When Mr. Dog Bites (33 page)

“But that’s bonkers. Nobody gets the sack from the army, do they?”

“He was a bad man, Dylan. They had to sack him.”

“But what about all my letters?”

“He got them, I made sure of that.”

“But I wrote ‘Iraq’ on some of the envelopes.”

“They didn’t get sent to Iraq.”

“He wasn’t even in Iraq?”

“No, he wasn’t in Iraq.”

“So how did he get them?”

“I still sent them to him—I just changed the address on the envelopes you had put them in.”

“So he got them?”

“Yes, I presume so.”

“Why hasn’t he ever written back, then?”

“Only he can answer that.”

“Where did you send them to, if you didn’t send them to Iraq?”

Mom took one of the tea bags that were sitting on the table and squeezed so hard that all the tea juice came running onto the table and made a wee tea puddle, which was stupid because she would just have to wipe it clean later; I didn’t make the mess, so I wasn’t cleaning it up.

“Where did you send my letters to?”

“I sent them to your dad in Barlinnie.”

“Where?”

“Barlinnie,” she said again, which didn’t make any sense at all, as I didn’t know where or what it was. She could have said the word all day long and it wouldn’t have made a dent in my noggin.

“You can keep saying that, but I still don’t know where it is.”

“Barlinnie is a prison, son. Your dad’s in prison.”

MASSIVE CAPITAL LE
T
TER PAUSE.

I felt like my brain was going down a huge escalator toward a deep black hole. It took me a

long

long

long

long

time

to get the correct answer, but with the agony of thinking so hard I eventually got it. Dylan Mint, a true brain-gym master. A gold star for Dylan Mint.

27

Robber

Mom said she had to leave me with my head on the kitchen table for about half an hour before she plucked up the courage to come and give me one of her hug specials and explain to me what really happened with Dad, and why he had to go to prison and all that. When she kissed me full force on the cheek and told me she “loved me s­o­o­o­o­o­o­o­o­o­o­o­o­o­­o­o­o­o­o­o­o­o­o­o­o­o­ much” and that me, her, Tony the taxi driver, and the little monkeys were going to be one happy family, my tears connected with her tears and flowed down both our cheeks together, like best-bud tears holding hands all the way down to the chins. But when she dropped that bombshell bolt from the blue, that knockout punch, that sledgehammer to the balls, I badly needed some nasty-ass brain-gym questions to get me through the initial blast. My tongue blade wasn’t enough on its own.

THIS IS THE STUFF MOM TOLD ME:

When Dad was booted out of the army for being a major embarrassing pain in the arse to them, he couldn’t get a job anywhere for love or money. The eejit spent all his time at the pub getting sloshed or at the bookies spending all his little savings and dole money on mad things like betting on races and skiing. Anyway, he lost all his dosh super-rapido style because what he knew about races or skiing you could write on your eyelid. He was left with only his dole money to keep his head above the grass. Dole money’s crap, and the papers say that it’s only tramps, thickos, and lazy people who are on the dole and it’s a pure redneck to be on the dole, and that’s when I thought Dad had some nerve on him to say it was a redneck for me to go to Drumhill when
he
was on the bloody rock and roll. Anyway, he still managed to get mangled at the pub all the time and did some odd jobs for some guys he knew, putting bricks and other rubbish people didn’t want into a Dumpster. He started hanging about with these pure badass hoodlums, and that’s when he got into doing some real dodgy stuff. Mom didn’t know what because she was afraid to ask in case she became a human punching bag again, but her detective head told her that Dad was up to no damn good. Around that time she and Tony were graffitiing each other’s Facebook walls. All of a sudden Dad had new hip clobber, did his car up to the nines, and bought a top-of-the-tree cell phone, and drank tons of super-alcoholic booze, champagne, and Martini Lambrusco wine. He was going about the place thinking he was some kind of big-shot playboy James Bond type. Or the dog’s bollocks. Mom said I hadn’t a clue what was going on because Dad couldn’t be arsed with me, and anyway he wasn’t at home for days on end, so it was easier to tell me he was away on army duty so I wouldn’t ask too many Dylan Mint Questions.

Then one day when I was at school, police with motorbike helmets came to the door with a big red battering ram and dragged Dad out of his bed while he was sleeping off a massive booze binge and huckled him downtown to read him his rights, throw the damn book at him, and charge him with “aggravated armed robbery.” When Mom told me what “
aggravated”
meant, I wondered if there was any other form of armed robbery. The police do have funny names for crimes. The funny-ha-ha-belly-laugh thing was that Dad only had his underpants on when they huckled him downtown. Mom laughed because she said that she hoped he had on clean underpants that day. When she got to the station, Dad was wearing a bright orange railway worker’s suit and had a hangover that would have knocked a camel out. Dad didn’t want to see her and she didn’t really want to see Dad either, but the police had some serious questions for Mom and put her through the ringer for five hours and forty-two minutes. I remembered that day so well, because that was the day I had to remain in school for what seemed like ages and ages and ages for no reason at all and listened to Sigur Rós and Mogwai
in Miss Flynn’s office.

Dad the dafty head case had only gone and robbed a wee post office in a tiny borders village, tied up the man and lady who ran the wee post office, and smashed a baseball bat into the poor man’s legs until he gave up the information about where all the dosh was stored. He hooked the poor man four times on the face and gubbed the poor soul of a lady twice on the jaw AFTER they told him where the loot was. He got away with 763 quid (not very wow!) and hightailed it back to Glasgow
in his own car
. What a tool! The police huckled him the very next day because they saw him on the wee post office’s CCTV camera with his face uncovered. What a total tool! He put his hands up, said it was a fair cop, and pled guilty to the dastardly deed.

Because Dad was the world’s worst armed robber and the world’s biggest tool, he received a fifteen-year stretch in the notorious Barlinnie Prison. Fifteen years for 763 pounds. What a total bloody tool you are, Mr. Mint!

Out of the ninety-two teams in the English leagues, which teams have the shortest and the longest one-word team names?

A teasing

tease

of a

teaser,

especially as English leagues weren’t on any of my

“specialist subject” lists.

Long hard think.

Lots of staring and not talking.

Bury

and

Middlesbrough.

Brain Gym Champ Extraordinaire!

Game over!

28

Shopping

When I told the bold Amir that I wasn’t going to cack it after all because the docs at the hospital had made one almighty dick-up, I think he wanted to give me a bone-crushing bear hug. (I was too embarrassed to tell him that it was, in fact, my own almighty dick-up. I didn’t want my best bud to think I was a mad dumb dumb tosspot. So I kept schtum.) In the end he didn’t give me a bone-crushing bear hug, partly because we were out in the open, and partly because that’s what sausage jockey men do with each other before they get down to the real nitty gritty, and we weren’t in the slightest bit sausage. There was no nitty gritty to be had.

“It’s bl-bl-blooming annoying as well, though, isn’t it?” Amir said. He did some severe blinking, which he only did when he was upset or shocked or didn’t know the answers to easy questions in class, like when Mr. McGrain asked him what the capital of the USA was. Amir took a tortoise’s lifetime to answer New York. The class chuckled, and Amir blinked like the start of the movie in the cinema. “Do you not think it’s a wee bit bl-bl-blooming annoying?”

“How?”

“Because you won’t get to do all those cool things on your to-do list now.”

“I can still do them, Amir.”

“How?”

“It just means I’ll have more time to do them in, and when you think about it, I can add more top-notch things to my to-do list and do them over a longer period of time. See? That’s what makes living ace.”

“You think of everything, don’t you?”

“It’s up here for the thinking, down here for the drinking,” I said, pointing to my head and then to my willy.

Amir sniggered. “You’re men-men-mental, Dylan.”

“Want to know another thing?”

“What?”

“I can still have my
Cool Things to Do Before I Cack It
list, because the way I see it, we are all going to cack it anyway. That’s one hundred eighty-five percent fact.”

“Suppose.”

“I can add you to the list, if you want.”

“Can you do that?”

“Special rules for best buds.”

Then Amir put his thinking hat on. Danger Alert!

“So,” he said, still wearing his thinking hat. Abort! Abort! “You want to do
me
before you cack it?”

“Not on your nelly, Amir.” Sometimes Amir’s mind worked differently from other people’s. This was one of those times.

“So how could I be on your list, then?”

“I mean I could just change it to a
Cool Things for Dylan and Amir to Do Before They Cack It
list.”

Amir blinked and hit himself four times on the thigh. It was a pity that there was no mouth brace for him to wear. Mine was working wonders. Not so much as a tic session for a week or so. I sort of missed Mr. Dog. Not too much, but enough. Sometimes I made a few wee head shuffles on purpose so Amir wouldn’t feel all alone with the stuff he did. I could tell he liked my idea of the new list.

“I like that idea.”

“Excellente, capitano.”

“Can we change it a wee b-b-bit, though?”

“That’s what we just did.”

“No, I mean, can we change it again?”

“To what?”

“To
Cool Things for Dylan, Amir and Priya to Do Before They Cack It
?” he said like a wee lost laddie.

Since they met at the Halloween disco, Amir and Priya had become bf and gf. For a lassie, she was as sound as a pound. And because she was from India and Amir was from Pakistan, they did a lot of

you’re a pure fanny,

no,
you
’re a pure fanny.

You’re a stupid arsehole,

no,
you
’re a stupid arsehole

type banter to each other. Their parents didn’t know they were Velcro knickers, though. If they had known, a river of shit would have been unleashed. I promised never to open my gub about the bf–gf thing. They were a fantabulous pair, and I liked having Priya cut around with us; it was good to have another person’s mind and a woman’s opinion about stuff. One thing I didn’t like, though, was when they spoke to each other in their own dub-a-dub-a-dub language, because I thought that they were taking the micky out of me. Amir told me they weren’t, and I believed him. He was my best bud, after all, and trust is everything. The worst thing was when Amir and Priya said good night, and I had to wait around the corner of a shop, at the back of a bus shelter, at the front of the community center, or behind a tree while they snogged each other’s faces. The bold Amir always returned as if he had just come straight from Santa’s grotto. I wondered how poor Priya put up with his breath, but she smelled a wee bit like curry too, so I suppose everyone was as happy as Harry.

It was so much better when Michelle Malloy started to hang out with us, because then I had someone to talk to and didn’t feel like the big green hairy-suited monster. Me and Michelle Malloy didn’t kiss in front of people. We hadn’t done real kissing yet, though sometimes our hands would touch and we held them there for a while. We did some damn good talking about super-crazy stuff like parents being annoying, school being shit, normal people being idiots, walking like a wonky donkey, reality telly shows being utter crap, and music that old people listen to.

Michelle Malloy liked the fact that I didn’t call her SLUT BITCH any longer. Sometimes I’d text
nite nite slut bitch
to her as a joke, and she’d text back something like:
ur a prick mint! lol. nite hun
. It made my tummy tingle when Michelle Malloy said “
hun”
or “
babe”
or “
hey, you”
in her texts. She and Priya got on like a garage on fire, so everything was cushty jubbly.