Tell it to The Dog

by Robert Power

  SORRY

  I’m sorry, Mum, I thought you were sleeping. It’s the early hours and you will die soon. I had turned on the TV, with the volume down low, to keep myself awake. A film was showing. It wasn’t good and was gratuitously violent. You waved your hand in a gesture I understood. Who would want to die with images from a very second-rate movie on your mind? It’s like when I fly. As we take off, the time you’re most likely to have an accident, I make sure I’m not reading the in-flight magazine. Rather, I sit quietly and centre my mind to ensure my last thought as the plane implodes/explodes is not focused on the duty-free items or the latest blockbuster on the entertainment system. Once, I visited with a friend when his father knew he only had days to live. He was in a hospice and during the time we were there the TV was tuned to the Winter Olympics. When there were lulls in conversation we all looked at the screen and followed the ski jumpers as they sped down the slope then took off into the air, arms by their sides, head forward, taut and concentrated.

  Sorry Mum, I said again, as I turned the TV off and moved my chair closer to the bed. I held her hand as she closed her eyes and fell into a shallow sleep. Her breathing was jagged and unpredictable. I thought about some times we had spent together: her taking me to see West Side Story, my first grown-up film; our trip to Egypt and the wonder of seeing the pyramids from our hotel balcony. But part of my mind returned to the film on the TV and set me wondering if the main character would escape and how it might all end up.

  SKULL

  I knew as I told the story that I’d get the Yorick response. And for sure I did.

  ‘Yes, just like Yorick,’ I say, when I tell my cousin about it at the memorial service back in Dublin.

  Three years to the day of his death and I had to take my father’s remains from the grave and settle him in the niche of the cemetery wall at the Church of our Lady of Merces in Colva, Goa. The gravedigger handed me a thick plastic bag of my father’s bones. I gave him a bundle of Indian rupee notes in exchange. As I looked inside the bag, a small brown lizard scurried to the top and flopped to the ground. In my own bag I had a letter I had written him and the medal he’d been awarded in Palestine. I wanted to make his last resting place cosy. I cleaned the dirt from the bones at the water tap in the far corner of the cemetery, carefully, tenderly. I put the medal and the letter in the niche. Then I placed some petals and small stones around the medal. The thigh and forearm bone and other odds and ends I positioned with reverence in the niche, giving them space, air to breathe. And last, the skull. I held it in the palm of my hand, brought it close to my lips: one final kiss; one last word of love to whisper.

  ANCESTORS AND LINEAGE

  It was the third day of the silent retreat. Suvoco, who had spent eighteen years as a forest monk in Thailand, led us into the garden. We arranged ourselves in a large circle, all fifty of us. The wind was howling and the rain drizzled from the low-hanging clouds (for this was summer in south-west England).

  ‘Tonight,’ said Suvoco, raising his voice above the weather, ‘we will contemplate and honour our ancestors, our individual lineages.’

  I looked from face to face, not knowing names, having yet to hear any of the voices. One had features similar to my father’s. The idea came to me. So I imagined the woman to his right was his mother; the man to her right was her father. My line of vision moved from one to the next, around the circle. Each successive person I envisaged to be the forebear of the one standing beside them. This one the mother of that one. The next the father of the previous. I looked intently at each of the fifty individuals, making my fantasy seem all the more real. If each had lived an average of forty years then I’d constructed an ancestral line, a lineage, of two thousand years. Back to the time of Christ. Christ may well indeed have come to Eboli, to Cookham, to Jerusalem, and beyond. But that blustery summer’s night in England he made his way to a special corner of a garden in West Ogwell, Devon.

  INSCRIPTION

  There is a heavy frost and a fog that fills the gaps between the houses. All day it has hung beneath the trees and lingered as an unwelcome visitor at the end of the lane. In the cemetery, the father kneels at the grave of his son. It is the father’s birthday and he talks to his boy of other years and times different to this. He catches sight of the scene and realises that he could never have imagined such a strange event. But here he was. And later he would write in the memorial book a note to his own soul, making arrangements for his own burial, sketching out the plot. Next to. Adjacent. Father and beloved son.

  THE STORY

  There was a story I used to tell. To lovers, family, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, classmates, members of the congregation, penpals, strangers on a bus, a plane, a train, on holiday, brief encounters. The tale of the victim. It would meander and diverge but always end with blood on the wall. It had a shock value; it could be used to excuse all manner of behaviours, brought into play to relieve the tension, used as a peculiar and yet exquisite line towards seduction.

  ‘If you had seen what I’ve seen …’

  It was easy, even natural, to slip into this narrative: a comfortable shoe, well-travelled, snugly fit. But I’ve long resolved to change the story, to no longer fall back on the old prop. There’s a new, more vital, tale of hope and redemption; one of brighter memories. A life less ordinary for sure, but not of battle wounds and tears. Cold comfort reshaped as sunny resolve: a nightmare retold as a fairytale.

  THREE

  I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.

  —Jane Austen.

  ENCOUNTER

  A man stands on the cliff top. Waves breaking way below. A woman walking on the beach.

  He waves a hello. She looks up, shielding her eyes from the sun.

  A silhouette is what she sees: a stranger, a friend? A note flutters down from the hand of the man. It loops in the wind and falls at her feet. The paper is sealed with red wax from a time gone by. She breaks it open. The old-fashioned handwriting is appealing to the eye. For a moment she forgets the sadness she has left on the kitchen table in her house near the harbour. The words she reads make her sigh. She looks up. The sun, an orange rim, has almost sunk below the line of the cliff. The man has gone. She flaps the letter above her head, as if to show him she has read it, has come to know more of him.

  PHONE CALL

  A public payphone. Under the Loop. What am I thinking, calling her now? I try (not hard) to work out the time difference. Chicago to London. Eight hours. Night-time? Daytime? Feed some dollars. Listen for a connection, against the traffic, the noise passing by. Calling out in the dead of night, across time zones, waking the sleeping, tapping on shoulders, reminding those at peace that all can be disturbed. She answers. Her voice is slow. Words come slowly. Tiredly. And not only for being dredged from sleep.

  ‘It’s you,’ she says. I make a sound, like air escaping. ‘Where are you?’

  I make another sound, a different one. Thinking back, I think I said something about being lost. About the wrong train station and the Loop. Then making more sounds, other different ones, and then hanging up.

  She tried to track me down. Called a number I had left on the corner of the Sunday newspaper. She spoke to a confused old woman, the mother of my friend, who said she didn’t know me. And she didn’t. Why should she? I didn’t even know myself on days like that.

  REACHING FOR SHADOWS

  Was that you? The shadow passing by the long window in the hall that sets the curtains ablowing. Did I hear you then, as I listen in the darkness for a sound, for any sound? Please be there, but not as a familiar apparition. Be of old, before the dust blew and the windows shattered from the force of the storm. Is it your tear that drops outside my door? Down the stairs and out into the street, too far away. Something in the waiting. That which claws at the windowpane; that listens to the tick of the clock and the swish of the world passing by.

  STREAM

  Is that a stick? A snake? The wild cherry. Cracked and broken
. Here on the riverbank. After the ice has melted and coursed its way from the mountaintops, down valley gorges, picking up roof tiles and branches along the way. Time to stand, time to stare; shaving cream still on my face, drying as the stubble finds its way back to the surface. The razor, cutthroat potential, open and ready to do its job. The towel hanging loose around my neck. How did I get here? To the riverbank. Looking back to the house I can see the light in the bathroom, through the open window, illuminating the mirror, where at this very early hour of the morning I should be standing, examining my reflection, preparing to shave, getting ready for the day. Yet I am here. A bird sings from a branch on the other bank. The stick, the snake, having moved on downstream.

  SUNSETTING

  He hired a car and headed to Vancouver Island. His second marriage was all but over and he was alone. The flat map belied the climb and then descent to Tofino, his chosen destination. At Cathedral Grove he climbed inside a hollowed-out redwood and felt the moss on his cheek. There was a storm and hailstones to follow the sun. He drove on. When calm settled he stopped at a riverbed and walked a short distance. It was so very quiet he fancied a bear might come along and eat him. He wouldn’t have minded; his life was not going so very well. Later he headed off on the road into Tofino. The sea was sparkling and the sky promised an amazing blood-red sunset. He drove up and down the beach road, unsure which hotel to choose for the night. By the time he picked one and settled in to his room and stepped out to the balcony the splendour of the sunset had been extinguished. His deep sadness wished for someone to be there with him, even though they, the couple, would have missed the spectacle of the sun dropping behind the horizon. Just as he alone did.

  FOSSHEIM

  She looked out of the window at the frozen fjord. He was still asleep. The sun was bright; the sky, clear and blue. The air was as icy as the fjord was frozen. She watched as a man, carrying a sack, walked across the sheet of ice. It was a long way from one side to the other. By the time her lover woke, the fisherman was still walking.

  ‘Quick,’ she said, ‘it’ll be amazing, we can follow his footsteps, and we can walk across a fjord!’

  He smiled as he pulled on his clothes and his boots.

  ‘If we drown?’ he said.

  ‘We drown together,’ she said. ‘Ophelia with her Hamlet.’ When they were halfway across, the sun higher, the fisherman long gone, they heard the eerie, foreboding, creaking sounds of the ice shifting. They stopped stock-still, looked at each other, hardly believing what was unfolding. The couple, who were so recently locked in a tender embrace in the warmth of their bed, now clung, one to the other, in fear of their lives. Out of sight, on the far bank, the fisherman turned his face to the sun and drew deep on his first pipe of the day.

  FLIGHT OF FANCY

  Down which lanes, across whose stiles did that path take you? Which avenue? Which path? The one that kept you away for so long, the one you told nobody about. About you being away, away from us. It was late, long gone dark. The curtains were drawn and all the children were deep in sleep. I knew as you hung up the tea towels to dry that the questions would come. Out of concern, of love. But which path? Which avenue?

  TREE ON THE HEATH

  There is a copper beech tree on a heathland. Where sorrow is buried. And sadness. Dug to a small depth beneath the soil. Between the roots at the base of the trunk. No bones. No flesh. Merely trinkets.

  When the man is in the country he travels to the spot. And he stands and wonders. There where there are no footsteps. No memories to conjure. No events to re-enact. As often as not, he weeps. Silently or otherwise. Tears stinging his face. As they should do. Soil, wet and nourished by northern rains. And if he has a mind to, he sets his thoughts awondering. How might she have been? In form. In gesture. In majestic deed. And, soon enough, he turns to walk away. As he must. If the breeze rustles the brittle foliage, then he might look back. The tree calling to him. The musical leaves refusing to let him go. And he might invoke a voice. The colour of hair. Of eyes. Of embodied flesh. But mostly it’s the silence that accompanies his steps back down the hill. Silence as a reminder of the tree standing in quietude in the depth of each night. Mementos in the soil in place of blood and flesh and voice. And yet, some vital part of him looks out for a cipher. A blot. A heart above the head, waiting, year upon year to find its rightful place above ground.

  INSIDE

  I’m going nowhere, but I’m looking great. Don’t get me wrong, I am going somewhere tonight, and I do look great (I make sure of that), but it’s taking me nowhere. All these externals: the hair, the clothes, the sculptured body, the cars and the house. Oh yes, I’ll smile a white-toothed smile at the party tonight and no one will know that inside, where I know it matters most, I am crumbling; I have crumbled. The clear, manicured, perfumed and glossy skin encases dust, handfuls of dirt. If I were to be cut, fine grains would trickle from my wound to be caught on the wind, sand from an hourglass until all was spent, leaving behind a shell of expensive clothes and jewellery: the Witch of the East, ruby slippers and all. Tomorrow I will change. Tomorrow.

  BOUQUETS

  Sometimes, always late at night, he would bring flowers home to his wife. But not wrapped in fancy tissue paper, or with a bow. Neither were they carefully clipped so the stems would be of uniform lengths. No, the flowers this particular husband brought home to his wife were still attached to their roots and bulbs, with clods of soil left hanging loose. On these nights he’d appear at the foot of the bed with his floral offerings. Tulips, daffodils, sweet williams, pansies and other flowerbed and border varieties. His wife would sigh, rub the sleep from her eyes and stare at the spectacle of her husband with arms full of flowers and stems and roots and bulbs, and soil and dirt dripping and dropping onto the bedroom carpet. She’d roll her eyes, turn over, put the pillow over her head and try to sleep. Next morning a neighbour would look out at their ravaged garden and wonder who or what could have wreaked such carnage.

  NOT ENOUGH

  ‘Love is not enough,’ she says.

  It is late. The moon for the sun.

  ‘Life finds a place,’ she continues.

  The dog barks from the garden beyond. The rain tickles the window. Words and more words pass between them, falling at their feet. Some silence. Some weight. He shifts in his seat.

  Love should, but cannot, sustain us, they both think, in their own way.

  All of love once was theirs. Down the years. All the passion that anyone could hope for. She draws the curtains. He switches off the lights. The moon turns and shines elsewhere.

  FURNITURE

  They had long since parted. The pain receded to some distant place rarely visited. She found a new man and moved to the country, a cottage deep in the moor: foggy mornings, spectacular sunsets, flocks of birds arrowing across an orange-flamed sky. She took her things: furniture, books, clothes, trinkets. Her new partner, a city boy himself, was happy with her choice, and so besotted that he would follow her anywhere. Just to be with her. She’d heard of a local feng shui practitioner and invited him to clear the house. He asked her many questions. He reflected, then returned some days later.

  ‘That man,’ he said, stroking the single white hair that grew from his chin, ‘the husband you spoke of. The one you left. He is still too much of the furniture of your mind. You must sift through your possessions for any remnants, reminiscences of him. Photographs, letters, artefacts, anything at all. Send them all to him.’

  So she did as the feng shui man said, putting together three large parcels. At the post office, the man behind the counter looked up from sorting parcels. He had heard of the arrival in the village of the newest of the city slickers. There she stood with her tightly wrapped bundles.

  ‘Someone’s in for a surprise,’ said the postman.

  FOOTSTEPS

  I listen out for your call. Is that you now? No, just a passing car, a leaf on the breeze, footsteps on the gravel. Is that your voice? Or a whistle in the wind? The sound of the da
rk. A trick of the night. I await an intimacy. The brush of your lips on my neck. The sense of the smell of your skin close by. I meet you in a dream, by a wall in a harbour. The time is night, you say nothing. I listen in my sleep, eyes closed. Is that you now, as I wake, as the day insinuates its way into my bed?

  STRANGERS

  When he wakes. On the bedside table, lit by the morning sun: a knife, bloodied.

  When he turns she is not there, the pillow crumpled, the sheets creased, the shape of her body left behind: the reminder of a night together, no longer quite such strangers, unknown to each other but thirteen hours earlier. A chance meeting, both on a whim having gone to the gallery. Standing before a huge tortured canvas he turned to her and she turned to him. Some words, complicity, attraction; he and she went to his room. She cried in the night.

  When he steps on the floor: little beads of blood, leading to the bathroom. Not Hansel and Gretel; no yellow brick road.

  When he gets to the bathroom: water running; a sense of foreboding, strangeness.

  When he opens the door.

  CAR

  He promised himself he would not do this. There had been more than enough pain. He had tortured himself plenteously already. Yet here he is. He has left his seven-year-old daughter unattended in his new apartment (the courts would slaughter him and slash his access rights should they ever find out). He is cycling the streets looking out for her car. The fact that she has not parked outside Dino’s house means nothing. He knows she knows him well enough to suspect he might stoop to this level of snooping. So she may well have parked in a side road. The fact that she told him the marriage was over and that she was free to do as she pleased also means nothing. Not so far as the exquisite torment of jealousy is concerned. So here he is, at two in the morning, looking for a parked car, a red Fiat Coupé, to prove to himself that it really has ended and that he can go home and sleep in the room next to his daughter and act as if none of it really matters anymore.