Dead Dogs (4 page)

I look hard at his profile and I say, ‘Seán, you have to tell me what’s wrong.’

He’s ignoring me and his great liquid eyes are studiously avoiding mine. He wags his head like a cart horse yoked under a huge weight and says, ‘I can’t tell you. It’s too hard. I’ll show you the camp. Then you’ll see.’

I can feel the unease creep back into me. It’s sliding under my skin until my skin feels taut and gelid. I’m frowning now and I’m going, ‘What camp?’

Seán doesn’t say anything. He just keeps plodding onward, his head rocking on its thick neck.

When we get to the road Seán turns right. This takes us away from town and out toward the Milehouse. I stop just as Seán starts to walk out along this road. He’s about two yards in front of me and his back is a broad orange and black wall under the road lighting. I can see the still-wet fabric of his army surplus jacket stretch across the drumlin mounds of his deltoid muscles. I don’t know why Seán wants to walk out the Milehouse Road at quarter-to-nine at night. I don’t know what he’s done to scare and disgust him so much that his throat closes and he nearly gags when he tries to tell me. I don’t know what this camp of his is. All I know is that I’m suddenly a bit scared.

And in the back of my head Judas gibbers,
Another fucking first
.

Without looking at me he’s saying, ‘It’s not far. It’s not even as far as the school.’

I stare at his back for longer than I probably mean to and then I’m saying words and I’m hating the whine that they come out in. I’m saying, ‘If I’m too late, Da’s going to fucking murder me. I don’t even have my phone.’

Seán turns around then and in his face I see an enormous sadness. It’s like his whole big frame is one giant cistern of tears. Picture how you’d feel if every bad thing you thought about
yourself
was suddenly proved to be true. Every failing, every flaw was there in front of you clear as day. Everything unvarnished and burred with ragged edges and all slimed over with failure. Can you picture how you’d look? Well, this is how Seán looks. I see all this in Seán.

He says, ‘Please.’

Looking at him I heft my gear bag, and looking at him I’m going, ‘Ah, fuck it. Go on. Da won’t mind that much.’

For a moment it’s like Seán is going to smile but he doesn’t. Instead he just turns around and starts heading on up the road to where the lights run out and the dark chokes the road between ditches the same colour as Seán’s jacket.

With every step away from town it’s like he’s drawing further and further into himself like a neutron star slowly caving in. With every step Seán is becoming a black hole. He’s not saying
anything
and he’s not looking at anything and he’s sucking all the light and life from around us. The whole world is background to Seán’s misery.

I don’t say anything. I have nothing to say. Whatever Seán wants to show me he’ll show me and then we can decide what to do about it. I hope, I really hope, that the guards can be kept the fuck out of it. I also hope that there’s some other brand of tablets that Dr Thorpe can put Seán on. The little red ones, they aren’t worth a curse.

About a hundred yards after the lights die out there’s this big ragged tear in the footpath and this big ragged tear in the ditch. The tears are the works entrance to one of those
half-finished
estates that stagger up out of muddy fields and dirty lakes of rainwater all over the country. All over the place there’s ragged concrete boxes, empty as rotten teeth and they chew the sky and collect rain and empty cans and their rebar rusts and colours the puddles like blood.

The gap in the ditch leading to this particular jumble of abandoned concrete is sealed off through the foolproof expedient of throwing two steel mesh barriers across it. No locks. No chains. Just two galvanised lattices of mesh propped up against the briar-scrawled banks on the left and right and sagging in a pathetic V where they meet in the middle. If you look up and to one side, in the ditch above this impenetrable barrier you can see a broken advertising hoarding with a computer-generated image of three-bedroom-semis and lime-green-grass and smiling
computer
-generated-familes and everything’s hyphenated with all the joined-up-thinking. Where the name of the estate should be someone’s taken a spray can and graffiti’d the word COCK in four-foot-high letters.

Seán stops at the gap in the ditch and still not saying anything he pushes his way through the hole between the wire mesh and the snarl of briars that covers it. I follow him and I can feel my runners sink into the morrass of Caterpillar-chewed mud that is the ground beyond. There’s not much of a moon and I can’t see a thing and I’m floundering around before Seán grabs my arm and steadies me.

I go, ‘What are we doing here, Seán? This is fucking insane.’

Seán, in the dark, goes, ‘We’re nearly there. It’s the second one on the right.’

In front of us there’s a row of half-finished houses. Even in the dim illumination of moon-rind and light pollution from the town I can see that they look like something you see on the news. They look like a street scene from Iraq or Afghanistan,
windowless and austere. They look bombed out.

Me and Seán, we slew and slip across the wet yards of mud until we stand in front of one particular shell of a house. There’s nothing that sets it apart from the others. The window frames are just as empty and the door is an open yawn of midnight just like all the rest.

I’m thinking all this but then something catches in my throat. Right on the edge of certainty, right so’s I’m not sure whether I actually smell something or not, I think I get a reek of something. And just like that I’m back beside the pitch and Seán’s big paws have me by the throat. And just like that I can smell the
something
else that’s coming from his hands. Something pervasive and unpleasant.

Seán’s looking at me and he’s going, ‘It’s in here.’

And just like that I’m afraid. Actually really afraid.

My Mam died when I
was six. I’m not saying this out of a desire for sympathy or understanding or anything like that. The fact that me and Seán haven’t had a Mam for years has fuck all to do with how we turned out. I’m grand, Seán’s internal wiring is badly fused. We are both ourselves. It’s not anything else’s fault.

My Mam died when I was six. I don’t remember that much about her. The only real concrete image I have of her comes from the photos that Da looks at every so often. He takes them out of this small cardboard box and sits, not watching the TV, shuffling through snapping drifts of polaroids and landscapes, black-
and-whites
and old sepias. They slither in his grip like a pack of playing cards.

In all these pictures my Mam is grinning and I’m in some of them, all crumpled and grumpy. In all these pictures my Mam with her big hair and her ’90s fashions looks like something out of
Reeling in the Years
. She looks like what she is. Something gone
and in the past. Something from another time.

But these photos don’t get across the emotion I still get when I think about her. I can’t see her unless I look at the photos but I can feel her all the time.

The last proper memory I have of her is from the Strawberry Fair maybe nine or ten years ago. The Strawberry Fair is this
festival
that the town puts on to celebrate the joy of summer and the lovely, fat tumour of sun-blooded sweetness that is the Wexford Strawberry. Everyone always says it hasn’t been the same since it left the Prom but me and the lads are too young to remember when it was anything other than shit.

I love strawberries. And I love the summer. The Strawberry Fair, however, really is terrible.

Picture the market square of any fairly big town. Now put a stage at one end and white plastic lawn furniture all around so that pensioners can sit down and eat their ice creams and kids can slalom between and drunks can stumble over. Now on this stage put either a crap DJ or some band that was big when the festival organisers were young. Overhead you dissect the sky with taut lines of purple and gold bunting. The festival
organisers
are baffled that people just stay in the pubs so they don’t have to listen to the bad music and don’t have to avoid the puddles of puke. The local scumbags deal drugs and fight and drink cans in the side streets and you always get women in old Wexford GAA jerseys strolling around. The words
Wexford Creamery
are stretched across their tits. This always cracks me up. Like
everyone
else, the organisers of all this are stuck twenty years behind
the times. Everyone gets stuck at a certain point and then gets pissed off because the world leaves them behind. It’s like every grown-up is a version of my Da. Always going through photos of stuff that doesn’t exist anymore.

The last proper memory I have of my Mam is from the car park of the L&N supermarket. The festival organisers set up this huge big haunted mansion that you pay into to get the shite frightened out you by plastic skeletons and actors hamming it up in twine wigs and white face paint. The haunted mansion is
actually
a series of bulk cargo containers all bolted together with their insides turned into a papier-mâché tunnel with mirrors and lights and sound effects. Walking through it is like walking through the bowels of a giant worm that’s swallowed the contents of a fancy dress shop and a company of terrible amateur
dramatists
. The outside of this block of containers is clad in plywood hoarding that’s been painted in swirling purples with ghosts and goblins leering across the car park.

Even at six years old I’m wondering, what have ghosts got to do with strawberries?

My mam has me by the hand and I remember the taste of
candy-floss
around my mouth and the smell of melted sugar that seems to be what years-ago summers smell like. Mam is smiling down at me but the sun is behind her head and I can’t see her face. She had red frizzy hair and I remember it balled around her head like a nest round an egg. All about her there’s the corona of a nuclear explosion millions of miles away but right in front of me her face is a mask of black. She pays the man at the ticket
counter and we go into the haunted mansion.

When we go in I remember she goes in first and a black
curtain
falls down behind us and everything goes pitch-black. I’m only six and I don’t like this and my little hand tries to tighten on my mother’s but my fingers don’t go all the way around and I know that I won’t be able to hold on if something bad happens.

Then something bad happens.

A strobe light explodes. It batters my eyes with whumping pulses of light and a scream like something dying comes out of a speaker right beside my head. A rubber skeleton with an unhinged jaw gets shunted toward us by a mechanical arm. You know when a rasher isn’t crispy? You know when you cut into it and lift it on the oily tines of your fork? You know that bit of fat that waggles disgustingly and drips stuff onto your plate? That’s how the skeleton’s jaw moves. Elastic and nauseating.

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.’