Births Deaths Marriages

by Georgia Blain

  Change did come. The public picture of normality was stretched to embrace the reality of the private sphere. It has altered since, and will continue to alter; the interplay between the personal and the public is a constantly shifting dynamic on both a large scale and a smaller, more immediate one. I see it in myself on a daily basis. The different layers that I reveal and hide are always changing. Sometimes the picture will be one of a middle-aged woman who has done what society expects: entering a happy heterosexual relationship, having a child, working, being a mother, balancing it all bar the occasional glitch. At other times, the image shatters; look at the mess, I want to scream. There is a flash of raw immediacy, the feeling as it is experienced out there on display. Later it will once again be interpreted, reasoned, placed within a context, and you will see something quite different.

  Years ago, when Andrew took those photographs in his father’s flat, I thought I was afraid of what I then saw to be a strange disconnection in the act. The truth was infinitely more complex. Later, I came to realise that I saw his action as dissociated because I was terrified of the raw immediacy of his pain.

  I was a teenager when my father died, and in my early twenties when my brother died. Each time I remember knowing that I was supposed to feel grief, and that this was meant to last for a certain amount of time, but what the exact length of time was, I didn’t know.

  In high school, I was one of the few students who had experienced a parent dying, and it gave me a certain status. I felt that this meant I should know something of the mysteries of life; I should be capable of summoning sensitivity, caring and compassion whenever they were required. But the reality was different. I had floundered, and then I had fought to keep my head above water by watching myself, from a distance, trying to behave as a person in grief should behave. I didn’t dare let myself really feel. I didn’t dare let myself really think. All I wanted to do was to get through it, to survive, and it seemed to me that the best way of doing this was to take a role, to behave as I believed I was expected to behave. Anything else was too unknown, too terrifying in its vastness.

  When the father of a girl in my year died suddenly in a freak accident, we all tried to comfort her. I remember looking at her and wondering what she was doing to cope. She was coming to school, she was not breaking down, she didn’t seem to have thrown herself into a mad howling despair. I wondered if she’d let herself touch the true sadness of her grief, or whether, like me, she’d seen it and backed away, hands up to ward off any contact.

  I felt that I was expected to pull something special out of the bag, just the right words, and because I was an aspiring writer, I sat down and wrote her a poem. I don’t remember what I wrote. I know I did it because I wanted to help, to offer some condolence, but my words were not true. They were beautiful, poetic, the product of that role I had taken, and although I took a certain pride in my effort, there was a small part of me that saw its emptiness.

  Then, as I waited for Andrew, I wanted a similar role. I wanted him to fall apart in the way that people did in books or films. I wanted to be able to comfort him, to hold him and tell him it would be all right while we both sobbed. But it didn’t happen like that. He disappeared, and I didn’t know how to cope.

  The complexity and rawness of an immediate response to pain is not easy to understand and recognise, let alone pin down in writing, in a photograph or in a film. The very act of capturing distorts. Once neatly contained, all that we felt is no longer unruly, unreasoned, immediate and wild. Perhaps this is why we hold these moments as truth. They cannot be replicated. Each time we try, we dilute their intensity, we confuse, holding up false images of this so-called truth that leave us reeling as we try to reconcile what we see encapsulated with what we have experienced.

  Hours later, I wrote about that afternoon in my diary, adding layers of reason. Now I write about it again, interpreting it differently with a greater distance from its rawness. Each time I do this, I know I give it a beauty it did not have at the time. Years ago, as I waited for Andrew, I stood pressed against the white walls of that terrace, with my hand over my eyes, wanting shade, while from inside I could hear Louis Armstrong singing. As the song came to an end, I heard Andrew push the rewind button, the whirr of the tape audible as it went back to the beginning. Not again, I thought.

  I believed, and still do, that if I wrote about my own life and the lives of those I love, I had to tell the truth. But foolishly, I believed the truth lay only in the immediate. I didn’t know how to capture this, and I was wary about trying to do so. Now, as I remember standing out on that terrace, the thin sound of that cassette player only accentuates the sweet sadness of that song. I can hear the melody curling around the nakedness of that moment, and then it drifts out over flowers wilting in the heat, floating high above the pale green leaves on the tree tops, playing on and on in the stillness of that afternoon.

  TOP DOG

  AS SUMMER FINALLY ENDS, THE ELMS ALONG THE RIVER path begin to lose their leaves. The mornings are cool, and the light paler, despite the lack of a green canopy overhead. It is quiet, and I like these morning walks, Harry on the lead next to me, his tail wagging like a banner as he trots from smell to smell, diving into a clump of reeds, burrowing his nose into the mulch around the wattles, yearning all the time to go right into the thick mud that oozes between the mangrove roots lining the river like stubble.

  I say hello to people I pass, either a nod of greeting or a brief chat about the beauty of the morning. Harry behaves well, heeling when I tell him, sitting and waiting when I stop to talk.

  As we round the last bend that leads to the oval, a white cockatoo screeches high overhead, swooping down to the grass in front of us. It is, of course, just too much for Harry, and being unprepared I don’t have time to brace myself. Body darting forward like a horse out of a gate, he races towards the bird, wanting only to chase it, pulling me so hard that I land flat on my back in the dampness of the dirt.

  ‘Harry,’ I shout.

  But he doesn’t care. Still straining on the lead, he lunges once again, until the bird (who has always known it was quite safe) decides to take to the air, now screeching at us from the branches of a stringy-bark.

  ‘You’re a bastard,’ I tell Harry.

  He sits and waits, tail wagging, until we are ready to walk again, and as I hold the lead firmly in the lock position, I am no longer fooled by how obediently he appears to trot by my side.

  Harry came to live with us a year ago. I’d never actively wanted a dog, but shortly before I turned forty, this changed. It was a last maternal gasp, a desire to mother that crept up on me as stealthily as it had the first time, and once the idea had entered my consciousness, I was determined.

  As soon as I got what I wanted, I regretted it. I’d grown up with dogs, but this was not what I remembered. The dogs of my childhood stayed outside. They did their own thing. Our new dog was exhausting. Everything was out of control.

  According to the trainer, our dog was a ‘dominant dog’, and this was the cause of all our problems. At first I was bemused. He was a puppy. He wasn’t aggressive. He was hardly what you would call dominant, but as soon as she defined what it was we were dealing with, I knew she was right.

  I’d booked Maria two weeks after Harry became ours. She arrived exactly on time, ringing the doorbell as Harry’s paws scratched against the flyscreen.

  ‘I’m sorry about this,’ I apologised as he leapt up, nose almost reaching her shoulders.

  Maria just turned her back on him. She followed me through the house to the outside table, finally nudging him out of the way with a sharp shove from her hip, a movement executed with a precision designed to put any dog in its place.

  ‘I need you all there,’ she had said on the phone, and we were, Andrew, Odessa and I, waiting for our instructions.

  She opened her clipboard. Harry’s name was at the top of the page and underneath was a list of the problems I had summarised for her when I booked the session: pulling
on the lead, failing to come when called, stealing shoes, barking when left alone. ‘Still true,’ I offered as she read them out to us, while Harry lay out on the dirt that had once been lawn and idly chewed at a bone.

  ‘This is boring,’ Odessa whispered in my ear, draping her arms around my neck, her weight pulling me to one side. She had spent the day in the kindergarten classroom and was in no mood to listen to more instructions.

  ‘Ssh,’ I hissed. ‘It’s important.’

  She only slumped a little further.

  After adding another two or three items to the list, Maria sat back. ‘I’m going to give you some tips, ways of shifting the power balance. Once Harry knows things have changed around here, that he’s no longer in charge, we can work on some of the other issues. But first things first.’

  Andrew waited, pen in hand, ready to take notes. Out in the garden, Harry stood slowly, one eye on the patch of dirt beneath the lemon tree. He was going to dig. I could see it in the way he glanced at me, bone in his mouth, body turned to the mess he had already made despite our attempts to fence off the area.

  ‘Resources,’ Maria said, and we all looked at her, uncertain as to what she was talking about. She turned to the dog bowl, full of uneaten biscuits, and then pointed to the bloody bone that Harry was now burying. ‘Food, toys, walking, playing. You control the resources. You start controlling him.’

  Harry had come to us via a circuitous route. He was rescued from the pound by a foster carer. She kept him for over a month. He then went to live with my mother. But before all that, his history is vague. His registration papers listed him under the name ‘Bigpond’, description: medium-sized, tricolour. His brow is black, with an Addams family white streak down the middle, his face is brown, and his body is grey and red. His hair is long and wiry, sticking up in some places, flat in others, and right at the end, his tail curls up, a great white question mark to punctuate all that has gone before.

  ‘He looks like a bloody toilet brush,’ a friend told us the day after he arrived at our house.

  My mother came across Harry as she trawled through the pet rescue websites shortly after her twelve-year-old ridgeback died in her sleep. There he was, listed under the name ‘Ralph’.

  ‘I’ve found the dog I want,’ she told us, and I was surprised at how quickly she had come to a decision.

  Later, when I saw the photograph, I saw the appeal. Harry posed for the camera well. Other dogs on the website cowered, looking woeful; some stubbornly turned their heads away, many had eyes veiled with mistrust, some didn’t even have eyes at all. Harry, however, faced the lens, tail wagging, one ear up, one down; his picture an enticement to any dog lover.

  My mother and Odessa drove up to the mountains together. They returned with Ralph in the back seat.

  ‘Look at him,’ Odessa said, grinning, as he raced around the back garden, sniffing at each plant, coming back to us for a quick pat, resting his head on our knees, until eventually it was time for my mother to take him home.

  He was endearing, she told me a few days later. But exhausting. He was terrified of the stairs in her house, but couldn’t bear to be left at the bottom when she went up to sleep. He barked until she returned, and so she had to entice him up with a trail of biscuits. He took paper from all the rubbish bins. He chewed the ends of her rugs. When she left him tied up outside the local shop, he yelped. All of this was manageable. The way he pulled her on the lead was not.

  ‘It’s just hopeless when he sees other dogs,’ she said.

  Recognising that Ralph (whom she had now called Harry) may have been too much for her wasn’t easy. I knew that and so did she, although neither of us referred to it directly. My mother is considerably older than she was when she got her last dog, and she doesn’t like it. Nor will I when I am her age. She fights it most of the time, refusing to do any less than she has always done. I’ve given up trying to convince her that she should slow down. Life is different now, I say occasionally, and I wonder why I bother. But as she confessed her uncertainty about dealing with Harry, we were both aware of how large the admission was for her. And that was when I suggested that he come and live with us.

  ‘We’d like to have him,’ I told her, remembering how he had run around our garden. ‘We really would.’

  ‘Rule number one. Never feed the dog before you feed yourselves.’

  Andrew wrote the words on top of the piece of paper and underlined them, but I could see he was doubtful.

  ‘They’re pack animals,’ Maria explained. ‘The leader of the pack always eats first. The ones at the bottom have to wait. When you give him his food first, he gets the wrong message.’

  Don’t argue, I thought, seeing Andrew about to speak. We’d only booked Maria for an hour and a half, and after three weeks with Harry, I was desperate.

  ‘We should get a dog too,’ I had urged Andrew when my mother had first started looking.

  He’d resisted the idea strenuously.

  ‘Odessa would love it.’

  We should wait until she was old enough to look after it on her own, he told me each time I brought up the idea.

  ‘Let’s take Harry,’ I began to suggest, continuing to ignore him. I went through all the arguments, until finally I had to resort to tactics dirty and low. ‘You don’t want him back in the pound.’

  And at this he finally gave in.

  After two nights, I was horrified. Andrew, on the other hand, was besotted. He came home with toys, bags of bones and dog biscuits, and Harry jumped high to seize them. He took Harry running in the morning, down through the parklands and along the river path. He kicked the soccer ball to him and Harry pounced on it, shaking it backwards and forwards in his mouth.

  ‘Out,’ I shouted every time he brought it inside. Dropping it at my feet, mud and leaves trailed across the floor, he would wag his tail and walk away.

  ‘Down,’ I tried each time he leapt all over me. Nipping me on the hand, he just jumped a little higher.

  ‘Drop it,’ I would say when he stole a shoe or toy and ran with it out to the garden. And thinking it was a game, he would toss it in the air, catch it again and then run that little bit faster.

  At night Harry insisted on being in our room and I woke each time he scratched himself. We put him out and he barked and whined. During the day, he followed me everywhere, whimpering whenever I was out of his sight. It poured with rain, and he needed to be walked. By the fourth day, I was depressed.

  At the end of the first week, I asked my mother if she wanted Harry back. She told me she didn’t, and there wasn’t a moment’s hesitation in her reply.

  The day before I called Maria, Harry bounded into the filth of the Cooks River and sank. I willed him not to resurface. But up he came, shaking his entire body, only to plunge under again. He eventually emerged, black with mud, and then rolled himself in a patch of freshly mown lawn clippings. I looked at him in horror, ashamed of my momentarily murderous desire, and wondered how we were going to hold him still to hose him down.

  It wasn’t working. I felt similar to the way I had felt after Odessa was born. Trapped, exhausted and helpless. With Odessa, I’d sought help. I’d called in midwives, I’d gone to doctors and I’d eventually got a referral to a sleep school for desperate mothers. We learnt routines and I clung to them, insistent that we did exactly as I’d been taught.

  ‘She’s meant to sleep for an hour,’ I would say when she woke after forty minutes. Andrew was all for letting her get up, but no, I would stand beside her cot and pat her for a good fifteen minutes, determined that she would sleep for the allotted time period.

  Odessa’s first words were ‘No pats’. When I sent her to day care, she said them to everyone, and they were written up on the board next to her name.

  ‘Just so that we all know not to pat her to sleep,’ they told me as I looked at them, embarrassed.

  Now I can see that I was obsessive. In order to cope I needed to be in control. I have, of course, learnt that order, like all t
hings, has varying degrees, with the absolute standard towards which I tend to aim being a pinnacle whose existence is dubious at best. But knowing this does not stop me from striving for the impossible. It’s like a trap that I slip into and I start running, round and round, the wheel rattling as I chase the unattainable, unable to stop. With the arrival of Harry, I was doing it again. I wanted him to be obedient, and although I knew how foolish I was being, I secretly believed in the possibility of both a complete transformation, and a rapid one.

  Maria lifted the dog bowl and put it on the table. ‘When you’re ready to feed him, he has to sit.’ She demonstrated the hand command to us and, surprisingly, Harry did as he was told. She put the food down, blocking Harry’s access with her body. Slowly she stepped to one side. ‘Don’t let him go until you give him the release command, until you say “Off you go”.’

  Harry cautiously headed to his meal.

  It was our turn now. I was first and he was fairly well behaved. Andrew was next, and although Harry sat, he barged his way through to the bowl the minute Andrew moved. When it came to Odessa’s turn, he didn’t even pretend to follow any of her commands.

  Maria took us through some of the other basics. There was lie down, heel and stay. He obliged with some, and turned stubbornly away at others. In between each lesson, he yelped, racing round the garden, stopping to dig a hole despite our shouting at him, and then racing on again, coming to a sliding halt right near where we sat.

  ‘This is what he’s going to do over the next couple of weeks,’ Maria said. ‘He’s going to muck up, try and reassert his dominance. He’s going to be a pain.’