Dogballs - Chapter 1

Dogballs

It all hinges on them. Dogballs. Shiny black eggs.

"He's disgusting," Anne says.

The dog is lying on his back, a pinned out frog ready for dissection.
His dewlaps flap back and touch the carpet showing his teeth in a
smile. His front feet are up in begging position.

"Oh he's a boy," Dylan says in that encouraging voice and the dog
thumps his tail, swivels his eye towards Dylan. He knows that tone, he
knows the word boy. Dylan, who spends too much time on the carpet,
reaches out a hand and scratches the dome of the dog's chest. He is
entertained by the back leg jerking as he scratches. Dylan has found
the spot.

"He peed up a woman's leg yesterday," Anne says.

"Good boy," Dylan croons. The tail thump, thumps.

The worst day of Anne's life had been when they had driven miles to the
beach. Miles and miles. She thought she would die before they got
there, Dylan squinting at the B roads, unable to tell left from right.
The dog leaning over her shoulder and huffing out of the open window,
drooling. Finally they had parked up, bare dunes ahead, only one other
car in sight. A brown Volvo. Next to it a huge family on a patchwork of
blankets, picnicking. A funny, treeless landscape. The kind of place
Dylan loved. Anne wasn't thinking, the dog was past her in a black
moment, shooting off, nose down for smells.

"Dylan," Anne warned. The dog was tracking the Volvo family. He
streaked towards them, a missile of intent. Anne watched, paralysed as
he cocked his leg and peed into the Volvo family's picnic basket. The
Volvo family froze. Anne got back into the car.
Dylan dealt with it, money changed hands. The dog was brought back.
They drove home in silence. They never even saw the sea.

"He's got to have them off," Anne says. She watches Dylan close his
legs. "Two bricks," Anne says. A look of pain crosses Dylan's face.
Agony, rather.

Anne has not told Dylan that she has thought about doing it herself. It
couldn't be too difficult. She has a scalpel in her art tools. She can
sew. There can only be a stringy bit holding them on. It wouldn't take
much. But Anne has not turned her mind to the problem of anaesthesia.
In her mind the dog just lies there, like now, his shiny dogballs on
show and she has them off with a quick snicker snack. Sometimes she
uses the pinking shears. They were her mother's. Anne leaves a neat
scar and the dog just gets up and trots off to sniff in the garden,
unworried.

"He'd miss them wouldn't you, boysy?" Dylan says.

"How could he miss them," Anne says. "He doesn't even know about them."
She folds her arms. "That's ridiculous," Anne says. "You're
projecting."

"Of course he knows about them. They're part of him."

"But he doesn't know what they are," Anne says. "What they're
FOR."

"He doesn't need to. He's an animal. He's whole. He works as a whole."
Dylan smooths the dog's ear out onto the carpet. "Gestalt boysy, aren't
you?"

"I'm telling you, he wouldn't miss them," Anne says, rising and
clicking off the TV.

"I'm telling you mate," said Dylan's friend Mike, squeezing a squash
ball in warm water in the locker room sink "she's got a castration
complex."

"Sweetheart," said Anne's friend Helen, swishing red wine round the
balloon of her glass "he's living THROUGH that dog. You want to watch
him. It's all about virility."

"You want to watch yourself, mate," said Mike, with a nod in a
southerly direction.

"Are things all right in that department?" said Helen, with a gesture
down below.

When they fetched him, Anne had brought him back inside her zip up
sweatshirt. He smelled sweet, she thought he still had milk on his
chin. They had watched him, waited for him to wake and play. They had
felt wonder as he tottered about the house scared of his reflection in
the patio door. Anne felt he was just on loan, or visiting, that he
didn't really belong to them.

"He's been humping his bed," Anne says as she squeezes toothpaste onto
her brush. Dylan is peeing.

"He's an adolescent," Dylan says, flushing the toilet. "It's normal."
He reaches for his brush. "He'll grow out of it."

"He's gone all macho," Anne said to Helen.

"Just like our rabbit," Helen said. "He got gonads over night. A dick
like a pine cone. Started rogering the gineau pig. Didn't mind which
end."

"He tried to hump a pekingnese in the park yesterday," Anne said. "I
was mortified."

"Mind you it was a long haired gineau pig," Helen lit a cigarette. "You
couldn't tell which end was which."

"It belonged to an old lady," Anne said.

"That was gratitude for you," Helen said, "The vet said a gineau pig
would be company."

"I mean, trying to hump a pekingnese," Anne said.

"You are talking about the dog, aren't you?" Helen said.

Things are all right in that department. Regular. Satisfying. Almost
nightly. Often on weekend mornings, lazy and slow. Anne loves Dylan,
she is sure of it.

It was Dylan's idea to get a boy dog. It saved the trouble, he said, of
all that heat business with females. Keeping them in or getting them
done which was pricey. Or dealing with puppies. Females ran to fat
anyhow and he fancied a boy dog. Lean. Masculine. Dylan's family had
always had dogs. They were doggy. They had a rambling scruffy house
with worn lino in a big kitchen and just about everything tumbling
about in there. Kids, animals, several unspecified moulds and funghi in
corners.

Anne loved it at Dylan's, where it didn't matter if there were extras
at the dinner table. In any case there was hardly likely to be any
dinner at any predictable time, Dylan's mother was often to be found
playing the cello and losing track of time. Ella she was called and had
her hair in a bun. She was big and glorious. And vague.
She would wave her bow at anyone who asked tricky questions like when's
dinner, or indeed is there any dinner?
Anne fitted well due to her way with conjuring pasta dishes from
virtually nothing. There were hardly any staple foodstuffs at Dylan's
but there were always luxuries. Anchovies and olives and best smoked
back bacon and always, always double cream.
Ella didn't mind Anne staying over though it would have given Anne's
mother heart failure to know that Anne shared Dylan's three quarter
bed. Anne lost her virginity in that bed and shortly after that Dylan's
sister, or one of them, the impossibly beautiful fifteen year old waif
with pre Raphaelite hair who was called Fleur, appeared in the bedroom
with a tray of tea and toast. It was three a.m. Fleur settled herself
cross legged between them and dispensed her goodies. She was wearing
some brown paisley men's pajamas and still looked ravishing. She gave
Anne an enduring need to eat after having sex. Conditioning Anne
supposed. Pavlovian.

Anne is lying in the double bed listening to Dylan inn the shower.
Downstairs the dog is shut in the kitchen to sleep. Anne is grateful
that Dylan insisted the dog sleep there from the very beginning. She'd
been all for taking the little puppy to bed with them but Dylan was not
sentimental. Now Anne is glad.

"Sure it's not a baby substitute?" Helen remarked the first time she
came round after they'd got the puppy. Anne was sitting on the floor
with the puppy cradled in her arms. He was sound asleep and Anne had
pointed out the little crop of white hairs that she had first mistaken
for a milky chin.

"What do you mean?" Anne said.

"Well sweetheart, you're not getting any younger." Helen made the sound
of ticking.

Helen had four kids, the oldest already at college. She had just had
what she referred to as her tubal ligation.
"No more sprogs now," she'd said, groggy from the op. "All tied
off."
But Anne didn't know what she felt about babies.

"Well the good thing about this baby is he can go in kennels." Anne
said, firmly, dumping the pup onto the floor. He got up, confused,
tripped over his feet and then squatted right in front of Helen. He
left a circle of pee the size of a fifty pence piece. Helen
frowned.

Now he pees up things. Women's legs, picnic hampers. He lifts his leg
every two minutes on walks. He slavers after smells. Anne is repulsed
the way he comes back foamy at the mouth. Excited. It makes her want to
throw up. But Dylan doesn't mind. He takes the dog running, he has
trained him to heel and to stay and to come when he's called. They are
a team. Along the canal, Dylan sweating and breathing, running
steadily, wiping his forehead on the sleeve of his t-shirt. That
gesture is so Dylan. The dog looping ahead, then getting left behind,
lifting his leg into the hawthorn, sniffing smells then racing to catch
up again.
Anne stays at home and reads.

Dylan slides into bed next to Anne. She smells his fresh soapiness, he
is cold and still slightly damp. She wants him. She puts down her book,
she wasn't reading it anyway. He lifts him arm for her to settle
against him on her side, head on his chest and her hand naturally falls
on his belly, creeps lower. Dylan is ready. Anne's hand finds him hard,
slides down to feel his balls.
"Ooh," Dylan says.

"Things are perfectly fine in that department," Anne told Helen.

"Still at it like knives?" Helen said. "Wait til you've been married
twenty years."

"We'll never be married twenty years," Anne said. "We'll never be
married at all."

Dylan doesn't believe in marriage. Like he thinks boy dogs should
remain whole. It's OK for the man, Anne's mother's voice says in her
head.

When they are done, Anne feels she can't move, the whole of her is
leaden, pressed into the mattress. She is surrendered wholly.
"I'll miss you the weekend," Dylan says.

Dylan has a race. Three marathons in one weekend. Anne can't stand to
see him after one marathon. Eyes deep in his head, skin grey and grey
spit spinning itself from his mouth corners out along the line of his
jaw, dried. It sickens her. Dylan is thin as a wire. Three marathons.
He is off on Thursday night. He asked her to come but it's such a boys
thing. He's no company when he's racing, getting himself mentally
prepared. She'd only be bored and it's bound to piss with rain.

"Sure you won't come?"

"Sure." Anne says. "Plenty to do here and besides who'd look after the
dog?"

The kennel thing went badly wrong. They left him for a week to go to
France. Brittany, camping. When they got back there were several
answerphone messages from Kennel Woman, as Dylan called her. Each one
more hysterical. They went straight out to pick him up and when they
got there found he had eaten the kennel.

"Eaten it?" Dylan said to kennel woman, and stiff with rage, Kennel
Woman took them to see. All the other kennels seemed cosy, but twhen
they got to his all he had was bare wire walls.

"I've never had a dog like it," Kennel Woman said through tightened
lips. "He ate it all."

Dylan and Anne looked down at him and he looked up at them. Scattered
around the kennel were spongy traces of yellow insulating foam,
splinters of wood, little fronds of hessian.
"I can't understand it," Dylan said. "He never chews at home."

"Chews!" Kennel Woman spat out a twisted laugh.

Anne got into the car. Dylan sorted it out. Money changed hands. The
dog never went to kennels again.