by Paige Clark
Before you ask, god no, we didn’t have any children. Visitation with the dog! Sweet Miss Minnie. She was his dog to start. He got her for $550 from the Lost Dogs’ Home. She’s a long-haired chihuahua cross—the colour, shape and size of a sweet potato with two chocolate-chip eyes and a chocolate button nose. They found her on the streets, toothless and wretched, begging for scraps and getting in fights with basset hounds.
When we broke up, I offered him a thousand dollars for her. I won’t repeat here what he said in reply to that.
But I said back, ‘If she’s your dog, then why don’t you trim the hair around her butt, so the poo doesn’t get stuck?’
‘I’d do it if you gave me the chance,’ he said. ‘That’s not my problem, it’s yours. You’re always doing things first, then wondering why I never do them.’
‘I’m not quick. Don’t you dare call me quick,’ I said.
‘I’m busy. I work.’
‘As a lawyer. That’s not real work.’
‘It’s my damn dog,’ he said.
He’s right. The paperwork at the vet lists him as the primary owner. Minnie’s even got his last name. Isn’t that just so typical.
I find myself asking: when does a dog become your dog?
Is it when you fork out half a grand to a well-meaning and understaffed rescue organisation?
Is it when you spend an entire day of your week, usually Sunday, cooking up kangaroo mince and rice into a dog congee so your pet can eat sustainably? Minnie doesn’t need the climate emergency on her paws. She’s been through enough on the streets.
Is it after the medically indicated termination of your thirteen-week-old baby—foetus, according to Bernard—when the dog sleeps next to you during the day and during the night? When the dog won’t go for a walk or lie out in the sun because the right place is right next to you?
Or is it now, when the dog is standing limply on the porch, watching as you slump out of the house with your original 1800s Turtle Exhaling Long Life painting by Toyohiro tucked underneath your arm and a book of poems about a woman’s body in your free hand, waiting for you to tell her in your soft dog voice, ‘You be good. You be good. I’ll be back.’
Or later still, when you’re not back, when you hang up the painting in your new apartment, not bothering to clean away the grime of other people, and call Bernard on the phone. Is it when he does not put the dog on the line and you scream through the mouthpiece, ‘Minnie Mouse, here girl, here girl,’ even after you hear the dial tone and then some time after that still?
Is she my dog yet?
She is not. I pay a visit to my lawyer, Mary, a friend of Bernard’s. If you ask her, the dog never will be.
Lawyer Mary wears a pinstriped skirt suit and explains to me that pets are personal property. They are divided up accordingly. She taps her iridescent stiletto nails at line items in the prenuptial agreement.
‘You’re Bernard’s friend,’ I point out.
‘I see myself as a friend to you both,’ Lawyer Mary says. ‘A mutual friend.’
‘Or a frenemy?’ I suggest.
Lawyer Mary’s eyes are smiling but her claws rest, thank god. ‘As your friend, I advise you to just leave it. This is costing you, and I don’t mean financially,’ she says.
‘But it’s also costing me financially, right?’
‘If you want to throw your money out the window, just get the dog cloned already.’
‘Will I need further legal representation for that? I’ve got a friend I can call. She’s pricey.’
‘Listen to me,’ Lawyer Mary says. ‘Get it together. It’s going to be okay.’ The pincers creep affectionately towards me.
I lurch away from her clutches, search my handbag for a pair of knockoff sunglasses and whip them on. I leer at her from above the opaque lenses, gritty with bag crumbs. ‘Make sure to bill me for this, no? I wouldn’t dream of taking advantage of my pal,’ I say. I leave the room, closing the door quietly for effect.
Outside, I press my ear to the wood and I hear Mary talking to Bernard on the phone. ‘She knows it, she just doesn’t want to believe it,’ she says to him.
‘Hello, my pumpkin-pie pooch,’ I say to the door. ‘Hello, Minnie marshmallow fluff beard,’ I say to my dearly beloved dog.
Now, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea and think Bernard cruel. As a departing gift, he gave me a lump-sum payment of $107,000. Granted, it was stipulated by a binding legal agreement designed to circumvent the hassle of alimony payments and, say, any visitation rights with an aforementioned well-liked dog. I’m not ungrateful, truly. I’m overwhelmed by his thank-you-for-carrying-my-chromosomally-extra-baby-forthree-months-of-your-life-now-kindly-be-on-your-way present.
To put it to you plainly, I can’t think of a single reason why I don’t deserve custody of the damn dog—his word, not mine. I consider hiring a dognapper and faking Minnie’s untimely death.
Then I think, what the heck, I can dognap her myself. I wouldn’t want anyone else to have Bernard’s hurt feelings on their good conscience.
Dognapping can be as simple as walking into what once was your house and taking a dog, or as elaborate as calling your estranged brother’s ex-wife and asking to borrow her two staghounds, Wilson and Tucker, so you can stage the death of an elderly tooth-free chihuahua. You betcha I went with plan elaborate.
Donna, who was a great sister-in-law and is an even better ex-sister-in-law, offers to come over straight away to the new apartment with Wilson and Tucker in tow. Before she arrives, I drag in two lawn chairs from the common outdoor area. I turn on all of the overhead lights in the apartment to give the impression of cheerfulness. I am fine, Donna, the lurid lights chirp. Fine.
‘You need dog time,’ Donna says when she arrives, ignoring my jovial lighting choices. She marches in, sics the stags on me and plants herself in the outdoor seating.
‘Dog time, not horse time,’ I say. I pet Wilson anyway. Tucker places a single paw on my thigh and sighs.
‘We’re not stealing Bernard’s dog,’ she says.
‘It turns me on when you lie to me,’ I say.
Donna shifts her position on the lawn chair, coiling her thin ankles around the plastic legs. She squints at the equines and at me, her eyes adjusting to the fluorescents.
And then she says, ‘Your fucking turtle is upside down.’ The turtle, the one that exhales long life, is on his back, spewing up into the festering light. ‘Goddamnit. Did you consider making a half-decent life for yourself when you picked this place out? You’re a divorcee, not a work-from-home dental hygienist.’
‘Hey, that’s good honest work,’ I say. For the record, I am a mosaic artist-slash-ceramist. I repurpose broken materials from local primary schools to sell at shops frequented by women who wear natural fibres.
‘You’re smart as hell,’ Donna says. ‘You know what I mean.’
Tucker moony eyes me. Wilson gives me a single lick with his long, rough tongue. I have to admit they are cute for horses. ‘This building allows pets,’ I say.
‘Then can we please get you one?’ Donna gets up to leave and Wilson and Tucker follow her. There is no need for her to call them. They are her dogs.
‘I’ve got a dog,’ I say, but the place is empty. Not a creature is stirring, not even a—you guessed it—Minnie mouse.
If I call Bernard every night at 7.01 and ask him if his refrigerator is running, and he replies that yes, it is, and I say well then you better catch it, maybe he will let me see Minnie. If I text him every morning at 3.59 with nothing but the chromosomal letter X, maybe he will let me talk to her on the phone long enough to hear her woof. Of course, if I do this for as many days as I plan to, there is the chance he will block me or call the police. But I know Bernard—he’ll keep taking my calls. He’s a lawyer. He knows there is always more to get from someone else. Plus, I’ll let you in on a little secret. He really gets off on being unfussed on the other end of the line.
Then I actually call and I forget the punch line.
It’s just me and him on the phone saying nothing and so he says, ‘Babs, is that you?’
He knows it’s me because everybody has caller ID now. Caller ID is so advanced these days, it tells you who it thinks is calling. It knows when it’s spam. Even Bernard screens those calls.
And who else would call him at precisely 7.01, say nothing and risk wasting his time like that?
He knows it’s me and he’s used my nickname, which must be by accident because we both stopped using our nicknames for each other when we decided we wanted to break up and he decided I should never see the dog again and just die alone with my puking turtle and poems of female decay and no offspring whatsoever, abnormal or otherwise.
Because my name isn’t even Barbra. That’s a joke based on the fact that I think Barbra Streisand is the pits. In every movie she’s been in—okay, the one movie of hers I watched—every shot was a close-up of her face like she was the moon. All of the action happened off-camera, behind her moon head. Everyone calls me Bettie, like Bettie Page. Talk about a woman deserving of a close-up!
Being quiet on the phone, I remember how Bernard pretended to hate it when I let Minnie sleep in the bed. I would act like she wasn’t there by hiding her inside my oversized sleep shirt, top to tail like a puggle in its mother’s pouch.
‘Dogs don’t sleep in beds,’ Bernard would say. ‘Tsk, tsk.’ This was his sound for me.
‘Nothing to see here, dear,’ I’d say. ‘Just a woman at rest.’
He’d laugh and pat the Minnie-shaped lump through the shirt. ‘You should get that checked out, Babs,’ he would say.
‘Are you okay, Bet? Do I need to worry?’ he asks over the phone.
I hang up without asking if he took Minnie to get her nails done this Tuesday past. If he forgets, her dewclaws will grow and grow, until they curl under completely and cut into the flesh of her feet.
Do you want that for her, dear?
Then it hits me like the forgotten punchline. Get the dog cloned already, said my pal Lawyer Mary of gaudy nail fame.
Google says in the middle of America a company makes pets. GeneLife! has successfully cloned chihuahuas and other domestic animals, including a teacup merle pomeranian with two different-coloured eyes called Jane Seymour (Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman). In the blurb on GeneLife!’s website, the owner of Jane Seymour, a fleshy, pink-skinned SEO marketer from Amarillo with a mild case of vitiligo, talks about how Jane Seymour was the only little lady who didn’t mind his skin condition. While both clones bear a striking resemblance to the original, they each have their own inimitable personalities. Dan Aykroyd (Blues Brothers) wears a tie and is cheeky and loyal. Mila Kunis (That ’70s Show) wears a fringy collar and is frisky and territorial.
Why GeneLife! didn’t edit out the word ‘frisky’ from the blurb I’ll never know, but this oversight makes me trust them. They’re not out to dupe. They’re out to help harmless people like me face the unavoidable ache caused by the brevity of the average canine lifespan, or an emotionally deficient ex-husband, whichever comes first. I stare into the soulful heterochromatic eyes of Dan and Mila, two very good dogs on the lap of a corpulent man with discoloured skin and a marketer’s heart.
These dogs are cute, but my dog is cuter, thinks everyone.
Further research reveals that a biotech company in South Korea also makes adorable pets. Maybe the lab in Korea is better at Science, or maybe Asian people have better taste in dogs, but the clones on the Korean website are higher quality copies than the clones on the American one. A promotional video features a papillon clone named Ruka owned by a Japanese divorcee who has luscious, colourless hair and no longer speaks to his adult children. The owner says, ‘No price is too high a price for Ruka.’ It occurs to me that the Japanese divorcee didn’t even bother to give the clone a new name.
With the papillon, the man, who is also a konobi connoisseur, wanders from his apartment to one of his beloved convenience stores. He buys a ham katsu sandwich in a cellophane packet and shares it with Rukachan, peeling off the breading with his hands for the dog. He’ll need a reprint soon if he keeps feeding Ruka II like that. After he’s finished his sandwich, the divorcee talks to the camera again about the original Ruka. He moves his voluminous hair out of his eyes and for the rest of the segment he has katsu dandruff. I shouldn’t say it, but we’re all thinking it—even with Ruka II, the man seems lonely.
So of course I go with the American company. The cost is $50,000, half the price of the lab in Korea and half of the money I have. And isn’t that what I deserve exactly? Half of nothing. Half of a cell, half of some DNA errantly multiplying, half of whatever technology they use these days to make what shouldn’t be. Or rather—to make up for what shouldn’t be.
If you have the money, getting a clone of your pet is as easy as returning an ill-fitting natural-fibre garment purchased online late at night. The process takes place through the post. When the cloning is complete, a GeneLife! representative delivers the duplicate/s to you. It’s the Amazon of genetically specified pets.
In my particular case, there is one teensy, tiny, not insurmountable problem of DNA. But hasn’t this been my problem before? And didn’t I take care of it as easily as a vacuum up the vagina? And look at me now, I’m doing fine.
That is to say, it won’t be any sweat off Minnie’s back—just cells off her stomach, to be technically correct—if I take a biopsy of skin, send it to a scientist in West Texas and wait while those cells are multiplied in a Petri dish, inserted in eggs mined from a donor dog and implanted into a surrogate mother who is then electrocuted, tricking the egg into thinking it’s been fertilised. Ha ha, stupid egg.
That, kids, is how a baby is made!
Except it’s not a baby. There’s no father—a dream—and it’s not like Minnie is really the mother. More like the cooler, older twin sister. Ashley Olsen to the clone’s Mary-Kate. Or even less. She’ll be half of nothing to this new dog. A prototype. A blueprint.
Isn’t that what Bernard thought too? ‘This is modern medicine,’ he said. ‘Why bring this baby with three chromosomes into the world, when we can make another with two?’
‘It’s unthinkable, dear,’ I said. ‘What with overpopulation, the planet virtually an incinerator, viruses blamed on East Asians, et cetera et cetera.’
‘Exactly. We both care about this world, Babs.’
Bless Bernard’s heart. When I remind myself that he thought that was the best thing he could say, I don’t hate him as much. I want to be very clear here. I didn’t make the wrong decision, but the right decision was still all wrong.
What happens next is I call up Mary. She is as expensive on the phone as she is in person, but at least I don’t have to watch her acting like a lawyer, I only have to listen. She has a throaty telephone voice, devised to sound consoling but firm.
‘I need a visit,’ I say.
‘We talked about this.’
‘We talked about visits. Multiple ones.’
‘You’re not the only one hurting, you know.’
‘A visit.’
‘Okay, so we’re talking closure. I’d be willing to discuss this with Bernard’s representation if that’s your intention.’
‘I’m looking to move on to a new, identical model.’
‘Like a puppy?’ Lawyer Mary can’t help it. She’s human. She breaks character, giddy with puppy talk, a nasal version of the common affliction—dog voice. ‘Bernard’s going to be thrilled for you, you know that, right?’
I interrupt her to remind her she’s on the clock. ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘We can even take the dogs to the dog park together.’
‘He’d be up for it if you are.’
Is it all lawyers or only the ones I know that just don’t get tone?
‘An unsupervised visit,’ I say.
I hate to admit it, but Lawyer Mary is being nice. Dare I say friendly? I go as far as considering making her a decorative plate from the broken mugs I recently fished out of the Holy Saviour School teachers’ lou
nge, before I think better of it. She’s getting paid for this. Handsomely, might I add.
Bernard always said I could talk light about things that were heavy. And, okay, I do have my arsenal of end-of-the-world gags, but it’s only because, honestly, I’m nervous. He thought since he was serious and read The Guardian that he cared more. But then which one of us bought the worm farm, Bernard?
Another example: he thought taking Minnie on more walks meant he loved her more. He didn’t get that I needed her to be with me and I also needed to leave the house as infrequently as possible. My career as a stay-at-home artist depended on it. But I was considerate. I didn’t let my work get in the way of her needs. Say, for instance, I got the heads-up that an entire box of glasses had been dropped and smashed at Caulfield Primary, did I hesitate in bringing her along and leaving her in the car, with the windows open, of course? Did I celebrate her birthday and request cream cheese from the shops, not the cheap home-brand kind, but the expensive kind from a city in America? Did I let her sleep on my side of the bed to protect her from Bernard, who is a sound sleeper prone to rolling and who potentially loathes her very existence when in the bed? Poor Minnie is sleeping on the ground now, or worse.
What I’m trying to explain here is this—Bernard is literal to a fault. He says I can’t visit the dog and blames it on the calls and texts, which I’ll have you know I skipped twice last week. When I rang him on Sunday evening, I even made conversation. Granted, I lied a bit.
‘Were you out last night?’ he asked.
‘You don’t get to know what I do anymore,’ I said.
‘I just hoped you were, you know, getting out a little.’
‘Yeah, I’m seeing someone,’ I said. ‘We haven’t used the “L” word yet, but we probably will soon.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Lawyer Mary says on the phone. ‘He’s not up for visitation.’
‘It’s okay. It’s not the end of the world,’ I say, ‘not yet.’