Everything in This Country Must by Colum McCann Page B

there were some older teenagers at the back of an alley and he spied on them from the window of the video arcade. The light from a blue neon sign pulsed upon them. They too wore black drainpipes and white shirts, but their hair was shorter than his and they had sideburns. He smiled when he saw that they wore black armbands. He wanted to go outside and tell them that his uncle was on hunger strike—they would look at him with a certain awe and feel a shiver and know him to be a hard man. They would share their cigarettes and give him a nickname. He would show them his penknife and lie about how he once sliced a soldier from neck to stomach like a gutted deer.
    One of the teenagers looked around furtively and the boy was startled to see him bring a bag of glue to his mouth.
    The boy turned immediately and put his fifty pence into the machine. It lit up. He played with a bead of sweat beginning at his brow, but the teenagers in the alleyway kept their faces to the plastic bag. He wondered what it was like to get high. Back home he had never seen any of his friends taking drugs—once there had been a pusher in the house next door and she had ended up with bullets in both knees. He would listen to her coming along the street and her crutches struck the ground, a shrill metallic language. Late at night when she played her stereo he could hear the crutch tapping out a rhythm against the floor, but when she kept dealing the vigilantes kicked her door down, put two bullets in her elbows, and two more in her ankles for good measure, after which she disappeared altogether, and people said she’d gone to England, where she was dealing from a wheelchair.
    He stole another look at the alleyway.
    They breathed the bag in and out and it looked to him like the beat of a strange gray heart. Between hits of the glue they smoked cigarettes and one of the youths nonchalantly left a lit cigarette behind his ear and the smoke curled up above his head.
    The boy patted his pockets and cursed himself for spending all his money on one game, but he controlled the machine for two hours until his fingers began to ache, and when he looked again to the alleyway the youths were gone. On the ground lay a ring of cigarette butts and a patch of vomit. At the far end of the laneway was graffiti that said: SMASH THE H-BLOCK . Beyond that were the words: BOBBY SANDS M.P., R.I.P. He saluted the graffiti and wished he had some spray paint so he could put his uncle’s name in high strong letters all around the town.
    The sea threw waves on the beach, and out on the water he spied some fishing boats. One of them flew a black flag and the Irish tricolor promiscuously from atop its cabin. The boy ran down to the water’s edge and waved at the boat, but there was no response. He walked along the hard edge of the sand, whistling.
    Good on ye, he said to the disappearing boat.
    He took off his shoes and toyed with the water, daring it to wet his toes. The cold sand sucked around his feet and made gurgling noises. He found himself laughing and he wasn’t quite sure if he should be enjoying himself or not, in this strange town, on this strange beach, in this strange loneliness.
    He stepped in farther until the sea was up to his ankles and he kicked up spray and the droplets made shapes and parabolas in the air. Mathematics was the only thing he enjoyed in school, though he told nobody, and he wondered now if he could ever chart the arc of a droplet of water. It would be an odd graph, he thought, captured in a millisecond, from one end of an axis to another. He could create a formula for moving water and it would be decipherable only to him.
    The sea no longer felt cold and in a moment he was running along the sand, kicking furiously and laughing, and the sea itself seemed doomed to the fact of his joy.
    He shouted to the waves: Try me, come on, try me. He was soaked to the knees and moving at the edge of the empty beach like some piebald horse with his feet in the air