Dead dogs, p.12
Dead Dogs, page 12
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?’
Again, jaundiced under the naked bulb hanging from the kitchen ceiling, into the thick stink of fried offal and burnt vegetables, my Da goes, ‘No bother at all, Doctor.’
And Dr Thorpe goes, ‘Splendid.’
And then he says something that makes me blink for the first time in what seems like days.
He says, ‘Good man. And always remember. We’re all in this. Understand?’
And just like that I’m six years old and standing in Dr Thorpe’s kitchen again.
And then Dr Thorpe is gone.
The front door closes and I can breathe again and I can feel the sweat sticking my T-shirt to my back and trickling down like grease from my oxters. I’m breathing really hard but now instead of dragging in the clinging smells of cooking, it’s like my lungs are sucking in something else. All at once my head is filled with a smell from ten years ago.
My sinuses are clogged with the pulpy sweetness of rose petals.
Seán’s fading black eye is really noticable. In the hollow to the left of his nose and all across the heavy swell of his cheekbone there’s this jaundiced stain. The flesh all around his eye-socket is still fairly puffy and the skin looks taut. Not one of the teachers asks how he came by it. Not one of the teachers asks how he came by it because if they do that, then he’d have to tell them and then things would get complicated. It’s much better for everyone if they know what happened to Seán and that Seán knows that they know but no one does anything too official about it. I get the feeling though that if Seán strolled in one morning looking not much worse than he is right now then Mr Cowper would have Social Services calling out to his Da like a shot.
Mr Cowper is the school’s Guidance Counsellor and his job seems mainly to consist of putting his arm around the shoulders of scumbags and telling them how special they are and how mean the world is. In recognition of this and all the other stuff that Mr Cowper does for them, the scumbags call him Cowpat. Occasionally though, Mr Cowper is pretty useful.
It’s over a week now since I saw what I saw and the nightmares are still as bad as ever. The other stuff though, the sense of falling apart, the sense of the world about to swallow me, is starting to weaken. I did some research on it and the only thing I can put it down to is shock. It’s like I was on the verge of a breakdown or something.
I’m glad Seán’s back and I think he’s glad to see me too. I have it in my head that we have to do something about Dr Thorpe. We have to prove to people that he’s a murderer.
Two things are getting in the way of this.
Number one is the fact that when Seán comes back, he comes back on medication that has the same effect as really strong dope. It’s like Seán’s moving in a thick swaddling of fog. Now it takes whole, long minutes for anything you say to him to register.
Number two is the fact that the entire fucking school knows about the dead dogs. And I mean the entire fucking school.
The caretaker is the first one to open his mouth about them.
When you walk into the school you have to push open the doors to the main building and the Junior Resource Area. The outside of the building is all red brick and white plastic rainwater chutes and downpipes. The inside is all slick with linoleum and tile. The carpet was all replaced a year ago with this sort of plastic stuff that’s supposed to be easy to clean. For easy to clean read easy to scrape chewing gum off. It’s all polished and washed so that there’s an oily sheen off every flat surface. The hallway, the stairs, the wire-reinforced glass of the doors, everything is industrial, institutional. Everything is pale green or the colour of sour milk. Think marrowfat peas. Along the skirting boards and streaked blackly on some of the floors, the marks of shoes and runners are indelible. The place smells like a hospital.
This one day when me and Seán walk in through the doors the caretaker goes, ‘Oh, here they are. Lock up your labradors.’
Then he laughs like he’s just told the funniest joke the world has ever heard.
I’m looking at him with his little square head set onto his non-existent neck and I’m going, ‘Been reading a lot of Wilde lately?’
He blinks at me like I’m speaking a different language but it doesn’t matter because the whole corridor is full of other people and they’re all looking at me and Seán. Every face is an open sore of mockery and here and there little groups are starting to giggle and point.
Before Seán can start to moan I go, ‘Let’s just get to class.’
The first class is English and I’m sitting in my usual spot and trying not to think about how terrible my life has suddenly gotten. The classroom is the same marrowfat colour as the corridors outside and I’m sitting in this marrowfat cube and I’m trying to draw a picture to illustrate Montague’s ‘Killing The Pig’. Our English teacher, Mr Gorman, thinks that this helps us to concrete-ise the abstractions. I’m pretty sure that concrete-ise isn’t a word.
There’s a blank sheet of paper on the table in front of me and in front of the table is the whiteboard. Mr Gorman has his laptop hooked up to the digital projector and across the whiteboard images that Mr Gorman thinks might prompt us in the right direction are cycling one after the other. The digital projector hums and its colours bleed off the whiteboard onto the paper in front of me, washing it blue, washing it red, washing it yellow. I’m staring at the empty sheet with a pen in my hand trying to think as the projector’s cycle begins and ends and stains my page with someone else’s ideas. If you’re at home, daytime TV does this same thing. The Oprah Winfrey Show comes on and now Ally McBeal comes on and now I find myself thinking about Diagnosis Murder. The All Singing, All Dancing Dick Van Dyke from Mary Poppins as a crime-solving genius doctor. Who’d have thunk it?
