Dead Dogs by Joe Murphy Read Free Book Online Page A

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 goneand 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.