Einstein

by Einstein (retail) (epub)

‘He should have left you for dead,’ Geraldine said, turning on Einstein. ‘You nasty, dirty brute.’

  ‘Shut your mouth!’ Einstein growled. ‘Hold your tongue or I’ll chew you to rags!’ He sprang forward, hackles raised, and threatened the ghost with his foaming fangs.

  Geraldine let out a shriek and vaulted from the chair. She threw out her arms, drifted across the ceiling and started to fade away.

  ‘Let me tell you how it happened,’ Einstein said, turning back to the Mariner.

  ‘No time!’ The Mariner roared. ‘No time!’

  ‘You’re forgetting your own responsibilities,’ Einstein bristled. ‘You belong to the greatest civilisation the universe has known. There has never been such a race of poets and philosophers. Your wisdom lit the stars and set the planets in their orbits. And yet you’re condemning this monkey to death without an excuse me or thank you.’ He growled, very deep in his throat, and whipped the floor with his tail. ‘And you might have considered my own tender feelings before you tried to steal me away.’

  ‘And the children,’ Geraldine sighed. ‘I never caught sight of the little children…’ She was very faint, a luminous patch on the ceiling.

  ‘Tell me the story,’ the Mariner sighed.

  ‘Mine is a tale of adventure!’ Einstein said, pricking up his ears and sitting to attention. ‘Mine was a life of hardships and dangers.’

  39.

  Einstein had been the runt of a large litter born to a bitch in the cellar of a London pet shop. His mother had been born a mongrel, the daughter of a mongrel, and in her veins ran the blood of the poodle and terrier, the cocker and springer, the greyhound and tumbler, the house cur and turnspit, the Assyrian hunting dog, the Roman dog of war, the temple dog of Egypt and beyond, yea, even unto the wolf of the forest and the nimble jackal of the desert.

  Einstein’s ancestors had been warrior hounds of Attila the Hun, silken spaniels of the Chinese emperors, muscle-bound mastiffs of King Mwanga of Buganda. They had been starving pariahs, cracking open the bones of corpses buried in the mud of ruined cities. They had been pot-bellied pets of kings, sleeping on jewelled cushions, licking honey from the fingers of perfumed concubines.

  Einstein, for his part, had been a yelping scrap of life, scratching at the bottom of a cardboard box. His first memory was the smell of the cellar, ripe with rabbits, kittens, white mice and parrots, horse cakes, fish flakes, biscuits and bonemeal. His second memory was the smell of the straw in the warmth of the crowded pet shop window. His third memory was a wickerwork cage and the flushed face of Mrs Flodden as she set him gently down on her bedroom floor.

  Mrs Flodden was a widow who had purchased him as comforter for her large and lonely bed. She kept him in the top of her night-gown and fed him biscuits while they watched TV. She kissed him and squeezed him and set him loose to roam at night beneath her lace-embroidered sheets.

  During the day she liked to sit in bed and read aloud from a tottering tower of library books. She had an enormous appetite for Katie Pphart romances and pocket digest editions of ancient and modern classics. The Katie Ppharts made him fall asleep with their drivelling accounts of swooning, pale-skinned women and dangerous, dark eyed men, hopelessly trapped in all the elaborate rituals of courtship. But he learned to love the classics. He rode out with Don Quixote, pursued Moby Dick and followed the doings of Dombey and Son. He met Hamlet. Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe. He was introduced to the Hindu warriors, Greek gods and Russian princes. It was Mrs Flodden who provided his early education and for a time they were happy together.

  She seemed surprised when he started to grow.

  In the beginning he was content to burrow between her breasts, searching for sugar crumbs with his tongue. But as the months passed he changed from a trembling velvet ball into a whiskery ruffian who tore her night-gown, scratched her arms and sank his teeth in her fat.

  It was Mrs Flodden who had called him Einstein because, as she told the engraver who had punched the name on the plate of a beautiful leather collar, her puppy was turning into a monster. She gave one of her little laughs. A high-pitched yapping. So amusing. The engraver looked blank. Einstein, she felt obliged to explain to this idiot of a man, was the famous beast in the Mary Shelley book of that name. The engraver didn’t argue. He asked her how to spell it. It made a change from Randy and Rambo.

  She continued to adore the young Einstein with his bristling moustache and wet inquisitive nose, but he was tired of Mrs Flodden’s pillow talk. He was tired of catching his claws in her night-gown and tired of the games of hide and seek she played with his favourite biscuits. He longed to be running loose in the streets, mauling cats and exploring drains, and at the first opportunity he slipped through the widow’s legs and escaped.

  He lived on the streets and learned to beg food from the doors of hotel kitchens. It was a hard life but full of adventure. He hunted for cats in the alleys and courtyards and chased pigeons in public gardens. He slept secure in the basements of derelict buildings or fashioned nests from the rubbish that rolled in the streets.

  These were the days of a thousand conquests. He surprised the shambling, swag-bellied Labrador with her chocolate eyes and her soft, drooling mouth; startled the nervous Afghan with her narrow shoulders and diamond collar and dainty tiptoeing stride; stunned the swaggering pit bull terrier with her stump of a tail held high like a flag, flaunting her broad and twitching buttocks; he sprang traps for the Pekinese and the corgi, the dachshund and the whippet. Such variety in the world! So many curious shapes and sizes. So much heat from so many bitches. Einstein always took his pleasure.

  It was during this time that he met Arnold Belcher. The old man had been working as a cook in the kitchen of the Hotel Glorious, a tourist trap in Paddington. They stumbled upon each other one morning behind the hotel dustbins. Einstein was trying to salvage some pork ribs from a tangle of polythene wrappers. Arnold had just finished frying fifty egg and bacon breakfasts and had crept outside to enjoy a cigar. He was a small man in a greasy apron. He had a long face, very white, as if it had been poached and drained of its colour, and a tremendous gherkin of a nose. His arms were freckled with frying pan burns.

  ‘I wouldn’t touch them bones if I was you,’ Arnold warned him. ‘The rations in this place ain’t fit to eat.’

  He winked at Einstein and snorted smoke through his mighty nose and then, because the mongrel looked so hungry, slipped back into the kitchen to fetch him a slice of liver. This act of generosity earned Arnold Belcher a devoted friend.

  When he returned to the dustbins that evening to smoke his after dinner cigar he found Einstein waiting for him.

  ‘How d’you fancy a cockroach supper?’ he said, bending down to scratch Einstein’s ears. ‘And somewhere warm to sleep the night?’

  Einstein grinned and followed Arnold into the kitchen.

  The floor glittered with cockroaches. They swarmed from every chink and crevice, ran up the walls and hung in festoons from the ceiling. They filled the breadbins to overflowing and clung in quivering chains to the locks on the pantry doors.

  Einstein was astonished. He whimpered. He barked. He lowered his head and ran across the floor with his jaws clacking like castanets. Within half an hour there was nothing left of the infestation but broken shells and a litter of legs.

  Arnold was so impressed that he let Einstein remain in the kitchen. He grew uncommonly fond of him. They slept together beside the ovens and lived on sweet tea and table scraps.

  At the end of the summer Arnold Belcher left the hotel and Einstein went with him. They travelled north, to the sea, where they spent a season in the galley of a deep sea trawler. They sailed crimson seas that were stained with blood from the giant Japanese factory fleets and soft black seas spread with oil so deep that they that burst into flames and lit the night. They sailed seas that had turned as thick as glue from a plague of poisonous jellyfish and sinister empty stinking seas where even the wandering albatross refused to cast a shadow.

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nbsp; The man and the dog were constant companions for nearly five years. They shared all kinds of feast and famine during their travels together. They worked trawlers and tankers and short-sea traders and, whenever they had to come ashore, found shelter in the kitchens of cheap hotels.

  Arnold loved the sea. ‘When the time comes to say goodnight, they’ll wrap me in a nice clean apron and drop me into the deep,’ he told Einstein one evening as they gazed out across the oily water.

  The little dog growled and pressed himself against the old man’s legs.

  ‘I want the mermaids to have me,’ Arnold said wistfully. ‘I want them to sing me mermaid songs and wrap me into their cold embrace. I want a shroud woven from mermaids’ hair.’

  But when the time came, Arnold Belcher said goodnight in the kitchen of the Trumpet Hotel. It was a two star hotel in the outskirts of London. It had badly infected drains, a Polynesian cocktails lounge and last year’s Christmas decorations still pinned in the corners of the restaurant ceiling. The hotel offered fixed price lunches and tasty toasted sandwiches. Arnold had been hired to plan and prepare the lunches.

  The old man had been hacking at a frozen leg of mutton when the axe bounced and butchered his wrist. He yelped in horror and his teeth fell out. The teeth skittered across the table. The hand slapped the floor like a wet glove. It took Einstein by surprise. He’d been sleeping under a sack of rice. He was so shocked that he sprang forward, snatched up his master’s ruined hand and carried it into a corner.

  When the headwaiter arrived, Arnold was already dead. His heart had stopped. He was slumped against one wall with his apron covered in blood. There was blood on the ceiling and blood on his shoes. The dog was sitting beside him with the severed hand in his month.

  They took the old man away and Einstein never saw him again. He stayed near the Trumpet Hotel for a week but the waiters cursed and threw stones at him. They thought he was a troublemaker. They thought he’d brought a jinx to the kitchen.

  Eventually Einstein took to the road, hunting for food in junkyards and ditches. The episode at the Trumpet had left him feeling confused and lonely. He tried to pick up the threads of his old, independent life. He didn’t need comforts of home and hearth. He was a gentleman of the road, a ruffian, a buccaneer.

  At first he thought he could hunt for carrion like his brother the fox and dig shelters in the earth. He was finished with the company of men. But he had none of the quick wits and cunning that kept the wild dogs alive. Scratching for scraps he had soon become chilled and sick with hunger.

  And then one morning he found himself limping along in the shadow of a tall brick wall. He followed the line of the wall to a pair of wrought iron gates. When he poked his head through the bars he saw an ugly concrete house set in a wasteland of uncut grass. Faint smells of food came drifting from the house. A man was standing on the lawn. The man was wearing striped pyjamas and wet carpet slippers.

  It was Charlie.

  40.

  I was strong, Einstein told them proudly. I was a seadog and trained to eat anything. But how long could I have survived in the wild? My coat was tangled and caked in mud. My pads were scratched and bleeding. When I saw Charlie that morning and caught the smell of fried eggs and sausages, hot toast and coffee, I nearly dropped dead with desire. I was foaming at the mouth. I managed to drag myself forward and offered a pitiful, submissive moan. I slobbered and thrashed with my tail. I sank down on my belly and begged. And Charlie knelt down to pick me up in his arms and carry me back to the house.

  Another man might have turned away in disgust, alarmed by my frightful appearance. Another might have thrown stones at me and chased me from the garden. I was too weak to do anything more than accept the fate that awaited me. But Charlie cradled my stinking body in his arms and carried me away to the blissful fragrance of that early morning kitchen.

  A small television, perched on a shelf, was tuned to a breakfast news show. An ocean incineration ship with 2,000 tons of toxic waste on board was breaking up in a North Sea gale twenty miles from Scarborough. A woman in false eyelashes and a satin tracksuit was talking about a crash diet programme guaranteed to shed ugly fat in thirty days or your money back. There were food riots in the Western Sahara and flood warnings in Bangladesh. A famous world leader had died in his sleep. Someone said Have a nice day.

  There was a toaster burning bread and a kettle spurting steam and a woman standing at the stove with a pan full of smoking sausages. She was a small woman with big breasts and a mane of dark, untidy hair. Baxter.

  Why did Charlie find her so attractive? Her face, unpainted, was pale and unremarkable. She had large, slightly squinting eyes and a matron’s chin that trembled like a turkey wattle. Her belly bulged through a dirty woollen dressing gown and she shuffled her feet in cracked leather slippers.

  It’s true, they were not, as Katie Pphart might have said, flushed by the fire of love’s first embrace; but there was no excuse for the jowls, the paunch and the poisonous demeanour. This woman, his wife, only beloved daughter of the infamous chicken slaughterer, was a witch, a tartar, an acrimonious brabbler, a flatulent virago.

  I was drooling into Charlie’s pyjamas and doing my best to look wistful and winsome, in the hope of a morsel of something wholesome, when she turned and scowled at me with a look that withered my scrotum.

  ‘What have you found?’ she shouted, without taking her eyes from me. ‘Don’t bring it into the house, Charlie!’

  ‘It’s a little dog,’ Charlie said gently.

  ‘Was it hit by a car or what?’ she demanded. ‘Is it dead?’

  ‘No,’ Charlie said, smiling and scratching my muddy chin. ‘I think he must be lost.’

  But Baxter the ice queen found her heart unmelted. ‘For God’s sake, take it out of here! It probably has worms. It might have lice. It might even have rabies. Look! Look! Its eyes are different colours.’

  ‘What difference does that make?’

  ‘Clear out!’ she shouted impatiently, threatening us with her sausage fork. ‘Put it back where you found it and then go upstairs and scrub your hands!’

  ‘But he’s lost,’ Charlie insisted, holding me tighter against his chest as if shielding me from her evil eye. ‘I think he’s starving. He’s nothing but skin and done. Can’t we find him something to eat?’

  ‘I’m warning you.’ Baxter said. ‘There’s something wrong with it. Look, for God’s sake, it’s practically foaming at the mouth. Filthy little beggar. You’ll go crazy if it bites you and I absolutely refuse point blank to visit you in hospital.’

  ‘He’s not going to bite!’ Charlie shouted back angrily. ‘I can’t leave him out there in the garden to starve. I can’t ignore him. He only needs a good meal and a little care and attention.’

  ‘It needs drowning.’

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Charlie demanded. ‘We can spare him something to eat.’

  ‘I’m not your skivvy!’ Baxter screamed. ‘Christ you’re such a pain!’ Her wattle quivered with indignation. She flung the frying pan at the wall and suddenly burst into tears.

  Charlie didn’t know what to do for the best, so he just stood there with a starving vagrant in his arms and a fat woman in a tantrum and the sausages rolling over the floor. It was terrible. And then, very gently, he set me down, picked up the sausages one by one and placed them back in the frying pan. When he’d retrieved the breakfast, without a word to his wife, without another glance at me, he walked out into the garden with the frying pan in his hands.

  I dragged myself after him. Baxter was busy blowing her nose into a Mickey Mouse™ tea towel but I knew that once she’d wiped her face she’d want to attack me with the kettle. She certainly wouldn’t put down a plate and fry me a thick slice of smoky bacon. So I followed Charlie into the garden.

  He was walking towards the summerhouse. It was a wooden pavilion with creaking veranda and peeling bargeboards. I followed him up the steps and into another world.

  Light poured through t
he windows into a simple whitewashed room. A beautiful easel stood in the centre of the room and against one wall was a trestle table loaded with brushes and bottles, tubes of paint, palette knives, boxes of rainbow coloured pastels, bundles of charcoals and rolls of rag. Empty canvases had been stacked beside the table. Against the opposite wall a horsehair sofa draped with a blanket seemed to serve as a makeshift bed. In a corner of the summerhouse a table had been transformed into a kind of kitchen with a camping stove and a water bucket. A man could survive, shut away in this place, for quite a considerable length of time.

  Charlie had taken the frying pan and carefully balanced it on the stove. While he finished frying breakfast, and the sweet smell of pork fat and pepper once more tormented my senses, I tried to entertain myself by prowling around the room.

  There was something wrong.

  The bed had been frequently occupied. The blanket and pillow smelt strongly of Charlie. The kitchen had been used to provide many meals, according to the crumbs, raisins and tiny slivers of cheese rind, some no bigger than toenail clippings, that were caught in the cracks in the floorboards. All these signs spoke of an artist who lived for weeks in his studio, painting with furious energy, obsessed by secret voices and visions.

  And yet the easel was empty. The canvases were empty. The tubes of paint bore no thumbprints, no wrinkles disturbed their straining waistbands. The brushes were clean. The bundles of charcoal still wore their immaculate paper collars.

  The studio, I discovered, served as a hide-out, a retreat from an angry world. Charlie came here, not to paint nor even to ponder the pleasures of painting, but to get away from the chicken slaughterer’s daughter.

  Sometimes he would come here merely to rest and relish the silence of the afternoons and sometimes he would be forced to seek its shelter in the middle of the night after a sudden, explosive fight when all the mirrors in the house were smashed and his clothes sent sailing from the bedroom windows.