Spectacles

by Sue Perkins

  Only one thing could make this concrete metropolis more perfect for a kid.

  A dog.

  Not even my dad’s epic three-quarters-of-a-century grief was going to stop me in my mission to get a hound. So I wore my parents down with the most toxic weapon in my arsenal. My personality.

  I tried again.

  29 MARCH 1976

  A girl in a tartan kilt and thick tights with a pudding-bowl haircut approaches her mother. She looks like a Scottish version of Damian from The Omen.

  Girl:

  Mum, can I have a dog?

  Mum:

  No.

  Girl:

  Mum, pleeeeeeease.

  Mum:

  I said no.

  Girl:

  [plug of snot forming in nostril] But why?

  Mum:

  Because …

  Girl:

  But why?

  If my dad’s reason for not having pets is that they will die and make you sad, then my mum’s excuses are way more comprehensive …

  Mum:

  Well, for starters, they’re dirty. They’re unpredictable. They transmit diseases. They can give you asthma, hives, ringworm, roundworm, heartworm, tapeworm –

  I am going to stop her in her tracks because that list goes on and on. What you need to know about my mum right now is this: she is a weapons-grade catastrophizer.* That is to say, she’s a professional mountain-maker when only a molehill is called for. Give her an inch, she’ll panic about running the mile. OK, let’s return to the list.

  Mum:

  – hookworm, toxocariasis, campylobacter, Lyme disease, scabies … oh …

  Here it comes – the Big One.

  Mum:

  … and rabies.

  Yep, just to reinforce the point, she’d dropped the R-bomb. Anyone who was a child during the 1970s understands the knee-jerk horror created by the mere mention of rabies. We grew up watching endless public service announcements – the whole of my childhood in fact felt like one long cautionary tale voiced by Donald Pleasance dressed in a Grim Reaper outfit. Many of these ‘Charlie Says’ information films were specifically about the dangers of slathering wild dogs (usually from France, of course), which could, at any time, cross the Channel and bite us into insanity.

  The rabies thing worked. It was a while until I asked about dogs again.

  My mum actually liked dogs. When she was little, her parents had bought her a poodle called Tracy, who turned out to be the only hypo-allergenic thing to have come out of the 1960s. After Tracy shuffled off her many mortal coils, Mum’s folks invested in a series of ever-larger beasts, culminating in Dusty and Clyde – two vast and menacing Alsatians that looked like they’d run straight from Berchtesgaden. I was four years old when I first clapped eyes on them and was fascinated by Dusty in particular, especially when she was feeding. There was something about her powerful jaws as she crunched through lamb bones that intrigued me. So I decided to take a closer look. One dinnertime, as her bowl was put down, I decided to saunter over and get a worm’s-eye view of her mouth in motion.

  As my mum entered the kitchen, she was greeted by the sight of her four-year-old daughter lying on the floor, back of her head in the dog bowl, with Dusty’s vast teeth clamped either side of her face.

  Mum:

  [suddenly very quiet] Susan, what are you doing?

  Me:

  I can see inside!

  Mum:

  There’s a good girl, Dusty, good girl. [Trying to prise the dog’s jaws apart]

  Me:

  It’s dark. And it smells weird. Where does the food go?

  Mum:

  [sound of growling] Easy now, easy now.

  Me:

  [pressure in my head growing] My ears feel bursty, Mummy.

  A pop as my head is released. There is a moment of calm, followed by the time-honoured Ann Perkins battle cry.

  Mum:

  Bert! Get the Dettol!

  As far as my mum is concerned, there isn’t a single situation that can’t be cured by either a.) a bath in Dettol or b.) gargling with TCP. Her anxiety is constant. Oftentimes I’ll come home and she will have left a message on the answerphone like this one, which is taken, verbatim, from a recording in 2011.

  ‘Hi. Just to let you know that I’ve heard from Jean about a new Yardie scam in London. They flash their headlights at you, and if you flash yours back, they’ll steal your car and kill you. Thought you should know. Oh, it’s Mum, by the way.’

  Recently, while visiting them in Cornwall, I chucked a handful of dog biscuits on the lawn for my pet hound to sniff out. Mum immediately starting fretting.

  Mum:

  Will they sprout?

  Me:

  What?

  Mum:

  Only your father and I have spent ages on that grass.

  Me:

  Mum, they’re dog biscuits.

  Mum:

  Yes, but will they sprout?

  Me:

  Yes, Mum, they’ll grow into kibble trees, with pelletized dog-food fruit that will drop onto your lawn all summer.

  There is no situation, however banal, that my mum can’t infuse with dread. To read about a promotional credit card offer is to have it completed, sent off, card received, maxed to the limit and thence be whisked to debtors’ prison. During the anthrax scare of 2001 she opened all her mail wearing Marigolds. One day, on returning home to visit, I found her bent over the steps to the front door, daubing the edges with luminous white paint.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘These steps are a trip hazard!’ she replied.

  ‘What? Suddenly? Since last week?’

  ‘Yes. Your dad’s not getting any younger, you know.’

  ‘He’s fifty-five!’

  ‘Yes, he’s fifty-five now,’ she replied – and carried on painting.

  And yet, for all her anxiety, she didn’t see the threat that lurked just outside her home. Despite all the consternation about poisoned Royal Mail packages and credit card debt, my mum seemed oblivious to the fact that she and Dad had chosen to buy a house right next to an electricity substation – a brick bunker hung with daisy chains of barbed wire and stock-proof fencing. There was even a massive sign, replete with skull and crossbones that said:

  WARNING!

  KEEP OUT!

  But no. She was so concerned with what was happening within a six-foot radius of herself, she never even noticed I was living my entire childhood within sight of a sign reading:

  DANGER OF DEATH

  And thank goodness, because what I discovered for myself is that when the DANGER OF DEATH is permanently on your doorstep, it takes an awful lot to freak you out from further afield. I was fearless.

  PINKY AND PERKY

  A couple of years later my parents relented and got us two gerbils. Even though I was not the sharpest tack in the box, I was aware that the furry sausages shitting in the cage in front of me were not the Dalmatians I had asked for. My mum christened them Pinky and Perky because apparently (as I was duly informed) Christopher and Reeve we
re not appropriate pet names.

  Never owned gerbils? Want to know a little more? At this point I defer to world-renowned gerbil expert Susan Elizabeth Perkins, aged seven. I have asked for the author’s permission in publishing these extracts …

  Now, my rule of thumb when it comes to choosing a pet is simply this: am I ever going to see it? In the case of the gerbils, the answer was clearly NO. Gerbils are nocturnal. And I, at the age of seven, was not. (Unless I’d been on a Robinson’s orange squash binge, in which case this little soldier was going on a four-eyed 24/7 rampage.)

  Our incompatible sleeping regimes meant I probably only spent about twenty minutes of quality time with our pets in just under four years. I say quality time; I mean grabbing them from their slumber and squeezing their back ends till their eyes bulged. The gerbils’ main hobbies were eating a plastic wheel and defecating in a nest, both of which they appeared to excel at. I say ‘appeared’ – I have no idea, since everything they did was performed in the dead of night when I was out for the count.

  In fact, the only time I ever saw my gerbil do anything, was when she ate one of her babies after my brother bombed down the stairs while giving a spectacularly rousing version of the Batman theme tune. This act of casual infanticide was the only thing I witnessed my pet doing in all the four years of its life. I was distraught. I was disturbed. But mainly I was confused.

  Me:

  But why? Why did it do that?

  Mum:

  Well, Susan, the mummy was protecting her babies.

  Me:

  What? By EATING them?

  Mum:

  [leaden pause] Yes.

  I’m forty-five years old now, and I still can’t see the logic in that. It’s like worrying that your child might get bullied at school, so beating them to death to protect them.

  They’ve got a lot to learn about motherly love, gerbils. Even now I can’t listen to the opening strains of the Batman theme without thinking of that fat infanticidal mamma licking her lips in a now empty cage.

  She may have been a slouch when it came to childcare, but Perky was certainly game in the procreation stakes. My mum had made it clear to Helen Banks’ parents that she wanted two of the same sex. And yet, just a few months after taking receipt of them, in a miracle of same-sex breeding, six babies were born. And then another five. Then six again. Then seven.

  Always one to turn tragedy into profit, I sold the babies to the local pet shop for sixty pence a pop. What began with a pair of nocturnal siblings, ended in a thriving cottage industry. Every month was like Christmas. I’d come down the stairs to find a writhing mass of pink four-legged sausages, like recently severed still-twitching fingers.

  Once, a tiny baby escaped and made a bid for freedom behind the piano. We hunted high and low and finally had to assume it was dead. We lit a candle, said prayers – I may have even made a cross out of lollypop sticks. Those who say Catholicism can be easily sloughed off have never seen a seven-year-old give full burial rites to what basically amounts to a posh mouse. Two weeks later it turned up, alive and well, behind the sofa, where it had grown fat on a diet of discarded Marmite sandwiches and fluoride tablets. It was fat, feral and happy – with a set of gnashers more gleaming than Donny Osmond’s. When I handed it over to the pet shop, I couldn’t help but think they’d got a bargain.

  My lack of interaction with them notwithstanding, when Pinky and Perky died in quick succession, I grieved like a drama-school Medea. Not only had I grown to love them, I had made a total of £23.40 out of them in a mere three years. Their death brought not only emotional pain, but my own personal credit crunch.

  Dad knelt in the garden, Farah action slack stretched against beefy thigh, flicking the rigored corpses into an ice cream tub and thence into a hole in the garden.

  ‘See, I told you,’ he said, fixing his beady blue eyes on me. ‘Pain.’

  Later the postman arrived and seemed to pay an awful lot of attention to Dad’s frantic digging.

  Mum:

  It was the time of the torso murders, so it looked very suspicious.

  Me:

  What kind of torso could fit into a one-litre tub of Wall’s non-dairy solids ice cream?

  Mum:

  Oh, you’d be surprised. They can be very devious, these serial killers …

  After Pinky and Perky we went through a period of what can only be described as pet surrogacy. Here are the creatures that passed through our doors.

  ROLLO THE BUDGIE

  Dad was obsessed with Rollo the budgie and used to spend hours every day training him to say ‘You bastard’. However, Rollo did not want to say ‘You bastard’ and therefore remained mute for the entire period of his stay. The next, and last, time Rollo came to stay with us, Dad renewed his efforts – staying up late into the night repeating the same phrase over and over and over again. Still nothing.

  Rollo’s owners came to collect him the next day. As his cage crossed the threshold, I heard Rollo mutter something. I couldn’t be sure, but it sounded an awful lot like ‘Thank fuck for that.’

  TASHA/KARA

  Kara, like her sister Tasha before her, was a Samoyed, a bright white husky as gormless as she was cute. And she was very, very cute. She belonged to our beloved family friends the Szilagyis, and we’d look after her when they went on their summer holidays. To say Kara shed fur was an understatement – she’d drop hairballs the size of fairground candyfloss wherever she went. Her finest hour came following a long walk after she had been put in the back of the car. Suddenly she caught sight of a squirrel and leaped straight through the back windscreen, leaving it in shards behind her. She didn’t even feel it. Told you, gormless.

  UNNAMED HAMSTER

  I don’t remember this creature’s name – just his testicles. That’s me for you. He arrived one autumn, and it became immediately clear the poor thing had a serious case of elephantiasis of the gonads. He looked like two beanbags attached to a pipe cleaner. We spent a few weeks watching him gamely lug his junk from one end of the lounge to the other, until his owners came back from a fortnight in Magaluf and our fun was over.

  POLLY THE CAT

  Polly, or Pog as we called her, was our neighbours’ cat – but as with most cats the concept of home was a movable feast. She used to occasionally pop round for some chicken and a cuddle, but she decided to come and live with us full time in the winter of 1999. She made her home on my dad’s stomach as he lay sleeping on the downstairs couch. His insomnia had become increasingly bad, and he’d set up camp in the lounge so as not to disturb Mum.

  Shortly after Pog started making pilgrimages to his tummy, he was diagnosed with colon cancer. There were operations which cut his already scarred belly into ribbons. Then there were the ridges of incisional hernias which followed. During this time Pog seemed to understand she shouldn’t sleep on him, so lay beside him, purring like a pair of bagpipes cranking into life – a contented wheeze that was the soundtrack to his long road to recovery. After the hernias there were more ops. Radiotherapy. A year of chemo delivered through a Hickman line into his heart. She purred while his nails went black and fell out, while he bloated with steroids, as he crunched endless mints to get the metal taste from his mouth. She purred through the whole damn thing.

  The Christmas after Dad got the all clear, Mum took a whopping seven-kilo turkey out of the chest freezer and stood it in a large bucket to defrost. We went out en masse to do some last-minute shopping and returned to find Pog in a state of some distress, dragging the bird around
the floor, her fangs fused to the frozen meat. We didn’t shout at her; Mum merely got out the electric carving knife, hacked off the entire breast that she’d punctured, popped it in the microwave and gave it to her to finish at her leisure.

  A few weeks later Pog took herself off to die. We never got the chance to thank her, or to let her know that any one of us would have happily lain next to her, like she did with Dad, in her hour of need.

  I did finally got the dog I’d always wanted. At the age of thirty-one. It turns out that Dad was right – animals are pain.

  But what a joyous, joyous pain.

  Nineteen

  Describing how sound recording equipment worked in the 1980s to a teenager today is like a Homo habilis explaining how he used to slap mammoths to death to the Homo erectus who has just invented the spear. Even as you describe the process, you feel as obsolete in the world as the technology you’re describing.

  Well, kids, in the olden days, if you wanted to listen to music and most importantly find out what was number one, you had to wait until Thursday nights and Top of the Pops. For those too young to remember, Top of the Pops was a documentary about a group of predatory paedophiles set against a backdrop of disco music and early electronica.