Dead Dogs (12 page)

I’m looking at him and now I’m articulating six words, ‘I’m surprised this is the first.’

Then I’m ducking and the paperweight misses my head by inches.

This all seemed quite jolly last year. Now with my Da staring at the floor and the guard grinning nastily at me it doesn’t seem so funny. Dr Thorpe is sitting in his chair with a smile creeping across his face like something seeping out from under an abattoir door. The light in here is dim and isn’t like the halogen glare of the rest of the house. All it seems to be doing is emphasising the gloom gathered in the corners and the heavy walls of books all around. I’m suddenly feeling claustrophobic and my lips are
crinkling
up like dead leaves and going all dry.

Into the silence, into the awkward gap opened up by the guard’s question, my Da goes, ‘Alright, Guard. That’s enough. We get your point.’

I go to say something back but now my Da is looking at me and I can see something hot and flaring in his eyes. He’s saying, ‘And can you not be such a little prick all the time? Now you’re in this as well as Seán and nobody can believe the Lord’s prayer out of either of you. So just spit it out. What were the two of you doing here spying through a fucking letterbox?’

This time he doesn’t apologise for his language and beside him
Dr Thorpe has this expression on his face like a Pope handing out blessings. Dr Thorpe had that same fucking expression all the time when he came to see Mam. The night she died it was there like the skin over a blister. I remember that and now me and Seán just stand here in front of him like we’re up in front of a judge. Me and Seán just stand there and the unfairness of it all nearly has me in tears. The memory of my Mam weighs down on me. Sixteen years of age and it’s like I’m about to break down crying.

The guard nods at me and Seán and he says, ‘We’ll get to the bottom of things quicker if you just tell us the whole story. It’ll go easier on you.’

And I’m thinking, you’re all bastards. Every adult in this
fucking
town is a dick.
It’ll go easier on you
, my arse.

And all the time Dr Thorpe just sits there looking at the two of us like a curious spectator. The fact of his violence, the hidden awfulness of what he is, is sitting in my stomach like an ulcer.

The dead meat smack of it.

I know he’s going to do it before he does it. Beside me Seán cracks and beside me he goes, ‘I’m really sorry. Really really sorry.’

In spite of my indignation. In spite of my anger at how
powerless
we are. In spite of the fact that nobody belives us. In spite of all this, Seán can’t keep it in anymore. I listen as he talks and with every word he says I can feel any hope we have of seeing Dr Thorpe taken away in handcuffs disappear. Every word he says knocks the steel out of me bit by bit and I can feel myself sagging. Physically sagging. Worse than this I can feel my mind playing
tricks on me. I’m standing there listening to Seán talk about what he did to those dogs and I’m wondering, did I actually see
anything
at all? Did I see Dr Thorpe, smiling, talk-show Dr Thorpe, actually strangle someone? Am I going nuts?

All the adults are listening to Seán and he’s almost sobbing now. He’s sobbing with relief and his words are roped all
together
with mucus and he’s snuffling because the shame and disgust he’s carrying around with him is being purged. It’s like Dr Thorpe’s study is a confessional and Seán wants nothing but to be absolved.

All the adults are listening to Seán and expressions are
sleeting
one after another across their faces. My Da is sitting there and his face seems to be all concern and reassurance but he can’t hide the curl of his lip and the weird wrinkle of his nose. He can’t hide how appalled he is by Seán. He doesn’t want them to but his eyes keep flicking to the dark stains on Seán’s jacket and I know he’s remembering the smell he got in our hallway. The guard is sitting forward in his chair with his forearms braced on his thighs and his pudding fingers bundled together like he’s praying. He’s nodding in fake plastic understanding and his head is doing that horrible insincere bobbing thing that adults do when they’re patronising someone. But in his face and in the set of his
shoulders
I can see that he’s delighted at this. Every single suspicion he’s had about Seán Galvin has been confirmed and laid out in front of him. Each one spelled out in an augury of spilled entrails. And Dr Thorpe just sits in his bloody robe. Sits and radiates sympathy. Lord of his domain.

When Seán finishes, Dr Thorpe goes, ‘We’ll need to put you on some rather stronger medication, Seán. I’m sorry the other prescription didn’t work as well as I’d hoped.’

And the guard goes, ‘I’m sorry for disturbing you, Dr Thorpe. This was a waste of everyone’s time.’

Dr Thorpe looks at him and smiles and says, ‘No problem, Ted. Sure, aren’t we all here to serve. If Seán gets the help he needs out of this, well then at least some good has been done.’

Da doesn’t say anything. He’s just looking at Seán like he’s seen him for the first time.

I can’t say anything. I’ve never felt so beaten. I’ve never felt so worthless. How this has happened I don’t know but all my
fucking
arrogance has been misplaced. Nobody takes me seriously. Not just Seán, but
us
. I’m suddenly as big a fuck-up as he is. I’m a sixteen-year-old child getting laughed at by people who know more than me. The limits of what I can do are now clearly defined and set out for me and what they amount to is shag all.

And all the while Dr Thorpe is smiling his smile and then he winks at me. Slowly and carefully. A
we know something that they don’t know
sort of wink.

And now I’m thinking, I’m going to get you, you smug
arsehole
. You’re going to regret this.

When Dr Thorpe shuts the front door he straightaway turns off the porch light. Me and Seán and my Da and the guard are all suddenly drenched in dark. Skin looks blue without light and the guard’s big moon face turns to me, turns to Seán, turns to my Da.
The guard shakes his head and then says to my Da, ‘Can we have a little chat?’

The two of them go over to the squad car and me and Seán are left standing on the porch. I have my stupid gear bag slung on my back again and Seán is still sniffling and I’m going, ‘Would you cut that out.’

Seán shakes his head like a dog drying itself and he goes, ‘I had to tell them. My head was all full of stuff. I couldn’t listen to them talk anymore.’

I’m watching the guard and my Da mutter to each other. The guard has his big blue-sleeved arm around my Da’s scrawny shoulders. I don’t look at Seán but I’m saying, ‘I know. You’re in a bad way. I know you feel bad about the dead dogs. I don’t blame you for anything.’

Seán nods slowly and then he says, ‘Dr Thorpe thinks he got away with it.’

And just like that I know why I’m friends with Seán. He never doubts me. He doesn’t say,
You never saw anything
. He doesn’t say,
Dr Thorpe wouldn’t do something like that
. He doesn’t say,
Nobody can believe the Lord’s prayer out of you
. He trusts me.

And then Seán goes, ‘I don’t want to take any more tablets he gives me but I don’t want to do any more bad things.’

I’m looking at him now and I go, ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do, Seán.’

The guard and my Da are walking back towards us now and before they get to us Seán says, ‘Nobody believes us.’

And I go, ‘No. They don’t.’

Then my Da is standing in front of us and he’s saying, ‘Garda Devlin said he’ll give us a lift home. We’ll drop you out first, Seán.’

Seán’s house is out the Still Road beyond Cherry Orchard. We have to pass our old house on the way to it. My Da is sitting in the passenger seat of Guard Devlin’s squad car and between him and the guard the shiny plastic block of the radio bleeps and lights up. Every so often a squawk of static erupts from it and you can hear voices all tinny and distorted saying stuff. The guard has it turned down though so you can’t get any sense of what obscure dramas are going on around town as we rumble out the Milehouse Road and swing left at the Aldi roundabout. The static of the radio is the only sound in the car. Otherwise we’re travelling along in a little box of inarticulate tension.

When we pass our old house I twist like something caught on a hook so that I can catch a glimpse of our old garden. The new owners have cut back the ditches and my Mam’s flower beds have all been dug up and grassed over. We drive past but my head keeps swivelling. My gaze is tethered to our old house. Big, heavy hawsers of memory and laughter tie me to it. I’m sitting watching my childhood race away through the rear windscreen and I can feel myself go limp. The sight of the house like this has me not just hooked. It has me gaffed and gutted.

Seán’s driveway is short and it’s concreted over and leads down to an old dormer bungalow with a glass and plastic
conservatory
thrusting out from one gable wall. It’s dark now but in the
day you can see the green mould and the drifts of dead flies that cram the angles of the conservatory windows. Seán’s Da hasn’t really been paying attention to the little things for the last while.

When the front door opens Seán’s Da is standing there and against the light from the hall you can’t see his face but you can make out the stoop of his shoulders. You can make out the lack of surprise at the sight of a squad car in his yard. You can make out the resignation that weeps from him.

Seán gets out of the squad car and walks past him into the house and just like that Seán’s front door is hammering closed. His Da doesn’t acknowledge us. He doesn’t say anything to
anyone
, just slams the door shut on himself and his fucked-up son.

My Da and Guard Devlin exchange a look but they don’t say anything to each other and they definitely don’t say anything to me.

The guard swings the car around and its headlights splash across the front of Seán’s house, splash across the ditches and bushes along the drive and now they’re splashing out across
concrete
and tarmac. In their light everything is given brittle edges and the shadows behind things are intensified. It looks like the entire world is one huge page from a giant pop-up book. In the headlights the whole place looks two-dimensional and backed by nothing but empty space.

When we get home Da thanks the guard and apologises for my behaviour and then he drags me inside the house. Before I
can say anything he goes, ‘You’re not seeing that Galvin boy until he gets put on his new meds. Do you hear me?’

I blink at him and say nothing. I hate this.

By the time I see Seán again his black eye is starting to fade into the yellow colour of a thunderhead.

Without Seán, I have nothing
to do. I spend the next couple of days avoiding my Da. I try not to think about Dr Thorpe’s fist crashing into the brittle cartilage and soft blubber of that woman’s face. Again and again and again. The dead meat smack of it. I try to not think of the spark that I saw go out in her. I try not to wonder what Dr Thorpe has done with her. My dreams are full of clutching hands and the smell of fake pine. They are full of voices saying, ‘Shhhhhhhhhh.’

Two days later I ring the guards again and the voice at the other end of the line goes, ‘Is this about that yoke with Dr Thorpe? Listen chap, Garda Devlin has that under control.’ And then the line goes dead and I’m left holding the receiver and
staring
at it while it beeeeeeeeeeps at me.

Garda fucking Devlin.

I think about going down the Banks and then I think better of it. Seán isn’t in school all week and he doesn’t reply to my texts
and his Facebook page is shut down. I don’t know what’s
happening
to him but I’d say there’s doctors involved. I’m really worried and every time I see a squad car I want to run and hide.

Sunday morning I wake up in a sweat and I’m breathing so hard I sound like Ronan Davitt who has asthma so bad he never, ever, does P.E. I’m lying there in bed and I’m wondering, am I having a panic attack? Is this what post-traumatic stress feels like? I’m swinging my legs over the side of the bed and I can hear my Da rattling around in the back yard. And just like that I decide to go watch the men’s team playing their football match. This has as much to do with the fact that I can’t talk to my Da anymore as it does with the fact that I like football.

When I was younger I used to play with the club I play for because it was only down the road from me. I used to play with this club until we left our house out by the Still. When that
happened
something changed and I stopped playing for a while. I went back to them last season though because I can’t play with any other club. It doesn’t feel right.

Now from our shitty little house the pitch is about a thirty minute walk which is a bitch if it’s wet and cold but today it’s nice so I don’t mind. The season is heading into the last maybe eight games or so and when I look at the league tables in the paper I see the men’s team is doing pretty well. Nine more points and they should get promoted and I’m smiling at this. I’m happy for a group of people to which I don’t really have any connection except that they wear the same colour jersey as me. I’m thinking that no matter where you go you always carry something
of where you’re from with you. Like someone exposed to MRSA.

The pitch is really two pitches with an all-weather training area for the men’s teams alongside. The men’s training pitch is surfaced with stuff like aggregate. The only difference between it and the car park is you’d laugh at someone who said you were going to slide and scrape around on the car park for two hours. If you go right up close to the training pitch and look at the gouges torn into it I swear you can see scraps of skin left behind. The
elephant
wrinkles of elbows and knees. The tender stuff of palms. People rip themselves up on this patch of ground so they don’t lose Sunday League matches on the nice patch of grass over there. Maybe it shouldn’t, and to a lot of people it doesn’t, but to anyone involved this makes perfect sense.

The town on Sunday mornings is hushed like something drugged. Walking through the Square there’s a few tattered rags of chip papers lying around and an empty burger carton goes skirling away across the path when the breeze catches it. The inside of the burger carton is splatted with ketchup and curved slivers of onion. The only people stirring at this time are the
people
going to matches all red-eyed and bleary. The ones who were on the tear last night are swollen-faced and heavy-jowled and they look around themselves with appalled frankness, like for the first time they can see the world exactly as it really is. The only people stirring at this time are the people going to matches and the threadbare line of alcos waiting outside Barrett’s Pub at the top of the town. Half-nine on a Sunday morning and there’s
people queuing for a snakey pint. Just to take the hard edge off the day.

I’m walking past this shambling line of patchwork people and then I’m standing beside the pitch watching the lads kick around before the game starts and then I’m screaming something out over the Market Square. It’s funny how things turn out.

The two teams out there are both local and both sets of players know each other. Both sets of players know each other both on and off the pitch. Both sets of players hate each other both on and off the pitch. This is because the other team are scum. This state of affairs does not bode well for the match as a spectacle of Barcelona-style passing and movement. It does however bode well for the match as a spectacle of kicking and
off-the
-ball incidents.

In much the same way as a car crash attracts the morbidly curious there’s a fairly big crowd standing around. I’m next to a lad I used to play with before he went off to college last year and we’re talking shite and we’re watching the two teams kick fucking lumps out of each other. Then this lad, this lad who’s two or three years older than me, turns to me. He turns to me and he goes, ‘Jesus would you look at that other shower. The state of them. Wife-beaters and drug-dealers. Fucking dirtbags.’

He’s looking at the pitch and his eyes flick to every opposition shirt and he’s saying, ‘“Sure what would you want a job for?” Fucking spastics.’

I don’t know what’s happened to this lad with his red hair and his freckles. I don’t know what’s been done to him but he’s spitting
these words out and the way his eyes are looking from jersey to jersey is a little scary. This lad’s nearly an architect and had to work hard to get it. It’s like the ignorance branded on some of the faces out there is a personal insult to him.

We stand there watching the rest of the match and we don’t say much else. Injuries happen and the crowd becomes a bristling hedge of spittle and vitriol. I’m not thinking about them. I’m not really paying any attention to the game anymore. What my
ex-teammate
said has settled into my brain. It is something barbed.

I’m looking around and it’s like I’m back in the insurance place again. The crowd watching the game has become one big blank to me. The faces, laughing, shouting, cheering, are like scar tissue in my eyes. Smooth, flat, numb.

The lads win 2–1 and I’m looking happy and smiling because this is what I’m supposed to look like. In my head a wound is opening. No matter what I do, I can’t get rid of the sound of fist on flesh. It’s way more solid than you think. You know when you watch a film and the hero swings and connects with a big
roundhouse
punch? You know that sharp crack of a sound that they add in post-production? Well that’s complete bullshit because it doesn’t sound anything at all the way that Dr Thorpe’s fist
sounded
as it jack-knifed down into that woman’s face. There’s a weight and there’s a concussion to it that’s sickening.

One of the lads in school has a video on his iPhone of some poor bastard in Chechnya being beheaded. I can watch it as far as where the knife slides into his gullet and this stuff like black ink starts to run out of his mouth. He can’t even scream because the
psycho doing this is sawing through his voice box. I can only watch so far because I start to feel fucking faint and honest to God I think I’m going to throw up all over the resource area.

This doesn’t surprise me but Seán watches it all the way through.

This is how I feel all the time now. I feel like the stomach has fallen out of the world and there’s a big hole that I keep filling with fear and disgust until it overflows and starts drowning everything else. I’m trying to force the hollowness that’s yawning all around me to pucker closed for a bit. Imagine a bullet wound or an incision for a surgical drain. Imagine the way that looks when it heals. Corrugated around the edges, plugged with scar tissue but a weak point all the same. That’s what my life is now. I’m standing watching the lads huff and slop off the field and I’m trying to draw everything tight about the hole in my life. I’m
trying
to seal it but it’s still there.

Seán hasn’t rang or texted all week and when I come home from the match he still hasn’t rang or texted. I don’t like this and I’m getting the feeling that my life is starting to flap loose like the edge of a burst blister. I get home and walk into the kitchen and my aunt is there and she’s saying to Da, ‘We have to talk about him.’ Then she stops and then she looks at me and then she
pretends
to do something with the cooker. Fuck her. Da’s clearing his throat and now he’s going to say something and now he’s
chickening
out. Fuck them both.

I don’t know what I interrupted but I get the feeling it has something to do with me.

I eat dinner in the sitting room with one eye on the Fulham/Blackburn game on TV. Did you ever find yourself doing something and wonder why? I’m watching the game on TV and I’m finding myself thinking, this is shit. I’m shovelling forkfuls of roast beef into my mouth and my mind is wondering how the fuck Sky Sports gets away with this. I’m thinking how the match I saw this morning was better than this. All the glitz and all the razzmatazz is plastered on to dress up something with absolutely no substance or consequence. I keep eating and I keep watching. The remote is way over there.

Tuseday night after training I come home and there’s a text on my phone. It’s from Seán and it says
B in tmro
.

Twenty minutes after I get this text off of Seán there’s a knock on our door. Our bell doesn’t really work. I’m sitting in the kitchen eating my dinner and my Da shuffles off down the hall to answer it. His voice starts off real high and surprised but then dips down into a quiet rumble. The door closes and now somebody else is rumbling with him back towards the kitchen.

I stop eating with my fork halfway to my gaping mouth like something out of
Looney Toons
and I listen to the voices. The first is my Da’s but the second is after covering me in a slick of sweat from one breath to the next. Instantly my heart rate has trebled.

Into the kitchen, into our woodchip and lino grotto filled with steam and the smells of fried onion, steps Dr Thorpe. 

A half-chewed ball of cud falls out of my mouth and splats onto my plate.

In the yellow light Dr Thorpe’s hair is glimmering like spider silk and his too-earnest face is wrapped around a perfect smile. Behind him, my Da is practically bowing.

I should do something but I am absolutely terrified. I am
sixteen
years old and am paralysed by fear. The yellow streak that I’ve always always had opens up and glues me to the seat. My mind is a frozen ball, locked solid.

Dr Thorpe goes, ‘Hello there, little man. I just called round to make sure everything was alright after our little shock the other night.’

He can see I’m not moving. He can see that behind my eyes I’m basically shitting myself. And all the while there’s this tiny
little
voice that’s screaming way down in my chest that I have to say something. That I have to do something.

Dr Thorpe is smiling smiling smiling. And smiling he turns to my Da and smiling he puts a hand on his shoulder.

He goes, ‘I hope we’re all okay?’

Da nods and says, ‘Ah, sure. We’re getting by. The Galvin boy is being sorted out and our man there is fine once he’s not in bad company.’

Our man
.

I’m thinking, I’m not
our
anything.

Without being invited, Dr Thorpe sits down at the head of the table and he looks at me with this expression like something
you’d see on daytime TV. Patronising and self-interested all at once. The expression of someone who is going to engage in a conversation but could not give two fucks about what anybody else says. It is an expression as shining and blank as the moon.

He fixes me with this expression and he says, ‘You haven’t had any more little episodes, now, have you? No more,
delusions?
’

The little voice in my chest, that brave little part of me, screams because my traitor head shakes mutely. I am terrified. Behind Dr Thorpe, Da is standing looking at me like I’ve just tracked shit across the carpet and between my legs my balls are trying to climb back up into my abdomen.

Dr Thorpe says, ‘Good. Good stuff.’

Then he stands up and he turns to Da and he says, ‘I hope you don’t mind me calling around like this?’

And Da, like he’s still middle-class, like he still exists in Dr Thorpe’s frame of reference, goes, ‘No bother at all, Doctor. You must be looking forward to the Strawberry Fair Golf Classic?’

Dr Thorpe’s smile never moves and I’m wondering how the hell he keeps his face so static. It’s like his flesh is as chemically bonded as his Pat Kenny hairdo. He is a man of oil and
emptiness
. And in him is something sour. If I listen really hard, I can hear it.

The dead meat smack of it.

To my Da he goes, ‘I always look forward to it. Playing off ten this year and I’ve been getting in a little practice with my new rescue wood. Sweet as a nut, she is.’ 

Then there’s a barb that my Da, the fucking bagel, completely misses. Dr Thorpe goes, ‘I suppose you don’t really get out to the club much in your present circumstances?’

Behind that question, behind the white wall of Dr Thorpe’s teeth, I can hear silent laughter.

Da just shakes his head and goes, ‘No. No, I don’t. Not
anymore
.’

Dr Thorpe is nodding his head in pretend understanding and then he looks at his watch like an amateur dramatist and goes, ‘Would you look at the time. Sure, I’d better be motoring. Loads more people to see. Are you sure you didn’t mind me dropping by?’