Tell it to The Dog

by Robert Power

  MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

  www.transitlounge.com.au

  Copyright © Robert Power 2017

  First Published 2017

  Transit Lounge Publishing

  All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cover and book design: Peter Lo

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  A cataloguing entry for this title is available from the

  National Library of Australia: www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN: 978-0-9953595-8-1

  With love as always to my three sons,

  Tom, Dominic & Louis.

  PROLOGUE: RALPHIE DOG AND THE KORA

  There’s a sliver of a moon and a single star hanging low in the sky. It’s six in the morning and already thousands of pilgrims are performing the kora, walking clockwise, always clockwise around the Jokhang Temple, the jewel in the ancient Barkhor quarter of Lhasa. Some have walked hundreds, even thousands, of kilometres to get here. The most devout prostrate themselves the whole distance. I have strolled two hundred metres from my hotel to join them on this, my morning ritual before going to work.

  Today is a very auspicious day: 22 November 2016. It’s two years since I adopted Ralphie Dog from the Lost Dogs’ Home in Melbourne. If he were here with me now he’d be at my ankle the whole time. We’ve been joined together (not quite at the hip, for he stands only a few inches off the ground) since the day I brought him home.

  I do miss him while I’m away, but there are so many dogs in Lhasa. They walk freely and everyone accepts them as part of the toing and froing of this city in the sky. They sit in shop doorways in the sun, wander about in packs and often join the pilgrims on the kora. They come in all shapes and sizes and only a very few have collars.

  There’s a special ancient Bodhi tree on the walk. I always reach up and touch the leaves as I pass it by. Many a pilgrim sits on the benches there to catch their breath and to watch the procession: so diverse, so colourful. On my second circuit I take a seat myself as I love to look up at the branches. In later life, trees and dogs have become important to me in a way I never dreamt of. Soon enough an old man, his prayer wheel still spinning, sits down next to me.

  ‘Hello. America? France?’

  His face is wrinkled and weatherworn. It’s cold up here on the top of the world, but the sun is fierce and nearer than you think. He must be seventy, could be fifty. His full head of hair is cropped close to his skull.

  ‘No … Ireland … I’m Irish.’

  I always say this, though I was only there until I was three. It’s an identity thing.

  ‘Visiting … tourist?’

  ‘Not holiday. Working … making better health for Tibet people.’

  ‘Ah … good thing. Good health. Good life. You stay long?’

  ‘Just a short time.’

  He laughs. His eyes sparkle and he looks decades younger.

  ‘All just for a short time. This one life. Speck of dust. Until next time. You next time. Me next time.’

  A dog comes up to us. He’s matted, but looks healthy enough. He sniffs, then moves off.

  ‘Lots of dogs. Here in Lhasa. You treat them well.’

  ‘Ah … dogs. Many dogs. In Tibetan Buddhism we believe dogs will be reincarnated … next life … as human.’

  Now it all makes sense. Sometimes, late at night, I talk to him. Just me and Ralphie Dog. I lift up his soft leathery ear and I remind him how we first met. That he was lost, just the way I was for so much of my life, especially when I was little like him. So here’s the reason. The purpose. Talking to him so he’ll know a bit more when he comes back as a small baby boy. So it’s not just a conceit, this title I conjured up in Lhasa while walking the streets of the Barkhor. This book is part remembrance, part roaming. A retelling of what has happened, could have happened, of what might happen yet.

  ONE

  If you tell the truth, you don’t

  have to remember anything.

  —Mark Twain

  MY GRANDMOTHER’S ARMS

  I live in a house of echoes. In a room of whispers. Eyes open, looking through the window at whatever might pass by. A man walking his dog. A cloud reshaping on the wind. And the stories and moments, long or half forgotten, drifting by, disappearing into the hedgerow. In this time of dusk, this half-light, this nearending. This space of echoes and whispers. This place of mine.

  Memories. Waking, stirring, the lost thoughts, the far forgotten inklings. Snippets and patches. Fragments. A smell, a sound, a smile or a tear to light a fuse. Rustling up the dead; turning fallen leaves to find a smooth pebble or a shard of glass, long rounded by nature’s turning. Poems hidden away on yellowed paper. Stories twice told, awaiting the retelling. A stick. A stone. The flutter of a wing. Where is my earliest memory? A sliver of glass to cut and smart, opaque, part glimpsed. Small moments that weave together the singular story both told and lived and retold and relived. Pebbles and shards washed up on a beach. To be held and cherished, turned around in the palm of my hand as my feet sink into the soft sands.

  It must have been in Dublin because I was sitting on my grandmother’s lap. Being held in her arms. It must have been before I was two years old because my grandmother never was in England. And it must have been shortly before she died because my mother said I cried at being taken away from her. That would be the last time I saw her. I remember the big armchair. I remember my grandmother’s hair in a bun and a ribbed metal hairclip holding it in place. I remember a small yellow toy lorry on the carpet. There for me to play with? Or did it fall from my hand as I dozed in my grandmother’s arms? I remember the fire in the grate: its crackle, its dancing blue and orange flames. I remember its warmth and the warmth of being held by an old and loving woman; a woman soon to pass away. What is it about this singular scene that comes back to me time and again, down all the years, pressing, pressing?

  GRASS

  The grass is dry on my face, prickling my cheek. The sun is fierce and white-hot sharp. I am hiding from my cousins, the ones I have been left with this past month. They’ll not see me here at the back of the house, in the long grass, down by the lane where we buried the cat when it was dead. I hear them, Siobhan and Kieran, calling my name, opening and closing the shed door. But I lie still (as still as the cat under the mound), enjoying the bitter taste of the grass in my mouth as I press close to the ground, flattening myself out of sight. They walk close by, shouting out my name some more.

  ‘We’re coming, ready or not,’ they howl as they clamber over the fence and into the fields.

  There’s a bumblebee, plump as a pudding, buzzing by my ear, making the day seem all the warmer. I can feel the tiny vibrations and the hairs of its body brush my skin. It’s then, the bumblebee circling my hand, that I become aware of the other footsteps, heavier. And a deeper voice calling my name.

  ‘Robert. Robert, I’m here.’

  Peering through the latticed blades of grass, barely raising my head, I see him walking towards me. My father, back from where he has been. Coming to get me. To take me somewhere else. To take me away again.

  FLIGHT OF FANCY

  It wasn’t until she told me that I couldn’t, that I stopped. It was then that it came to an end. All those possibilities. That freedom of expression, the floating feeling that this, and any other world, really was my oyster, my peach, my china bowl of cherries. I could portion it. I could hold the sweet fruit between my teeth and with no effort pull it from its stalk. I could roll the tiny berry around my mouth and tongue, freeing th
e succulent ripe flesh from the stone. Tasting the difference of it. Where the clouds were valleys and the mountains peaks of blueberry pie. But that afternoon, how old was I? Three, no more. I saw how worried she looked as I flew in from the garden. Standing there, tea towel in hand, drying a large white dinner plate, framed by the door that led out onto the yard, she had an expression of frozen horror on her face. How did she not realise that I was a gift from the sky? That I had been plucked from the sweetest dew of a savanna storm, from the breath of the wind as it whistled over the frozen desert of the north. That I, like each and every one, was born with magic, with each and every delicious touch at the tips of my fingers, knowing the smell of tulips and the sound of the spider’s web as the dawn breaks. That without honey and spirits, temples and nectarines, yellows and blues, tree barks and volcanoes, all would be an unlearning, a pushing back, an empty room with a withering view. Just as it was that afternoon, between the kitchen and the garden, when my mother, in horror, dropped the plate (which crashed to the floor) and shouted to me to stop doing it, that I couldn’t. As I swooped below the washing line, setting the shirt tails aflapping and came to rest beside her. Grounded.

  BETWEEN THE MOAT AND THE DOG

  It’s easy waiting for the dog. Peering through the slats in the fence, the arrow slits of my castle. Pulling back the string of my bow, letting fly and sending another enemy to his knees, the chain mail being no defence against my poisoned tips. And if he doesn’t come again today, I’ll eat the chicken and beef from the blue fish bowl that I’ve laid out as my trap for the three-headed dragon. But I’ll keep a lookout, just in case he needs me.

  MOTHER

  The sun shines so brightly, so warmly. The sky a massive blue; the clouds, somewhere else, far away. The pond at the end of the lane, caressed by the weeping willow. You look so beautiful, your white frock with the big red flowers. The blue leather belt around your waist and the colour and weight of your hair. The sandwiches you made, the fruit cake and squash in the hamper. I look up at your profile, dazzling in the sunlight, as we walk through the garden gate, my toy boat in one hand, your hand in the other.

  INTO THE WOODS

  One day, when the little boy was first allowed to wander, he sought out the woods. Meandering through the alleyways at the far end of the town and up the hill, he kept going until the townscape was laid out below him with the sea beyond. Entering the woods he felt himself to be an intruder, a trespasser. He had nothing to say and no one to speak to; he felt contented to be silent. He found himself standing beside the tallest and oldest of all the trees. Reaching out he touched the lines of the bark, fingering the crevices, exploring the body, the texture. Looking up, way, way up, his head thrown back; the hues and yellows of the leaves flittered against the blue wash of the sky. The rough bark of the trunk was cold against his cheek as he caressed the tree. He clung to the old tree like a child to his mother. And the words he fancied he heard as he pressed his ear close to its body were those of the secrets of the town that had drifted up the hill over the decades, the centuries, to find a resting place among the roots and branches, moss and leafmeal.

  THE TRAIN ON THE VIADUCT

  Let me hear your breath. Have you been running? Running to get here before I packed up and went home? Before I had given up hope and left the scraps for the birds and hedgehogs? But it’s okay, because I waited that little bit longer today. I had this feeling in my bones that you’d be along sooner or later. So I waited for the sound of one more whistle of one more train on the viaduct, on the old railway track. But before it blew, I could hear you heading towards me, making your way to the gap in the fence.

  GARDEN TREASURE

  In the garden with the lilac tree, I found a snail, an old coin and a broken mirror. The sky was that watery blue you could pour into a glass. I shielded my eyes from the brightness of the sun, watching the hawk hanging over the meadow beyond the ridge. I sang to myself as I tilted the shard of glass back and forth to send messages to the forest. I slipped the coin into my back pocket after rubbing the soil from it. Placing the snail on a dock leaf, I spent the rest of the afternoon watching it go slowly about its business. Tentatively stretching out from its shell, to test the world around and about. Sensing that it would all be okay. That it would be safe, after all.

  COUSINS

  Where do they go to, the fragments and memories? When they’ve been lived and remembered and mulled over, retold and reframed. I had two cousins who stood one afternoon on the end of a pier, somewhere close to Dun Laoghaire. A storm was raging and they dared each other to stand still where they were, watching the waves roll in, crash around them, soak through their clothes. One’s name was Declan, the other was Brendan. They were brothers, eleven and nine. Well, a wave came thumping in and swept Brendan away, leaving Declan standing in its wake. Brendan’s body was never found and Declan lived in a kind of sadness for the rest of his long life. He never married and never had children. The month before he passed away I visited him in an old people’s home in Bray, south of Dublin. He spoke again of Brendan and that day on the pier. I’ve told a few people down the years, but one day the story of the two young brothers, my cousins, will be forgotten. Disappeared. Pebbles and shards sucked away by the tide.

  TIGER DREAM

  In my dream I saw the tiger as I walked down the grassy hill. It stood to my left, emerging from out of the tall grasses. A deep marmalade orange and black and snowy white. Majestic. I only saw his back and then he leapt into the air and bounded away across my path. Behind him came two small tiger cubs, who sprouted hoods like lizards or daffodils and then flew into the air. It stayed with me, like all good dreams, sculpted the day and set me right. The gold and the black bands of the tiger, calling to me from the hillside of my dream world.

  BENEATH THE HEDGEROW

  He messed his pants in the midst of it all, but it didn’t matter. In the room of the small terraced house, as the fiddle players bowed their instruments and the singers sang in turn. Voices joining in chorus. He felt and smelt it on the tip of his finger, but it wasn’t wrong of him. He somehow knew that. To be kept secret for sure, but there was such a warmth and conviviality all around on that early evening in the late 1950s.

  Out in the garden, all was late summer and very English. Hedges and foliage, fulsome and shielding. The gardener clipped a privet and turned to the small boy. Come into the safety of the garden, his smile seemed to say, listen to the refrains and harps of the house. Taste warmth.

  RED VELVET CURTAINS

  There was such a deep redness to the curtains. He could feel the weight of it on his fingers, almost horizontal in its depth. He dared not separate the folds to feel for the opening, for he knew that something luscious and forbidden was taking place behind, hidden from view. Not that he could see anything, obviously, or hear or smell for that matter. But he sensed that something exotic was happening, out of sight. For why else would the curtains be so red and heavy and rich and closed?

  WET SHOES

  Standing on the other side. On the opposite bank. The river running freely, in spate after the heavy rains. I look and see the rushes and the forest of vines and greenery beyond. The rim of the world a snow-coated ridge of mountain peaks. And the water rippling from the boat that has just left the landing stage. And my reflection distorted and fragmented by the tiny waves that lap on the sands and seep through my shoes.

  BEAR TRAP

  The little boy turned. The light of the moon from the window above caught his expression. But the boy sat still as the bear in the trap howled in the forest. As the crows flew upwards, the stars spoke to him, as he held the glass beads close to his mouth. Suck now, they said, before it’s too late, before it’s too late.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Twenty-five became my special number. I picked it; it picked me. There was a bag of sweets called Lucky Numbers and each wrapper had a number. The one I first ever picked was wrapped in white paper. It was round with twists at each end. There was a blue circle in th
e middle and the number 25 was there in white. The sweet was a hard toffee. So by chance and toffee, synchronicity and lucky happenstance, twenty-five became mine forever. It is special, almost sacred. I use it for everything. As a child, when a madness raged downstairs, I would bury myself under the bedclothes, plug my ears with my fingers, and count very slowly to twenty-five; unplug, listen for signs and signals, smell for fear and violence, repeat and replug as needed. In later life the number will be used for many things: press-ups, repetitions, footsteps forward and otherwise. My friend: 25.

  LOOKING GLASS

  I sat in the corner of the room, against the wall, smiling. You see, I was happy now, playing with the shard of broken glass, from the mirror of the dressing table that lay splintered about the room, because it hadn’t happened the way it had, after all. I had come to realise that, as I sat in my corner, no plums to pull from a pie, just the remnant of my mother’s looking glass moving between my fingers.

  EGYPT INSCRIPTED

  This is what she tells me. My Mother. More than once.

  There is one inscription from Senenmut himself that tells of his special relationship to Hatshepsut. ‘Companion greatly beloved, Keeper of the Palace, Keeper of the Heart of the King, making content the Lady of Both Lands, making all things come to pass for the Spirit of Her Majesty.’

  The room is empty, save for they two. All servants and handmaidens, priests and functionaries have been dismissed; they will wait, until called, in outer quarters and courtyards, whispering from mouth to ear for fear of disturbing their mistress, their goddess. Surrounded by all manner of fruits and flowers, sumptuous cushions to lie upon and exotic perfumes to sweeten the air, the pharaoh beckons her architect to her side. This man on whom she has bestowed countless titles, in whom she trusts and whom she allows, above all others, to lie close by her. A mortal alongside the immortal.