Even the Dogs: A Novel (18 page)

Remember the way Heather always laughed, a bit louder and a bit longer than everyone else, like it took her a while to get the joke and she had to make up for it.

Laura sliding on to the floor to get the works, already wriggling her trousers down and saying Heather do you want some more I want some more. Ben knocking on the door, moving it aside, looking down at Laura with her trousers around her knees and saying All right ladies I got your shopping. That grin on his face, spread right across his cheeks, his lips rolling round his teeth, trying not to look so pleased with himself, with his dark hair curling over his face and his hands reaching into his pockets to pull out the goods like a magic trick. Like some kind of showman, weren’t he. How old was he then. Sixteen. Only just out of care, officially. Got himself out a long time before but he was still getting used to not looking over his shoulder all the time, to not worrying about getting caught and taken back. Was starting to miss it already in fact. The two of them reaching out and him teasing them for a moment, waving the gear above them, enjoying the passing thrill of power before dropping it into their outstretched hands. That was early on. When he would do missions for nothing, for fun and thanks and a bag or two he could keep to sell on himself. Was a lot of things he’d do for a word of thanks, then. The way it would light up his face.

Ben always had a lot to say but he never told us much. Always talking about going down to Brighton to find his sister. Said the last he’d heard she was staying down there, and if things didn’t work out he could always go and track her down. Lost touch with her after she left care, she was supposed to come and visit but she didn’t always make it. Didn’t even get on with her that well, never had much to do with her after they got taken into care. But she’s still his sister and that, she’d still help him out, probably. If he could get down to Brighton. If he could find her. She knows how it weren’t his fault. She knows that’s old news now. He couldn’t have done nothing to stop him, to stop it happening. He didn’t even know about it really, not enough to be sure. She took it out on Ben at the time but that’s old news now, she wouldn’t keep taking it out on him no more. If he could get down to Brighton. If he could find her. What would he have done anyway. He was only little. At the time when it happened. Anyway. Don’t matter no more. Sweeping the hair out of his eyes. Bouncing up and down on his toes and looking all over, like he was getting ready to run. Always seemed like he was ready to run. Didn’t he. Remember that. Don’t you. Jesus.

The doctor moves over to the whiteboard and talks to his junior, asking if he’s happy with their observations so far, if he has any further comments, and then he speaks to the woman with the black-rimmed glasses and says Okay, Jenny, I think it’s time we had a proper look at our gentleman, could you do us the honour of opening him up? We see, through a window in one wall which looks on to a small office, the detective talking on his phone, drinking coffee from a polystyrene cup and watching as Jenny takes a long scalpel from a steel tray of tools and slices into Robert’s chest. There’s a soft slow hissing sound as his chest and stomach deflate. The polished blade parts a long u-shaped line through his flesh, from one ear to his chest and then back to the other ear, the blood running in streams down each side of his body. She keeps cutting, and the blood keeps coming, thick and dark and draining away along the gullies in the sides of the table. She lifts the scalpel and makes another long cut, from the centre of the chest right down to the pubic bone, and then she peels back the flaps of tissue and skin, tugging them away from Robert’s ribcage and laying them out flat on either side of his chest like the opened pages of a book. She peels away the third flap, at the top, draping it over Robert’s face, and uses an electric saw to cut through each of his ribs. The noise of the saw fills the room, grinding and violent, and we step back for a moment. We turn away. This is difficult to watch, even now. How easily a body is reduced to this. Knotted sinew and fat and bone. Severed arteries and veins, the blood pouring out. The saw whines a little as it bites into each rib, the technician rocking on her toes as the blade breaks through the soft marrow and out the other side. She cuts through twelve ribs along his left side, stooping low over the table, and then circles round to cut through twelve more on the right. The saw whirrs to a noisy halt. The extraction fans in the table whistle softly as they suck the bone dust out of the air.

No obvious damage to ribcage, sternum or clavicle bones, the doctor says. No evidence of violence to the torso, nor of any attempted resuscitation.

Second time Laura came home she asked her dad if she could stay for a while. Remember that. He thought all his birthdays had come at once, thought he was going to keel over with it there and then. Thought things were going to be all right after that. He could see she’d got herself in a bit of trouble, bit of a mess, but it was something they had in common now, something they could get sorted out together, the two of them like a team, like father and daughter getting things right together, making up for lost time. Like fuck.

The pain in his head, sometimes. Blocking out everything Yvonne was saying to him, making him want her to go away, to be quiet, to just fucking shut up and go away that pain in his head like nothing else. But she didn’t believe him, or she thought it was his drinking, or she thought he was being a wimp. Drinking was just about the only thing that made it go away. Like someone hammering a nail into the side of his head. Jesus what was it. If he kept moving he couldn’t feel it. If he drank enough, and kept moving, and she shut up fucking shut up a minute it went away. But it always came back, and, sometimes. Made him act wrong sometimes.

The pain in his head when he first heard Yvonne warning him what she was going to do. The feel of the sound of it. Like a what, like a storm, like a storm behind glass. Shrieking into his face to make sure he could hear, beating on him. Her tight little fists shaking in the air. I’ll go back to my mum’s, I will. Are you listening to me. I don’t want to but I can’t stay here like this. And everything he’d heard her saying to her mum on the phone. No he hasn’t been looking for a job yet but he, I thought he just needed a bit of time to get over it, it was such a shock the way they all got locked out like that with no warning, they all took it hard and it’s not like they’ve had much help, I mean most of them just went straight on the sick. But he’s had long enough now, it’s been long enough, he could at least give me a hand about the place. Standing by the kitchen sink with another drink while she hid in the bedroom and said all this and she thought he couldn’t hear. He’s leaving everything down to me and I’ve had enough, there’s bills stacking up, Mum, I’ve been swinging a few extra shifts but I still don’t see how we’re going to cover it all. I don’t know, Mum. I don’t know what I’m going to do. And Laura waking up to hear her mum shouting again, shouting I’ll go back, Robert, I will, I’ll take her with me and all, you bloody watch me, I don’t want to but I will. Are you listening? Are you bloody well listening or what? And then the thumping, like before, coming through the wall, her mum’s little fists against her dad’s chest, pounding through him and the thin wall and knocking against Laura where she was sat up with her back against the headboard of her bed. Until it stopped, like it always did, and they were both crying, and she could hear the shuffling three-legged footsteps of the two of them helping each other to bed, and she fell asleep, and years later she was lying with her head in Heather’s lap telling the story all over again. Not feeling nothing about it this time.

These things all coming together now. Coming up to the surface.

And remember Robert told Steve about it too. Said it had been more or less the only clue that something was up, that something was going wrong. Said he’d known she didn’t like him drinking so much, and he’d known they’d been doing plenty of arguing, but he’d thought it was normal. But that’s just it Rob mate, Steve told him, the two of them sitting in their armchairs in the empty room and working their way through the day’s drinks, nothing’s normal for them is it, nothing’s good enough. They’re always after things being different, being better. You’re better off without mate, he said, and they knocked their cans together in agreement, looking out across the playing fields and the sun going down behind the trees by the river. That’s what Steve told him. Didn’t he. That’s where he went wrong, he broke the golden rule, let himself get in too far. You start leaning on someone, when they do the off you’ll fall over. Stands to reason. Never lean on no one. Never trust no bastard. Golden rule, that’s what he told him. Remember that. That’s where he went wrong with what’s her name, as it happens, the woman from the shop. Marianna, Marianne, Marie. Whatever her name was. Let down his guard, got to the point where he’d do all sorts of bollocks for her, like he was trying to impress her, like he thought she was bothered. Then when he came back from that roadtrip to bloody Bosnia she didn’t want to know. Said things had changed. Said Steve had changed, said he was too moody and it was too hard being around him any more. Too right he’d changed, what else did she expect. He’d seen a few things when he was over there. Things that had, even someone who’d been on all the postings he’d been on, they’d taken him aback a bit, more or less. He wasn’t looking for sympathy, he’d never asked for that. Just a little bit of patience. A bit of understanding. She made out like he’d got too quiet and moody but she only had to give him a chance to think. Just sometimes. Jesus. He was still up for a laugh and a joke but he needed to clear his head and she didn’t really get it. Giving it all Maybe you should talk to someone about it, like that would help. There was that time, the two of them stood on the bridge over the canal, it was right when he was getting his tenancy sorted out and he’d said something about she could stay over sometimes and as soon as he’d said it he knew he was stuffed. She wouldn’t even look at him. Hands deep in her pockets like she had a weapon hidden away in there. Giving it all Oh but the thing is really, Steve, things are a bit different now, things have got a bit weird. I wasn’t really up for anything serious. Looking down at the muddy brown water like she was hoping he’d jump in or something. And after that the staff wouldn’t let him work in the shop any more, or even go in there at all. They said it wasn’t appropriate, which was a joke because he wasn’t the one with the problem. He wasn’t the one who’d said things had got a bit weird. He wouldn’t have bloody minded only he never even got to bang her whatever her name was Maria or Marie or whatever. Would have liked to. She had nice hands and that.

The technician reaches across Robert, grasping the top of his ribcage and lifting it away from his body. It comes off in one piece, like the breastplate from a suit of armour, and she lays it down on another stainless-steel table. We move in close around his body again, our hands resting on the table, and peer in at the strange swollen gleam of his insides, the flabby organs crammed wetly in upon each other. The doctor scrapes away more layers of creamy yellow fat, slices through a series of arteries and veins, and then lifts the organs out as a single block, easing them on to a plastic tray which they carry over to a cutting board on the counter running along the wall. Behind them, in the scooped-out hollow of Robert’s body, we see the rib-bones fanning out across his back, the knuckles of his spine, the coiled mass of his intestines and bowels already slipping and spreading out to fill the space.

Should be something more like. We prop photos up amongst the candles, snapshots from younger days, better days, so that people can look and tell lies about how he hasn’t aged all that badly, considering. A photo from his army days, in full dress uniform, so that his former colleagues can pick it up and put it down and catch each other’s eyes and not need to say a word. A photo Laura once found in the bottom of her mum’s wardrobe, of a young-looking man with a soft round face and a broad flat chest, his shirt hanging open and a young girl grinning wildly on his shoulders. She used to go and look at it when her mum was out of the house. The young girl on the shoulders was her, she supposed.

All those years thinking about him, and once she was back there she found it hard to think of him as her dad at all. He didn’t even look much like that photo, by the time she got to him. The Robert she met – fat with drink and sorrow, unwashed, with a crushed face and a sunken posture, each hand punched into an arthritic curl – was the man her mother had warned her about, the man she’d always been told they’d left. The man Robert had only really become once they’d closed that door behind them and he’d started drinking seriously. Once he’d given up expecting them to ever come home. She’d imagined hugging him when she came back. Sitting on his lap, resting her head on his shoulder. Making up for everything they’d lost. Which had sort of happened, once, soon after the second time she came back, putting her arms around him and clinging on desperately until the smell of his long-worn clothes had pushed her away. After that, she’d only ever touched him when she wanted money. Crouching beside him and resting a hand on his knee, or standing behind him with her hands on his shoulders, leaning over and talking softly into his ear. She felt bad asking, but she felt like he owed her. All those years he hadn’t been around. That one time though, she thought about it sometimes. When she wasn’t thinking about other things. The way it felt. Nothing like she’d been expecting. The solid, numbed stillness of him. Like hugging a tree. His arms by his side, lifting out into the air for a moment, uncertainly. Like he’d forgotten what he was supposed to do, and by the time he’d remembered she’d already gone, again.

They stand around the cutting board, the doctor and the technician and the assistants and the photographer. The rest of us pressing in around them. The doctor separates out the liver, lifting it in one hand and resting it in the shining bowl of an electronic set of scales. Two thousand seven hundred and forty-three grammes, he says, and one of them just about whistles, and the junior doctor writes it down on the whiteboard. The liver is a yellowish orange colour, like a sponge, speckled and grainy, and thick gobbets of fat spread out across the knife as the doctor slices into it. What can you tell me about this? he asks his junior. Cirrhosis, the younger man says. Advanced cirrhosis. Thank you, the doctor says, smiling. The technician takes one of the liver slices and puts it into a clear plastic container, soaking it with formaldehyde and carefully labelling the lid. The doctor separates out the heart, an awkward-looking lump of flesh with severed pipes and tubes fingering out in all directions, weighs it, and puts it back on the board. He cuts into it, exposing the chambers, the valves, the arteries, using his scalpel to indicate particular features while he dictates his notes.