Free Young Skins by Colin Barrett Page A

mouth with his sleeve. His head is sore; his head is always sore. The headaches tune down to a vestige, but they never truly go.
    The drinking doesn’t help , Bat thinks, but it does help .
    As he slams open a cubicle door the possibility of throwing up seems fragilely close. He gropes the door shut behind him. A pitifully loud retch doubles him over; nothing follows but a gutty hock, a hot trickle of bile. Bat retches until it plops from his lips into the jacks’ waiting mouth.
    There in the cubicle, unbidden, floats up the remnant of a dream; a recurring dream, Bat knows intuitively, though this is the first time he has consciously recalled recalling it. The dream remnant is merely this, like a random, unfinished scene from a film: Bat is Bat, but in a different body. A Dungan-like body, wasted and bowlegged, older perhaps, though perhaps not. Certainly frailer, flimsier, and he, dream-Bat, is walking around what must be this town. It’s just a street, an undistinguished strip of concrete paving flanked by generic buildings—and he’s wearing a mustard-seed suit. That’s what his mother—in the dream—calls the suit. The suit does not fit. It’s several sizes too large and the superfluous material billows and flumps comically around his limbs. And in the dream all Bat is doing is walking around and around and crying and crying and somewhere to the back of him—he can’t precisely tell—his old dear’s voice pursues him like a vindictive raincloud, saying change the medication, change the medication .
    How long has he been having this fucking dream, he wonders?
    And then his thoughts turn to the boot to the face; the last thing Bat himself recalls of that night was staggering through the door of Munroe’s takeaway with a hunger in his belly, his head down and headphones in, music blaring and scrolling through his playlist to see what song was cued up next. He woke up in hospital. The culprit was a five-foot-two sparkplug went by Nubbin Tansey, and Luke Minion was there, saw it all unfold.
    And now Tain is outside. Tain is on a stool by the bar, waiting for Bat to return. Bat squinches closed his eyes.
    How long have I been having this fucking dream?
    Tain is on a stool and Minion, expert bar-grift, has inveigled her into buying him a drink—the first she’s ever ordered in a bar. The barlad didn’t look at her twice as she put in the round. It makes Tain feel pathetically proud of herself. She’s on her fourth vodka and lime and has no more money. The odour of limes—spiked and soured by the gelid see-through spirit—is all she can smell. She’s watching Minion—the lad finicks with his stool, skims his palm round the lip of the seat like he’s searching for the sweet spot. Finally he hoists himself into position. He looks at her and launches in.
    ‘It must’ve been up on the heels of four on a Saturday morning, Munroe’s being one of the few eateries still open at that hour so it was fairly packed. I was queuing at the counter, hangover already coming on, waiting on a kebab and batter burger. Nubbin Tansey was up on one of the tabletops, making a holy fucking show of himself. Now Tansey was a shortarse but he was built through; physique of a jockey on steroids. He was well oiled, as we all were, looking wild and dishevelled, his shirt hanging off him, buttons all burst off, Doc Martens scuffing the Formica as he whelped out a furious jig. His boys were crowing him on—there were five or six of them, big rowdy units—and the Turkish lads behind the counter weren’t going to risk stepping in, though good old Saleem, the manager, was threatening to call the pigs if Tansey didn’t get the fuck down fairly lively. Tansey, bald since seventeen to go with the height deficiency, was amped up, face gone red and every veineen in his skull popping, a solid wall of perspiration coming right off him and fizzing in the fluorescence as he jigged and jigged. Nervous little cheers coming up from all corners of