The evening had started like so many other Friday evenings that summer, with us in a pub drinking to forget the week’s work. We finished half and hour early and started; which is earlier still if you think that this meant we finished at two-thirty. We were onto our third pub and were still only 900 yards from the student halls that we had spent our summer cleaning. For all three of us it was a temporary job, work to line our pockets before we re-entered into a notion of where or what our lives were going to be, money to keep us going and to keep drinks in front of us.
It was now six-thirty and I’d guess you’d really say that our evening had started in the afternoon when we’d had our first pint. It was certainly colouring our experiences now as the normal, usually jovial, dissection of our colleagues’ flaws had drunkenly turned nasty and was making me feel a little uncomfortable.
On any other Friday we would’ve gone our separate ways by this stage but the normal plans to meet other friends or girlfriends had disappeared and this big slab of Friday night-time had opened up in front us, we had decided we were going to fill it by getting shitfaced together. It was a decision I was now regretting. Normally I drink with them for a couple of hours before cart-wheeling into town to meet my other friends, my ‘real’ friends; men I was at school with. People I’ve been friends with long enough to be able to know enough of the scars, mental or physical, to make drinking with them easy. With Jack and Marvin there is that male one-upmanship over knowledge and ownership, be it of women or music or experience or anything, every point has to be seen and raised within its context. You do it so rabidly you don’t notice the tedium.
Jack and Marvin were younger than me and in my mind it showed. They had that outspoken confident sheen that extra years tend to dull on most of us. This was particularly true of Marvin, and he was the one sticking the knife into the ladies who cleaned with us.
‘She’s a right fat bitch her. Telling me to do things when all she does is stand there sucking on a tab.’
After every point like this he’d stare at Jack or me as a way of underlining his opinion. I’d stare back, daring him to shut up but he wouldn’t.
‘Shall we move on?’
Jack said. A better way to cut this conversation short; to hopefully leave it with the pub we were leaving. It worked to some degree as in the next place there was a pool table that was keeping us occupied until a big group of lads tipped up and we got involved in a fifteen man group of killer with them. I overheard Marvin relaying his grievances to a couple of these fellas but I was just glad to be out of it, engaged in a mindless chat about football with another member of their group.
The whole lot of them were a sports team, out celebrating the birthday of one of their number. The man in question was already half-gone. Every shot he took splurged away from the pocket as he complained of double vision and that ‘these bastards’ had forced shots of tequila down him in every previous stop on their crawl. He had one of those faces that you knew would look soggy, baffled and desperate before slipping into unconsciousness in the corner of the nightclub while his mates grappled after girls.
The night slipped away from us and after following this group on two more of their three stops we found ourselves huddled around short drinks, swimming in a sea of our own overindulgence. I glimpsed the shore and went for it.
‘Right lads I’m off.’
I said declamatorily downing my glass and wincing as the whisky burned my throat.
‘I’ll come with you.’
Jack followed suit. Then:
‘Hold on.’
Marvin matched us and we stumbled onto the pavement. Three boorish musketeers and I certainly wasn’t for anyone but myself at that stage.
‘Hold on- I think she lives round here.’
‘What? Who are you talking about Marvin?’
‘That fat bitch. She told me she lives on the same road as this boozer.’
It was a short road and sure enough in under a minute we’d spotted her car with its crass bumper stickers.
‘Let’s see what she’s up to.’
And with that Marvin dived into the driveway, disappearing into the blackness beside her car.
Jack and I looked at one another. I wanted nothing to do with Marvin or being in someone else’s back-garden but some sort of morality meant I had to drag him out of there. The two of us headed in after him.
We found him hovering at the end of the tarmac drive where it met the back lawn.
‘Alright ladies, you took a while. I don’t know why you’re worried. She told me she was going out tonight;
‘Then what are we doing here?’
‘This.’
He said with a smirk and we watched dumbstruck as he lifted up a plant pot, pulling a backdoor key from underneath it. He slipped the door open and a friendly looking Labrador trotted toward us.
‘Hello fella.’
Marvin said rubbing the dog on the muzzle. He lead it into the back garden where it plodded around, sniffing the grass while Marvin locked the backdoor. Jack and I looked at one another again. I saw in the bewilderment on Jack’s face the sickness I felt in my stomach.
‘Here boy.’Marvin went over to the dog. A security light flicked on, but Marvin ignored it. He and the dog cast thick shadows on their lurid green stage. He went over to the dog. Stroking it, petting it, moving around it until he was stood astride it, his legs either side of it. He ruffled its ears and then in one fluid movement he’d stamped on the dogs left hind leg; pinning it down and he’d clamped his left hand around the snout of the dog pulling its head back while his right hand whipped a knife out of his pocket and ripped its belly from crotch to neck. The dog squirmed, whimpered, frothed. Its innards slipped out like a thrashing newborn foal. Its innards slipped out. Pink snakes, wet, warm and watery, looking exactly as I’d expected them to look and completely different at the same time.
I heard Jack vomiting beside me, the splash of the vomit on tarmac contrasting with the silent wet thud of the dog’s insides rolling onto the grass. I looked at Marvin. The blade sticky in his hand as the dog cried between his legs.
‘That’ll teach the fucking bitch.’
I looked at Marvin, I looked at the empty sack of the animal at his feet, lying on top of, outside of, its insides. I looked at Jack coughing his own insides onto his laces.
I allowed myself to breath for what felt like the first time in hours. Then I ran. As I carried myself down the drive I heard the sirens, cutting through and doubling the tension. Without knowing what else to do I threw myself into the hedgerow at the top of the street and waited. I couldn’t believe what was happening, wondering what to do next, I couldn’t believe what the fuck was happening.
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