by Tim Parks
The dog sits and pants. Thomas gets up to walk home.
‘It’s childish sleeping elsewhere just because of the dog,’ Mary says some days later. ‘In the end you like him as much as we do. It’s just an excuse.’
Thomas doesn’t answer. He stays in what was once his daughter’s room. But he feels the pull of going back to his old bed, their bed. To be precise, he feels the pull of pretending all is well. Now when he doesn’t go up the final flight of stairs to their room the dog comes back down and scratches at his door. Thomas won’t open. In their separate rooms he can hear both Mary and Mark laughing. It’s that laughter.
Or perhaps it’s my problem, he thinks.
Sometimes Mary stays out at the dog park till eleven and even later with her young dog and unobtrusive friends. Ricky looks exhausted when he gets home. He crashes. Sometimes Mark goes with his mother, but mostly the boy is busy at his computer.
‘Mum does seem to overdo it with the dog,’ Thomas remarks.
‘Ricky’s a faithful companion,’ Mark says drily. Thomas watches him. How much does the boy know? Why has the dog become so important in their lives?
Eighteen months after they brought the pup home, Thomas is half asleep when Mary shouts. ‘He’s poisoned. He’s dying!’
She had taken the dog out late on a stretch of land at the bottom of the hill. Ricky ate something there; now back home he has started to vomit. He is in convulsions. Mark rushes from his room. It’s Sunday after midnight. Thomas drags himself out of bed and climbs the flight of stairs to the marital bedroom. Ricky has his four legs splayed wide, shaking violently. With no plan Thomas grabs the dog and starts downstairs. ‘Check on the Net for an emergency vet!’ he shouts to his son. As he passes the boy’s room, Mark sees the dog twisting and turning violently in his father’s arms.
‘He’s going to die,’ the boy starts to yell wildly. ‘Ricky’s going to die!’
The dog is fully grown now and flings himself back and forth in Thomas’s arms. He arches his head back with surprising power.
‘Find where there’s a vet,’ Thomas tells Mark. ‘Doing night duty.’
Downstairs, he’s forgotten the alarm and it goes off. Woo woo woo woo.
He leaves his wife to fix it and struggles out through the back door to get the animal some air but the dog wrenches himself free and is on the ground, yelping, pawing. Thomas gets down on the grass and puts his hands in the animal’s mouth, to see if there’s anything in there, or maybe to make the creature vomit, if he can. The dog writhes and bites. He’s taken some skin off Thomas’s hand. It’s impossible to see anything, with all the saliva and fur in the half dark. Thomas becomes aware of sobs behind him. His son is standing at the back door in blue pyjamas shaking his head furiously: ‘He’s going to die, he’s going to die. It’s horrible!’
‘I told you to get on the Net!’
Woo woo woo, goes the alarm.
Mark is beside himself. Who would have thought the dog was so important to him? Thomas leaves the animal and grabs his son’s shoulders, shakes him hard.
Inside the house, his wife turns the alarm off, which makes Mark’s voice even louder.
‘Ricky’s dead, Dad, he’s dead, he’s dead!’
Thomas slaps the boy across the face. ‘Check the fucking Net! Now. Emergency veterinary services. Postcode. Go!’
Mary arrives on the scene. Thomas is on his knees trying to calm the dog which is retching and tossing its head from side to side. They are on the back lawn with the light from the kitchen window coming through the branches of the apple tree. The dog rolls its eyes. They are yellow. It spasms and is rigidly still, fiercely still. His wife is weeping. ‘He was so good, he didn’t deserve this, he was so good. Such a good doggie. He really didn’t. He didn’t.’
‘Get the car out of the garage. Get a blanket.’
‘He was so good, he didn’t deserve this.’
On the lawn, Thomas looks at the dog lying still and rigid. Is it dead? He crouches beside it, turns it on its back and puts his ear to its chest. The heart is beating fast. There’s such a doggie smell. Not entirely unhappy with the situation, Thomas hurries into the house and finds his son at the screen. He has an address.
The boy is calmer now. He looks at his father differently. ‘Is he going to die?’ His voice trembles.
‘I’ve no idea,’ Thomas says and hurries to his room to get some shoes. The address is the other side of Salford.
Thomas drives fast and efficiently. The dog is convulsing on the back seat, wrapped in a blanket now. His wife is beside it, crying, endlessly repeating what a good dog he was. ‘Don’t die, Ricky. Don’t die. Please don’t die.’ This is mad, Thomas is thinking. As if the animal were a child. He’s on the point of bursting out laughing. Am I acting to save the dog, he wonders, or to show my wife and son who counts in this family when there’s an emergency? There is no traffic and the car races through the streets entirely ignoring warnings of electronic speed controls. The address corresponds to a door in a block of flats between two shops. They have to ring the bell twice before a window lights up, then the door buzzes open.
The vet is a tired young Indian in his thirties. He pulls on a white coat, injects the dog with a tranquilliser, lays him on a table and starts to set up a drip. As he works, shaving away fur, tying an elastic cord round a leg, Mary talks on and on about what a remarkable dog Ricky is, how playful, how good tempered. If only he hadn’t picked up whatever was left on the path. Who would do such a thing, leaving poisoned food where there were dogs!
Thomas is struck by the intensity of his wife’s emotional investment in the creature. How much love she has to give! But not to Thomas. ‘He always greets me so warmly when I come home,’ she is explaining, as if the vet could be remotely interested. ‘Always happy to see me.’ She is crying. She brushes tears from her eyes and blows her nose. ‘He’s such a beautiful person.’ The vet is ignoring her completely as he pushes a needle into the dog’s leg and sets the speed of the drip. Thomas understands that what she is saying is that he, Thomas, never greets her in this way, that he and she are never really happy to see each other. Talking to the vet, she is addressing him. Suddenly he is overcome by a deep sympathetic sadness for her. For himself too. He will never be allowed to experience the love she gives the dog. Or her unobtrusive friends, for that matter. He will never be able to show her the affection he gives to his girlfriends. He wishes he could. He really does. But he can’t. For some reason it’s impossible. On the table their common friend Ricky twitches. He’s still alive. Bubbles rise in the drip bag. The vet frowns and pulls off his gloves.
‘That’s it. We’ll know tomorrow. Call around midday.’
Mary begins to press him. ‘Will he survive? Do you have any idea what he ate?’
The vet shakes his head. ‘If he’s alive in the morning, he’ll probably live,’ he says.
Approaching home, towards three, Mary puts a hand on Thomas’s wrist and says quickly, ‘Thanks, Tom. You were fantastic.’ ‘It’s nothing,’ he says. After reassuring Mark that Ricky is still in with a chance, Thomas hesitates on the landing, then climbs the stairs to the marital bedroom. It’s a mistake but one he feels he has to make. In the night, getting up to pee, he wonders if it wouldn’t have been better if the animal had died. Better for their relationship, for the end of their relationship. When Thomas brings the dog home two days later, Mary throws a party and invites her friends from the dog park. She serves them assiduously. She has cooked all kinds of treats. No one seems to notice Thomas. Mark rolls around with Ricky on the lawn. The dog appears to have forgotten everything. Soon his son and his wife too will have forgotten how it was that night, Thomas thinks, how hysterical they were and how efficient he was, when it counted. Going upstairs to the marital bedroom, he finds his wife is letting Ricky lick her eyes. ‘Oh, come and give him a hug,’ she beckons her husband. ‘He wants you to admit you love him, don’t you, Ricky?’
FOUR-STAR BREAKFAST
‘Yo
u’ll gobble up that boy for breakfast and spit him out before lunch.’
This was the burden of what Mary’s mother told her daughter the day she was introduced to Thomas. Mrs Keir, from Glasgow, was famous for her way with words.
There were other unhappy omens: the man who stopped them on the street in Durham a couple of months after they met and said: ‘You’re in love now, but in ten years you will hate each other’; the love-match astrology encyclopaedia in a bookshop in Leeds that presented every possible combination of birth dates and declared theirs a catastrophe in the making.
Was it an omen, too, that at Patty’s Christmas party Mary had poured the dirty dishwater over Thomas’s head when he flirted with the big Russian girl who promised, ‘I will drink you under the table’? If it was, they didn’t recognise it at the time. They felt very sure of themselves and in bed they laughed at dumb astrologers and creeps who pestered young couples on the street. Out of envy. Because they were in love.
But let’s go back to that instructive first meeting with Mary’s parents. Mr Keir was in Newcastle on business with his wife in tow. They arrived mid-afternoon; Mr Keir had appointments, then there was a dinner with old friends. The following day they had to be in Edinburgh for lunch. So the only moment to catch up with their daughter was at the Grey Street Hotel near the station for breakfast. Since she had told them this new boyfriend was serious, they were eager to meet him.
At the time Thomas had never been in a four-star hotel, let alone eaten there. His parents never got beyond boarding houses and bed and breakfasts. Mary’s family, he sensed, moved in a different world. No sooner were they through the gleaming doors than a blonde woman let out a little shriek and enveloped Mary in a fierce embrace. She wore a broad-brimmed red hat above, of all things, a Mexican poncho. Mary cried out too and hugged her mother hard. Looking on, Thomas found himself sharing his disorientation with a small squat man in a grey overcoat and trilby. The man put out his hand. ‘You must be Tom.’ ‘Good to meet you, Mr Keir,’ Thomas said. Mary’s father stood back and sized him up. ‘How old are you?’ he asked.
All Mary’s friends were saying the same thing. Thomas looked so young. Actually, he was six months older than her. But he was so fresh-faced. The beard fooled no one. If anything, it underlined his anxiety to appear adult. No sooner had they drunk their orange juice than Mrs Keir more or less lifted Mary from her seat and took her off to the Ladies. ‘What are you doing with such a baby?’ she demanded as they both looked in the mirror. ‘Whatever’s got into you, girl?’
Thomas was thrown by the sudden disappearance of the two women.
‘Girls’ talk,’ chuckled Mr Keir in his soft Scottish accent.
He began to ask Thomas what he was studying, what his plans were, when he expected to be looking for a job. Thomas answered as best he could. He couldn’t see the sense, he said, in worrying too much about employment when he still had another full year’s scholarship to run. The university was a prestigious one. Mr Keir shook his head. The world wasn’t like that any more, he said. One had to be constantly establishing contacts and building on them. There was no other way. In his briefcase, which he kept beside him on the floor, he found a wallet stacked with business cards. He pulled them out, and began to tap the edges on the tabletop as if he were aligning a pack of cards before shuffling them. Very soon Thomas was being invited to consider a bewildering array of career choices, mainly in the construction and manufacturing industries, each one represented by a card laid out on the table as if in a game of Patience.
‘If there’s anyone you want to approach, just pick up the card,’ Mr Keir said. ‘Tell them I gave you their name.’
Thomas was relieved when the women came back, though surprised to see Mary arm in arm with her mother, laughing and generally in high spirits. Her Scottish accent seemed stronger in her parents’ company. At this point Mr Keir got up and went to load his plate with kippers and fried bread and sausages. There was quite an array of food. Having risen early to drive from Durham, Thomas and Mary went to tuck in.
‘It’s going well,’ Mary said, putting an arm round her young man’s waist.
However, the four-star breakfast was subsequently spoiled when an animated argument blew up over the kippers; it began with some lightly mocking observations from Mrs Keir about Mr Keir’s eating habits and cholesterol levels, but quickly rippled out into a choppy sea of mutual irritation. Suddenly both fury and hilarity were in the air as one accusation followed another. Mr Keir was ignorant and presumptuous, Mrs Keir claimed; he took no proper care of their financial affairs and left his children to languish unprovided-for. Mrs Keir was a cretin who had not the slightest idea what she was talking about, Mr Keir observed. ‘And, quite frankly, the sooner I have a heart attack the better! If I eat like this, it’s because food is the only thing that cheers me up.’
‘Don’t worry, they’re always like that,’ Mary told Thomas later, when the young couple had waved the older pair away in their Rover 35. ‘At least we had a good breakfast,’ she added.
‘At least we know what to avoid,’ Thomas said.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Mary took his arm affectionately. ‘Deep down they’re inseparable.’
Years later, but well before the merciful heart attack struck, Thomas would understand that that was precisely the Keirs’ tragedy.
BROTHERLY LOVE
After visiting my mother I feel it’s my duty to tell my brother how things stand. ‘She’s having difficulty moving around,’ I email. ‘She’s in pain. She can hardly get out of the house. I don’t know how long this can go on.’
From the other side of the world my brother replies: ‘She’s a tough old bird. I phoned last week and she sounded very chipper.’
Not that I live nearby. After Father died, Mum moved to London. I have to spend hours on the train to go down there, hence I only tend to see her when work calls me to the city. I add a day on to my schedule and take a couple of buses out beyond Twickenham where she is now more or less imprisoned in her tiny house. ‘It takes her a while to answer the doorbell,’ I write to my brother. ‘She has trouble getting out of her chair. Her left arm is swollen like a balloon.’
My brother often leaves a while before replying to emails, but not these. ‘We all have our bad patches,’ his message appears in a matter of minutes. ‘I’ve been telling her for ages she should use a stick, but vanity dies hard!’
It irritates me. My mother has had this cancer for some years now. Why is my brother pretending it isn’t happening? Why doesn’t he accept the testimony of someone on the spot? Worse still, he occasionally seems to be suggesting that I’m some kind of gravedigger; that I’m willing the end to come, out of a macabre love of melodrama. This isn’t true. I love my mother, I visit her when I can and I see what I see. ‘She has to get her neighbours to do the shopping now and can’t eat in the evening. They’ve given her a morphine substitute to inject herself as required.’ My brother responds, saying his daughter, who is on a tour of Europe, visited a few days ago when she was passing through and apparently found her grandmother in good shape. ‘Mum took her to an Indian restaurant and ate with gusto, it seems.’
This is strange. I realise my mother must be giving a different account of herself when she talks to my brother or his close family. Is this because he was the poorly one as a child? She doesn’t want to scare him. Certainly he loves her quite as much as I do, perhaps more. Or because she fears if she tells the truth he’ll feel she’s trying to get him to make the expensive trip back home to visit? With me she puts a brave face on things, but if I ask directly, she’s all too frank. ‘Most days I feel terrible,’ she told me on my last visit. ‘I’m nauseous and confused and not myself at all.’
I wonder if her confessing these things to me isn’t a kind of compliment – a recognition that I’m tough enough to handle it. She’s glad of the relief of being able to tell someone the truth. Or could it be that she is equally candid with my brother, but he doesn’t want to take it
on board? Or he takes it on board but doesn’t want to appear to have done so, since his not being aware how serious the situation is is now the only reason for not coming back to see her while there’s time. Perhaps he’s so attached to her deep down that he can’t face the idea of a last meeting. Or I suppose you could even imagine that my brother deliberately makes light of the situation in order to make me feel like a drama queen, thriving on her dying. Meantime, I catch myself looking forward to the shock it will be for him when she actually does go. How is he going to sound relaxed and optimistic then? I’ve started observing her more closely to find ominous symptoms that I can describe to him: the slightly slurred speech, for example, or the way she puts a hand on the nearest piece of furniture to steady herself as she moves around the room. It’s not good. I didn’t want to become like this.
‘It seems,’ I write, ‘she can’t take a bath any more because once in the tub she can’t haul herself out. She has to wait till the nurse visits to do her dressings.’ With uncanny immediacy, given the different time zones, my brother replies, saying his wife phoned the evening before and Mother spoke cheerfully of a visit to a flower show. It’s as if my emails were a threat that had to be neutralised at once. But a threat to what, exactly? I happen to know that Mother was bullied by an old friend into accepting this invitation to the Chelsea Flower Show, then felt too nauseous to enjoy the flowers and spent most of the time sitting in the car outside, getting cold. I could explain this to my brother, but I hesitate, because this whole back and forth between us has begun to make me fear I might be wishing her dead simply to prove him wrong. There has always been a certain amount of competition between us. Out of the blue, he writes: ‘Spoke to Mum yesterday, who told me she was enjoying a good game of Scrabble with her old pals from the Church Missionary Society. Complained they kept looking up words in the dictionary and ate all the Battenberg. Guess she’ll be with us for a good few years yet.’ I realise I should feel cheered by this picture of domestic feistiness, but actually it feels like my brother is trying to ram far more than Battenberg down my throat. I didn’t reply.
