Luiz finally got the Parka coat he'd been pestering for, the one with the quilted orange lining and synthetic-fur-ringed hood, because he'd gotten a paper round. He was trying to go straight after his earlier dalliances with petty crime. His mum finally got the coat on the club, a very English scheme that enabled her paying for it at so much a week, with coin of the realm or services in lieu of. His mum told him, twice, that if anything happened to the coat, especially while it was still being paid off, there would be all hell to pay. Big fucking deal, Luiz thought.
He was chuffed with the coat anyhow. When the hood was pulled up you couldn't even tell he had ginger hair. The paper route Luiz was riding each morning culminated in a street just one away from where he then lived, and for a month or so, the round went okay and Luiz proved himself a diligent and reliable pre-dawn deliverer of national news in all of its multifarious English newspaper forms. It was relatively simple work, even for a retard like Luiz. You cycled down streets, up paths, opened front door letter flaps and wedged said newspaper therein, basically shredding the first eighteen-pages of the Telegraph or Guardian. Luiz's family were always Express or Mail readers and newspaper's like those that were always light on editorial, always slipped into the average mail slot a treat. Strangely, that was about the time Luiz became aware of the great English class system. Newspapers like the Sun and the Mirror (the rags), were always delivered to council houses, whereas the Express and the Mail went to middle-class homes whose occupants still thought of themselves as working class, but not as low-brow as the real working class, and your snobby, snotty papers like the Telegraph, Guardian etcetera went to upper-middle class homes with fences and gates and signs like No Trespassing! And Achtung! If you were lucky enough to deliver a Times or a Financial Times, well, then you'd spend a half-hour riding up the driveway to reach the letterbox and a butler would most likely snatch it from your filthy hand and go iron it. The same class system didn't apply to Christmas tips however Luiz discovered. The best tippers were always the middle-class, followed by the council house tenants, followed more meagrely by the snobby snotty upper-middle class and you could fucking forget a Times reader tipping you at all. Luiz pretty soon learned that that was how they came to be reading the Times and residing in a house with a moat around it – by not fucking tipping the paperboy, coalman, milkman, postman, butcher, baker, candlestick maker et al. Needless to say, it was those snobby bastards who got pretty short shrift from their paper delivery person, let fucking Jeeves traipse down that driveway and pick the fucking thing up before the crows got at it. That was the general paperboy's anti-code. All was well. Until a new street got added to Luiz's ever-burgeoning but unduly recompensed route. On this additional street there was a shabby house with a brute of a hound stalking its unkempt gardens. The first time Luiz set eyes on that beast he knew it was a psychotic canine, the kind of drooling, slobbering, hulk of a crossbreed used to digging itself out of its own grave and eating parts of its own anatomy when scraps became scarce. He'd only got the damned street added to his round anyhow because the newsagent, Mr. Maxwell, had heard Luiz bearating the stupid little bastard who'd had it before him about being scared of Pluto and not holding up the paperboy's code of We Deliver!
So there he was, lumbered through his own inability to keep his cakehole shut. The guy who owned the house with the dog kept telling the newsagent that the bloody thing was only a puppy and wouldn't hurt a fly. Obviously, a lumbering lump like that wouldn't have the agility to nab a fly, but a paperboy wasn't a fly, was he? To his credit, Luiz was the first kid over that gate anyhow, and amazingly, the dog only raised one saggy eyebrow and drooled lazily, before it started sucking its own reproductive equipment. After that the dog and Luiz struck up a kind of mutual respect; it respected that Luiz had to deliver a fucking Daily Mirror each morning, and Luiz respected the fact that at any given moment he could be seriously mauled in the course of performing said delivery obligations.
They went on like that for four or five weeks, mutually admirable, until the weather began to deteriorate and Luiz swapped from the denim jacket to the Parka. The first morning Luiz hopped over that gate dressed like Scott of the Antarctic, that fangy mutt was up on all fours with its hackles raised and its donger erect, snarling like some maimed beast. Luiz wasted some time attempting to placate that obviously riled animal with puppy platitudes and a rolled-up Daily Mirror - although he wished it had been a Telegraph, at least that fucker rolled-up gave you a bit of clout. Hitting a dumb deranged animal the size of that with a rolled-up Daily Mirror, was about as pointless as trying to stop a runaway train by standing in front of it with your hands out. As he made for the letterbox, with the paperboy's code forefront of his mind, the dog sprang to life with an agility that would have made the British Olympic selectors drool. It was on Luiz in a flash, its wet animal smell and warm breath all pervading. The Daily Mirror went in one gulp. Good riddance to bad rubbish. It had paws the size of ham knuckles. Teeth as yellow as Luiz's aunt Isa and fangs as long as icicles on a wintery morn, Luiz said goodbye to life:
Paperboy Killed In Savage Attack By Footloose Hound! As he braced for the inevitable bite; for losing a hunk of face and protracted plastic surgery that would most likely make him look like a South American villain, he toppled backwards and the hound fell with him, wherein it began savagely tearing at the fake fur around the Parka's hood. Luiz could hear large remnants of cheap manmade wadding being torn from even weaker stitching, and then he could hear the hound choking, trying desperately to chug up a synthetic fur ball. He didn't move, a sagacious non-move as movement itself is not advised when a dog, or indeed a bull elephant, is in the process of duly assaulting your person. He lay there gazing up at the clear morning sky where a hundred-million tiny stars twinkled brightly and dogs were not a species ever considered worthy of inter-galactic abduction, or space travel. Still the hulk of a hound coughed and choked a loud, wracking cough that echoed around the otherwise lifeless morning streetscape like an artillery explosion in a canyon. Luiz might even have prayed, although he doubts it in hindsight. There was no time for any kind of celestial diety to intervene in a dispute between man and beast, not when there were the law of the jungle to uphold. Finally, Luiz heard the gruff, demanding voice of an adult, either that, or another dog that could talk humanspeak. He was long past the point of surprise but not yet at the point of catalystic shock, somewhere in that dreamy state that preceded pain killing injections, sutres, amputations and a sea of morphine. It was a pleasant place he recalls. He heard the dog howling, howling like a kid howls when its daddy whups on him, or her, for some petty indiscretion. He sat up, giddily. Wiped a thin white layer of frost from his top lip, which remarkably, still appeared to be where his creator had positioned it and saw the dog cowering in the opposite corner, its muzzle all speckled with synthetic fur threads. Luiz reached for where those same threads had been situated by the tiny hands of foreign manufacturer’s precious moments beforehand, and felt his own head instead.
Realisation took a good few minutes to dawn. When it did, Luiz saw that the Parka was minus its hood, and the best part of one sleeve. He knew then, instantly, that having been attacked by a dog with an aversion to fake fur, was undoubtedly going to be the paltriest of his problem load for that particular day, and probably, for the remainder of that particular year. The guy who had intervened, St. Bernard, patron saint of dog handlers, then proceeded to berate Luiz rather sternly about the non-delivery of that day's Mirror. He was collecting coupons for something apparently, perhaps two-weeks at a holiday camp all expenses paid. Luiz smiled ungraciously - like a Halloween pumpkin the morning after the night before. Unremarkably, Luiz's old man handed him a sounder and more thorough beating than that dog had received. If Luiz's old man had gone and beaten that dog, that senile beast would at least have known what it was like to be beaten by a human being. Luiz's mum meanwhile tried to make him go back to the scene of the attack and locate the missing hood and sleeve as she intended to re-attach them and then trim it with flimsy yellow feathers that had fallen off of a feather boa. Being molested and mauled by a canine, being beaten by your own father for a matter that was not even of your own making - they were run-of-the-mill occurrences in Luiz's young life, but having to walk to school looking like a canary was a whole different can of worms. What kind of a boy would seriously return to the house of hell and scrabble around looking for a Parka coat sleeve? Not this kind of boy. Not long after that Luiz hung up his newspaper sack and his one-sleeved Parka coat and decided to over-winter next to the radiator near the headmaster's office at school. Scalping dinner tickets was a far easier gig anyhow, not to mention infinitely warmer.
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