OK, Mr Field
Page 12
A body with a space in it – once I’d started, nothing could stop me – I thought of it over and over, until the effort of climbing Jacob’s Ladder had neutralised the thought, or at least reduced it so that its importance seemed a product of my imagination. When I get to the top of the stairs, I consoled myself, everything will be OK because the dog will be waiting for me. I had left him alone for a very long time and he would be lonely and thirsty. But when I opened the door, the dog was nowhere to be seen. Where are you? I said. I’m here, said Hannah Kallenbach. There’s no one here, I said. Look! she said. In the air! And when I looked across the entrance hall, past the basin, towards the laundry door, which was slightly open, floating above the floor tiles, almost indistinguishable from the white of the wall, was a veil of white airborne particles.
When I opened the laundry door, among the white flecks of paper hovering in the air was the dog. His eyebrows lifted. He stood under Mim’s desk with his black ears flopping out from either side of his head like the leaves of a palm tree. His tail was crooked against the underside of the desk and he had one foot pressed down on Mim’s notebook to steady it. White scraps were caught in his whiskers and I could tell from the clicking sound he made as he opened and closed his mouth that paper was stuck to its roof. What have you done? I said, and the dog stopped trying to dislodge whatever was in his mouth, put his ears down, and darted out the door.
I reached for him but the dog was faster than me, and cunning. Sometimes, when I’m dredging up the memory of that evening, I think that however much I learn, however much I understand, I know least about why something which one person regards as trivial sends another into the depths of fury. I chased the dog down the corridor. Near the basin he allowed me to close in on him but the moment I tried to grab him he broke away again. He ran up the ramp, with me after him, and although he slowed on the landing, bringing himself within reach, before I could get close enough he doubled back past me and was off. I ran out of breath and stopped. Sensing that nobody was coming for him, the dog stopped too and considered me, his tense body ready to spring at the slightest movement. He yapped, enticing me to resume the chase. Once, twice, we circled the house. Several times he stopped, teasing me, before eluding me, darting sideways, twisting his head excitedly round to check that I was still chasing before, ears back, panting, dashing off again.
Then, caught between two urges – the urge to kill the dog and the urge to run away from him so that I didn’t kill him – I stopped. The dog wagged his tail so hard his whole body joined in. Come here, I said, making the clicking noise you use to call a horse, and although the dog didn’t come – of course he didn’t – his guard was let down enough for me to grab him by the collar and bring my hand down on top of his head. Because I’d used my left hand, the blow was like a child’s hit, with no real strength in it. But the dog recoiled and looked at me with what appeared, if animals could feel shame, like a kind of humility. I said, Stand still so I can hit you, and then switched hands and delivered another puny blow, more a flap than a slap. But I couldn’t tell how hard it was because it was cold and I couldn’t feel my hands. Anyway, whichever hand I used was equally useless, with neither the power nor accuracy necessary to cause damage.
The dog didn’t bark or yelp or bite me. He just sat there with bits of paper poking from his teeth and surrendered. He could have bitten me, I suppose, but in the end a dog is simple and wishes to be loved only. A dog is love and a dog is made for love. According to animal pragmatism, then, my attack must not have been a form of cruelty but a form of seduction, in the light of which his response was not to retaliate or try to stop me but just to sit there, waiting for the attack to end, as though I’d dispensed it not out of fury or hatred but as a way of preparing him to be loved. And so, when my temper had unwound itself or my serotonin levels had been restored, or both, I said, I’m sorry and patted the dog (because a dog can’t understand sorry), who flinched, then yielded and let himself be comforted.
When I walked away from him he followed me, staying a few steps behind as if wanting always to be in close proximity to me. When I lay in the bath, he stood at the foot of the tub. And when I got out he licked the water off my skin as if the taste of it was me, made drinkable. All night, instead of lying in his basket, the dog paced the room, keeping me awake with the sound of his nails clipping against the floor. He’d stop at the bed’s edge, staring at me with his cocked head. What are you staring at? I’d say. I care about you, the dog seemed to be saying with his eyes. You concern me. But you’re an animal, I said. You don’t have real feelings. And the dog said, I do have real feelings. Then he lay down and went to sleep, though sometimes he woke momentarily and looked at me – as if to check that I was still there – and having confirmed this, would close his eyes again and resume his ragged breathing.
I lay awake that night for a long time, watching clouds drifting past the window and gathering into thick walls of grey that grew so dense that the sky went milky. By midnight the air was so impenetrable that the window itself had disappeared, the whiteness outside having become indistinguishable from the white wall framing it, as if I were in a windowless room within which nobody would see me or hear from me or think of me again. Except the dog sleeping beside me. I tried not to take too much pleasure in his company, knowing that it was bad to adore him in the way that I did. After all, he was just a dog, a fact that limited my feelings for the dog since I could never really be sure what I was thinking of when I was thinking of him. What is a dog? This question occupied all my thoughts. What kind of animal was I dealing with anyway? The animalness of the dog raised two difficult issues. Firstly, is a dog a hairy but essentially human being or is there something more fundamentally different about a dog, making him no more similar to a person than, say, an ant? And secondly, what is a worthwhile way of spending time in life? Or, said another way, what kinds of things are worth investing one’s time and feelings in? Sometimes, when I looked down and saw the dog lying on the floor with his legs tucked under him like a grasshopper, I felt an immense affection for him followed by a terrible sadness because it occurred to me that it wasn’t a real relationship at all because I’d fallen in love with a grasshopper. But later, since all kinds of loving feelings flourish in the dark, I couldn’t help lifting him up onto the bed beside me because the form of affection I most liked (it goes without saying, a man cannot have intercourse with a dog) was just to be curled up against him. And in the middle of the night, woken by the movement of the dog, whose habit was to go round and round and round in circles to warm a patch of duvet before lying down on it, I’d have the bizarre notion that Mim was there, watching me. What would you do without me? she’d say. And I’d say, Just go on living, I guess.
About the Author
Katharine Kilalea grew up in South Africa and was awarded an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. In 2009 her debut poetry collection, One Eye’d Leigh was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. OK, Mr Field is her first novel.
Copyright
First published in the UK in 2018
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This ebook edition first published in 2018
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ISBN 978–0–571–34090–3