by Livi Michael
Indeed, Boris wouldn’t hurt a fly – because in general flies were far too fast for him. They would crawl over his nose and into his ears, and only some time later, when they had gone, would Boris remember to snap.
But Mr and Mrs Finnegan weren’t put out by Boris’s slowness, since they were slow, well-rounded, cheerful people themselves. The only drawback to living in their comfortable home was the food. Mrs Finnegan didn’t believe in commercial dog food and instead made her own concoctions, which were a gut-wrenching mixture of leftover dinner scraps, cereal, potato peelings and cod-liver oil, plus any medicinal additives featured in her weekly magazine, Canine Cuisine, such as lavender oil or kelp.
The leftover dinner scraps were an adventure in themselves, since Mrs Finnegan was experimental with all food and went to a number of evening classes on cordon bleu cooking, which taught her to attend to matters such as height, texture and tonal variation, but seemed to leave out taste entirely.
‘One for the dog, I think, love,’ Mr Finnegan would say. ‘Shall we get a takeaway?’
And so, while Mr and Mrs Finnegan would eat wonderful food from a variety of unusual and exotic takeaway venues, Boris, who was the only dog in the world to look depressed at mealtimes, would be given the failed results of Mrs Finnegan’s experimental cooking.
Boris bore with this bravely, generally assuming it was a kind of punishment for something he didn’t know he’d done. He was helped by the fact that he didn’t have much of a sense of smell, and he only realized how bad it was when his best friend, Checkers, came to stay for the weekend.
Checkers was a lively dog with a healthy appetite. At teatime he bounded eagerly towards his dish, only to keel over, stunned by the smell. When he got up, he backed away from his dish, barking madly.
‘Don’t be silly, Checkers,’ Mrs Finnegan told him. ‘It won’t hurt you – it’s only your tea!’
‘Whatever is it?’ Checkers asked Boris in a hushed voice.
Boris thought hard, running through the various possibilities in his mind. ‘Chicken?’ he ventured at last.
‘Chicken?’ said Checkers. ‘It’s blue!’
And indeed the substance, whatever it was, was bluish and steaming.
‘That’ll be the ink,’ said Boris with a sigh.
‘What ink?’ said Checkers, looking even more worried than before.
‘She gets it from an octopus, I think,’ said Boris.
Checkers advanced nervously towards the steaming mass, then backed away again.
‘I can’t eat that,’ he said.
‘Well, don’t look at me,’ said Boris. ‘I’m still trying to digest the last one.’
Checkers stepped cautiously forward again, then ran off into a corner with his tail between his legs.
‘Is that an eyeball?’ he said fearfully. ‘It winked at me!’
Checkers was a dog not easily put off his food. In fact, he rarely restricted himself to things he was supposed to eat and had gamely tried most things in his house – his owner’s slippers and shirts, and even, on one memorable occasion, the sofa and chairs. But now he seemed to have met his match.
‘It’ll all come out in the poo,’ said Boris encouragingly.
‘That’s what I’m scared of,’ said Checkers. And he did really look scared.
Over the course of that weekend, Mrs Finnegan, determined to treat her guest, fed them turnip and mung bean surprise, then she prepared something tubular that slurped and sucked at the sides of their bowls.
‘Blimey, mate,’ said Checkers, ‘I don’t know how you stand it here, I really don’t – the stuff she puts in your dish!’
Boris thought hard again. ‘It’s not the stuff going in that bothers me,’ he said finally, ‘so much as when it tries to get out again.’
And indeed the tubular mess did look as if it was trying to get out of their bowls.
All in all, Checkers was very glad when the weekend was over and his owner came to collect him. He dragged him all the way home and promptly ate a kitchen chair to relieve his feelings.
But Boris bore with all this patiently, since in other respects Mr and Mrs Finnegan were very good owners. That is, until they had the baby.
Mrs Finnegan went into hospital and when she returned Boris’s life changed forever. She was carrying a small bundle, wrapped in blue. It had a wrinkled, yellowish face, rather like Checkers’s bottom, only less attractive. And it produced the loudest noise Boris had ever heard.
‘WAAAAAAAAAA!’ it said whenever Boris approached, and Mrs Finnegan would always come running and haul Boris away. And this was the pattern of his life now. Whenever he tried to sit in any of his usual places, near the fire or on the settee, he would be hoisted up and shut into the kitchen, or even outside in the garden.
Boris waited patiently for Mr and Mrs Finnegan to get fed up with their new toy and take it back to the shop. But this just didn’t happen. They seemed entirely entranced with it, though for the life of him Boris couldn’t see why. It screamed loudly enough to send Boris, who was slightly deaf, into the nearest cupboard, and whenever Mrs Finnegan sat down and closed her eyes briefly, it started again. But whatever it did – dribbling, puking or pulling their ears – Mr and Mrs Finnegan thought it was marvellous.
‘Who’s a clever boy, then?’ they would say, and ‘Ahh, isn’t he lovely?’
Whereas when Boris dribbled or puked or howled along with the baby, he was smacked and put out of the room once again.
One way or another, the baby dominated the entire house. Every room in the house was full of baby stuff. No one slept any more, or ever got to watch a full programme on TV. Much as they loved the baby, Mr and Mrs Finnegan were exhausted, sometimes too exhausted to take Boris for a walk. He tried to show his owners that they didn’t have to put up with it. When the bin men came and Mrs Finnegan had nipped inside to answer the phone, Boris pushed his paw down on the pram’s brakes and nudged it along the garden path to the wheelie bin. But the bin men proved even harder to train than his owners and they brought the baby back. Mrs Finnegan was very puzzled. She couldn’t work out how the baby had got himself out of the garden gate, but fortunately she didn’t suspect Boris.
Soon the baby got bigger. It changed from being an entirely helpless, useless being with a wobbly head and limbs that flailed in all directions to a creature that could crawl with determination across the kitchen floor to eat Boris’s food and suck his ears. Mrs Finnegan’s experimental cookery had stopped for the time being and Boris was now on tinned dog food, which, as far as he could see, was the only good thing to have come out of this baby business. But one day, after the baby had eaten a full tin of Winalot, it was suddenly and severely sick, all over Boris. It promptly emitted a series of ear-splitting shrieks and Mrs Finnegan came running as usual, and gazed aghast at the colour and consistency of the vomit.
‘But you’ve only had milk!’ she wailed.
The doctor was summoned and he examined the baby all over, but failed to find anything wrong. Eventually, he shook his head gravely.
‘It is possible,’ he said, ‘that your baby is allergic to your dog.’
Mrs Finnegan looked stunned.
‘He is often sick when he’s been near Boris,’ she said, and poor Boris couldn’t tell her that it was because the baby was eating his food.
Fortunately, just then Aunty Dot and Sam arrived to take him out for a walk.
Boris trotted towards her happily, instantly forgetting his problems as she fastened his lead, talking to him all the time in an encouraging way. He pulled her to the front door, his enthusiasm growing as he spotted Gentleman Jim and Pico, of whom he was very fond. But he stopped in his tracks when he saw Jenny and gazed at her in astonishment, wondering whether or not to bark.
‘Allow me to introduce you,’ said Gentleman Jim, and Pico said, ‘WOOF!’ meaning, ‘Don’t worry,’ but Jenny lifted her nose to Boris.
‘Dear friend,’ she said slowly, as the words came to her from nowhere, ‘you are a natural
guardian and protector. The time will come soon when you have to defend the whole world and guard life itself from danger.’
And as she spoke, Boris seemed to remember the nobility of his blood, and his desire to protect the defenceless (the baby didn’t count, of course, being his natural enemy). He felt himself to be towering and heroic and strong, rather than stupid and slightly deaf, and he could see that image of himself reflected in Jenny’s eyes.
‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ said Gentleman Jim, and as Boris looked at him and Pico, he knew that they too had had the same experience, of seeing themselves as they really were, and right then and there Boris gave Jenny his heart.
‘Just look at how the others have taken to her straight away,’ Aunty Dot said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’ And just for a moment, she gave Jenny her penetrating look again, but this time she didn’t take her glasses off. Then she added, ‘Well, since you’re all getting along so beautifully, we’ll see how it goes with Checkers.’
5
Checkers
Checkers was very excited. This was nothing new, since Checkers was always very excited. He got excited when it rained, which was frequently, and particularly excited when it was windy. When the snow came, he was almost apoplectic with excitement. He barked madly when the sun shone, and when it hid behind a cloud until it came out again, which might take days. Checkers seemed to think the sun was playing some kind of game with him and that it had to be encouraged to return.
All the excitement and energy were quite entertaining when Checkers was a puppy, but much less so now that he was a full-grown dog.
‘He’ll grow out of it,’ the dog breeder told his owners, a young couple called John and Freda. ‘He’ll calm down as he gets older.’
But Checkers was nearly five now and there was no sign of this yet. If anyone walked along his street, he practically turned himself inside out with barking. And it was a busy street.
Then there was all the chewing. Checkers ate everything (apart from Mrs Finnegan’s experimental cooking, that is), from John’s shoes to any papers left lying around. He chewed the ends of the curtains, so they got shorter and shorter, and the table leg, so the table was crooked. He chewed his way through a set of encyclopedias on the bookshelves that had been put there to look impressive in case John’s boss ever came to tea, and when the new settee arrived he ate that too.
Chewing was just one of the ways in which Checkers relieved his excitement. And there were always so many things to be excited about. John and Freda were often out working, and didn’t really spend enough time with Checkers, so that all his energy remained pent up inside him and he had to relieve his feelings any way he could.
Right now, he was excited because he was having a bath.
Bathing Checkers was a strenuous occupation and not to be lightly undertaken. Checkers hated being bathed, partly because he couldn’t see where he was going afterwards. No one knew what kind of a dog Checkers actually was. He had a mass of black hair and when bathed it was impossible to tell one end of him from another, until one end bit you. And his sense of smell was distorted too, because all he could smell was soap. So when anything attracted his attention, he would set off with the speed of a bullet, barking madly, but in completely the wrong direction.
It took the combined strength of both John and Freda to haul Checkers towards the frothy water in the dog bath. Freda pushed and John pulled and finally they all tumbled in, upsetting the water over the floor. Fortunately, they had bathed him before and had covered the entire house in plastic, so no real damage was done. They simply filled the bath again, and there was a short, tense interlude during which it was not quite certain which one of them was having the bath. Then, once they were all in together, with John and Freda sitting firmly down on Checkers, he promptly ate the soap, and when they tried to scrub him with a special mitten for his long coat, he ate that as well. When finally it was done, and John and Freda had collapsed in an exhausted heap, Checkers gave vent to his feelings by widdling all over the floor.
Freda wailed aloud. John buried his head in his hands.
‘I never thought I’d say this,’ he said, when he could trust himself to speak, ‘but that dog is getting worse.’
‘Cooee,’ said Aunty Dot, letting herself in. ‘It’s only me! I thought Checkers might want a walk.’
John and Freda tried to explain that Checkers had only just had one, and they had just finished giving him a bath, but since Checkers was tearing round the house, barking madly in excitement at seeing Aunty Dot, no one could hear themselves think, let alone speak.
‘We won’t be long,’ shouted Aunty Dot above the noise. ‘I’ve got someone I want him to meet.’
That was all she managed to say before plunging through the door on the other end of Checkers’s lead. Checkers had just succeeded in dragging her through the outsize dog flap John and Freda had installed in their back door when he caught sight of Jenny and skidded abruptly to a halt.
‘What?’ he said, staring at Boris. ‘Who?’ Then ‘Why?’ And he was so surprised, he completely forgot to bark.
Boris was still grappling with the first of these questions, and Aunty Dot was still picking herself up, but Sam said, ‘This is Jenny, Checkers.’
Checkers pushed his nose forward and sniffed a scent that, while dog-like, was like no other dog scent he had ever sniffed. He could smell stars in it, a whole universe of stars, and a vision came into his mind of a vast tree, its branches spreading into the sky. Then he found himself standing next to Boris, and gazing deep into the little dog’s dark and fathomless eyes, and a great calmness entered him. He felt as tall as a mountain and twice as still.
‘Dear friend,’ said Jenny, ‘you are a natural warrior, with the great gift of courage.’ Then she looked at both Boris and Checkers. ‘You belong together,’ she said, ‘and together you will accomplish great things.’
Checkers didn’t fully understand this, and Boris didn’t even try, but both of them felt that Jenny was speaking to the depths of their being, saying only what they had always already known. Boris felt himself grow strong and patient as a tree, while Checkers felt as though he came from a long line of the bravest dogs that had ever lived. He didn’t move or bark, but stood still as a statue, as one who has waited for his destiny to call and, now that it had, wanted only to know what to do with it. He could see that in other circumstances all his tremendous qualities, his keen sense of smell, his boundless energy, his reckless courage and determination, would win him praise rather than getting him constantly into trouble. He saw those other circumstances, and a whole other world, in Jenny’s eyes, and right then and there he gave her his heart.
John and Freda had never seen him calm before.
‘Look at that!’ said John, astonished. ‘Is he ill?’ For Checkers normally dealt with strange dogs by trying to eat them.
‘No,’ said Aunty Dot, smiling and petting Checkers. ‘He isn’t ill. He’s just met Jenny, that’s all. And Jenny’s no ordinary dog.’
‘Can I walk Checkers, please?’ said Sam, and while John and Freda started to protest that if they couldn’t hold Checkers on a lead, then a child certainly couldn’t, Aunty Dot thought about it, then smiled and said he could give it a try. And Sam walked, holding both Checkers and Jenny, while Aunty Dot took Gentleman Jim and Boris, and Pico of course, who was in her pocket, and as long as he was walking with Jenny, Checkers behaved perfectly, just like a dog in a show. John and Freda watched, open-mouthed, as they disappeared out of the drive and on to the busy street.
‘Now,’ said Aunty Dot, ‘there’s only Flo.’
6
Flo
Normally, Aunty Dot wouldn’t attempt to walk six dogs together, but Flo’s house backed on to the croft, where they could all be set free, and since they were all behaving so well, and Jenny was having such a miraculous effect on them, she thought she might as well meet the last of the dogs she regularly walked.
‘Who’s Flo?’ Sam wanted to know,
and Aunty Dot told him she was a poodle, though one of the bigger ones, standard-sized. ‘I haven’t introduced you to her yet,’ she said, ‘because she’s a very nervous dog. Very nervous indeed. But you never know,’ she added mysteriously. And there’s no time like the present. We’ll give it a try, shall we? We’ll go and pick up Flo.’
Flo peered nervously around the lounge doorway.
‘Easy does it,’ she said to herself. She stepped very cautiously into the hallway.
‘One step at a time,’ she murmured, then retreated in terror as she stood on a creaking board.
‘Forward and onward,’ she quavered, sidestepping the board this time.
‘Walk, don’t run.’
‘So far, so good,’ she encouraged herself as she reached the dining-room door and nothing untoward sprang out at her, and she remembered another of her owner’s many proverbs.
‘Fortune favours the brave.’
Flo was one of the very few standard poodles who had mastered the art of tiptoeing. She tiptoed now past the utility room and into the kitchen, where the smell of breakfast temporarily overcame her fear. She glanced nervously to left and right, then trotted swiftly towards her dish.
Unfortunately, like most standard poodles, she had not mastered the art of glancing upwards for danger. If asked about this, she would probably say that she had enough to cope with at eye level. But in this case, not looking upwards was a serious mistake. Just as she reached her dish, her jaws opening in anticipation, the Thing from the Topmost Cupboard sprang.
It sounded like this: ‘YEEEOAWWWWOOEEEEEIOW!!!!’
And it sank all its claws into Flo’s back.
Flo tore up the stairs yelping, and belted back down them again howling, but the thing on her back only released its hold when she collapsed on the carpet and rolled over in an attitude of abject submission. Then it stalked into the kitchen with its tail twitching and calmly ate her breakfast.
Poor Flo! It was a while before she could even summon the courage to sit up. And when she did, she realized that she had widdled, in her terror, all over the carpet. It was enough to make a dog weep, especially a dog as naturally fastidious as Flo.