‘Butch,’ Dad told her.
‘Butch!’ Mum repeated. ‘It doesn’t sound like a small, docile, house-trained dog to me.’
‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ I said. ‘I’ll take good care of it. It’ll be no problem.’
If only I had been right.
When Dad brought the dog home I couldn’t believe it, I just couldn’t believe it. I had always wanted a dog – a silky red-haired setter with doleful brown eyes or a cuddly corgi or a cute little chihuahua or a soft golden labrador or a frisky black and white collie or a long-haired spaniel. But Mum wouldn’t let me have any pets. She said it would be cruel to keep an animal with her and Dad out at work and me at school all week, with no garden for it to exercise in and the street so busy with traffic. I would have settled for almost any kind of dog, even that miniature poodle that Micky’s mum had, but I certainly didn’t want a dog like Butch. He was like some prehistoric monster.
‘Well, here we are,’ said Dad sheepishly as he tried to pull this fat snarling creature through the front door. Eventually he managed to get the brute inside, and it was then that I stared in amazement.
There stood Butch, a big, ugly, barrel-bodied, bow-legged bull terrier with square pinky-white jowls and pale unfriendly eyes. The monster growled as it caught sight of me, showing a set of sharp teeth like tank traps, and stuck its fat tail in the air.
‘I know what you’re thinking, Brenda,’ said Dad quickly when Mum emerged from the kitchen. Mum didn’t say a word; she just stared in disbelief. ‘I know it’s not what you…’ His voice tailed off.
‘It’s horrible!’ she cried. ‘Colin, it will have to go back. I am not having that brute in this house.’
‘I can’t take it back,’ whined Dad. ‘Reg is in hospital and there’s nowhere to take it.’ The dog growled and showed its set of sharp teeth again.
‘It will have to go into those boarding kennels on Gilberthorpe Street,’ said Mum. ‘They look after animals while people are on holiday. You’ll have to take it there.’
‘Ah,’ sighed Dad. ‘There’s a small problem with that. I did mention to Reg about the boarding kennels on Gilberthorpe Street when he asked me to look after Butch but he said he’d never settled there and, to be honest, I don’t think they were very keen on having him back.’
‘Colin!’ said Mum sharply. ‘We cannot look after that dog!’
‘We can’t just throw it out on the street,’ pleaded Dad. ‘And I did promise Reg we would look after it. It’s just for a few days.’ I could see by her expression that Mum was softening to the idea. ‘I’m sure he’s a very friendly dog, deep down,’ said Dad, unconvincingly. ‘We’ll soon get to like him.’
‘Well, just keep it out of my way,’ said Mum, retreating to the kitchen and slamming the door behind her.
But Butch wasn’t friendly and we didn’t get to like him. He turned out to be bad-tempered and moody, and one hour after his arrival the entire bird population of the street migrated and even Mrs Sewell’s tortoiseshell cat, the most vicious creature in the street, made itself scarce.
Butch soon made himself at home. On the first morning he sat on the pavement outside the front door, sunning himself and watching for any movement. I tied him to the street lamp with a piece of short rope and looked out of the window regularly to check on him. He seemed quite happy to sit there in the sun. I did notice that pedestrians began to cross the road when they caught sight of him, and later in the week they avoided the street altogether. Then people stopped calling. The milkman stopped collecting the bottles from outside the front door and posted a note through the letterbox to say the milk had to be collected from the depot in future, the postman posted our letters next door and asked for them to be passed on and the newspaper boy threw the paper over the back wall. Micky, my best friend, informed me that he would meet me at the park in future rather than call for me, provided I didn’t bring the dog along. It wasn’t so much me taking the dog for a walk, it was more the dog taking me for one, for it tugged me along the street growling and grunting and terrifying anybody who passed.
Then one morning when Dad was on the afternoon shift, the inevitable happened. Fortunately Mum was at work, so did not witness the crime. I knew Butch would kill something sooner or later. I told Dad that he would. I had seen the way he eyed anything that moved in the park and I had a real job holding him back when he saw other dogs. He snapped and snarled and gnashed his teeth, scraping the ground with his fat paws, desperate to be let off the lead. Anyway, that dreadful Friday morning I had just finished my breakfast when Butch wandered into the kitchen with a white rabbit wedged in his jaws.
‘Dad! Dad!’ I screamed. ‘Come quickly.’
‘What is it?’ he shouted from the bathroom.
‘Get down here now, Dad!’ I shrieked. ‘Now!’
I must have sounded pretty desperate, because I heard him a moment later bounding down the stairs.
‘Whatever’s the matter?’ he shouted, rushing into the kitchen. He was half dressed and with his face covered in shaving cream.
‘Look!’ I cried. ‘He’s got a rabbit!’
‘Oh my goodness!’ gasped Dad when he caught sight of Butch standing staring up at him with the rabbit in his mouth.
‘However did he get that?’ cried Dad.
‘I don’t know,’ I told him miserably. ‘He must have slipped his rope. He just wandered into the kitchen with the rabbit in his mouth.’
Dad grabbed Butch by his collar. ‘Drop!’ he commanded. ‘Drop!’
Butch looked up with the grey, watery, button eyes of a shark and tightened his grip on the rabbit.
‘I said drop it!’ shrieked Dad, his voice two octaves higher by this time. ‘This instant!’
Butch made a rumbling noise like a distant train and continued to grip his victim.
‘Do you hear me, you… you nasty, vicious, savage cur!’ shouted Dad. ‘Drop that rabbit!’
Butch blinked, then flopped down on the floor, still with his jaws tightly clamped together.
Dad attempted everything: trying to prise open the jaws with a hairbrush, tapping him on the head, dangling a morsel of juicy meat in front of his nose, nipping his nose to cut off his air, but nothing worked.
‘There’s nothing for it,’ said Dad suddenly. ‘We’ll have to take him to the vet’s.’
So we tugged and pulled Butch down the street, across the main road, past the shops, watched by amazed shoppers, still with the rabbit wedged in his mouth, until we arrived at the vet’s.
The waiting room was crowded with people and their pets. They stared in shock and astonishment when we walked through the door. There was a man with a cage containing a noisy parrot which stopped squawking immediately at the sight of Butch, a nervous-looking woman with a sleepy white cat on her knee which soon woke up when it heard the growling, a little boy holding a hamster or some other small creature in a cardboard box, and a girl with a woolly-haired dog which whimpered pathetically when it caught sight of our canine companion. They all stared in horror, pets and owners, as Butch flopped on to the floor, tightening his grip on the rabbit, rumbling threateningly and eyeing everybody with those cold grey button eyes.
‘Who’s next?’ asked the receptionist, popping her head round the door.
‘He is!’ they all chorused, pointing at Butch.
‘It’s the wolfish ancestry,’ explained the vet cheerfully, surveying Butch as he stood bow-legged and brazen on his examination table. ‘It’s over ten thousand years, you know, since dogs were first domesticated but they still retain their wild instincts. We have modified a great many of their wild traits, of course, but all dogs still have that basic urge to kill. Even the most endearing of puppies is quite capable of savagery.’
‘Much as I would like a potted history of the canine world,’ interrupted Dad, getting irritated, ‘I do want to know what you can do about the rabbit.’
‘Not much, I’m afraid. It’s dead,’ replied the vet flatly. ‘It’s been dead for hours. As s
oon as the dog grabbed it, the rabbit had no chance, no chance at all. Bull terriers have jaws like iron clamps. They lock on, you see. The rabbit’s backbone would have been cracked like a nut.’
‘Oh dear,’ sighed Dad.
‘The rabbit,’ said the vet, ‘is very definitely dead.’
‘I know it’s dead,’ said Dad. ‘I guessed it was dead as soon as I saw it. What are you going to do about it?’
‘Well, I can’t revive it, if that’s what you are thinking,’ the vet told him. ‘I’m not a miracle worker.’
‘I don’t expect you to work miracles, Mr Fox,’ said Dad. ‘I just want the rabbit removed. The dog can’t go through the rest of its life with a dead rabbit stuffed in its mouth!’
The vet agreed. He stroked Butch on his fat, round head and then tickled him behind his ears.
‘He seems to like that,’ said the vet, smiling.
Dad glowered.
A minute later Butch sort of yawned and the rabbit flopped out.
‘There we are,’ chortled the vet. ‘You just have to know the right spot.’ He picked up the rabbit and examined it. ‘Oh, this creature has been dead for hours, in fact it’s beginning to smell.’
Having settled what Dad thought was an exorbitant bill for merely tickling a dog, we departed, taking with us the dead rabbit in a cardboard box.
‘And not a word to your mother,’ warned Dad on the way home.
I had a good idea who owned the rabbit. It belonged to the little girl who lived at the other end of the next street. I had seen her father sometimes on my way to school. He was a huge bear of man with a tangle of black curls and a sour expression. I wouldn’t like to be the one who had to tell him about the rabbit, I thought, but I kept my thoughts to myself. Dad was upset enough as it was. The prospect of him getting a punch on the nose would only make matters worse.
‘It’s the Simmonite house at the end of the next street,’ I told Dad. ‘They kept the rabbit in a hutch in the back yard and the little girl would let it out sometimes for exercise. I’ve seen her do it when I’ve been coming back from school down the alley at the back of their house. Butch must have somehow got into the yard, killed it and brought it back here.’
‘I don’t know what I am going to say,’ sighed Dad. ‘I bet that rabbit meant the world to that little girl. She’ll be heartbroken.’
‘I’ll come along to the house with you, Dad, and give you a bit of moral support,’ I said. Perhaps if I was there, I thought, Mr Simmonite might not hit him.
‘I just don’t like the idea of telling her it was killed in such an awful way,’ said Dad. ‘Savaged to death by a dog.’ We both looked at the dead rabbit in the cardboard box. It looked pathetic, all floppy and lifeless, with its white fur speckled with blood and with dark, dirty streaks down its back.
‘I think we ought to clean it up a bit before we take it back,’ I suggested.
So we washed and cleaned the rabbit and dried it with Mum’s hairdrier so it looked all white and fluffy – as it would have looked before Butch got a hold of it. Then we took it back.
There was no one at home, so Dad went round the back of the house and placed the dead rabbit gently back in its hutch.
‘We’ll call round later when they are in,’ he explained, ‘and tell them what happened. I guess the little girl will want some sort of burial. Perhaps her parents can tell her it died a natural death rather than being savaged to death by that brute on the pavement outside. Then I’ll buy her another.’
We never did call at the house to explain what happened. When Mum arrived back from working in the corner shop that afternoon she was excited to tell us what she had heard over the counter. We sat at the kitchen table and never said a word.
‘Well,’ she began, ‘you will never guess what somebody has gone and done at Mrs Simmonite’s. When her husband got back from town this afternoon he found his little girl’s rabbit dead in the hutch.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Dad looking straight at me.
‘Evidently some person had put it there as some sort of sick joke,’ said Mum.
‘Sick joke?’ Dad repeated.
‘When the little Simmonite girl went out in the back yard early this morning to feed her pet rabbit,’ continued Mum, ‘she found it dead in the hutch.’
‘Early this morning?’ said Dad. ‘Dead?’
‘Colin,’ said Mum, ‘will you stop repeating what I say and listen. It’s a very strange story. This morning the little Simmonite girl went out to feed her rabbit and found it dead in the hutch and as stiff as a post. According to her mother it was an old rabbit, couldn’t see properly and had all sorts of ailments, and she said it was a blessing that it had died. Anyway, her father took the dead rabbit out of the hutch, put it in a plastic bag and placed it behind the dustbin ready to bury it later today. Then he took the little girl into town to get her another rabbit. When they got home you will never guess what they found?’
I knew exactly what they found but kept my mouth closed. ‘What?’ I asked innocently.
‘Someone,’ said Mum shaking her head, ‘had taken the dead rabbit, washed it and put it back in the hutch. Now who in their right mind would want to do such a horrible thing?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ I said, looking straight at Dad, who had gone a deep shade of red.
‘I mean,’ continued Mum, ‘what sort of person would take a little girl’s dead rabbit, wash it and clean it and put it back in the hutch? Mrs Simmonite said that her husband was furious and if he gets his hands on the joker who did it he’ll be laughing on the other side of his face.’ She looked at Dad. ‘You’re very quiet, Colin. Is something the matter?’
‘No, no,’ he said, trying to summon up a smile.
‘And what’s that dog been like today?’ she asked.
‘Butch?’ he said. ‘Oh, he’s been as good as gold.’
3
IGNATIUS
Ignatius Plunket was an odd boy. That’s what Mum used to say whenever she saw his long gangly figure meandering down the street, his head buried in a book. ‘He’s an odd boy, that Ignatius Plunket,’ she would say. No one would disagree with her. Ignatius was certainly strange.
‘He’s more like a foundling orphan than one of the Plunket brood,’ Mum would tell me every time she caught sight of Ignatius. ‘Foundling’, I later discovered, was an old-fashioned sort of word which described a child abandoned and left on the doorstep of some stranger’s house because its parents couldn’t or didn’t want to care for the infant. ‘I mean,’ Mum would say, ‘no one’s telling me that that big fat lazy lump is his real father. Ignatius couldn’t look more different if he tried.’
Mum had got a point. Mr Plunket was as round as a biscuit barrel, with a frizzy outcrop of dirty brown hair and a nose as big and heavy as a turnip. His fingers were as fat as pork sausages and he had small piggy ears and small piggy eyes. Dad said that during the war, Old Man Plunket got out of serving his King and country and made money on the black market while every other able-bodied man was fighting. That’s why he was so fat and well fed.
All the other five children in the Plunket family were the spit and image of their father, with their stocky build, large round noses and fuzz of mousy hair. Ignatius was the complete opposite. He was a tall scrawny boy with a sharp beak of a nose, ears like jug handles, large inquisitive eyes and a mop of jet black hair which fell like a curtain over his forehead. Whereas all the Plunkets had very red, healthy-looking faces, Ignatius’s was as pale as the tripe Mum put in the pan when she was making Dad’s favourite meal. I once heard Mum tell Dad that Mrs Plunket must have had a fling, as she called it, with an American GI just after the war.
Ignatius was different in other ways as well as in his appearance. For a start, he was really clever and spoke in this strange, grown-up, old-fashioned way.
‘Mr and Mrs Plunket must have been at the back of the queue when they gave the brains out,’ Mum would say when she saw them bustling around town, cigarettes dangling from their lips.
‘They’ve not an ounce of sense between them. Thick as two short planks them two, and lazy as that dog we had to look after for Mr Turner.’ But their eldest son, Ignatius, had more brains than the rest of our class put together. He could add up quicker than our teacher, Mrs Sculthorpe, and knew more than her about history and geography and science. He was a better speller as well, and his stories and poems were as good as any in the books we studied at school. Some teachers would have found such a clever pupil a threat, but not Mrs Sculthorpe. If she didn’t know the answer she would smile and say, ‘Let’s ask Ignatius.’ Everyone knew she had a soft spot for Ignatius. Perhaps it was because he came to school in an old threadbare jumper, trousers a size too big with a shiny bottom, a coat a size too small and a shirt with frayed cuffs and collar. Perhaps it was because he was so good-natured and polite and never complained that Mrs Sculthorpe took a shine to him. Whatever the reason, Ignatius would sit at the front desk watching the teacher like a hungry cat watches a goldfish in a bowl, devouring knowledge.
Looking as he did and acting as he did, you would have thought he would be an easy target for bullies, but that wasn’t the case. Everyone left him alone, and Ignatius seemed to sail though life reading his books, not bothering anyone and smiling at the world.
On Monday mornings we would all line up at the teacher’s desk with our dinner money. Ignatius was the only one in the class who didn’t. We once asked him why he never paid anything like the rest of us, and he told us that his parents were on benefits because they were unemployed and short of money and that he got free school dinners. He had no problem with accepting the fact and was not at all ashamed or upset about it.
One day, as we made our way home from school, I asked him what was in the brown paper parcel stuffed underneath his arm. Ignatius announced, without any embarrassment, that Mrs Sculthorpe had given him some clothes that had once belonged to her son and were now too small for him. ‘There’s quite a nice jacket,’ he told me cheerfully, ‘and some rather sturdy shoes, hardly worn.’
A Load of Old Tripe Page 2