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About the Author

Colin Barrett was born in 1982 and grew up in County Mayo. His stories have been published in The Stinging Fly, Granta, Harper’s and the New Yorker. His first book, the short story collection Young Skins, won the 2014 Guardian First Book Award, the 2014 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the 2014 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. In 2018 Barrett was selected as the Rolex Arts Initiative protege in Literature. His debut novel is forthcoming from Jonathan Cape.

ALSO BY COLIN BARRETT

Young Skins

CALM WITH HORSES

Dympna told Arm to stay in the car while Dympna gave Fannigan a chance to plead his case. This wasn’t the way it usually went, but Arm nodded okay. Arm watched Dympna stalk up the lawn and politely hammer on the front door of the council house Fannigan shared with his mother. Eventually Dympna was let inside.

Arm slid in his earphones and sank in the passenger seat. The car was originally Dympna’s Uncle Hector’s, a battered cranberry Corolla Dympna dubbed the shitbox, its interior upholstered in tan vinyl that stank of motor oil, cigarette ash and dog. Recessed into the dash was a dead radio, its cassette-tape slot jammed with calcified gobs of blue tack, cigarette butt-ends and pre-euro-era Irish coins. The dash smelled of fused electricals. Above Arm’s head, a row of memorial cards, their laminate covers wilted by age and light, were tucked into the sun visor and a red beaded rosary chain was tangled around the inverted T of the rear-view mirror.

Three houses down, two schoolgirls were sitting on a garden wall, talking and smoking. They were in their teens, their figures swollen to shapelessness by puffa jackets and the voluminous skirts of navy-and-green convent plaid heaped up in their laps. It was ten on a Wednesday morning, and the girls, Arm figured, were mitching from school. They were sharing the one cigarette, passing it back and forth and gabbing and rocking their feet from side to side in insistent tandem. Their heads were bent low, they covered their mouths as they spoke, each the other’s confidant, and Arm could have happily sat and watched them for the rest of the morning but he sensed movement from Fannigan’s house. Dympna was stomping back down the lawn in a way that reminded Arm of his own little boy, Jack. Dympna loomed by the passenger window, made a gun shape with his finger and pointed at Arm’s head. Arm popped out his earphones. Dympna’s features, which always looked too small for his wide face, were pinched, consternated. His trackie top was zipped right up to his neck, and Arm watched the zipper shiver tautly against the protuberant knot of his Adam’s apple. Dympna let out a long sigh, like a mammy.

‘Arm, get in there and beat the fuck out of that daft man.’

‘What about the mother?’

Dympna held up and opened his left hand. A key adhered to his clammy palm.

‘I put her in the bathroom. Fannigan agreed that was best, gave me a hand getting her in there. He’s waiting for you in the sitting room.’

‘Is he going to make it awkward, you reckon?’

Dympna ran his right hand over the ginger stubble on top of his head, shaved so tight it shone like vapour in the morning light.

‘You never know, but I don’t think so. He knows it’ll go over easier if he just takes it.’

‘How easy should it go?’ Arm asked.

Dympna smiled wanly, ‘Well, don’t kill him.’

The story came out last night, when Mary Rose, the third eldest of Dympna’s seven sisters, discovered Charlotte—Charlie they all called her—the youngest, weeping hysterically in the upstairs bathroom. Charlie had to be given a cup of warm milk chased by a sedative jigger of whiskey before she calmed down enough to tell what happened.

‘It’s myself I blame,’ Dympna had confided on the drive over. ‘Letting uncivilised fucking animals like Fannigan past my front door.’

Dympna Devers was twenty-five, a year older than Arm. Dympna sold marijuana, fat green ziplocked bags of the stuff, all over town. The town was small, and Dympna held a monopoly on such business. Fannigan was the eldest of the crew of five dealers currently in Dympna’s employ. Fannigan sold out of the industrial estate, where he worked evenings as a production-line stiff in the Allgen medical prosthetics plant.

The Friday evening gone, as he periodically did, Dympna had invited over the crew, Fannigan included, for drinks at the Devers’ family home, where his mother June and three of his seven sisters still lived. The Devers were a sociable breed, and liked crowding the house up. The parties tended to putter amicably on into the early hours, and attendees were encouraged to crash on the couch or floor if they had drank, snorted or smoked away the wherewithal to get home in one piece. The problem was that on that last night, Fannigan, completely pig-eyed, had at some point found his way up to young Charlie’s bedroom, let himself in, and attempted to stick several parts of himself in under her bedcovers. Charlie had only turned fourteen a couple of weeks ago.

Dympna told Arm all this on the way over. Arm was amazed that Dympna had put the lock on his initial impulses, had waited out the night before taking action; amazed again that Dympna had gone in there and given Fannigan an opportunity to explain himself instead of just caving the man’s skull in.

‘So did he offer another side, then?’ Arm said.

Dympna rolled his little eyes.

‘First he claimed he couldn’t remember a thing at all. Then he started swearing blind that in the state he was in he thought Charlie was Lisa.’

Lisa was Dympna’s second oldest sister, twenty-four, by general consensus the prettiest of the Devers’ girls; that Fannigan’s molestations were intended for another of Dympna’s siblings, albeit one of legal age, would have done little to mollify the big man.

‘Jesus,’ Arm said, ‘fair play.’

‘No,’ Dympna said, ‘no fair play at all.’

Arm wound the wires of his iPod neatly about the device and placed it on the dash. When he stepped out of the car, Dympna handed him the bathroom key.

‘Light damage,’ Dympna said, ‘lesson damage.’

Fannigan was on the couch in the sitting room, in front of a low wooden coffee table. A shining black plasma hung on the wall, a talk show on, switched to mute. It was a Yank show; tanned people with bleached teeth and sports jackets mooing and grimacing at each other like pantomimes. Arm could hear a clock, an old-fashioned mechanical tick-tocker in the hall, and faint scrabbling noises from behind the bathroom door.

‘I don’t want to keep her too long in there,’ Fannigan said, nodding towards the hall. He was a bit drained looking, but there was no tremor in his voice. His limbs were pinned to the couch. Fannigan was somewhere in his fifties. He was gaunt, with dirty silver-tinged rocker hair. He wore a bushy grey moustache he presumably considered distinguished, the whited ends tamed into tapered points by regular, finger-tipped applications of spittle, and he might once have been a handsome man. All Fannigan had on were jeans and a vest. His ropey arms were decorated with the murky green-blue blotches of old tattoos, their original shapes and lines mottled into illegibility by age. The lack of clothing was on purpose, Arm decided. Fannigan wanted to advertise the frailty of his scrawny frame.

‘Have a seat,’ Fannigan said.

Arm stepped forward.

‘Arm—’ Fannigan said and raised an open hand.

Arm grabbed the back of Fannigan’s head and flipped him off the couch onto the floor. Fannigan’s cheek smacked the coffee table. He moaned, and a dark rivulet, meaty and viscous, slipped from his mouth. Arm stepped back and guided his foot up under the old man’s ribs.

‘Up,’ Arm said, ‘look, Fannigan. Look.’

Fannigan raised his face as requested. Arm hit him two, three, four times. To his credit, Fannigan was still conscious after that, though swimming on his elbows on the carpet. It was often hard to tell if a person was crying in that state—there was usually a lot of liquid running from their face, necessitating all manner of soggy expulsions and clogged snorkelling noises. But Arm thought Fannigan was crying. Certainly, Fannigan was struggling to say something.

‘I—I—I didnnnn efffin ged, ged haa nnnnnnickers off!’

Arm hit Fannigan again. There was the wishbone snap of his nose breaking and the old man was clean out. Arm wrenched the plasma from the wall and tucked it under his arm. In the hall, he dropped the key and toed it under the bathroom door. Arm could hear Fannigan’s mother scuffling on the other side, groaning, ‘Where’s my Billy, where’s my Billy?’

Arm became friends with Dympna at fifteen. They were in the same school, but hung in different groups and it was not until Dympna showed up at Saint Ignatius Athletic, the local boxing club, that Arm got to know him. Dympna was a porky, eager boy back then, keen to transmute his flab to muscle and learn how to throw a punch. Boxing was Arm’s thing; at under-age level he had fought his way to county, and briefly, provincial, distinction. Arm had the clear head and cold-bloodedness required by the ring, the knack of detachment. Arm could be buried in the moment of a fight, spun and dizzy and snorting sputum, his body bright and ringing, and yet at the same time occupy a little bubble of lucidity above it all. His punches travelled with just the right weight and restraint, and they had a bounce to them when they landed, the way raindrops splash. And Arm was relentless. If the ref did not intercede, he could pound equably away on a lad until his head fell off.

Because Arm was the best around, Dympna pestered after him to spar. Dympna was barely in shape, and had mediocre form, and both boys knew rightly that Arm would destroy Dympna, but Dympna insisted. After each session they would sit in the bleachers, Dympna staunching a pumping nostril with a wad of cotton or pressing an ice pack to a blown-up eye socket, and at his behest the two would go forensically back over whatever combination of moves Arm had used to demolish him that day. Dympna viewed the beatings as instructional in nature, a mapping out, bruise by bruise, of the vulnerable regions of the body. Arm intuited that even at sixteen Dympna had plans, and that Dympna would need to understand the dynamics of pain, its infliction and its absorption, in order to effect those plans. What Dympna couldn’t give a fuck for were the organised formalities and quaint codes of conduct that governed in-the-ring competition, and after he secured what he wanted—Arm, Arm’s friendship—he persuaded Arm that he shouldn’t either.

Dympna and Arm started smoking dope, lots and lots of dope, and Dympna, who had a connection through the uncles, started selling it. Arm lost his virginity to Lisa and additionally got his dick into Fatima and Christina, the twins. Dympna, who always deferred to the coven wisdom of his sisters, took their plural interest in Arm as a sign of clinching approbation, and brought Arm in permanently as his muscle. Arm’s name was Douglas Armstrong, but every creature around knew him as Arm ever since Dympna christened him such. Arm was what Dympna threatened to sic on you if you dared cross him. Don’t make me put the Arm on you, Dympna would say, though most of the time Arm was required to do little more than hover stone-faced behind Dympna’s right shoulder.

On the drive back to the Devers’ house Arm kept the window down. He looked in the wing mirror, imagining the ruination he’d dosed upon Fannigan’s face dosed on his own. Arm had been beaten badly a couple of times in the ring, of course—had to have ripped eyelids sewn up, the flopping cartilage of a disjointed nose wedged back into place—but nothing too serious, and in Dympna’s employ he had suffered little more than an occasional scratch.

Arm watched the Devers’ home appear. They lived in a big redbrick, two-storey house on the edge of Farrow Hill estate. The family was of traveller extraction, and though they’d been settled going back three generations, such origins, however distant, were enough for the house to be known locally as The Tinker Mansion, though no one called it that to Dympna’s face.

Dympna’s cousin Brandon was outside. Brandon was a slope-shouldered, paunchy lad in his twenties, with a round pale face and a shock of long, prematurely white hair that came right down to his arse. He seemed to wear only black T-shirts emblazoned with the name and artwork of various metal bands, and was himself a guitarist in a local band called Satan On Sabbatical. He was standing in the front lawn, his head bent forward, drawing a comb through his hair with girlish solicitude.

Brandon was originally from Guernsey. He’d become involved in some vague, not very serious trouble (vandalism, petty theft, a painted cow) after leaving school and his mother—Dympna’s aunt, an obese diabetic divested fairly recently of the toes on one foot—had sent the lad here, ostensibly to spend the summer. That had been a year ago. He was a docile lad, his only passion the pursuit of metal. White wisps of hair floated in the air around him.

Arm hefted the plasma from the back seat.

‘How do, Brandon,’ Dympna said, and Arm nodded at him.

‘Hi,’ Brandon said in his soft voice, ‘you lads coming to our gig tomorrow?’ Satan on Sabbatical was playing in Quillinan’s pub on the main street.

‘Sure,’ Dympna said, ‘we’ll be right up front with our tits hanging out.’

‘He know about what happened to Charlie?’ Arm asked Dympna as they went inside.

Dympna shook his head. ‘He knows she’s been poorly, that’s it. No sense sharing the gory details with him.’

They went through the hall, into the sitting room. Lisa and Charlie were on the sofa, watching TV. Charlie was in a bathrobe, her shins, thin as twigs, protruding from the bathrobe’s folds into pink-striped socks. She looked lamentably like what she was, a child, and Arm felt good for the throbs in the joints of his fingers.

Lisa was barefoot in shorts of battered denim, with one leg curled up under her, propped on a cushion. She was wearing fake gold earrings, her dark, streak-shot hair piled in a sloppy bun that listed enticingly. She was one of those women who were at their most physically eloquent in a state of casual dishevelment, though as always she had a thick layer of make-up applied to her face; hot pink lipstick, dusky orange foundation trowelled on and eyeliner as vividly black as cinders, and dense, as if each lash was magnified in bold type.

‘There’s the men,’ she said. Arm watched Dympna come round the back of the sofa, put a hand on Charlie’s shoulder and nuzzle the top of her head with his nose.

‘Grrrrrr,’ he said.

‘Get off!’ Charlie said.

Dympna looked up at Arm.

‘Do you not want that?’ he said, meaning the plasma. Wiring trailed from the back.

Arm shrugged.

‘I thought Charlie might like it.’

‘Well aren’t you the thoughtful one, Douglas,’ Lisa said.

‘Say thanks,’ Dympna said.

‘Thanks,’ Charlie said.

June Devers, the mammy, was in the kitchen. She had the breakfast cooked and waiting—sausages and eggs, tomato, soda bread and milky tea. June was a short, broad woman with a wide, freckle-ridden bosom. Her late husband’s name, Neddy, was tattooed in slender cursive on the inner slope of her left tit. She had the same ruddy face and dinkiness of feature as Dympna, and small, very yellow teeth. She kissed Arm on each cheek, and, as he and Dympna attacked the steaming grub, she asked Arm how his little lad Jack was.

‘You know,’ Arm said, ‘still ticking along in his own world.’

‘Such a gorgeous creature,’ June said. ‘You and that Dory girl, good genes.’

When Arm said he had to leave, Dympna looked up from his plate, ‘We’ll be talking soon, Arm.’

‘He has you at his beck and call,’ June said indulgently. On the way out she grabbed Arm’s wrist. She slipped two fifties into his hand.

‘Thanks for all this, Douglas. Buy some flowers for your girl.’

The girl, who was no longer Arm’s girl, Ursula Dory, lived with Arm’s son in her parents’ house in the Drummond Rise estate, up the other end of town. Arm booted it on foot out the main road. Traffic was sparse but steady; the whoosh of a mammy hatchback or transit van trundling in off the state road sounded like lazy waves breaking on a shore just out of sight.

When Arm got there Ursula was ironing and Jack was up on the kitchen table. Jack was in a T-shirt and nappy, his toes hooked tightly around the table’s ledge, like talons. He was gouging apart a slice of bread with his fingers. The position looked precarious, but Jack was a practised indoor climber and percher.

‘Well, shameen,’ Arm said.

Jack fluted his lips, made a subdued hooting noise, and went back to working on his bread. Jack ate fitfully, with a lot of incidental wastage. He tore off a piece of the bread, put it in his gob, and worked it about until it was a tight wee wad. Sometimes he swallowed, and sometimes he took the wad out and flicked it onto the lino, as he did now. There were half a dozen such wads already littering the floor

‘Stop that,’ Ursula said.

Arm snapped two fifties from his snakeskin, added the two June gave him. He folded the notes into a tight tube and waved the tube in front of Jack.

‘Hey, Jack, here you go, go buy your mammy something nice,’ Arm said, and put the money in his son’s hand. Jack was about to put the notes in his mouth when Ursula snatched them away.

‘Thanks,’ she said unenthusiastically. She pocketed the money and went back to the laundry. The unfolded pile gave off a damp heat, pinkening her whey complexion. There was a fat textbook on the table beside the iron. Ursula was taking evening classes in the community college.

Jack was five. Arm had put the boy in Ursula’s belly when she was just gone eighteen, and Jack and Ursula had lived here, with Ursula’s ma and da, since he was born. Arm came round perhaps less than he should, but he found it wearying to be in a place where he would only ever be tolerated. Ursula’s folks, entirely reasonably, Arm thought, hated him. They hated what he and Ursula’s recklessness had thwarted, though they were helpless to do anything other than love the little boy.

‘How’s he sleeping?’ Arm asked.

‘Well enough, these days,’ Ursula said.

‘Will we go to the park, monkey-bar boy?’ Arm chucked Jack under the chin.

Arm liked to get the kid out of Ursula’s hair, though she was wary of him taking Jack anywhere unfamiliar. Anything other than the usual routine unnerved Jack; new people and places had to be introduced to him in slow stages, or he’d shy, or worse. The boy was in the main docile but capable of ferocious turns, instantaneous eruptions. It had taken several attempts but Arm had got him down to the playground out by the new road, and Jack loved it there now, as long as there were no other kids around. Jack loved to climb and loved the blue-painted jungle gym they’d thrown up. He liked the back-and-forth tacking of the swings and the looping simplicity of the slide; up the steps, down the dented tin chute, repeat, repeat.

‘If you can get him into his trousers, sure,’ Ursula said.

Jack preferred to go barelegged, and if left to his own devices would shed any trousers and footwear as soon as possible. Arm shrugged. ‘Sure I’ll take him like this. Don’t think Jack’ll be bothered.’

‘You will not!’ Ursula said and smiled. She had the same sandy blonde hair and blue eyes as Jack, and her face ignited when you could coax a smile onto it, which had never been easy. Ursula was smart, and Arm wondered if he wasn’t still in love with her half the time, but she was a wincy, moribund bitch when she wanted to be.

‘Serious. I’ll take mine off too. Solidarity.’

Jack stuck out his tongue and blew a raspberry, and added a garbled yip as a period. It was clear to Arm that the doctors hadn’t a notion about Jack, or his prospects, and were taking the long route in admitting as much. Before Jack was two he had actually picked up a few baby words, but they went away again soon after, like toys he had tired of and abandoned. Jack had talked, and now did not, and the doctors could not tell if he would ever get back to talking again, or when that day might come.

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