by Matt Shaw
“What memories? We’ve never even been there before!”
“Maybe it’s something to do with the family here before us? I don’t know, Emi...” he stopped mid-sentence. “Where’s Roald?” he asked. Normally if they left the house with the dog - he’d be there, at the door, to greet them when they returned.
“Asleep? I don’t know.”
“Roald?” Jason called out for him. “Here boy! We got pizza! Your favourite!” he paused and listened for the bounding paw steps of an excited canine but there was nothing. “That’s not right,” he said. He put the pizza boxes down on the table. “I’ll check upstairs,” he said as he raced up the stairs to search the rooms.
Emily didn’t need to say she’d look downstairs - she just got on with it.
Both Jason and Emily called his name as they looked but he didn’t come running or even let out a little bark to let them know he was okay - something he’d often do if he couldn’t be bothered to move from a spot he found to be particularly comfortable.
“Is he down there?” Jason called from the top of the stairs as he saw Emily cross the hallway to the next room - the living room.
“Hang on...” she disappeared into the room and called back seconds later, “Relax - he’s in here...”
Jason ran down the stairs, like a concerned parent, and into the living room. From Roald’s lack of acknowledgement he half expected to find Roald huddled in a corner with a high fever, knocking on death’s door. Instead, he found him highly alert, sat upright looking out of the patio doors. “Roald?” Jason called him again as he approached but he still didn’t move. “What have you seen?”
Jason passed Emily who was just standing there - unsure how to react to this new strange, almost aggressive appearing, behaviour.
“He’s worrying me,” she pointed out, “what’s he seen?”
“Probably a pheasant. Here - Roald...”
As Jason neared his pet, Roald suddenly snapped at him and started barking. The sudden, uncharacteristic ferociousness caused both Emily and Jason to jump back a little.
“What the fuck!” exclaimed Jason. “Does everyone have it in for us today?” he started to nervously laugh when it was obvious Roald wasn’t going to attack - he was just letting him know to back off or else Jason would most likely regret it. “Fucking heart feels like it’s going to explode!” he laughed.
He side stepped Roald, giving him plenty of space, and turned the key in the patio door. Seconds later he pushed the handle down and kicked the door open. “Here - go and kill whatever it is that’s wound you up, boy!” he told Roald.
The dog needed no second words of encouragement. As soon as the door was open he charged into the garden with a look of determination. Emily and Jason just stood and watched him.
“What do you think has him so pent up?”
Jason replied, “Guess we’ll find out in a minute.”
They both watched as the dog silently ran across the garden. Jason half expected him to suddenly just stop as though he had reached his destination but he didn’t. He kept going. Soon he was at the far end - a row of hedges marking the end of their property.
The hedges didn’t stop Roald as he leapt them in an effortless bound.
“Shit!” shouted Jason as he ran into the garden, closely followed by Emily, as soon as Roald failed to stop at the property’s edge. The dog disappeared over the hedge to where Jason knew there was a main road. “Roald!” he called out.
Seconds after Roald disappeared from their vision both Emily and Jason reached the hedge. Relief rushed over Jason when he noticed Roald had also stopped right slap bang in the middle of the road.
“What the hell are you doing boy?” he asked as he climbed through the foliage. “Wait here,” he told Emily as he dragged his foot - the last bit of him - through to the other side. “Come on, we’ve had enough weirdness today,” he said with a stern tone of voice.
Roald was just lying on his belly with his head between his front legs which were stretched out in front of him. His ears down in an act of submission and a high pitched whimpering coming from his throat.
“Okay, Roald, you’re aware this is a road, right? Come on - what the hell has gotten into you?” Jason slowly approached him so as not to spook him. He didn’t want the dog taking off again and, more importantly, he didn’t fancy getting snapped at again either. He was sure Roald wouldn’t have meant it but it wouldn’t have made it hurt any the less.
He needn’t have worried. The dog didn’t even flinch when Jason grasped his collar. Instead he let his master move him to the side of the road and out of the path of any traffic - not that there was any traffic around at that particular moment.
“Good job it’s a quiet day,” he pointed out to Emily. “God knows what would have happened had it not been...” He pulled some of the thicket back and beckoned for Roald to go, “Home!”
The dog didn’t need to be told twice and jumped through the hole Jason had prepared for him. Once through he patiently waited for Jason to catch up with him whilst allowing a concerned Emily to gently tickle behind his ear. Sitting there with his tongue hanging from his mouth and his tail wagging - he was like a different dog.
“Let’s just put today down as one of those days, yeah?” suggested Jason as he dragged his way back through the hedge.
5.
Jason woke up to a note on his bedside cabinet wishing him a nice day and informing him that Emily would be home between seven and eight - not that he needed a note saying when she was due back as she always stayed later on the first few days after a holiday. Something about having to check through all the messages her colleagues had left in her inbox - some of them quick, trivial and easy to solve whilst others took more time. Not that it mattered what the nature of the email as the volume alone was enough to ensure she always had a game of catch up to play. So much so, in fact, that - on her first two days back in the office - she often said she couldn’t be disturbed unless it was really, really important. A rule which gave her a little breathing space.
Jason rolled onto his side. He liked having his wife home with him but, at the same time, he had always enjoyed his private mornings to do with as he pleased. With Emily home, at the same time, his starts tended to follow a different routine rather than when there was no one in the house other than the dog and him.
Just a couple more minutes, he thought. A few more quiet moments snuggled under the warmth of the duvet to contemplate what he’d do with his day. He never planned what to do the night before as he found that the plans would change or he’d instantly be put off getting out of bed because of the list of chores that were waiting for him. No - he much preferred to wake up to an otherwise empty day and formulate a plan from there; a bit of writing, a bit of channel-hopping on the television, a little bit of surfing the various social networking sites he belonged to, answer some fan mail and maybe, if there was time, attack those boxes he had promised Emily he’d help with. Even if the boxes were opened, at least, with the bits and pieces inside laid out in front of them. That way it looked as though he had made a start. That and the fact he knew Emily would, most likely, carry on and put the stuff away for him. A little bit of a cheat but he’d always come in half-way through and say something along the lines of, “I was just about to do that - leave it!” and she’d normally reply with, “I’ve nearly done it now - it doesn’t matter.” A trick he had learned with the washing up and putting the clean clothes away. A trick that Emily was all too used to.
Today, he decided, was to be a writing day.
Emily’s encouragement, the day before, had made him want to carry his story on. It always helped when someone looked over his work and said whether it was good or not. Sometimes, as a writer, he’d get so lost in this world he had created that he couldn’t tell the bullshit from the literary gold. Something that was evident from his last novel - a critical failure although, thankfully, still a success with the majority of his readers.
At the time he was disappo
inted to read the negative reviews but he soon put them to the back of his mind when his fans started to stick up to him on his facebook page. He always said he wrote for them and not the critics. A point that Emily was first to raise - said in an effort to get him from the depression the critics had unwittingly put him in. Emily was first to raise the point but - once it was in his mind - he claimed it as his own.
Yes - today was definitely going to be a writing day.
After a little nap. After all, there were still enough hours left in the day to get everything done.
* * * * *
It was well into the afternoon when Jason finally opened his eyes again. He used to hate wasting most of the day like this but now he simply looked at it with the thought process telling him his body obviously needed the sleep and that it would make his writing better. A thought process he didn’t share with Emily as he knew she’d disagree and start calling him lazy or complaining that - if she had to get up early every day - so should he. With regards to Emily - he always kept his long sleeps to himself. No sense in rocking the boat and it’s not as though she needed to know. Whenever she came home, from a day at the office, he’d be sitting there typing away at his latest story - each new word typed, slowly chipping away at the word count limit and plot.
Armed with a bowl of cornflakes, drowning in milk, by his side - along with a now lukewarm cup of tea - Jason sat at his typewriter waiting for inspiration to hit. The one problem, he found, in going directly to your work space, is that all good intentions flew out of the window if there was even a hint of writer’s block. Today even the lined paper that was scribbled full of notes, also next to the typewriter, didn’t offer him any clues what to type next. Annoying considering that he had the story, he had the plot twists, his characters were defined and he even had his ending - the bit he, funnily enough, often started with. For some reason today it just wasn’t coming together although the annoying lack of progress still wasn’t enough to push him into unloading any of the remaining boxes - a little fact he knew he’d come to regret later in the day when Emily came home expecting to see it done.
He placed his fingers on the typewriter’s keys and waited for the words to come flowing out but nothing came.
“Always the same,” he moaned to himself, “whenever I take an extended break - always harder to get back into it.” He sighed, “Son of a bitch. Come on...Think...”
His mind started dancing around with the characters he had already introduced whilst peering closely at their lives and what they had been through together in the hope that the next chapter would suddenly reveal itself to him. A happy couple, a wedding, exotic honeymoon...He couldn’t help but laugh at how this new story was mirroring his own life.
“Well they do say write what you know,” he said as he shook his head.
Who would have thought it? A number one horror author writing something with the potential to have a happy ending! Could it be he was about to branch into romance now? A sudden and unexpected new direction. He looked down at his scribbled notes. Looks like it.
“I don’t think so,” he said. He picked a pen up, which was always left on top of the notes, and put a line through what he had previously written. “My readers don’t want that and I’m not about to try and attract new readers yet.” Jason could remember how hard it was to find his readers in the first place. A spot of fluke helped, in the end, when his self-published book happened to land on the desk of one of the bigger literary agents by a friend of said agents who recommended that she should take a look. She did, she fell in love and she contacted Jason through his details at the front of the book on the copyright page. The last thing Jason wanted to do was turn his readers away by writing what he considered to be a run of the mill romance; a title he had been penning to show his love for Emily.
He glanced at the typed pages already filled with the starting of his new book. It was a shame to waste them - especially considering the fact they’d already been given the ‘Emily seal of approval’.
“No need,” he told himself, “just adapt them to fit in with a new story...But how?” he mumbled.
A sound broke his random mumblings, as he turned a small blue ball rolled across the doorway on the landing, he half expected to see Roald scampering after it but soon realised that the dog wasn’t playing fetch by himself. Curious, he stood up and peered out of the office room and down the landing. The ball bounced off a door at the far end of the landing and eventually rolled to a stop. Roald was sitting on the floor at the opposite end watching the ball intently. When the ball did come to a rest - Roald’s gaze fixed onto Jason instead.
“I’m sorry, kind of busy right now,” Jason said. He presumed Roald had pushed the ball with his nose to try and get his attention away from the typewriter - a ploy which worked albeit for a short amount of time only. Roald just carried on looking at his master but added a little tilt to his head - a funny little whiney noise from the back of his throat. “Let me try and get some writing done...Just a few hundred words at least...Then I’ll take you out. Deal?” Roald rested his head down on the floor - a sign Jason took to mean that he understood. “Good boy!” said Jason as he disappeared back into his office.
He sat down at the typewriter and poised his fingers across the keys once more - back to waiting for inspiration to hit. Behind him Roald’s soft ball rolled back across the doorway in the direction of Jason’s beloved pet. Seconds later and Roald crossed the doorway, with the ball in his mouth, to return it to where it had just come from - his tail wagging excitedly.
Jason called back to Roald, without turning around to face him, “You’re not making this any easier on me, boy, I’m trying to concentrate...You mind keeping it down a little?”
A bark sounded from the hallway. Jason wasn’t sure whether it was a bark of frustration or whether it was a bark to show he’d understood what Jason had said to him. He closed his eyes tight as he tried to ignore the pang of guilt that rushed through him for stopping his beloved pet from enjoying himself.
“I’m not going to get anything done today, am I?” he said to himself as he sat back in his chair with his hands raised behind his head. “Okay...Let’s just right the day off. Start again tomorrow.” He span around, in his chair, to face the doorway, “Okay, boy, you win...Let’s go for a walk.” He was surprised to notice that Roald didn’t suddenly come bounding around the corner at the sound of the ‘walk’ word - something he usually did with utmost excitement bursting from his expression. “Walk...Walkies?” Jason repeated. Maybe Roald didn’t hear him? Still the dog didn’t appear.
Jason frowned and ventured onto the landing to see what had distracted him. Roald was sitting by the doorway, at the far end of the landing - the soft rubber ball in his mouth.
“You didn’t hear me, boy? Where’s your lead?”
Roald dropped the ball and dashed down the stairs. He heard him that time and Jason knew exactly where he was running off to. Straight to the kitchen where his red lead was kept, hanging by the back door. Jason laughed and went to follow Roald down the stairs only to jump when his office door violently slammed behind him.
“Fuck was that?” he said to himself. He stood there, for a moment, looking at the door as his brain tried to process how it had slammed shut. No windows open. No through draught. No way. He jumped again at the sound of Roald’s bark coming from the kitchen. He shrugged and continued towards the sound of the bark and his waiting dog. A walk would do them both the world of good.
And then - after that - he’d definitely do some un-packing.
6.
The red lead in his hand and a large stick found by one of the trees near the rear of the garden - Jason couldn’t help but smile whilst watching Roald bounding around the garden. He stopped, with his tail wagging, and waited for Jason to throw the stick again.
“Okay - last time,” he said as he raised the stick high in the air. “Ready?”
Roald barked.
“Fetch!”
He threw the sti
ck as hard as he could.
“Be careful of the road!” a female voice called out from the other end of the garden. Jason span around to see a woman standing near the back of his house - on his property. “People treat the road as a raceway.”
“You startled me,” Jason pointed out hoping the lady would take the opportunity to introduce herself and, more importantly, explain why she was on his property. She didn’t say anything. Jason walked towards her trying his best to hide his annoyance. Roald bounded after him with the stick wedged firmly in his mouth.
“The lorries are the worst,” the lady said as Jason neared her. Her eyes were fixed firmly on the road just over his shoulder. “The speed they go up and down there - all in a hurry...None concerned about who or what may be in the road. Of course, we used to complain all the time,” she continued. “Occasionally they’d set up a speed trap but...It didn’t make a blind bit of difference. Even now...They still speed.”