Prologue
Seth Cullen killed a dog when he was eight.
The dog was a Rottweiler called Rashers. He belonged to Butcher Hegarty and he roamed free around the streets of Carrig Cove. The butcher insisted his dog was a gentle giant and wouldn’t hurt a fly, but we kids knew Rashers was mean because he curled his lip if you came too close. Then Rashers attacked Scrap, old Mrs Kehoe’s Yorkie. Scrap was torn up so badly the vet over in Ross said the kindest thing would be to put the wee dog down.
That summer was tense – our mothers were scared to let us play on the street. I remember Mam telling me Rashers had tasted blood now and he’d want to taste it again. She told me to get away from the dog if ever I met him.
‘Don’t look him in the eyes, Emer,’ she said. ‘Walk away, don’t run.’
But the day Rashers attacked, I ran. We all did.
Me and Fee and some other girls were skipping – ‘Banana splits, banana splits, banana splits, and you do it like this’. The Rottie came charging around the corner onto High Street, barrelling for the flying ankles of the skipping girl, Mary Ryan. She screeched as his teeth sank into her calf. I dropped the rope and I ran. We all ran.
Except Mary. Rashers had her pinned.
I scrambled after the others to the turn in the road. The other girls kept on running. I stopped, dared to look back. Rashers still had hold of Mary. He was swinging his massive chops from side to side and she was flailing on the ground, helpless as an old shoe.
I remember wanting to go to her but I couldn’t, couldn’t move, not an inch. I clutched onto the wall of that corner house like it might fly away on me. I watched Rashers do his worst, while Mary’s screams split the street and the girls behind me covered their eyes with their hands and the crooks of their elbows and begged me to tell them what was happening.
Seth Cullen came out of nowhere, a blond blur. He gave Rashers a quick thwack with his hurley stick as he ran behind him. Rashers dropped Mary with an outraged snarl and span in a circle to examine his backside. His huge head swung back to Mary and swung away again to look after the small figure racing up High Street.
The boy stopped, turned, waited.
The dog made his decision. He ran towards Seth, his big paws pounded the tarmac, his growl seemed to come up through the ground, come up through my bones. Rashers will kill that boy for sure, I was thinking as I left the safety of the wall and crept over to Mary.
The dog was nearly on Seth now. The boy stood there, his hurley stick in his right hand, staring Rashers right in the eyes, exactly like my mother had said not to.
‘Run,’ I whispered. ‘RUN,’ I yelled.
Seth didn’t run. I saw the slow raise of the stick in his right hand, the toss of the ball from his left, but when he struck, it was so fast my eye couldn’t follow the ball. I saw Rashers stop, as if he’d hit an invisible wall. His head flipped back, his legs buckled. He hit the ground like a sack of potatoes.
I looked at Seth, both his hands wrapped round the neck of the hurley, his arms and body coming back from the swing. I understood. He’d used the little ball as a missile. He’d fired it straight into the dog’s open jaws.
For a moment nobody moved, then everyone came at once. The girls I’d been skipping with inched out onto the road. The boys came racing across from the green. They all formed a circle around the dog and the boy with the hurley stick.
Mary’s leg was covered in blood. She whimpered in protest as I hauled her to her feet but I was determined to see what was happening. I put my arm around her and took her weight as we hobbled over to where Rashers had fallen. We pushed our way into the circle.
‘He’s dead,’ someone said.
‘He’s pretending,’ someone else said. ‘He’ll jump up in a minute and savage the lot of us.’
But there was no doubt. Rashers was dead. Up till then, in my imagination, death looked like sleep; that day I understood that death has its own particular stillness. Rashers’ eyes were glazed, his teeth were frozen in a surprised snarl, there was blood in the white spittle foaming about his mouth, his paws were limp and heavy on the ground. He was dead, dead, dead – as dead as the half cows hanging in Butcher Hegarty’s shop window, as dead as the pig’s head with the wizened apple on the cracked china plate, as dead as the sheep’s hearts on the metal tray, as the tripe and the rashers arranged in squelchy rows beside the heaps of dead pink sausages.
‘You killed him,’ Gus McRoy said. His eyes were big as balloons. ‘You feckin’ killed him.’
‘Stone dead,’ Kit Crosby said.
I stared at Seth. He was breathing hard and his hands still gripped the hurley stick, but his face at that moment was like no kid’s I’d ever seen. It was contorted into a grimace and Seth Cullen was lost somewhere inside it. His skin was drawn back so tight I could see his skull. His eyes were bulging and black. His lips, normally full and soft and pink against his pale skin, were thin and bloodless, stripped back from his teeth, brand new incisors too big, too sharp in his little-boy mouth.
‘Holy cow,’ Gus said, slapping his friend on the back. ‘What a shot! It must have been a hundred miles an hour.’
‘Shame to waste a good sliotar,’ Kit Crosby said. ‘I’ll get it for you, Seth.’
Kit knelt in front of Rashers’ gaping jaws and reached a shaking hand towards those bloody fangs. There were gasps around me as everyone realised what Kit was about to do. Louise O’Toole squealed, Mary dug her fingers into my arm, but we stepped closer.
Kit counted to three under his breath and pushed his hand between Rashers’ teeth. Mary wailed. The boys began to chant.
‘Out, out, get it out.’
A wildness ripped through us. It spread across Kit’s face, caught every boy and most of the girls too. Gus McRoy grinned, kicked the dead dog and whooped. Conor McNessa grabbed hold of Rashers’ tail and made it wag. The boys howled with laughter, the girls clutched their faces and each other.
‘Out, out, get it out.’
Kit began clowning with his hand inside the dog’s mouth. He let on he’d sunk his arm halfway down the dog’s throat and he couldn’t find the ball.
‘Out, out, get it out.’
He pretended Rashers had him.
‘LEMME GO, LEMME GO, LEMME GO!’ he yelled, thrashing around, eyes popping, fighting off Rashers with his free arm. We were all yelling, screaming, squirming. When he pulled his hand back out and held the little leather ball above his head, we cheered. He wiped it clean on the leg of his shorts and presented it to Seth, whose eyes were returning to their usual colours – one green, one blue.
I saw. I saw the rage slide off his skin like a passing shadow.
He tossed the killing ball up into the sky. We raised our faces to watch it fly above us, higher, higher, till it stalled at last and fell back, back to Seth’s outstretched hand. We cheered again.
Grown-ups arrived, running, frowning, calling out. Mary’s mother, mine, Fee’s, Seth’s. And Butcher Hegarty. He let out a roar when he saw his dog lying there. When he saw the blood-red ball, the hurley in Seth’s hand, the exultant look on Seth’s face, I thought he was going to belt him. But Mary’s mother began yelling, ‘Look at Mary’s leg. Look what that horrible brute of yours has done to my Mary’s leg. She’ll need stitches, there’ll be scars.’