by Paige Clark
I have to go through with the dognapping, which I didn’t want to resort to because I’m an adult. This whole plot would be a hell of a lot easier if we had an outdoor dog, but then whoever heard of a chihuahua that’s an outdoor dog? Plus, who am I fooling? As if I believe in outdoor dogs. To me, even those ponies that Donna brings round are indoor dogs. It’s like people who don’t let their dogs up on the couch. What do they do, get down on the ground to cuddle?
Still, I’m at my last bad option if I want to get my dog back. Before you ask, yes, I read the fine print on GeneLife!’s website. I don’t need a lecture. It’s not going to be the actual dog, but it is going to be like the actual dog. And I know from experience that when a thing is like the real thing it can hoodwink your brain something extraordinary. Case in point: I thought I was going to have a baby and then all the medical professional people told me it was not a baby. They said foetus. But their doctor jargon didn’t trick me. I’m still stuck in the goddamned fantasy where that foetus gets born. Would Bernard have used his lawyer talk then? Or would he have been the way he is, which is mostly caring but in that cool, reserved way where he tries to pretend that he’s not being caring at all? Could we have got by? It’s not like we didn’t have the money. It’s not like we didn’t have the space.
Just when I’m getting desperate, a plan presents itself. Donna brings the horses and her friend Damien, who works at the tip, over for lunch. Damien is her neighbour. He smells like he actually believes your hair looks better when you don’t wash it. A baseball cap hides the worst of it. I have no doubt he would steal a dog for fun and no doubt I would like to sleep with him. Donna figured out the latter part, but we are all still here pretending to be meeting under the guise of my day job as a mosaic ceramist. She’s right—a connection at the tip would come in handy. But if I know Donna like I know Donna, she told Damien in plain English that I am pitiful and horny and here he is. Whatever she said, I fancy him and his sinewy muscles enough to drag another lawn chair from the common area into my apartment and make him an egg-salad sandwich.
‘I like your art,’ Damien says. He is looking at the turtle, who is still the wrong way around, puking into space.
‘It’s a Toyohiro original,’ I say.
‘It’s upside down,’ Donna says.
‘There are lots of, like, tiles and shit at the tip,’ Damien says.
‘Maybe you could go down for a visit,’ Donna says. ‘It’s a private landfill.’ Donna is the only person I know who would try to make rubbish into an innuendo.
‘Or I could bring some shit back here,’ he says.
‘I’m in,’ I say, because that’s what people say when they want to sound casual and have sex. I feed a scrap of eggy bread to Wilson and then another scrap to Tucker. It’s not fair otherwise.
‘Don’t feed the dogs too much egg,’ Donna says. ‘High in cholesterol.’
‘How many times do I have to tell you?’ I ask.
‘For Chrissake,’ Donna says, ‘they are dogs!’
‘Are you free tonight?’ I ask Damien, to change the subject. I know from my calls that Bernard occasionally goes out on Tuesdays. On Fridays, he likes to get laid. I remember that from before. He enjoys slow sex. The last time he tried it with me, he kissed me with an open mouth, undressed me very tenderly, talked to me how he always did.
‘You’ve got a perfect body. Did you know that? Has anybody ever told you that before?’
‘Does the extra genetic material come from the mother or from the father?’ I asked him.
In the end, Donna and her stallions leave. Damien and I return the plastic chairs to the common area and have sex in the living room. We wear as many clothes as possible. Before long, I find out he likes to be on the bottom and move his pelvis back and forth rapidly in a jerking motion. In this position, I can see Wilson’s stray sandy hairs poking out from behind his neck and a few of Tucker’s black ones around his shoulders. The fluoros are hot on my back. A word Deborah Landau would use in a book to describe his type of sex is ‘virile’. When he’s finished, I ask if he wants to go to my ex-husband’s house and steal my dog back.
‘Sounds fun,’ he says.
‘It’s Tuesday, so he might be home,’ I say.
‘Oh, shit.’
‘You’ve got nothing to worry about,’ I say. ‘The dog we are fighting over is literally a chihuahua. Besides, I’ve got a pretty good lawyer—she’s, like, a friend of mine.’
‘Fuck,’ he says, ‘that’s cool.’
There are no lights on at Bernard’s so I guess he must be at yoga or out with a lawyer friend.
‘This is where you lived?’ asks Damien.
‘And died,’ I add.
‘The dog won’t bite?’
‘She’s got no teeth. Go in through the laundry.’
‘We’re not both going in?’
‘I’ll be the lookout. I know what to look out for.’ I can see Bernard moving upstairs behind the curtains, but I’m not sure if it’s him or my memory of him. There he is folding laundry. There he is combing coconut-scented balm into his hair. There he is waking me up in the morning with a disapproving comment about the dog in the bed. Bernard can fold a fitted sheet. He flosses every night. But sometimes, when he was hung-over, he stayed in bed long after waking up, long enough to let me kick the dog out of bed.
I get so busy looking for Bernard that I don’t realise Damien has retrieved my dog. Suddenly Minnie is in front of me, staring at me with her chihuahua eyes.
‘Don’t be mad at me,’ I say.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ says Damien. But I am in the backyard of my house, rolling in the grass. My sweet dog is on my belly.
‘Don’t blame this on me,’ I say. ‘I got here as soon as I could. I know you’re mad, but you blame this on your daddy. You blame it on him. ’Cause I came to get you, baby dog. Just like I swore I would.’
‘This is getting weird,’ Damien says.
‘You used me for sex,’ I say.
‘Yeah, well, I’d do it again.’
Minnie puts her head underneath my hand as if to say, more pats, more pats, please, don’t ever stop. I do as she commands. I could stay here all night like this, Minnie girl. I promise I could.
This time it is Bernard that calls me. I buy myself time by having a conversation.
‘I’m not even surprised,’ he says. ‘And that’s what I’m upset about. I knew you would do this. It’s exactly the kind of thing you would do.’
‘I’m telling you, Damien took the dog.’
‘Who the fuck is Damien?’
‘A guy that works at the tip.’
‘You met someone at the tip?’
‘We didn’t meet at the tip.’
‘Listen, I’m happy for you. That’s not what I’m trying to say here.’
‘He’s not my boyfriend.’
‘Then why does he have our fucking dog?’
‘Our dog? It turns me on when you lie to me,’ I say.
‘Bring her back by tonight or I’m calling my lawyer.’
‘I’ll call mine too.’ But I’ve got until tonight and that’s more than long enough. Best of all: I got him to raise his voice at me.
‘Don’t worry,’ I add. ‘I cut all the dried poo out from around her butt.’
My happiness is short-lived, marred by my inability to shake Damien for part two of my plan—find a vet and extract the DNA. His work at the tip seems undemanding. He has a lot of free time to hang around my apartment and recline in lawn furniture. Life ain’t a picnic, Damien. Some people have to work. Not him, not today. He lounges around and eats foods that make crinkly noises—packets of crisps and sleeves of biscuits. Minnie sits beneath his plastic chair, basking in his spray of crumbs.
Unlike doctors, vets go into business for the love and not for the money. Minnie’s vet, who has a three-legged greyhound named Lacy, spouts mantras like Adopt, don’t shop. I argue there’s very little shopping involved in what I’m doing.
Still,
the cloning angle isn’t going to work on many vets. I have to lose Damien so I can cold-call a few. I decide to have sex with him, so he will think I am keen on him, get bored of me and exit. Also, I’m feeling amorous.
I want to cover Minnie’s eyes for this next part, but she politely leaves the room when we start fucking. I hear her whimper once from the bedroom.
‘Don’t worry, Minnie, Mummy still loves Daddy,’ I say out of habit.
‘You whore,’ Damien says. ‘You fucking slut.’ He pulls out in time to cum onto a discarded chip wrapper. He gives me a kiss on the temple. I run into the bedroom and fetch Minnie, who is snoring softly, chasing rabbits in her sleep.
‘Nice one,’ Damien yells out from the other room. ‘You’re into that daddy shit. It’s pretty kinky.’
‘He’ll be gone soon, baby dog,’ I say. ‘You won’t have to see that mean old man again. Keep chasing those sweet bunny rabbits.’ But I know myself, so I know he’ll be back.
GeneLife! also offers cryogenic pet preservation using the same biopsy-punch sample, which I decide will be an easier sell to vets than cloning straight up. I find a vet on the internet named Walt and take it as a good omen, especially considering the Disney family’s history of freezing their dead. Dr Walt is affable and expensive. He agrees to see Minnie immediately.
After I drop Minnie off, I go to the shops and pick up a polystyrene-lined box, half a dozen cold packs and some cream cheese. Minnie is ready for me when I get back. Dr Walt places her in my arms. Her cookie head is in a miniature plastic cone.
‘What’s Mama done to you, baby dog?’ I ask. I put the tissue samples Dr Walt gives me carefully into the cool box and pay him a considerable amount.
‘She’s a sweetie,’ he says. ‘Come back and see us anytime.’
Will Dr Walt recognise her when he meets her again as a puppy? I head straight from the vet to the post office where I ship off every cell of dog I’ve got to my name.
On the way to Bernard’s, Minnie and I share the cream cheese, licking it straight out of its shiny casing. She knows we are going home, and is overjoyed with each corner we round towards the house. By the time I put the car into park, she is jumping for joy. Even the cream cheese won’t entice her to stay.
Bernard must have been waiting. He appears at the door and asks what the fuck I’ve done.
‘I took her for a check-up, that’s all. I worry.’
‘You know I’m capable of taking care of her.’
‘They found something they didn’t like the look of on her belly. They’ve sent the skin samples off for testing. They’ll call you if it’s anything,’ I say. I get a familiar rush, standing on my porch lying to this man.
‘Well, thanks for that,’ Bernard says, ‘but I’ve got this.’
I don’t correct him. I say, ‘I’ll keep out of your hair from here on.’
He doesn’t correct me either and I walk away. Before I make it to the car, he yells, ‘Hey, Babs!’ and when I turn back, he’s holding out a photo. It’s of Minnie and me in bed. I’m fast asleep and Minnie is looking up at the camera as if she is protecting me from the man taking the photo.
‘I let her sleep in the bed now,’ he says.
I can’t say anything back to him, so I bow my head in gratitude and take the photo from his outstretched hand.
When I get home, I inspect the photo beneath the brilliance of the fluorescents to find that Bernard’s got his thumb in the frame. It’s nice to have him here. I tuck the photo into a page of the poetry book and catch a line I’d never noticed before. ‘When the sun comes out it’s a disappointment/Who on earth can live up to it,’ Deborah L says.
I go over to my turtle and I turn the painting the right way up. For a second I think I like it better the way it was, vomiting up into nowhere. Then I realise—you can get used to anything.
I lie down on the floor and try to fall asleep. Through my eyelids, I can still make out the flicker of the lights, on their brightest setting. Next to my head is the chip packet with what’s left of the cum, all but licked clean by my precious dog. The smell of Minnie’s saliva puts me at ease and I fall asleep like this, my head craned towards the cum, my heart chasing the rabbits that dance across my eyes shut tight.
If I call Damien every night at 9.31 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 stop wanting to sleep with me. If I text him every morning at 6.58 with nothing but the pornographic letters XXX, maybe he will stop sending me photos of his penis in the naked light. Of course, if I do this for as many days as I plan to, there is the chance he will fall in love with me. But I know Damien well enough to know he will keep sleeping with me and still not fall in love with me. He’s one of those teenage-forever men. If he doesn’t get laid by me, he’ll just get laid by someone else. Plus, here’s something he doesn’t even know about himself. He really gets off on how much I pretend to hate his guts.
But then I call and he thinks the joke is funny.
‘Why do you always say that when you want to fuck?’ he asks.
I’ve turned him on like I worried I would, so I suggest a late-night tip run to find materials.
‘You’re using me for my rubbish,’ he says. For all of my misgivings about the man, I respect that he only talks about art and intercourse and would try anything once. Hell, he’ll steal your dog from your estranged husband. Do you blame me? I have a lot of time to kill.
When Damien picks me up to go to the tip, ‘Woman in Love’ is blasting on his stereo. He grunts at me and I grunt back. With other men, I get offended when they don’t want to talk. With him, I let myself relax into the song, the swooping synths, the power-ballad vocals.
‘Barbra Streisand sucks,’ Damien says.
I hadn’t recognised her voice. For all my years masquerading as Babs, I’ve only seen the one movie. I disagree with him despite myself.
‘It’s a classic song,’ I say.
‘Did you know she cloned her dog? What a bitch move.’
So I say, ‘She’s not a good actress.’
‘She’s a bitch,’ he says. ‘Don’t say anything else.’
We are sitting in the car with Barbra eddying around us, defending her right to do anything for love. And wasn’t I a woman in love? Didn’t I have the right?
What do I do?
What I do is tell Damien I don’t want to go into the tip as soon as we arrive. He asks what I want to do and I know he thinks I feel like having sex in the car. I don’t not feel like having sex in the car, so we do. Barbra isn’t on the radio anymore. It’s something rock, maybe the Eagles. And I don’t like it any better than what was playing before. I don’t like the sex any better than the other sex we had on the floor, beneath the plastic chairs and next to the crisp remnants. I remember that I used to come having sex in the bed, the normal way, and sometimes that made me feel boring, but most of the time I didn’t overthink it the way I am overthinking it now. The car pulses with Damien’s vigorous thrusting, but I can’t feel any movement. I can only visualise it, like seeing lights through your eyelids. You wonder if your eyes are open or if they are shut.
‘Stay in the car,’ Damien says when he’s finished.
He is gone for a long time. Lots of other songs play and some commercials too and I still like the song the bitch who cloned her dogs sang the best. When Damien gets back, I know he’s chuffed with himself by the way he mumbles and slides into the driver’s seat.
‘Look at this shit,’ he says. He passes me a box of marble floor-tile offcuts. They look familiar.
‘Why would anyone throw this away?’ I ask.
‘People just want new luxe shit,’ he says. He is unfazed by it.
‘This is luxe,’ I say.
‘Don’t forget the actual medium that you work in is trash.’
‘Well, what medium do you work in then?’ I ask. This shuts him up. Though it’s possible the conversation would have just ended there anyway.
Lawyer Mary calls me on the phone. She must be missing my money now that I’ve secured the biopsy sample of Minnie and my clone is on the way.
‘Always nice to hear from a friend,’ I say. I wonder what colour her nails are this week.
‘Bernard hasn’t signed the papers yet,’ she tells me. ‘But I’m working on him.’
‘He already paid me the money,’ I say. ‘I’ve spent the money.’
‘He’s stalling. This is quite common. People tend to get cold feet. I’m working on him.’
‘Do you have to?’ I ask.
‘I understand you want this thing finalised. I get it.’
But she doesn’t get me at all. There is $57,000 sitting in my account and the rest of it is somewhere in an American bank, paying for cell division and electrical artificial insemination.
‘Hey, how’s the puppy?’ she adds cheerfully.
I hazard a guess in my mind: her nails are glazed and bespeckled in the shade Passionate Prawn.
‘No sign of her yet,’ I say. ‘But she’ll be as sweet as Minnie. I’m sure of it.’
When does a dog become your dog?
Is it when you fork out $50,000 to a dog-making Science institute? Is it when you spend an entire day watching Barbra Streisand movies, convincing yourself that you like her films because she cloned her dog Samantha? After all, she does have that one catchy song you like. You can relate to that song and so can a lot of other people. So what if your future ex-husband called you Babs as a joke. Who’s laughing now?
Is it after the medical procedure that replicates your beloved dog’s DNA from a stolen skin-tissue sample and puts that DNA into a donor egg, which is implanted into a surrogate dog and then fertilised by a jolt of electricity? Is this dog—a replica of your dog but not your dog, with perfect genes, not a single chromosomal defect in sight—your dog? Or is your old dog still your dog? Will the new dog know you like to sleep with the lights on when you’re scared? And you’re often scared these days, after all the sucking and the fucking and the plotting and the pranking.