Dead Dogs by Joe Murphy

paved only with chippings. People from town walk along the Banks a lot, not like the Prom where you get the people staying in the hotel sauntering along cooing at the river over the dull hiss of the N11. I like this walk along the Banks because it takes a long while and you can think a lot when you’re doing it. I sometimes write stories and I like to think about where they’re going when I don’t have to think about where I’m going.
    To get down to the Banks you’re walking away from town and cars and people go by you in the opposite direction. Some of them have questioning expressions on their faces. A young boy in a tracksuit bottoms and T-shirt on his own and moving against the tide. One or two say good morning. Genuinely genuine women in genuine Dunnes tracksuits being genuinely friendly. Going to school in a place where there’s over a thousand other kids just like you desensitizes you to indifference. It desensitises you so much that you greet these comments like they’re door- to-door  salesmen in cheap polyester crackling with static.
    I like this stroll. This pushing against a stream that doesn’t push back. I like the Banks. You strip the surface from a tree and it’s still a tree. A river is still a river. Everything is as it seems. The sun on the Slaney’s red wave makes me smile. A genuinely genuine smile.
    Standing looking out my window it is eleven o’clock in the morning and I decide to go for a stroll.
    The easiest way to get to the Banks from my house is to go down to the bottom of the road through the Council estate, go down Nunnery Lane and cross the Dublin Road. Nunnery Lane’s not even a lane. It’s a beaten track of grass and dirt zigging between briars and zagging between the mesh fence of the primary school. In the summer the briars and blackthorns are spattered with blossoms and insects are a white noise in the grass. In the winter though the place is dead and the path is so greasy it’s like it’s floored with eels.
    But in the summer, like it is now, it makes the perfect shortcut .
    I’m halfway down Nunnery Lane and I’m listening to the grass and lashes of briar are snagging and catching on my tracksuit . I’m thinking how there wasn’t any food in the fridge today. And now I’m wondering if everything’s alright with Da and his sister. I’m wondering this and I’m walking along and a briar hooks my hand and tears a little red crescent in the web of skin between thumb and forefinger. On a branch just as you come to the road there’s the drooping amniotic sac of a condom. I don’tknow who impaled it there on the thorns but there’s stuff in it and I don’t touch it as I go by.
    The path down to the Banks is covered in gravel. The gravel is all steel-coloured chippings and I’m listening to it grind under my feet and I can feel its hard angles through the soles of my runners. The river is on my right and it gurgles along shallow and looking like chocolate in the heat. Across the water the flat meadow of the Island is spangled with geysers of wildflowers and horses in a swirl of flies are cropping the plants. The ground on my left slopes up and up to the road and slopes up and up covered in trees.
    When you’re walking along like this you can see along the river and you can look over your shoulder to see the town built along both sides of the valley. From where I am, I can see fields and cows and the black fleck of a person in the distance. The person isn’t moving, they’re just standing there in the distance where the cows have trampled a pitted slipway down to the river. The blades of mud between the hoofprints will be made hard as terracotta by the sun. And in the distance the black fleck just stands there and I keep walking.
    I keep walking and now I’m thinking how shrill my aunt sounded when she was asking Da about the money. Not accusing but getting there.
    And for the last while since, every day, Da goes to work. He gets up puts on his overalls and goes to