Dead Dogs Read Free

Well Ritalin ups the levels of catecholamines while, at the same time, it increases your heart rate, blood pressure and body temperature so that you’re more alert and you concentrate better. Ritalin basically stops you focusing on irrelevancies and simultaneaously suppresses hunger and fatigue .
    What this doesn’t tell you is that the spark that lives in people goes out when they take this stuff. I used to play football with Stephen Pepper and now he doesn’t play anything. He’s just sad all the time.
    You take a messed-up teenager, convince them they have a disease and then medicate them until their personality changes to fit your world. The teenager you’re left with isn’t the teenager you started out with. Instead of discipline you get chemical lobotomies and instead of children you get automotons.
    This is the reason I don’t think the tablets are working. Seán hasn’t changed. He’s stopped doing things. He’s stopped acting when whatever wrongly wired fuse he has sparks; but I don’t think it has anything to do with the tablets. Deep down he hasn’t changed. Not at all.
    We’re sitting in the yard this one day a while ago and Daniel O’Hara’s five-year-old brother comes in. It’s lunch time and he must have come in to show his big brother the labrador pup that’sgambolling ahead of him at the end of its leash. The lolloping puppy is followed by its lolloping master and Mrs O’Hara stands at the school gates, smiling.
    Within seconds, everyone’s around this puppy like they’ve never seen anything like it. Some of the Sixth Years amble across, cast their jaded eyes over the scene and then amble off again. If it’s not a porn mag they’re not interested. The rest of us are, though, and hands are reaching out to stroke, to pet, to ruffle the pup’s ears. And, in all this, nobody notices that Seán just stands there. Watching.
    Daniel O’Hara arrives. His little frame is charged with indignation and his delicate head is creased pugnaciously around a frown. He’s trying to push everyone out of the way and he’s roaring , ‘Get the fuck away from my dog, ya pack of spas!’
    At the sound of his voice the puppy quails. It’s velvet head droops and a moment later our group gives way. Daniel’s grinning. He’s grinning because he obviously hasn’t seen his Ma bearing down on him like a storm front. She is the blackest thunderhead on the darkest night and she’s spitting lightning.
    ‘Daniel O’Hara! How dare you use language like that in front of your little brother!’
    Then she’s grabbing him by the ear and thumping him in the back and then Daniel starts to cry.
    We spill away, laughing. And I know that Daniel knows nobody will ever, ever, forget this. For the last two years of his school life, Daniel O’Hara will never be able to tell a joke or jeer or take pleasure at someone else’s expense. The ring of boys andgirls gathered around that puppy will be a noose he’ll never, ever, be able to shake off.
    And, laughing, I turn to find Seán and, laughing, I turn again.
    There’s Daniel and his mother. There’s his brother, looking confused and in shock at his warring family. So where’s Seán? And where’s the puppy? Where the fuck is the puppy?
    And now, not laughing, I turn to run.
    I know Seán couldn’t have brought the puppy into the school so now I’m running around to the side of it. There’s a bristling evergreen hedge at the side but there’s a narrow pathway between it and the sports hall. The pathway opens out onto the back of the school and this horrible warren of prefabs that we have to spend half our time in. The prefabs are like ovens in the summer because most of the windows only open four inches before getting stuck, and they’re like freezers in the winter because when the windows get stuck you can’t unstick them. Every day we sit in these makeshift classrooms with bellying ceilings and watch hundreds of empty four-bedroom semis rear above the trees across