came back in.
‘What’s wrong with you lot?’ she asked, as if she’d finally made a breakthrough with her problem class.
We looked up from our work. It took about four seconds before she started to cry.
Her classroom has one of those doors that you have to lock or it keeps swinging open; it took about twelve seconds of jiggling with the key before she could run out into the corridor.
We keep walking. Jordana is biting her bottom lip.
‘Shit,’ Jordana says again, stopping in the road.
‘Well, nobody expected her to cry,’ I say, remembering Chips’s exact words: I bet she weeps.
I stop and look back: her eyes are wide, staring past me into the road. Jordana needs to control her empathy.
‘It was probably symptomatic of deeper emotional turmoil,’ I say.
‘Shut up,’ she says, her eyes are fixed on something.
I follow her gaze to the middle of the road a few metres ahead.
A black dog is laid out, its legs twitching.
‘It’s Fred,’ she says.
I step a bit closer and see that his gut is split, tiny intestines spilling out, spag bol on the tarmac. His eyes are coming out of their sockets like zits ready to pop. His jaw is slack. His teeth are mostly yellow but the tips are white – snow-capped. Just beyond him, there is a gory comet-shaped splat of blood on the road.
‘Fred’s dead,’ I say, trying not to enjoy the rhyme.
And then, for the first time in his sixteen years, Fred makes a noise to be proud of. He sounds like a failing hedge-strimmer: half gargling, half squealing.
‘He’s still alive,’ Jordana says, and I wonder whether she is going to try and save him: press his eyes back in, sew him up with her shoelaces. I think of the old guy from the St John’s Ambulance who came to morning assembly and showed us how to snog a plastic twelve-year-old girl whose heart had stopped. One of the things I like – liked – about Fred was that he didn’t have bad breath.
Jordana disappears. I assume that she’s gone to get help, that she can’t handle the horror of it. I kind of know what she means. It’s the way his legs are twitching that’s really making me unhappy.
I ought to put him out of his misery. That would be the humane thing. There’s a skip just down the road which I could get a brick or a plank from. I wonder how Fred would prefer to go. Brick or plank? Which carries more dignity? But I don’t do anything because I can’t stop staring at him. The hair on his back is spiked up – punky – in tufts of gore. A trail of blood leaks toward the gutter. I turn away from Fred so I can think more clearly.
I’m surprised he can manage it but Fred makes the sound again – a caterwaul.
I think that at least Fred is dying with an obscure word.
Jordana returns carrying a breezeblock.
The look on her face is focused and sad. It’s the same face she puts on when she’s doing a maths test.
‘You’re joking,’ I say.
‘We can’t just leave him.’
‘I don’t think the breezeblock is the way forward.’
‘We’ve got to do something.’
‘Maybe we should just wait for another car?’
‘Oh God,’ she says.
‘How long do you think he’ll last?’
‘Poor Fred,’ she says.
His mouth isn’t even open but he makes a noise again. The sound comes from his throat. It is closer to gargling.
‘Oh, Fred!’ Jordana’s face has gone red. She stands over him with the breezeblock. ‘I’ve got to.’
‘You can’t,’ I say.
‘It’s for his own good,’ she says.
‘But…’
‘Help me hold it.’
‘He’ll be dead soon.’
‘Help me hold it.’
Her eyebrows are scrunched low over her eyes.
We stand either side of Fred’s skull and hold the edges of the breezeblock. Patches of dried skin run up Jordana’s wrists where she’s been scratching. It looks like when you scuff carpet the wrong way.
I think that if Jordana’s mum was in Fred’s situation we would not have this option unless they flew her to Switzerland, where there are no rules.
‘Hitler did this to disabled people,’ I tell her.
‘Shut up, Oli.’
‘The word is euthanasia,’ I say.
‘Shut up!’
It used to be one of my favourite words.
‘Right, after three,’ she says. She’s blinking furiously.
‘I can’t,’ I say.
‘Three.’
‘Stop.’
‘Two.’
‘Please.’
‘One.’
‘God.’
‘Go.’
Neither of us lets go.
‘Shit,’ she says.
‘Sorry,’ I say.
‘Shit.’
His legs stop spazzing after four and a half minutes. I help Jordana slide a sheet of cardboard under Fred’s remains. The smell, I can only assume, is of half-digested faeces. We stretcher him into