Even the Dogs: A Novel Read Free Page B

shallow impression of Laura’s body on her mattress slowly fades. The scent of her lingers in the hollow fibres of the rumpled pillow, and in the turned-back duvet, and in the vests and pants and t-shirts which spill in bitter fistfuls from her drawers. The book she was being read is left unfinished, broken-backed on the floor. Dust settles. And then the two of them are gone.
     
    He wakes up. Robert, this is. He wakes up, and every day it seems as though they’ve only just left. He wakes with a jolt, as if at the sound of the softly closing door, and remembers that the two of them are gone.
     
    The room is suddenly much darker. We sink to the floor. The view from the window is clouded by an unfamiliar condensation on the glass. The heat from the lights and the voices and the bodies of the men and women who have been in the room takes a few hours to fade. As it does so, and as the whole flat begins to cool, the condensation hardens into thin tracings of ice, and splinters of light from the dawn outside crack slowly into the room.
     
    We get up, and we leave the flat. We’re not sure what else we can do. In the street, the men slide Robert’s body into a van with darkened windows, and we all climb in beside him. There isn’t enough room, but it seems like the right place to be. In the circumstances. They slam the doors closed. The air inside is hushed and still, the steel floor shining with cold. Two of the men stand outside, talking to the younger policeman and the photographer, and the man with the dark tangled hair. At the top of the steps, the woman with the checked dressing gown is standing with her arms folded, watching, the older policeman beside her. People have appeared on the walkway, and at windows on the upper floors. A group of children are standing on the pavement, pushing each other, shouting questions. The two men, and the younger policeman, climb into the front of the van, and there’s a rush of cold damp air before they close the doors. They start the engine, and the tyres slip and squeak as we drive away down the hill. We look back, and we see the garage roof behind the flat, where Danny jumped and slipped and ran off looking for someone to tell. And we see Danny

two
    They carry his body through the city at dusk and take him away to the morgue.
     
    And we see Danny, stumbling away from the garages at the back of the flats, tumbling down the hill like he’s about to fall, rubbing at his cheeks with the backs of his hands in great angry gestures which look almost like punches, wiping at the tears which haven’t yet fallen from a face still twisted with fear. Einstein beside him, snapping and whining and trying to keep up, held back as always by the weight of her broken
     
    Had to find someone and tell them was all he could think. Had to find Laura and let her know, had to find Mike. But tell her what, him lying on the floor like that, one leg bent wrong under the other and one hand over his mouth like he could smell himself beginning to rot. Tell her what, he died peacefully, they took him in and did everything they could but in the end there weren’t nothing to be done. He didn’t suffer. Couldn’t tell her that. Didn’t know much about it but knew it weren’t nothing like that. He had all his friends around him when fuck
     
    Through the darkened windows of the van we watch him, slipping and hurrying down the hill to the main road and the underpass and through the darkened windows we see the city passing us by, whole streets abandoned to the cold, faint shadows moving behind curtains backlit by a flickering pale blue. Christmas decorations dip and swing between telegraph poles and skeletal trees, hang from garage doors, trail from the lids of bins spilling over with crumpled paper and packaging foam. Coloured lights snap on and off in front-room windows, and around shop-front displays, and we follow him down to the bottom of the
     
       Danny, were you the last one to see him?
    Fuck