He’ll most definitely find out one of these days. One of these days he’s going to smell the soft shower cream on the insides of my legs or see the all-too-familiar matrimonial fingerprints tattooed on the side of my balls. He might equally find it all out from Shirley. After all, there’s only so much pharmaceutical mint-flavoured jelly you can rub into your breasts before the scabs start to open up and bleed in your sleep and before you know it your husband is up and stumbling back from the kitchen with something sharp or worse something blunt. I know Greg is stupid and short-sighted and stupid, but one of these days even he is going to realise that the only thing holding his wife together is a dollop of cheap cream and the occasional, carefully concealed plaster. I think she’ll soon start to put socks on my paws as she is starting to wince more than she used to. Oh! How I’ll miss the tingling sensation of her warm blood drawing patterns on my paws, tracing my bones and caressing my claws!
And as she cuddles me against her beating heart after our love making and pushes her tongue into my throat as far back as it will go, sloshing it around my gums like fleshy solid mouthwash, with her eyes closed peacefully as she moans unconsciously between kisses, gently nuzzling her nose up and down mine the mantra that she has made her own:
“There’s a good dog...there’s a gooooood dog...”
I stare right back at her with unblinking rage and think to myself. One of these days I’m going to bite that stupid happy loving smile right off of your stupid happy loving face. Then I close my eyes and kiss her back. Her lips feel big like the pout of the Queen of Hearts and they oddly faintly taste of cigarette butts even though I know she has never been near a cigarette. Somehow it reminds me of a time when I was poking my nose in the garden gutter when it filled up with leaves. But this gutter smells of black lipstick and mint mouthwash and staunchly refuses to let go of me but at this point I’m starting to get hard again real bony hard oh Jesus for the love of
OW!!
“Come on, Ezra! Come on, poochie pooch! Hep hep hep! There’s a good dog! There’s a good dog!”
Grrrr.
Chapter Three
The butterfly was trapped in the overturned glass, bouncing desperately against it while its wasp friends drowned a sticky death in the mould-tinged marmalade jar. Estella loved trapping insects. For hours on end she would carefully set up her house of horrors on the garden table with the tools of torture at her ready: marmalade jar, spoon, glass, scissors, a pair of rusty nail clippers and a hammer with “Ruby’s Adventures” playing in the background. I fell in love with Ruby and would jump up and down whenever Estella would reach for the box set and slip a black brick into the silver mouth of the television set. With a flick of her little wrist the screen would go from dusty black to rainbow Technicolor, and wild scrawled golden titles would bounce and jump across the screen as a family wagon trundled along a countryside lane to the roaring fanfares of a banjo-only orchestra.
Timmy, a freckled red-haired boy with a heap of books under his arm, jumps out of the carriage and screams:
“Yew sayd ah kerd see Rooby ayfter scyool, pow pah! Ah wowna seeee Rooby, pow pah! Ween can ah say Rooby, pow pah?” he implores.
A handsome dimpled Hollywood honcho farmer with a physique wide as a muscular wardrobe flashes a shampoo ad smile and winks at him.
“Any minute now, son. She’s just over on yonder hill o’ there,” he bellows in a voice somehow less regional than his son’s. Then he passes a hand to shield his eyes from the sun, sticks a blade of grass between his teeth and growls. “Yip, yip, there she blows.”
“Aw shucks pow pah ahm so excited ah cain’t hawrdly beleeeeve eet!” the boy screams. Then he runs gawkily across the wide expanses of the field in his skinny legs made of breadsticks. The father smiles, spits the grass blade out of his mouth and looks back towards the house. Inside, a smiling woman in a bonnet smiles back at him. Focus jumps into her smiling freckled face, then swings back to pow pah as the boy’s ecstatic screams of joy sound off in the background. They seem happy he is getting mauled by vicious prairie animals. Maybe it’s what kept their marriage alive in the bedroom all this thirty-five years.
But no, these are not screams of terror, but of joy! The gangly lad runs up the hill, his face etched into a grimace with the effort, revealing two protruding munchers that make him look like some demented orange-haired clean-shaven chipmunk.
The love of my life jumps over the riverbank to greet him. She isn’t the most attractive spaniel I’ve ever met. She has a bit of a goofy look in her eye and an irritating habit of letting her tongue hang out like she is panting for breath all the time. In truth she is a dizzy dopey looking thing. She isn’t a Crispy Charlie’s Dog Nuggets kind of dog. More like the kind of pitiful creature you see on those adverts with the phone number display and some celebrity in a Kevlar vest talking sincerely about how something’s got to be done and how can we allow this to happen in this day and age.
But I found that as the scene went on and Timmy stroked her and patted her and chased her down the hill and rolled around the floor laughing while she looked at him with a quizzical expression, I understood exactly what she was thinking and in moments like these I knew I had found the dog I would spend the rest of my life with. I just knew. Gradually, I found that the distance between myself and her decreased the more the film went on until finally I heard Estella begging me to get out the way so she could see what was happening to Ruby. Ruby. I tried to say it out loud but all that came out of my mouth was a plaintive howl and a comma of saliva. I gazed upon Ruby as she triumphantly saved Timmy from the cattle rustlers that tried to kidnap him and hold the little brat for ransom. I marvelled as Ruby threw herself bravely at the bow-legged crooks and ran joyfully in a circle around the room when she bit through the wires of the leader’s electric wheel chair and sent him spinning out of control off the cliff edge. Then as his wheelchair smashed into dust on the rocks below and he lay clinging to the cliff edge screaming and sobbing for his poor dead mother and how he didn’t mean to do it it was just for the money but Ruby didn’t care. I jumped up and down with joy as she scratched at his withered fingers until he let go and disappeared from reality into the crashing foam below. As the family reunited around the kidnapped boy and the heroic dog around the cliff edge, sobbing and laughing together, I felt like I had been with Ruby all along right by her side.
Then I froze with tension as the town police car pulled up and Sheriff Chambers growled that the dog had to be put down and Daddy Timmy stood up valiantly to the bitter little man and growled between gritted teeth.
“Hell, Chambers! Those scumbags deserved what they got.” He paused. “And you know it!”
“Hell, Fred, ah understand,” Chambers replied apologetically and making to grab for my Ruby, “but ah’ve gots tuh follah duh laow. Yew knooooh dat!”
Daddy Timmy pushed the officer’s hand away and held my Ruby in his big oaky arms. What I would have given to have been there.
“Hell, sheriff, if you’re gownah take that dog away from me an’ my family.”
He paused to give his wife Mrs Timmy the time to put a hand to her mouth in horror and Timmy the chipmunk to show another set of wonky molars behind the first ones.
“If you’re gownah take that dog away from me an’ my family,” he repeated, “then you’d better take me with you!”
My heart was in my mouth. The sheriff pulled at his gun.
“Hell,” he finally said, “I guess them scum did have it coming aifter awl!”
Daddy and Mummy Timmy grabbed each other and passionately kissed, thoughts of their son Timmy being ravaged by prairie animals turning their thoughts to sexual firework displays in wooden sheds. The sheriff smiled. Timmy and Ruby rolled by the cliff, Timmy laughing hysterically. Daddy let go of Mummy Timmy, grabbed the sheriff by the hand and muttered.
“Ah guess yewd better come round ours for a drink, whadd
ayasay sheriff, huh?”
The sheriff grinned.
“Hell, ah don’t mind if ah do, Fred ole boy! Ah surely don’t mind if ah do!”
At that point the image froze and more golden titles appeared from below. The banjos screamed once more and then the screen dimmed to black once again. I turned back to Estella but she wasn’t there. She was back in the garden picking the legs off butterflies. I wanted to see Ruby again but I knew I’d need Estella’s help for that. I figured it would have to wait. She didn’t like being interrupted when she was playing House with the insects.
Chapter Four
“He told her to turn that crappy music down. He asked her nicely at first but she just laughed and carried on with the ironing. So he asked her again less nicely this time but she took no notice and carried on ironing just like before. So he stood up and told her that hey if she wouldn’t switch that racket off now she’d be having a problem. But she just carried on ironing like before. So he put his drink down on the radiator and moved towards her and she held up the iron and said don’t you come near me you bastard but he just kept coming and coming so she pressed the orange button on the side of the iron handle and blew the steam into his face. So he covered his face with one hand grabbed her throat with the other and said you fat little bitch I’m gonna kill you and she said Tim Tim you’re hurting me and he said yeah bitch that’s the idea and she pressed the iron right up against his face as they crashed onto the floor. I can still hear the sizzle and crackle of burnt skin and Tim going aaah you fucking bitch aaah. So I buried my head into the back of the sofa and tried to shut out the noise as best I could.
“I knew when he’d come back because the sofa always made a big oomph whenever he sat down and that’s what it did just then. I saw his arm reach out for his glass but it had fallen onto the floor and spilled drink onto the carpet. He reached down and refilled it with the bottle which he always kept wedged between the sofa and the radiator because he said he liked his drinks warm especially in winter. Then I heard the gluck gluck gluck of the drink spanking the glass and just before I covered my ears again he made a little choking noise that sounded like crying but couldn’t have been because Tim never cries when he drinks he just drinks.”
““Boy oh boy my head hurts like hell,” he said the next day. Then turning to Wendy, he asked her how the hell did you get that lump on the side of your eye?”
She giggled and spat the straw out of her drink, a candy-smelling beer.
“You’re hilarious!”
The bouncer frowned. Had she been listening to a word he’d been saying? The seven-winged eagle tattooed girl with the neon hair and the Cheshire cat grin made a handstand and thrust one ivy-patterned leg against the door and rubbed herself up and down like a slender wolf scratching its flea-bitten back against redwood bark. She rubbed herself up and down the bouncer’s leg. Her beer had drawn a white Colonel Sanders moustache across her wet bulbous lips that were going blue with the effort. The big bloated balding blob in black held her like a dolled-up fleshy wheelbarrow to his groin as he unhooked his skull-and-cross-bones belt and let his trousers snake all the way down to his knees. He rocked her back and forth as she see-sawed on and off the floor, spitting beer and froth and howling like a werewolf being maimed by a grizzly bear in the mating season.
“You should’ve given me a gum shield,” she yawned, “I think I’m going to bite my tongue off!”
“Here!” he hisses. “Let me bite it off for you!”
The bulldog lifted her violently off her hands and swung her head backwards to his in a kind of blonde-wigged elephant ballerina motion until her ear was pressing against his gritted teeth. He twisted her head three-hundred-and-sixty degrees towards him and muffled the snap! of her neck by kicking the bright yellow jukebox into action. Some trapped London band from within suddenly began to scream a one a two a one two three four yeah alright here we go now
The albino rats in the city
And the life that is shitty
But the bouncer don’t care
Oh no the bouncer don’t care
Oh no
Then he kissed her.
We pass a taxi driver arguing with a cyclist with a delivery on his back. With his bright blue uniform and dark goggles he almost looks like a giant poisonous snail that has just swallowed some garden chemical poison and is starting to froth into convulsions while grandma gardener looks on smiling with sadistic satisfaction. His bike lies twisted and broken on the edge of a pavement, a strangely distorted metal monkey frame battered on the side of the curb. He wildly rants at the taxi driver.
“You madman! Can’t you see I’m a goddamn cyclist?”
The taxi driver’s face lights up as he ignites a cigarette and glares back at him.
“You’re not a cyclist! You’re just a kid riding a bicycle.”
Five hundred yards down we pass a man wearing only a stethoscope to protect him from the freezing cold. He leans lopsidedly against a twisted lamppost and measures its pulse with the instrument around his neck and pulls a face. It doesn’t look good. Then out of the darkness we hear the howling and screaming and thrashing within the building as we approach the sign. We hear it from the outside and I see the lights in one corner of the pub dim to blackness. Must be closing early. I wonder where the bouncer is. He’s usually about at this time scaring students and barring beggars.
As with all of Greg’s evening walks, this one has to end with a quick pint at The Swan, or the Mucky Duck as the regulars call it. For Greg, it means he can sit by himself and think of himself as one of the lads for a few agonisingly self-delusional minutes. For me, it means lying on the floor of a sickly yellow pub carpet admiring the colourful squalor of the locals with baleful eyes and my tail throbbing under my arsehole. Ugh. I hate being in that position. Once out of sheer boredom I even tried making conversation with one of the flea carpets lying behind the bar: the landlord has about three. Labradors, I think. Or so they used to be. Sad little fuckers ought to run into the road for all they’re worth: one of them is so still they only found out he’d actually been dead for two weeks when a new girl behind the bar tripped over it and found her foot covered in dried pus and flies. She’d turned the thing onto its side and seen that its intestines lay flopped out in front of it, going green. His tongue was flopped in the far corner in his mouth and his face was frozen in an expression of raw terror but to the girl he looked like he was laughing because she stood up and started kicking him in the head until she finally realised that no matter how hard she kicked it the poor thing would carry on smiling until his teeth were pulled out of his mouth. So that’s exactly what she did. They never did find out who did that to it. They figured it might have been some rabid animal, a fox perhaps, had slipped in during the night after closing time. Maybe even one of the deranged locals with a sharpened nail or a crowbar. But I know who did it. And it was no rabid animal neither.
There was a cat these poor sods used to tolerate. They were so meek and laid back they’d probably tolerate any animal so long as it didn’t get too close, but this ginger moggy they used to adore. They really looked after it, even going so far as to catch its own food for it. They kept a pile of dead mice by the fireplace for when it came back from its street errands. They’d make a little pile of the mice and put them especially close to the fire so that they would feel all nice and warm in their friend’s mouth. Of course she wasn’t too responsive to them in return. Never played with them or caught anything ever for them. Never lifted a claw for anything but itself, that cat. But they didn’t mind. They were lonely and needed the company, however brief or unappreciative it was. The highlight of their day was to see Mina silently pad across the carpet, green eyes glowing, honing in on the hot pile of mice in their usual place. The dogs always tried to sit up waiting for her to turn up, but inevitably always dozed off just before she arrived on the scene. Besides, Mina would wait unti
l her benefactors had fallen fast asleep before she gobbled up their generous donations. Cats don’t like to look like they need anybody else’s charity to get by. They get proud like that. Not like dogs. Not like me.
But one day the mice just weren’t there. I can only imagine how Mina felt. Probably wanted to scratch the sleeping bastards’ eyes out but then if she did she would have had to admit herself that she actually needed their kindness to survive. Which deep down she knew she did but heck, she wasn’t going to pretend she knew that. Complicated creatures, cats. She felt more like sobbing by the last embers of the dying fire. She looked into it as if trying to conjure up the powers that be to give her what she oh so desperately wanted.
Oh no, wait! There they were! Relief showered through her spine. Her ears pricked up. Why weren’t they in their usual place? Stupid curs trying to play games with her, eh? Well, whatever. She’d think of something to get back at them later. Something really mean. Still, they might have been away from the fire, but they were certainly warm enough. Bigger pile than usual, too. She rolled one of the little furry dead bodies towards her, turned it over playfully with her paw, and held the end of its tail with her teeth and began to reel the creature slowly into her mouth. She swallowed it down in one gulp, not even waiting to chew on it. She shivered with delight. Ah, that’s better. Still, bit of a meagre starter. Better get stuck in. She reached out for another one, looking back at the dogs as she thought she saw one of them stir.
Then an odd feeling of nausea came over her. She tried to yawn but couldn’t somehow. The air suddenly felt hot around her and she felt something hot, something vaguely salty. A slight sting. A pounding in her ears. She turned back to the floor where she still held the rodent’s body in her paw. She didn’t feel too hungry anymore. Was it indigestion? Had she swallowed the mouse wrong? How can you swallow a mouse wrong? It felt very cold all of a sudden, as if the pub door had just been opened. She pushed the mouse away.
There's a Good Dog... Page 2