The Secret Lives of Men

by Georgia Blain

  The puppy pissed on the floor as soon as Sophia put her down.

  ‘There’s a rag under the sink,’ Pete told her wearily.

  Sophia ignored him. Standing at the back door, she lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply as she began to pace the courtyard. ‘Have you got any money, Dad?’

  He didn’t answer her straightaway.

  ‘I’ve been kicked out of my flat, and they won’t give me back the bond. They’re saying there’s a rubbish removal and cleaning fee, a thousand bucks, and I’m broke, Dad. I’m so fucking broke.’

  As he bent down to clean up the piss, the puppy lay on her back, paws in the air, fur thick beneath his fingers.

  ‘What’s she called?’ he asked.

  He scratched her under the chin, her hind leg thumping against the floor in a reflex reaction.

  Sophia shrugged. ‘How would I know?’

  ‘I thought she was yours,’ he said.

  Her eyes were conniving; he didn’t want to see it, but there it was, right in front of him, naked and sharp and ugly. ‘I bought her for you, Dad. As a present. To thank you for always being so good to me. You’re all I’ve got, you know.’ She dropped her cigarette to the ground, stepping inside to hug him. ‘So you name her. She’s yours.’ And she bent down to the puppy. ‘She’s sooo cute.’

  He didn’t want a dog. He told Sophia this.

  ‘Well, I can’t look after her.’

  There was silence between them.

  And then Sophia remembered why she had come. ‘I’ve got nowhere to live, no money. How am I meant to even feed her?’ She scooped the puppy up in her arms.

  He sighed and opened his wallet.

  But when she left, very soon afterwards, the puppy remained behind.

  In the first year and a half, he would wake bleary-eyed to walk Doris around the parklands, trying to stop her from pulling him on the lead or, if he let her off, trying to get her to return. Crouched down, he would call her, coaxingly, lovingly, holding out treats for her, sometimes even weeping in frustration as she would stand perfectly still, watching him, poised to bolt the instant he attempted to seize her collar.

  On one particular morning, he had tried for over an hour. He was late for work, a lecture to two hundred first-years on the role of media in government, and he knew that when he did make it in, there would be snickering, whispers about how hopeless he was. There were always lecturers who students thought were bumbling, useless, and only good for a high mark — and he was one of them.

  ‘Could you grab her by the collar?’ he called out to a woman who was walking five dogs of various sizes on a tangle of leads.

  She seized Doris, keeping her apart from the other dogs with swift nudges. ‘You’d better be quick,’ she said. ‘Six may well be the straw to break this camel’s back.’

  He snapped the lead on Doris and thanked her.

  ‘Pity I don’t have enough free hands to write down my number. Dog walking,’ she added when she saw the confusion on his face. She grinned broadly. ‘I’m not offering anything else.’

  He apologised, embarrassed.

  ‘She’d be one of the ones I take to the Bad Dog Park.’

  ‘Is there a place with that name?’ He realised how idiotic he sounded as soon as he asked the question.

  ‘It’s what I call it. The place where you take the ones who aren’t so well behaved,’ she said. ‘The ones who drink, smoke, lie, cheat and steal.’ She nodded in the direction of the station crossing. ‘Over the railway bridge and behind the velodrome. It’s one of the only untouched areas of park. Overgrown. No bike tracks or sporting fields.’ She turned to keep walking. ‘I’m there for the late-afternoon shift. Three p.m. onwards.’

  He had passed there every day on the train, never thinking to walk Doris beyond this side of the tracks. The grass was uncut, growing in unruly clumps, insects whirring in the humidity of the afternoon, wild fennel in bunches of licorice sweetness, and overhead the white cockatoos screeched with a note of panic as they lurched and swooped and wheeled against the charcoal clouds.

  She wasn’t there. Admittedly, it had taken him three months to finally venture into the badlands, and he was a fool for thinking there would be some magical meeting, but he had hoped.

  He let Doris off the lead, and she sniffed the breeze nervously.

  ‘Go,’ he told her, shooing her away with his hand.

  Far off, by the velodrome carpark, he could see another dog — large, alsatian-like, the owner some distance away. Doris spotted it as well, and tail high, back straight, she loped towards it with an erect gait that was half bravado, half fear.

  He had never witnessed a truly ferocious dogfight before. As he ran across the parkland, sweating and afraid, he could hear the snarling, and the yelps from Doris; he could see the owner kicking at them both, trying to separate them while keeping himself out of the fracas, his shouts panicked, the thud of his boot against the flank of the alsatian and then his own scream as he, too, was bitten.

  Later, Pete had only a vague recollection of how they had managed to break up the fight. He remembered shouting at the man, telling him to control his dog and reaching for a stick, which he flailed uselessly, until one of them (it must have been the other man because he couldn’t imagine it being himself) had dragged the alsatian out by its hind legs.

  Doris had puncture wounds to be patched and antibiotics to take, and in the midst of this the vet had also taken a blood sample, as part of a free service offered during October. ‘To check your dog’s overall health.’

  He didn’t listen. He was too busy trying to soothe her.

  Two days later, they called to tell him Doris was a diabetic.

  ‘It’s unusual,’ the vet said, ‘in a dog so young. But it happens.’ Had she been drinking more, eating more? Was she urinating more frequently?

  Pete hadn’t noticed anything. But now he thought about it, it should have been obvious. She’d been scavenging in bins whenever he walked her, and twice in the last week she’d pissed inside.

  To inject Doris, he had to pull up a scruff of skin on her neck.

  ‘Make a tent,’ the vet nurse instructed him, irritated that she had to demonstrate the technique again. ‘And then you put the needle in. Here, you have a go.’ She shoved a syringe into his hands.

  He wanted to faint.

  ‘It’s just a needle,’ she said. ‘You’ll get used to it.’

  But he never did. Holding the loose skin in his hands, he felt sick at the thought of puncturing flesh, piercing through the warmth of her body. And Doris howled, head back (until he learnt to keep her steady), mouth open in abject terror; she howled and howled in deep shock. How could he do this to her? And yet he did. Every morning, and then again, every night.

  ‘Oh for god’s sake, just put her down,’ Sophia told him.

  It was a sentiment echoed by most.

  Gretchen, who taught with him, listened in bemusement. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ she scolded, as she frequently did. ‘That much money on caring for a pet. There are people in Third World countries desperate for insulin, and here you are, giving it to an animal.’

  He didn’t know if she was correct about insulin need in other parts of the world, and he refrained from commenting on her newly purchased shoes (she’d just shown them to him and told him how much they cost). How many of the unshod across the globe could have had something on their feet for the price she’d paid?

  The truth was he wanted to put Doris down every single morning and every single evening, but when he removed the syringe and began to breathe again, rubbing her neck and feeding her another treat, he told himself he would learn to cope. He was getting better at it. Surely that had been a little easier than the injection twelve hours ago? And why should his discomfort with needles cause the death of a living creature he had come to lo
ve?

  At the end of summer he returned to the Bad Dog Park. Walking over the railway bridge and down the gravel path under the lemon-scented gums, he was a little wary.

  There was no one in sight.

  The ground was muddy beneath his feet, and the damp soaked through his shoes as he followed the track round to the open expanse, holding Doris on the lead until he could be sure all was safe. When he turned the corner, ready to let her go, he saw to his distress that there was a pack of dogs, five or six of them — all bad, no doubt; killers, probably — and he was tempted to slink away.

  But then he noticed her.

  Sitting in the grass, headphones in, oblivious to his approach until he was right behind her, she jumped, startled. He apologised for frightening her.

  She didn’t remember him, not at first, and when she did acknowledge some recollection of their meeting all that time ago, he wondered whether she was just making it up.

  ‘You going to let her off?’ she asked, nodding in Doris’s direction. ‘They’re all okay.’ She gestured at the pack, two of whom had begun circling Doris, sniffing her.

  ‘I thought you said this was the Bad Dog Park.’ He hesitated before undoing Doris’s lead.

  ‘Oh, they’re bad,’ she agreed. ‘But not nasty bad. Just trouble in other ways.’

  She asked him if he had ever walked along the tracks and up to the creek reserve.

  He hadn’t.

  ‘Want to come?’ She was standing now. ‘My van’s parked there. I need to load them up and deliver them back.’

  Separated from the railway by cyclone fencing choked with lantana, purple heart and blackberries, the track they followed was little more than flattened grass, worn down by her daily trek there and back.

  She told him she’d been walking dogs for ten years. ‘I thought it was just going to be temporary, and then I couldn’t see a reason to give it up.’

  Didn’t she get bored spending so much time on her own?

  She contemplated his question with more seriousness than light conversation would ordinarily receive.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she eventually answered. ‘There are days when I don’t speak to a single person. I just sit in a park with dogs, and I wonder how they see me, and I think I could go crazy.’

  He flicked a trail of bramble weed away with a stick. He knew what she meant. ‘Some days I spend hours talking to hundreds and hundreds of students and I wonder the same thing.’

  ‘When I was young, I thought I was going to be a doctor.’ She bent down to pick up yet another piece of dog shit. ‘There are some similarities between this’ — she held up the bag — ‘and the work of healthcare professionals.’

  ‘I wanted to work in politics,’ he told her. ‘I quickly learnt that I was very unsuited.’

  ‘But there are also days when I love this,’ she said.

  ‘At least you have that. I don’t think I’ve felt that about my work for years. I know I should make some kind of change. I just seem to be very bad at that side of things.’ He smiled at her. ‘Hopeless at change, but very, very good at staying true and loyal and fulfilling my duty.’ He stared up at the sky. ‘And I’m not saying I’m a saint,’ he rushed to add. ‘My heart is bad. Desperate to do the wrong thing, and to hang out with the bad dogs.’

  She grinned. ‘Well, you’re with ’em now.’

  He flicked a fly away. ‘Not really. I’m just tagging along.’

  The first night he stayed at Marnie’s house, he told her he would have to set the alarm early and leave.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s the injection.’

  They were lying next to each other, her hair like honey on his shoulder. He ran his hand gently down her body, resting on the line of her thigh. He knew he could be a little late administering the insulin, Doris would survive, but the truth was he needed his routine. This was the way he stayed calm. He wanted to explain this, but he felt so foolish.

  She kissed him on the mouth. ‘It’s been five years since I’ve slept with anyone. I am very happy. You may feel free to leave whenever you need to.’

  ‘But I’ll be back,’ he promised. ‘Commitment is not my problem.’

  He woke, well before the alarm of course, leaving her in bed and walking through the winter streets alone. Just him and the occasional shift worker, houses dark, curtains drawn.

  He remembered his life with Kate, the time when, together with Sophia, they had been one of those dark houses, the three of them seemingly safe, nestled in a smooth knot of family, close and whole. For years his whole being had ached to return to that place. He could have sat, knees to chest, and rocked himself in grief and longing, a desire to go back, forever and ever. He had fought to close himself off from that, gasping for air and eventually able to stay above the surface by doing the right thing, by which he meant doing what he knew he should do, day after day, always aware of the depths beneath.

  He opened his front door to find Doris, pressed against the other side, fast asleep at the end of the hallway. She lifted her head and thumped her tail, a thud on the floorboards, and she was up, eager to greet him.

  Seven a.m. One hundred grams of mince, one cup of dog biscuits.

  Splashing his face in the bathroom, he tried to remove all memory of the night before, the smell of Marnie lingering on his fingertips. He wanted to focus on the task at hand.

  Ten past seven. Insulin out of fridge.

  Rolling the bottle between his palms, he watched the cloudiness spread through the liquid. He had a syringe ready and he uncapped it, taking care not to let his eyes linger on the steely point of the needle. With the bottle upside down, he pierced the rubber stopper and began to draw out an amount that far exceeded the dosage, carefully pushing the plunger back in until he reached a place that was close to fourteen units. He held it up to the light and searched for his glasses on the kitchen table, just to make sure.

  Doris had not eaten all her food.

  Calling her back outside, he tried to coax her towards the bowl. She started to cough, a hacking half bark, her back arching, and he was scared she was going to vomit, leaving nothing in her belly. He would have to call the emergency vet to check whether he should be skipping her dosage, and if he needed to bring her in. He looked at his watch. He was meant to be at work in two hours.

  And then she stopped.

  Head down in her bowl, she finished it all.

  Seven-thirty. She sat at his feet, paws neatly in front of her, eyes resting on him while she waited for her treat, and accepted another as he ran his fingers through her coat and apologised for leaving her alone all night, talking nonsense until he felt calm enough to lift the scruff of her neck and plunge the needle in, to a howl that cut through the veil of serenity he had tried to cloak them both in, flimsy as always in the face of both their distress.

  ‘Oh, Doris.’ He put his head in his hands.

  Her tail was thumping again, the horror forgotten as quickly as it had descended.

  ‘Why do you do that?’

  Of course she didn’t answer.

  Taking a deep breath, he re-capped the needle and put it in the sharps disposal container. Tonight would be better.

  Marnie didn’t mind him leaving her place so early.

  ‘But you could just bring Doris here with you. Or we could stay at yours.’ She kissed him on the eyelids, her mouth sweet in the darkness.

  Pete tried to explain. ‘There are some things I am good at. Like ignoring how little respect I receive from students. Like cooking a perfect roast chicken. Like giving every essay a distinction, no matter how bad it is. I’m also very good at cleaning a bathroom, and I can fix broken-down electrical equipment — DVD players that don’t open, toasters with blown fuses.’ He could sense her looking at him. ‘But I am very bad with needles. And I mean truly terrible.’r />
  He waited for her to suggest that he didn’t have to do it. That he could put Doris down.

  She remained silent.

  ‘And I just need to be alone.’ He didn’t know how else to say it.

  She was staring at the ceiling, eyes open, considering his words. He was coming to know the profile of her face, the shape of her gradually imprinting itself on his skin; his hands and mouth able to tell the story of her body now.

  He could love her, he realised, and the sense was enough to make him reel, light-headed, until she shifted, just a little, and curved into him.

  ‘Perhaps you could let me inject her for you.’ She handed him the alarm clock as she spoke.

  Two days later, they were walking along the tracks, the pack of dogs in front of them, the first warmth of spring in the evening air, when he asked her to come back to his place.

  ‘I want to make you dinner,’ he said. ‘And be your host.’

  She told him she would love that.

  She didn’t mention the needle, not then, not when he set his alarm, not when he crept out of bed at dawn, beckoning Doris to follow him down to the kitchen, trying to be quiet, even though he knew Marnie was probably lying awake in his room.

  As he rolled the syringe in his palms, she came into the kitchen and held out her hand. ‘Here, let me try.’

  He explained the process, anxious that she understood every detail. She assured him she would be fine and she waved him away, telling him to go and have a shower.

  The howl that morning was worse than ever. Marnie swore, the needle and insulin clattering to the floor.

  Doris had bitten her, the teeth marks white on her skin.