Dead Dogs Read Online Free PDF

shoulders and now I’m guiding him around the black edge of the pitch. I don’t how I know it but I know that I can’t let any of the lads see Seán like this.
    The dressing rooms are twin cubes of gulag grey. They were supposed to be hooked up to the ESB last year but that didn’t happen. Now they’re dark cavities of cold concrete. Useless light-bulbs dangle from the ceilings, like dead planets hanging in the void. Away from the lights, away from the slap and suck of the training, the dressing rooms are empty apart from me and Seán. Around us the coiled piles of the lads’ kit-bags and clothes are little heaps of matt black in the sort of grainy charcoal that passes for light in here.
    In this no-colour light I’m watching Seán as he slumps onto one of the benches lining the walls and sobs slither out of hismouth. His face is buried in his hands and now my eyes have adjusted to the gloom enough to see a hanging festoon of snot and spit arcing down from his big fingers. Under the cold wet of my jersey I can feel the cold wet of my skin, and under my skin I can feel the hot gush of my heart’s every pulse.
    ‘What happened, Seán?’ I ask.
    I don’t like the detachment that’s entered my voice. I sound like I’m trying to talk someone down from a ledge.
    In the damp-concrete night of the dressing room my breath floats out from my face and away in a cloud of condensation. Seán’s head is bandaged round in the moist coils of his own despair. His breath billows through the cage of his fingers like he’s a trapped animal.
    Now I’m moving toward him, my studs chattering on the hard cement of the floor. They sound like tapshoes, brittle and clattering and for some reason they always, always, remind me of that sound your tooth makes just as the dentist finds it with his pliers. Like something splintering.
    Above the splintering of my footsteps just as I get near him, Seán goes, ‘You can’t tell anyone.’
    His face is still in his hands so to the crown of his head I say, ‘That depends, Seán. I can’t promise you anything until you tell me what’s wrong.’
    Fighting his sobs, he lifts his head and his eyes are the first things I see. They swallow the world. It’s like all the heartache, all the self-disgust that lives within Seán is now puddled in the holes of his eyes. They are bottomless shafts filled with an endless,aching dark. Looking into them it’s like I’m looking into Seán and all that I see in him is a hungry universe of nothingness.
    But from these blank, black sinkholes a whole world of tears is sluicing down his face. His lank hair is plastered across his forehead and his mouth is whorled about with deep lines of grief. His lips are working now but nothing’s coming out except for drool and this weird gurgling sound he’s making. Words want to get out of his throat but Seán’s too shattered to let them.
    I kneel down in front of him and I can feel the mud caking to my legs crack and chasm and tug at the hairs on my calves and thighs. I can feel the damp grit of the floor beneath my kness. The studs of my boots scrape the concrete and score lines across it.
    I’m looking into the swallowing dark of Seán’s eyes and I go, ‘It’s me, Seán. You can tell me. We always help each other. You’re my best friend.’
    Seán snorts a clotted ball of phlegm back up into his sinuses and he reaches his big paw out to catch the front of my jersey.
    His slack mouth works without any words for a second and then he says, ‘I can’t tell you. You don’t want me for a friend. Nobody wants me for anything. I’m a fucking freak.
    And then he untangles his fist from my jersey and he hits himself in the forehead so hard I’m surprised I don’t see blood.
    I’m reaching for his arm and I catch it on the second attempt but at the same time I’m turning my head to look out through the gap in the metal shuttering that covers the windows. Through the slot in the sheet steel I can see the caustic