Dead Dogs (2 page)

Not literally
kill
.

What you do is, you get all the toy guns, all the hurls, all the bits of sticks you can find and then you use them to shoot with. Everything usually goes fine until one side tries to invade the other’s camp. Then people who’ve been deadly accurate from a field away suddenly start pulling triggers to be met with cries of, ‘Ya missed me!’

When this happens, the whole game falls apart and if Nicky Sullivan is playing he’ll start to cry. This is because Nicky Sullivan is a quare bad loser. When this happens, everyone will start
slagging him and then someone will suggest going down to the pond and our little war will suddenly be forgotten.

The reason that me and Seán are up in this big tree is because we’re snipers. The reason we’re snipers is because everyone knows Seán never misses. He never misses. Not with his catapult. Not with his cocked right arm. Not with the hurl he’s cradling to his chest like a small Daniel Boone with his rifle. This is what everyone believes.

I don’t believe it because it is a lie.

The real reason that me and Seán are up in this big tree is because I volunteered us for it. I do this because when Seán’s playing, he’s like Nicky Sullivan only worse. When one army tries to invade the other’s camp, sometimes people start wrestling or stabbing with invisible bayonets. When this happens Seán
sometimes
loses the run of himself. He’s only ten but in the middle of this do-or-die struggle, in the middle of this flail where no one shouts ‘Ya missed’, Seán can’t hold back. It’s as if the world in his head and the world where everyone else lives are all tangled up together. For Seán, it’s like things leak from one to the other
without
anything getting in the way. So Seán stands there, with his hurl hefted like an axe and he’s the centre of a slowly expanding circle of empty space.

And then Nicky Sullivan starts to cry.

This is why I take Seán up into the tree.

The tree is this huge old conker tree that grows in the corner of Stafford’s field. It’s easy to climb because its bark is ancient and fissured and full of handholds. It’s like someone has covered the
trunk in wrinkled wattles of elephant hide. If you tuck your gun into your belt you can be up it in a flash. This tree stands in Stafford’s field until me and Seán are twelve years old and then a man with a chainsaw and a hi-vis jacket cuts it down.

This summer though, with our rifles, me and Seán are sitting on this massive big branch and peering out through the foliage. I’m sitting with my back to the trunk and the world around me is a sphere of green. Around me leaves overlap and spill, spreading like splayed hands. Each of these green hands hangs broken-wristed and drooping in the sunlight, swamping me, swamping Seán, swaming us, in shadow. Seán sits, straddling the branch with his bare calves and ankles twined together to steady himself. Along the back of one of his legs, briar scratches are red on white. Like raspberry ripple ice-cream. We are fifteen feet off the ground and every breath we take is vital with the cut-grass joy of summer.

I’m sitting with my back to the trunk and an ant is crawling across the back of my hand. I’m not looking at the ant though. What I am looking at is Seán. He’s sitting with his back to me but there’s a set to his too-square shoulders that, even at ten years old, I’ve learned to recognise. Beneath his T-shirt, Seán’s too-big
muscles
are making one solid block of his torso and I just know that his broad face is horribly vacant. Looking at Seán now would be like looking into a marl hole. The hurl he’s holding rocks gently in his grasp. Rhythmic as a pulse.

I’m looking at Seán’s back and I’m thinking the walls have come down in his head again.

From fifteen feet up through gaps in the leaves you can see an
awful lot. You can see the Blackstairs, bruise purple against the sky, the slopes of Mount Leinster diffuse in the heat haze. You can see Stafford’s farmhouse with its whitewashed walls glaring from out of the browns and rust-reds of its yard. You can see mile after mile of fields and woods, all sutured and stitched together by the dark olive seaming of ditches and hedgerows. You can see all this and you can see the bumbling form of Cha Whelan making his way towards our tree.

Cha’s wearing a white T-shirt with a picture of Homer Simpson on it. Homer is scratching his ass and eating a doughnut. He also looks weirdly out of proportion because Cha’s cumulous puppy fat has stretched the T-shirt into widescreen format. Cha is wading through the long grass along the ditch and in his right hand he carries a Wild West Winchester. A roll of caps licks up from the Winchester’s cocked hammer.

I watch Cha coming and I know that Seán is watching him too. Seán has stilled. Even the metronome of his hurl’s rocking has stopped. I’m sitting there watching Seán watching Cha and I know something’s going to happen. This is like all those times playing football.

The sweaty ball of lipids that is Cha Whelan is now standing in the shadow of our sniper’s nest. He’s fifteen feet below us and maybe ten feet to our left. Seán is still as a gravestone but I can feel the potential in him. It is static before a thunder storm. I can feel this and now I’m thinking I’d better do something. But before I can raise my plastic M16, before I can shout
bang
, before I can twitch a muscle, Seán is moving.

Seán moves calmly and quietly but with shocking speed. You know those nature programmes or documentaries you see on the BBC or Discovery? I saw this one documentary where this hippy dude from California thought he was a grizzly bear. He lived out in the Alaskan wilderness and tried to commune with these huge big monsters of animals. You’re watching this documentary and you know, you just know, that the bears are going to eat him. The bears ate him. When a grizzly charges it moves like an avalanche. Soundless, inexorable and faster than it looks. Seán moves like that.

Seán’s right hand lets go of the hurl and buries itself deep into the pocket of his shorts. When it comes back out it’s curled around the bitter, green lump of a crab apple. The crab apple is smaller than a golf ball and its sour hardness is held cocked above Seán’s right shoulder and then Seán lets loose and then Cha Whelan starts to cry.

To this day I don’t know why Seán does this anymore than I know why Seán does anything. I don’t know why he lets fly with all the strength in his ten-year-old’s body. I don’t know why he follows the crab apple’s trajectory with the rapt
concentration
of an animal. I don’t know why my shout of warning comes just late enough for Cha to look up and be caught square between the eyes. I only know that as soon as Cha’s hands drop his rifle and leap to his face like horrible pale spiders, Seán starts to smile. I can see Seán in profile and I can see his liverstrip lips curl darkly at their corners. I can see him blink once, blink
twice and then the smile vanishes and he turns away.

Beneath us, Cha is wailing with his hands pressed to his
forehead
. His flesh is so padded that each knuckle of his fingers is a dimple rather than a bump. They look like buttons sewn into plump cushions. From under his hands, Cha’s tears are rolling over the undulations of his cheeks.

Cha’s wailing and he looks up at us and he goes, ‘I’m telling my Mammy!’

Then he’s picking up his Winchester and then he’s running away.

In front of me, Seán is ignoring him. Seán is again cradling his hurl and his attention is focused God knows where. It’s as if nothing’s happened. It’s as if someone has taken a scalpel and cleanly excised the last five minutes. It’s as if nothing’s happened except that all the tension, all the potential, has evaporated out of Seán. He no longer sits square-shouldered and taut. He no longer bristles.

I’m looking down to where the crab apple sits nestled in a clump of cow parsley. I’m looking at Seán and I’m saying, ‘Why did you do that?’

Without turning around, Seán goes, ‘I don’t know.’

I can hear the confusion in him. I can hear the awareness. Again he says, ‘I don’t know.’

This is six years ago and this is the first time I ever see Seán hurting anyone or anything on purpose. Out of what anyone who isn’t me or Seán would call
badness
. This is six years ago and this
is just after his Mam walks out on him and things start to go downhill for Seán. This is six years ago and I’m sitting in a tree, watching Seán’s big back and two days later Seán’s trying to
pretend
that he doesn’t have a black eye.

A couple of days after
I take the O’Hara’s puppy off Seán, I’m at soccer training. It is around eight o’clock and it’s black dark so we’ve got the floodlights on. My club can only afford to have floodlights along one side of the pitch and they’re mounted on these old, grey telephone poles. This means that we can only train on one half of the pitch while the other side is a swamp of black ink. The floodlights are these incredibly bright supernovas of things and they light the training area with a cold, white brilliance. They turn the world into calico and black. They turn the world into a negative.

Because the light is so harsh and uneven it’s very hard to do ball work. As soon as the ball goes above the arc of the lights it simply disappears and even if you keep it on the deck it’s only lit on one side, like a half moon. This means an awful lot of shuttle runs. An awful lot of sit-ups. An awful lot of laps.

I am a goalkeeper and I don’t like this stuff. I don’t see the
point. What difference does it make whether I can do twenty laps when the longest distance I’ll have to run in a game is twenty yards?

This is a source of much contention at the moment, and me and Rory, the other keeper, are almost at the point of open rebellion.

We’re sitting in the moth-haunted glare of a floodlight, the soles of our boots touching and we’re passing a ball to and fro, gloved hands to gloved hands. It’s basically a form of sit-ups just with a ball included. In the eye of the floodlight my breath is a billowy ghost and I can hear Rory groan as he raises himself off the wet grass. I can feel the mud and the cold and the water soaking through my shorts. This is a joke altogether.

I’m thinking this and I must say something because Rory, he goes, ‘I agree. We should say something.’

I’m going, ‘What do you want us to say?’ Every syllable is given a nebulous form by the cold and hangs in the air for a moment, suspended and ashen.

Rory’s brow wrinkles and shadow masks his face and swills his right eye socket with black. Then he goes, ‘We should tell him this training’s fucking useless for keepers and we want to do our own stuff.’

I’m imagining Peter Cullen’s reaction to two sixteen-year-olds questioning his managerial skills and I go, ‘Jesus, Rory. We’ll have to think of a better way of putting it than that.’

Rory says, ‘You got a fucking A in English. You think of
something
.’

Things haven’t been the same between me and Rory since last Halloween and that trip up to Dublin. The fact that I know what his brother Davey gets up to is stuck between us like a shred of beef between two molars.

I’m sitting in the wet and the cold and I’m looking at Rory and I’m trying to think of something.

Rory’s just sitting there with a sour expression on his face.

We pass the ball to and fro between us. To and fro until our sixteen-year-old stomachs are aching and our breath voids into the air in a cloud of grey and a series of grunts like we’re taking a dump.

Now I’m thinking, enough is enough. The ball that Rory goes to pass me misses my left shoulder and goes skittering off into the dark. Now I’m getting up and now I’m walking towards Peter Cullen and behind me I can hear Rory going, ‘Thank fuck for that.’

Peter Cullen is standing in the middle of a bedlam of players. Their drills involve a lot of passing and a lot of running and each player slops and slips and is spattered with mud. Under the bright lights the spatters of mud look black like holes, like dried blood. Peter Cullen is standing there and around him the only sounds are the slap and suck of running boots and the pants and hacking curses of the boys. He’s standing there watching the boys work through their drills and the scouring beam of a floodlight paints his shadow out behind him.

I’m pissed off and I walk straight up to him and I go, ‘Peter, can I talk to you for a minute?’

Without turning around, without taking his eyes off the lads and their passing, he goes, ‘Yeah, you can. What’s up?’

Still not turning around he roars, ‘Take a touch, Andy, for fuck’s sake!’

Still looking at the back of his head I’m saying, ‘It’s about the training for the keepers.’

Peter Cullen is a big man and when he turns around the
rat-grey
fuzz bristling over his bullet head is halo’d by the floodlights. He’s a big man and when he turns around the supernova of light behind him dresses his entire front in black. His FAI tracksuit is a featureless ebony panel and the gristly knots of his fists are pale smudges at his sides. The light coming over his shoulders lines his heavy cheekbones, the damp swelling of his double chins. Standing in front of me like this there’s something primal about him. He is a golem of mud and sweat and darkness.

In the set of his shoulders, in the balling of his fists, I can see he’s angry.

What I’m thinking is
ohshitohshitohshitohshitohshit
but what I’m saying is, ‘Me and Rory were talking and—’

Like a brick through glass, his voice shatters my words. He’s speaking low but there’s an edge to what he says. It is saw-toothed and rasping and he’s saying, ‘Oh, talking were you? I’ve seen the two of you sitting on your arses all evening. Have you a problem with my training? Would you rather be running with the rest of the lads?’

I can see he’s pissed off at something but I’ve gone too far to stop now, so I go, ‘That’s the point. What good is it having me and
Rory doing hours of fucking stamina work, when what we need is handling and speed drills?’

I say this a bit too loudly and a couple of the other lads stop their training and are starting to look at us. Paul notices this and his big cannonball head turns to them and he goes, ‘The fucking keepers think they’re too good to do the same training as the rest of us.’

I’m raising my hand up to block some of the floodlight’s glare and I can’t believe he’s fucking said that. I’m looking from him to the boys and back again and I know how I must look, spot-lit like a fucking urchin in a play of Oliver Twist. I’m looking from him to the boys and I’m going, ‘That’s not what I said.’

Now all the other lads have stopped and they’re standing in a line looking at me and Paul. Their breaths are coming hard and hissing through the sieves of their teeth and their heads and shoulders are wreathed in opaque, misty ribbons. I’m thinking, Paul Cullen’s a bit of a bastard.

And then I’m thinking, where the fuck has Rory disappeared to?

I’m facing Paul and the rest of the lads and I can feel every
single
gaze fastening onto me. The lads are all gasping and blowing and under their jerseys their chests are heaving. I’m standing there, watching them watching me and I’m suddenly aware that I’m not out of breath.

I’m suddenly aware of this and then I’m going, ‘Ah, for fuck’s sake.’

Paul’s looking at me and out of the black nothing of his face
he says, ‘If you don’t want to train like the rest of us, you can train on your own.’ Then he says, ‘Ten laps and then go home. I’ll talk to you on Thursday.’

Just like that he turns around to the other lads and just like that I know I’m dropped for the game on Saturday.

The way the ground is now, it’s hard to run. The rain over the past few days has saturated it and here and there water lies in the pitch’s gouges and troughs. In the floodlights the water looks like dribbled mercury. I’m turning away from Paul and the other boys and now I’m splashing through the metallic spills. I can feel my boots sink into the slick mud, I can feel it shifting beneath me as I start to jog. With each step there’s a retching slurp and my studs carry away a cloying splat of the pitch’s surface. With each step the mud mounts my boots and with each step I’m carrying a
little
more weight. I know that by the end of the tenth lap if I’m able to haul my feet out of the gloop at all, I’ll be lucky.

On the way past Rory, he gives me this apologetic look and shrugs at me.

I’m thinking, thanks a fucking bunch you dick. I’m thinking, if you’re that fucking sorry you should be doing these laps with me.

The ghost light of the floodlights runs in a salt-white band most of the way up one side of the pitch. This means that as I jog, I’ll be able to see where I’m going for only about half the way round. The other side of the pitch has a black curtain drawn across it. Now, though, the floodlights are drenching me down one side and alongside me, instead of Rory, my shadow keeps
pace with me. It is elongated and made spidery by the angle of the lights and it is as black as I feel. It is rank and frustrated. It is a spillage of anger.

I’m jogging up the sideline, away from Paul Cullen, away from Rory, away from the other lads and their curses and panting, away from their clutching stares. I’m jogging up the sideline and my breathing is a sea in storm and every slap and suck of my boots pulls a little more out of the muscles in my legs.

Halfway round the first lap, I look up and across the pitch at everyone else in a welter of movement under the eyes of the lights. Everyone is running and swerving and everyone is
hard-edged
and stark. From over here in the dark it all looks so alien. It is all dance and ritual. Primitive.

I’m on my third pass through the black when I look down to see where I’m putting my feet.

I’m on my third pass through the black when Seán grabs me by the throat.

He’s looking at me and even in what little light there is I can see an awful glee in his face.

I don’t know how long Seán’s been waiting in the black dark beside the pitch. I don’t know how long he’s sat with the water dripping off the briars onto his head and neck. I don’t know how long he’s been watching me slop and strain in the mud with that disgusting look on his face. I don’t know how long it took for his hands to get this cold and hard, how long it took for his blonde hair to get this plastered to his head, how long it took his olive green jacket to get this soaked. I don’t know how long it took
before the fire in his eyes exploded into life like this.

But it has and now Seán has me by the throat and before I can even yell out, he’s bringing his wide, wriggling mouth close to my ear. His clammy cheek is pressed against mine and he whispers two words.

He whispers, ‘Help me.’

I’m blinking in the darkness and Seán is so close to me that the smell of him fills my senses. Shampoo, Lynx deoderant and something else. Something pervasive and unpleasant. Something coming from his hands. I can feel the soft dampness of his cheek against mine. I can feel the hot surge of his breath against my ear and I can feel the way he’s shaking where he stands.

I push him away from me and now I’m staring at him in the dim light from the far side of the pitch. His huge shoulders are slumped forward like his chest is caved in and his whole body is shivering in horrible little ripples. He looks shattered. In the cold wash of light from the training area he looks beaten.

He looks like this until you see his face.

His stooped shoulders have brought his head down and
forwards
like he’s wearing an invisible yoke. He’s looking at me from under his blonde eybrows and the will-o’-the-wisps that live in his eyes are frantic and bright. From between the tight curves of his lips his teeth show white and slippery. From behind this
horrible
smile his voice comes soft and pleading like from a different person, ‘Help me.’

I’m looking at him and it’s like watching someone wearing a mask.

I’m looking at him and I’m thinking, Seán’s fucked. He’s done something really, really bad.

I’m thinking this but what I’m saying is, ‘It’ll be fine. Don’t be worrying. You’ll be alright.’

And now Seán’s expression is starting to fold into that of a sobbing child. I’m watching his smile slacken and wilt into a
sagging
line and I know that whatever effort he was putting into stopping himself doing bad things was way too much for him in the end. Dr Thorpe’s little lipstick-red tablets didn’t work and now looking at Seán I know that whatever it cost him has cost him everyting.

Standing there in the dark I’m thinking, Seán’s beyond fixing.

Without really knowing what I’m doing, I put my arm around Seán’s shoulders and now I’m guiding him around the black edge of the pitch. I don’t how I know it but I know that I can’t let any of the lads see Seán like this.

The dressing rooms are twin cubes of gulag grey. They were supposed to be hooked up to the ESB last year but that didn’t happen. Now they’re dark cavities of cold concrete. Useless
light-bulbs
dangle from the ceilings, like dead planets hanging in the void. Away from the lights, away from the slap and suck of the training, the dressing rooms are empty apart from me and Seán. Around us the coiled piles of the lads’ kit-bags and clothes are
little
heaps of matt black in the sort of grainy charcoal that passes for light in here.

In this no-colour light I’m watching Seán as he slumps onto one of the benches lining the walls and sobs slither out of his
mouth. His face is buried in his hands and now my eyes have adjusted to the gloom enough to see a hanging festoon of snot and spit arcing down from his big fingers. Under the cold wet of my jersey I can feel the cold wet of my skin, and under my skin I can feel the hot gush of my heart’s every pulse.

‘What happened, Seán?’ I ask.

I don’t like the detachment that’s entered my voice. I sound like I’m trying to talk someone down from a ledge.

In the damp-concrete night of the dressing room my breath floats out from my face and away in a cloud of condensation. Seán’s head is bandaged round in the moist coils of his own despair. His breath billows through the cage of his fingers like he’s a trapped animal.

Now I’m moving toward him, my studs chattering on the hard cement of the floor. They sound like tapshoes, brittle and
clattering
and for some reason they always, always, remind me of that sound your tooth makes just as the dentist finds it with his pliers. Like something splintering.

Above the splintering of my footsteps just as I get near him, Seán goes, ‘You can’t tell anyone.’