckin dreamt of the day when the workin classes refuse to work. Don’t do it if ye know what’s good for ye. There’s nothin noble or dignified about workin, it’s just degradation. Are ye gettin me, Matthew?’
‘Yeah.’
‘“Beware the eulogizers of work” — those are the words I’ve got painted on the wall above me bed, to remind meself of what’s important. This is an age of bitterness and resentment, so make yerself at home. Do ye follow?’
‘Yeah. So ye don’t, like, work yourself then?’
He hissed, all indignant. ‘I wouldn’t work even if they paid me for it. Never get out of bed for less than ye got into it for, that’s my way of lookin at it. There’s a hundred solid reasons not to work. The big one for me is that it distracts me from me poetry.’