The Black Dog Eats the City

by Kelso, Chris

  —Tell me Dmitri… do you believe?

  —Believe in what? You’re talking in riddles…

  —In them!

  —What, aliens?

  Mario nodded.

  —Um…

  —Can I tell you something?

  —Emm… sure…

  Mario tilted his head towards Dmitri.

  —You should believe…

  —Why, you seen an alien?

  Again Mario nodded.

  —Really?

  Mario nodded.

  —No fucking around? You’ve actually seen one?

  Mario leaned closer again to whisper.

  —I am a fucking alien…

  —You are, huh?— Dmitri rolled his eyes.

  Mario just nodded.

  —Ye don’t really look like an alien to me.

  —And you would know what an alien looks like?

  —Sure… dumb bobble heads… green, with big bug eyes… E.T phone home… Alien Resurrection…

  —When they come for me I’ll be waiting. Just hope they get here soon.

  —Well, what’s good for you won’t past you pal.

  Mario wasn’t at all unnerved anymore. He was obviously unstable but hardly seemed dangerous. He stared deep into the bruised atmosphere.

  —So… Mario, when are these aliens swingin’ by for ya?

  —Swinging by?

  —Yeah, you know, when’s the mothership pullin’ up to beam you on board?

  —Anytime now…

  —Why did you come pick me up anyway? If you had such an important inter-terrestrial rendezvous?

  —You’re coming with me.

  —Eh?

  —You’re my specimen…

  —Is this a joke?

  Mario’s face was so serious Dmitri didn’t actually need a reply.

  —Jesus… Look man… if this is some weird highway role-play thing you‘ve got going on here I‘m not interested. It‘s not in my nature, you know, but it’s cool if you are, you know… gay and stuff… but I’m not really up for being anther guys specimen, so if it’s all the same I’ll…

  Mario pulled over the dustcart.

  Dmitri sat in the passenger’s seat and wondered what on earth was going on.

  Mario walked over to the roads edge and stood motionless.

  Dmitri leaned over the gears to shout out to him.

  —You okay pal?

  Mario stood on the bank gazing into the forbidden fields beyond the city.

  After taking a moment to collect himself, Dmitri climbed over the dash (the lock on his van door didn’t open from the inside). When he had finally scrambled into the driver’s seat, Dmitri lit up a cigarette and continued observing Mario.

  —You okay man? Want a smoke?

  Dmitri walked over to the roadside to join him. Side-on, Dmitri noticed a cumulus of ear-hair. Gradually, Mario’s ear whiskers would make their way towards his vicinity. Dmitri noticed that Mario wasn’t looking into the fields but up at the sky.

  —Quite a day huh?

  Mario had a scar on the side of his face which leaked sebum. Dmitri sucked a final draw from his cigarette and tossed the butt into a hedge. He motioned forward.

  Mario’s warty back-palm swung across Dmitri’s field of vision and landed on his chest.

  —You can’t change a man’s clay— he whispered as his eyes twinkled like polished pool balls.

  —I don’t want tae change your clay, I just want to go.

  —You can’t, I need you Dmitri. You’re my only friend in the world… you’re my specimen…

  —Huh?

  —You’re…

  FIVE

  Dmitri turned the key in the ignition. Mario was still lying face down outside. When the engine fired itself up, a fluorescent headlight illuminated his crumpled up body, bowed on the tarmac in front of the dustcart’s bonnet. Dmitri jacked down the window and inhaled some fresh night air before he finished the job. Then a hand appeared, clutching at the fender. Mario was attempting to pull himself up from the road. His face was a mess, more of a mess than before. He’d been disfigured by boot kicks and repeated fist lashings. Time to finish it.

  Everything went blurry for Dmitri. He hadn’t panicked when kicking seven shades of shit out of Mario but finishing off the job demanded more from him emotionally. The kill-shot was something surely nobody ever got used to.

  He revved the engine. Mario continued to struggle up the front of the car.

  He’d read somewhere that when you kill something you absorb all its power. Dmitri revved the engine again, psyching himself up with each growling tug of the accelerator. That’s how he had to look at things— Dmitri needed the power for sustenance or The Black Dog would get him in his sleep. Go on old boy. Almost over. Finally, he was ready, ready to advance the throttle. The dustcart jutted forward clumsily and, with great relief, Dmitri watched as Mario disappeared under the hood to be sucked under the wheel. There were two bumps as the dustcart rolled over his body. Dmitri pulled the hand-break and put the car into reverse. Two more bumps. Can’t be too careful.

  That part of the brain, the frivolous recesses somewhere towards the back, began to die and the acceptance of death was tremendous, grotesquely momentous.

  And perhaps I’m richer now because of it

  Leaving things behind

  In the shadow of the wood

  In arcane, sunken hollows

  Rain-washed and nylon coated

  And maybe in time we can come together again

  When ogling a busy flume

  Losing yourself in a subterraneous human bookshelf

  I hope you realise the false peak

  Between the Krummholz and your Napoleon Pocket

  You’ll return, weathered and worldly qualified

  Begging with emotion for things to be restored

  But you chose your corridor

  You won’t back-pedal

  All people will forever see is the dwindling

  Butt of shredded tobacco glowing red in recesses of the cave

  The Mainstream Psychopath

  The same sun that brings out the lilies brings

  out the snakes.

  Bobby Dummit was afraid of…

  …as an older man living in a scheme crawling with young labourers, he did very well with women, probably because he started most conversations with

  — I’m a famous painter yano?

  This wasn’t untrue as such, no— Bobby was perhaps just being more economical with all the facts, and why not at his age?

  He was a painter right enough, but if his chat up line was “I’m a FAILED painter,” this would have been in proper tandem with reality. There had been the odd glimpse through the brume at success, a showing at Hayward Gallery which no one showed up to, an invitation to Goldsmiths University in London which he turned down because he hated posh, upwardly mobile cunts with a passion.

  Bobby’s version of his own art career was an intricate net of subterfuge. At the Hayward exhibition, (which actually happened remember) he met an Italian dealer who had seen some his work in Soho. The dealer brought Bobby to France where he financed a retrospective of his work at the Emmanuel Perrotin Gallery in Paris. The show was a rousing success— of course it was— Europeans really got Bobby’s art. The Italian benefactor decided to finance the next few exhibitions with ill-gotten cash. This didn’t sit well with Bobby who backed out, believing his integrity to be more valuable.

  —Corruption is too mainstream— he’d say.

  Bobby first appeared outside of Europe at the Gagosian Gallery in New York. . This was followed by prominent exhibitions at the Venice Biennale in 1995 and a memorable installation at the centre of Hoxton Square where Bobby and his crew set up a stage and performed the works of Charles Baudelaire backwards while dressed as famous British politicians.

  It wasn’t long before he was kindling the interest of other high profile and sinister men in power. He claimed he was once commissioned by the Crown Prince of Qatar to
produce a cabinet installation containing 500 used, bloody tampons. He sold the piece for £30 million on his birthday, which he burned to scraps in a fit of sell-out self-loathing.

  —Being rich is too fucking mainstream— he’d say.

  A rags-to-riches documentary film based on his life won a prestigious award at the Montreal film festival, which he accepted alongside the filmmakers.

  His Wikipedia page claimed he was a financial donor of the Labour Party. He was not.

  According to Bobby he had lived in New York, Seoul and Marrakesh, but missed the honesty of his home town.

  ~

  All of these lies were further established by a bogus story about how most of his work had been destroyed in the 2004 fire in the Momart stage warehouse. While this was initially a painful time for Bobby he set out immediately to work on the defining chapter of his career— CARPE REDUX: A Gesamtkunstwerk work of 3 separate vitrines containing animal corpses with cigarettes stubbed in their hollowed out eye sockets.

  Unsurprisingly this development in Bobby’s career had proved a complete and unreserved disaster. It seemed no one got Bobby anymore, not the Europeans, not even his own wife— who he divorced on account of this ambivalence.

  He protested that even marriage became too mainstream!

  Unlike the rest of Scotland’s artistic community he was incredibly vulnerable to criticism and as a result was ineffably wounded by the whole public reaction. He retreated.

  Fleeing the bad reviews and disdain seemed like the easiest thing to do. Bobby often took the road that seemed easiest. That’s another reason why he’d come back to Ayrshire. He belonged in a place of perpetual downpour, of all-ensconcing greyness and frugal, morose farm-folk, living off benefits like common leeches. Women would, of course, dismiss this self-reproach and tell him he was still fabulous and interesting.

  ~

  Outside Mary Kinloch’s house the air was keen with frost. There was a smudge of red paint on the limp of Bobby’s wrist. He made sure he was always covered in paint, it added to his image. He hung his nostrils over the stain, inhaled and concluded that, yes indeed, it was primer.

  Not blood as he’d initially thought.

  Had it been blood, Bobby would not have been surprised either. Bobby rang the doorbell. Mary answered, blushing right away.

  —Come in, come in!— She stood aside and let him pass like a loyal subject shifting aside for the queen. Her face seemed racked by a private grief. Bobby went into the living room and prepared to give Mary the canvas he’d painted her.

  Mary Kinloch was about as basic a specimen as you could hope to imagine— divorced, the wrong side of 40, two kids— both grown up and living elsewhere. Her face suggested she’d been a carrier for the Black Dog virus for years. She appeared to be in the latter stages of infection. This was Bobby’s bread and butter— a mainstream woman desperate to obliterate the mainstream. He’d be the spice in her life.

  Mary came in all giddy. Bobby smiled and handed over the canvas.

  —There ye go, a Mona Lisa for the Mona Lisa.

  Mary giggled uncontrollably. She unsheathed the canvas and clutched her blouse at the left bosom.

  —Och Bobby… it’s gorgeous.

  Bobby explained how he’d become obsessed with territoriality and animal instinct. He used his own faeces to scrawl profane anti-Semitic messages on the edifices of famous landmarks. Now he was offering Mary a unique preview into his brilliant madness. She put the canvas on a nail above the television.

  —You know what they say about me don’t you?

  —Well…— Mary had heard a lot of things about auld Bobby.

  —That my personality meets the three recognised tests of pornography?

  —Oh, really?

  —Oh yes. Lack of social value, appeals to prurient interests, and is, of course, patently offensive…

  Bobby moved quickly towards Mary and grabbed her by the shoulders. He could hear her panting and was aroused by it.

  —Mary, there is a pain in me that heroin and cocaine cannot reach. The warm, grubby fingers of exotic drugs don’t descend far enough… I need deep, penetrating relief— he accentuated the consonants in the word “penetrating”, puffing the P’s and F-ing the F’s into the dainty shell of her ear canal.

  Mary just kept panting. Bobby thought he could get her to climax just by clutching her shoulders and whispering nonsense into her ear for the next 2 minutes.

  —You scared of me Mary?

  She shook her head.

  —Never underestimate the true intentions of the sub-culture…

  —I… I’ve made fish— Mary eventually let out.

  Bobby smiled smugly at how superior she clearly found him.

  Mary was perfect prey.

  You see, women filled a gaping void in Bobby, his relationships with women were rarely ever healthy and he expressed no remorse when leaving them shattered, heartbroken and alone. Not that it’s any excuse, but his soul died a long time ago shortly after his wife ran for the hills. People always tell you that the death of your soul has purely spiritual repercussions, but in the instance of old Bobby this holy abandonment had manifested itself through several physical ailments too. He often suffered from tinnitus, bouts of chronic autism, ulcers, baldness; he developed a speech disorder, anxiety, avitominosis, and osteoporosis and is the only other recorded individual to’ve suffered from Boanthropy since King Nebuchadnezzar in the Book of Daniel— Bobby, at the height of his transient lapse of sanity, decided to live as a cow, grazing in a field completely naked and covered head to foot in his own smeared faeces. Yes, Bobby went, by all accounts, temporarily insane. He was institutionalised and quickly released after no longer being considered a threat to civilised society. It was a minor incident in his life.

  Bobby remained convinced this was not The Black Dog creeping up on him…

  Mary would satisfy this hunger, if only temporarily. He pulled her in, kissed her hard on the mouth then pushed her away and told her playfully to fetch the fish from the pan. Her lips were chapped and Bobby found that arousing too. Mary hobbled off to the kitchen in a daze.

  ~

  The rain was incessant, collapsing from the dull gloaming in diagonal sheets— the inverted tears of terminal boredom. Bobby had been sitting watching the football for 15 minutes without having heard so much as a cheap from Mary Kinloch who was still in the kitchen. He looked around the mainstream abode, the floral wallpaper, the 4x9 frames of grand-kids, the dog eared chick-lit under a lamp on the coffee table. He scoffed. Mary’s prolonged absence had given him enough time to come up with another load of shite to feed the gullible old birdie— he had a trunk full of dead animals, road kill, which he planned to use in his next installation. He found most of them flattened or burst open by the roadside and couldn’t resist his creative compulsions to eternalise death through art.

  Bobby made sure his lines were properly memorised and decided to go and see what was taking Mary so long.

  —Knock, knock— Bobby pushed through into the kitchen. The room was slung in a haze of smoke. There was a clattering of pots and pans somewhere inside the heavy vapour.

  —Mary? Christ…— He tried desperately to see through the plumes of oncoming smoke. Bobby saw the vague impression of a figure standing by the window.

  —Mary? Mary, how the bloody hell are you still alive in here?— The steam was getting into old Bobby’s lungs. He coughed. The figure at the window was as tranquil as a dressmaker’s dummy. It seemed to survey. You could rule the world with that kind of silence. Bobby moved closer.

  He was standing inches from a woman’s contours, nothing definable— two bleary eye slots and an oblate golem mask. A pale fear chilled Bobby right through to his very marrow. The face was so close to his now, but the steam wouldn’t clear, for the life of him he just couldn’t see clearly. The breath of something fetid wheezed out at him in intermittent gusts.

  —Mary?

  Her face had the distorted geometry of a Picasso painti
ng. There seemed to be a long tube dangling from the centre of the face. It looked like an enormous elephant trunk or an obscene slack, stretched-out cock. The smell of wet dog was in the air, mixing with the thick steam.

  —Tell me that you love me— came a voice in a low-end growl.

  Bobby was frozen with fear.

  — I love you Mary…

  A monstrous fist tore through the steam and caught Bobby on the side of the cheek, as if hateful of its human shape.

  —Tell me that you’ll never break my heart.

  Bobby backed out of the kitchen. His cheek throbbed.

  —Did you mean it when you said ye loved me?

  —No…— Bobby said honestly, thinking he’d be better off in the end to fess up now.

  —You do this to so many women. What about your wife?

  —Left me…

  —Eh?

  —She left me; I said she left me. Now Mary, if it’s awe the same, I’d quite like to get home before the hoodies and junkies hit the streets.

  The tall figure with the flaccid cock nose raised both hands in the air. Bobby feared another assault but when he peeked through his fingertips he saw the creature rubbing its long rubber nose and grunting. Bobby couldn’t find the door. It made one final climactic moan and a strange, foul smelling liquid gushed from its nostrils and all over the work surface.