When Mr. Dog Bites (12 page)

Nada came out, and I walked straight past him. I’m not a million percent sure, but I think I might have growled at him as well. Anyway, I Usain Bolted out of the school gates for home, to
The Jeremy Kyle Show
in bed.

Then I realized why everything was blurry like Dad’s car’s windshield when it rained all torrential. I wiped the tears away from my peepers.

1
4

Car

When I reached my street, the shaking, twitching, tears, and shouting had all gone. Phew! But I was now terrified in case the school knew I was cutting class. When they found out, they’d phone Mom to ask where I was. Or, worse, they’d tell her that I’d been seen entering the school gates and then exiting them. I hated how Drumhill always phoned parents when students were a nano-nano-nanosecond late for anything. Amir said it was in case anyone had had a heart attack or fallen on the ground with foam pouring from their mouths on their way to school or had been touched in their privates by pervert people in the bushes. I knew for a fact that this wasn’t the case in the normal schools. If students didn’t bother their arses attending from day to day, the schools didn’t give two flying fishes. I wished Drumhill didn’t give its fishes.

I hoped that Mom was out buying grub for dinner or having morning coffee with some of her friends who didn’t do any paid work. If she was out, I could sneak up to bed to watch the saddos on
The Jeremy Kyle Show
and put my head under the covers and pretend I was inside a tent or an igloo or a teepee and feel super safe and comfortable. I could imagine I was on an exotic holiday or on some important adventure or leading a crucial expedition to find a cure for all those poor souls living in Tourette’s Hell Hotel. (This would be tough, as the doc had told Mom and Dad that there was no cure.) More likely I’d fall asleep and forget the whole Michelle Malloy conversation.

There was a maroon car in Dad’s space. It wasn’t Mom’s, because she couldn’t drive, and therefore didn’t need a car to get her from A to B. Mom failed her driving test five blinkin’ times. Imagine that. Dad always teased her about all her failed attempts behind a wheel, saying she “couldn’t drive a bargain,” which is a pun, which is a thing people do when they’re playing with words in order to make themselves seem funnier or cleverer than they actually are.

My favorite puns are:

I’m reading a book about antigravity. It’s impossible to put down.

And:

I couldn’t remember how to throw a boomerang, but then it came back to me.

But I’m not clever or funny.

It was similar to the kind of car that plainclothes cops or the CIA drive around in; a type of car that police want the public to believe is your average John Doe’s car and not an actual police car so as to pull the wool over criminals’ eyes and lead them into a false sense of security—then the clink. This ploy was rubbish, because anyone streetwise and “
with it”
knew what an unmarked police car looked like straightaway. And this thing sitting outside my house, in my dad’s parking space, looked like an unmarked police car.
Ding! Dang! Dong!
I thought. What if the school had called the police and asked them to tail me for the crime of cutting class or, major head-wrecker, sexually harassing Michelle Malloy? Maybe I’d be frog-marched down to the station for some serious strip-searching interrogation. I’d have to get a brief in case they wanted me to do a stretch: five to ten in the pen. I didn’t know what to think. I was all over the place. One part of my brain was at the shop, while the other part was running home with the change. Jeeze Louise! If they did huckle me to the station for questioning, I’d tell them that Michelle Malloy was sooooooooooo cheeky and sooooooooooo insulting to me that her remarks actually made me cry and I was in such a state of emotional bouncy castle that there was No Way, José that I could’ve even considered sitting behind a desk all day, and if they made me, I’d have probably launched it against the classroom wall and quite possibly injured an innocent classmate. I didn’t want to do that, so I walked out of the school gates for the safety of everyone.

My plan was to tiptoe up the stairs and sneak into bed without as much as a squeak or a creak being heard. I held my breath as I put my key into the door, twisting it the same way an iceberg safecracker would open a reinforced bank vault. If bones could breathe, I would have held my bones’ breath too. My body tensed when I carefully closed the door behind me. One wee toe was on the bottom stair, ready for the big climbing expedition.

“Is that you, Dylan?”

I held my breath and felt my face redden because this action was dead hard to do, meaning I would have been a terrible lifeguard or deep-sea free-diver, if that was my chosen career path.

“Dylan?” Mom sounded upset—probably because I was driving her into an early grave—so I took my toe off the step and turned my body toward the kitchen. That’s where her voice was coming from. “Dylan?”

“Yeeeesss?”

“What are you doing home from school?”

I wondered if this was one of those questions that don’t require an answer or one that did. If Mom wanted an answer, it meant that the school hadn’t been in contact with her yet, and if she didn’t want an answer, it meant I was for the high jump. I shushed myself and said zilch. Then there was a standoff, just as the good and bad lads in the Wild West have from time to time. A silent standoff. I was about to hotfoot it up to my room when I heard another voice coming from the kitchen. Mom and this voice were having a whispered conversation. I didn’t recognize the voice, and it was a man’s. No mistake, sugar cake. Then I thought about it, and . . . Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Maybe it was a policeman. A copper. The Old Bill. Five-O. At this moment my heart could have provided the beat on a rip-roaring drum ’n’ bass track.

“Mom,” I said.

There was more whispering, and I was sure I heard Mom saying, “NO.” But she said this in her weird shouting-in-a-soft-voice way. She does this in the shops when I ask again and again and again if I can have random things, like chocolate, soccer stickers, special dishwasher tablets, or razors (even though I haven’t started shaving yet). Mom looks at me and softly shouts, “No, Dylan, enough is enough.”

There was no answer from the kitchen.

“Mom, are you okay?”

That’s when I thought the whispering guy in the kitchen could have done something evil to Mom. I could easily have interrupted him in the middle of a sickening and sordid ordeal. He could have been holding a blunt butcher’s knife under her neck, urging her to come clean about where all the goodies in the house were stashed. And the mad thing is, even though I was the man of the house, I didn’t know what to do in a situation like this, or who to scream to, or who to phone. I didn’t really know how to fight.

I whistled really loudly. I whistled to a flock of imaginary birds.

“Dylan, I’m okay.”

I kept whistling, getting louder and louder.

“Dylan, I’m okay, honestly.”

But I didn’t believe her, so I hotfooted it straight for the kitchen to make sure the whispering man hadn’t been pressing the knife into Mom’s throat, forcing her to say those things to me. This beast obviously thought Dylan Mint would roll over and say, “No problemo, Mom,” then head up to bed and play some tunes while
he
was playing devil in the kitchen. This geezer thought Dylan Mint was some sort of eejit.

“EVIL CUNT PEDOPHILE.” I burst through the kitchen door and scowled at the man. Twitched like crazy. This fellow wasn’t holding a blunt butcher’s knife in his hand, nor was he raping Mom. In fact, Mom and the whispering man were sat at each end of the table, having a nice cup of tea. Confused dot com. My head was fuzzy. I punched my thigh four times. Twitched three times. The whispering man stood up from the table and extended his hand for me to shake. I didn’t. I kept my hands firmly at my side. No stranger was touching me. I’d have him locked up in solitary forever and ever. He’d become someone’s bitch behind bars if he didn’t watch his step. Super rapido, he would. Facedown in the showers.

“You, young man, must be Dylan.”

I looked at Mom. She smiled as though she’d done something incredibly wrong.

“Are you from my school?” I asked him, which was a stupid question, because if he’d been from Drumhill I’d have seen him cutting about the corridors from time to time. He laughed. I was fed up to the back teeth with people laughing at me.

“Not exactly.”

“The school phoned, by the way, Dylan,” Mom said. “They told me you walked out, just like that.” On the “
just like that”
part Mom clicked her two fingers in the air. I must have looked sheepish, because she didn’t seem too angry or pure mad mental. “We’ll talk about this later, okay?”

I wasn’t sure if she wanted an answer to this.

“Okay,” I said. “Are you a policeman?” I asked the man.

He was still standing. He was majorly tall, enough to be a policeman. Not CIA or Special Branch, though. I’d place this maniac outside a soccer stadium checking people’s tickets. In my mind that would be a horrendous job, beaten only by waving heavy traffic through polluted streets in the wind and rain because the traffic lights have failed for the gazillionth time. He laughed at my question.

“UGLY PIG FILTH FUCK .
.
. Sorry .
.
. I’m .
.
.”

“That’s okay, Dylan. And no, I’m not a policeman.”

“Is that your car outside?”

“Yes, it is. Do you like it?”

“It’s in Dad’s space.”

“I didn’t know there were allotted spaces for residents on this road.” I made a mental note to look up “
allotted”
in the dictionary, but I had a fair idea what it meant. I’d remember this and impress Mrs. Seed.

“Are you a doctor?” It all made sense then. This man was some sort of specialist doc sent by the National Health Service. The good-news man. Maybe they’d realized that the other doc was terrible at his job and everything he said to patients was pork pies pish. I’d then have to sue his arse for the emotional rampage he had caused us.

“No, I’m not a doctor either, Dylan,” he said, still smiling away like a big massive cat from that town in England where cats smile all the time. He looked at Mom and flashed his eyes toward the ceiling as if to say,
Heaven forbid
.

“Dylan, stop asking so many questions, will you?” Then Mom rolled
her
eyes skyward at the man as if to say,
I did tell you what he was like, didn’t I?

“So why is your car in Dad’s space, if you’re not from the school or a policeman or a doc?”

“Dylan,” Mom said, “this is Tony. He gave me a lift back from the shops.”

“But it’s too early to go to the shops.”

“Don’t be so silly—it’s never too early to go to the shops.”

“But you never go to the shops in the morning.”

“Well, I did this morning.”

“What did you buy?”

“Dylan, what’s the problem with me going to the shops first thing in the morning, eh?”

“It’s just a bit weird, that’s all.”

“I just gave your mom a lift back because she had lots of bags, Dylan,” the tall man said.

“You’re not my dad.”

“DYLAN,” Mom shouted.

“Well, he’s not.”

“Tony knows that.”

“So tell him to get his car out of Dad’s space, then.”

“I’ll do no such thing.”

“Look, Moira, I need to be going anyway,” the man said.

“At least finish your tea first, Tony.”

“I’ve got an airport run in half an hour anyway,” he said.

“Are you a pilot?” I asked him.

“No, Dylan. I’m a cabbie.”

“A what?”

“A taxi driver.”

“So that car outside is a taxi?”

“Yes, and it will be out of your dad’s space in a jiffy.”

“Does that mean soon?”

“Dylan, will you please stop being rude to Tony?” Mom said. The anger had returned to her voice.

“But taxi drivers aren’t supposed to come into passengers’ houses for cups of tea,” I said.

“I couldn’t agree more, but your mom and me go back a long way.”

“We were old school friends,” Mom added.

“But how come I’ve never heard you talking about him?”

“Well, that’s because—” the taxi man butted in, but I didn’t let him finish.

“Me and Amir are school pals and we see each other all the time and talk about each other when we’re not at school, and his mom and dad know well who I am even though I’m not allowed in his house.”

“Tony and I just rediscovered each other recently by accident.”

“At the shops?” I said.

“Online,” the taxi man said.

“On Facebook,” Mom said.

“But you said that Facebook was for freaks, Mom.”

The taxi man laughed and so did Mom, like they were sharing some secret joke. I hated them both.

“Many of the people who use it are, Dylan, but there are nice folk who use it as well.”