When Mr. Dog Bites

by Brian Conaghan

  “FAT WHORES.” Two women carting their shopping bags around, laughing and squealing like wildcats. I saw a packet of biscuits popping out of one of their bags.

  Kilmarnock. Two–nil Mint.

  “SHUT IT, ARSE BANDITS.” Two guys in business suits walking behind me were talking massively loud to each other. I think their job was to show people around houses and try to get them to buy them. How dull would that be?

  Dundee United. The first three were easy-peasy because they played in the top league. Three–nil Mint.

  “TAKE A PICTURE, GINGER CUNT FUCKER.” A woman with red hair walked past me and stared and stared and stared. I think she liked the threads.

  East Fife. That one was a toughie. Took a lot of thought and made me forget about many of the people walking past. Good stuff. Four–nil Mint.

  “KIDDIE FUCKER.” A priest getting into his car looked at me and smiled.

  I thought really, really hard about the last one. Put my head to the ground and entered the brain gym.

  East Stirlingshire. Wow! What a legend. Five–nil Mint. This boy simply couldn’t be beaten. This boy’s brain was way too advanced for a seat in the normal school up the road.

  But, phew, I was chuffed to see Amir waiting on me.

  “It doesn’t look like we’re dressed up for Halloween,” Amir said.

  “That’s the plan, Amir,” I said.

  “It’s not really fancy dress, is it? We should have gone as Transformers or a bunch of grapes or something. I feel as if I’m going to court in this clobber.”

  “Stop being Moaning Minnie, Amir. We look Cool for Cats.”

  “W-w-where’s Waldo would have been a good costume too.”

  “He wasn’t from Pakistan,” I said.

  “Neither was Mr. Orange,” Amir said, smiling because he knew he’d done me over the backseat. He did his get-it-right-up-your-kipper face. “Anyway, I decided not to go as Mr. Orange.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause he’s the police informer. I don’t want to be a grass.”

  “So who are you now, then?”

  “Mr. Blonde,” Amir said, shrugging his shoulders up as if it was, like, dead cool to be Mr. Blonde.

  “But Mr. Blonde is a mentalist.”

  “I don’t care if he is—he’s way cooler than Mr. Orange.”

  “But he’s more mental than anyone at our school, and he dies in the end and cuts off some guy’s ear and goes to set him on fire. I mean—”

  “So?” Amir said, kicking his shoes off the ground, scuffing them up and looking dead uncool. I think Amir was nervous.

  “Are you okay, Amir?” I asked.

  “I just think we lo-lo-look rubbish.”

  “We look the bomb.”

  “But everyone will be dressed as famous people or superheroes or sport stars. No one will know who we are.”

  “Of course they will.”

  “I was going to go as Sachin Tendulkar at the last minute, or Imran Khan,” Amir said.

  “Who?”

  “What do you mean, ‘who’? They’re world-fa-fa-famous cricketers.”

  “But nobody would have a five-to-two who they are.”

  “They would in Pakistan, though.”

  “But we’re not in Pakistan, Amir, so I doubt the mongs at Drumhill will know who they are.”

  “Whatever. Come on, let’s go.”

  “After you, DICKHEAD . . . Shite, I didn’t mean that, Amir.”

  “’S okay. Sometimes I ca-ca-can be.”

  “You’re not.”

  “Are you going to try to pork Michelle Malloy again?” Amir asked.

  “She won’t be there.”

  “You think?”

  “She’s too good for Halloween discos at Drumhill.”

  “Is she now?”

  “She says they’re for major losers.”

  “Well, I’d say anyone who’s on their sofa watching Come Dine with Me and not at the Halloween disco is the real major loser, if you ask me.”

  “How do you know she’s watching Come Dine with Me?”

  “I have a good brain for these things, Dylan. Trust me, amigo, she’ll be glued to Co-Co-Come Di-Dine with Me.”

  “If you say so, bud.”

  “Who’s the major loser now?”

  “Well . . .”

  “And who won’t be getting the dagger tonight?” Amir said, slapping me a cracker on the back. “My main man, Dylan Mint, that’s who.” An ouch moment.

  “Let’s get a move on.”

  There was tons of activity in the playground. Two nurses were chatting to a scarecrow and a zombie. A cowboy and Bob the Builder were having a laugh with a hip-hopper—or it could have been a rapper; I don’t really know the difference—and a big giant iPod. A fireman was chasing an alien around with his pretend hose, using it as a big whopping willy. And a nun was trying to fix an oversize baby’s nappy on her friend. It was bloody brilliant and bizarre. A bit like a Glasgow version of the bar scene from Star Wars.

  An Amy Winehouse song was playing; we could hear it in the playground. It was the one about people trying to tell her to cut out all the drugs and demon booze in her life and get herself down to the clinic quick style so she could clean herself up from the mess she was in. Mom liked singing it when it was on the radio. I think Amy should have listened to all those people. I bet the poor girl just didn’t have the time to make three parting wishes to herself. Shame! It wasn’t a dance number, though. Mr. Comeford was probably trying to be all hip and with it.

  Miss Flynn was semidancing at the door. She was obviously on door and make-sure-the-nutters-don’t-do-mad-things-in-the-playground duty. Her feet were stuck to the ground, but her hips jiggled a bit. She had her blouse on. The one that you could see some of her bra through. Black. I bet she bought it in M&S or H&M or T.J. Maxx. I sometimes squinted my eyes to check out the lady section when I went to these shops with Mom. These shops sell all the silk and lacy stuff that make a woman feel sexy and important. We could smell her perfume when we got closer.

  “Hi, guys. Let me guess,” Miss Flynn said, looking the two of us up and down.

  “I bet you’ll never get it, miss,” I said.

  “No one will,” Amir said to me, not with a smiley face.

  Miss Flynn was playing the game of fake-thinking, as if she gave a flying fudball what we were dressed like.

  “I think I’ve got it, lads,” she said.

  “What?” I said.

  “The Blues Brothers,” she said.

  “Who?” I said.

  “Who?” Amir said.

  “Never mind,” she said, and then did her fake-thinking game again. “Are you a couple of bouncers or minders?”

  “Nope,” I said.

  “Oh,” Miss Flynn said, with a wee bit of disappointment in her voice.

  “Sorry, miss,” I said.

  “These costumes are rank,” Amir whispered to me through his I’m-being-a-miserable-bastard-tonight teeth.

  “One more guess, miss, and then we’ll tell you.”

  “Okay, one final one,” Miss Flynn said. She pretended to be putting an invisible hat on her head and said, “I’ll need to put my thinking hat on for this one, though,” as if she was talking to a couple of four-year-olds or a pair of Drumhill’s chief window-lickers. She made her eyes into two wee slits to show us that she was thinking like a woman possessed. “I think I have it now,” she said.

  “Who?” I said.

  “Who?” Amir said.

  “Are . . . you,” she started saying, but there was a dead long pause between the “Are” and the “you.” Then she repeated the words. “Are . . . you . . . characters . . . from . . . a . . . famous . . . film?”

  “Yes, w-w-we are, miss,” Amir said, all excited.

  I stood behind Amir and looked at Miss Flynn straight in the eye. Wowzers! I did some silent barking. Not Mr. Dog barking; this was just me trying to give Miss Flynn a clue as to who we were. I really hoped that she had seen the film. T
hen I pretended to drink some water and did some more pretend barking. It was turning out to be, like, the worst game of charades ever. Miss Flynn looked confused.

  “Who, miss? Who?” Amir said, as if he were about to pounce on Miss Flynn’s see-through blouse with the excitement.

  I pulled my ear out as wide as possible with one hand and with the other I pretended to slice the bugger off. Amir clocked me but he thought I was just doing my ear thing and luckily didn’t say anything.

  “Aw, lads, I knew right from the start. I was just pulling your legs,” Miss Flynn said.

  “Who then, miss?”Amir said.

  “Well, I’m not sure exactly which color each of you are, but you’re both definitely from the film Reservoir Dogs.”

  “Brilliant, miss,” Amir said. “I thought nobody would have a five-to-two who we were.”

  “A what?”

  “A clue; it’s cockney rhyming slang, miss.”

  “Well, Amir, everyone will know who you are, I’m sure.”

  When we walked past Miss Flynn, the smell from her makeup/perfume blend made my nose wiggle. We gave each other one of those I-know-that-you-know-that-I-know looks. My favorites. I wanted to thank her. When we were well past her, me and Amir gave each other another one of those I-know-that-you-know-that-I-know looks. Then we put our shades on, ready for some serious disco action.

  “It’s hard to see with these shades on,” Amir said.

  “So take them off.”

  “Then I won’t look so cool.”

  We both took our shades off.

  “I’m going to get a drink. Want a Coke?”

  “Get me a lemon Fanta. I’m just going to hang here and see if the hot-hot-hotties come to me,” Amir said.

  “Good luck with that,” I said, and plodded off to the bar.

  Well, it wasn’t exactly a bar, more like a couple of desks shoved together with rough white paper covering them; the same white paper that we put on the cafeteria tables when the school had its Christmas lunch. A square metal money box and some plastic cups were on the “bar.” Mr. Grant was barman.

  “What will it be, sir?” Mr. Grant said.

  “Can I have a vodka tonic and a piña colada, Mr. Barman?” I said.

  “We’ve just this minute run out of vodka and colada, sir.”

  “What about a G and T?”

  “No G left, I’m afraid.”

  “Give me a pint of snakebite, then.”

  “All the snakes have slithered away.”

  “Shame, that. Give me a Bud?”

  “Gone.”

  “Becks?”

  “Finito.”

  “Wicked?”

  “Out.”

  “Water?”

  “Now that we have gabillions of.”

  What we were doing was called role play; we did this all the time in Mr. Grant’s drama class, and I was quite good at it—he told me so. I was thinking that when I finished school maybe I could become the first actor with my syndrome to be on the silver screen or on the telly. But I tried not to think these thoughts ’cause that was when I became super sad, and this was the big Halloween disco bash and the last thing I wanted to do was get all sad and misery guts. I laughed really loudly so that Mr. Grant would realize our role play was over and done with. If I hadn’t laughed, we could have gone on all night with it, and there were far too many things to be getting on with for me to be standing and role playing with Mr. Grant all evening. Also, he had to be a barman. For real.

  “What can I get for you, Dylan?”

  “Can I have a Coke and a lemon Fanta, sir?”

  There was no fridge, so all the sugar drinks were stacked up behind him. All warm and fizzy. In my mind some of the real morons at Drumhill shouldn’t have been mixing their medication with drinks like these. Could have been a disastrous concoction.

  “One Coke and one lemon Fanta, coming right up.”

  Mr. Grant put the drinks on the desks/bar and poured them into two plastic cups. I wasn’t looking forward to the drinks.

  “Thanks, sir.”

  “Who are you supposed to be, then? One of the Blues Brothers?”

  “No, I’m one of the characters from Reservoir Dogs.”

  “Oh, I see. Well, very good, Dylan, very good.” I could tell that Mr. Grant had never seen the film.

  The Beyoncé song where she talks about having a rock the size of a grape on her finger was playing. This was a song all the girls seemed to love; they loved it so much that they all pointed to their ring fingers when they were dancing as if all the men should go out and spend their hard-earned cash on a bloody silly sparkle ring. Stupid song. Stupid dance. Stupid message. And, as I expected, all the dudes and walking wounded hovered around the edges of the dance floor/gym hall with nothing to do.

  “This is pure shite. There are no chickadees here,” Amir said.

  “It’s still early. Cool the jets, Amir.”

  We checked out the dance floor, sipped our drinks, and tried to sweat coolness. In America they would say we were working it or that we were damn fine.

  “Look at the state of you two fannies.” The voice was so loud it boomed above Beyoncé. Doughnut was there with a couple of third-year guys. He was dressed as a punk rocker. The third-year guys were dressed as a pirate and the pope. A punk, a pirate, and the pope. What a shower!

  “Look at the nick of you,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Amir said.

  “So who are you supposed to be, then?” Doughnut asked.

  “Reservoir Dogs characters,” I said.

  “Really?” Doughnut seemed impressed with this. “Really? You’re from Reservoir Dogs?”

  “Yeah, really.” Amir was no longer scared of Doughnut since our soccer disaster.

  “Cool fucking film, dudes,” Doughnut said. Scottish people shouldn’t say words like “dudes” and “awesome” and “bitch”—it doesn’t sound right. Singing in an American accent was okay, but Doughnut sounded like a pleb. Secret: I did it too sometimes, but never in company. “So, what’s happening, boys?” he asked.

  Me and Amir looked at each other as if he were talking to someone else. Was Doughnut trying to be our Halloween disco buddy? He called us “boys,” as if we were two of the boys or part of his gang of boys.

  “Erm . . . Nothing much; just watching the dance floor,” I said.

  “No bitches in here yet?” Doughnut said.

  Amir laughed, and I knew why.

  Doughnut turned to the pirate and the pope and said, “Fudballs, go to the bar and ask that shirt-lifter Grant to give me a Coke on the rocks.”

  The two third-years did what they were told. Fudballs. I’d never be a slave to anyone. Dad’s advice was to scud someone full force in the coupon if they were taking liberties with friendship. I thought Doughnut was taking liberties here with the pirate and the pope.

  “What’s your tipple, Amir?” Doughnut asked. For him to even say a sentence to the bold Amir without using the word “Paki” or “Pak-man” in it was a rip-roaring success. It made me happy inside for Amir.

  “What?” Amir said. He spoke for me also.

  “What are you drinking?”

  “Erm . . . Just Fanta.”

  “What kind?”

  “Erm . . . Lemon.”

  “Faggot Fanta!” Doughnut said.

  “No, it’s not,” Amir said.

  “No, I didn’t mean you were a faggot, Amir. I mean your drink needs some jazzing up.” Then he turned to me. “What are you guzzling, D-Boy?”

  “D-Boy”? I guessed that meant “Dylan-Boy,” and the D was an abbreviation. This was proper buddy talk. I wasn’t quite sure of D-Boy as my new nickname, but I didn’t want to tell Doughnut to blow town, because he was making a real effort to act all chum chummy, even if it did sound like he was reading all his sentences from an American film script.

  “Just Coke,” I said.

  “Fuck that for a game of Scrabble. You want to put some of this in it, spunk it up a bit.”

>   Me and Amir sniggered at the thought of Doughnut spunking up our drinks. The image of it was rot-rot-rotten in the nap-nap-napper. Doughnut by this time had gone into the inside pocket of his punk leather jacket and produced two bottles. A half bottle of vodka and an odd-shaped bottle of something else.

  “What’s that one?” I asked, pointing to the odd-shaped bottle.

  “Grappa,” Doughnut said.

  “What the bloody hell is that? It sou-sou-sounds like toilet cleaner,” Amir said.

  “Crapper,” I said.

  “It’s fucking dee-licious. It’s from Greece or Italy or some fucking spic country or other,” Doughnut said.

  I wondered if he meant a clean country, as in spic-and-span.

  “Where did you get it?” Amir asked.

  “I swiped the bitch from my dad’s garage. He won’t have a scooby—he’s totally clueless.”

  “And what do you do with it?” I asked.

  “Are you serious, D-Boy?”

  “I mean, do you put it in your drink or do you swig it neat?” Check me out, “neat.”

  “Whatever floats your boat, D-Boy, whatever floats your boat. You guys want some?”

  I flashed my eyes to Amir—he caught my eye—then to the bottles, and again to Amir. I could tell that he didn’t want to be the one who backed down. Me neither. Neither of us wanted to be the one who was the weak son of a gun. But Mom would swing for me if she caught me drinking, as would the docs; it was super dangerous to booze while taking my type of medication. I knew for a fact that Amir’s dad would gut him like a junkyard dog if he caught him pissed as a fart. I didn’t think people like Amir or his family drank anyway. I scrunched up my face and looked at Amir. He understood the sign as only best buds do. Sometimes we had that ESP Twilight Zone stuff going on. Bonkerinos!

  “Erm . . . I’m not sure, Doughnut. I’m not supposed to take any booze with my medication,” I said. That was my way out of the teenage humiliation of not being cool. I was Rubik’s Cube square.

  “What about you, Amir? Your lot must like a bit of grappa, being foreign and all that.”

  “Not for me, man. My guts would be in bits all night, and I’d have to spend the rest of the disco in the l-l-lavvy.” He didn’t say that his dad would have knocked all the shite out of him if he got caught. He might even have kicked ten lumps of shite out of Doughnut, too, but then he’d be in the papers for battering a spastic, which would mean they’d have to flee the country because of all the backlash.