Dead Dogs (16 page)

Davey’s grinning is a shark’s head and he’s saying, ‘Fucking sheep.’

And now I’m wondering, are we as alien to them as they are to us?

Davey’s getting into the Peugeot and then he’s leaning across the passenger side and then he’s swinging open the door. Over the arthritic groan of the hinges he goes, ‘Hop in and lets blow this popsicle stand.’

Davey pops the locks on the rear doors. Seán and Rory are giving out about Xbox vs Playstation and they clamber in the back. I’m getting into the passenger seat and then I’m closing the door.

Davey drives out of college and onto the Clonskeagh Road. The drizzle’s stopping and the traffic’s moving and I’m glad to be out of the flat. The interior of the car is cluttered and does not smell like fake pine. I’m looking around and then Rory’s asking, ‘Where
are
we going?’

Davey winks at me and starts to whistle. He’s whistling that song from
The Italian Job
. This doesn’t fill me with confidence.
And now I’m saying, ‘That doesn’t fill me with confidence.’

The drizzle has left pearls of water all around the edges of the windscreen and with the forward motion of the car they are
elongating
and flowing upwards against the slope of the glass. It’s like they’re defying gravity.

Ranelagh is a solid mess of parked buses and oversized 4x4s are trying to nose their way out of side streets. I’m watching a suburban housewife with inevitable blonde hair try to insert a
silver
BMW X5 into a gap that you couldn’t wedge an After Eight into. She sits there gunning the engine and rocking the beemer forward and back. Her blonde bob is flaring out as she twists her head left and right and there’s a look about her of someone whose self-regarding bustle has been baulked by mere plebs.

A gap opens up but Davey slides the Peugeot into it. Slick as eels.

I’m looking at the woman in her beemer and it’s like she’s going to scream.

In front of us a bus is parked so that it blocks traffic. There’s a tangle of people trying to get on at the same time as half the bus is trying to get off. Between us and the bus a guy on a bicycle is having an argument with a taxi driver. Above us the sun is
coming
out.

Davey’s joke of a Peugeot doesn’t have a radio let alone a CD player. We sit more or less in silence until we get to town. Then Davey goes, ‘We’re going to Capel Street.’

This strikes me as a bit odd and I’m saying, ‘Why Capel Street?’

Davey’s indicating and then he’s changing his mind and then someone’s leaning on their horn. Davey ignores this and he’s
saying
to me, ‘We’ve a package to pick up. Interesting this one. You’ll love it.’

Not paying any attention to the road he turns around in his seat and he grins at Seán and Rory and says, ‘You’ll all love it.’

Rory frowns at his big brother and Seán just grins back. He likes it when people smile at him.

I don’t entirely believe Davey and I’m turning to take in his profile as he drives. He has that habitual look of smugness that hints at the arrogance underneath and I’m asking, ‘Is this
legitimate
income?’

Davey’s grinning in his predatory way of grinning and he’s going, ‘This is.’ Then he turns and jabs his thumb over his
shoulder
, ‘That isn’t.’

Now I’m turning and the seatbelt bites into the slack bulge of flesh beneath my lower ribs. In the footwell behind the driver’s seat, between Seán’s big feet, there’s a parcel wrapped in brown paper.

I look at Davey and I look at the parcel and then I look at Davey again. His grin is fixed in place and I can feel the laughter coming from his wellhead eyes. Feel. Not hear. He says nothing and not a sound slips from between his lips but I can feel him laughing. Deep down and hidden.

I’m not going to ask what it is. I know that if I do he’ll just grin or tap his nose or start whistling something. So I’m turning back around and I’m feeling the seatbelt loosen its grip. 

Davey parks the Peugeot in an alley just off Capel Street. There’s a billboard high up on one wall so that it can be seen from the main street. On it the corrugated torsos of American wrestling stars look cold and hard as concrete. Their faces gurn and the tendons of their necks look like cables. I know for a fact that they wouldn’t last five minutes in the company of Davey’s friends. You take one brash yank with tumescent pecs and balls shrunken to the size of peanuts and mix thoroughly with a gang of drug dealers. What you get is a bloody mess and a gang of drug dealers looking to buy an oversize coffin.

Around the corner from where Davey parks his car there is a sex shop. This is where we are going. Davey stops outside it and me and Seán and Rory stand there looking uncomfortable. We stand there for a minute and I say, ‘You’re joking.’

The building is like the one Rory’s family lives in back home. Above ground it is a stacked hodgepodge of unreliable-looking electric shops and unused flats. In most of the windows grime is making dirty sweeps across the glass like the fake snow of
forgotten
Christmases. I’m wondering could anyone ever live in those rooms again. I’m wondering how long it would take to get rid of the stink of decay. Every window is a welling eye.

At ground level the spikes of a guardrail spring out from the building’s front. In front of us though there’s a low gate with steps leading down to the basement. The basement windows look out onto this stairway except they’re all blacked out and a necklace of purple neon gives them a garish border. Above the basement door the sign says FUNTASY. And I’m saying, ‘This is legitimate?’

Davey’s looking at me and I’m thinking that he’s thinking I’m such a soft chap. Then Davey’s going, ‘Come on, you pack of pussies.’ Then Davey’s going down the steps and we all follow in his wake. We are all children. We are all puppies on a string.

We stop at the bottom of the steps and Davey says, ‘Press that buzzer over there.’

There’s a button in the shape of a heart set into a speaker set into the doorframe. Rory’s pressing it before I even get the chance to question why. A man’s voice crackles out from the speaker and it’s saying stuff. It’s saying stuff like, ‘Have you got an
appointment
? Or order number?’

Davey’s grinning again and now his teeth are reminding me of the spiked railings overhead. And now Rory’s going, ‘Ehm … this is mercury.com.’ He doesn’t know what else to say.

The voice says, ‘Jaysus Davey, is that you? Come in come in. I have it waiting for you here.’ Then there’s a sound like a dentist’s drill and the door’s lock snaps open and me and Seán and Rory and Davey push our way into the basement. For some reason my brain refuses to think of it as a sex shop. It is the basement. It is not FUNTASY.

The basement’s interior is dark and I can’t see anything for a minute. My irises expand and contract and I’m starting to realise that we’re in a kind of hallway. The door swings shut behind us and we are all suddenly lit only by a single pink bulb. There’s a beaded curtain in front of us and between its rattling fronds
fluorescent
brilliance is sharply filtered. The overall impression I’m getting is of sheer class. 

Then Davey’s slipping his way through the curtain and we’re following. Lately I seem to spend the majority of my life
following
people. The room we’re in is fucking huge. Aisle upon aisle of shelf upon shelf of weirdness fills it from wall to wall. Davey’s walking down the middle aisle and we’re following him past vibrators. Following him past handcuffs. Following him past ball gags. Following him past butt plugs. Following him past the hugest collection of kinky videos that I’ve ever seen. There’s a counter at the end of the aisle and behind the counter there’s a middle-aged man with a bald head emerging like a turtle’s from a very expensive-looking suit. Apart from us and Davey and the man behind the counter there’s no one else here. Beside the counter there’s a mannequin dressed in a studded leather gimp suit complete with buckled hood. The metal stitching of a zip is drawn closed where the mouth should be and reminds me in a fucked up way of Zippy from
Rainbow
. The price tag attached to the mannequin’s wrist reads €5000. I’m thinking being a pervert must be an expensive hobby.

Yer man behind the counter is looking at us with one eyebrow cocked. The light is reflecting off the smooth hairlessness of his head and the loose skin of his neck rasps against his shirt as he looks at Davey and three sixteen-year-old boys. The shirt looks silk and where the line of his collar meets his neck it has discoloured from the acids in his sweat. He’s looking at us, at me and Davey, and then he says, ‘mercury.com? Why the fuck did you call yourself that?’

And I know what Davey is going to say before he says it. He says, ‘Because life doesn’t wait.’ 

Now the man behind the counter is laughing and now he’s bending down and he’s taking a brown parcel from under the counter. It is exactly the same as the one lying in the Peugeot’s footwell. Then he’s reaching inside his inside pocket then he’s taking out a tightly rolled wad of twenties and then he’s peeling off six of them. He places them on the packet and slides the whole lot across the counter. Now he’s looking at us and he starts off saying one word, ‘Discretion.’

Our oddball meeting ends very quickly after this and the upshot of it is that we have to deliver this package to a very large house in Drumcondra whose resident is also very large and very well respected. Hence the discretion.

The basement door clicks shut behind us and the locking mechanism grinds angrily to itself. The outside is bright after the basement and I can’t see anything for a minute. My irises expand and contract and I’m starting to realise that I’ve been left holding the package. I ask Davey how come I’m carrying the fucking thing.

He tells me that he’s the one driving so I do the carrying. It’s like we’re married.

Davey’s joke of a Peugeot is still parked in the side alley. There’s a little runt of an inner city scumbag sitting on the bonnet. He couldn’t be any more than twelve but already he’s developing that inner city Dublin thing. That weird permanent shadow on the upper lip. That weird thing that never really turns into a proper moustache but remains marked and indelible as a permanent marker. The twelve-year-old with the knacker ’tache isn’t alone
and a tiny red-headed boy kitted out in a Kappa tracksuit and white runners emerges from behind the car. He is tucking his penis away and I’m hoping he didn’t take a slash against any of the door handles. For some reason I’m nauseated by the sight of them. By the sight of their leering mouths, their aggressive little bodies, their little faces so pugnacious and brazen.

A mate of mine down home used to have this theory about Dublin kids. He saw them as some virulent kind of weed
growing
in the lightless spaces between tenements and office blocks. He figured that if you deprive a plant of light and proper
nourishment
it becomes pale and limp and stunted.

Standing here in this alley looking at the two kids in front of us, I’m willing to concede he may have had a point.

Davey’s looking at the two young fellas and his black black eyes make him look ready to do murder. His mouthful of teeth turns into a maw and he’s roaring at the two kids in front of us. I can see the anger in him. I can feel the violence coming off him in waves.

When he moves, he moves like lightning.

Young knacker ’tache is sliding off the bonnet and his
belligerent
little head is puckering around a frown. The frown lasts about two seconds. Davey’s right arm snaps out and I’m blinking at the ferocity in it. The alleyway seems to shrink and all lines of
perspective
are now leading to the blood spurting from knacker ’tache’s nose. I can’t take my eyes off it.

The sound that Davey’s fist makes as it connects with the
cartilage
and flesh of the kid’s nose is something that months later
I’ll hear again. The smack of it as it ruptures blood vessels. The dead meat smack of it.

Young knacker ’tache is down on the ground. He holds his nose and starts to cry. His red-head companion is trying to dart around Davey and he’s yelling, ‘I’m telling me Da!’

Davey grabs him on the way by and now he’s pinning him to the wall. His eyes are fixed on the young fella’s face and he’s going, ‘If you tell anyone. Your Da. Your Ma. Anyone. They’ll never find your body.’

Little red-head goes quiet, goes limp, goes still. I’m thinking that if he hadn’t just taken a whiz he’d be pissing himself by now.

Now Davey’s dropping him and the young fella goes over to his bleeding friend. Both of them are crying now. Both of them are terrified. Their faces are pale as paper.

Beside me, Seán has his face in his hands and he’s starting to moan.

When the kids leave Rory and Seán and Davey all go to get back into the car.

Not me though. I stand looking in at Davey with the glossy furrows of his hair raked across his skull. Davey looks at me and through the driver’s side window, he goes, ‘What? What’s wrong with you?’

I don’t say anything and I take a sort of half-step backward.

Inside the car, Seán’s big face is swivelled to stare at me and with his heavy jowls and wide dull eyes he looks like a puppy behind dog-pound glass. He’s about an inch away from putting his paws against the window. 

I don’t really want to get back into the car.

I don’t want to get back in but I don’t want to leave Seán either. Leave him with Davey sitting behind the wheel and his white face turned towards me. His eyes are so dark they look gone. It’s like the crows have been at him. He sees me seeing him and he
doesn
’t move and his eyes seem like mineshafts and in my head I can hear his fist connecting with my own gormless face. The dead meat smack of it.

It is now, right now, that the little Judas who lives in the back of my head first starts to squawk. I don’t know how long he’s been in there. I don’t know how long he’s been battening on the soft stuff of my brains but when he starts squawking he doesn’t stop.