‘Don’t be stupid, Morgan,’ Barry says. ‘Just give us what we want.’
‘I can’t!’ His face is shiny-wet with crying. ‘I can’t, my mum will find out –’
‘Okay, Morgan,’ Barry says, like he is sad about it. ‘Then you know what we have to do.’
Carl sinks to one knee and aims the can.
‘No!’ Morgan screams, but no one can hear him from here. ‘No, wai–’
The flame roars, and for a second it swallows up everything. Then it goes, leaving a blue-white flash glowing in the dark. The air is full of the smell of burning.
‘Have you something to give us now, Morgan?’ Barry says.
Morgan is crying without making any noise. He rolls over onto his stomach, squirming around like a worm in the dirt.
‘Have you changed your mind? Have you something to give us? Or do you want to have another talk with the Dragon here?’
Morgan shrivels up like he’s been burned again. Then his hand appears, holding up an orange see-through tube. Barry grabs it. ‘Why didn’t you just give it to us when we asked? You could have saved all of us a lot of trouble, arsehole.’
Morgan is too busy crying to reply, this weird shaking crying that doesn’t make any sound. His feet are all red, you can see it even in the dark. Barry turns to Carl. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
Carl nods. As he goes he sees Morgan’s phone has fallen onto the ground. He picks it up and puts it in his pocket.
In the jacks of Burger King, Barry shakes out four pills from the orange tube onto the toilet lid. He mashes them up with his phone and makes the powder into two fat lines. It was his idea so he goes first. Then it’s Carl’s turn. He leans in with the Burger King straw and snorts. Powder charges up his nose. Instantly, with a metal noise zing like a sword being drawn, everything tightens to one sharp edge.
Now it all makes sense. Carl feels shivery-new, he feels ice-cold. Everything is great. It is great to be here with Barry, it was a good plan to get the pills from Morgan Bellamy. They leave the cubicle and walk out into the silver and white and glass of the mall like two G’s in a hip-hop video. They ride up the down-escalator and down the up-escalator, they shout things at girls. They steal a cigarette lighter, a pack of cards, Marbella Ireland magazine. Then it starts getting boring.
‘Let’s go and visit the Gook,’ Barry says.
On the way back they check on Morgan, but he is gone. Do you think he’ll tell? No way because he knows what would happen to him then.
The Gook isn’t in Ed’s tonight, just Gookette. She looks up and when she sees them she goes stiff. They walk up to the counter real slow. In the background BETHani is playing:
I wish I was eighteen so you could photograph meWe’d put it on the internet so everyone could seeHow I make your love grow, the things you do to meWhen teacher isn’t looking, when my parents are asleep
‘Can I help you?’ Gookette says like she doesn’t want to help them. In her gook voice the words come out, ‘Cah ah hep yo?’ like she is retarded. Barry pretends to read the big lit-up menu behind her head.
‘Yes, I would like an Agent Orange juice, please?’
‘We doh have.’
‘You doh have? Okay, then I will have a napalm sandwich.’
‘We doh have.’
‘You doh have napalm sandwiches either?’
‘Only stuff on menu.’
Beside him Carl is laughing because he knows Agent Orange and napalm are things they dropped on the gooks to burn them in the Vietnam War. He knows because Barry told him. Barry knows everything about Vietnam, he has seen every film, Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Hamburger Hill, Full Metal Jacket, Good Morning Vietnam, Rambo First Blood Pt 1&2, other ones as well, he has them at home on DVD.
I wish I was eighteen, it would be so fine –
BETHani sings –
To show everybody how we pass the timeAnd all the boys around the world could peek into my homeSo there’s always someone watching and I never feel alone
Barry asks Gookette if she wants to make sexy. He licks his fingers and rubs them over his chest, going, ‘Me so horny, me ruv you rongtime’ to Gookette. Gookette stares at him like she wants to smack him, which is funny because she is about five feet tall and also because she probably doesn’t even know what he’s saying, all she knows in English are doughnut names.
Carl turns round to check the door and everyone who is watching quickly looks down at their doughnuts – except for two girls in a booth who look back at him.
‘Me rikee bro-job,’ Barry is saying now. ‘Bro-job, bro-job.’ He helps her out by sucking an imaginary dick using his curled hand and his tongue in his cheek. She stares at him with eyes like stones.
‘You stupid bitch, he wants a blowjob,’ Carl says. ‘How much is a blowjob?’
He takes a five-euro note from his wallet and crumples it up and throws it at her. It hits her on the arm and bounces back to land on the counter. ‘How much?’ he says again. Now he balls up a twenty and throws it at her. This one hits her on the cheek. It annoys him that she doesn’t scrabble after the money or even move at all. He takes out another twenty then sees Barry is staring at him.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Barry says.
‘What?’ Carl says.
‘What are you doing with the fucking money?’
‘Trying to get you a fucking blowjob, asshole,’ Carl says.
Barry’s face has flared up red. ‘No, you spa, I mean why didn’t you tell me you had all that money? What the fuck were we doing sniffing fucking furniture polish if you had money all along?’
‘I forgot,’ Carl says.
‘You forgot? How did you forget?’
Carl does not know how he forgot. Suddenly he feels quite tired. Everything is starting to fizz away at the edges, like a pill in water. He wishes he had the orange tube but it is in Barry’s pocket and Barry is looking way too angry to give it to him. But then hurray! here comes the Gook running out of the back room, waving his arms and shouting, ‘You bah! You bah!’
‘You bah! You bah!’ they shout back at him. Carl knocks over the plastic straw holder and straws with different-colour stripes spill over the floor. The Gook rushes through the hatch in the counter. Carl raises his fists just to see what’ll happen. Instantly the Gook clicks into this Jet Li-type martial arts pose and for a moment they both stay like that, no one moving, except the Gook’s nostrils get bigger and smaller. Then Carl and Barry turn and run out of the shop, laughing and shouting, ‘You bah! You bah!’
Across the road on the wall of the park, Barry is happy again so they can have more pills. Carl crushes them up with a key. In the big glass window of the Doughnut House, Gookette is crouched down picking up straws.
‘Do you think he’s riding her?’ Barry says. ‘Charlie?’ Sometimes they call the Gook ‘Charlie’.
Carl says, ‘I don’t know.’ Above them there is a full moon in the sky and stars. The moon is a ______ of the Earth that the Earth orbits around.
‘He wouldn’t get anyone else to ride him,’ Barry says. ‘Those gooks have wormy little dicks.’ He makes an imaginary rifle with his hands and points it at Gookette and fires two bullets into her. He discharges the shells and reloads. ‘I’d ride her,’ he says.
Carl doesn’t say anything. The pills keep squirting out from under the key, twice he has to pick them up off the ground.
‘It makes me sick to see gooks just walking around here like they own the place,’ Barry says. ‘After everything that happened.’
On eBay you can buy actual dog-tags from Marines that were in Vietnam, and even an old US Army jeep. But Barry never has any money to buy anything because his dad is a major scab even though he is loaded. Half the time Carl has to loan him cash just to buy beer.