“What do you mean?” the brick-faced woman hissed. “Turn round, you. Turn right round. I shan’t go on till you turn right round.”
Alf unfroze himself and turned around and stood staring out over the heads of the others behind him, into the blinding square of sunlight at the door. When permission was given to approach, he made his purchase wordlessly, fumbling the change with his slightly trembling fingers, and went out. Halfway back up Elystan Street the enlargement of his throat surpassed containment.
“wurf! Wurf! WurrrfffaaarrrhhOOORRRHHHrrrr,” he barked. A bobby looked at him sternly from the opposite side of the street. With an additional swallowed snarl tightly wrapped around his tonsils, Alf averted his eyes and went resolutely on.
Hazel seemed to grow a little restless too; she swept more and more activities into her schedule, adding to the watercolor sessions a class in yoga and another in French conversation. Her shopping expeditions moved farther afield; she undertook riverboat trips and excursions to outlying villages. Alone in the flat, Alf turned the television on and off, flipped through books and magazines and furtively prowled from room to room; the areas he found the most attractive were those where he had no good reason to be. A time or two he breached the sanctity of Big Brother’s electronic office, tiptoeing in and standing on the little throw rug before the desk. All around him on their long shelves the machines blinked and flickered, pooped and wheeped, and every so often they spontaneously crunched out some document. Alf could not rid himself of the superstitious fear that somehow they were recording his own activity to report to Big Brother on his return.
In the bedroom, Hazel and Big Brother’s bedroom, there was an indefinable smell of lilac, a natural scent as from dried petals, though Alf could find no bowl of potpourri. Atop the bureau was a wedding picture in a silver frame. Big Brother’s long neck was loose in the high stock of his tuxedo; he looked a little frightened, perhaps startled by the flash, but Hazel wore an easy, merry smile, and looked straight out of the frame at Alf, who set the picture down. He opened a drawer at random and discovered Big Brother’s starched white shirts laid out in rigid rows. Another held a tangled nest of Hazel’s jewelry.
The bed was a platform on short legs, low and broad, with two unremarkable nightstands on either side of it. On Hazel’s was a ragged copy of Time Out. Big Brother’s was bare except for the coaster where he set his water glass at night. The bed was spread with a quilted eiderdown, emerald green, with feather pillows mounded on it at the headboard. When Alf leaned down and touched the surface of the quilt, his fingers somehow would not come away. He was. drawn farther, farther down, his shoulder tucking as he dropped. He curled up on his side and dreamed.
“I don’t know why,” he said. “I just don’t know.” His arms were pasted to the leather arms of the deep dark chair, his head lolled, his eyeballs spiraled behind their lids.
“You know,” the hypnotist murmured softly. “Oh yes, you know very well.”
“I didn’t want to know,” said Alf. “What would have been the use of that?”
“Knowledge is power,” the hypnotist suggested.
A galvanic shudder emerged from the reaches of Alf’s autonomic nervous system and shook him to his finger ends.
“No it’s not,” he said loudly. “Not when you know everything and can’t change any of it.”
No matter how deep his daydreams took him, Alf remained alive to the sound of Hazel’s key entering the downstairs lock. He’d roll from the eiderdown, land on his hands and knees and scamper out, coming erect again some distance down the hallway toward his own bedroom. Until the day some deeper sleep overtook him and he woke to find Hazel standing in the doorway, looking down. She wore her loose black sweatsuit, her face was patchily flushed from yoga, and a forefinger pulled down her plump red lower lip in her familiar gesture of perplexity.
“oooOORF!” barked Alf in sheer alarm. He flipped from the bed onto all fours and barked again, “urrrrrffffff-OOOHRRRFF RRAAAARRFFFF!”
Hazel’s eyes lit up, she swirled in the doorway and ran down the hall. Alf pursued her as quickly as he could on his knees and elbows, barking happy ringing barks. She ran a little awkwardly, her loose hair flagging out behind her, looking back over her shoulder in mock fright. He chased her around his room, back down the hall and down the stairs and up again, yapping hysterically at her heels. Hazel fled back into her bedroom, dove onto the bed and rolled onto her back, shuddering with wave upon wave of laughter. Her knees drew up toward her stomach, her sweatshirt rode up to the bottoms of her breasts, her head thrashed back and forth on the wide silky spread of her hair. Too breathless to bark anymore at all, Alf put his forepaws on the quilt between her feet and raised himself to look at her. She was warm with a radiant heat, an intoxicating scent poured out of her, she was rich with her own beauty (he put his hind paws on the bed and bunched himself for his next move)—she was his brother’s wife.
Hazel turned stone pale and sat up quickly on the edge of the bed. She clapped her knees together, wrapped her arms around herself, bit down on her lip till it went white, and began to shake all over. Alf got up too and stood with his hands hanging, dead little lumps against his thighs. After a moment he picked up her hairbrush from the bureau, turned her slightly with the least touch on her shoulder and started to brush her hair. Supporting the whole sweep of it over his left forearm, he brushed it out till every auburn highlight gleamed beyond perfection. After a few minutes her back loosened and her breath began to ease and deepen.
“Thank you, Alf,” she said. “Thank you, that feels good. That was very nice. You can stop now, please.”
Alf walked away and set down the brush, turned and propped himself on the bureau’s edge. Hazel gathered her hair in one hand and drew it forward over her shoulder. She put an end of it into her mouth and wet it into a point, then took it out and stared at it round-eyed.
“I’m thinking of getting all this cut off,” she said.
“Don’t do it,” said Alf. “What for?”
“It’s a lot of trouble to take care of.”
“It took you twenty years to grow it.”
“Neddy said he’d style it for me free, said he’d come to the house and do it.”
“What, that slimy little shrimp? Don’t you let him touch your hair.”
“He’d like it if I looked a little more contemporary,” Hazel said, jerking her head toward Big Brother’s nightstand.
“Don’t do it,” Alf said as he walked out of the room. “You’ll be sorry if you do.” He hadn’t been so sure of anything all year. Big Brother had been working too hard—well, that much was no secret. But Hazel wanted a good night out, she wanted a date with her husband, in fact, and that wasn’t so unreasonable, was it, once every couple of months or so? They went to the theater and to a champagne supper afterward. Alf fell dead asleep on the eiderdown and didn’t wake up till he heard them giggling outside the bedroom door.
There was time, just barely time, for him to make it under the bed. He lay frozen in a mummy’s pose, admiring its simple but ingenious construction. There were many slender wooden slats, and these were surely what made it so comfortable to lie on. He heard the sound of buttons and zippers, drawers opening and closing upon articles put away.
“Love?”
“Yes, Love …”
A great soft weight settled itself over him. He began a mental chant: Don’t bark, Alfie, you mustn’t bark, quiet now, good dog, good dog … and by some mercy this drowned out every sound. Three fifths of the way down the length of the bed, a group of slats began to flex, slowly at first, then faster and faster and FASTER … Then it stopped.
Big Brother unlocked the door, came in, set down his sharkskin briefcase, locked the door, picked up his sharkskin briefcase and snapped his fingers. Alf, who’d been basking in the glow of the BBC in the front room, raised his head slightly from a couch cushion.
“A word with you, young Alfred,” Big Brother said brittlely. “Upstairs, if you please.”
Alf stood on the little throw rug in the glow of the various video terminals. The phrase “called on the carpet” distantly presented itself to his mind. Big Brother, strangely inarticulate, swiveled to and fro in his desk chair, compulsively flicking the edge of his sharkskin calculator case with a fingernail. Finally he stopped in midrotation and stared up at Alf.
“My hair is brown,” he remarked. “Yours, on the other hand, is black.”
“This much is true,” Alf said. “Always the wizard of perception, Bee Bee.”
“I have a name,” Big Brother said bleakly. “My name is Tom. You are familiar with it, I believe. Why don’t you ever call me by my name?”
After the ensuing silence had accomplished itself, Big Brother spoke again.
“Well,” he said. “Right.” He reached into a tea mug on his desk and pulled out a little snarl of something. “This is hair.”
Alf nodded.
“Black hair.”
“That’s so,” said Alf.
“There’s quite a bit of it, wouldn’t you say?” Big Brother said. “I’ve been collecting it for about a week. Off my pillow, in point of fact.”
Huskily, Alf cleared his throat.
“Well then, I’d like to know what you’ve been playing at.”
“When exactly was it you started talking like a freaking Englishman?”
“When in Rome …,” Big Brother said. “Don’t try to change the subject.”
“Okay,” Alf said. “You’re concerned that I’ve been climbing on your furniture.”
“Yes, I suppose you could put it that way.”
“At least I’m housebroken,” Alf said. “That’s something to be thankful for.”
In the weird light of the computer screens, Big Brother’s sudden change of complexion looked purely fantastic.
“What the hell is the matter with you?!” he cried, half rising from his seat. Alf barked at him several times and left the room.
He sat with his elbows on the table, watching a bug walk around the little blue squares of the oilcloth. They didn’t have cockroaches in the flat, and this bug didn’t much look like one; however, it didn’t look much like anything else either. After a long time Hazel came down and made a pot of tea. When she brought it to the table, Alf could see the dark circles around her eyes.
“It’s been a tough year for him too,” she said. “You need to try and understand that, Alfie. He’s more of a small-town type of person, really. We all are, I suppose.”
Alf leaned back and raised his eyebrows toward the ceiling.
“I had to make him take a pill,” Hazel said. “Zonko.”
“I see,” said Alf. “Well, here we are.”
“It’s really hard for him at work,” she said. “The English snub him all the time. But they don’t know any of the stuff he knows. Till this year they did their whole stock market with pen and ink and big black books, supposedly.” She gave her braid a yank and dropped it. “But it worries him that he doesn’t fit in. He thinks they think I look like some kind of a pioneer woman off the prairie …”
Alf scalded his mouth on a gulp of tea.
“You two were close when you were children, I know that,” Hazel said. “He used to talk about that a lot.”
“That’s right,” Alf said. “But ever since we got to London he’s been acting like a goddamn microchip.”
“He’s really scared about it all sometimes,” Hazel said. “He’s afraid the whole balloon is going to pop. He says people used to worry when their assets were only on paper, but now they’re not even on paper anymore.”
Alf watched the bug walk over the edge of the table out of sight.
“He’s worried about you too, Alf,” she said. “He’s pretty upset about you, in fact.”
“He doesn’t think—”
“No, not that. Thank God, he never even thought of that … He knows you didn’t go to school, though. But he doesn’t know what to do about it.”
The bug reappeared in the vicinity of Alf’s tea mug. He turned the mug around and around and watched the amber liquid swirl.
“He’s worried maybe you’re going nuts,” Hazel said. “He doesn’t know how to handle that either. Alfie, you know he’d do anything for you, but what is it he can do?”
Alf reached over and snapped his finger at the bug, which rebounded from the Delft tile around the kitchen fireplace and fell down into the shadows below.
“He was crying, actually,” Hazel said.
“roorrrfff!” said Alf. “aaaarrhhhhwwwOOOOOORFFOOOOOOOOO!!!”
“For God’s sake, will you stop that ridiculous barking,” Hazel said, and slammed her palms flat down against the table.
As he retreated further and further into the world of the canine, Alf’s sense of smell became increasingly acute, so that on the final day he was faintly apprehensive of disaster from the moment he got onto the lift. The aroma, at first indefinable, became more vivid and more complex as soon as he had entered the flat. Hanging over everything was the odor of neutralizer and the bright ammoniac smell of the perm fluid. Mingled with this was a whiff of Neddy’s after-shave and, most alarming of all, the smell of Hazel’s tears.
He went down the hall with his hackles rising. Hazel, barely recognizable by sight, sat at the kitchen table, weeping over a small square mirror. The inch or two of hair remaining to her had been strangled into tiny ringlets which resembled scrambled eggs. The balance of her face was wrecked and her features looked heavy and bovine. It appeared that she had been crying for a long time without even trying to wipe her face. Her eyes were ridged with stiff red veins and her tears were pooling on the mirror.
“Well, there’s no need for you to keep grieving so,” Neddy said a little crossly. He had stretched Hazel’s severed hair out on the table and was securing each end of it with a bit of black ribbon. “What if it is a little tight? It’ll relax in a day or so, you’ll see if it doesn’t …” He took a cloth tape from his pocket, measured the coil of hair and tucked it away in a leather bag. “And if you really decide you don’t fancy it, why, in just a few years you can grow it all back. So brace up, eh? There’s a duck …”
Alf dropped to all fours on the kitchen floor and bounced springily on all of his paws.
“Here now, Hazel, look who’s come,” Neddy said with a nervous titter. Hazel cried intently on, as if she were incapable of hearing.
“It’s your little brother who’s mad,” said Neddy.
“rrrrrRRRRRR,” said Alf. He bristled. His lips pulled back from his incisors.
“Hazel,” Neddy said. “Your brother’s off his bloody head—”
“rrrrRRRRR,” Alf said, and moved a little closer in, his hindquarters taut and trembling. Neddy took a long step backward into a complicated corner of the fireplace and the kitchen walls.
“Here now, Alf,” Neddy said. “Let’s be reasonable, old chum. There’s a good fellow, I mean, keep away, you! Just you keep off!” But Alf was no longer able to hear or understand his speech. In fact, he was aware of nothing at all but the vibrating fabric of Neddy’s trouser leg and the odor, texture and taste of the blood and meat inside.
“No,” the hypnotist said thoughtfully. “No, I do not think you can believe that you were justified. Undoubtedly what you did was very wrong. And it is true, as you have heard, that human bites are very dangerous …”
Limp in the deep dark chair, Alf commenced to twitch and whimper.
“However,” the hypnotist went on, “you will remember that it has all been satisfactorily resolved. The gentleman in question has accepted your brother’s settlement. Moreover, he has not been lamed or hurt in any permanent way. It is not true, and never was, that you have rabies. And so, though naturally you will regret your unwise action, you will feel no permanent guilt. You will forgive yourself for what you did. Indeed, you have already done so.”
Alf twitched again and faintly yipped a time or two.
“And now,” the hypnotist said, “and now, you are l
et off your leash. You have slipped your collar, Alfie, you are free. You are running away from the house and into the barnyard. You feel the soft damp grass of the lawn between your toes, you feel the dust and the little stones of the barnyard. When you have run into the hall of the barn, you pause and sniff—you smell the hay, you smell the grain … and something else too, another odor. Rats, Alfie! rrrRRRATS!”
“rirfff!” yelped Alf from the chair. His body tensed and then relaxed.
“You leave the barnyard,” the hypnotist said, “and you go into the field. You are capering among the hog huts, you run past the slow and lazy hogs until you reach that farthest fence. Feel the wire rub hard across your back as you squirm underneath. And now you have come through the screen of trees to reach the little pond. You are very warm from the sunshine and from running, and so you splash into the water, you feel the cool water soaking into your hot fur, and you look up and see how the little white duck you startled is flying far away in the blue sky.
“And now you are lying on the warm soft grass, Alfie, with your eyes closed and all four legs stretched out. Feel how the warm sun dries your fur, feel how the little breeze ruffles it. You doze, you are sleeping very deeply, yes. You dream.
“And now you are running into the forest, deeper and deeper into the trees. You see all the woodland sights, you hear all the woodland sounds, and you are in a very special world of smells, Alfie, which only you can understand and navigate. There are many, many smells, Alfie, but one of them is more important than all the rest. What is it, Alfie? What is that you smell? rrr … rrrrrr …”
Barking Man Page 11