‘Diabetes,’ said Mr Ronald. ‘Didn’t know, did you, that it could take your leg off?’
Sarah shook her head, but she did know. She’d seen diabetic dogs; cats too. She’d cut off their legs. The French field fell into the sea, and the rain still fell against the roof of the car.
‘Started as a blister, then an ulcer,’ said Mr Ronald. ‘Just a mishap. A blister from new shoes. No one tells the young: be careful of your feet. Feet should last a lifetime. What can be prevented? Everything, they say. No they don’t. They say not everything.’
He laughed harder now, in a thin straight line, and his cheeks drew in over the laugh so that Sarah could see the shape of his skull and the crowded teeth, nicotine-stained, that swarmed in his mouth. Perhaps this wasn’t laughing, but breathing. The steady rain and wind moved the car slightly, back and forth, and it felt as if they were floating together gently at sea. The branches of the tree against which the car was pressed were black shapes at the corner of Sarah’s eye, like Sheba at night, stalking rats with his stomach full of jellymeat.
(Sheba himself lay panting in the corner of his cage, overwhelmed by a calm fury and a pain on which he concentrated with a careful doling out of attention. He kept himself steady, but his small side rose and fell, rose and fell, higher and then deeper than it should. His eyes moved toward the door, and his mouth sat open, showing pink.)
The laugh was a clatter behind Mr Ronald’s teeth, a rough edge over which his breath moved hectically. Sarah huddled close to him as he moved against the back of his seat, placed her arm around his shoulders, and touched his damp forehead. She felt her hair lift away from her skin, all along her arms and the back of her neck. The summer passed through the car, windy and wet.
‘Hold on,’ said Sarah. ‘Just hold on.’ Her mouth was against his ear. David would come soon. You could swear at a cat that rocked this way, crowded close in pain and confusion; you could talk softly, not to the cat but to the idea of the cat, to the faces of the family you must explain to about the cat. You could sing to the cat and if you had forgotten its name you could call it kitty — you could say ‘hold on, kitty’ while your hands moved and your neck craned forward and the parts of you that understood the machinery of a cat, its secret and moving parts, worked beneath the cat’s terror. You could set the leg of a monkey and watch it, later, as it limped across the surgery floor, scowling and shaking its funny fist at you.
Noises came from Mr Ronald’s throat now, and these sounds seemed accidental, the by-product of something else. They continued past the point Sarah felt certain he had died; they rattled on in the can of his throat. Sometime after they had subsided she became aware of the sound of a radio playing. In her own car, or this one? Who could Douglas be? A son? A grandson?
Sarah was now unsure of how long she had been sitting beside Mr Ronald, and how long it had been since he had stopped making any sound at all. Gently she laid his head back against the seat. His wife cleaned the walls of their shower, and he had been to see orangutans in Berlin. He was too young to have been in that war.
Without warning, David filled up the space in the passenger door of Mr Ronald’s car. She had been so certain she would hear his footsteps on the road, but he was here in the doorway, as if she’d summoned him out of the field.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t find anyone.’ He was breathless and wet. ‘I ran and finally found a house, but there was no one home. I thought about breaking in. Kept going for a bit but no sign of life. No cars on the road, even. So I headed back to try the car again.’
He looked at the stillness of the man in the driver’s seat. He saw the blood on Mr Ronald’s trousers and the way that it crept towards his belt and shirt, and searched for blood on Sarah.
Sarah concentrated carefully on David’s face, which swam in the sound of the rain and the radio and the end of the vodka. My husband. She smiled because she was happy to see him. Then she placed the wallet in Mr Ronald’s lap.
Sarah moved to step out of the car, and David made space for her.
‘How is he? Has he woken up? How does he seem?’
When a cat died during an operation, when a newt was too sick to be helped, when it was necessary for a macaw to die, then Sarah must tell its owners. It was difficult to tell them this true thing, and so along with it she added other, less true things: that the tumour caused no pain, that the animal hadn’t been frightened to go under anaesthetic. Still, it was difficult. It made no difference to Sarah that words were inadequate to her enormous task. Of course they were. There might be a time when she would have to tell her friends, Sheba’s owners, that he wouldn’t survive his infection. Their grief, she knew, would be altered by a slight embarrassment that they felt it about a cat. Each loss of which she had been the herald seemed now to lead to this new immensity, her own: Mr Ronald, dead in a car. But they didn’t know Mr Ronald. David had never even spoken to him. They had been married that midday, with no rain. There were no witnesses.
‘He’s dead,’ said Sarah. She stood and shut the door behind her.
David fought the desire to lower his head and look through the window. It seemed necessary to make sure, but more necessary to trust Sarah. He held his hands out to her and she took them.
‘My god,’ he said. She shook her head. He knew that when she shook her head in this way, it meant: I’m not angry with you, but I won’t talk.
‘What now?’ he asked. ‘Should we take him somewhere?’
It seemed to David that Sarah owned the wreck, owned the tree and piece of road on which Mr Ronald had died, and that he need only wait for her instructions, having failed to find help. He thought of her sitting alone with the unconscious body of an old man, and he thought of the moment at which she must have realised that he was no longer unconscious: that he was dead. David saw with certainty that Sarah was another person, completely separate from him, although he had married her today. His wife.
‘We’ll try the car again,’ said Sarah. ‘We just have to get to the surgery.’
‘And use the phone there,’ said David.
Sarah crossed the road, and he followed her. She didn’t look back at the wreck. Waiting on its grassy rise slightly above the road, their car had a look of faithful service, of eagerness to assist. It started on the third try with a compliant hum. Sarah had always been better at coaxing it; even before trying the ignition she’d been sure it would work. She was uncertain if this resurrection was good or bad luck or if, beyond luck now, it was simply inevitable. Now that she could see the rain in the headlights, she realised how soft it was, how English. She missed home, suddenly: the hard, bright days and the storms at the end of them, with rain that filled your shoes.
It grew dark in Mr Ronald’s car as Sarah’s headlights passed over and then left him, and it remained dark as she left that piece of road and that tree. David watched Sarah drive. They didn’t speak. As the distance between their car and Mr Ronald’s grew it seemed that the roads were all empty — that all of England was empty. It lay in its empty fields while the mice moved and the airplanes flew overhead to other places, nearby and faraway.
They reached lit buildings and then the surgery so quickly it seemed impossible to David that he couldn’t have found help within minutes. Sarah walked calmly into the building, and she spoke calmly with the nurse. She didn’t look at the telephone. There was no blood on her clothes. David watched his wife as she made her way towards the Queen of Sheba, who rubbed his head against the bars of his cage. He was waiting for the pain to stop. And then he would be let out, healed, to hunt mice in the wet grass.
Reward Offered
JON BAUER
The old man smiles. This is his favourite bit.
He opens their garden gate, brings the dog in, turns and closes the gate, a curtain twitching inside the house. The old man’s stomach a helium balloon in the sky.
The sudden squealing of children, the kelpie straining on the string now, not wanting to sniff anything.
The front door flings open and a woman beams, faces appear round her legs, little hands gripping on and lifting her dress inadvertently higher, the dog lurching forward, its tail batting the old man’s legs.
He extends the lost-dog sign in his hand, corrects himself and lets go the string, the family falling on the animal then squinting up at the man as if at the sun.
‘Thank you so much. Where did you find her!’
Back outside the house now, biscuit crumbs on his clothes, his hair sticking up from rough and tumbling with children. He waves enthusiastically at their steaming-over of the lounge window, turns and opens the gate, steps through, whistling, shuts the gate — glances up, but the children are already gone.
He makes his way as far as the next corner, out of sight, rolls himself a smoke, his face concentrated, the pleasure of the good deed already fading from his chest. He attempts to hold on to it, tries to stop it seeping out between his ribs.
As he licks the paper his gaze is on the hills in the distance. Forty or fifty kilometres away, but there he is looking at them in the blink of an eye. What was distance when you had eyes? When you could see what you were missing.
At the corner the old man joins the main street and its usual morning hubbub of food-delivery trucks and the unsteady old. Lapdogs are tied up outside the miniaturised supermarket, cafés are full of laptops and blue collars mixing with white — foccacias, lattes and Great, thanks, how are you?
He travels among the throng, as ignored as if this was an old sepia photo and he’s that smudge of a person moving through the background.
Outside the pub, he sits with a beer and a Winning Post, people wafting like bees in and out of the supermarket over the road — a woman coming along towing a chocolate labrador, the dog’s underbelly littered with distended teats.
The old man puts his beer down and watches dog and owner pause outside the supermarket, then go on.
He relaxes again, picking the paper up and shaking it straight, returning to the column he was reading for the third time. Staring at the picture of the writer.
An old lady ties a dachshund up outside the supermarket, the dog issuing its outraged yapping at the automatic doors — making them indecisive. The dog jumping back, confused too. Both dog and doors making each other stutter. Both of them seeming panicked.
The yapping stops and the old man looks up, noticing the chocolate labrador tied up there now.
He leaves his paper and beer, waits at the crossing, hammering the button.
The lights change and he’s marching before the beeping’s started.
On the other side he steps over the dachshund, becomes entangled with it — hops on one leg, the door juddering against him, the labrador at the full extent of its lead, wolfing down some Friday-night vomit near the ATM.
The old man peers into the supermarket for the owner, then quickly unties the lab and crosses the road with it, darting between moving traffic and away.
Once home he inspects the labrador’s collar: Chocolate, it reads. A phone number. He removes the collar and heads outside with it, crossing the expansive parking lot at the end jon bauer of his street — checking for any obvious observers before wiping off the evidence with his hanky and chucking both in the bin.
Back indoors he turns on the radio, horseracing commentary coming at him. He likes it on in the background. The snaffled excitement of the voice. He only hears that on the radio now — that familiar voice.
He stands at his front window for ages, peeking through the drawn curtains. The dog watching him. The racing commentary turned right down now to just a bubbling stew on the stove or a waiting taxi.
Eventually he gives up his window vigil and surrenders to the TV in the corner, the labrador by his slippered feet, unsettled but playing the part at least.
Spring carnival is around the corner and that familiar voice is a face on the news, talking about the influx of overseas contenders and Can Australian racing stand the competition? The chocolate lab plonks her head on his lap, and even though he could never think the same way about dogs again after what happened in the hills those months ago, he leans over the animal and buries himself in the solace.
Next morning he shuffles out of his bedroom in slippers, lifts the kettle from its throne, gives it a wiggle, shuffles over to the sink, his hair squiffy. His head fogged over with last night’s scotch. He turns on the tap, letting it run into the kettle, gazing out at the back garden and groaning at the piles and piles of unearthed soil and chewed bamboos that once supported the first creeping of beans. The dog out there too, looking at him, jowls on paws. The man’s own jowls to-ing and fro-ing as he shakes his head, standing with his hands on the stainless steel of the sink, the kettle grumbling.
He’s outside later, traipsing about the garden in his dressing-gown, using a small shovel to fill in holes and pick up dog-dirt. The lab sulking, or twisting round occasionally to fuss over her breasts that are almost neon with rawness. Small cries filling her throat.
The old man can’t recall seeing a dog like that, mammaries hanging down. More naked somehow than when male dogs get their erections in the park — cantilevering behind some bitch with her bum on the ground.
It’s been three days now and still no posters up. He looks for the collar in the parking lot bin but it’s been emptied of everything but stench.
In the newsagent’s he picks up the special-edition Winning Post and the daily papers, both of which have a picture of a glistening racehorse on them.
FREE Cup Day Form Guide!
He scans the sports sections of the nationals and there it is, a column in each paper. He’s aflame with pride. His smile sustaining all the way through the usually curt transaction with the shopkeeper.
He sits at the pub with a celebratory beer and smoke. Reads the articles both. Then reads them again. Raises his beer to the hills. Cheers, the old man’s mouth says, and a little girl in the back of a car looks like she’ll remember it forever. A lonely old man with nobody to cheers.
People come in and out of the supermarket with armfuls of alcohol. Men and women go by in the garb of pageantry. Every other car is a taxi.
The man sees the woman sticky-taping a sheet of A4 to a power pole then moving on, a stack more of them under her arm.
Back home he hurriedly unburdens himself of keys and newspapers, the sticky tape from the poster catching on his sleeve, the old man arrested for a moment by the dog’s agonised yelps.
He opens the laundry door and she remains distressed, the smell of ammonia, a puddle on the floor. She comes out, stopping to lick at her underbelly, walking away, a perfunctory wag of her tail, then pausing again to fuss and fuss at her swollen teats.
Please help, the poster says (a picture of Chocolate with an array of snuggling, suckling puppies, their eyes closed). Her puppies and family miss her! Reward offered.
He takes the piece of paper to the phone, shutting both the back door and the one in the hallway against the yelping.
Ordinarily he’d wait, give it a few days. But it’s Cup Day, his first without an invite to the hills. Last year it was little Jerome and Daniel cheering the telly, the dog barking, the old man laughing — their dad working his busiest day of the year.
He shaves again, drinking from a bottle as he does. Runs a towel under a hot, hot tap and puts it to his face, dancing a little in the bathroom. He brushes his hair. Dresses in his suit, chooses a tie. Takes the suit jacket off. Looks at himself. Puts the jacket back on. Takes off the tie. Goes out and pats the dog panting on the lawn, listless, whimpering.
He opens the cupboard and tries to remember which of the dangling leads is Chocolate’s. He chooses string instead, for authenticity.
They leave the house, Chocolate putting on a smile despite her discomfort. That same dachshund yapping at the automatic doors outside the supermarket, working them open and closed like its bark is a clicker.
As he turns the last corner he can see the woman at her gate, her hand up to her forehead to keep
out the sun. Then she’s coming along the footpath, halfway between walking and jogging, Chocolate straining on the string until the old man lets her go and her claws click-clack away, teats swishing.
There’s a tangle of hair and fur and wagging tails, the woman looking up from the embrace to smile at the man’s approach, then turning back to Chocolate, checking her over.
As he gets close she stands, holding the string, Chocolate attending to her teats again. The woman keeping her hair behind her ear. A kind smile.
‘I can’t tell you what a relief this is!’
‘As I said, right out in the middle of the road.’
‘It’s crazy, I was only in the shop two minutes.’
‘Maybe she slipped her collar?’
She shakes her head. ‘It would have been left behind. No, someone must have taken her then thought better of it and let her go. I’ve given up trying to understand what motivates some people.’
‘Well all’s well that ends well, I suppose.’
‘I suppose,’ she says. ‘We’ve got a house full for Cup Day but, come in and meet the puppies?’
‘I’ve just finished work, and —’ ‘Sarah, by the way.’ An outstretched hand. ‘Don’t you want your reward?’
‘Ted. No need for a reward, Sarah. Any decent person would have done the same. I love dogs.’
He wipes his feet before entering the house. Does his hair again. Struck by the sheer homeliness of everything. All the different-sized shoes by the door. The faces posing together on the walls. The distant sound of voices, as well as yelping. The aroma of damp newspaper, and that sickly-sweet puppy smell.
He catches up in time to see Chocolate let loose and racing to the wooden board barricading the puppies in the laundry, all of them jumping up towards her face. Little tails thrashing. A garden of people through the windows, the barbecue going.
‘Hopefully they’ll get a moment together before the kids notice,’ she says and removes the partition, the pups standing on each other’s saggy faces to get to their mum. Chocolate licking and licking at them then giving in to the nudging and rummaging for nipples, her body moving on the lino with the seven heads pushing into her side — Sarah turning to Ted and beaming at the moment, bottles and little rubber teats drying on the draining board.
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