Stroking the Dog
‘Dog massage?’ said Jim. ‘It’s just a fancy word for stroking.’
‘Well, I think it’s a lot more than that and so do several other people whose opinion I admire,’ said Betsy. ‘Why don’t you ever support what I do? I’m trying to do something good here.’ She waved a handbill at Jim; he read it, to show how seriously he took her. There was a lot of stuff about health benefits, to the strokers as well as the dog.
‘It’s symbiotic,’ said Betsy.
‘You’re turning this into a science? How much are they charging?’
Betsy shrugged.
‘Why can’t you do something normal?’ he said.
‘I miss Bruno,’ said Betsy.
‘He was just a mutt,’ said Jim. Damn dog used to leave hairs everywhere, especially on the bed where he slept between them like a hot and heavy bolster. Betsy had cried an ocean when he died but Jim had just been glad he could go out at last without having to brush himself all over like he was leaving a shift in a gold mine. ‘No one,’ said Jim, ‘should keep a dog in Manhattan.’ After all, he was the one who went up and down in the elevator three or four times a day, who had to read all those signs shrieking: ‘Curb your dog!’
It had been embarrassing when Bruno could no longer make it to the park; he started doing his business just anywhere. Jim had to look the other way while the poor mutt tried to cock his leg and not fall over. And picking up dog dirt under the eyes of passers-by! Betsy wouldn’t do it. All Betsy had ever done for the dog was pet him and feed him from the table and let him climb on the bed.
At the end, when Bruno couldn’t hold it anymore, he stank, and made the apartment stink too. Then Betsy agreed he should be banned from the bedroom, but she kept to her side of the bed as if the dog was still there.
The trips up and down in the elevator became more frequent, but even so, he once pissed, when they were just on their way back up, and with a mournful look, all over the newly washed laundry of a lady from the fourteenth floor. Jim yelled and yanked the lead, but that only made the dog fall over and the lady cry out, ‘Oh, please don’t!’
Jim wiped up the splashes with a Kleenex and offered to re-wash the linen. ‘He’s an old dog,’ he’d said, by way of apology. She’d nodded and said of course it was just an accident, but soon after that they got a letter from the Committee saying something must be done.
‘It’s him or us!’ said Jim.
Now here she was, aiming to pay over good money to learn how to massage the canine species. It was all nonsense – he was sure of that – and wouldn’t last. Still, if it gave her something to think about.
‘There are all kinds of things to consider,’ said Betsy, excited after the first lesson. ‘You have to get to know the client: he or she may have arthritis, or painful old scars from fighting….’
To pass her course Betsy had to get in so much practice. ‘We are not getting another dog,’ said Jim. She wouldn’t need to, said Betsy; she would massage the homeless ones.
But it seemed there was a boom in dog massage and a shortage of dogs needing it. People in parks were getting offers from students who wanted to practise on their pooches. Stray dogs found themselves being petted, fed and passed around. There was an epidemic of canine caressing. Some people, even some dog owners, thought it was all going too far.
‘The dogs aren’t complaining,’ muttered Betsy to Jim at the Public Meeting. By then she was working as a volunteer at the pound. ‘You don’t see them biting the hand that strokes them.’
A man stood up, identified himself as ‘an ordinary dog-lover’, and suggested proposing a new law to prohibit the therapeutic massaging of dogs in the city without a licence.
‘But where do you draw the line between ordinary, casual, spontaneous contact and serious intentions to heal?’ said a woman.
Without getting to his feet, Jim cupped his hand to the side of his mouth and said loudly, ‘When they stop calling it stroking and start talking about effleurage.’ Betsy hit him on the arm and looked away, red-faced.
To get enough practice, Betsy ordered a blue rubber dog from a catalogue supplied by her training course.
‘Is it a dog or a bitch?’ asked Jim as he watched Betsy go to work on Bluey’s shoulders.
Betsy wouldn’t answer.
They were probably asexual, thought Jim, a fact he ascertained later: no realistic orifices. Even the mouth was sealed and the eyes closed, with a little furrow between them as if the dog was working through its pain.
‘If I were a dog would you stroke me?’ said Jim.
‘Don’t be disgusting,’ said Betsy.
Betsy talked of setting up a charity when she qualified, to provide dog massage for people who couldn’t afford it. ‘I’d like to call it CHUM,’ she said. ‘Short for Canine Healing and Massage.’
‘That’s CHAM,’ said Jim. ‘You know, I’m thinking of starting a charity myself. I’d call it SAG. That’s short for Stroke a Granny. Just think of all the poor old ladies out there who can’t afford that kind of therapy.’
Betsy ignored him. She set up a stall near the subway on 72nd Street and got people to give donations. Bluey went along for demonstration purposes. Jim lurked behind her chair, not wanting to leave his wife alone in a city full of nutcases. Besides, it gave him a chance to eyeball the ladies who stopped to admire Bluey and even pat him on the head. He was amazed to see how many people gave money.
Hanging about on the street had its compensations: ‘I wouldn’t mind stroking them puppies,’ he muttered under his breath, as a smiling girl with bouncing breasts walked by.
‘Don’t be disgusting,’ said Betsy.
Girl on a Pedestal
The editor of the Buckington Bugle is worried about my tendency towards broadsheet, big-city cynicism. ‘Stop trying to be Julie Burchill,’ he says. ‘This is a local paper; end of story.’ Apparently my review of the Brownies’ Christmas concert has upset some parents.
Where did I go wrong? After all, I had faithfully reported the enthusiasm of family members: vying for camera angles and clapping loudly; but I had also added – unforgivably, as it turns out – my own opinion, calling the choice of material ‘unoriginal and yawn-inspiring’. I think this was justified when you consider that the high point was a shaky rendition, sung in the round, of ‘Campfire’s Burning’ for which the lights had been dimmed to heighten the effect of seeing half a dozen timid little girls clustered around a stack of twigs with a red light underneath. It was exactly the same set-up as when I was a Buckington Brownie, nearly thirty years before.
‘People aren’t interested in what you think,’ says the editor. ‘The job of the art critic in this town is to describe what’s on offer and reflect what people are saying about it.’
He makes it clear that I will get one more chance.
But do I care? Do I care whether I’m a success by the standards of this small-town paper? I’ve been away long enough not to mind what people think of me, and I’m back here for my own reasons. I’m not exactly looking to fit in. If I want a social life I can head up to London for a weekend; no, I’m here to write my own work, if I can. It had seemed like a good idea to work for the local paper while I was doing it, that was all. With my track record as a freelance, I thought they’d be glad (and lucky) to get me.
Not so. My editor was grudging, making it clear that I would have to prove my worth.
So nothing has changed in my home town. Twenty years ago, when I left school with no idea of what I wanted to do, except write, I sent a letter to the Buckington Bugle, asking if they would take me on. There was no reply and I went elsewhere, halfway around the world and back, gradually building up my freelance portfolio. So I knew I could support myself. It was just that I thought this job would be easy and regular and leave me plenty of time for my higher purpose: finishing my first novel.
‘I’m going to send you on one more assignment,’ he says, ‘and if I don’t like your piece then I’ll pull it and write one my
self. If that happens, don’t expect to get any more work.’
He’s sending me to the arts centre to interview the two young people responsible for a new exhibition: ‘Girl on a Pedestal’.
‘Hannah Gifford is a local girl,’ says the editor. ‘Not long out of art college. Her parents are farmers, well liked and well connected. Don’t be too critical. It’s probably rubbish, but remember: it’s not just about the work.’
‘So how do you want me to approach it?’ I say.
‘Find out what the public thinks,’ he says. ‘Give us the view of the majority. That’s what they want to hear; that’s what sells newspapers in this part of the world.’
‘I am an Installation,’ says the girl, ‘and this is Stew.’
They sit together, on a table, side by side, Hannah and Stew, looking out at me with grey moody eyes through identical jagged black fringes.
‘Are you brother and sister?’ I ask.
‘No,’ says Stew, taking Hannah’s hand.
Hannah has long straight hair and pale skin; she is petite but well made; she is…
‘Aren’t you going to write that down?’ says Stew, meaning, I assume, Hannah’s portentous announcement, not my own wayward thoughts.
I look past him, round the gallery space where Hannah will give her performance, or show her art, or install herself, or whatever it is she thinks she’s doing. It is a wide, square, white-painted room with tall arched windows; they let in plenty of light. No furniture except the table. No sign of a pedestal. Nowhere, even, for me to sit down. So I stand and face them and repeat dutifully: ‘I am an installation,’ nod a few times, then ask, ‘In what way… exactly?’ My pencil noses the paper, as if anxious to take down a reply. Stew looks up at the ceiling and sighs. The ceiling is a very long way above our heads.
I shift my weight and try again. ‘Is it possible to tell me what exactly is going to happen?’
Hannah developed this work at art college: ‘I showed this as my final piece,’ she says. ‘But it’s more important for us to do this; to show it here.’ She waves her hand at the otherwise empty room.
‘Right. So… ’ I waggle the pencil from one to the other, ‘which of you is the actual artist?’
Hannah blushes.
‘It’s a collaboration,’ says Stew.
‘But who had the idea?’
‘Actually,’ says Hannah, shaking the hair out of her eyes to look at me directly, almost defiantly, ‘I did.’
My next question – ‘How do you feel about showing your work to the home crowd?’ – is intended to be a little more sympathetic. I’ve been away and come back myself I tell them; it’s a small town.
‘Oh yeah,’ says Hannah. ‘You know, I think my Dad said you went to school with him.’
‘Really?’ I say. ‘Who…?’
‘And anyway,’ says Stew. ‘Hannah’s not ashamed of who she is.’
‘So, how do you think people will remember you?’ I ask.
‘As talented,’ says Stew.
But exactly what they’re going to do or show, neither of them will tell me. They’re ‘not into talking about it’.
‘At college,’ says Hannah, ‘I wrote that it was an allegory of the effects of time on a psychosomatic-social being.’
‘But that’s just art college bullshit,’ says Stew. ‘We can’t explain it. You just have to get it.’
I smile as condescendingly as I can and say, ‘Isn’t that always the way?’
An hour later, with all the blood in my body pooling in my shoes and my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth, I stagger across the road to the Boar’s Head.
What I like about the Boar’s Head is that it hasn’t changed much from my under-age drinking days, before college, London, New York: other lives. Its walls are perhaps a deeper shade of cigarette-tar brown, but the same oil-painted ships still battle choppy seas inside their picture frames and the smell – of wood steeped in the local beer, soggy carpet and fags – is for a moment or two as magical as when I was sixteen.
‘What can I get you?’ It’s the very same landlord, older of course, as everyone is in this town. There’s nothing like coming home to remind you how you’re aging.
Seated on a stool at the bar, and having taken the first restorative gulp of gin and tonic, I look at my notepad: Hannah Gifford; twenty one; a potential graduate of Diffington Art College; local girl. I’ll have to find more to say than that. It’s tricky. The exhibition opens tomorrow but the actual opening night, when ‘the whole thing goes interactive’ as Stew put it, is on Thursday. By then the paper will have gone to press for its Friday distribution.
‘What about a last minute update?’ I’d asked my editor.
‘To be avoided at all costs,’ he says, ‘though in an absolute emergency you can ring me, and then email it in, by midnight at the latest.’
Which means I will have to write my review article before the exhibition ‘goes live’, disguising, as far as possible, the fact that I haven’t seen it. It would have been in their own interests for Stew and Hannah to tell me what is going to happen, but they don’t seem to think it’s necessary.
‘Word of mouth is the best publicity,’ Stew said. I decide he’s right. Before I reach the end of my drink, I’ve formed a plan: drop in to the exhibition every day and hang about listening to what people say about it; that way I can’t go wrong.
I toast this resolution and down the last of my drink in its honour. Having decided I had better not have another, I am about to leave when a man comes up to the bar, gives me an eyebrow flash and a don’t-we-know-each-other smile, and says, ‘Hi’.
Now, this is what happens when you come back to your home town: people you’ve quite naturally forgotten pop up and expect to be remembered. The ones who know you from primary school are the worst. You struggle to shrink the bloated features before you to the memory of some nub of a boy who once punched you on the arm or pulled your hair when you were six to show he liked you.
So I just blank him, and slide off my stool, as planned. It isn’t until I get outside that I realise two things: one, though he looks familiar, I can’t place him – I don’t remember him from school; and, two, he is the best-looking man I’ve seen since I came back.
Driving home, I dismiss him from my thoughts: no point regretting another opportunity wasted; I would just remember to do better next time. Instead, I think about Hannah Gifford and the fact that I knew her father.
Gordon Gifford: I remember his first name because he suffered for it in the seventies, when ‘Gordon is a moron’, that line from the song by Jilted John, pursued him round the playground of our comprehensive school. But what did he look like? There is only one clear visual memory of him lodged in my mind, relating to an incident way back in primary school, when Gordon’s illicit use of a ballpoint pen, and his persistent chewing of its top, left him with ink all over his mouth and chin. He looked like a blue-blooded boy who’d been punched in the mouth. I remember the look of confusion on his face as he tried to work out why his chin was wet, and the fleeting thrill I felt, wondering if he would actually be poisoned to death in front of me, or merely disfigured for life with a blot of indelible blue.
Neither had happened, obviously, because here was Hannah, his only daughter, all grown up and ready to show the world what she’s made of. Literally, as it turns out.
Hannah is naked; or would be if she were not wrapped in cling-film. The effect, against the white walls, is of fragmented water. Leaning forward a little on her pedestal, which is also painted white, she looks as if she is up in the air, but going somewhere. Or she looks like a mummy in a hurry, wrapped in transparent bandages; or an ethereal speed skater.
She does not move. When I first see her, I can’t help but think of those mimes that pose as living statues. In particular I remember a clown who would drop his trousers and raise his wig if a child (it was always a child) toddled up and put a small coin in the hat at his feet. But at Hannah’s feet there is no box for taking money, no
r does she respond when anyone walks into the gallery or makes some comment on her work or her appearance (these being, to a great extent, the same thing).
Whispers are amplified, distorted and then lost in the high-ceilinged room. Low voices sound more urgent than the words that are spoken justify, as they seem to make the walls vibrate. What are they saying? Mostly they are being very nice, so as not to upset Hannah. A few people enter with children and take them away again quickly, though there is not a nipple or a wisp of pubic hair to be seen. I suspect it is because they know the children may say potentially embarrassing and true things and ask awkward questions, such as, ‘What is that lady doing?’ – to which neither the parents, nor I, would feel qualified to give an answer.
Still, the visitors do come. Word has got around.
On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, I visit the gallery in order to spy on people’s reactions. To disguise my intentions, I sit and appear to be listening to Judy, the volunteer in charge of the table at the door. The exhibition is free, but Judy smiles at the visitors and informs them that they might like to make a donation. They also have the opportunity to sign a sort of visitors’ book. In fact, this is an A4 ruled sheet on a clipboard, with space for name, address and comment.
Judy sits with her back to Hannah and I sit at right angles to Judy, so that I can see the whole room, while pretending to listen to her waffle. Despite my best efforts, I find myself knowing far more about Judy and her life than I would like: I learn of her adventurous cats, the squeak in her washing-machine that sets her love-birds chirping in a competitive manner, why one should never groom a horse while wearing cashmere. I am having difficulty keeping my eyes open; it is a struggle to tune Judy out and focus on the hushed comments of the visitors as they circle the Girl on the Pedestal. Luckily, as the week progresses, there is a tendency towards more forthright opinion.
‘How silly!’ says one elderly lady, using the right to free speech they issued with her bus pass. ‘What is the world coming to?’
To Hannah’s credit she does not react. I wonder how long she will stand there without a break. Hours, as it turns out. When she wants to get down she simply straightens up, stretches and jumps to the floor. When she wants to get back up she borrows Judy’s chair.
Pumping Up Napoleon Page 3