Shirley dragged me past a black guitar case filled with brown and silver circles. Some bearded weirdo with a racoon on his head and an orange mop of hair that were curtains to his eyes strummed a triangular ornament and whined the same four coded signals through broken teeth over and over and over again.
“Yah yug yee yoh! Yah yug yee yoh! Ya yug yee yoh bluh!”
We went on for miles and miles through endless worming corridors and hordes of murderous feet. I only saw signs for more labyrinths, each more complicated and twisted than the next. When would it end? Roasted chestnuts, pigeon shit and the odd mangy cat hairs punched my nostrils over and over again. More often than not something else bludgeoned those whiffs away and I was replaced with a metallic feeling in my nose and ears. A constant clanging in my ears. I was a moth battering myself to death against a blinding boiling bulb. A kamikaze butterfly. A lemming on a cliff edge. A junkyard dog trapped in a dishwasher. Then the leash snatched at my neck and once again I was plunged into the undergrowth of misshapen animal carrion and smelly cotton.
We passed through a depot for skeleton trucks perched on giant skis and the gasping throaty gullet of the rotting carcass of this metropolis of chaos and confusion.
We seem to spend half our lives standing with the alien race at the bus stop to destination Nowhere. A man standing beside me sucks the life out of a cigarette then tosses it into an open top baby pram carrying the weight of two well-fed ham-fisted twin brothers. They look about 38 years old. Their mother looks younger than 17. The lucky one gets to smell his brother roasting and spluttering while his teenage mother twists her head back and forth to the dolphin clicks and wails of a Nouveau-Riche teen idol trying to act like he’s depressed and grew up in the gutter. The nose of a blind man in a black overcoat, fedora hat and 3-D glasses wrinkles into a fist as he moves awkwardly to another seat by the bus stop. The burning baby stops writhing and silently coos rather sweetly like spitting fat meat reversing out of the fire and into the pan. His brother has lost interest in the spectacle and sleeps peacefully beside him. In perfect timing the blind man’s flimsy cane snaps under his weight and he slowly falls backwards off his feet and into the oncoming transnational coach he’s been waiting for all day. The smoking youth and the girl step onto the coach and reach for the back seats as the pram burns silently in the window reflection.
They’re onto me. The furry men with matchstick legs. The cats in the plastic rubber raincoats. Like six-foot hairy scratching meowing condoms they’re onto me. My legs are tied together but when the shit hits the fan I get in the van, stopping just in time to scare a pigeon so bad its guano runs to its head and it haemorrhages white faeces out of its beak. I smell meat trucks stinking sizzling in the red-hot sun, cooking the sawn-off animal joints of my four-legged cousins. We blast past a sheep truck on fire a bleating pissing woolly fireball smashes through a concrete sandpaper colour schemed motel corridor. The toad-faced manager looks on sheepishly. Raw mice have never tasted so good.
I notice there’s a weasel wrapped around the luggage rack. Bones shattered up like gangsters’ valentines and kinky uncles’ belt lines. The seatbelt cuts a map into my stomach, the armrest breaks under my weight and the window is a piss take. The coffee table squeaks and the seat itself writhes and whines. A hog with a conductor hat and spatula feet asks Shirley if she has any luggage as he swipes her ticket. She tell him No, just the biggest headache he can imagine. He grunts a reply and farts off to the back of the bus where he watches us suspiciously while picking his nostrils with a fig twig held between his hooves.
We pass the sign that indicates Bolsover Castle. A rat-skin tent in a dried-up peat bog. Bags of dog shit swing from the twig poles dancing and spinning to the gusty farts of constipated water voles and incontinent fish. The air pulls the hair off my skin strand by strand as if with a rusty nail clipper. We pass a poster advertising dead models to necrophile motorists. A fat Labrador and a Chihuahua ride a see-saw together in an advert for doggy flakes. Ruby and Timmy do a cooking show. They’ve roasted their parents in the oven and present them to the sheriff. They give him a knife and ask him if he’ll do the honours. He says sure thing little man he don’t mind if he do. He don’t mind if he do.
A blind man behind us is tapped awake on the shoulder by a plain clothes dick. A black pig grunts at him and scuttles to the front of the bus.
“Mister, you’ve got a pig on the end of your leash!”
“A what?” he cries.
“You know! A pig.”
“Nonsense!” The man sounds educated. “That’s my dog Heidi!”
“Yeah?” the plain clothes growls. “Ever heard a dog bark oink! Oink?”
“Why, yes! That would be Heidi!”
“Sir, I believe there’s been some foul play here. Looks like you’ve been cheated out of a guide dog and someone’s been using your weakness against you.”
“My weakness? What weakness? I don’t have a weakness. Mind who you think you’re talking to, young fellow!”
“With all due respect, sir. You’ve been taken for a ride. That thing ain’t no guide dog: you were sold a goddamn pig!”
“Bastards!” The blind man slumps in his seat. “No wonder he smelled like shit.”
“Ah-ha. Pigs are actually quite clean. I’m the one who smells like shit.”
“You mean you’ve been following me since I bought the goddamn thing!”
“That’s right, sir.”
“But...whatever for?”
“To track down the crooks that sold that thing to you.” He turns to two sniggering youngsters in the seat next to the blind man. “Ay up, did you sell this blind gentleman that pig over there?”
“Well, uh...yeah.”
“That’s as good as a confession. In fact that is a confession. Come with me. Your arse is going to jail.”
“What the-”
“I’m Joe King. Plain clothes police.”
“PCP?” he turns to his friend. “Like the angel dust? Phencyclidine?”
“Why? You got some?”
“Come with me.” The private dick persists. “I repeat. Your arse is going to jail.”
“Ah-ha! Hang on a second! My arse is going nowhere!”
“Not until it goes to jail. Come with me. I repeat. Your arse is going to jail.”
“No it’s not, PCP man.”
“You refuse to cooperate?”
“Absolutely. Ow! Hey!”
Sounds of a scuffle. Bones snap. Sound of a hacksaw being wrenched out of a toolbox. The pig screams in fear and hammers itself against the bus doors. I stare out the window for fear of looking behind me. Blood splashes onto the window blocking my view of the never-ending bypass. Blood-red sunset on the horizon. I jump off my seat and scuttle to hide in the toilet but when I see the state of its walls I think again: add a blocked toilet to a bumpy overcrowded bus ride and you know you’re in trouble. Just as I decide to sit back down I hear the hacksaw clang back into the toolbox. The plainclothes dick has finished. He briefly speaks to the driver, who stops the coach and lets him out on the hard shoulder of the bypass. The pig-dog scuttles for freedom. Just before getting off the plain clothes private dick Joe King hoists something pink and dripping under his arm and turns to me grinning:
“Told you his arse was going to jail.”
Chapter Seven
When we finally got back, Shirley sat down next to Greg on the sofa (exactly where we’d left him two days earlier) and they started watching the news together. Almost every night he would fill up his wine glass, occasionally with some black stuff that looked like liquid tar and didn’t smell much rosier.
“There’s pint glasses for that, you know,” Shirley would call to him from the living room. He’d smile to himself as he emptied half the can into the wine glass, downed the rest, and pitched the rattling container towards the bin. He near
ly always missed it and the back wall was covered in dark stains.
Then he would bomb into the armchair by the radiator and roast his eyeballs on the woeful woes of the world. Six contestants on something resembling an up-market quiz show without the canned laughter would squawk, squabble and grapple amongst themselves to the baying of a beige-trousered mob, most of them with crew cuts and dimples. None of the panellists - not the anarcho-syndicalist communist, not the columnist for The Conservative Woman, not the baron come out of hiding, hell not even the retired footballer taking a break from shopping adverts - ever made any sense to him. But they were always greeted with cheers and applause from the computerised crew-cut crowd. Greg would rant and rave at them, face red as Cabernet Rouge and twice as pissed. Once the glass left his hand and slammed into a thousand sharp reflections on the carpet. I remember he frantically felt for the salt shaker, unscrewed the top of the lid off and poured it onto the dark red areas of the carpet.
“It doesn’t help to throw drinks at electrified walls,” Shirley had said.
He’d grumbled off to bed, leaving me and Shirley to lick each other’s heads until the dawn of the next day.
“Greg’s always been like that, you know,” she told me once as we watched the sun creeping through a crack in the curtain rings. “Always up to something he was. Even before we started going out on Friday nights he’d stand under the streetlamp outside our house while I undressed for bed. He’d throw pebbles and bits of old plaster he found lying in the street until he caught my attention. Then he’d smile and cup his fists around his eyes to make like a pair of binoculars and shout Alright bonny lass what’s on at the pictures tonight then?”
She shifted over to make herself more comfortable, stroking me beneath my ears where she knew I liked it.
“So I’d lick my lips at him and say something like oh I don’t know Peggy Ashcroft that’s who and he’d say who’s that and then I’d cup my breasts in my hands and say that’s who and he’d yell the bells the bells and I’d yell back you silly twerp you and we’d both laugh till our chests hurt me up on the window ledge and him down in the street. Then dad would catch us and say is that young turd out there again and then he’d chase him down the street and through the park with a frying pan. Greg told me he’d been hit enough times with that pan to wear it as a hat. Once” - she leaned in closer to me until her eyes were level with mine-”dad chased him into a public toilet in town but this time with a butcher knife so Greg locked himself in a cubicle just in time so dad stuck the knife under the door again and again and nearly took Greg’s toe off. Right nutter your dad, he said to me later when I’d snuck out the back and run all the way to his place. Then he’d go on all fours and let me ride his back and I’d go yee-haw yee-haw like Clint Eastwood in the movies and then he’d arch his back up and down and twist and turn until we both lost balance and rolled onto the floor next to his bed. Then we’d laugh and then I’d feel my cheeks going red and then he’d hold me close to him and I’d look deep into his eyes his very soul and I’d see nothing worth liking but who else could I play Clint Eastwood with at that time of night. Then his brothers would come in from the pub and we’d roll under the bed while they kicked their work boots off and crashed into bed. Once a work boot smacked me in the head and I wanted to scream it hurt so hard but Greg put his mouth over mine and so I breathed my scream into him instead. We’d spend hours every night pressing our mouths together with our eyes closed and his legs wrapped around mine. But that was a long long time ago.”
One night when I was waiting for him to go, he turned and whispered something to Shirley, who was curled up on the sofa by the armchair in her usual place. She made no movement as he leaned over, still looking at the screen, and slid two digits under her dress and began to inch them up her legs. With his other hand he turned up the news that was on the set. It was something about a beaver-like trade union lobbyist being found in a train cubicle after a two-day strike organised by picketing toilet cleaners. They found him after the strike with his head between his legs, his pants around his ankles, face gone blue.
But I was too preoccupied with Greg spreading his spidery fingers beneath Shirley’s skirt until he cried out a roar of lust yanked her legs onto the sofa threw off his shirt hurled it towards me lurched against her drool coming out of his mouth like a mastiff I once stole a bone from in Bethnal Green. I hid under his shirt not wanting a repeat of the previous night before when suddenly I heard him scream she’s dying the girl is dying! Shouting over the blank-faced newsreader he pressed his head to her chest and turned her face towards me. It was then that I saw that her eyes had rolled to the back of her head and she was murmuring in silence as blood dripped out of the corner of her mouth. I hid back under the shirt and waited for Greg to stop screaming but he ripped the shirt off me, exposing me once more to the horrors of the world.
“Fucking useless fucking mutt!”
I was pretty sure he was talking to Shirley until he kicked me into a corner and left the room holding his wife like a vampire stealing a corpse. Being Greg of course, he couldn’t do this without banging her head against the doorframe and catching her hair in the lock before he left, eliciting a meek groan from the dying dame.
He was watching the television when she came back from the hospital. She had an open brown envelope in her hand and a nightdress. She’d been crying all night. His feet were wet and smelled of Alpine cheese and hairy onions.
“Greg, you awake?”
“Mmmh hmmm.”
“Greg, listen to me. There’s something I have to tell you. About me. About me...and the dog. About Ezra.”
“Huh? Oh, not now, hon’. I’m trying to watch the game here.”
“Greg, you don’t understand. I really like that dog a lot. I really do.”
“I’m glad you do, sweetheart. He’s alright.”
“No, Greg! Listen to me now. This dog...I love it like a human being.”
“Huh?”
“Greg, we’ve made love. Several times. Dirty stuff. Raunchy. Bad. I mean really bad, Greg. I’ve licked its arse and he’s licked mine and he made me come and I made him come and we love each other physically, I mean we really do. Do you understand what I’m saying?” She burst into tears. “I can’t make it any clear than that. I really can’t!”
Greg looked up from the screen and smiled.
“That is so sweet.”
Several times she tried to tell him. Even when the vet came round the house and told him about the ridiculous visits. Even when she started to see specks of blood in her vomit from a night out and when she pissed blue water and cried so hard she woke up the whole neighbourhood with her screams. Even when she stayed in bed all day and shook so uncontrollably that she rolled all the way out of bed down the hall and down the stairs crying and raving. Even when the doctors showed the scratches on her back and the traces of inhuman semen inside her at the mortuary. Even as she was lowered into the ground and Greg couldn’t help the horrified murmurs of the mourners staring and pointing at me, then back at a picture of the lovely Shirley Steadman smiling at her graduation ceremony, clasping a scroll in one hand and a Prosecco glass in the other. Even when Greg was bawling like a baby and she was screaming in her coffin she tried to tell him but he wouldn’t listen. They all tried to tell him. But he never listened. From that moment onwards after Shirley’s death the football was all that was on inside his head. And his team still hadn’t scored.
Some nights he would get up in the middle of the night and pace around the living room naked, crying into his palms that were firmly held over his face. Then he would pick up the phone and dial random numbers in the phone book, holding his hand over his crotch as he waited for a crackled voice on the other end of the line.
“Hello. Welcome to Harrogate Sofa Land UK. This is Polly speaking. How can I help?”
“Hello, Polly.”
“Hello,
sir. How can I help?”
“I’ve lost my wife.”
Pause.
“I see.”
Pause.
“Polly, you still there?”
“Oh yes, sir.”
“Polly.”
“Yes, sir? Would you like to buy a sofa? Our most popular choices this year are the Izzy, the Aissa and the Bluebell and we also provide a wide variety of Chesterfields as well as choices on castor woods and fillings as well as modular designs with complementary pipings or tufts if you so desire not to mention our extensive collection of fabrics to acquaint your needs if that is what you-”
“No, I wouldn’t like to buy a fucking sofa, Polly! No! I just want to let you know that I’ve lost my wife. That’s all.”
“I see. And when was the last time you saw her?”
“In her coffin. Where do you think?!”
Longer pause.
“Hihihi.”
“What is it, Polly?”
“So she’s not really missing then, is she?”
“Huh?”
“I’m mean she’s not missing.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, not in a physical sense.”
“Bloody hell, I hope not. I’m not paying for another coffin. That thing cost a bomb!”
“Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?”
“How about wasting my fucking time for a start-”
“What? Hey, I was only trying to-”
He slammed the phone down. His face looked like dead porridge, whiter than the Yellow Pages. The most exciting thing he did all week after Shirley left was to buy a pair of nail clippers which he lost on the way back from the shops. I can still see him sobbing with rage and pounding his fists against the Venetian blinds in the living room. They were a damn good pair of nail clippers.
Sometimes he would sit on the edge of the sofa having all-night conversations with Shirley’s ghost on the other side of it. All by himself for hours on end, Greg recalled conversations he had had with his friends long ago when he first met Shirley “back in the day.” When he first met this accordion music fanatic from West London the harpsichord crowd he hung out with didn’t give them six weeks together.
There's a Good Dog... Page 5