Head Injuries by Conrad Williams Page A

manage to squeeze by on the path by clinging on to some of the thin branches which overhang. From here I see everything.
        I see Seamus circling Dando. I see Kerry with her hands to her face, crouching by the canal. I see Dando. Dando's holding a dog by its hind legs and plunging it into the soft mud on the bank. He's keeping its head submerged until it begins to convulse before pulling it back out again. There's a wet sucking noise as it comes free. The dog is shivering and making odd, weak yelps. Its head is misshapen with mud. Back it goes. Seamus is cheering. Dando's face is half-hidden by shade. The other half blazes. He's got his dick out; a jutting, moonstruck twig.
         'Stop it!' Kerry screams.
        As if only now becoming aware of the people around him, Dando grins and kicks the dog in the stomach. Any noise it might have made is muffled.
        'The fucker bit me. No dog gets away with that.' He covers his dick with his hand, giving it a little tweak as he pushes it back into his jeans.
        I'm striding over, even though Dando's bigger than me and-if it weren't for Jimmy Price-would be the cock of our year. I aim a punch at his face but he leans away and my fist finds his throat. He loses his footing and falls over, letting go of the dog. Kerry pulls it free of the mud and it runs, blind, straight into the canal. I watch it swim away, its head twitching left and right. At the opposite bank it sprints towards the housing estate. I'm wondering if it will die of shock when Dando wades over and grabs me by the neck.
        'I ought to kick your bastard teeth in for that.'
        And then… then…
        
***
        
        And then what? I sat up in the bath and stared at my hands, which were beginning to prune. My mind wouldn't allow me to drift with the true course of events: how I fell back against a rotten plank and felt the slow heat of a nail sink into my thigh. How I'd gone to casualty where a nurse who smelled of lavender swabbed my wound clean and gave me a tetanus injection. How we went for popcorn and a Coke at the cinema but couldn't get in to see The Empire Strikes Back after I'd gone back to the park to rejoin everyone, Dando teasing me that I'd had a prick up my arse. I could think all this, but I couldn't see it. Instead, I saw Dando grab me by my jumper. While he held me, Seamus bound my hands behind my back with a length of twine. Then they upended me and forced me into a hole just wide enough to accommodate my shoulders. My head touched the bottom and the weight of my body above me forced me on to my cheek. The mud, folding around me…
        I swallowed thickly. Hands shaking, I pulled out the plug and stood under the shower for a few minutes until the panic was washed clear. But those things hadn't happened. It was like a game in which secrets are passed on and distorted. Dando hadn't tried to kill me.
        Scrubbing myself dry, thoughts turned back to Kerry. We'd finished a month or two after that incident. The last time I saw her was a year or two after we'd left school. She was living in Taunton with an Alastair and practising midwifery. I remember thinking-what did I ever see in this girl? Her face was painfully thin, putting me in mind of a teddy bear I once owned whose head was crushed by a prolonged spell down the gap between my bed and the wall. We never talked about that night by the canal. I wonder if that was because of some teenage ability to reject the horrific, or because we consciously stopped it from surfacing? I know I'd blocked it, until tonight. And what of Dando? I gazed into the mirror, the towel around my shoulders; the scratch was a raised whitish worm. We'd spent so much time together it seemed criminal we should lose contact so quickly. How many friends could I boast of now, that meant as much to me as the ones with whom I used to play football until way past a time when the ball was visible in the dark? I found myself mourning