Authors: Joe Murphy
I’m looking at Seán and my grin is so wide that it’s hurting my jaws.
‘Seán,’ I go, ‘you’re a genius.’
Seán used to be
like
this all the time. In spite of his weirdness. In spite of the way he does
things
to things. He always used to have a current running through him. Something more than just a spark.
This all started to change around the time that his Mam left. Something soured in him.
No, that’s wrong.
What that implies is that there’s some causal relationship between Seán’s Mam leaving and his internal wiring starting to short out in a bad way. It’s like there’s a row of dominos with his Mam’s face on the first one and a picture of dead dogs on the last. This just isn’t true.
His Mam leaving has fuck all to do with his problems. His Da hitting him might though.
This one time just after his Mam walks out, Seán is playing with me and the lads in Alex DeCourcey’s house. Alex DeCourcey’s
little sister has a bunch of rabbits and guinea pigs that live in this little hutch made out of timber and chicken wire. The little sister doesn’t really give a fuck about her box of rodents but God help you if you go near them. She doesn’t even know how many she has. She doesn’t even feed them.
We are paying absolutely no attention to the rabbits and guinea pigs because Alex DeCourcey has managed to get his hands on his big brother’s collection of
Nuts
magazines. The day is cold, I remember this, cold and windy because whenever you let go of the pages the wind whips them closed.
Me and the lads are hiding behind the coal shed in Alex DeCourcey’s back yard and we are all amazed by pictures of
half-naked
, air-brushed models. All of us are trying to stop the breeze fluttering shut the pages. All of us except Seán.
Seán is standing over at the rabbit hutch and he’s smiling away to himself because Alex DeCourcey’s Mam has given him lettuce leaves to feed to the rabbits. Seán couldn’t care less about
anything
in
Nuts
magazine.
Things start to go wrong when Seán goes to put his hand inside the rabbit hutch. He doesn’t want to open the door because it’s locked and, to Seán’s mind, if there’s a lock on something it’s there for a reason. However, he doesn’t see anything wrong with trying to shove his hand into a slight gap between the chicken wire and the timber frame.
When me and Alex DeCourcey and the rest of the lads come out from behind the coal shed with our faces red and our heads full of fake boobs and shiny lipstick the first thing we see is Seán
lying on his belly with one arm shoved into the rabbit hutch. His arm is all the way in, right up to the elbow and all the rabbits and guinea pigs are gathered in this mound of fur and twitching whiskers at the far end of the hutch. Seán’s ass is sticking in the air and he’s squirming like an eel because he’s after getting his arm stuck in the chicken wire. From across the yard you can hear him moaning as if he’s about to cry.
Me and the lads go and stand over him and Seán goes, ‘My arm is stuck. I didn’t mean to.’
To help him out, me and Alex DeCourcey grab an ankle each and we heft him backwards. He sticks for a second and then comes loose so suddenly that me and Alex nearly end up falling on our arses. He comes loose so suddenly that the rabbit hutch rattles on its moorings and the rabbits and guinea pigs all make this weird piping noise.
Everyone laughs and Seán sits there smiling in inane gratitude and then we all go and play football. An hour later, Seán runs away with the ball and we all go home.
So much, so ordinary.
The thing that nobody notices is that, when we pull Seán free, his big arm is after widening the gap between the chicken wire and timber frame. His big arm is after widening it just enough so that one particularly determined guinea pig can fit through and make a dash for freedom. Can guinea pigs dash? Anyway, said guinea pig makes it as far as the road and then a passing car turns it into red paste. The driver doesn’t even stop.
This happens at night and Alex DeCourcey’s little sister
discovers what’s left of her guinea pig the next morning. She discovers what’s left of her guinea pig and she will just not stop crying.
This is where things get bad for Seán.
There’s a big parental enquiry about who fucked up the rabbit hutch and Alex DeCourcey squeals and blames Seán. This is utter crap because it was probably me and Alex who ruined it by
dragging
Seán out of it by the ankles. We dragged him because we thought it would be a laugh. Nobody’s laughing now, especially not Alex’s little sister.
Alex’s Mam calls around to Seán’s Da and she gives him both barrels. All of us except Seán are out in the road pretending to be playing football. Seán’s Da stands there saying nothing. He stands there in an Ireland football jersey from about 1994 and he just lets her words sleet over him. He hasn’t got that waxy look off him yet. His skin doesn’t look like yellow lard but it’s starting to. Even from the road you can tell he’s drunk as a maggot and his eyes are all whorled about with black wrinkles.
Alex’s Mam goes, ‘What are you going to do about it?’
And Seán’s Da says, ‘Do? I’ll do plenty.’
And then he’s roaring, ‘Seán! Seán! Get your arse down here!’
Seán doesn’t get his arse down there. In fact nobody knows where Seán is. We all search up and down the road for him. Even his Da.
When we find him it is at the back of Alex DeCoursey’s house and he has a guinea pig in his arms. Alex’s Mam goes crazy at this and Seán’s Da grabs him by the collar and hauls him home. Alex’s
little sister grabs the guinea pig and puts it in the hutch with the others.
The thing about this is that everyone goes hysterical without asking Seán anything. Everyone is so wound up that their nerves are razor wire beneath their skin and they can’t think straight. Nobody talks to Seán and nobody listens when he tries to explain.
The next day me and Seán are sitting on his wall and he won’t tell me what happened to his lips, what happened to his eye. He just stares at the ground and in a voice that’s all slurred and slushy because of his busted mouth, he tells me why he was holding the guinea pig.
It turns out that Seán got up real early that morning and went to look at the guinea pigs and rabbits again. He couldn’t sleep for thinking about them. It turns out that Seán was the first person on the road that morning, the very first person, to realise what happened to Alex’s sister’s guinea pig.
Seán isn’t stupid.
It also turns out that Seán had about twenty quid saved up for the new FIFA due out in a month or so.
Seán, being Seán, feels terrible about what happened. He feels like he’s to blame and that he’s going to get into trouble. So,
feeling
like this he goes back and gets his twenty quid and, still
feeling
like this, he walks into town and he buys Alex’s sister a new guinea pig.
When Alex’s Mam goes all psycho on him he was just trying to replace the dead one. The one he blamed himself for getting killed.
And nobody listens to him and nobody asks him any
questions
and his Da just hammers the tar out of him.
Even back then, that morning sitting on the wall, I can see the change that Seán’s undergone. He’s still Seán but something’s hardened in him. There’s an edge to his smile that I don’t like. An awful glee. His grin is like a sickle ever since.
There’s three weeks to go till the summer holidays. When they kick in, me and Seán are going to do something about Dr Thorpe.
We have this all worked out.
The Friday after school ends is the start of the Strawberry Fair. Dr Thorpe with his big car and hair is going to head off playing golf all day. He does this every year. His face is always plastered all over next week’s
Echo
accepting a trophy from the Club Captain. Every year this happens. Regular as breathing. I
remember
Dr Thorpe calling out to our house when Mam was sick and Da hooting laughing with him about playing off eleven when he should be playing off four or five.
I fucking
hate
golf.
We, me and Seán, are going to wait until the coast is clear and then we’re going to do our best to see if we can find anything at his house or in his garden. Anything at all.
The three weeks until the holidays crawl along like something gutted and dying a slow death. Every day, every single day, me and Seán get caught in a blizzard of woofs and yelps and howls.
For the summer exams our Irish teacher includes a
comprehension
on a lost dog. Maybe I’m being paranoid but I’m pretty sure he’s taking the piss.
School for Seán isn’t really working without his meds. There’s a static charge building in him with every minute he spends in the place and it’s going to have to be earthed somewhere. He spends most of the day with Mr Cowper and he spends his lunchtimes sitting on a windowsill with his face in his hands. I feel really, really guilty about this.
Nobody wants to talk to us. Nobody texts and nobody rings and it’s like we’re cut off from everybody else. Pariahs.
Football in the yard is a joke. I’m the school’s Under-18
keeper
and nobody picks me for a kick around anymore. I can’t wait for this year to end.
And Judas is gibbering away all the time,
This is all Seán’s fault. I don’t know why the fuck people think you’re a weirdo too. He cut open that dog, for fuck’s sake. Not you
.
But I ignore him and he fades into the background and I
concentrate
on proving what we know about Dr Thorpe. I can’t do this without Seán. I hate to admit it but I’m nowhere near strong enough.
I make a complete hames of my summer exams. I make a complete hames of everything except English. The report won’t be posted out until July but I know that I’ve failed at least four subjects out of seven. It’s not that I’m stupid or lazy but I can’t concentrate on anything other than the plan for the first day of the Strawberry Fair. When I should be studying Maths, I start
making rough sketches of Dr Thorpe’s property. When it’s time for a change, instead of Geography I’m labelling the sketches in BLOCK CAPITALS. Here’s the house and here’s the driveway.
See also the electric gates.
See also the eight-foot wall.
See also the rose beds.
Everything nice and precise.
I text Seán every few minutes and he replies every single time. I check my phone at one stage and my inbox has 129 messages. All except one is from Seán. The exception is the one from my Da telling me to turn down the speakers for my iPod and go to sleep.
We finish school and the
following Friday is the start of the Strawberry Fair. That Thursday night I can’t sleep. I keep
twisting
in the bed and my stomach is a twitching swamp of nausea. I’m not sure if I can go through with this. A good few times I pick up my phone and start to text Seán to tell him to forget about this whole thing. And every time I see Dr Thorpe’s slow, born-to-
be-a
-winner smile and I hear his fist connecting with cartilage.
The dead meat smack of it.
Every time I remember this I delete the words I’ve written on my phone and I lie there with my brain a lump of sweating tar in my skull. I’m so tired it feels like my eyeballs are filmed with dust. Every blink feels like sandpaper. I lie like this for I don’t know how long but when the bedroom starts to brighten, I know I have to get up.
It is six o’clock and all is not fucking well.
I get up, dress myself, and really quietly I sneak out the front door. All the time my heart is thud-tha-thudding under my ribs. If my Da wakes up and starts asking questions I don’t know what I’ll say.
The door clicks shut behind me and I freeze on the doorstep. I’m waiting for my Da to lean out his bedroom window and call me back. Nothing happens though and after a minute I head across the bridge and up past the Castle. The Market Square is empty apart from a skinny black mongrel that limps away from me on three good legs. The entire place is covered in purple and gold and red and white bunting. There’s a big trailer after being hauled into the Square and there are speakers set up and ready to be plugged in. In front of the trailer white lawn furniture is stacked waiting for the pensioners and the children and the spilled ice cream.
Up past the Cathedral Seán is waiting for me outside Kelly’s shop and in spite of my nerves I’m grinning at him.
Seán blinks at me and he goes, ‘This is too early.’
He’s wrong on this one. We have to be ready to hop over Dr Thorpe’s wall as soon as we get the chance. I looked in the
Echo
for the tee-off times for the Golf Classic and the earliest two-ball is scheduled for half-past seven. If Dr Thorpe is playing first we might miss our chance to poke around his garden.
I’m looking at Seán and I’m shaking my head and I’m going, ‘It’s not too early. We’re bang on time.’
And then I’m going, ‘Did you bring them?’
Seán reaches a big paw into his hoodie pocket and pulls out a half pound of sausages. These are for Dr Thorpe’s dog in case she gets all brave in herself all of a sudden.
Seán holds the bundle of sausages in the bundle of his own sausage fingers and he looks down at them and he starts to frown.
Before he has the chance to say anything I’m going, ‘We don’t have time for breakfast. There’s nowhere open anyway. Later on. Afterwards.’
Seán tuts like he’s a child and he tucks the sausages back into his pocket.
We, me and Seán, walk down Nunnery Road but instead of going straight to Dr Thorpe’s we climb up the hill to the grotto and we sit on the benches and we watch Dr Thorpe’s gate. Because of the Strawberry Fair the barricades are already up to stop people driving into the centre of town and the road below us is deserted. This is traditional because one time this really pissed fifty-year-old woman in a Land Rover tried to drive down into the Square. The guards pretty much hauled her out by the hair. Nothing is moving and my skin is bubbling up with goosbumps. It’s like every inch of me is covered in little nettle stings. My adrenaline is at such a pitch that my stomach is in constant spasm. If I did have time for breakfast I’d be spewing it all over the grotto’s nice paving slabs right about now.
Seán is sitting beside me and every now and then he throws a look towards the statue of Our Lady standing in her little nook. She is staring off at a spot in the sky and her hands are steepled under her chin. Her paint is starting to flake away after all these
years and her eyes are blank and white and blind as spiders’ eggs.
Seán throws the statue another look and he goes, ‘Did she really move?’
Without taking my eyes off Dr Thorpe’s front gate I say, ‘No. She never moved.’
And Seán goes, ‘Da says that during the eighties she moved and you could pray to her for stuff.’
Still not taking my eyes off Dr Thorpe’s front gate I say, ‘Well, go ahead and pray then.’
Seán sits there for a minute and then he puts his hands
together
and he squeezes his eyes shut and just like that he goes, ‘Dear Mary. Help us.’
And just like that Dr Thorpe’s big black iron gates give a little shudder and start to open up with a noise like scrap being crushed. A few seconds later Dr Thorpe’s oil-sleek 407 slides out onto the road, turns left because Nunnery Road is closed to
traffic
, cruises up to the roundabout at the top of Bohreen Hill, swings right and disappears.
I watch it go and beside me Seán’s blessing himself and he says, ‘Dear Mary. Thank you.’
Me and Seán walk down to the road and we follow Dr Thorpe’s eight-foot concrete wall around to the side of his
property
. There’s no way we can get over it the way we did in the dark so we have to plough our way through all the bracken and all the briars that fill this little scrap of wasteland behind Dr Thorpe’s garden. When we get round the back we are in a little alley
swarfed with briar and hedged in by blackthorns, and the back wall of Dr Thorpe’s garden rears up on our left. All along the base of the wall there’s a drift of decaying grass cuttings. Month after month, year after year Dr Thorpe must cut his grass and dump it over the wall. The stuff is slumped all together in lumpen strata, the top ones green and smelling like summer, the bottom ones putrefying into brown slush.
We stand here breathing in the smells of the slowly decaying grass and Seán sticks his thumb in his mouth because he’s hooked it on a briar. Around his thumb his voice comes all distorted. It goes, ‘What do we do now?’
I’m looking at the wall and I’m accutely aware that I don’t know how much time we have.
I look at Seán and I look at the wall and I go, ‘If I boost you up could you lift me?’
Seán nods once. This time he’s not afraid he’ll drop me.
Seán weighs a tonne and from the platform of my cupped hands he half hops, half scrabbles to the top of the wall. He lies on his belly and he reaches down his hand and he grins at me. There are blades in that grin and I’m wondering if Seán is about to crack again.
Then I think of Dr Thorpe and then, trying not to think of anything else, I grab Seán’s hand and I sort of scramble up the wall.
I’m out of breath and the two of us sit there for a minute
looking
down on Dr Thorpe’s garden.
Dr Thorpe’s garden is about a half acre of soft green lawn. In
the sunlight you can see that he’s cut the lawn all fancy so that it looks like there are areas of lighter and darker grass all in the shape of diamonds. The whole middle of the lawn is taken up by a big spiral bed of roses. The bare earth of the flowerbeds is
covered
with more quilts of decaying grass. Dr Thorpe’s house sits at the far end of this half acre of grass and roses, and to the left there’s a concrete straggle of sheds with galvanised roofs. One of the sheds is open and hanging on a nail on the door jamb is a dog collar and a choke chain.
We, me and Seán, sit there for a minute taking this all in and Seán goes, ‘Dr Thorpe has a really nice garden. Maybe we shouldn’t jump down. I don’t want to get in trouble.’
I’m looking at him and I’m saying, ‘I can’t do this on my own, Seán. I have to find out what happened to that girl. Everyone thinks we’re freaks. If we can show them that we saw what we saw then maybe people will change their minds.’
Seán looks from me to the lawn and back again and he goes, ‘People think I’m a freak all the time.’
Then he stops and lifts up his big hands and he clenches and opens them, clenches and opens them. He looks at them like it’s the first time he’s ever noticed them and he says, ‘I don’t like being a freak.’
And I’m saying, ‘Neither do I.’
Without another word the two of us are climbing down into Dr Thorpe’s garden. As soon as the soles of my runners touch Dr Thorpe’s mint-green lawn my heart starts to paradiddle against my ribs. I can feel every hot gush of its workings.
As soon as the soles of my runners touch Dr Thorpe’s
mint-green
lawn his German Pointer comes trotting out of her shed.
The dog is this lovely soft grey colour all splotched with daubs of chocolate. Her head is a chocolate wedge and two intelligent gold eyes take in me and Seán standing stock-still against the wall. The dog stops and the hackles raise on the back of her neck and she makes this weird whuffling noise halfway between a bark and a growl. She takes two quick steps forward and this time she lets out this little yipping bark like she doesn’t quite mean it yet but she’s getting there.
Then Seán is moving past me so that he stands between me and the dog and he goes, ‘Here, girl. You’re a good dog, aren’t you? Here, girl.’
He has the half pound of sausages in his hand. The German Pointer looks like she’s going to turn around and run the hell away but then her wet pad of a nose lifts and she takes a step towards Seán.
Seán’s going, ‘Good girl. Good girl.’
There’s a softness in his voice that I’ve never heard before and he’s staring at the dog like he’s amazed by her.
The dog takes another few steps forward and now Seán is
giving
her the sausages. The dog sniffs at them and then she starts wolfing them down with Seán standing over her, his big hand stroking her back and smoothing the place where her hackles had all bristled up.
I let him stroke her for a minute and then I go, ‘Seán! We have to get moving. If Dr Thorpe comes back we’re fucked.’
Seán doesn’t move. He just stands there smiling and petting the dog.
I’m looking at the house and the hairs on the back of my neck are starting to stand up and I’m going, ‘Seán! For fuck’s sake. We may hurry up. If Dr Thorpe catches us here he’ll kill us too.
This seems to trigger something in Seán because he slowly turns around and there’s this strange dopey expression on his face like he’s been anaesthetized or something.
There’s this poem we’re doing in school and one of the lines goes,
like a patient etherized upon a table
. Seán is upright but this is exactly him. Etherized.
Slowly he says, ‘Yeah. We may. She’s real soft. Her hair is real soft.’
The dog follows me and Seán as we walk around the garden looking for anywhere that could be used to hide a body. Looking for any evidence of anything at all. The garden is wide open and apart from the sheds there’s absolutely nowhere that anyone could hide anything. We look under a wheelbarrow that’s
upside-down
against the wall of one shed. Its flat tyre is a fat slug of rubber, heavy on its axle.
The sheds aren’t locked so we open them and look in. They’re all ridiculously neat inside with tools hanging on racks and
garden
furniture all stacked like the furniture for the Strawberry Fair. Even the dog shed is pristine. There’s a sort of loft under the roof in the dog shed and we even climb into that but there’s
nothing
up there except forty-litre bags of grass seed and Presto dog food.
We even go right up to the house and look through the kitchen windows. Seán makes the mistake of pressing his face against a window pane and the fats in his sweat leave a halloween mask of his features on the glass. I’m cursing at him because I’m frustrated and feeling stupid and he starts to moan because I’m giving out to him and all the while Dr Thorpe’s German Pointer follows us around with her bright eyes and her little spud of a tail wagging like crazy.
Around the garden there is nothing. There is absolutely
nothing
to suggest that Dr Thorpe murdered anyone. The place looks like it’s cut and pasted straight out of
Gardener’s Weekly
. There’s not one blade of grass out of place. Not one fork or spade has even the smallest clot of soil or dirt clinging to it. Everything is elegant and meticulous and I feel like an idiot.
For the first time since all this started, Seán’s looking at me like he doesn’t believe me.
His mouth opens and he goes, ‘Are you sure he hid her here?’
I’m frowning at him and I go, ‘No, I’m not fucking sure. I’m not sure that she’s even within a hundred miles of here. I just thought we might find something. Anything.’
Seán’s face scrunches up and he goes to say something but then stops.
I’m looking at him and I’m saying, ‘Go on. Out with it.’
And Seán looks at me and he goes, ‘Are you sure you saw what you saw?’
Before I can answer there’s that scrap crushing noise again from beyond the house and the German Pointer pricks up her ears
and lets out this little excited whine. Seán and me look at each other for a moment with our foreheads all creased and then the sound of tyres on gravel makes both our mouths drop open like our jaws are dislocated.
There’s a sudden panic in me that’s so intense it’s like it’s going to swallow the world. The edges of my vision are all blotted with shadow and I think I’m actually going to faint. I don’t know how long we, me and Seán, stand like this staring at each other but at the sound of a car door opening the German Pointer runs around to the front of the house.
From over the keel of the roof we can hear Dr Thorpe’s voice, not shouting but getting there. Into his phone or something he’s going, ‘I’m not playing without my rescue wood. It’ll take two minutes, Darragh. Two fucking minutes.’
And in his voice there’s just the merest suggestion of the
violence
squirming in him.
And then another voice carries in the summer air all thick and heavy as a midlands bog, ‘A rescue wood? If I find
it
still in that shed you’ll need more than a fucking rescue wood.’
Then Seán’s shaking himself like he’s just waking up and he’s going, ‘We have to leave. I don’t want to get in trouble.’
And automatically I’m answering him. I’m saying, ‘You won’t get into trouble.’ But I don’t know if this is the truth or not. I’m terrified.