AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Conor
Outside Dublin Ink the dead leaves whipped up on a fierce wind, brittle pieces bound for dust. Inside, I followed their path, whipping forward before turning on my heel, marching back, and starting the process all over again.
“Would you sit down?” Rian complained from an old tufted leather chair, his long pale fingers gripped over the worn armrests. “You’re making me nervous.”
I eyed him before turning away. “What makes you think you shouldn’t be nervous?”
Mason was leaning against the window, checking out a woman passing by who was struggling to keep her skirt down in the whipping wind. He spoke without looking away, “Now that’s the winning spirit, Conor.”
My nails dug into the sensitive skin on the inner part of my wrist as I gripped my hands behind my back. Did they think this was what I wanted? Did they think this was what I dreamed of, all those years ago before that fateful night? A failing tattoo shop. An apartment decorated with eviction notices. A future as bright as the neon light on the faded floral wallpaper that announced to the rare customer “ub nk”.
“It’s not about ‘winning spirit’,” I said.
Mason craned his neck to catch the woman (and perhaps her ass) before she rounded the corner. Rian’s gaze went blank, drifting as usual to some other world, maybe one where we weren’t broke as fuck.
“It’s about facing reality,” I continued, though I wasn’t entirely sure I was being listened to, I was never entirely sure I was being listened to. “Staring down the cold, hard truth with cold, hard eyes. Accepting that this is the way things are for us.”
For me, I thought bitterly.
Mason would one day snag some rich old lady and hide his Americana tattoos under British silk. Rian needed the parlour like he needed a paint-by-numbers box set; he had more talent in his watercolour-tattooed pinkie than half the artists in the city. One day he’d realise that he had better things to do than twiddle his thumbs in a hand-me-down leather chair and stare at a pink fringed lamp blinking against the lengthening shadows as the front door remained unopened.
It was me who was stuck. My chance had come years before. I’d fucked it up. And now it was gone.
This was my purgatory.
“How about some sort of refer-a-friend incentive?” Mason suggested as a homeless man stumbled by on the beer bottle-littered sidewalk out front.
I ignored him. It was debatable whether Rian, wherever the hell he was at the moment, even heard him. I felt Mason’s eyes on me as I turned again to march the opposite direction, the length of the townhouse’s living room we’d semi-converted for the parlour hardly long enough for my restless purposes. No, in fact, pacing just seemed to make me feel even more like I was in a cage. I knew what he saw as my feet landed heavy on the shag carpet: broad shoulders stooped like some weather-faded gargoyle, fingers blackened with ink, tattoo and pen residue blending together till one was impossible to tell from the other, the hair in my bun a little unwashed, a little unkept.
Mason wanted me to say it was a good idea. He wanted me to smile (I didn’t smile), to tell him everything was okay (I didn’t lie), to hold his hand and tuck him into bed and bring him a warm glass of milk (I didn’t fucking coddle anyone). But we’d played this game one too many times before. The fact was we were fucked.
We set up shop in the wrong part of Dublin. Dolphin’s Barn was known for needles, but not the kind that came with ink. Nobody knew about us and the ones who did certainly weren’t willing to risk getting their tires slashed when they could throw a stone from their bedroom window and hit some hipster douchebag with an “it’ll do” portfolio. We’d been open for a year and in that time the bank had gone through more ink sending us late notices than we’d gone through for customer tattoos. We could tattoo each other, Rian, Mason, and I, with art that would blow your mind, but that didn’t exactly pay the bills, now did it?
The phone, an old rose-coloured antique rotary that had belonged to Mason’s mother and her mother before her, that had been passed down along with the rest of the crumbling, granny wallpaper-plastered townhouse, rang suddenly, a rare occurrence I assure you at Dublin Ink. Neither Mason nor Rian gave the impression of going to answer it, Mason with his pierced nose smushed against the glass and Rian with his eyes closed and his finger shifting through the air like a young trash polka tattooed Mozart.
I stalked over to the phone with a humph of irritation that neither of them noticed and snatched it up in a fist.
“What?”
“Ah, lucky me,” a familiar voice said cheerfully, which just irritated me further. “I played Dublin Ink roulette and I got the bullet.”
“I’m kind of busy, Diarmuid,” I said brusquely.
“Pleasant as always, my friend.”
Diarmuid Brennan could call me his friend all he wanted. I supposed that to anyone else that’s exactly how our relationship would appear: friends, that is. We met as teenagers through our mutual Juvenile Liaison Officer, Brian. He figured the best way for delinquent boys to get out their frustrations was through guided, structured, rule-enforced violence, aka boxing. That first day at O’Malley’s boxing gym the rules of the sport meant nothing to us as our fists introduced each other again…and again…and again… After that we fought a thousand more times, though most times it ended at the insistent ringing of the bell. I guess that’s as close as my definition of friendship got: caring enough not to take someone’s head off.
Even with Rian and Mason I felt like they were closer to me than I was, or ever wanted to be, with them. Sometimes I thought they knew it. Sometimes I thought it was only so long that they would accept it before…well.
“I won’t take much of your time,” Diarmuid said before I could hang up as I was prone to do.
“Unless you want to schedule a tattoo or take down the address to send a check for a tattoo, I don’t have any time,” I said. “Not ‘much’ or otherwise.”
The phone was already moving toward the rusted receiver when Diarmuid shouted, “C! C! Wait, it does involve money!”
This earned him a thirty-second reprieve. I raised the phone back to my ear. This raised the attention of Mason from the window, Rian from his ethereal tattoo composing.
“Is that the bank?” Rian whispered.
