Lady

by Melvin Burgess

  ‘What’s the matter? Have I upset you?’ asked Simon in a high, surprised voice, but I couldn’t say because I didn’t know.

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said Annie when we were swapping stories a few days later. ‘Doing it with Simon must be like having sex with Mr Nobody. He doesn’t seem to want anything, from what you’ve told me. I’ve made sure I know exactly what Toby wants.’

  I was cross – she was just jealous because I got in first after all. Toby is a baboon. He’s got an overhanging forehead. Really – it looks as though he’s coming out of a cave all the time. One thing though – it convinced me never to make any more plans, ever again. I was just going to let things happen to me. What was the point? I’d planned and planned and planned this one and I still hadn’t got it right, according to Miss Organisation herself Annie Turner. I’m just not the sort of person plans work for.

  ‘What does Toby want, then?’ I asked her, but she blushed red and wouldn’t say. I thought it must be something really kinky, but when she did tell me later, all it was, was for her to wrap her legs around his waist and squeeze hard while they were at it.

  ‘Did you?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  Later on, me and Simon were sitting next to each other on the settee and I’d had a chance to think about it. ‘On the floor in front of the telly,’ I said, feeling like dirt. ‘Stars in their Eyes,’ I said.

  ‘Tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be a bit of a goer,’ he said and he fell around laughing. Which made me feel a lot better, actually, even though I hit him for saying it.

  ‘I think it was very romantic,’ he said, but then he remembered what I thought of romance, and he said, ‘Very sexy, I mean.’ He held me and kissed me and I soon felt better. The annoying thing was that he was right – it did feel like I’d lost something and he’d got something. But he was also right that it was quite sexy. I never minded sex on the floor on cushions after that, and I never cared about the telly being on. Once we’d done it once, Simon came into his own, I’ll give him that. He knew exactly what he wanted. I used to drive him mad with lust. He used to bend and twist my legs all over the place. He used to say he could spend hours just looking at me when I was naked, but it wasn’t true – the looking bit usually only lasted about two seconds. I remember lying there with my legs wide open and he was kneeling in between them, having a good look. Then he leaned forward and tickled me down there.

  ‘What’s this?’ he teased.

  ‘That’s my tuppence,’ I said.

  ‘More like about thirty thousand million quid,’ he told me, and he was on me like a randy old dog.

  I went out for nearly two years with Simon and he made me happy, happier than any of the other boys I knew. He loved me, he was in pieces when I stopped seeing him. And you know what? I was in pieces, too. I loved him. I truly did love him, it broke my heart when we split up. Maybe I should have married him and lived with him my whole life and never needed anyone else, but I wasn’t ready for that. I wanted to sleep with those rough boys and hang out with those rough girls. He just didn’t fit in. So he had to go – bingo! He went.

  When I lost my virginity the second time among the gravestones on the edge of the Southern Cemetery, it was all so different. There was the sound of cars nearby, the wind was blowing all around us, people were watching and I didn’t give a toss. Why should I care who watched? Life is so much simpler when you’re a dog. All I knew was, I wanted to do it so much it hurt. And then it was just so glorious, so lovely. People say sex for animals isn’t as good, but they don’t know nothing. The only thing is, I lost interest so quickly you wouldn’t believe it. I gave a great big sigh and then I got this scent …

  ‘Is this a rabbit?’ I snuffed, and began running off to follow it up.

  ‘OW OW OW! Stay still! Stay still!’ Poor old Fella! He was stuck in there. He was right up against me, glued tight, running after me as fast as he could with only two legs to go on, gripping tight with his paws round my neck for dear life. He made me think of Simon when we’d done it doggy fashion. I looked over my shoulder at him.

  ‘Aren’t you done yet?’ I asked. I was!

  ‘I’m not done till you let go.’

  ‘I’m not holding on.’

  I decided he was arsing about, so I shot forward to get him out. He howled – OWWWWWW! – fell sideways and slid off me. I felt a sharp twang in my insides and went, ‘Ung!’ in surprise.

  I looked behind me and we were bum to bum. Poor Fella was looking backwards at me, and you should have seen the look on his face. I went, Huf huf huf, he looked so funny. That must hurt!

  ‘Kama Sutra! What a lover!’ I said. Then I caught another whiff of rabbit and took a few steps, and of course he had to hobble backwards after me, his dick bent in half.

  ‘Ah! Ah! Ah!’ he yelped. ‘Lady, stay still! Stay still, Lady!’ I took one look and just cracked up. It was so funny! I was laughing so much my legs gave way. Fella gave a great tug and pulled out.

  ‘Ha ha ha!’ I howled. ‘That was so funny. Your face. OW OW OW!’

  ‘That’ll teach you.’ He shook himself from head to toe and grinned at me. ‘It was worth it, baby,’ he growled. He came over and licked me up, and I licked him back. He was some gorgeous, lovely dog. Good old Fella – always on my side.

  ‘You old dog,’ I told him.

  ‘You pretty, pretty little bitch.’ We kissed each other, but then, just like last time my spirits just fell out of me and I lay suddenly down in the grass, my nose between my paws.

  ‘What?’ asked Fella, licking my nose.

  ‘Is that it?’ I asked. ‘Is that what dogs do? A minute and that’s it?’ I felt devastated! I had in my mind those sessions I used to have. We used to roll about the bed for hours. It used to be a night out and now it was just – less than a minute. I mean!

  ‘Right – don’t worry. Each time is only quick, but it goes on and on and on for days.’

  I felt better after that. Mitch came up, and Fella let him sniff briefly round me. Then we moved off into the older part of the graveyard, hunting for rabbits and mice and voles until the urge took us again. And what a great day that was – the best day of my life! Hunting, playing, chasing, shagging. Fella was right, it was just one thick, misty soup of hormones and sex. Mitch was hanging around as close as he dared to me, just waiting for a chance to slip in, and Fella had to keep chasing him away. I kept giving him the nose so he knew all he had to do was get me on my own and he was in. It was funny watching him! He kept finding scents and running off with Fella, who forgot everything when he was on a scent. They’d go haring off after it and Mitch would double back to try and get on me before Fella cottoned on. He did it too, a couple of times. Fella came back, sniffed me and sighed, but he didn’t do anything about it. Fair game. It was about ten of Fella to two of Mitch. Not bad odds, I guess.

  If you gotta be a dog, be a bitch. It was just so great, trotting around town with those two lovely old dogs panting along behind me. Where I went, they went. They’d have dropped anything to be by my side.

  After a bit, in a sort of half-puzzled way, I found myself thinking about poor old Terry, left on his tod for the day. It made me Huf, huf to think about him rolling around on his back in that alley where we left him. He’d be cross! Gradually, I made my way back, with Fella and Mitch after me. I was still in a daze – almost got my brains knocked out on the Princess Parkway. I found his scent easily enough. I was only half bothered. Did it with Fella a couple of times under an overgrown apple tree and then headed out of the alley and into the road after him.

  Terry’s is the easiest scent in the world to follow. Pee and beer and sweat, and a selection of weirdo hormones – you could sniff him out across a road of busy traffic. I followed him as far as the swimming pool, and guess what? He’d disappeared – pop! – just disappeared into thin air. There was his scent by the roadside, and then it stopped. I snuffled bemusedly around for a few minutes while the other two yawned and scratched.
r />   ‘He’s gone,’ I said.

  ‘Great,’ said Fella.

  ‘He’ll be back,’ said Mitch.

  There was a pause.

  ‘We need to eat,’ said Mitch.

  ‘The pack runs tonight,’ barked Fella. ‘But let’s check out the bins behind the shops first.’ So we loped off to find scraps. And – I didn’t care! My master had gone, and I didn’t care. He’d treated me well enough and I’d almost convinced myself that I loved him. But – begging for sausages on the end of a piece of string? What sort of a life was that? The pack – now that was worth living for!

  You know what? I haven’t lived long, but I’ve packed a lot in. I’ve known a lot of people and I’ve done a lot of things, but those days out on the street with the guys, they were the best. Dogs – what a crowd! I’d got bored with Annie and Simon, who were both nice, decent, thoughtful people. I’d been browned off with about five or six different groups of people in the past year. I’d picked them up and dropped them one after the other. I was already getting bored with Michelle and her crowd, even though I’d only been hanging about with them for a few weeks. But I could have hung around with Fella and Mitch forever.

  OK, my life could have ended at any second under the wheels of a car, or I might have fallen to the police or any one of the half a billion busy-noses who love to grab a stray by her collar and slap her in the dogs’ home, waiting for the needle. But life at the edge tastes so sweet! It’s steal or starve, life or death. There’s so much more to pack in. The smell of meat – when I walk past a butcher’s shop it makes me whine with pleasure to this day. Dog shit and hot fur, spit, grass and breath! Glorious days! My pads sore, my tongue out in the cool air; the dew on my coat, the pack around me and Fella on my back. Boy, we had some fun! And, boy, were we in love with each other. I could talk about it forever, but what for? You can’t even imagine the flavour of the things I did.

  A dog is a thing no one can imagine. She does what she can without a care and doesn’t bother who thinks what about it. She doesn’t count her pleasures good or bad – there’s just the touch, the scent and the sound. She has her nose to the ground; she can live her life with her eyes shut. Under the moon, she’s no one’s slave. If her life ends tonight, no one misses her for long but while she’s with us, she loves and is loved with passion. She eats until she’s full, shits where she likes and communicates with her kind at both ends. With her ears up, her eyes wide and her nose tasting the wide world near and far, past and present, she’s hers and her pack’s alone. Above all, she is always on the look out for prey. Oh, yes! The dog is a hunting animal – never doubt it!

  You have no idea! Heading off a rabbit as he makes his way to the brambles. Cornering a rat in the open road. Yes! The flush of blood and breath that fills the space between your teeth as you crush some little life away. Who can describe the intimacy of a life ending inside your mouth? Once, there was a deer, a huge beast who ran like the wild thing she was. Perhaps she understood that we could think – she screamed for mercy as we closed in. She must have come to graze along the railway line, or escaped from a park, who knows? But she found her way into the city where the pack ran, and that was the end of her.

  The pack went up and down in size. The dog-dogs would turn up, mutts who’d slipped the leash or escaped from home to spend a few hours roaming the bins and the gardens and allotments with us. Mitch was there mostly, hunting rabbits, mice and voles in the parks or playing fields, or in the Southern Cemetery. But always, always, always it was me and Fella. I don’t think we spent more than a few minutes apart the whole time. We lived to hunt and we hunted to live. We were soul mates, we two, more dog than the dogs themselves, who’d forgotten what it was like to be true to your own nature.

  Mitch was a good friend and pack mate, but he was only really ever half there. He was bit dog, bit man, bit nothing. He spent half his evenings moping around the house on Victoria Road where his family still lived, lying behind the hedge in the garden, ‘watching over them’, as he put it. Watching for what? He liked to think he was still doing them some service, guarding them or something, but no one ever wanted to hurt them.

  He loved to watch his children making their way to school, he did it almost every day. As soon as they were out of sight of the house he’d run up to them and let them pat his head and stroke him like he was their pet. ‘Half-Dog,’ Fella called him, and he was right. What did we want with human beings? As the days and nights tumbled past, my life as a person began to seem like a dream to me, one of those anxious dreams that come to you early in the morning as you lie half awake, half asleep, turning over your worries in your mind. The people I knew became distant memories. Sometimes I saw someone I recognised, but although it was only a few weeks ago, it felt far away. I had no desire to follow them up and remind myself.

  I felt the past, even my recent doggy past, falling away from me. It was like a terrible weight that had been bound with iron to my neck had suddenly broken and fallen away. To be freed from the past – can you imagine it? It was like growing wings. By the end of another week, I had no idea that I had ever been a human girl called Sandra Francy. All the people that I had once known and loved and hated evaporated out of my mind. If I saw my mum on the street during that time, I don’t think I’d have even recognised her. A dog lives by her nose, her wits, and her eyes and her ears. What use is memory to us? Poor Mitch was crippled by his humanity. Perhaps that was why he was unable to enjoy that most perfect of pleasures, the sweetest bone in the whole carcass – cats!

  Late at night when the people have gone to their beds, the cats come out. They think the night belongs to them. The garbage bins, the gardens and roads, the spaces under the cars – it’s their territory; so they think. People don’t bother cats, and what cat ever got caught by a dog? But they hadn’t met us before. We’re something different.

  We tried everything, me and Fella! We spent whole nights discussing tactics and tricks. We called to them, we shouted at them, we barked at them. One of us hid round a corner in ambush, while the other chased cats towards them. We went down drains, on roofs, we hid in alleyways and shrubberies, on the tops of cars and behind hedges. We hid in bins in Chinatown for hours, waiting for the lanky brindled tom who sprayed there at the same time every night. We even broke into houses in an effort to trap them in their own homes, but we never caught one. Fella had this one trick he was certain was going to work. We must have tried it about six hundred times, an ancient plan of his to catch a cat on its own territory – up in a tree.

  ‘Imagine the terror of the cat! Imagine the joy of the dog!’ he barked enthusiastically, rolling his eyes and wagging his tail so hard that his whole bum banged from side to side.

  It worked like this. We’d find a small tree, something with branches fairly low to the ground, out in the open – we wanted to be sure the cat would make for it when the chase began. Then came the hard bit – getting Fella up into the branches. Sometimes he’d do it in stages – on to a wheelie-bin, then a window ledge, then a garage roof, then into the tree. Other times, if we could get Mitch to join in, we’d do it by forming a tower of dogs – me on the ground, Mitch on my back and then Fella would have to clamber up on top of us and reach the branches that way.

  Next thing was to wait for a cat to get near enough to the tree to go up it when we chased it. Fella, precariously balanced up there, would be peering out trying to spot one, trying to keep his trap shut. Quite often he’d fall out several times before we finally got it sorted and we’d have to start all over again. The plan was, once the cat was treed, it would relax. It would probably even turn round and look at us on the ground, hissing and taunting us. Then, Fella would suddenly and silently seize it in his jaws and bite the life out of it.

  That was the theory; but Fella could never contain himself. All he had to do was wait, then drop quietly on to the cat, or at least push it down into my waiting jaws. But he never could. As soon as pussy was two leaps up the trunk, a fusillade of ferocious b
arking and abuse would emerge, not from the ground, but from the quivering tree itself. The poor cat would cling on for a second, frozen in surprise and terror. Every hair on its body would stand on end. It would open its jaws and wait for a split second for its hearing to come to its senses and make the barking come from a sensible place. Then, it would catch Fella’s scent up there with it. With a great yowl, the cat would leap into the air and come down, claws flailing – just as I rushed up! But we never caught one. They were so full of terror they always shot off like rockets, once or twice even running over my actual teeth. Fella would fall out of the tree snarling with excitement and rage and we’d have an argument.

  ‘You shoulda caught it, you shoulda caught it, you shoulda caught it!’ he barked.

  ‘You shoulda waited, you shoulda waited, you shoulda waited!’ I barked back.

  ‘You shoulda caught it! You shoulda caught it! It fell into your mouth!’

  ‘You barked! You barked!’ I told him. ‘If you didn’t bark you’d be able to sneak up and get them.’

  ‘I’m a dog,’ he growled. ‘Dogs don’t sneak.’

  ‘Dogs don’t climb trees, either,’ I pointed out.

  ‘You try it then,’ he snarled. So I did, but he was right. It was impossible not to bark when you got that near a cat. Even a dog that was once human can’t do it.

  Mitch sometimes joined in cat hunts, but afterwards he was always full of undoglike shame and guilt. He’d creep back after the chase on his belly, licking his lips and whining miserably. He swore it was beneath us, that it was disgusting, unhygienic – anything he could think of. So he said – but when the little pussies ran he was off after them, his feet helpless beneath him, and his disgust never returned until they’d got away.

  ‘It’s like some horrible addiction,’ he groaned. But he was utterly unable to help himself.