Read by Fergus Rattigan
Cian is a shiver of denim with a plastic bag of canned good times. Deckchair-striped, it gouges heavy into his fingers so they bulge white at the tips. Occasionally, some acquaintance of his mother cackles by and comments on him breezily before reemerging with the dregs of the Centra wine fridge. Along the street, a family with kids unable for midnight sets off New Year’s fireworks early, and a crack of gold sparks splits the bite-cold evening, leaps over the broody hulk of suburbia.
Rob is late but for once Cian doesn’t mind. Since the summer, he’s coexisted with this bubbling anticipation, the simmer of it fizzing through his skin. A little longer. His mam had slipped him a twenty when she’d heard Kathy’s son was home. ‘God love him,’ she’d said, ‘that lad deserves a good night. What’s it been, five months now?’
So even though the party’s not far, the drive there will be something. They’ll take looping back roads and he will prop his feet on the dashboard and fill the car with ‘Oh, just a band I caught in Workmans a few weeks back. Experimental. You’ve not heard of them?’ Not fully a lie - he would’ve gone if anyone had asked. Rob will talk about college in England and say ‘It’s fine, like, but it’s not the same.’ They’ll skip the party to drink cans at the beach, throw pebbles at the empties like they used to. He gets a flushed and queasy feeling just thinking about it.
But when the battered Corsa swings into view it’s not just his friend in the car. It’s barely stopped moving and the girl has the passenger door open, glides herself out and clamps him in a one-way hug.
'The famous Cian!'
She’s heron sleek, with a fanfare mouth and the expansive manner of someone whose place in the world has never been challenged. Behind her, Rob crouches half-in half-out the car door, taking great interest in the pavement. He seems sharper, as if his new city face has no time for the inefficiencies of emotion. Features contorted from sharing the air with thousands of harried strangers, the spit and choke of their lungs circulating directly back into yours.
Slouching across the back seat, Cian watches squat houses and tree trunks flash by like morse code. Fat smears of moss line the bottom of the windows and there’s a corpse-sweet smell of wet soil and rot. Rob’s mum Kathy’s car then, left to fester undriven. Chloe is non-stop noise. She’d booked a flight last minute, not told anyone until she was belted in, exit row, and expected an airport meet-cute.
'Totally spontaneous, but that’s so me,' she says, ‘and I’ve never been to Southern Ireland before.' With pearl nails tight on Rob’s left thigh she wiggles contentedly and gazes out the bird-pocked windscreen at the salt-bruised seafront and the derelict hotel. 'So romantic.'
'Fáilte Ireland’s wet dream, you are. Staying long?'
'The second. Don’t want to impose on Rob’s dad. We’re flying back together.'
There’ll be no time, then. Cian stares resolutely ahead, fixed on the breadcrumb trail of cat’s eyes along the unspooling road.
'Dad doesn’t mind,' says Rob, 'I doubt he really notices to be honest.'
The whole town knows about Tom. They sigh about him in the pensions queue and dally when they pass his house. A terrible thing, they croon. A terrible terrible thing. They are no longer certain to which thing they’re referring, the earthquake or the aftershock. Everyone has heard the stories; walled stacks of newspaper encrusting every room in small squeaks and itchings. The kitchen furred with dirty plates. Neighbours drop in mawkish casseroles which - it’s rumoured - Tom decants into Tupperware labelled with descriptions of whoever has made them. Evenings tallied by defrosted lucky dips marked ‘with the hair’ or ‘TEETH’. Rob does not know this, or maybe he does. When he left he slammed a shutter on everything.
The party is at Maura’s. Her parents work in tax assurance, exchanging finite hours of existence for dragon-hoards of cash and an annually apportioned 22 days in which to create meaningful experiences. They forgot she snuck the spare key and, as their Thailand glow flakes away, are set for an unsettling January Cluedoing mysterious breakages and suspected poltergeists.
Chloe is armed with airport gin and a paper bag of limes, and the kitchen swallows her as soon as they arrive. Rob takes their coats upstairs and Cian pads after him, leaving his tepid cans by the heap of bags in the hall. The sunset glow of the streetlight makes shadow puppets of the furniture and the cairn of coats on the bed.
He wipes his hands down his shirt, trying to work out the crease of his mam’s iron. Through the floor he can hear Chloe introducing herself to everyone.
'You didn’t mention a girlfriend.’
'I never said she was.' Rob starts picking up and replacing the various tubs and beauty items on the dresser, arranging them so they descend in height order.
'And she’d agree with that view would she?'
‘We don’t do labels.’
‘Ooh la la, how very modern.’
‘Look, Dad likes her. OK? Said he can stop worrying about me, nice girl. It might help. It’s what he wants.'
Carpeted, Cian takes a steady half step towards him as if approaching a nervous horse.
'And is it what you want?'
A drowsy buzz of sun-brewed summer flickers between them. Rememberings of heat and sand-worn cotton, sour tongue chips and wheeling gulls.
‘Cian, we －’
There’s a loud pounding of feet and three girls barrel into the room, sloughing jackets like reptilian scales to reveal beetle-jewelled colours beneath.
'Ooh lads, don’t let us disturb you! You work away there. Don’t get it on the coats mind.'
'Very funny,' says Rob.
The girls heave laughter and clutch each other and trip down the stairs with naggins tucked in tight waistbands. Rob takes a determined inhale and follows them out.
Chloe stands encircled by an orchestra of people, conducting conversation with a shot glass waved around imperiously. She shimmies across the lino to seize Rob in a movie-star smooch under the kitchen striplights. Caught off guard, he moves his arms uncertainly through the air, then settles them around each bare shoulder blade. Their bodies look so neat and beautiful together, like clean teaspoons stacked in a drawer. The hormoned mob hoots, delighted.
Cian recognises most of them from school. The ones at college in Dublin are broadly the same, perhaps augmented with a confrontational hairstyle. They stand in cliques, looking self-consciously edgy and making brazen noises about socialism. Others have moved away and taken the opportunity to construct an entirely new personality, now making its Bambi-legged hometown debut swathed in velvet and bewildering eyeliner. He himself is unchanged, essentially an embarrassing continuation of the person he was in school. He spends a long time sidling up to conversations and trying to smile his way into them until it becomes apparent that he has no controversial opinions to trade. Then he does a circuit of the house holding two drinks and looking around studiously as if searching for someone, downs one of them, and starts the process again.
This is the party that slips into teenage folklore, that with necromancer sleight of hand will be reanimated round pub tables from a pulpy mass of swollen pupils, clicking jaws on glass, cheeks. Bottles pass fist to fist, necks sticky from yammering mouths, and they drink out of bowls and pans when the glasses are gone. Three girls black out in the yard and stay there unnoticed until hard blue sky and icy concrete rap at their skulls. And at the howling heart of it is Chloe, now in a tactile gaggle salting margaritas, now staccatoing punchlines through a careless cigarette haze, now getting the door to more bodies who pour into the hallway and brush off Rob’s introductions - ‘Sure I met her already! Some woman!’
'Sickening,' says Cian, lurching into Snack Box Larry who exudes the linger of a fry not quite masked by panic-spray Lynx. They’ve been backed into the alcove by the kitchen bins and the back door, the cupboard full of pegs, Bags for Life and empty margarine tubs.
'Look at her there. Who - no, listen - who does she think she is? All over him. Just turning up like that.'
He takes one long swig of his empty can and Snackers sees his chance, mumbles ‘Another?’ and lumbers away into the human soup that broils around them, the whole house thrumming with blurred sound and pale ovals that swivel about and grin with shining teeth. Maybe this is life from now on, tonight is just the trailer. Existing behind a wall of thick glass clammy with desperate handprints, the people he knows escaping to worlds beyond his reach, until one day he realises that eternity is just him and his mam and dinner in the warming drawer.
The puce mass in front of him spins kaleidoscope triangles that accumulate to form Rob’s face, right there, and he raises one arm in clumsy surprise, grating of stubble on his palm.
‘All right Cian,’ says Rob, stepping back quickly. ‘Chloe was right then!’ He’s loud with her name now, pleased with himself and his conclusive ability to attract blandly popular foreign girls.
‘The famous Cian? Yeah that’s me. Bono without sunnies, handy with a basin wrench.’
'What? She said you might need looking in on. Here.' Rob passes him a pint of water, filmy with crisp-grease fingerprints.
What kind of person brings their own limes to parties anyway? The water is tepid and swimming with crumbs but he drinks it, glad of something to occupy his hands. Rob is still standing there, watching. He is very aware that through the glass his open mouth must be horribly distorted, like a thick-lipped carp. He wipes his sleeve across his face.
‘What?’
‘We’re leaving soon,’ says Rob, ‘are you all right to make your own way back?’
‘Fine yeah.’ He kicks at the bin, gnarly toe poking through a hole in his runner.
‘You’re being so weird. Are you - jealous or something?’
‘Of you? No.’
‘Of her.’
His insides jolt, a great writhing eel churning through his guts. A few jagged breaths, then he grapples for the yard door and pulls Rob through it. Outside, the night air is brittle, as if he could grasp it and snap it apart. On the concrete a fox has disembowelled a rubbish bag, spewing chicken trays and puckered orange peel now tingling with frost. The throaty drift of peat smoke and under every chimney are people that belong there. Inside, someone yells ‘One minute!’
They’re standing so close now, in the dark and the cold. What would it take, one step, two?
Burnished hot-slow silence and Rob’s gaze like a physical pressure on his face. He closes the door behind them, mutes the midnight countdown. The heartwrench flash and crack of sparks.
This could be the start or end of everything, but at least it’s real.
(c) Jess Worsdale, 2021
Jess Worsdale lives in Dublin and writes short stories, flash fiction and music journalism. Her work has previously been published in Splonk, GoldenPlec Magazine and read at Liars' League events in London and Hong Kong.
Fergus Rattigan is a London based Irish actor who has appeared on stage in Ramps on the Moon's national tour of Our Country's Good , at Chester Storyhouse as the title character in the Wizard of Oz in 2019, onscreen in CBBC’s 4 O Clock Club in 2020 and during lockdown as a regular performer with Shake-Scene Shakespeare on YouTube.
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