Dead Dogs (8 page)

My front door looks nothing like Dr Thorpe’s. It’s a big
rectangle
of veneer tacked over nothing but empty space with another piece of veneer tacked onto its back. You’d put your fist through
it if you really wanted. Dermot Sinnott, three doors down, did just that a couple of days ago. There’s no reasoning with Dermot when he has a few jars in him and his wife is always wandering around explaining to people how she can’t stop falling down the stairs.

When I turn my key in the lock and open the front door my Da is standing there in the hall. Before I can say how glad I am to see him, before I can say that I think I’ve witnessed a murder, before I can even open my mouth he’s saying stuff.

He’s saying, ‘Why don’t you ever bring your phone with you?’

And then he’s saying, ‘I just got a phonecall from Dr Thorpe. He wants to speak with you.’

Mam and me and Da
,
we all used to live out on the Still Road. This shitty little house on a loop of the road, huddled under the Turret Rocks, is not where I grew up. I’m too young to know how this happened and Da never says but I think Mam’s medical bills were pretty high and I think when Da lost his job out in the
factory
a couple of years ago he couldn’t keep up the payments and lost the house. That’s a lot of losses all at the one time.

A couple of years ago when I still live out by the Still it’s the third week of the summer holidays. We have three months off from the first week in June to the last week in August and for the next while life at home is one long yawn. Da gets up and puts on his overalls and heads to work. My aunt, Da’s sister, does the shopping. I sleep in. Things start to slide a bit when my aunt goes to pay with Da’s Laser card and it won’t go through. She asks Da where all the money’s gone. She asks Da what he’s done with his wages. Da blinks like a toddler, gormless and hurt, and says he
doesn’t know. My aunt spends the next week ringing banks and tax offices and Da gets up, puts on his overalls and heads to work.

I’m tired of sleeping in. Eleven o’clock in the morning and I pull open the curtains and I’m standing in my boxers looking out at the sun on our road, standing in my boxers looking out at a blue tarpaulin sky. In the brightness my body looks made out of candle wax. I don’t like this. I don’t like missing half the day. I am a morning person.

A lot of days during the summer I get up and I shower and I walk down to the Banks. The Banks are just that. The banks of the Slaney river in town. They are flat and grassy and paved only with chippings. People from town walk along the Banks a lot, not like the Prom where you get the people staying in the hotel
sauntering
along cooing at the river over the dull hiss of the N11. I like this walk along the Banks because it takes a long while and you can think a lot when you’re doing it. I sometimes write stories and I like to think about where they’re going when I don’t have to think about where I’m going.

To get down to the Banks you’re walking away from town and cars and people go by you in the opposite direction. Some of them have questioning expressions on their faces. A young boy in a tracksuit bottoms and T-shirt on his own and moving against the tide. One or two say good morning. Genuinely genuine women in genuine Dunnes tracksuits being genuinely friendly. Going to school in a place where there’s over a thousand other kids just like you desensitizes you to indifference. It desensitises you so much that you greet these comments like they’re door-
to-door 
salesmen in cheap polyester crackling with static.

I like this stroll. This pushing against a stream that doesn’t push back. I like the Banks. You strip the surface from a tree and it’s still a tree. A river is still a river. Everything is as it seems. The sun on the Slaney’s red wave makes me smile. A genuinely
genuine
smile.

Standing looking out my window it is eleven o’clock in the morning and I decide to go for a stroll.

The easiest way to get to the Banks from my house is to go down to the bottom of the road through the Council estate, go down Nunnery Lane and cross the Dublin Road. Nunnery Lane’s not even a lane. It’s a beaten track of grass and dirt zigging between briars and zagging between the mesh fence of the primary school. In the summer the briars and blackthorns are spattered with blossoms and insects are a white noise in the grass. In the winter though the place is dead and the path is so greasy it’s like it’s floored with eels.

But in the summer, like it is now, it makes the perfect
shortcut
.

I’m halfway down Nunnery Lane and I’m listening to the grass and lashes of briar are snagging and catching on my
tracksuit
. I’m thinking how there wasn’t any food in the fridge today. And now I’m wondering if everything’s alright with Da and his sister. I’m wondering this and I’m walking along and a briar hooks my hand and tears a little red crescent in the web of skin between thumb and forefinger. On a branch just as you come to the road there’s the drooping amniotic sac of a condom. I don’t
know who impaled it there on the thorns but there’s stuff in it and I don’t touch it as I go by.

The path down to the Banks is covered in gravel. The gravel is all steel-coloured chippings and I’m listening to it grind under my feet and I can feel its hard angles through the soles of my runners. The river is on my right and it gurgles along shallow and looking like chocolate in the heat. Across the water the flat meadow of the Island is spangled with geysers of wildflowers and horses in a swirl of flies are cropping the plants. The ground on my left slopes up and up to the road and slopes up and up covered in trees.

When you’re walking along like this you can see along the river and you can look over your shoulder to see the town built along both sides of the valley. From where I am, I can see fields and cows and the black fleck of a person in the distance. The
person
isn’t moving, they’re just standing there in the distance where the cows have trampled a pitted slipway down to the river. The blades of mud between the hoofprints will be made hard as
terracotta
by the sun. And in the distance the black fleck just stands there and I keep walking.

I keep walking and now I’m thinking how shrill my aunt sounded when she was asking Da about the money. Not accusing but getting there.

And for the last while since, every day, Da goes to work. He gets up puts on his overalls and goes to work.

There are an awful lot of weeds coming up through the
gravel
. The farther you go away from the Dublin road the more grass
and dandelions there are. Every time I step on one, every time I step on a dandelion, my runners crush it flat. It stays there pressed against the gravel bleeding its white milk blood. There’s a stile between the path and this big field that runs along the river for a couple of hundred yards. The stile makes a hole in a fence of barbed wire. The gravel rattles up to this stile and then stops dead. It doesn’t continue into the field but the path does. It is a worn track of bare earth. At least once a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year, someone walks along here. It’s gotten so that if you get right down you can see the effects of all this weight. It’s gotten so that on your hands and knees you can see the trench that the path is becoming. Once a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year, is starting to make the riverbank subside.

I’m standing at this stile and now the black fleck up ahead is starting to look like a man. I’m standing at this stile and now my face is starting to make a weird expression. I know this because I can feel the muscles of my jaw spasm and I can feel my lower lip twitch and I can feel my eyes go wider and wider. It’s like they’re trying to suck in and swallow everything in front of them.

I’m standing here with one foot on the gravel and one foot on the stile and my face is looking like melting plastic because I recognise the man on the riverbank.

I recognise him because he’s my Da.

The next day my Da tells my aunt that he’s been let go. But he doesn’t tell her since when. He never says for how long he got up, put on his overalls and went to a work that doesn’t exist.

He never says why he gets let go. He never says what happened. What really happened.

This is my Da. He won’t ever, ever meet a problem head-on.

I’m listening to my Da saying that Dr Thorpe wants to speak with me and I can feel Seán tense up behind me. I’m listening to my Da saying this and what I’m thinking is, Da’s going to be fucking useless in this situation.

He’s standing in the hallway and his hands are all knotted together into white balls of gristle so that it’s like he’s praying really hard for something. He’s lost most of his hair and the forty-watt bulb hanging above him is slicking his pate with a light that looks jaundiced. He doesn’t look healthy and his face is a shifting swamp of worry.

He’s going, ‘What have you done, boys? Seán, are you in trouble?’

All the time he blames Seán for stuff. No matter what I get myself into, he blames Seán.

My shitty results in maths? Seán.

See also my superhuman ability to repel girls.

See also my problems with some of the other lads from around town.

Everything is Seán’s fault.

My Da refuses to allow me to take responsibilty for anything. It’s like I’m a miniature version of himself. You just avoid things or yoke them onto someone else or hide yourself under the
covers until they go away. If life fucks you over, you just put on your overalls and keep leaving the house like everything’s all A-okay. You live in the vain hope that things will somehow turn out fine. That there’s been some big mistake somewhere. That the universe is sorry for throwing sand in your face. Anything other than confront the fact that you may have to actually
do
something.

This is what yer man from
Teens in the Wild
calls
avoidance
. It follows from a lack of self-esteem. Like everything else in the entire fucking world. I hate psychology. It is snake-oil and
make-believe
.

I hate psychology because Seán’s gone to about a zillion
psychologists
and he’s still all screwy in the head.

I’m looking at my Da and I’m watching him wring his hands and I’m saying, ‘Seán didn’t do anything.’

This isn’t strictly true, but I figure I have bigger fish to fry at the moment.

Seán goes to say something but I hit him an elbow and Da’s seeing me doing this but I keep going anyway. I’m saying, ‘I think I’ve seen something that’s going to sound really weird but I swear to God it’s all true.’

Da’s looking at me and he’s frowning and behind me and Seán the front door swings closed.

Da listens to me as I blurt out what happened at Dr Thorpe’s. I tell him what I saw through the letterbox. What I heard. The dead meat smack of it.

And Da goes, ‘Why were you at Dr Thorpe’s?’

No outraged squawking that his sixteen-year-old son may have just witnessed a murder. No scrambling for the phone to tell the guards. Just an accusatory question. The pedictable fucking supposition that we were up to no good.

I go, ‘Jesus, Da. Are you not listening? Never mind why we were there. You have to go to the guards or something. They’ll believe you. You’re a grown-up.’

We’re having this conversation in the hallway and the light from the dim bulb is staining everything like with tannin and the chipboard wallpaper on the narrow walls seems to be about to peel off and smother me. The smell of the mince and onions that Da’s fried for dinner is making me sick.

Da looks from me to Seán and back again and then he’s going, ‘This is Seán’s fault, isn’t it? Why else would you be at the
doctor
’s? Well, I’ll tell you this, my fine lads, if you’re going to go around making up stories about people to cover your own arses then I’m not going to help you.’

Seán’s starting to groan and I go, ‘Da, you’re being stupid. We told you because if the guards knew Seán was involved there’s no way they’d believe us. They’d start asking questions and stuff. You’re my Da. You have to believe me.’

Da’s frowning now and he’s scratching his jaw and he’s saying, ‘I don’t have to believe anything. We’re all going to go to Dr Thorpe’s and we’ll hear what he has to say. Hopefully he won’t be too pissed off that you two were sneaking around his garden like peeping fucking Toms.’

He goes to Seán, ‘And stop that fucking moaning, Seán Galvin.
Ring your Da and tell him where we’re going. You better pray to Jesus that he doesn’t beat the the shite out of you when you get home.’

Then he wrinkles his nose and he goes, ‘What’s that smell?’

Before Seán can say anything I go, ‘Seán hasn’t got his phone on him.’

And Seán says, ‘Da took it until I cop myself on.’

Da looks at us like we’re that sort of gunk you get in the bottom of a bin and he goes, ‘Jesus Christ. What are you two like? Use the house phone.’

Seán goes past my Da and into our kitchen. Da goes, ‘I need a slash.’ And then he’s muttering something and then he’s heading upstairs.

I wait until I hear the bathroom door closing and then I go into the kitchen after Seán. Our kitchen is all lino and woodchip and the air is gritty with the smells of frying. Seán is talking into the phone that we have screwed to one wall. It’s bright candy red and looks like a slightly more modern version of the Batphone that Commissioner Gordon has in his office.

Seán’s saying, ‘No, Da.’

Then he’s saying, ‘Yes, Da.’

From down the phone line and from out of the earpiece I can hear a dry leaf voice say something short and sharp and now Seán’s sighing and he goes, ‘I promise, Da.’

Seán hangs up and before he has a chance to say anything to me I’m grapping the receiver off him and I’m dialling the number for the guards’ barracks. Seán’s looking at me with that
strange empty expression that he gets when he doesn’t know what’s going on. I put my fingers to my lips to tell him to be quiet and then a voice in this real thick midlands accent starts talking out of the phone.

I’m thinking I recognise the voice and it goes, ‘Hello. Garda Station.’

I’m swallowing like my throat is filled with wet rags and I don’t know what to say and the guard at the other end of the line says, ‘Hello? Can you hear me?’

Before the guard gets annoyed and hangs up I go, ‘I think I’ve seen someone commit a murder.’

The guard splutters down the phone and I can picture his coffee and his copy of the
Sun
being knocked off his desk. I can picture the Page Three girl grinning up at him from the floor.

And now this spluttering, panicked guard, he’s going, ‘Can I have your name, sir. Your name and the details of what you’ve seen.’

Down the phone I just go, ‘Dr Thorpe’s on the Nunnery Road. You have to get there quick.’

Then I hang up.

From up the stairs I can hear the toilet flush, the bathroom door unlock and the shuffling plod of my Da as he comes back down the stairs. When he comes into the kitchen he looks at me and Seán and he looks at the swinging umbilical cord of the phone. He looks at all this and me and Seán must look pretty suspicious because he goes, ‘What are you two up to?’