When Mr. Dog Bites Read online

  “Are you a doctor?” It all made sense then. This man was some sort of specialist doc sent by the National Health Service. The good-news man. Maybe they’d realized that the other doc was terrible at his job and everything he said to patients was pork pies pish. I’d then have to sue his arse for the emotional rampage he had caused us.

  “No, I’m not a doctor either, Dylan,” he said, still smiling away like a big massive cat from that town in England where cats smile all the time. He looked at Mom and flashed his eyes toward the ceiling as if to say, Heaven forbid.

  “Dylan, stop asking so many questions, will you?” Then Mom rolled her eyes skyward at the man as if to say, I did tell you what he was like, didn’t I?

  “So why is your car in Dad’s space, if you’re not from the school or a policeman or a doc?”

  “Dylan,” Mom said, “this is Tony. He gave me a lift back from the shops.”

  “But it’s too early to go to the shops.”

  “Don’t be so silly—it’s never too early to go to the shops.”

  “But you never go to the shops in the morning.”

  “Well, I did this morning.”

  “What did you buy?”

  “Dylan, what’s the problem with me going to the shops first thing in the morning, eh?”

  “It’s just a bit weird, that’s all.”

  “I just gave your mom a lift back because she had lots of bags, Dylan,” the tall man said.

  “You’re not my dad.”

  “DYLAN,” Mom shouted.

  “Well, he’s not.”

  “Tony knows that.”

  “So tell him to get his car out of Dad’s space, then.”

  “I’ll do no such thing.”

  “Look, Moira, I need to be going anyway,” the man said.

  “At least finish your tea first, Tony.”

  “I’ve got an airport run in half an hour anyway,” he said.

  “Are you a pilot?” I asked him.

  “No, Dylan. I’m a cabbie.”

  “A what?”

  “A taxi driver.”

  “So that car outside is a taxi?”

  “Yes, and it will be out of your dad’s space in a jiffy.”

  “Does that mean soon?”

  “Dylan, will you please stop being rude to Tony?” Mom said. The anger had returned to her voice.

  “But taxi drivers aren’t supposed to come into passengers’ houses for cups of tea,” I said.

  “I couldn’t agree more, but your mom and me go back a long way.”

  “We were old school friends,” Mom added.

  “But how come I’ve never heard you talking about him?”

  “Well, that’s because—” the taxi man butted in, but I didn’t let him finish.

  “Me and Amir are school pals and we see each other all the time and talk about each other when we’re not at school, and his mom and dad know well who I am even though I’m not allowed in his house.”

  “Tony and I just rediscovered each other recently by accident.”

  “At the shops?” I said.

  “Online,” the taxi man said.

  “On Facebook,” Mom said.

  “But you said that Facebook was for freaks, Mom.”

  The taxi man laughed and so did Mom, like they were sharing some secret joke. I hated them both.

  “Many of the people who use it are, Dylan, but there are nice folk who use it as well.”

  “Someone posted an old school photo on my wall, and your mother was tagged in it,” the taxi man said. I didn’t use Facebook, so I didn’t really understand what the bloomin’ Nora he was on about. “So I sent a friend request, and then we were writing on each other’s wall talking about the old times and that.”

  “But we don’t have a wall,” I said.

  He laughed again. “It’s not a real wall, Dylan. It’s what they call your page on Facebook,” he said.

  “Why don’t they just call it a page?” I asked.

  “This young chap’s a right character, Moira, a real live wire.”

  “That’s not even the half of it,” Mom said.

  “Right, listen, I’d best be off—got to get that fare.”

  “Are you sure, Tony?” Mom said. She sounded disappointed.

  “Afraid so. It’s a biggie.”

  “Yeah, right, Tony,” Mom said.

  I felt both their peepers on me. I wasn’t moving for no taxi man.

  “See you, mister,” I said, and there was this dead long pause.

  “Okay, Moira, I’ll, er . . .”

  “BYE,” I said.

  Then he headed for the front door.

  “I’ll see you out, Tony,” Mom said, jumping from her seat. “You, stay here.” She had this witch’s croak in her voice, making me feel scared. “I mean it, Dylan. Stay here.” She said this in one of her angry-soft-voice ways.

  So I stood like a pure mad plank in the kitchen, looking at the half-empty mugs of tea. At the front door there were more whispers and a wee giggle from Mom and the taxi man. Then nothing. Hush. Dead time. That’s when my mind went into a tailspin.

  “TAXI BASTARD TAXI BASTARD.”

  The door slammed shut.

  Bang!

  “Get up those stairs,” Mom shouted.

  “Why are you friends with that man?” I asked.

  “It’s none of your business who I choose to be friends with.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing, Dylan. Get up those stairs. I won’t tell you again.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? For skipping school, that’s why. I’m fed up to the back teeth with all this.” She pointed to the stairs.

  “Sorry for skipping school, Mom,” I said as I made my way toward the bottom step. “I was having a nightmare of a morning.”

  “Some of us have nightmares every morning, Dylan, but we don’t run away.” Tears were in her eyes.

  “Sorry for being rude to the taxi man.”

  “His name’s Tony, and it’s too late for sorrys, isn’t it?”

  When I was at the top of the stairs, Mom shouted up to me.

  “I’m thinking of going and having a word with your school, so you’d better watch your step from now on, Buster.” She only calls me Buster when she’s mega angry, which meant that I was pressing all her wrong buttons.

  “Fuck’s sake,” I muttered to myself.

  I lay on my bed, held on to Green tighter than ever, and rocked myself exactly fifteen hundred times from side to side. Exactly fifteen hundred times. A record. I was rocking in time to songs by Sigur Rós, because those guys knew how to churn out chilled peaceful music. I couldn’t work out why Mom wasn’t worried about me anymore or why she was treating me like a Goddamn leper child, given the race against time she had with me. Most moms in her position would have been carting their sick children off to a stunning sandy beach somewhere or to an amusement park that had a mandatory helmet-wearing policy or one of those safari parks you drove through to see all the wild animals roaming around. Although Mom didn’t have a car and she usually relied on taxis, I couldn’t make out why some taxi driver was in my house drinking out of our mugs and parking his jalopy in Dad’s space. I couldn’t make out why, when the taxi man left, Mom seemed to be angry or sad or disappointed. I was terribly confused, so I was.

  It would have been incredible if Mom had come into my room, lain down beside me, stroked my head, and said everything was going to be all right on the night. I would have given my right arm to be called “sweetheart” or “cuddly bum” or “Dylsy pops” again, or for Mom to attack me in one of her giggle fits before licking my face and for me to go: “Y­u­u­u­u­u­c­c­c­c­c­k­kk,­ M­oooooo­m­m­m­m­m­m, that’s Disgusting with a capital D” and for her to say, “Love ya, snookins.” Or was it “snookims”? When I was rocking, counting, slapping, or whatever it was I was doing, Mom was always there to rub my back, run me a bath, and tell me everything was going to be “hunky-dory” and that she was sorry if she’d
upset me. But not this time.

  I lay there trying to think about anything other than the thing I was really thinking about. But as hard as I tried to imagine what Michelle Malloy looked like in her knick-knacks, all I could think about was the big D word. WHAT WAS IT LIKE AND HOW WOULD IT HAPPEN? Would I just lie down on a really soft duvet, close my eyes, and let my body sink into it? A bit like going into a big scanner, except more fluffy, more comfortable, and more exciting? I hoped Mom would buy a new one for me; I didn’t want to bow out in the old scabby one I used ’cause it was like having Ten Ton Tessie on top of your body. Would it happen while I was asleep? Then my life (or death) could become, like, this amazing dream that never, ever ends. All I’d be doing is floating from one groovy place to another. That would be Utterly Butterly A-mayonnaise-ing if that were to happen. I did an upside-down capital C grin while my eyes were closed as if I were actually in that dreamland.

  Then my grin turned all the way around and I was in sad-face thought-time. I was thinking about all the ways Dad could go. Like if it was an IED, which is army talk for Improvised Explosive Device, it would be a disaster, because it might take ages to find his legs, arms, or torso. We might not get to see him in the coffin because they could only find his head, one leg, and half an arm. If he went in Friendly Fire, which is what American soldiers call it when they accidentally kill their own buddies instead of backslapping them or saying hello—those bloody Yanks!—at least we’d get to see Dad in his coffin all peaceful and heroic. I swung my legs off the bed and fetched Dad’s letter. I read it for the eighty-nine millionth time.

  And I thought I had it bad!

  Eventually I got back onto Michelle Malloy.

  Phew!

  15

  Kidneys

  When my cell phone blared out “No Sleep Till Brooklyn,” I woke up. Sun sneaked through my bedroom window, meaning that I had only been snoozing for a few hours. I knew who it was straightaway because I have all my friends specially programmed in my phone. When I say all my friends, what I mean is that I have my mom, whose cell phone song is “Mama Said Knock You Out”; I have my dad, whose cell phone song is “King of the Swingers” (but that never rings because Dad can’t use his cell in case the crazy infidels track him down, cart him off to some deep, dark cave in the middle of nowhere, and torture him for the top-notch secret state information he has stored away in his head); and then I have Miss Flynn, whose cell phone song is “Good Vibrations.” But that’s just for emergencies. Even though today was a type of emergency, I didn’t hear “Good Vibrations.”

  hi dylan, itz amir here. r u goin 2 skool 2 mor? Amir always started his texts with telling me who they were from even though I’d told him a billion times that “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” meant that I knew it was him. I even played his message tone to him. He was some man, Amir was.

  Probs, dont want 2 tho

  dont wory about MM

  Im not

  shez a carpet muncher anyway. lol

  so iz her maw. Lol

  lol

  lllloooollll

  r u still goin to disco?

  dunno.

  Itll be brill . . . cum on

  Ill think about it.

  we cud go as laurel and hardy

  ur the fat one

  or cagney and lacy. Amir was always watching the old programs on Netflix.

  bags cagney then. Lol

  wot about susan boyle and mrs. seed? lol.

  thot u wer goin as oor m8 doughnut?

  na hez a fat cok gobbler

  lol

  lol rite bak at u

  so r u goin then?

  may b

  think about it

  I will. only got 17p credit left

  c u 2mor then

  okeydokey

  Cell phones are possibly the greatest invention the world has ever seen. My top four inventions are:

  1. Cell phones.

  2. TV.

  3. Soccer.

  4. Dialysis machines.

  Come to think of it, Michelle Malloy had to have a dialysis machine strapped to her kidneys so she didn’t pee herself all the time. Or was it so her kidneys didn’t go on the blink? Basically I wasn’t 100 percent sure, as I was too scared to ask her about it. She went to the hospital loads for it—well, for that and for her big-leg-wee-leg issue. Maybe that was why she was so grumpy: she could have been suffering dialysis-machine withdrawal. Maybe being a crabby chops is a symptom of this; who knows how these dialysis machines work? I certainly don’t. I wouldn’t mind getting my grubby hands on her cell number; I could send her nice text messages without having to listen to her slagging me off or calling me hurtful names. I’d send her text messages full of ???? so she’d have to return my ???? with answers. Amir did this, and I ended up spending all my credit having text chat with him. He was a blast. I regularly fell asleep chuckling away to myself because of some daft thing he’d written. I lay in bed LMAO. Sometimes it was sooooooo funny that I was LMFAO. (The F is a bad word.)

  It must have been really difficult in the olden days when they didn’t have cell phones. What did people do for fun in those days, I wondered. Questions like this often ripped my knitting and regularly kept me awake at night, tossing and turning and groaning, because I couldn’t find answers to them. How come there were no black champion skiers? How come when I was in Torremolinos with Mom and Dad the dogs in the street could understand Spanish much better than I could? Who was it who decided that a table was going to be called a “table” or an ear was going to be called an “ear” or yellow was going to be called “yellow”? Aaaaarrrrrhhhhh . . .

  You could never find these answers in any books, not even in The Monster Book of Facts or The Monster Book of Facts Volume 2 that we had in our school library.

  The teachers didn’t know the answers, and they all told me to stop asking questions like these. That’s how I got to know the meaning of the words

  banal

  futile

  obtuse

  facile.

  16

  Classmates

  I thought Amir would be pleased as Punch and Judy to see me when I went back to school the next day.

  He wasn’t.

  I thought he would do the high five, pulling away at the last minute just as I moved in to slap his hand and shout, “Howdy, best bud.”

  He didn’t.

  I thought he might put his hand lower and say, “Downstairs,” then fire it away for a split second before I hammered mine down, leaving him to say, “Too slow.”

  He didn’t.

  I thought he might say his Special Occasion Amir Greeting to me: “All right, D-d-dildo.” The word “dildo” sounded a wee bit like Dylan, and ’cause we both knew it was a really dirty woman’s word, that always made us howl with laughter.

  But he didn’t do this either.

  In fact, Amir was like a bear with a sore toe when I saw him sitting in our tutor class.

  “All right, farty pants,” I said.

  He was pretending to read a book about lions, but I knew he was doing fake reading because Amir wasn’t the world’s number-one reader. He couldn’t pull the clothes over my eyes.

  “All right, baw-jaws,” I said, in case he really was, in fact, reading the book and was, in fact, pulling the clothes over my eyes.

  But he said nothing. No LOLs or LMAOs today.

  “Are you all right, amigo?” I asked him.

  I put my hand on his shoulder, and he put his head on the desk. I knew that something was up, as best buds tend to know when their buddy is feeling like shite.

  “Amir, what’s wrong, buddy?” I asked him again.

  “I hate this st-st-stupid fu-fu-fucking shitey arse place,” he said. That was the point I knew something had gone massive boobs up.

  “Amir?” I said.

  “This school’s full of dicks and arseholes,” he said, before launching the lion book across the room like the best ultimate frisbee player in Scotland. It almost hit the only other person in
the class, Charlotte Duffy, full force on the napper. She hardly moved. She never did in the morning. That was when she was given all her drugs to eat. She was like a mad spacer in the morning time.

  She turned in our direction and said, “Watch it, you, or else I’ll . . .” And after that she just muttered something under her breath that I couldn’t make out, but her face was all scrunched up; it was like she was talking to her desk. Round the twist or what?

  “Sorry, Charlotte, that was an accident,” I said.

  “I’m going to get you one of these days.” And then she said something that made my hands tingle and my face bendy. Something that made me want to jump on her Teen Wolf–style and yank a big chunk out of her cheek.

  She called me a “Paki shagger.”

  “What did you call me?” I asked her.

  “You heard.”

  “Say it again.”

  “Say it again.”

  “Say it again—I dare you.”

  “Say it again—I dare you.” I hated it when people did the imitation-voice stuff; it made my inside kettle hiss. I was totally hissed off at this stage.

  “You’re off your head, Charlotte.”

  “We’re all off our heads, daft arse. That’s why we’re in this shit hole.”

  “Buzz off, desk-licker.”

  “Is your ear sore?” she said.

  “What?”

  “Is your ear sore?” she said, tugging at her own ear.

  “What have they been feeding you?”

  “It’s a simple question. IS YOUR EAR SORE?” she screamed.

  “I think you’d better take another pill, ’cause I haven’t a clue what—”

  “Rubber ear.”

  “What?”

  “Rubber ear.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I screwed up my face.

  “Big rubber ear.”

  “What are you on about, headbanger?” I said. Off-the-radar chats happened every hour at Drumhill—that was why there were always people shouting, screaming, crying, or trying to hurt either themselves or each other. On one side of our classroom was Amir with his head down hugging the desk; at the other was Charlotte Duffy doing an impression of the bonkers girl from The Exorcist. Add another forty or fifty people to the mix, and you had a typical day at Drumhill Special School. No wonder people actually shat themselves all the time.