MORNING SERIAL

‘NO chance,’ I said. ‘You.’ Bryan used the stick to widen the opening of the bag so we could get a better view of the five or six little bodies, slick and wet.

There was no rot, no stink of death. The puppies were as fresh to death as new-plucked daisies, the pale pink pads of their tiny paws held out on straight legs as if in supplication, bodies huddled together, as they might have been in life when crowding round their mother to feed. If they had been alive we would have picked one up and petted it.

But as they were dead, neither of us had the courage to even prod them with that stick, though we desperately wanted to see it done. The shocking obscenity of death appearing like this, without warning, on an otherwise bright and normal day radiated out toward us, both nauseating and compelling. I could see Bryan was as disinclined as I was, every bit as timorous, when it came to poking the little corpses about.

This surprised me, because his father was a miner after all, and everyone knew that miners were tough and not afraid of much, and I had assumed he would be too.

The next day, on arrangement, we ran straight back to the spot where the puppies had been, emboldened now, and full of a ghoulish greed to see more of what dead things looked and felt like.

Perhaps this time we’d have the courage to prod them with a stick, or even nudge them with the toe of a shoe. But the puppies were gone.

Thanks to the river rats which abounded there, most likely.

Our playtime on the Riverstones was ended each day by an adult shout calling us for tea at our respective houses, and I would scramble back into the garden of number 19.

When I got to the house Nana would invariably throw up her arms in horror.

‘Ych a fi! Look at the state of you!’