GARETH
O’CALLAGHAN
STRAY DOG
Gareth O’Callaghan is one of Ireland’s best-known radio presenters. He has been writing for more than a decade, and Stray Dog is his second book for the Open Door series.
STRAY DOG
First published by GemmaMedia in 2010.
GemmaMedia
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Copyright © 2004, 2010 Gareth O’Callaghan
This edition of Stray Dog is published by arrangement with New Island Books Ltd.
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Printed in the United States of America
12 11 10 09 08 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN: 978-1-934848-35-7
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1
I loved him more than life itself. I often heard people say that about someone they had lost. But I never understood how anyone could love another person so much. Now I can. It’s been three months since I lost John. And, yes, I know now that he was everything to me. With each day that passes, I realise that more and more.
We sat close together and held hands the afternoon the doctor gave us the awful news. John’s cancer had gone too far for us to have any hope. He had less than a month to live, if he was lucky.
He lived for six months, which meant we were both lucky. It also marked the start of an amazing journey, which I now know has given me the strength and understanding I need to carry on. It is a journey that has given me more hope than I could ever have imagined.
We sat in heavy traffic that evening on the way home from the hospital. We took turns to hide our tears. I tried to hide my shock and disbelief. John reached across and squeezed my hand. He said, “It’ll be OK.”
I couldn’t believe he’d just said that. “What the hell do you mean ‘it will be OK’?” I felt sick. My heart pounded. I wanted to scream at him for the lack of respect he had just shown me with his silly, simple, careless words. I turned the key, pulled it out and threw it at him. I flung open the door and jumped out into the heavy traffic. I cried and banged the roof of the car.
John was standing behind me before I realised he had got out of the car. He put his arms around my shoulders and hugged me tightly. “We need to keep our heads. We need to be united on this, Jo. Please get back in the car. Let’s go home.”
His words made no sense. How could they? I had four weeks left with the man I had spent almost half of my life with. He was going to die, and he was telling me we needed to be united?
But then, that was my John – the man I had come to know. He was always the calm, reflective one in our relationship. He thought things out. I just lost the head. He always looked at choices. I never thought I had a choice in most things I did. What really scared me now was the prospect of life without him.
John had always believed he would go somewhere better after his life here. I had believed for most of my adult life that there was nothing beyond what I had been given. At that moment, I wanted to believe so badly that there was something beyond the word “goodbye”, something that might give me a lasting connection to the man who had been my cornerstone for over twenty years.
2
We sat together on the double armchair that night. It was something we hadn’t done for years. The fire crackled with damp wood and coals. The soft lamp in the corner gave off just enough light for both of us to look at photos. I was glad we had taken the shots on the few holidays we had gone on together over the years. I wished at that moment we had gone on more, that we had travelled the world together.
Instead we had become like most middle-aged couples. We assumed things, took each other for granted and lost sight of what it meant to be best friends. We felt uneasy sitting so close together. Even though I knew our time together was limited to weeks now, the touch of his body so near to me made me uneasy. I longed for closeness to this man, but we had become settled, on our own in our own little worlds. I wanted to be in his arms and to feel loved. I knew he loved me. And I hoped he knew how much I loved him. But it had become easier just to assume he knew.
“Let’s go somewhere,” I said nervously. It meant nothing to me. It felt like an unexpected cough that had interrupted a cosy silence.
“Like … where?” John sighed. “When?”
He was telling me there wasn’t enough time.
“Remember how you always wanted to visit the Great Barrier Reef? And Times Square? We could go to New York for a long weekend.”
What a stupid line of talk, I remember thinking. But it was better than the silence and the old photos, token gestures of holidays we had gone on because we had become bored with each other at home. None of that mattered any more.
“I’d love a dog,” he said softly. Then he smiled.
His words caught me completely off-side. I remembered him telling me that his dog had been killed when he was fourteen. He said it was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. It took him years to get over it.
I hated pets. I had a phobia about cats and another about horses. My first thought was what would I do with the dog when John was gone. “Where will we get a dog?” I asked.
“The local pound, I suppose. You can give it back later … if you don’t like it.”
I wasn’t even listening to what he was saying. I was nodding and nodding again harder. “Yes, yes, of course,” I insisted lovingly. “First thing in the morning, we’ll go. And you can pick …” I started to cry. It felt like I was talking to a child. I was trying to cheer him up in the light of something neither of us could explain properly or handle as well as we might have thought we could.
3
John spent most of the following day lying on the couch. He stayed in his pyjamas, under the duvet. He looked very tired. His eyes moved between the television and the French doors that opened out onto a small veranda.
It was the start of spring. Small birds sometimes pecked on the kitchen window. They picked at the nuts that he had left out carefully in the homemade wooden bird-house.
“The garden is getting its life back,” he said softly. He pointed to the small chestnut tree at the bottom of the garden. “Look at the buds,” he said with the wonder of a small child.
I was always fascinated by the way John looked at nature with such raw energy and excitement. It was as if every living plant, each small green fleck, took on a real life of its own. It was as if it acquired a soul when it came into being. Our chestnut tree was no exception. He seemed to look beneath the surface of everything that breathed and drank to stay alive. And he always saw something much deeper, more beautiful and everlasting. And yet, after twenty years of living together, I had never been able to share his raw connection with life and nature. It was a part of him that I felt excluded me. What I didn’t realise until midday that day was that I had been excluding myself all along.
Shortly after eleven, John complained of feeling sick. He told me the pain was so bad that he could not get comfortable on the chair any more. He had ta
ken his painkillers at eight. He wasn’t due another dose of morphine until two. I wanted to give him an extra dose but he waved his hand and forced a smile.
“Will I help you up to bed?”
He shook his head and held his stomach.
“Will I get the doctor?” I asked nervously.
“No.”
He was in agony. He gritted his teeth and squeezed his eyes closed. His fists formed a knot around his tummy. I felt helpless, as if I was going to cry.
The sound of a car screeching to a halt and a loud howl made me jump. We could hear the piercing yelp of an animal from the street outside. I ran to the front door.
No sooner had I opened it than a white, shaggy dog ran in between my legs, past the staircase and into the sitting-room where John was lying.
I closed the door quickly in case a second dog might follow. Perhaps there had been two of them fighting. I heard a car drive away at speed. I hurried into the sitting-room to find the shaggy dog crouched across John’s legs, whimpering and shaking.
“Out!” I shouted.
The frightened dog crouched even lower, shivering and yelping. Her left leg was bleeding. She licked the wound and stuck her head into the crook of John’s arm.
“Leave her, Jo. She’ll be OK. Let her just catch her breath,” John said softly. He stroked the back of the dog’s head.
I watched as John whispered to the dog. He smiled as the dog looked up at him.
“Here, come and pat her,” he said to me.
I shrugged my shoulders. “What if she bites?”
John smiled. “Of course she won’t bite you. She has just been knocked down. She needs to be loved, not thrown out. Get me a bowl of water and a clean towel. We’ll tidy her up a bit.” He felt the dog’s leg gently. The animal whimpered and crouched again. “She can still move her leg. I don’t think she’s too badly hurt.”
4
Later that day I called the pound. I asked them if they were missing a white, shaggy dog. They said they were. She had escaped while being fed. They asked if we wanted them to come and collect her. John waved his arm from left to right. It was a very clear “no thanks, we’re keeping her.”
And so, in the days and weeks leading up to my husband’s death, we adopted a stray dog and fell head over heels in love – not just with her, but also with each other.
Within a week of taking in “the dog from Death Row”, as John had christened her, strange things began to happen in our lives and around the house. John needed less sleep. He was managing on lower doses of morphine, which he didn’t need so often.
On the eighth day after the dog’s arrival, he asked me if I would like to walk in the park beside our house. Our doctor had warned me that John was not to walk outdoors because of the risk of catching a chest infection. This, I was told, could kill him. John insisted that, whether or not I chose to come with him, he was going.
And so, holding hands, with the dog on a brand new lead, we walked in the afternoon spring sunshine in a quiet part of the park. We chatted about old times. We laughed and squeezed each other’s arms like young lovers. It was something we hadn’t made time for in a very long time.
We spoke about the weekend we visited Paris to celebrate our first wedding anniversary. We talked about the weekend in Prague we had won in a pub raffle some years before and how we had promised each other we would go back some day. And we laughed.
We laughed at how the dog chased a small hare but couldn’t catch it. I watched John throw a large stick and shout to her, “Fetch!” I couldn’t help wondering where he had got this new strength from in just a few days. I had expected that he might need my help getting from the bed to the couch in a matter of those same days. Something was happening – something I couldn’t understand.
Another thing occurred within the same few days. Our “strange” neighbours, as John liked to call them, called to say hello. This might not seem unusual until you consider that they hadn’t spoken to us for almost three years! They blamed the sudden halt in our friendship on John’s habit of playing Chopin waltzes late into the night. Yet we never once complained about their son’s habit of testing his motorbike’s engine in their garden shed in the early hours of the morning. We’d built a wall between the two gardens. They felt that this was a personal slur against them.
In recent days they had heard the dog barking and playing and two people laughing in the back garden. They heard the sound of Chopin filling our home for the first time in years. They admitted that days and nights of curiosity had got the better of them. They called to see if there was room in our lives again for two old friends. And there was.
I didn’t like John standing at the garden gate, yelling “Get back here, you pup!” down the street at the top of his voice. So we needed to agree on a name for the dog. We finally settled on “Sonny”.
We walked her twice a day, usually in the park. Or, to be honest, she walked us. I marvelled even more now at John’s level of energy. He was able to stand straight. And he strode when he walked instead of hobbling from room to room. He slept soundly at night instead of twisting and turning, dreaming and waking.
The doctors were amazed. All they could do was smile and shake their heads. John became absorbed in the life of “my Sonny”, as he called her. And I became absorbed in the life of a man I realised I was only starting to get to know.
5
We met in the most unlikely way. It was on a freezing cold evening in the multistorey car-park at Dublin airport. I was returning from London, having stayed with my brother for a weekend. After paying my parking fee, I realised I had forgotten where I had parked my car. I wandered for over an hour, searching for a blue Fiesta. I went in and out of parking bays, sure that my car would be around the next corner. It wasn’t. I was frozen and close to tears when I heard his voice.
“Are you lost?”
It was a soft, warm voice, filled with concern and a slight touch of amusement. I looked around and stepped out of the glare of his headlights to put a face to the voice. “Yes, I suppose I am,” I said cautiously.
“Get in and I’ll help you find your car.” He pushed open the passenger door. “What are we looking for?”
I was slightly put off by his casual familiarity. But I was so cold and fed up by then I wouldn’t have cared if he were a convicted axe-murderer. We drove around for half an hour and eventually found my Fiesta. By then we knew more about each other than most people find out in a month. And he had asked me out.
He was forty-five, he told me – ten years older than I was – and divorced. He was a painter and a musician. He divided his loyalties depending on which was making the most money at the time.
Looking back, I realise I fell in love with John before his rear window had had time to defrost. I felt close to him, important and wanted. He sounded interested in me. He was dying to know all about me, and I loved telling him.
These were feelings I had never had – feelings that my own marriage had convinced me I never would have. I told him I had been married to a violent bastard who treated me like a doormat for ten years. He had beaten me often and told people he hated me. I divorced at thirty and closed the chapter entitled “Men” in my book of life. I could do without them, I told myself.
Life was so much better spent alone or with girlfriends. Ask me why and I could have given you twenty reasons. Ask me to describe my perfect man and I would have laughed at the very idea.
Then I lost my car and I met John.
Within two weeks we had moved in together. Because he worked from home a lot we were almost always with each other. But things changed quite quickly. Looking back now, I know my biggest fear was losing him. To what, or to whom, I don’t know. I just had this feeling, almost all of the time, that this big, cuddly man was too good for me. I wanted to be with him always. I went to exhibitions and galleries and music festivals as often as I could with him, even though he was always working. I usually sat by the stage if he was playing, or joined the small curious
crowds and wandered around if he was displaying his paintings. I needed to see him, out of the corner of my eye, if I was to know that he was still mine.
My friends told me I was mad. They told me no man was worth that effort. But John was worth it and more. So much so that, in the end, I lost contact with many of my old, trusted friends.
I loved him more than life itself. And we had only known each other for two months. We celebrated our third month together by dining at Toreador, one of our favourite restaurants. John proposed and placed the most exquisite ring on my finger. I still savour the sound of the word “yes”, which I said from such a depth of love and gratitude.
The man of my dreams had asked me to marry him, and I would. For the first time in years my life felt as if it had a purpose: a beginning and middle. My problem was I still could not stop thinking about all the possible “ends” that might be waiting for me.
I lived my life through disappointments but carried a cross like a crusader who had returned from the wars. As long as I could recall the bad times I’d survived I felt strong. My problem was that all I could see ahead were more bad times. I suppose it came from familiarity: if you kick a dog hard and often enough, the animal will begin to expect more kicks. It will come to believe that this is what life is all about. That’s why a badly treated dog will often run away from the owner who begins to treat it kindly.
Unfortunately my strange behaviour caused a rift between us. While we stayed married, we became strangers under our shared roof. John did his painting in the attic, tuned his mandolin in the drawing-room, while I continued my job as a web-design consultant. We worked from different rooms. Our work kept us distracted, away from having to answer the questions we both knew the other one was silently asking.
The busier I became, the less insecure I felt about John. The busier he was, the less he felt he had to reassure me that he really did love me. I knew he loved me but I suppose I never felt he loved me the way I wanted.
Stray Dog Page 1
