Dead Dogs, page 18
I fucking hate golf.
We, me and Seán, are going to wait until the coast is clear and then we’re going to do our best to see if we can find anything at his house or in his garden. Anything at all.
The three weeks until the holidays crawl along like something gutted and dying a slow death. Every day, every single day, me and Seán get caught in a blizzard of woofs and yelps and howls. For the summer exams our Irish teacher includes a comprehension on a lost dog. Maybe I’m being paranoid but I’m pretty sure he’s taking the piss.
School for Seán isn’t really working without his meds. There’s a static charge building in him with every minute he spends in the place and it’s going to have to be earthed somewhere. He spends most of the day with Mr Cowper and he spends his lunchtimes sitting on a windowsill with his face in his hands. I feel really, really guilty about this.
Nobody wants to talk to us. Nobody texts and nobody rings and it’s like we’re cut off from everybody else. Pariahs.
Football in the yard is a joke. I’m the school’s Under-18 keeper and nobody picks me for a kick around anymore. I can’t wait for this year to end.
And Judas is gibbering away all the time, This is all Seán’s fault. I don’t know why the fuck people think you’re a weirdo too. He cut open that dog, for fuck’s sake. Not you.
But I ignore him and he fades into the background and I concentrate on proving what we know about Dr Thorpe. I can’t do this without Seán. I hate to admit it but I’m nowhere near strong enough.
I make a complete hames of my summer exams. I make a complete hames of everything except English. The report won’t be posted out until July but I know that I’ve failed at least four subjects out of seven. It’s not that I’m stupid or lazy but I can’t concentrate on anything other than the plan for the first day of the Strawberry Fair. When I should be studying Maths, I start making rough sketches of Dr Thorpe’s property. When it’s time for a change, instead of Geography I’m labelling the sketches in BLOCK CAPITALS. Here’s the house and here’s the driveway.
See also the electric gates.
See also the eight-foot wall.
See also the rose beds.
Everything nice and precise.
I text Seán every few minutes and he replies every single time. I check my phone at one stage and my inbox has 129 messages. All except one is from Seán. The exception is the one from my Da telling me to turn down the speakers for my iPod and go to sleep.
We finish school and the following Friday is the start of the Strawberry Fair. That Thursday night I can’t sleep. I keep twisting in the bed and my stomach is a twitching swamp of nausea. I’m not sure if I can go through with this. A good few times I pick up my phone and start to text Seán to tell him to forget about this whole thing. And every time I see Dr Thorpe’s slow, born-to-be-a-winner smile and I hear his fist connecting with cartilage.
The dead meat smack of it.
Every time I remember this I delete the words I’ve written on my phone and I lie there with my brain a lump of sweating tar in my skull. I’m so tired it feels like my eyeballs are filmed with dust. Every blink feels like sandpaper. I lie like this for I don’t know how long but when the bedroom starts to brighten, I know I have to get up.
It is six o’clock and all is not fucking well.
I get up, dress myself, and really quietly I sneak out the front door. All the time my heart is thud-tha-thudding under my ribs. If my Da wakes up and starts asking questions I don’t know what I’ll say.
The door clicks shut behind me and I freeze on the doorstep. I’m waiting for my Da to lean out his bedroom window and call me back. Nothing happens though and after a minute I head across the bridge and up past the Castle. The Market Square is empty apart from a skinny black mongrel that limps away from me on three good legs. The entire place is covered in purple and gold and red and white bunting. There’s a big trailer after being hauled into the Square and there are speakers set up and ready to be plugged in. In front of the trailer white lawn furniture is stacked waiting for the pensioners and the children and the spilled ice cream.
Up past the Cathedral Seán is waiting for me outside Kelly’s shop and in spite of my nerves I’m grinning at him.
Seán blinks at me and he goes, ‘This is too early.’
He’s wrong on this one. We have to be ready to hop over Dr Thorpe’s wall as soon as we get the chance. I looked in the Echo for the tee-off times for the Golf Classic and the earliest two-ball is scheduled for half-past seven. If Dr Thorpe is playing first we might miss our chance to poke around his garden.
I’m looking at Seán and I’m shaking my head and I’m going, ‘It’s not too early. We’re bang on time.’
And then I’m going, ‘Did you bring them?’
Seán reaches a big paw into his hoodie pocket and pulls out a half pound of sausages. These are for Dr Thorpe’s dog in case she gets all brave in herself all of a sudden.
Seán holds the bundle of sausages in the bundle of his own sausage fingers and he looks down at them and he starts to frown.
Before he has the chance to say anything I’m going, ‘We don’t have time for breakfast. There’s nowhere open anyway. Later on. Afterwards.’
Seán tuts like he’s a child and he tucks the sausages back into his pocket.
We, me and Seán, walk down Nunnery Road but instead of going straight to Dr Thorpe’s we climb up the hill to the grotto and we sit on the benches and we watch Dr Thorpe’s gate. Because of the Strawberry Fair the barricades are already up to stop people driving into the centre of town and the road below us is deserted. This is traditional because one time this really pissed fifty-year-old woman in a Land Rover tried to drive down into the Square. The guards pretty much hauled her out by the hair. Nothing is moving and my skin is bubbling up with goosbumps. It’s like every inch of me is covered in little nettle stings. My adrenaline is at such a pitch that my stomach is in constant spasm. If I did have time for breakfast I’d be spewing it all over the grotto’s nice paving slabs right about now.
Seán is sitting beside me and every now and then he throws a look towards the statue of Our Lady standing in her little nook. She is staring off at a spot in the sky and her hands are steepled under her chin. Her paint is starting to flake away after all these years and her eyes are blank and white and blind as spiders’ eggs.
Seán throws the statue another look and he goes, ‘Did she really move?’
Without taking my eyes off Dr Thorpe’s front gate I say, ‘No. She never moved.’
And Seán goes, ‘Da says that during the eighties she moved and you could pray to her for stuff.’
Still not taking my eyes off Dr Thorpe’s front gate I say, ‘Well, go ahead and pray then.’
Seán sits there for a minute and then he puts his hands together and he squeezes his eyes shut and just like that he goes, ‘Dear Mary. Help us.’
And just like that Dr Thorpe’s big black iron gates give a little shudder and start to open up with a noise like scrap being crushed. A few seconds later Dr Thorpe’s oil-sleek 407 slides out onto the road, turns left because Nunnery Road is closed to traffic, cruises up to the roundabout at the top of Bohreen Hill, swings right and disappears.
I watch it go and beside me Seán’s blessing himself and he says, ‘Dear Mary. Thank you.’
Me and Seán walk down to the road and we follow Dr Thorpe’s eight-foot concrete wall around to the side of his property. There’s no way we can get over it the way we did in the dark so we have to plough our way through all the bracken and all the briars that fill this little scrap of wasteland behind Dr Thorpe’s garden. When we get round the back we are in a little alley swarfed with briar and hedged in by blackthorns, and the back wall of Dr Thorpe’s garden rears up on our left. All along the base of the wall there’s a drift of decaying grass cuttings. Month after month, year after year Dr Thorpe must cut his grass and dump it over the wall. The stuff is slumped all together in lumpen strata, the top ones green and smelling like summer, the bottom ones putrefying into brown slush.
We stand here breathing in the smells of the slowly decaying grass and Seán sticks his thumb in his mouth because he’s hooked it on a briar. Around his thumb his voice comes all distorted. It goes, ‘What do we do now?’
I’m looking at the wall and I’m accutely aware that I don’t know how much time we have.
I look at Seán and I look at the wall and I go, ‘If I boost you up could you lift me?’
Seán nods once. This time he’s not afraid he’ll drop me.
Seán weighs a tonne and from the platform of my cupped hands he half hops, half scrabbles to the top of the wall. He lies on his belly and he reaches down his hand and he grins at me. There are blades in that grin and I’m wondering if Seán is about to crack again.
Then I think of Dr Thorpe and then, trying not to think of anything else, I grab Seán’s hand and I sort of scramble up the wall.
I’m out of breath and the two of us sit there for a minute looking down on Dr Thorpe’s garden.
Dr Thorpe’s garden is about a half acre of soft green lawn. In the sunlight you can see that he’s cut the lawn all fancy so that it looks like there are areas of lighter and darker grass all in the shape of diamonds. The whole middle of the lawn is taken up by a big spiral bed of roses. The bare earth of the flowerbeds is covered with more quilts of decaying grass. Dr Thorpe’s house sits at the far end of this half acre of grass and roses, and to the left there’s a concrete straggle of sheds with galvanised roofs. One of the sheds is open and hanging on a nail on the door jamb is a dog collar and a choke chain.
We, me and Seán, sit there for a minute taking this all in and Seán goes, ‘Dr Thorpe has a really nice garden. Maybe we shouldn’t jump down. I don’t want to get in trouble.’
I’m looking at him and I’m saying, ‘I can’t do this on my own, Seán. I have to find out what happened to that girl. Everyone thinks we’re freaks. If we can show them that we saw what we saw then maybe people will change their minds.’
Seán looks from me to the lawn and back again and he goes, ‘People think I’m a freak all the time.’
Then he stops and lifts up his big hands and he clenches and opens them, clenches and opens them. He looks at them like it’s the first time he’s ever noticed them and he says, ‘I don’t like being a freak.’
And I’m saying, ‘Neither do I.’
Without another word the two of us are climbing down into Dr Thorpe’s garden. As soon as the soles of my runners touch Dr Thorpe’s mint-green lawn my heart starts to paradiddle against my ribs. I can feel every hot gush of its workings.
As soon as the soles of my runners touch Dr Thorpe’s mint-green lawn his German Pointer comes trotting out of her shed.
The dog is this lovely soft grey colour all splotched with daubs of chocolate. Her head is a chocolate wedge and two intelligent gold eyes take in me and Seán standing stock-still against the wall. The dog stops and the hackles raise on the back of her neck and she makes this weird whuffling noise halfway between a bark and a growl. She takes two quick steps forward and this time she lets out this little yipping bark like she doesn’t quite mean it yet but she’s getting there.
Then Seán is moving past me so that he stands between me and the dog and he goes, ‘Here, girl. You’re a good dog, aren’t you? Here, girl.’
He has the half pound of sausages in his hand. The German Pointer looks like she’s going to turn around and run the hell away but then her wet pad of a nose lifts and she takes a step towards Seán.
Seán’s going, ‘Good girl. Good girl.’
There’s a softness in his voice that I’ve never heard before and he’s staring at the dog like he’s amazed by her.
The dog takes another few steps forward and now Seán is giving her the sausages. The dog sniffs at them and then she starts wolfing them down with Seán standing over her, his big hand stroking her back and smoothing the place where her hackles had all bristled up.
I let him stroke her for a minute and then I go, ‘Seán! We have to get moving. If Dr Thorpe comes back we’re fucked.’
Seán doesn’t move. He just stands there smiling and petting the dog.
I’m looking at the house and the hairs on the back of my neck are starting to stand up and I’m going, ‘Seán! For fuck’s sake. We may hurry up. If Dr Thorpe catches us here he’ll kill us too.
This seems to trigger something in Seán because he slowly turns around and there’s this strange dopey expression on his face like he’s been anaesthetized or something.
There’s this poem we’re doing in school and one of the lines goes, like a patient etherized upon a table. Seán is upright but this is exactly him. Etherized.
Slowly he says, ‘Yeah. We may. She’s real soft. Her hair is real soft.’
The dog follows me and Seán as we walk around the garden looking for anywhere that could be used to hide a body. Looking for any evidence of anything at all. The garden is wide open and apart from the sheds there’s absolutely nowhere that anyone could hide anything. We look under a wheelbarrow that’s upside-down against the wall of one shed. Its flat tyre is a fat slug of rubber, heavy on its axle.
The sheds aren’t locked so we open them and look in. They’re all ridiculously neat inside with tools hanging on racks and garden furniture all stacked like the furniture for the Strawberry Fair. Even the dog shed is pristine. There’s a sort of loft under the roof in the dog shed and we even climb into that but there’s nothing up there except forty-litre bags of grass seed and Presto dog food.
We even go right up to the house and look through the kitchen windows. Seán makes the mistake of pressing his face against a window pane and the fats in his sweat leave a halloween mask of his features on the glass. I’m cursing at him because I’m frustrated and feeling stupid and he starts to moan because I’m giving out to him and all the while Dr Thorpe’s German Pointer follows us around with her bright eyes and her little spud of a tail wagging like crazy.
Around the garden there is nothing. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that Dr Thorpe murdered anyone. The place looks like it’s cut and pasted straight out of Gardener’s Weekly. There’s not one blade of grass out of place. Not one fork or spade has even the smallest clot of soil or dirt clinging to it. Everything is elegant and meticulous and I feel like an idiot.
For the first time since all this started, Seán’s looking at me like he doesn’t believe me.
His mouth opens and he goes, ‘Are you sure he hid her here?’
I’m frowning at him and I go, ‘No, I’m not fucking sure. I’m not sure that she’s even within a hundred miles of here. I just thought we might find something. Anything.’
Seán’s face scrunches up and he goes to say something but then stops.
I’m looking at him and I’m saying, ‘Go on. Out with it.’
And Seán looks at me and he goes, ‘Are you sure you saw what you saw?’
Before I can answer there’s that scrap crushing noise again from beyond the house and the German Pointer pricks up her ears and lets out this little excited whine. Seán and me look at each other for a moment with our foreheads all creased and then the sound of tyres on gravel makes both our mouths drop open like our jaws are dislocated.
There’s a sudden panic in me that’s so intense it’s like it’s going to swallow the world. The edges of my vision are all blotted with shadow and I think I’m actually going to faint. I don’t know how long we, me and Seán, stand like this staring at each other but at the sound of a car door opening the German Pointer runs around to the front of the house.
From over the keel of the roof we can hear Dr Thorpe’s voice, not shouting but getting there. Into his phone or something he’s going, ‘I’m not playing without my rescue wood. It’ll take two minutes, Darragh. Two fucking minutes.’
And in his voice there’s just the merest suggestion of the violence squirming in him.
And then another voice carries in the summer air all thick and heavy as a midlands bog, ‘A rescue wood? If I find it still in that shed you’ll need more than a fucking rescue wood.’
Then Seán’s shaking himself like he’s just waking up and he’s going, ‘We have to leave. I don’t want to get in trouble.’
And automatically I’m answering him. I’m saying, ‘You won’t get into trouble.’ But I don’t know if this is the truth or not. I’m terrified.
I’m looking at the back wall of Dr Thorpe’s garden. It is suddenly light years away. There’s absolutely no chance of me and Seán getting over it before Dr Thorpe sees us. If he comes straight into the kitchen we won’t even get as far as the rose beds.
Then Seán goes, ‘We can hide in the dog shed.’
I’m blinking and it’s like the machinery of my brain is all seized up and rusted solid.
Seán’s looking afraid too and he’s staring at me and he’s going, ‘We can hide up in the roof. Behind the dog food.’
I’m nodding because I can’t say anything. Every drop of moisture has evaporated from my throat. I can feel my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth like something charred in a stove. Without much conscious thought I’m running beside Seán. Running through the sunlight and the smells of roses. Running until we reach the dog shed.
No shout pursues us or halts us in our tracks. No noise comes from the doctor’s house.
The dog shed is an oven in the lifting sun and from the shadowed corners and the bowl of dog food there’s the sickbed buzzing of flies. We climb up into the little loft and burrow in amongst the bags of dog food and grass seed. We lie there baking under the galvanise and we try to stop our breathing from sounding too loud. I’m sure if you stood at the open door you’d be able to hear the woolly hammering of my heart. Of my panic.
Seán’s trying to stop himself moaning but every now and then this noise comes lowing soft from between his clenched teeth.
When I hear voices, I freeze.
Beside me I can feel the cords of Seán’s too-big muscles tighten and then he goes still as well. He lies there, hard and motionless as a concrete slab.
