Dead Dogs by Joe Murphy Read Free Book Online Page B

Now put a stage at one end and white plastic lawn furniture all around so that pensioners can sit down and eat their ice creams and kids can slalom between and drunks can stumble over. Now on this stage put either a crap DJ or some band that was big when the festival organisers were young. Overhead you dissect the sky with taut lines of purple and gold bunting. The festival organisers are baffled that people just stay in the pubs so they don’t have to listen to the bad music and don’t have to avoid the puddles of puke. The local scumbags deal drugs and fight and drink cans in the side streets and you always get women in old Wexford GAA jerseys strolling around. The words Wexford Creamery are stretched across their tits. This always cracks me up. Like everyone else, the organisers of all this are stuck twenty years behindthe times. Everyone gets stuck at a certain point and then gets pissed off because the world leaves them behind. It’s like every grown-up is a version of my Da. Always going through photos of stuff that doesn’t exist anymore.
    The last proper memory I have of my Mam is from the car park of the L&N supermarket. The festival organisers set up this huge big haunted mansion that you pay into to get the shite frightened out you by plastic skeletons and actors hamming it up in twine wigs and white face paint. The haunted mansion is actually a series of bulk cargo containers all bolted together with their insides turned into a papier-mâché tunnel with mirrors and lights and sound effects. Walking through it is like walking through the bowels of a giant worm that’s swallowed the contents of a fancy dress shop and a company of terrible amateur dramatists . The outside of this block of containers is clad in plywood hoarding that’s been painted in swirling purples with ghosts and goblins leering across the car park.
    Even at six years old I’m wondering, what have ghosts got to do with strawberries?
    My mam has me by the hand and I remember the taste of candy-floss around my mouth and the smell of melted sugar that seems to be what years-ago summers smell like. Mam is smiling down at me but the sun is behind her head and I can’t see her face. She had red frizzy hair and I remember it balled around her head like a nest round an egg. All about her there’s the corona of a nuclear explosion millions of miles away but right in front of me her face is a mask of black. She pays the man at the ticketcounter and we go into the haunted mansion.
    When we go in I remember she goes in first and a black curtain falls down behind us and everything goes pitch-black. I’m only six and I don’t like this and my little hand tries to tighten on my mother’s but my fingers don’t go all the way around and I know that I won’t be able to hold on if something bad happens.
    Then something bad happens.
    A strobe light explodes. It batters my eyes with whumping pulses of light and a scream like something dying comes out of a speaker right beside my head. A rubber skeleton with an unhinged jaw gets shunted toward us by a mechanical arm. You know when a rasher isn’t crispy? You know when you cut into it and lift it on the oily tines of your fork? You know that bit of fat that waggles disgustingly and drips stuff onto your plate? That’s how the skeleton’s jaw moves. Elastic and nauseating.
    And in the machine-gun brilliance of the strobe light and in the ball of feedback distortion from the fake scream my Mam lets go of me.
    I remember this. Cold and hard as the flash from a strobe light, I remember this.
    Her fingers loose and she steps away from me and I’m left standing there, terrified.
    I’m sixteen now and I know that what happens is she gets a fright and she jumps and she lets go of my hand. I know that I’m standing there for about two seconds before she grabs me again and lifts me up into her arms. But at six years old this all pretty hard to take.
    In the hammering light of the strobe it’s like she’s