‘Fucking St Frigid’s bitches,’ Barry says, when they have passed out of sight.
What the fuck are you doing? Why were you trying to give away our drugs? Carl wants to shout. But instead he just says, ‘Is that stuff true? About diets?’
‘I read about it on the Internet,’ Barry says. As they walk down the driveway back to the road, he starts telling Carl how in this thing he read these lads were dealing it and making serious cash. ‘Think about it, dude. All birds ever talk about is their fucking weight. They’ll go mental for this shit. Those two totally would have bought some, if that bloke hadn’t driven past. I’ll bet you anything they’ll be there tomorrow. And say they bring their friends, I bet we could sell all of these and more.’
But why does he want to sell them? Why doesn’t he just want to snort them with Carl? Wasn’t that the plan? This is the way Barry’s brain works though, new ideas are coming all the time, turning into plans. Carl has no ideas, no plans; he is just carried along on Barry’s like a piece of plastic on the sea.
‘I wonder if we could get more from Morgan,’ Barry is saying. ‘Like we could offer him a cut. Or there must be other people in school – or shit, junior school! I bet there’s loads of kids with prescriptions down there that…’
Carl tunes him out. He flips open Morgan’s phone and presses a button. Lollipop-Lips appears and gazes darkly, velvetly, out at him, biting her bottom lip, swaying from side to side. Then she freezes. Then she is there again, gazing, biting, swaying.
Now they have left the village behind, the shopping malls and pubs and restaurants, to go up a sleeping avenue with neat trimmed hedges and black SUVs. Carl feels the night become heavy again and knows that this time there will be no fighting it, it will keep getting heavier and heavier as he gets nearer to the house that is his house until it has dragged him all the way into tomorrow.
‘… genius of diet pills,’ Barry is saying very quickly beside him. He is excited: maybe he is thinking about the US Army jeep on eBay. ‘You don’t just buy them for a night out. You take them every day. And also, it’s girls. When do you ever see girls down in the park, buying drugs off knackers? Never. It’s a totally untapped market. I swear to God, we’re going to be rich! Fucking rich!’ He grins at Carl, and waits for Carl to grin back.
‘Show us them a second,’ Carl says. Barry hands him the tube, chuckling some more. Carl opens it and pours the pills into his palm. Then, as hard as he can, he flings them away into the air. Pills skitter along the road, bounce off car roofs, pelt softly into the grass.
Barry is stunned. For a minute he can’t even speak. Then he says, ‘What the fuck did you do that for?’
Carl keeps walking. There is a sour fire burning in him the colour of dried blood.
‘You fucking twat,’ Barry says, ‘you spa, now what are we going to say to those girls tomorrow?’
Carl raises his palm and smacks Barry flat on the ear. Barry gasps and staggers sideways. ‘What’s the matter with you, you psycho?’ he cries, clutching his head. ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’
It’s tomorrow. Skippy’s bare-legged at the edge of the pool, chlorine and earliness stinging his eyes. Outside the morning is a grey fuzz, the first shapes just beginning to emerge from it. On either side of Skippy, boys are lined up, their white Seabrook College swimming caps making them look like clones with the school crest stamped on their bald heads. Then the whistle, and before his mind even realizes, his body’s thrown itself forward and into the water. Instantly a thousand blue hands reach for him, seize him, pulling him down – he catches his breath, fights them off, scrabbles his way to the surface –
Breaking through, he emerges into a commotion of colour and noise – the yellow plastic roof, the crash and foam of the other swimmers, an arm, a goggled head thrown sideways, Coach like a gnarled tree trunk bending over the water, clapping his hands and shouting Let’s go let’s go and in the lanes around Skippy the boys like disobedient reflections stealing ahead, disappearing behind their wakes. Everyone hurtling for the wall! But the water grapples against him, the bottom of the pool is magnetic and it’s tugging him down again, down to where…
The whistle goes. Garret Dennehy comes in first, right behind him Siddartha Niland. In the seconds after, the others slide up alongside them, lean back against the wall, gasping, lifting off their goggles. Skippy’s still back in the middle of the pool.
‘Come on, Daniel, for Christ’s sake, you’re like an old granny walking in the park!’
Three times a week, at 7 a.m., training for one hour. Count yourself lucky, the Senior team trains every morning and Saturdays too. Breaststroke, backstroke, butterfly, crawl, back and forth through the blue chemicals; repetitions on the tiles, crunches and squats, till every muscle is burning.
‘Being a great athlete is not just about natural ability,’ Coach likes to shout, pacing up and down along the poolside as you squirm through your sets. ‘It’s about discipline, and it’s about commitment.’ So if you miss a session, you’d better have a good excuse.
Afterwards, the team huddles shivering by the doorway of the changing room, hands pressed under armpits. When you get out of the water the air feels cold and nothingy. Your arm moves and it moves against nothing. You speak and the words disappear instantly.
Coach wraps and unwraps the cord of the whistle around his hand, everyone gathered round him like the Apostles with Jesus in old paintings. If you look closely you can see how his body’s all twisted up even when he’s standing still. ‘You lads did good work on Saturday. But we can’t afford to rest on our laurels. The next meet is on 15 November. That might sound like a long way away. All the more reason for us to work hard and keep our momentum going. I want to see us in the semi-finals.’ He tosses his head towards the changing room. ‘Okay, off you go.’
The showers never feel like they’re making you clean. The tiles are lined with scuzz, the footbath half-full of brackish water; hair shivers in grey clumps in the grating, like drowned mermaids.
‘You swam like a turd today, Juster,’ Siddartha says. ‘What’s the story? Were you up late last night bumming Van Doren?’
Skippy mumbles something about pulling a muscle at the meet.
Siddartha wrinkles up his nose, sticks his upper teeth over his lip and makes the kangaroo noise: ‘Tcch-tcch-tcch, I think I pulled a muscle at the meet. Well, you’d better speed up. Just because you fluked through on Saturday doesn’t mean you’ve got a right to a permanent place on the team.’
‘Don’t mind him,’ Ronan Joyce says, when Siddartha turns round. ‘Dickhead.’
But Skippy doesn’t mind him: the pill he took when he woke up takes care of that. The sleepy feeling threads through him, wrapping around him like a blanket. Noises, images, the things people say, come to him all broken up and slowed down; the needly water of the shower, hitting his body, turning from cold to hot, he hardly notices, nor when he steps out again into the freezing changing room.
Ruprecht and the others are already eating by the time he gets to the Refectory. Monstro is behind the counter, ladling scrambled eggs like some kind of giant infection from a steel vat. The food in the Ref is always gross, the cheapest stuff they can get. Today even the toast is burnt.
Crowd-cheering noises from Geoff as he sits down. ‘This is very exciting, sports fans – we’ve just been joined by champion swimmer Daniel Juster, direct from his gruelling training regime! How are you feeling today, champ?’
‘Sleepy.’
A chorus of baa’s proceeds from a far corner as Muiris de Bhaldraithe, Seabrook’s biggest bogger and self-alleged lynchpin of the clandestine Real IRA Juniors, Dublin Brigade, enters the room. Scccrrrrcccchh, scccrrrrcccchhh, Ruprecht meticulously scrapes the burnt from his toast.