Barry stomps down to one end of the dugout, then comes back again and takes out his wallet. There is a twenty-euro note in there. He waves it under Oscar’s nose. ‘Twenty euro, and the sweets.’ Oscar doesn’t even look at the money. Across the pitches the clock strikes four. The girls will be arriving soon. ‘What is it you want?’ Barry shouts. ‘How can we do a deal if you won’t say what you want?’
The two small boys look at each other. Then in the distance a banger goes off. Oscar’s face lights up. ‘Fireworks!’ he says.
‘You just thought of that now!’ Barry says.
‘Fireworks!’ the white-faced kid speaks for the first time.
‘Where the fuck are we supposed to get fireworks?’ Barry says. But now the two boys are yapping away about what kind and how many – ‘Bangers – rockets – quartersticks!’
‘Okay, okay,’ Barry says. ‘You win. If you want fireworks, fair enough. But we can’t get them to you till tomorrow. So here’s what we’ll do. You give us the pills now for our experiment, and then tomorrow we’ll meet you here again, same time, same place, with the fireworks.’
‘Ha ha!’ Oscar laughs – actually laughs! ‘No way.’
Barry makes a noise like Gnnnhhhh through his teeth, and Carl can tell he is thinking, Fuck the deal, let’s teach these faggots some respect. But then he turns to Carl and says, ‘Watch them,’ and he pegs it off across the rugby pitches.
‘Where’s your friend gone?’ Oscar asks. Carl says nothing, just folds his arms and tries to look like he knows what’s happening.
‘What’s your science project about?’ the white-faced kid Rory asks.
‘Shut the fuck up,’ Carl says. He looks out into the going-dark evening. Maybe Barry won’t come back. Maybe he’s gone to meet Lollipop on his own! This is all a trick, he arranged it with the kids, and –
Panting, Barry clambers back into the dugout. In his hand is a plastic bag. ‘Fireworks,’ he says.
Every kind: Black Holes, Sailor Boys, Spider Bombs and others. Barry fans them out on the ground. ‘You can’t have all of them,’ he says, like a dad in a shop. ‘Pick out three each.’ The boys stare, whispering the names to each other. ‘Today, arseholes. And give me those pills first.’
They hand over the pills without even thinking – the white-faced kid’s in a Smarties box, Oscar’s wrapped in old clingfilm that smells like sandwiches. Barry counts them into Morgan Bellamy’s tube. Then he nods, and the two kids snatch up the fireworks before he can change his mind.
Now Carl and Barry are hurrying back over the pitches. The squishy ground is going hard with cold, the grass and trees are dark like night is spreading up from below.
‘Where did you get all that stuff?’ Carl asks.
‘Firework fairy.’ Barry smiles mysteriously. He is happy again now. As they walk he tells Carl how it just goes to show, everybody has a price, and often it’s a lot less than you expect. But he does not let Carl carry the pills or even touch them.
There are no lights behind Ed’s. First all Carl sees are the glowing tips of their cigarettes. Then the faces come out of the dark. Five of them: Lollipop, Crinkly-Hair and three others, talking in American-girl accents, waving around their Marlboro Lights. It is strange seeing them here, among the weeds and the cans and the bashed-up supermarket trolleys. The Tower stares over the scraggly trees and bushes like a giant stone face. But no one real is watching.
‘Hey, ladies,’ Barry says, like this is all totally normal, like he has just wandered over to their table at LA Nites. They look back at him without speaking, and as the boys come closer, the three new girls huddle together, their eyes flicking from Barry to Carl and back again.
‘Weren’t you supposed to be here a half-hour ago?’ Crinkly-Hair sounds pissed off.
Rising above the others, Lollipop gazing right at him. Carl feels his dick wake and stir in his pants.
‘We had some trouble with our connection,’ Barry tells her.
‘I thought that was your own personal prescription,’ Crinkly-Hair says.
Barry can’t think of an answer, so he just smiles. The new girls are looking really unhappy now, like Carl and Barry are two total scumbags. ‘Well, are we going to do business or not?’ Barry says. He takes out the orange see-through tube and holds it out, the way you’d hold out food to a stray cat. With a shrug, Crinkly-Hair comes over to him, and one by one the other girls follow. But Lollipop stays at the edge, looking over to where Carl is standing guard by the gap leading back to the road.
‘They’re medically developed by scientists,’ Barry is explaining to the new girls.
‘I read about them in Marie Claire,’ one of the girls says. ‘They stop you getting hungry.’
‘That’s right,’ Barry says. ‘In Hollywood everyone takes them.’
‘How much do they cost?’ another girl asks.
‘Three euro each,’ Barry says. ‘Or ten for twenty.’
‘Yesterday you were going to give us five for five,’ Crinkly-Hair says.
Barry shrugs. ‘Supply and demand,’ he says. ‘I don’t control the market. If you don’t want them there are some girls from Alex’s who said they’d take the lot.’
‘I’d say,’ Crinkly-Hair says sarcastically, but the other girls are reaching into bags for purses decorated with slinky cartoon cats and glittery flowers. Carl turns to watch the entrance while the deal goes through. Behind him he hears their voices counting, first coins, then pills. Every second it gets darker, like the air is filling up with particles. He realizes someone is standing beside him. It is Lollipop. She is looking at Carl. ‘I have a problem,’ she says.
It is only the second thing he has ever heard her say. He makes a sound somewhere between ‘Huh?’ and ‘What?’
‘I want to buy some diet pills,’ she says. ‘But I don’t have any money.’
‘You don’t have any money?’
‘No.’
‘You don’t have any?’
‘No.’
She looks at him with expressionless green eyes. This close he can almost taste how red her lips are. The others are talking among themselves. ‘Last night your friend said that you might be able to work something out?’ she says. She raises an eyebrow. Her school blouse is two buttons open and if he leans forward Carl can make out the top half of a white tit.
‘What do you mean?’ he says.
‘I don’t know.’ She noses the toe of her shoe against the ashy black ground. Carl lunges for her with his mouth. She pulls back, but takes his hand and leads him across the clearing and into the trees.
In here the air tastes of wet leaves and through the weeds he can see old initials graffitied on the wall. She is standing right up against him, an inch away, he smells the smell of her, it is sweet like strawberries. She pushes her hair back with her hand. The other voices seem far away. She leans in and upwards and her mouth is on his, her tongue strokes through it, deeper and deeper, like an oar through the water… She stops. ‘Are you Carl or Barry,’ she says.
‘Carl.’
‘My name is Lori,’ she says. ‘Short for Lorelei.’
‘Lollipop,’ he mumbles.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
Then she’s kissing him again. The smell of her hair and skin swirl all around him. He sticks a hand on her left tit. She lifts it off but doesn’t take her mouth away. For another twenty seconds, thirty, her thin body crushes up tighter and tighter against him, as if she’s screwing herself into place with her tongue. Then, like the claw in the fairground when the money runs out, she separates herself from him and steps backwards. She gazes at him with her expression of expressionlessness.