In the story there’s a dog, and the dog is watching the man you see. They’re walking down a frozen river. “Oh, the Yukon valley is mighty pretty!” It’s minus 75. Just imagine. The dog should be worried about surviving but he’s watching the man. Because he’s scared of him. Because he gave him lashes. As they go along the man’s foot falls through the ice, and his feet get wet. He tries to light a fire to dry himself with the last of his matches, because he knows he’ll die if he doesn’t, but the snow on the tree above falls, putting the flames out, and the man goes mad and runs around and pulls at his hair because he knows now he’s going to die. He sits down and his fingers and face go black with the cold and his body begins to turn into a block of ice. The dog just watches him. And when he’s dead, still just watches him. To make sure. Then the dog sniffs him and smells the death and turns and runs off to where he knows there is heat and food. The dog didn’t care. He just watched the man die. The story is about the dog not the man. I figured that out.
The Jack London book came from Uncle Tommy’s house. I took it after he died. He only had a few books, that one and an encyclopedia in brown leather. Uncle Tommy smoked Rothman’s and I can still smell them on the pages though he’s been dead so long. I put the 10 volumes of the encyclopedia on the shelf in the sitting room so you saw them when you walked in. Sometimes, when I wondered about something, maybe somebody said something on the telly, I’d take down the encyclopedia and try to find the answer there. I think it was old though. They had pictures of golliwogs in it like they were animals in the zoo. But I liked having them up there on the shelf. A perfect 10, all the same colour and the same thickness. I didn’t read them often, but Jack London, I read him. Lots of times. Especially after Maria left. It was the cleaning, I suppose, that did it in the end.
When I told her about the time in hospital she said, “That’s why you do all this bloody cleaning, you know that? Because of that place.” Maybe she’s right. I hadn’t even been sick. It was a dare. Johnny Byrne’s brother said, “Go up to the gates and say you’re sick in the head. They’ll bring you in and give you a bath and a warm dinner.”
They let me in alright, but then they made me cross my arms and put on a backwards shirt and left me on my own in a room and locked the door. All there was was a thin mattress on the floor. It was like being kidnapped. In a while I heard shuffling of feet and a voice saying “you’re going to have treatment”.
When the doctor came the nurse gave me the shot. Sodium Amital she called it, and the doctor started asking me questions then about everything. I remember him asking about Da’s drinking. Da went to the pub on pay day, but so did everyone. My Ma and Da. They weren’t bad people. And I began to feel drunk and I remember saying “Happy Christmas doctor” and it was like I was going down a long dark tunnel, and I could hear his voice coming in and out. At the end, when it was over, he said, “You were a hard nut to crack, but we got to the bottom of it.”
I hardly remember him giving us a hug, let alone, well, you know. That. So when did he do it? I cottoned on later he couldn't have.
When I got out of that place I asked Joseph and James and Mary and Susan and the rest of them, but they said they didn’t remember Daddy spending any time on his own with any of us, how could he sure in a two-bedroomed house with seven children in it? I hardly remember him giving us a hug, let alone, well, you know. That. So when did he do it? I cottoned on later he couldn’t have. He hadn’t. But it was too late by then. Poor Da. Why had I told the doctor that lie?
That’s all a long time ago. That bath needs cleaning. My hands are red raw but a cleaning it will get. I found a holiday brochure in the post and looked at the pictures. We never went away. That was Maria’s biggest complaint. This house, in the forest. She couldn’t stand it. Needed to move, to see people. She spent longer and longer away until she didn’t come back. I didn’t mind so much at the beginning. Less dirt to clean. I’ve cleaned the house twice today so far, but my skin is shedding even as I go, leaving dust on everything behind me. When I get to the end, I have to begin again.
I clean the shotgun in the morning, with the radio on, and the kettle boiling, and at lunch, and last thing before I go to bed. I like holding its weight. Someone made it just right so it sits in your hands, balanced like. But I don’t like putting it down. When it’s sitting in the corner and I’m cleaning the rest of the house, it watches me, I swear to God, it watches me. Like the dog in the story.
******
In the drawn window blinds of the cramped consultation room there is a film of black dust. Sloughed off skin. Murphy absentmindedly imagines gathering it together, enough to make a black lifesize likeness of the late Dr O’Brien, the man he replaced, to sit behind him during consultations; a little warning of mortality to encourage the heavy smokers to cut down. Murphy looks now at the patient before him. A farmer in his 50s, the good clothes on for the visit to the doctor.
“It’s the back doctor.”
“Uh huh.”
“Lifting a sow into a trailer.”
“Well. Any pain down the legs?”
“No, thank God.”
“The waterworks okay?”
“Never better.”
“Get this prescription filled. One tablet three times a day. Take it easy on the weightlifting.”
“Can’t promise you doc, but I’ll try.”
“That’s all I can ask.”
Murphy sees him out, locks the door and lies down on the examination bench and closes his eyes to sleep for a few minutes between patients. He is woken by the phone ringing. A call has come in from the guards. They need a body declared. The nurse rings a taxi and tells the patients still waiting that there will be a long delay. When the car arrives Murphy puts a coat on and clambers in to the backseat. The driver stretches and turns the volume down on the stereo. He has collected Murphy before, but they haven’t really spoken. People out this way don’t talk much.
“It’s okay, I don’t mind the music,” Murphy says.
He turns it back up, the opening chords of Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song sound, 'chunk a chunk a chunk'. The driver's ID on the dashboard shows a tired, doughy faced man. From the backseat Murphy sees the last of his greasy hair pulled in to a ponytail. It's thin enough that he can see the scalp below, red and eczematous. From the stereo Robert Plant gives an animal wail, "awwawwawwwahhhhh".
They drive east, out of the town and towards the mountains. The earth in the fields they pass is turned and sowed, but the trees are skeletons. On the horizon a scar in the forest is still painted with frost. The houses become more sparse. It’s cold out here in the valley; it’s late March but it could be January. Three police cars parked in a forest entrance indicate the house.
“Must be serious?” the driver asks as they stop.
“Um hmm . . . can you wait for me here?” Murphy says.
“Sure.”
Everything is ordered just so; the white plastic garden furniture on the porch is symmetrically arranged, the yard has been raked, the tools put away
Murphy takes his pocket light and stethoscope from the backseat. Two policemen and a policewoman stand guard on the track leading to the house. They nod as he approaches and one hands him a pair of latex gloves. Murphy walks beyond them and the house comes in to view, a single-level pre-fab made of plastic and plyboard, as cheap a house as can be built. He notices though how everything is ordered just so; the white plastic garden furniture on the porch is symmetrically arranged, the yard has been raked, the tools put away. The surroundings trees have been trimmed back carefully, but beyond the yard the forest is a chaos of entwined branches that block out the watery sunlight. There is a smell in the air of kerosene and something indescribable.
Two ambulance men stand in the yard. The younger of the two is staring at the ground as he pulls smoke out of his bunched fist. His fingers, red with the cold, are trembling. A police sergeant wearing some kind of body armour is standing on the porch talking rapidly and seriously in to his phone as if there is something to be done. He sees Murphy and muffles the mouthpiece with his hand.
“He’s in there,” he says nodding towards a station wagon parked in the yard.
The car looks wrong. It feels too big for the cramped space. It has been reversed into the yard so that the boot faces the edge of the forest and the front the sitting room window. The windscreen is tinged darkly, but a form is visible sitting in the driver’s seat. Murphy opens the passenger door and the seatbelt alarm begins to ring. He sees first the man’s exposed lower jaw, hanging from his neck by a tongue of skin. Murphy’s eye is compelled by the empty space above that should contain a nose, his eyes, his forehead, his hair, but doesn’t.
He looks around the car, in some way thinking he will see the man’s face, still intact, stuck to a window or rolled up like a newspaper on the backseat. He sees only red and grey flecks of brain and skull covering the back window and a mound of dark flesh in the footwell behind the passenger seat. The body is untouched, the man’s shirt and jeans unmarked. He is barefooted and between his legs there is a shotgun. Must have pulled it with his toes, Murphy thinks. He straightens, pocketing his instruments and turns to the sergeant.
“No doubt about that one.”
“Nice of him not to make a mess,” the sergeant replies.
Looking for somewhere to sit and write his report, Murphy walks to the house. There is a smell of cigarette smoke, disinfectant and fried food as he enters the hallway. At the end of the hall, through the open kitchen door, he sees a star left over from Christmas hanging on the back window. On the hall wall is a cheap print of an oil painting, faded with age, showing a fishing boat in a bay, made tiny by the surrounding mountains.
In the living room an easy chair faces a television and a bookcase, empty save for an old encyclopedia. Murphy sits down and sees a holiday brochure lying open and face down on the floor, a pool of primary colour on the brown carpet. On the cover is an image of a family on a white sand beach, a young looking father with a washboard stomach and dark thick hair, an equally young looking mother, with perfect breasts and perfect teeth. Two blond children are knee deep in the surf, masks and snorkels around their necks, The family have their arms around each other and are smiling out at the camera. Murphy studies their faces.
Their teeth, their noses, their eyes, their cheeks, their jaws.
Sam McManus is a writer, doctor and co-director of Irrgrønn Productions, a company that produces music, theatre and literature events. He has previously had his journalism published in The Irish Times, Village Magazine and Irish Medical Times. This is his first published work of fiction.
