Dead dogs, p.5
Dead Dogs, page 5
And in the machine-gun brilliance of the strobe light and in the ball of feedback distortion from the fake scream my Mam lets go of me.
I remember this. Cold and hard as the flash from a strobe light, I remember this.
Her fingers loose and she steps away from me and I’m left standing there, terrified.
I’m sixteen now and I know that what happens is she gets a fright and she jumps and she lets go of my hand. I know that I’m standing there for about two seconds before she grabs me again and lifts me up into her arms. But at six years old this all pretty hard to take.
In the hammering light of the strobe it’s like she’s receding into the distance and all her movements are jerky and spastic. The terror that I feel isn’t an emotional thing. It is in my muscles and bones. It is something physical that crushes me and buries me and scalds my throat.
This is the last proper memory that I have of my mother. Being terrified as she seems to vanish into the dark. Dread on dread.
This is the last time I’m really afraid. Actually really afraid.
Now I’m standing looking into this open sore of a half-finished house and I can feel that same fear bucking in my chest. I can feel the vomit churn in my gut. I’m looking from the empty doorframe to Seán and then back again. I can still get that weird smell. Something organic and rotten. Something that wants to sour the mucus in your throat and seed infection in your sinuses.
My tongue comes out and rasps along lips that feel like strips of leather stitched onto my face. I’m licking my lips and I’m going, ‘What’s in there, Seán?’
Seán shakes his big head and he goes, ‘I don’t want anyone else to see this. I don’t know what to do.’
I look at him for a minute and he looks at me and then the two of us are walking through the empty doorframe.
Inside, the house is a cold empty cube made up of smaller cold empty cubes. None of the walls are plastered and there’s ragged holes in them for wiring and fittings that will never be wired or fitted. The place is haunted by the ghost of what might have been. It is a non-existent home for a computer-generated family. The cold is so sharp in here that it straightaway sinks into your skin and penetrates your muscles. I’m still cold and still wet from training and this place is acting like a fridge so that I’m shivering only a few steps into the hallway. My breathing is coming harder and with every breath I pull more of the damp and more of the cold and more of that awful smell into my lungs.
Seán leads the way down the hall and his footsteps grind on the clammy concrete dust that powders the place. It’s like wet talcum to the touch. I’m following him and I’m getting more and more uneasy with every step. The smell is getting stronger and in front of us there’s the rectangular hole of what should have been a kitchen door. Seán’s frame is a moving wedge of darkness and with his shoulders stooped and his head hanging he looks like something out of a horror story.
Seán stops at the threshold between the hall and the kitchen and he goes, ‘It’s in here. I’m really sorry. Really, really sorry.’
The kitchen at least has windows and a sliding patio door in one wall that looks out over a three-foot drop into a ditch of filthy water. Pipes prod up out of the concrete floor, prongs of plastic tubing onto which washing machines and dishwashers, sinks and tumble dryers should be slotted. Not now though. Now the fuzzy light from the town and the road filters in through the windows and makes it look like my club’s dressing rooms. Migraine-grey and swamped in shadow.
Only the smell is vibrant.
A good few times, when I’m off over at my uncle’s, himself and my Da are skinning rabbits. What you do is you slit the skin of the belly and kind of fold it over the knee joints of the back legs. The skin separates from the muscle underneath a lot easier than you’d think. It makes a sound like peeling velcro. Then you make a nick in the back legs. Then you break them and cut off the lucky rabbit’s feet. You do this with pheasants too and you can grab the little white slippery tab of the severed tendon and pull on it. This makes the claws curl in on themselves like the dead pheasant is shaking its fist at you. When you have the skin pulled off the stubs of the back legs you can then tug it up along the back until you get to the head. All the time you’re doing this you’re hearing the same tearing noise of peeling velcro. Once you get the skin up to the head you can let it dangle all limp and pathetic over the rabbit’s face. This always reminds me of the snotty asthmatic kid in school who gets his jumper pulled over his head. Then you cut its head off. After this you empty out its belly and the cavity under its ribs and then you wash off all the blood and all the slime and all the fluids.
The trouble is sometimes when you’re doing this you catch the sac of the intestines with the point of your skinning knife. The trouble is your knife is really fucking sharp so when it snags this brown-purple sausage of gut it punches straight through it like a surgeon’s scalpel. This is pretty easy to do, especially the first few times you do it. It’s the smell that gets you. The smell of punctured viscera. The smell of half-formed shit and half-digested food. The smell of violation and death and indignity.
This is the smell that fills the kitchen.
And suddenly I’m thinking, please don’t let it be a person. Please don’t let it be a person.
And from beside me Seán goes, ‘I’m really sorry. Really really sorry.’
I’m nearly puking now but I’m saying, ‘What the fuck have you done, Seán?’
Seán slides past me and into the kitchen the way on telly a big ship will slide through an oil spill. He is all weight and silence and he points into the far corner of the kitchen. He points into the far corner of the kitchen but his eyes stay fixed on the concrete floor.
Not wanting to, I follow him and stare at where he’s pointing.
In the far corner of the concrete box there’s what looks like a rug, all bundled up and lying in a puddle of shadow. Around this lump there are five or six other small lumps. All are lying in darkness and all are unmoving.
With my hand to my mouth I’m taking a step towards the lumps. I can’t make them out in the gloom and so I’m taking another step and then another.
And then I see what they are.
There’s a dead dog lying in the corner of the kitchen, lying in a slick of her own blood, lying with her dead puppies all around her. Her stomach is slit all the way open. Dead dogs litter the cold concrete floor.
When I get sick it rushes out of my mouth and just keeps on coming.
I don’t know how I get outside. I don’t how I turn on my heel with vomit on my chin, vomit on my lips, vomit in my throat. I don’t know how I stumble along the hallway. I don’t know how quickly I manage to get away from that room with its stench and its horror. All I know is that now I’m standing in the half-finished porch sucking great gulps of air through my nose and mouth and I don’t know how I got here. I can smell the mud and the rain and the wet concrete. I can smell the smells of decay and abandonment. I can smell the acid stink of my own puke.
Then Seán’s beside me and out of fear and anger and disgust I go, ‘Don’t fucking touch me! Jesus Christ what the fuck is wrong with you?’
Seán just stares at me, sadly. He knows that this is coming. He knows what people are going to say if this gets out. He knows he has done a really bad thing.
I know that he knows this and he just stares vacantly at me. The stones of his eyes are wide and round and wet in the dark.
I’m looking at him and now I’m scrubbing at my mouth with the sleeve of my jacket. I should have a bottle of water in my gear bag and I start to root around to try and find it. I have to get the smell out of my throat. I have to wash the vomit off my face. I find the bottle and the water is cold and it ripples shivers all over my body but the goosebumps aren’t there from the water.
Seán watches me in silence and I stare back at him and go, ‘What the fuck are we supposed to do now? Why would you do something like that?
Seán’s sighing and he brings both of his big hands up to his face and then he drags them down along his cheeks. They pull his face out of shape for a moment like he’s about to pull off a latex mask and not be Seán anymore.
He’s sighing and he goes, ‘I didn’t kill her. I saw her being hit by a car. The driver didn’t stop. I went over and I saw her big belly and I could feel how warm she was. I cut her open and tried to play with her pups but they wouldn’t do anything. Some of them moved around for a while but then they died. I tried to put them back in—’
I’m going, ‘Stop it right fucking there. You cut open a dead dog to play with the puppies? Jesus Christ. Why didn’t you get a vet?’
Seán’s shrugging and I know what he’s going to say before he’s even saying it. He says, ‘They’d take the pups.’
I’m staring at him like I’ve lost the ability to think. I have lost the ability to think. The patchwork housing estate, the sobbing dark of the sky, everything is a confusing meaningless mess.
I’m trying to speak but words aren’t coming out. I can feel my head shaking from side to side but I’m not the one doing it. It’s like someone has a hold of my skull and they’re twisting it this way and that, the way you hold somebody’s arm and start going stop hitting yourself stop hitting yourself. Right now someone’s doing that to my entire body.
Seán goes, ‘We can’t tell my Da. He’d kill us.’
And I go, ‘What the fuck is this “us” shite?’
Seán is staring at me and in the dark he looks like something placid and bovine on its way to a slaughterhouse.
Still tasting my own sick in the back of my throat I’m going, ‘Alright. We can’t tell your Da. We can’t tell mine either.’
Seán with his face sad, his hands flat against his thighs, Seán with his head down, goes, ‘I don’t want to do this again. I don’t want to do anything like this again.’
And then, just like that, I’m going, ‘Dr Thorpe.’
And then, just like that, I’m saying, ‘We can tell Dr Thorpe and because he’s your doctor he can’t tell anyone else. We need to tell him you need new tablets. We need to tell him that the ones you’re on aren’t fucking working.’
I take a look back into the house and I go, ‘They’re really not fucking working.’
I’m not sure if I really like Dr Thorpe. I was scared of him when I was little. When Mam was dying but I was too young to realise she was dying, me and Da go down to see her in hospital. She’s lying in bed not moving at all. She’s lying there all snaked around in plastic tubing and a bag of clear liquid drip-drip-drips into her through an IV. With all the white and all the equipment she looks like an astronaut who’s gotten all snarled up in her own gear. She’s like someone drowning in the vacuum of outer space. Except she’s lying on a bed drowning in the antiseptic smell of a hospital.
Driving home and I’m asking Da about whether Mam will be better soon. The rain is coming down and the world outside the car windows is one solid slab of falling grey. Da says how Mam is doing fine and that she’ll be back to herself before we know it. As small as I am, I know he’s lying. But I don’t say anything about it and he doesn’t say anything else and on the radio Liam Spratt is asking his co-commentator, Georgie O’Connor, how he found the traffic on the way up to Croke Park.
‘About the same, Liam,’ says Georgie. ‘I was in your car.’
Dr Thorpe used to live just before you turned off the Milehouse Road for our old house. Me and Da are walking up his drive and there’s something in the way that Da’s face looks that I really don’t like. Then we’re standing in Dr Thorpe’s porch and the rain is bouncing cold spray to hit me in the shins. Shorts. I’m wearing shorts.
Dr Thorpe’s doorbell goes ding-dong-ding-dong-ding-dong. Real soft. The sound is sort of woolly-edged like the sound of something whispering. Da keeps pressing the bell and he shifts from foot to foot like he really needs to pee.
Dr Thorpe’s door swishes open and he stands there looking at us with his hair a solid crest above his shining face. With the door opening comes the smell of fake pine air freshener. I remember that.
Da goes, ‘I’m sorry, Doctor. I’m sorry but I don’t know what to do. She’s in so much pain.’
He stops then and I can hear the heartbreak lodge in his throat. He is choked by sadness.
Dr Thorpe’s hand is about level with my fat face and across the back of it I can see a lot of little cuts. They’re all thread-thin and beaded with blood. As I’m looking he lifts his hand and sucks the cuts. For an instant when he talks there’s blood all feathered across his teeth.
‘We’ll think of something,’ he says. ‘Come on in.’
Dr Thorpe’s kitchen is one big cavern of amber light and ash-blonde furniture. I swear to God it smells of cinnamon. On the kitchen table there’s about a dozen pots of sapling roses. Dr Thorpe goes over to the counter beside the sink and lifts the kettle and shakes it at Da and me.
He goes, ‘Tea? No?’
Da says back to him, ‘Jesus, Syl, my stomach’s in fucking knots.’
Neither of them look at me. It’s like I don’t exist anymore.
Dr Thorpe’s talk-show face splits open like an over-ripe fruit dropped from a height and from his smile his voice goes, ‘Okey-dokey. We’ll chat about this in the other room.’
Then he turns to me and still smiling he goes, ‘Can you wait here, little man?’
Even at six years of age I know this is a fucking stupid question.
Without waiting for my answer Dr Thorpe and my Da go into the sitting room. I can hear their voices all diffuse and burbling through the walls. They sound like indigestion. They sound like the workings of my guts.
I’m left standing in the kitchen and I stare and stare at the potted roses. On the one nearest the table’s edge I can see little white shreds of Dr Thorpe’s skin snagged on the black commas of the thorns. I remember that. I remember reaching to pluck them off. The rubbery scraps of the back of his hand.
My sinuses are clogged with the pulpy sweetness of rose petals.
Everything in the other room goes all quiet and when Dr Thorpe and my Da come back into the kitchen I jump. Dr Thorpe is going, ‘If she’s let home on Saturday, I’ll call round Saturday night.’
And Da’s going, ‘Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou.’ He’s nearly crying and snot is emptying out of his nose.
I’m watching the two of them and when Dr Thorpe says, ‘This is between us and nobody else. We’re all in this. Understand?’ even my six-year-old ears hear that there’s something not right about this.
And Da’s going, ‘Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou.’
Dr Thorpe plugs in the kettle and goes, ‘Just remember. You owe me one.’
I don’t know what’s happening, I don’t know why the adults are ignoring me and talking in code. At six-years-old I don’t know all that much but I do know that Mam comes home on Saturday morning and Dr Thorpe pronounces her dead at eleven fifteen that night.
Like I said, I’m not sure if I like Dr Thorpe.
Dr Thorpe lives just down from the grotto on the Nunnery Road. There was this derelict site there for years until he bought it and built this massive big detached mansion on it. We used to play there with the lads from the council estate when we were younger but then Jarlath Gildea got in a fight with one of the older lads from the estate and we weren’t allowed to play there anymore. Now there’s an eight-foot wall most of the way around except where a set of big double gates opens out onto the road. There’s a sign on the gates that says Beware of the Dog. Dr Thorpe’s dog is a German Pointer like my uncle’s and she’s the nicest dog you’d ever meet. I don’t know why he puts the sign up. Everyone knows it’s a load of crap.
To get to Dr Thorpe’s we, me and Seán, have to head back down the Milehouse Road and swing left and go through the estate. The estate used to be rough enough a few years back but it’s mellowed these days. Everyone’s gotten on a bit and lots of the older lads have moved away. There’s a lot of pensioners in the estate now and a lot of the houses are actually owned and they’re not the Council’s anymore. It’s like it’s respectable all of a sudden.
We half-jog down through the estate and now we’re on the Nunnery Road.
We stop to catch our breath and Seán goes, ‘I’m really sorry. I’m really really sorry.’
I’m smiling at him but I know it looks watery and that I don’t mean it but I’m saying, ‘It’s not you. I know you’re sorry. We’ll get you to the doctor and then it’ll all be okay.’
Seán nods and smiles and he doesn’t catch the desperation in my voice.
Dr Thorpe’s gates have a little buzzer set into the concrete of one of the pillars. There’s a little plastic panel with a light behind it that shines like sun through fog and there’s this kind of speaker thing that’s making this constant sort of crackling noise. Beyond the gates Dr Thorpe’s big house has a light on in every window. It looks like Eldorado in the dark. Seán’s standing beside me and he’s shifting his weight from foot to foot and his fists are clenching and unclenching. He’s nervous and angry with himself, and shame and embarrassment are reddening his face even as he’s standing there.
I say, ‘It’s alright, Seán. He deals with people who like to stick their dicks in industrial machinery. If he can treat knob burns without passing judgement, you’ll be a doddle.’
I’m grinning then because I’m trying to reassure him and then I’m punching him in the shoulder. I’m punching him in the shoulder and then I’m pressing the buzzer.
Nothing happens.
No chime. No voice. Nothing. The incessant crackling noise just keeps on crackling, not changing tone or breaking up in any way. A soft exhalation of white noise is hitting me in the face and I’m staring at the buzzer and I’m pressing it again. To anyone watching me I must look like one of those lab monkeys that have to try and solve a puzzle to get a banana.
