by David Jester
They sat down in the living room and explained that Fuckwit had phoned them and told them everything. They said they wanted our side of the story, which I was more than happy to give them. I saw the look on Lizzie’s face that said let me do the talking, which preceded, as it so often did, the looks that said, I don’t trust you and please don’t fuck this up, but I was keen to offload.
“It all began with the little kid,” I said, correcting myself just as I was about to refer to him by one of his many pet names. “I can admit that not all kids are perfect. I was a little shit myself as a kid and got into all sorts of mischief.” I was smiling, hoping for some sort of reciprocated gesture, but there was none. “But he was ringing the bell at six o’clock on a Saturday morning.” I avoided eye contact in case they could read my lies. “And there is no excuse for that.”
I stared at the officers and they stared back. I panicked and turned away again.
“And then, well, things kinda got heated with his father, as you probably know. If he had apologized, then things would be okay.”
“But he didn’t?”
“No. He just made things worse.”
“He was very abusive to both my husband and me,” Lizzie jumped in. “I mean, what sort of man shouts abuse at a woman in her own driveway?”
The police officer nodded and seemed to agree with her. I should have let Lizzie continue, he seemed to like her and listen to her, but I wanted the same sort of reaction so I chimed in. “He was a bully, a waste of space. And when he realized that his tactics weren’t working, all of his idiot friends joined in, standing in their yards looking up at the house.”
“Just looking?”
“Yeah, but they were mean looks.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I don’t want to press charges against them, though,” I assured him.
“You don’t want to press charges against them for looking at you?”
“I mean, unless you can.”
He shook his head slowly, not breaking eye contact. He then turned to his notes. “He says that you threw hot coffee on his child.”
“It was tea,” I corrected, hearing an audible sigh from Lizzie as she gave up hope that the police would be able to help us. “And it wasn’t hot, it was tepid at best,” I said, before adding, “there wasn’t even any sugar in it.”
The look Lizzie gave me at that point said Really? But in my defense, the officer was writing something down, so although it seemed trivial to her, it was probably noteworthy to him.
“And then, this morning, I caught him spying on my wife.”
That seemed to get his attention. He raised his eyes from his pad and stopped doodling. “Please go on,” he insisted, perhaps a little more perversely than I would have liked.
“She was in the kitchen, right next to the back door, and she was naked. I mean, she doesn’t walk around the house naked all the time or anything—”
“That’s a shame,” the short and wide woman said, making everyone pause and stare.
“—But even if she does, no one can see unless they open the side gate and get into the back yard.” I tried my best to ignore the policewoman, who seemed to be there for comic effect. “Which is what he did.”
“He just stormed in?”
I nodded. “No reason. Just opened the gate and stormed in. She got the fright of her life when she saw him standing there.”
“He was just standing there?”
I nodded. “With his hands down his pants and a weird look on his face. Creepy, if you ask me.”
“I can imagine.”
He took a few more notes, asked a few more questions, and then went on his way. I showed them out and then returned to the living room where Lizzie was sitting with her head in her hands.
“What the hell was all that about?” she asked, looking up.
“I told him the truth.”
“You made him out to be a pervert.”
“He is,” I said, before adding, “probably.”
In such a small community, one minor argument with the wrong person or the wrong family can leave you castigated, but at the same time, one accusation can save you and destroy them. When the police returned to Fuckwit’s house, he had a few of the neighbors over. In his cockiness and his willingness to prove that they were all in it together, he asked that the neighbors stay while the police question him.
He was so shocked and embarrassed by the comments that followed that the defense he provided was pathetic, feeble, and about as believable as the accusations I made. They tried to calm him down, but when one of the other neighbors remembered that she had seen a man “about his size” loitering around the woods behind their house and staring into their daughter’s room, the damage was done.
That night, he was a broken and beaten man. The strange thing about neighbors is that they are friends of convenience only. They are there to back you up only when it suits them, and because they don’t know you as well as a friend would, they also don’t trust you enough to believe your word over that of a stranger’s.
After Fuckwit fought with the police, spent the night in jail, and then returned a bitter, angry, but ultimately defeated man, he promised to stop his kid from ringing the doorbell early in the morning and he promised he would never spy on any of the neighbors again. The following morning, Lizzie ran into a few of the neighbors on her way to work and they all rushed up to her, apologizing, hugging, kissing. Fuckwit and his ill-mannered offspring kept a low profile for a few weeks, but the less they were seen the more the rumors spread, and before long he was public enemy number one and was forced to leave.
Ella, on the other hand, stayed. She became part of the fixtures for a while, but as cats tend to do, she eventually tired of us and moved on to find a new family. She felt like our cat by then, and Ben had really taken a shine to her, but we decided not to chase her down, knowing what happened to the last owners who did.
10
Cockawhat?
“Hello, darling! How are you?”
I was greeted with a call from a Stepford wife, dressed in an apron and a smile, with the smell of freshly baked bread wafting from the kitchen. It was enough to make me stop in my tracks as soon as I walked through the front door, enough for me to double check that I had the right house.
And the right wife.
Ben, who’s usually the source of all smells in our house, was asleep on the couch, a trickle of drool an inch from soaking into his collar. I kissed him on the forehead, wiped the drool from his chin, and ventured further into the house, which didn’t feel or smell like my own.
“How was Matthew?” she asked politely, looking like she genuinely cared.
“… okay,” I said slowly.
How was your journey to the 1950s?
“Anything interesting?” she wondered.
I began to worry. My first thoughts were that she was high or drunk. I didn’t smell alcohol on her breath, and if she was on drugs then I hoped she had a long-term supply. I could get used to this—as soon as I stopped being freaked out by it.
She guided me into the kitchen before handing me a beer from the fridge and a sandwich that she had ready.
“I made it with homemade bread,” she told me. “Three layers, all toasted like a proper club sandwich. There’s ham, two kinds of cheese, bacon, mustard, lettuce, and tomato. The perfect sandwich.”
I nodded slowly, wondering if she had slipped any of her happy pills into the sandwich, as well.
She continued, the smile seemingly engraved on her face. “I also made you your favorite for dessert, rice pudding.”
That’s when it hit me, that’s when I saw the glint in her eye, the one that said this was all a ruse, a trick. I had seen that glint before. I had fallen for it then, and it didn’t end well for me. I rolled my eyes and then asked her, “What are you up to?”
“Excuse me?”
“All of this,” I said, gesturing around to indicate her offerings. “You either did something or you want somethin
g.”
“Can’t I just make the man I love his favorite dessert without being up to something?”
“That depends on who the man you love is,” I told her. “Because I fucking hate rice pudding.”
“Oh.” She stared abysmally into the pan of boiling rice. “Banoffee Pie?”
“Closer, but no.”
“Okay.”
And suddenly, we’d entered a stare-off. She was still grinning at me, and that grin seemed reluctant to break, but it was getting ready. I waited for the inevitable words, the ones that always followed moments like these, but when they didn’t come, I shrugged, kicked off my shoes, and said, “So I’ll just go into living room and watch TV, right?”
Then they came. “I could give you a blow job if you wanted.”
That was the final straw. “Right, what is it, what do you want? You finally killed my mother, didn’t you?”
Or yours?
She lowered her eyes to her hands as she twiddled her thumbs, looking like a lost child about to admit to breaking a priceless vase. “I was just thinking.”
Please tell me it was yours.
“I don’t like the sound of that, but continue.”
“… that we should get a dog.”
“Really?”
She nodded, an expectant look on her face. I almost felt bad for destroying her hopes. Almost.
“There aren’t enough blow jobs in the world.”
“Oh come on, I’ll look after it. I’ll walk it; you don’t need to do anything.”
I paused to give it some thought. I really wasn’t much of an animal lover, but Mickey and then Ella had softened me somewhat. I was actually quite happy to entertain the idea of a little puppy running around the house. I wasn’t going to let it be that easy, though, otherwise she’d have me right where she wanted me and the war that is marriage would swing in her favor.
“I’ll think about it.”
“I think Ben would really love a dog.”
That was low. And she knew it. But she was committed to the cause. She sat down next to Ben and began stroking his hair, drawing my attention to him and hoping that a combination of her puppy-dog eyes and his cute face would result in a dog.
“I think he really misses Mickey and Ella.” He wasn’t the only one, and she knew that. “Just think how much fun he had with them. And with a puppy, it’s ours, so there will be no chance of it flying away or finding another owner.”
That was more about me than Ben. She knew that would get to me. But I didn’t let it show. “Like I said, I’ll think about it,” I told her again.
She seemed hopeful, but the vacant look I gave her told her not to be. I enjoyed complete silence and complete control of the television remote that night. She didn’t follow through with any sexual favors, but I was happy to take the small victories when they came. After several hours of having beers handed to me and watching all the shows that she hated, she asked me again. She had been watching Ben throughout, no doubt keen for him to wake up so she could use him somehow. But as desperate as she was for his help, she wasn’t evil enough to wake him up to get in.
“Can we discuss the dog some more?” she said eventually, deciding to go all-in one last time.
I held up the little white flag. “Okay. Let’s go for it. What breed do you want? Big dog, small dog? Have you given it much thought?”
She clearly had given it some thought. She waited until I finished speaking, but I knew the words had been on her lips since I walked through the door. “I want a labradoodle.”
“A labra … what?” Maybe she was on drugs after all.
“A labradoodle,” she repeated, as though it were the most normal thing in the world. “Or a goldendoodle. Oh!” She raised her hands. She was either having a eureka moment or the second dose had just kicked in. “Or a pugapoo!”
I slowly shook my head, absorbing the simpleton smile that she directed my way. “Have you had a stroke?”
The smile turned into a glare. “They’re dog breeds,” she informed me. “A labradoodle is a cross between a Labrador and a poodle.”
“Ah, right,” I nodded, pretending I understood and doing my best not to imagine how that abomination had been conceived.
“I quite like cockapoos, as well.”
“Now you’re just pulling my leg.”
She shook her head vehemently. “They’re real, honestly.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s true! It’s a cross between cocker spaniel and a poodle.”
“Come on, no one’s that cruel, no one’s that childish.”
She got that determined look on her face, the one that was invariably followed by an introduction of the iPad and a Google search. Within a couple of minutes, she was showing me pictures of animals clearly the result of a sordid affair between a pony and a mop.
“That’s a labradoodle.” She fired off another search, flashed me more pictures of dogs with interspecies parents. “And that’s a cockapoo.”
I was amazed. I had never known these things existed, and my eyes had been opened to a new and exciting world, namely one where people bred incompatible canines and then mocked them with stupid names.
As my intrigue grew, she showed me more alien breeds. They were cute, but imagining their parents going at it was equal parts terrifying, adorable, and hilarious. There were pure-bred monsters, half the size of humans and twice as thick, getting frisky with pocket puppies.
“But where does this end?” I asked as that intrigue and hilarity turned into something else. “What if someone breeds a shih tzu with a cocker spaniel?”
Lizzie shrugged nonchalantly. “I don’t see why not.”
“Really? Come on, no one wants a shitty cock.”
She lowered her brow in a disapproving gesture, but I was dead serious. The line had clearly already been crossed, and someone needed to draw a new one before the world was awash with Martian beasts who couldn’t recognize their parents.
“So, which one do you prefer?” she asked me.
I shrugged, and as if to tease an answer out of me, she began swiping through the pictures, showing me dog after dog—cute faces, ugly faces, squashed faces, scared faces. Half of them had an expression that suggested even they didn’t know what the hell they were.
“That one,” I said after a while, more as a way of ending the slideshow of misery than anything else.
“Perfect. That’s a labradoodle. My favorite.”
I gave her my best smile, telling her that I was committed to this bizarre new desire of hers and that I was prepared to go through with it—even though I would be sleeping with one eye open and wondering when the race of super intelligent, genetically superior canines was going to conquer the world in a revolution reminiscent of the Planet of the Apes, only with fewer bananas and a lot more incest.
“It just so happens that there’s a breeder nearby who has a litter.”
What a lucky coincidence.
By “it just so happens,” what she meant was that she’d already been in touch with the breeder, she’d already arranged a deal, and she’d already had the puppy wrapped up in a bow and ready to go. The “discussion” we’d just had was a show put on for my benefit, tricking me into believing I had any say in the matter.
“I just need some cash and then he’s all ours.”
“Sure,” I said, taking out my wallet and flicking through the meager sum of notes. “How much?”
I was ready to go along with it, ready to welcome a new alien life-form into our home at the cost of whatever was in my wallet, but I detected a wry grin on her face as she watched me take out a few dollars. Then she told me the price and my mind quickly changed.
“You’re fucking kidding me.”
At the sound of a swear word, we both instinctively turned to Ben, saw that he was still sleeping, and then continued.
“It’s a designer dog,” she said.
“Great, then he can do some freelancing and earn back some of his fee.”
“Stop being facetious.”
“Stop using big words.”
She glared at me, her hands on her hips, a momentary silence in the air. “Are you going to continue being difficult?”
“That depends, is he going to continue being expensive?”
She rolled her eyes and then made to move away, excluding herself from the conversation. “If you don’t want a dog, then we don’t get a dog,” she said. “Simple as that.” She sounded convincing, but there was an undercurrent to her words and the way she dismissively waved her hand at me. That undercurrent said, “but no dog means no more sex for you, ever; it means that I will pester you until the day I die and that if you want anything ever, even if I want that same thing, you have no chance of getting it.” We had only been married for a couple of years, but I could sniff out a declaration of war.
So I agreed to the dog, and I also agreed to pay for it. I was broke, but it made her smile so it was worth it. I knew that if she was smiling and if she was genuinely happy with me, then she wasn’t plotting to kill me. Because she was the one working, she was also the one to pay the rent and the bills. In fact, she paid for all of the essentials and whatever money I had was used to pay for nonessentials. Although, since losing my last job and not returning to the job market, I didn’t have much savings left and most of my cash came from my parents.
The breeder was about as insane as I would expect. She was the stereotype of a cat lady and she lived it to the letter, but with dogs. She hated me from the moment she saw me, glaring at me and saving all of her smiles for Lizzie. I wasn’t sure if she could sense that I wasn’t an animal person, or if she could sense my annoyance at spending my last penny on a freak show puppy that would eat me out of house and home and then defecate on said house and home. But there was definitely contempt behind her eyes.
As she looked from her pets to Ben to Lizzie and then to me, I noticed a declining interest and an increase of contempt. It seemed that the more responsive a living creature was, the less she liked it. And as Ben began wiggling around on his mother’s knee, trying to grab the ears or tails of passing animals and spurting random noises, the look she gave him looked like the one she gave me.
