When Mr. Dog Bites (23 page)

“Amir needs his best bud with him to show some support.”

“What about his brothers?”

“He doesn’t have any brothers.”

“Oh, I thought they always had big families in that culture .
.
. Oh, well, never mind.”

“Well, he doesn’t.”

“You learn something new every day, I suppose.”

“Can I borrow Dad’s suit for it?”

“What suit?”

“His funeral suit.”

“What suit are you on about?”

“The black one.”

“What black one?”

“The one hanging up at the side of the wardrobe.” The reason it wasn’t hanging up
in
the wardrobe, where it was supposed to be, was yet another of life’s bizarre things I didn’t really understand. It was like the towels in our bathroom that I wasn’t allowed to dry myself with. Mom put them there just for show, so they became our Just for Show Towels. What was the point of that, then? A wardrobe is for hanging things
in
, not
on
. A towel is for drying yourself
with
, not for looking
at
. How would staring at it make my hands dry? Things needed to change around here. I’d get Dad on my side when he got back from his TOD, which means Tour of Duty. (Army guys use it all the time. And their sons.) Dad was good at getting things done the way he wanted. When Dad returned, it would be
hasta la vista
, Just for Show Towels.

“Oh, that one.”

“Yes, that one.”

“Your dad’s funeral suit?”

“Yes.”

“Who told you it was a funeral suit?”

“Dad did.”

“Figures. Does it fit you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you tried it on, at least?”

“No.”

“That’s a good plan.”

“Me and Dad are roughly the same build.” Most of our relatives said that I was the spitting image of Dad.

“You think so?”

“Uncle Terry said I was a chip off the old block.”

“God help us,” Mom said, not in a funny way.

“I can use my own funeral tie as well.”

“What funeral tie?”

“The one I got for Granda Joe’s funeral.”

“Oh, I forgot about that.”

“It’s still, like, brand new, since I’ve only worn it once.”

“What about shoes?”

“I haven’t thought about those.”

“Kmart is having a sale.”

“NO!” My days of wearing cheap-arse shoes were done and dusted. “I’ll just polish up some older ones I have.”

“Whatever.”

“So, can I try Dad’s suit?”

“I suppose so.”

“Groovy.”

“You know something?”

“What?”

“I’m proud of you, Dylan,” she said. “Ever since that letter misunderstanding thing you’ve been as good as gold.”

This made me look at the floor, because I didn’t want to be telling Mom pork pies and have her thinking I was good as gold; I wanted her to be proud of me for something deep, like taking the soccer game by the scruff of the neck and pulling my team out of the Goddamn mire they had gotten themselves into, or because I got to play the part of Danny Zuko in our school’s production of
Grease
instead of one of the nonsinging and nondancing guys who stood at the back and shifted things around when the top actors were getting into their costumes or positions for their next scene. A blinking slave. But no, now Mom was proud of me for telling pork pies.

“LYING CUNT SON
.
.
.
Sorry, Mom
.
.
.
BAWBAG’S LYING!”

“Want some tomato soup?”

“No, I’m good,” I said.

Mom did her gazing.

“Seriously, I’m top of the morning to ya!”

“Sure?”

“Sure.”

“Good,” she said, and smack-a-roonied me on the cheek. I didn’t see them because it would have been impossible without a mirror, but I knew her lips were still there like a rosy lips tattoo.

“Thanks, Mom, for letting me go to the funeral.”

“It’s great that you want to stand by your friend at this time.”

“Yup.”

“It’s a shame, though, because I was going to tell you that you could go to the Halloween disco after all.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“Why?”

“As I said, you’ve been my golden boy again, and I know these past few months have been hard on you .
.
. on everyone.”

“They have.”

“The last thing you needed was me giving it to you from all angles as well.”

“I suppose.”

“Maybe I was too hard on you.”

“So, can I go to the Halloween disco, then?”

“Well, you can’t anymore, can you?” The crap plan was starting to let in water.

“No, I guess not.” What a bloomin’ klutz.

“Maybe I can ask Tony to pick you up from the funeral when it’s finished.” By this time the plan was similar to Niagara Falls on the rainiest day of the monsoon calendar. Noah and all his animals would have been the best bet to carry the rest of the plan out.

“No, that’s okay, he doesn’t have to do that.”

“He won’t mind.”

“I’m not a big fan of his maroon car.”

“Oh, come on, Dylan.”

“His driving makes me feel sick, and I wouldn’t want to be sick all over his taxi ’cause then he’d be off the road for hours on end and he’d lose a ton of dosh, and then his wife and kids wouldn’t be able to eat good food. And, well, he plays crap music as well.”

“But you like Tony now.”

“No, it’s not that. TAXI PRICK SHAGGER.”

“Dylan!”

“Sorry, no. It’s just that we’ll be at Amir’s mom and dad’s house afterward and I don’t know what time we’ll finish eating and talking about dead people.”

“They probably do things differently, I imagine.”

“Amir said there’ll be oodles of mad funky food as well.”

“Sounds lovely.”

“So, maybe Amir’s dad will give me a lift home.”

“Amir’s dad?”

“Yes.”

“But it’s a funeral, Dylan.”

“And?”

“Won’t he be a bit sozzled?”

“He doesn’t drink alcohol, so he won’t crash his car and kill anyone.”

“He doesn’t drink?” Mom said, and one of those
!
things appeared in my head.

“It’s against what he believes in, I think.”

“And what’s that?”

“Don’t really know . . . that all drinking is bad . . . and it’s okay to marry, like, when you are ten or thirteen . . . and he starves himself lots because maybe he doesn’t want his country to be full of obese people like America . . . and he thinks that you must pray on a Friday, always kneeling down . . . and he doesn’t have Christmas. How cracked is that? . . . And I’m not really sure what else . . .”

“And what does Amir believe in?”

“I’m not forty-five percent sure if it’s the same, but I one hundred and fifty percent know he hates racists.”

“Does he now?”

“Yes, and so do I.”

“Well, good for you.”

“I think his dad does as well. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t touch the demon drink ’cause all the racists drink like mad dogs.”

“Well, I don’t know about those things, Dylan.”

Mom then went to the window and did her Nosy Nora thing. She didn’t say anything to me, and it seemed as though she was at the end of her tether with something or someone, but not with me because I was her golden boy again. I puffed out my cheeks and in my head I called myself a fucking eejit for the plan. Watertight = water-shite. I couldn’t understand why Mom was gawking outside; I knew for a fact that nobody was hovering in the streets because the
X Factor
results show was on the television. Mom was watching absolutely nothing happen outside. Nada. Heehaw. Strange. Weird. Cloud cuckoo land. What was the point of looking at nothing?

“Dylan, son, can we talk about something?” she said.

And I was just about to say “Shoot from the hip, big chick,” thinking this was going to be one of those colossal Mom and Me Chats. My sharp-as-a-tack instinct had kicked in, because Mom rarely called me “
Dylan”
and “
son”
in the same sentence without it being colossal. But, anyhow, I didn’t get to say “Shoot from the hip, big chick” because my pocket started bopping and singing “
No Sleep Till Brooklyn.”
I always got excited when Amir called because it meant there was something super serious to discuss. He probably wanted to be briefed on the developments of the watertight plan. We’d made a pact to only talk about it and never write anything in case our phone calls or text messages could be traced, or we had failed to delete anything incriminating (which means make us look like criminals). In this day and age, phones of nobodies like us could be tapped easy-peasy. Not texting any information was what I called proper detective procedure. I ran upstairs with the phone.

A few natters later everything was hunky-dory. I sat on my bed slapping Green between my hands and staring at the orange, blue, and gray sky outside. If I’d been a painter, this would have made a brilliant painting, but I’m crap at painting. I used to get billions of color-by-numbers books for Christmas, and they confused me to buggery. All the finished pictures seemed to be of horses, as well. What was the point of herds of blooming color-by-numbers horses?

I sat on my bed thinking of all those lined horses and how I’d never even petted a horse in my life (I’d be too scared anyway); how I’d never done a bunch of things in my life; of all the stuff I’d never get the opportunity to do. I realized that my
Cool Things to Do Before I Cack It
list was going down like a steel balloon, and if I couldn’t do the skoosh things like bring Dad home without the need of a body bag, get Michelle Malloy to want to do things to me (apart from punch me), or get the bold Amir a new best bud, how in the world of big racist pigs was I ever going to milk a goat or paint a cool picture of a sky? I stuck my cold ears into my head and blinked hard so they popped out again. Over and over I did this. I didn’t want to return downstairs to Mom, even though we were bestest pals again.

I knew what it was. She didn’t need to Colossal Chat with me. I saw it. With my own peepers I saw it. So I knew what our Colossal Chat was going to be all about. The Goddamn letters. The curse of our house.

I spied it on top of the fridge.

Dear Mrs. Mint.
Blah blah blah.
Come to our hospital on November 5 at 10 a.m. Bring your son, Dylan Mint.
Blah blah blah.
Signed:
the Doc.

My doc.

24

Disco

Usually when there was any kind of student event at ­Drumhill it was Crap with a capital
C
. School discos were always the worst, though, because they were full of people who couldn’t dance. Who really, physically, couldn’t dance, meaning everyone just stood around the edges of the hall staring at a big empty dance floor or their shoes. The dance floor was our gym, which we used for doing somersaults and being told not to climb on the bars. The DJ was always Mr. Comeford. If his music was food, it would have tasted like shite. He’d say things like, “Come on, Drumhill, don’t be square. Waggle yer wallies on this here dance flair.” There was lots of waggling, but we couldn’t help that. Our school discos were no different from being at school, except you got to wear different clothes, rubbish doof-doof music played when you were trying to have some top chat with your buds, and it was dark outside. It was funny to see the teachers in their going-out clothes. Miss Flynn wore a see-through blouse at the last one, and you could see her bra underneath. It was black and lacy. Miss Adams wore these big, shiny silver stilettos. Doughnut called them her Shag Me Shoes. Some of the teachers would drag the real spazzies up onto the dance floor and boogie with them. But they could only use their arms and waist, so it wasn’t actually, like, real dancing. It was a pure redneck for the teachers.

Wee Skittle told us he got into the disco at the normal school last year and it was full of people trying to get off with each other and everyone was dancing to banging hot tunes. He said that there were millions of stunning girls, full of the sauce, queuing up for man action. People were smoking the black stuff in the bogs, and the teachers were doing bugger all about it. Now
that
sounded more like it, apart from the wacky baccy in the bogs. It made our school discos look like a day out at confession.

The trousers of Dad’s suit fitted perfectly but the jacket smothered me at the shoulders. Dad’s muscles were way bigger than mine; his arms were like tree trunks and his shoulders like a really angry bouncer’s. Dad pumped them up at the gym three times a week. Afterward he had to go to the pub in order to hydrate himself or his gym efforts wouldn’t have been “worth a flying fuck to neither man nor mouse.” That was how it was in the army—there was no space for weaklings; weaklings would be left by the wayside. Or roadside, as it was known where Dad was. At least hydration problems didn’t happen with brain gym. Dad didn’t take me to the gym because he said I was too young.