Dead Dogs by Joe Murphy Page B

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, GeorgieO’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,