Free Young Skins by Colin Barrett

young.’
    Tain swivels, with slow decisiveness, back to Bat. She makes a fist and wedges it against her hip. ‘Christ sakes just get me a vodka and lime, Bat.’
    ‘In a tick,’ he murmurs, lowering his head and shouldering back into the crowd, brimming pint in either paw.
    Forty minutes later and Bat has put away three drinks to the group’s single round. Tain is several bodies beyond his left elbow, stuck making small talk to a plump boy in black. The lad keeps placing and replacing on his ear the wire frame of his glasses. Most of the crowd are from out of town; Heg’s college mates, dropped down for the weekend. The dark beauty, as still and mute as a hologram, must be one of them too, though the rest of the party ignores her as she ignores them, even Heg; that she has deigned to stand in his proximity is the only suggestion of any association between them. But then, Bat, too, has largely kept his trap shut, his conversational contributions amounting to timed groans and dry whistles as one or another anecdote winds to its climax. They are all talking about and around college, the communal life they share there; the talk is an involved braid of in-jokes and contextual nuggets and back references. Bat feels doltish—too big, too bluntly dimensioned, a thickset golem hewn from the scrabbled, sodden dirt of Connaught. His jaw throbs—the teeth set into his jaw throb.
    Heg is drunk, his expression adrift in some boggy territory between gloating and concussed. Abruptly the hologram substantiates itself—the tall beauty leans in and begins kissing Heg most vociferously on the mouth. He kind of writhes around in her grip. A girl with an overbite breaks into a braying laugh. Bat gently shoulders his way out of the group and wheels off towards the jacks. His nape bristles; he feels the drag, like a faint current, of someone’s attention and turns. Tain scowling, in hot pursuit.
    She still has the present, jammed down into her handbag.
    ‘I feel like a wanker,’ she says.
    ‘Don’t,’ Bat says. ‘Heg has us all just standing around like gobshites.’
    A hand on Bat’s shoulder. He flinches.
    ‘Fuck me, man, how’s it going?’
    Bat’s grip tenses around a phantom pint. He gulps. But it’s only Luke Minion. As it goes Luke is one of the more congenial strands of that brood of cousins. Luke has always had time for Bat; was witness to the boot to the face.
    ‘Well, Luke.’
    ‘It’s been an age, lad.’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘Who’s this?’ Minion asks of Tain, an amused curl to the lip.
    ‘I work with her. Tain. This is Luke.’
    ‘You’re still out with the Maxol crowd.’
    ‘It’s a living,’ Bat says.
    ‘It is,’ Minion says through his teeth. He runs a hand through his crow-coloured cowlick of a widow’s peak. Most of the Minions are stocky and solidly hipped. Luke is rangy, with clear grey eyes. Last Bat heard the man was running up mountains; there was talk of a sponsored tackle of Kilimanjaro. It never happened. Before that Luke had been living in a mobile home on the farthest acre of his family’s farmplot. He’d had a Czechoslovakian girl and a baba stowed away there for a while, but one day the pair woke up and the baba was dead.
    ‘What you at these days?’
    Minion’s eyebrows rise, ‘Bits and pieces.’
    ‘In the Minion fashion,’ Bat says, hearing the old dear in his tone.
    ‘This guy,’ Luke says to Tain. ‘You ever hear tell of how he wound up with that face?’
    Tain looks to Bat.
    Bat wonders if she can read the total misery in his visage.
    ‘No,’ she says brightly, looking more like a child, in her densely daubed mask of makeup, than ever before.
    ‘Yeah,’ Luke says, ‘sure you’re only a young one.’
    ‘Hitting the jacks,’ Bat says, his throat going tight, like he’s just swallowed a plum gourd.
    The nausea has resurfaced in the other direction, a roiling ball of unpleasantness bubbling out of his gut. His mouth waters, and he tastes a flash of blood. He wipes his