Dead Dogs (13 page)

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?

And now I’m wondering what Jessica Fletcher and Dr Sloane’s kids would look like.

Colours are washing over my blank page and image after image slides onto the whiteboard, holds and then slides off again. The cycle begins and ends, begins and ends, and I must phase out for a bit because the knock on the classroom door startles me and I drop the pen. It rolls in a wounded arc and stops against a table leg. I haven’t made so much as a mark on the page.

Mr Cowper walks in and is followed by a very very attractive lady. She’s wearing a short black skirt that makes every single lad in the class do a cartoon double take, a white shirt, and she has dark hair framing a pale petal face. Her blue eyes look at me like she knows me. In her arms she carries a clipboard pressed to her chest. Now, like every other lad in the class, I’m staring and, like every other lad in the class, I’m suddenly envying a clip board.

Every other lad except Seán.

The medication that Seán’s on has him completely zonked and he doesn’t even notice that Mr Cowper and the lady have come in. He just sits there and in his big paw his pen is making a series of spirals on his page.

This morning I try to tell Seán that we can’t just sit around
and let Dr Thorpe get away with what he did. I try to tell him that we have to
do
something. We can’t let a murder just happen.

Seán blinks at me really, really slowly and says, ‘I don’t want to.’

I shake him by the shoulders and his arms swing loose and heavy like tubes filled with water. I shake him by the shoulders and I go, ‘For fuck’s sake Seán, snap out of it. Stop taking those tablets. You’re turning into a fucking zombie.’

Seán shakes his head and in the corridor other students walk around us. He blinks at me again and he goes, ‘I’m not a monster. I like that.’

I’m looking at Seán now and I can see that in the centre of the page his concentric circles have gotten so close and so dense that he’s almost put the ball point through the paper.

Then Mr Cowper’s going, ‘Sorry for disturbing your class, Mr Gorman, but could we have a word with the two lads please.’

He doesn’t even say our names. Everyone knows exactly who he’s talking about.

And now he’s going, ‘Bring your bags.’

I start to pack up my stuff but Seán just sits there with his pen swirling round and round on his page. The pen’s making this low rumbling noise as it swirls around and around because Seán’s resting way too much weight on it.

Mr Cowper’s frowning at him and goes, ‘Seán? Seán Galvin?’

Seán doesn’t even blink and Mr Gorman leans over his desk and says, ‘Earth to Seán. Is there anybody there?’

Seán looks up like he’s in slow motion and the lady with Mr
Cowper takes a pen out of her shirt pocket and starts to write something down.

Behind me, all soft and slurred but pitched just loud enough so that everyone in the class can hear, someone goes, ‘Woof.’

Mr Gorman’s head snaps up but he can’t make out who’s said it because the whole class is now sniggering.

I can feel my face and neck going so red and so hot that it’s actually, physically painful.

Seán is looking around him like he’s just after waking up and Mr Gorman smiles down at him. There’s a genuine expression of sadness and sympathy on his face and he says, ‘Seán, would you like to go with Mr Cowper for a while?’

He says this like he’s saying it to a four-year-old.

Seán looks around to see if I’m coming too and when he sees me with my bag on my back he nods slowly and goes, ‘Okay. I like Mr Cowper.’

The rest of the class roars with laughter at this and some of the bigger dickheads are using the noise as an excuse to throw in a few more
woofs
.

At that moment I hate them all. I really, really hate them.

We, me and Seán, follow Mr Cowper and the lady outside and Mr Gorman closes the door behind us. Through it we can hear him letting loose at the lads. Mr Gorman’s pretty sound and he’s a good teacher but you don’t want to cross him. He has this
ability
to make you feel ashamed of yourself and sorry for letting him down. It’s a black magic that some teachers have. If you’re not a teacher I think it’s called
passive aggression
. 

In the cold green and linoleum of the corridor Mr Cowper goes, ‘Lads, this is Ms Herrity. She’s from NEPS. Do you know what that is?’

Seán’s just staring at Ms Herrity like he’s never seen a woman before in his life and beside him I’m looking from her to Mr Cowper and back and I’m going, ‘No. I’m sorry, sir. I don’t.’

Ms Herrity is smiling this little crooked smile and she’s saying, ‘There’s no need to be sorry. I’m from the National Educational Psychology Service. Your principal just wants me to have a word with you two gentlemen. Just to see how you’re getting on.’

Seán doesn’t say anything. The meds have thrown a lagging jacket around his brain and I’ve no idea if he realises that the very very attractive lady in front of us is a shrink.

Seán doesn’t say anything but the words
you two gentlemen
have frightened me a bit. Seán is the fucked-up one. Not me. I’m grand.

Mr Cowper and Ms Herrity lead us up along the corridor that joins the Junior and Senior Resource Areas. On the walls
photographs
of previous classes are an archive of weird hairstyles and old uniforms. Mr Cowper’s office is in the Senior Resource Area. His door is sandwiched between two banks of grey-painted
lockers
. You’d pass it without even knowing it was there. I know lads who went looking for it and couldn’t find it. It’s like the door to fucking Narnia or something.

At one end of the resource area the double doors to the school library stand closed with a sign on them that says,
Books trap the mind into thinking for itself
. 

Mr Cowper’s looking at me and then he puts an arm around my shoulders and then he’s going, ‘You just go and wait in the library for a while. We just want to have a quiet word with Seán for the moment.’

I’m watching as Ms Herrity guides Seán into the Guidance Office and now I’m shrugging and now I’m going, ‘Okay, sir.’

The desks in the library are covered in a kind of slippery, hard veneer the no-colour of dust. Now I’m sitting at a no-colour study desk, a book unread at my elbow. The library is starting to fill up. The results of Mock exams and the approaching
juggernaut
of the Leaving are starting to bleed the sixth years away from classes like Religion and P.E. They are clotted around library computers and study stations. You can tell the ones who are going to pass. They always look the most worried. It’s a scientific rule that the outward calmness of the student is inversely
proportional
to the grade of the exam. It’s always the harried, drawn ones that get As. There’s a girl in a school jumper sitting at the desk in front of me. The cuffs of her sleeves are chewed into stringy
netting
. Beside her there’s a leaning tower of books about to fall off the desktop and onto the slate carpet. She can’t seem to take enough notes and her highlighter is wasting. I’ve never seen a highlighter waste before. Anyone who cares that much about her work can’t possibly fail.

Then there’s people like the two rugger buggers propping up the end of one row of books. They both play for the local rugby club and one is captain of the school team. The school team is rubbish but it’s like they’ve read Ross O’Carroll Kelly without
getting the irony. Both have the collars of their school polo shirts turned up and both are, like, screwed man, completely Daffy Ducked. I’m not underestimating them either. I know the one with the frost-tipped hair because he plays soccer too and, honest to God, he hasn’t a clue. I don’t care one way or the other about this but when he says, ‘Oh yeah, English Paper Two’s where I’ll pick up the marks,’ I nearly laugh.

The exams are just about two months away and if I were doing English Paper Two I wouldn’t be worried.

I have never ever gotten less than 88 percent in English. It’s what I do.