Atlantic City

      A July evening, after a tar-melter of a day, and Broad Street was quiet and muffled with summer, the entire town was dozy with summer, and even as the summer peaked so it began to fade. Dogs didn’t know what had hit them. They walked around the place with their tongues hanging out and their eyes rolling and they lapped forlornly at the drains. The old were anxious, too: they twitched the curtains to look to the hills, and flapped themselves with copies of the RTE Guide to make a parlour breeze. Later, after dark, the bars would be giddy with lager drinkers, but it was early yet, and Broad Street was bare and peaceful in the blue evening.

      The youth of Broad Street and its surrounds had convened in a breeze-block arcade tacked onto Moloney’s Garage. This had been one of Moloney’s sharper moves. He’d taken an old shed that he’d used for a store room, it was maybe forty foot long and half as wide, and he’d installed there a pool table, three video games, a wall-mounted jukebox and a pinball machine. To add a note of local pride, he’d painted the walls in the county colours. It wasn’t much of an arcade, with just the clack and nervous roll of the pool balls, and the insipid bleats of Donkey Kong and Defender. There was high anxious talk about girls and handjobs and who had cigarettes, and there was talk about cars and motorbikes. It wasn’t much at all but it was the only show in town and this evening, a dozen habituees had gathered there, all boys, from pre-pubescents through to late teens, and there was desperation to make this a different kind of night, a night to sustain them through the long winter. But so far it was the same old routine, with Donkey Kong and Defender, and winner-stays-on at the pool table, and James was always the winner, and he always stayed on. The pinball machine lit up and crackled to salute a good score. Its theme was the criminal scene of Atlantic City, and the illustration showed a black detective, with a heavy moustache, patrolling in a red sports car, and whenever the day’s hi-score was achieved, the detective’s eyes lit up and he spoke out, in a deep-voiced, downtown drawl.

      He said: ‘Atlantic City. Feel The Force!’

      This was James’s cue to leave the pool table and approach the pinball machine. At nineteen, he was the oldest of the habituees, and certainly the biggest. Not fat so much as massive, the width of a small van across the shoulders, and he moved noiselessly, as though on castors, and the flesh swung and rolled with him, there was no little grace to it, and he considered the breathless, blushing youngster who’d achieved a new hi-score on Atlantic City, and he considered the score, and he said:

      ‘Handy. Handy alright.’

      With a long-suffering sigh he reached deep into the pocket of his jeans and took out the necessary coin and inserted it in the slot. The silver balls slapped free and he pulled the spring-release to send the first of them on its way, and it bounced and pinged and rebounded around the nooks and contours of the game, around the boardwalks and the neon boulevards, and wordlessly, the habituees of the arcade swivelled their attention from the pool to the pinball, for the magic had shifted to a new discipline, and cigarette smoke hung blue in the air, and it twisted as they turned. It was a matter of pride to James that he wouldn’t let even one of the silver balls drop between the flippers to the dead-ball zone, and he worked the flippers with quick rhythmic slaps from his fingers and palms—an expert—and his score rolled onwards