Jon McGregor - Even the Dogs

Shall we indeed. Shall we bollocks like there’s a choice.

Who wants to open up the discussion.

Who’s got something they feel they can share.

Well, Mike, perhaps you’d like to begin, perhaps you’d like to begin by maybe thinking about when you first started having these unusual ideas. What makes you think they’re unusual pal. Well, they’re new to me, let’s put it that way, they seem unusual to me. You want to start paying more attention pal this stuff’s everywhere. Well, let’s try putting it another way, let’s perhaps say when did you first start having ideas that you realised other people considered unusual or difficult or strange. All this, on and on, the doctor or whoever he was talking in riddles and circles while the others all talked at once over the top of him and it was impossible to make any sense.

Waiting for the hour to pass so the joker would hand over the script.

Robert and Steve, back then. Sitting there in the smoke and the gloom of Robert’s empty flat. The curtains closed and the windows jammed shut and the clearing up long forgotten. Like a two-man support group or something. This was when, years back. Robert telling Steve about his wife taking off with the kid, and Steve telling him to forget about it, something like that always happens sooner or later. They’re never happy though are they mate, he said, and Robert laughed and said That’s about the fucking size of it.

Robert’s laugh, the last time we heard it, was like a ruined accordion, wheezing and guttural, reeking of damp and ash. Steve doesn’t remember it being like that when they first met, but he can’t be rightly sure. Can’t be rightly sure of much, now. There are too many gaps.

And when Laura got out of that taxi and went in through the window. Two days before Christmas. The things she said. She was, what, leaving him all over again. Or it was something else, like not leaving but just. What was it.

Is there anything further you’d like to share with the group.

Didn’t take Steve long to tell Robert he’d been in the army. Didn’t take him long to tell anyone that, as it happens. Told Ant before they’d even had their first drink together. Served in the Falklands, he said. Slept out on Mount Tumbledown a good few nights. Woke up in the rain and looked down across the sodden moorland at the tin roofs of Port Stanley, the long narrow bay, the sheep on the hill, the fishing boats in the harbour, and wondered what the point of all that was for. It was a pissing contest, he told Robert, and Maggie won, and never mind all the boys who got left down there. Near enough crying when he told Robert this, and Robert didn’t say a thing.

Ant never said much neither.

Didn’t take much for Steve to start crying, once he’d had a drink. Brimful with tears that he kept fighting back, and his dark sunken eyes would catch the light and shine. My country lied to me, he would say. Clenching his fists. The first tears spilling down the webbed red lines of his face. They told me to fight for decency and rights and the rule of law and all that bollocks and it was all over nothing, it was over sheep and grass and wind, it was a pissing contest and nothing else.

Is that right mate, Robert would say, is that right is it mate.

Ant mostly gouching out so he didn’t have much of a reply.

My country lied to me, Steve would repeat. Seemed like every time he had a story about the army he ended up with those words. My country lied to me. Like he expected any different.

First company Steve had kept for a while but it didn’t take him long to get used to it. Never would have told anyone this but one of the things he liked about being in the army to be honest was sleeping in the barracks and the camps. The sound of other men breathing in the middle of the night. Don’t mean nothing like that, just, it felt like some kind of comfort or something, in a way. Some kind of security.

First company Robert had kept for a long time as well. Since Yvonne and Laura had left.

Keep waiting to hear him breathe, now, behind that door, in the middle of the night. Used to hear him breathing all the time in the flat, his lungs creaking away under the strain. Took a lot of effort just sitting there, it sounded like. Holding up all that weight. Be a long time waiting to hear him now. We know that but we stay here anyway. With the clock, and the sinks, and the tiles on the sloping floor. Waiting for what.

Two of them used to wake up early and get straight to looking for a drink. Some days it took longer than others. Had something left over from the night before if they were lucky. But some days they were dry, and the giro hadn’t turned up, or had been spent too quick, and they owed too many people to get a quick sub anywhere. Some days it felt like they spent hours tramping around town trying to get something sorted, snapping at each other like two dogs shut up in a room. Like two men in a lifeboat or something. All that water and not a drop to drink. Jesus, the thirst, the trembling, heaving thirst. Can’t argue with a thirst like that. Can’t stop to think whether knocking over one of the old Irish blokes who drink behind the pavilion is all right or not. Only did it a couple of times. Robert got him talking, Steve clocked him round the side of the head, and they both grabbed the cans and ran. Which was them sorted for the day. Weren’t so much running as walking quicker than they usually did. What you might call scurrying or something. Fucking, scuttling. No one coming after them anyway. What would they do. Back to the flat and the two old armchairs Steve had found in a skip and not saying anything for a while until they’d made some kind of dent in that thirst. And then more or less laughing about it. And carrying on like nothing much had happened. Drinking and talking and telling tales.

Like Steve saying I was at boarding school for ten years and it weren’t no different from the army, making beds and running across fields and getting shouted at.

Like Robert saying Nine years we were married and she must have hated me for half that time and I never knew, I never fucking knew.

Like Steve talking about going to India to find his brother. Saying I’ve just got to get my passport sorted out first, shouldn’t be too complicated. And pick up these postcards I’ve got from him, they’re in a bag of stuff I’ve got in a hostel down in Cambridge. They’re saving it for me, they should be. And these postcards had an address on them, I can probably look it up on the internet or something. Once I’ve got my passport sorted out. There’s some issues to resolve first. Steve talked about going to India almost as much as he said My country lied to me. Didn’t he.

Like Robert saying You’d have thought she would have given me some fucking warning or something.

Who wants to open up the discussion.

Everyone sitting there looking at their feet or picking at their nails or stretching their arms out above their heads and leaning back to look at the ceiling. And the counsellor or whoever going You won’t find the answers up there. Facilitator. Enabler, whatever. I’m just here to enable the discussion. It’s up to you where we take things today. Why don’t we start with you, Ben?

And where was Ben. Sitting in the custody suite, still handcuffed, waiting to be processed by a custody sergeant in no mood to rush. The cells full of hangovers and black-eyes and Ben starting to jitter already. Thinking about how long it was going to take to get out, and where he could score when he did. Wondering where Mike had got to once he’d sent him in on Jamesie like that. Wondering what sort of a team that made them after all.

And the same time or near enough there was Steve, sitting on his bed, watching Ant with the spoons and the lighter and all the rest of it. A bed, more like a mattress on the floor. But better than most of the places he’d slept in. Taking off his boots and laying out his socks to dry and massaging his feet with the rough calluses of his hands. Waiting.