When Mr. Dog Bites Page 8

  I wanted the docs to find a mega cure for me, and then the cure-finder and I would become worldwide celebs and be on the celeb scene and go to all the celeb parties and be given lavish gifts like DVDs and cell phones and get to meet other celebs like Simon Cowell and Kevin Costner.

  No doubt this was the biggest case of cacking myself that I’d ever had. Even more than when I did shit myself for real in my first year at secondary school. How the devil’s haircut do real players do it?

  “I can’t do it, Amir.”

  “You can. Be br-br-brave.”

  “I can’t! My heart is pounding so much it hurts, and I want to swear out loud like a mofo.”

  “So swear, then; she’s heard it all before,” Amir said in an aggressive voice. “Look, if you don’t, I will.”

  “What, ask her out?”

  “No, you dumpling, I’ll ask her out for you.”

  We were now in the school cafeteria watching all the poor people queuing up for their free breakfast: mainly smelly fruit that supermarkets chuck out, dry eggs, soggy toast, and oatmeal. Yuck-a-duck! The noise was humongous. All these mad maddies in the same place making a major racket. It was worse than the worst disco on earth. Thank the lucky stars I wasn’t poor enough to ever have to come in here for scran; God bless the good old-fashioned packed lunch.

  Michelle Malloy was sitting in a corner with her hooter deep in a magazine. Probably a magazine about cool fashions or groovy pop bands or hot hunks or makeup. A magazine I would know heehaw about.

  “There she is,” Amir said, shoving me in the back.

  “All right, Amir, I’m not Stevie Wonder.”

  “Go,” he said, shoving harder, dead excited.

  “Calm down to a riot, Amir.”

  “Go.”

  “A player’s got to play it cool, you know.”

  “Well, you better hurry up or you’ll miss the opp-opp-opporchancity.”

  “I’m just composing myself.” No tics, no swearing, no slapping. Just a wee bit of nerves and heart hammering, that was all.

  “Come on,” Amir urged. “I didn’t get out of my scratcher mad early for bugger all. Go on.”

  I shuffled toward her. All the noise, all the deadbeats, all the pongo of the stinking breakfast food disappeared. It was only the two of us: Michelle Malloy and me. Just like a duel from the Western films that Dad liked to watch when he came home from the pub with his takeout. In my head I kept thinking Just say hello, just say hello over and over again. And before you could say, “Hey, Big Mama!” I was standing at her table.

  Time stopped. Frozen stiff. I could hear nothing at all except my own head. It was as if I were playing statues. Michelle Malloy didn’t look up to welcome me; she just kept reading her magazine as if it were the last thing in the whole wide world with words in it, and she only had two more minutes left in the world to live. BIG GIANT wave coming with a naked surfer riding on it. Nightmare. Amir, bud, please come and rescue me Pakistan-superhero style!

  “SNOBBY BITCH . . . Shit . . . Fuck . . . Sorry, Michelle, I didn’t . . .”

  “What do you want, Mint?” she said, not taking her peepers off the magazine.

  “FUCKIN’ TEASE . . . Shit . . . Sorry, Michelle . . .”

  “You’d better get it out, Mint, because I’ve no time for your Tourette’s crap.”

  Amir was spot-on about her knowing what I had and not really caring too much about it. She was mega cucumber. I was a turnip.

  “I was just wondering what magazine you were reading.”

  She looked at me. Wow! Michelle Malloy was s­o­o­o­o­o­o­o­o­ close to me right now that I could have reached out and stroked her. I could have smudged her bright-red lipstick and dark mascara with my thumb. Man alive, I could have flicked her earrings with my pinkie. My super smell sense told me that her deodorant was the same as Mom’s, Sure for Women. I was 117 percent Sure of it. When it wafted up my snout I didn’t think of those minging breakfast smells anymore.

  “Go away, Mint. Don’t you have some puerile stuff to be getting on with, with that friend of yours?”

  What did “puerile” mean? What an incredible babe. But this was Cool Things to Do Before I Cack It, so I had to get a move on. I had to get my game head on.

  “You mean Amir?”

  “I don’t give a shit what he’s called.” She flipped a page over in her magazine.

  “What’s your magazine about?”

  She looked up at me again. Oh, my good God in heaven! Those eyes! They were like two wee jewels peeking through her black eyeliner. Emeralds. But Michelle Malloy didn’t have sparkle happy eyes.

  “Why do you care?”

  “Just interested, Michelle.”

  “Well, don’t be.” My heart was boom boom booming about, all Batman and Robin throbbin’. “Look, what is it you want, Mint? I’ve no time for all this crap.”

  “It’s just . . . I’m dead interested in your magazine . . . Magazines in general.”

  She puffed out in the same way athletes do when they finish a tough old sprint.

  “It’s about body art.”

  “Really?” I said, as if I knew what she was on about.

  “Happy?”

  I was happy so I nodded my head.

  “Now piss off.” This wee honey said some great stuff, so she did.

  “I just wanted to ask you something else, if that’s okay with you.”

  “What?”

  But I couldn’t get it out. I needed to scream something, to shout at her or to slap myself on the noggin. I could feel my face burning with trying to hold it in. To normal people it would have been like trying to speak with a ginormous gobstopper stuck in their throat. That was every day for me.

  “I’m waiting, Mint.” And she waited.

  I tried, I really tried.

  She waited. “See, this is the problem with you, Mint. You just can’t get it out there, can you? Why don’t you just go back to your weirdo pal?”

  Then it all came out like projectile vomit. I had entered the Speed-Speaking World Championships.

  “Would-you-like-to-come-to-the-Halloween-disco-with-me? FUCKING BITCH.” Oh, please tell me she didn’t hear that last bit. But there was No Way, José she didn’t. Michelle Malloy stared at me for what seemed like yonks. I was rubbish at staring games.

  “If, Mint, by some chance, I have a lobotomy and decide to go to the Halloween disco—which I’m not going to anyway because it’s for major losers, but if I was going—there is no way on this earth I’d go with someone who calls me a bitch and a tease every second sentence.”

  “But I didn’t mean—”

  “Now blow town.”

  “I only ever say those things when I’m nervous, Michelle, you know that.”

  “Whatever, Mint. I’m still not going to some infantile Halloween disco. Now make like Michael Jackson.”

  “What?”

  “Beat it!”

  “We don’t need to go to the disco. BIG VAG . . . Sorry . . . SOCK-FACE . . . Sorry.” Oh, someone please put me faceup on a guillotine right now.

  “Not even if you were the last man standing, Mint. Not even if you—”

  “But I don’t have much time left.” This was a silly line, as it made me sound crazy mental. Michelle Malloy shook her head, the very same shake you do to pathetic people when you think they are super-thicko stupid, but for a nano-nanosecond I was about to tell her that I was soon to perish.

  “Yeah? Join the club,” she said, and waved me away with her hand. “If you’ll excuse me, Mint, I have a multitude of miscellaneous crap to do before class.” And, just like that, her eyes flipped to her body-art magazine.

  I plodded back to Amir. The long walk of shame. Everything in the cafeteria was in super slo-mo; all the voices were muffled, and I sensed everyone’s blurry peepers gawking at me. Then I felt Mr. Dog coming again, a great big giant of a dog. Only this time he was coming to bite the dome straight off me in one gulp. My head twitched and almost shook straight off my sh
oulders. I couldn’t control anything. Sweat soaked my stomach. Was this the moment the doc was on about? Was THIS my time? Without me achieving any of my wishes?

  I made out the figure of Amir walking slowly toward me. He was major easy to make out. His teeth were chalk white and he had a big banana smile. You’d think he’d scored the winning goal in a cup final, or saved a last-minute penalty with a salmon leap to the top corner (or “postage stamp,” as Dad calls it). There was more chance of winning the EuroMillions lottery, though.

  “Well, is she?” he said, all googly excited. “Is she going to have it off with you?”

  Nada came out, and I walked straight past him. I’m not a million percent sure, but I think I might have growled at him as well. Anyway, I Usain Bolted out of the school gates for home, to The Jeremy Kyle Show in bed.

  Then I realized why everything was blurry like Dad’s car’s windshield when it rained all torrential. I wiped the tears away from my peepers.

  14

  Car

  When I reached my street, the shaking, twitching, tears, and shouting had all gone. Phew! But I was now terrified in case the school knew I was cutting class. When they found out, they’d phone Mom to ask where I was. Or, worse, they’d tell her that I’d been seen entering the school gates and then exiting them. I hated how Drumhill always phoned parents when students were a nano-nano-nanosecond late for anything. Amir said it was in case anyone had had a heart attack or fallen on the ground with foam pouring from their mouths on their way to school or had been touched in their privates by pervert people in the bushes. I knew for a fact that this wasn’t the case in the normal schools. If students didn’t bother their arses attending from day to day, the schools didn’t give two flying fishes. I wished Drumhill didn’t give its fishes.

  I hoped that Mom was out buying grub for dinner or having morning coffee with some of her friends who didn’t do any paid work. If she was out, I could sneak up to bed to watch the saddos on The Jeremy Kyle Show and put my head under the covers and pretend I was inside a tent or an igloo or a teepee and feel super safe and comfortable. I could imagine I was on an exotic holiday or on some important adventure or leading a crucial expedition to find a cure for all those poor souls living in Tourette’s Hell Hotel. (This would be tough, as the doc had told Mom and Dad that there was no cure.) More likely I’d fall asleep and forget the whole Michelle Malloy conversation.

  There was a maroon car in Dad’s space. It wasn’t Mom’s, because she couldn’t drive, and therefore didn’t need a car to get her from A to B. Mom failed her driving test five blinkin’ times. Imagine that. Dad always teased her about all her failed attempts behind a wheel, saying she “couldn’t drive a bargain,” which is a pun, which is a thing people do when they’re playing with words in order to make themselves seem funnier or cleverer than they actually are.

  My favorite puns are:

  I’m reading a book about antigravity. It’s impossible to put down.

  And:

  I couldn’t remember how to throw a boomerang, but then it came back to me.

  But I’m not clever or funny.

  It was similar to the kind of car that plainclothes cops or the CIA drive around in; a type of car that police want the public to believe is your average John Doe’s car and not an actual police car so as to pull the wool over criminals’ eyes and lead them into a false sense of security—then the clink. This ploy was rubbish, because anyone streetwise and “with it” knew what an unmarked police car looked like straightaway. And this thing sitting outside my house, in my dad’s parking space, looked like an unmarked police car. Ding! Dang! Dong! I thought. What if the school had called the police and asked them to tail me for the crime of cutting class or, major head-wrecker, sexually harassing Michelle Malloy? Maybe I’d be frog-marched down to the station for some serious strip-searching interrogation. I’d have to get a brief in case they wanted me to do a stretch: five to ten in the pen. I didn’t know what to think. I was all over the place. One part of my brain was at the shop, while the other part was running home with the change. Jeeze Louise! If they did huckle me to the station for questioning, I’d tell them that Michelle Malloy was sooooooooooo cheeky and sooooooooooo insulting to me that her remarks actually made me cry and I was in such a state of emotional bouncy castle that there was No Way, José that I could’ve even considered sitting behind a desk all day, and if they made me, I’d have probably launched it against the classroom wall and quite possibly injured an innocent classmate. I didn’t want to do that, so I walked out of the school gates for the safety of everyone.

  My plan was to tiptoe up the stairs and sneak into bed without as much as a squeak or a creak being heard. I held my breath as I put my key into the door, twisting it the same way an iceberg safecracker would open a reinforced bank vault. If bones could breathe, I would have held my bones’ breath too. My body tensed when I carefully closed the door behind me. One wee toe was on the bottom stair, ready for the big climbing expedition.

  “Is that you, Dylan?”

  I held my breath and felt my face redden because this action was dead hard to do, meaning I would have been a terrible lifeguard or deep-sea free-diver, if that was my chosen career path.

  “Dylan?” Mom sounded upset—probably because I was driving her into an early grave—so I took my toe off the step and turned my body toward the kitchen. That’s where her voice was coming from. “Dylan?”

  “Yeeeesss?”

  “What are you doing home from school?”

  I wondered if this was one of those questions that don’t require an answer or one that did. If Mom wanted an answer, it meant that the school hadn’t been in contact with her yet, and if she didn’t want an answer, it meant I was for the high jump. I shushed myself and said zilch. Then there was a standoff, just as the good and bad lads in the Wild West have from time to time. A silent standoff. I was about to hotfoot it up to my room when I heard another voice coming from the kitchen. Mom and this voice were having a whispered conversation. I didn’t recognize the voice, and it was a man’s. No mistake, sugar cake. Then I thought about it, and . . . Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Maybe it was a policeman. A copper. The Old Bill. Five-O. At this moment my heart could have provided the beat on a rip-roaring drum ’n’ bass track.

  “Mom,” I said.

  There was more whispering, and I was sure I heard Mom saying, “NO.” But she said this in her weird shouting-in-a-soft-voice way. She does this in the shops when I ask again and again and again if I can have random things, like chocolate, soccer stickers, special dishwasher tablets, or razors (even though I haven’t started shaving yet). Mom looks at me and softly shouts, “No, Dylan, enough is enough.”

  There was no answer from the kitchen.

  “Mom, are you okay?”

  That’s when I thought the whispering guy in the kitchen could have done something evil to Mom. I could easily have interrupted him in the middle of a sickening and sordid ordeal. He could have been holding a blunt butcher’s knife under her neck, urging her to come clean about where all the goodies in the house were stashed. And the mad thing is, even though I was the man of the house, I didn’t know what to do in a situation like this, or who to scream to, or who to phone. I didn’t really know how to fight.

  I whistled really loudly. I whistled to a flock of imaginary birds.

  “Dylan, I’m okay.”

  I kept whistling, getting louder and louder.

  “Dylan, I’m okay, honestly.”

  But I didn’t believe her, so I hotfooted it straight for the kitchen to make sure the whispering man hadn’t been pressing the knife into Mom’s throat, forcing her to say those things to me. This beast obviously thought Dylan Mint would roll over and say, “No problemo, Mom,” then head up to bed and play some tunes while he was playing devil in the kitchen. This geezer thought Dylan Mint was some sort of eejit.

  “EVIL CUNT PEDOPHILE.” I burst through the kitchen door and scowled at the man. Twitched like crazy. This fellow wasn�
��t holding a blunt butcher’s knife in his hand, nor was he raping Mom. In fact, Mom and the whispering man were sat at each end of the table, having a nice cup of tea. Confused dot com. My head was fuzzy. I punched my thigh four times. Twitched three times. The whispering man stood up from the table and extended his hand for me to shake. I didn’t. I kept my hands firmly at my side. No stranger was touching me. I’d have him locked up in solitary forever and ever. He’d become someone’s bitch behind bars if he didn’t watch his step. Super rapido, he would. Facedown in the showers.

  “You, young man, must be Dylan.”

  I looked at Mom. She smiled as though she’d done something incredibly wrong.

  “Are you from my school?” I asked him, which was a stupid question, because if he’d been from Drumhill I’d have seen him cutting about the corridors from time to time. He laughed. I was fed up to the back teeth with people laughing at me.

  “Not exactly.”

  “The school phoned, by the way, Dylan,” Mom said. “They told me you walked out, just like that.” On the “just like that” part Mom clicked her two fingers in the air. I must have looked sheepish, because she didn’t seem too angry or pure mad mental. “We’ll talk about this later, okay?”

  I wasn’t sure if she wanted an answer to this.

  “Okay,” I said. “Are you a policeman?” I asked the man.

  He was still standing. He was majorly tall, enough to be a policeman. Not CIA or Special Branch, though. I’d place this maniac outside a soccer stadium checking people’s tickets. In my mind that would be a horrendous job, beaten only by waving heavy traffic through polluted streets in the wind and rain because the traffic lights have failed for the gazillionth time. He laughed at my question.

  “UGLY PIG FILTH FUCK . . . Sorry . . . I’m . . .”

  “That’s okay, Dylan. And no, I’m not a policeman.”

  “Is that your car outside?”

  “Yes, it is. Do you like it?”

  “It’s in Dad’s space.”

  “I didn’t know there were allotted spaces for residents on this road.” I made a mental note to look up “allotted” in the dictionary, but I had a fair idea what it meant. I’d remember this and impress Mrs. Seed.