Read Online Even the Dogs: A Novel by Jon McGregor - Free Book Online

and singing as his skull opened out with a soft pop and his bones cracked and splintered into ash. Instead of this. Instead of hiding him away in a van and sneaking him out through the deserted
     
    Through the darkened windows we watch him. Danny. Desperate now in a way only we can know, his ragged trousers catching under his feet and his blankets sodden, Einstein leaping and barking as she climbs through a gap in the fence which straggles around the emptied streets and maisonettes of the old Parkside Estate, the last of the tenants cleared out two years ago now and the demolition still hardly begun. Unless you count what the kids have done already, the windows all smashed, the doors torn from their hinges and sent sprawling across the streets and yards. Bathtubs and wash-basins thrown from fourth-floor landings and sinking into shrubberies grown wild on human manure. Black scorch-marks like smudged mascara around the gaping windows of burnt-out flats. And a great red X painted on the front of every flat to tell the contractors that the services have been safely cut off, and to tell the squatters and junkies and dealers that they can settle in for a while without fear of being disturbed. The van moves off along the road again, down into the underpass beneath the railway sidings, and we lose sight of Danny as he steps into a dark abandoned stairwell with Einstein still chasing at his
     
    Mike weren’t even there though. Got up to the flat where the two of them had been staying for near enough a month but he weren’t there. Would have been crashed out on a pile of blankets or standing at the window or even cooking up but he weren’t there. Weren’t no one there. Weren’t nowhere else Mike could be he should have been there if he weren’t at Robert’s, if he weren’t at the centre, but he’d gone off somewhere it looked like so that’s one more cunt letting him
     
    Stairs all slipping with ice and piss and the handrails ripped out from the walls and the sickness coming on bad. Voices coming out of darkened doorways, mutters and murmurs and moans. Shouts from another block across the courtyard, splintering wood and a silenced scream. Dogs barking and being told to stop and barking some more and the flickering orange light of flames against the dark evening sky and the sparks flying upwards into the clouds
     
    Thought Mike had maybe gone in a different flat for some reason but he tried a few and he weren’t in there and the cramping and the aching and the rattling was so bad that he couldn’t hardly stand up straight couldn’t hardly walk and nothing now he needed he
     
    Mike had never ripped him off on a deal except one time or two times and that was different that didn’t
     
    Kids coming up the stairwell shouting and breaking bottles so he went back the other
     
    He’d had a reason those times, Mike had, he’d told him, his voice low and fierce in his ear going I’m sorry and that la but I thought you weren’t coming back. The kid Benny boy said you’d gone off with Laura an that so I thought you were sorted, an I heard these blokes you know those blokes I told you about what I saw down the centre them ones what have been after me since that kid told them I grassed them up, I heard they was on their way round to tax us so I thought safest bet was to use all the gear so they couldn’t take it off us, plus that way if I did get a kicking it wouldn’t hardly hurt anyhow you know what I mean la. So that’s all it was I wasn’t trying to shaft you, you know that la, you know I wouldn’t do that, it was just a pure out-of-necessity thing you know what I’m saying it was just, only it turned out Benny boy was wrong and them blokes didn’t turn up neither, but still like it was I had the best of intentions it was out of necessity it was the mother of what is it like you know what I’m saying la
     
    Been sleeping in any old place before they found the Parkside flats. Doorways and alleyways. A tunnel down