My Dog Doesn't Like Me (2 page)

Chapter Three

When I said my dog doesn't like me, you might not have noticed that important little word ‘my'. Ugly is supposed to be
mine
. He was my present for my eighth birthday.

I had always wanted a dog. Mum and Dad decided it was a good idea for me to have one for a few reasons. Firstly, having a big, bossy sister who is ten years older than me means I can sometimes be a bit lonely. And although no-one said it to me, I think my family felt I needed to get out and exercise a
bit more.

‘With big feet like yours, you'll eventually grow into them,' Grandad says, but the rest of my family say I'm ‘on the chubby side'. Walking a dog seems to be one way people keep fit. But all of the walks Ugly and I take are disastrous. He goes flat out on his leash, dragging me along so that my feet nearly fly off the ground.

But back to my birthday. Turning eight felt good. I've always liked the shape of an eight – like a racetrack. And the idea of a dog for my present seemed fantastic. In the Bright family, we have a birthday breakfast. You have whatever your favourite food is, and you get to open your pressies after that. I had pancakes, berries, and ice-cream, and then I ripped into my pressies. They all had a dog theme.

First were Mum and Dad's presents. Mum had sewn me some new bedroom curtains and a cushion cover made with amazing material that had pictures of different dog breeds all over it. Dad gave me a red tartan dog collar with a matching red leash, and a padded dog bed up on legs, with raised sides to keep out nasty breezes.

Grandad gave me two bowls (one for water and the other for food) and a book called
Lassie,
which is about a really faithful, clever dog.

Gretchen gave me a bag of dog biscuits and some worming tablets. She said, ‘You could do with some worming tablets, too, Eccle.'

I felt a bit hurt. Gretchen rolled her eyes and said, ‘Just joking!' – words she often throws at me after she says something mean.

Mum said, ‘Ease up, Gretchen. It's your brother's birthday.'

Gretchen's mouth went the shape of a squashed strawberry. She leant back in her chair and crossed her arms. Because it was my birthday and because I was now eight years old, I tried to be grown-up, so I shrugged and smiled. But I know that it's unfair to say mean things and then pretend it was a joke.

Anyway, after Gretchen's ‘joke', Dad got us all talking about what sort of dog I could choose and where we'd find one. We all agreed that the dog should be medium-sized. We'd get him or her from the Dog Shelter, which is an orphanage for dogs. I liked the idea of rescuing an unwanted orphan.

I took the dog collar and leash to school to show the class.

Travis Petropoulous said, ‘Those are weird birthday presents.' But most of the kids were happy and excited for me.

My birthday ended really well. I came home from school with the two friends I'd been allowed to invite – Hugh Cravenforth and my ex-fiancée, Millicent Dunn. (Milly and I were engaged for a week in our first year of school, but that got boring. She wanted flowers and a ring – all that sort of stuff. Now we're just good friends.) Mum had arrived home early from work and had baked me a cake in the shape of a smiling dog with its tail sticking happily up in the air.

Before we got stuck into cake and sausage rolls, and ‘wore it all over our faces' as Grandad called it, Mum took a photo of us. It's now sitting in a frame on my dressing table. I'm standing in the middle, between my friends. I'm proudly holding the leash and the tartan dog collar. My hair is wet and freshly combed, but straw-coloured bits are already sticking out. I can see I had more of a tummy back then. Hugh is on my left. He has dark, curly hair, and he's tall and bony – big knees and elbows. Milly is on my other side. She has her light-brown hair pulled back in a ponytail with a big blue ribbon. She has the friendliest smile, with a wide gap between her two front teeth.

After the party food, Grandad invited us down to the back garden to help him build a dog kennel. The kennel was a real surprise. Grandad had bought all of the wood and nails. There was even a plan he had torn out of a weekly magazine. Grandad said we'd build a big kennel so it could fit just about any size of dog. Being good with handwriting, Hugh painted a little sign to go over the doorway – 
DOG HOUSE
. Milly and I held the wood together while Grandad sawed and nailed. He did a brilliant job considering he'd had a hip replacement only three months before.

Building that kennel was one of the best times I've ever
spent with my grandfather. He isn't a talkative man. In fact, he sounds a bit grumpy even when he's being nice. If someone is unlucky enough to ring our house and Grandad answers the phone, he has a strange way of saying a member of our family isn't home.
For example, if someone asks to speak to Dad, he'll more than likely say, ‘No. He went to Timbuktu and hasn't been seen since.' There'll be silence at the other end of the phone.

But when Grandad was working with us on the kennel, he asked us questions about school and our teachers, and he even told us about his schooldays way out in the bush, ‘Where the crows fly backwards to keep the dust out of their eyes'. At Grandad's country school, you'd get about five grades in the one classroom. And even more amazing was how the kids in primary school all over Australia were given teeny-weeny glass bottles of milk, the size of a small jam jar, for play-lunch so that Aussie kids would grow up with strong bones. The milk was free from the government.

By the time it was coming on dark, the kennel was half built, which was good progress. Then Dad got home, Mum called us in for spaghetti (my favourite dinner), and Gretchen got off the internet in time to eat with us.

During dinner, Dad announced we were going to the Dog Shelter the next day. I was over the moon. I was going to get my doggy birthday present.

Chapter Four

All the Bright family went to the animal shelter with me, but I was the one who was going to make the final choice. It was one of the best but saddest days of my life – both at once. There was cage after cage of lost, unwanted, or abandoned dogs. I wished I could give them all a home.

You wouldn't believe how many different sorts of dogs there are. Mum has a funny book she's kept since she was a kid where you flip half a page over and create new dogs from the front of one page and the back of another. Heaps of dogs looked like they'd come out of Mum's book – as if some scientist had played about with them. Some were smooth, some hairy. Spotty, silky-smooth, curly, and scruffy. Brown, black, blonde. Some had floppy ears, some pointy ears. Beady eyes or big owl eyes. Some long noses, some little noses. Some were as small as your hand; others were as big as a small horse. Some were full-grown and some were puppies. And the noise! Barking, howling, sniffling, whimpering, yapping, yowling. It's like most of the dogs knew that when visitors came, it was their chance to have a home. They were calling for attention.

Each of us had our favourites. Mum fell in love with a cute spaniel with one leg missing. Dad liked a young Kelpie-cross, but he said working dog breeds need lots of room to run around. Gretchen went nuts over a tiny dog with bulging eyes; I swear it was the size of a rat. Grandad didn't say much, but he spent a lot of time patting a big old German Shepherd who was so skinny you could see her ribs.

How was I supposed to choose? Luckily, it wasn't going to be up to me. I got chosen.

I had stopped to look at three fat puppies with shaggy fringes hanging over their eyes and wiry sandy-brown hair on their bodies. One was curled up by itself in a corner. The other two were play-fighting. The bigger one was winning. She was a girl. You could tell because she didn't have boy bits. She was a rough player – always knocking her little brother off his feet and pouncing on him. But he was great at wriggling out from under her. Then he'd jump on his sister, but she'd throw him down in a sort of karate hold. He'd squirm and nip. She'd lose her grip a moment, he'd escape, and then it would begin all over again.

That sister is just like Gretchen
, I thought.
And her little brother has the same sort of mussed-up, straw-coloured hair as me. He's also tough, just like I want to be
 
…

‘Never say die,' said Grandad quietly over my shoulder.

‘What does that mean?' I asked.

‘Never ever give in,' said Grandad. He patted my shoulder and walked on to join Mum, Dad and Gretchen at another cage.

I laughed. I knew what it was like to be the little brother who could never stay on top for long. The shaggy little brother must have heard me. He walked away from his game with his sister and trotted over to me. His bright, intelligent eyes looked at me from under his fringe. And I swear he was smiling with his neat little needle teeth.

He jumped up against the wire and looked straight into my eyes. His big sister wasn't going to let him speak to anyone else. She bounded up behind him, jumped on his back, and latched onto the loose skin around his neck. But little brother shook off his sister – and he kept looking at me.

‘This one!' I called over my shoulder to Mum, Dad, Gretchen and Grandad.

Gretchen was the first to walk across to me.

‘That?' said Gretchen.

‘Yep,' I said.

‘It's as ugly as sin!'

Gretchen's words helped me make up my mind even more.

‘He's the one I want,' I said. ‘And I'll call him Ugly.'

Chapter Five

Maybe my dog hates being called Ugly. Maybe that's why he doesn't like me. But I don't think it's that. The day I picked him, he said
thank you
by licking me all over the face. Anyway, if he doesn't like his name, he gets plenty of variations. Sometimes he's Uggie or Ug or Ug-Dog or Ug-Paws. Like me, Ugly looks like he's growing into his paws. He's over a year old and still growing.

It might seem silly to get so upset about a dog, but for so long I'd had this dream of what owning a dog would be like. I pictured myself walking along with him, my hand resting on his back. He would keep to my side like a loyal companion. He'd be waiting for me at the door when I came home. He'd fetch things and do tricks and come when I called. He'd sleep on the floor at the end of my bed and guard me all night long. He'd be my best friend.

But instead, Ugly is Mum's best friend.

It hurts.

He doesn't obey me. I'm not even on his list as second-best friend. There's Grandad, then Dad, then even Gretchen comes before me – and she's just as bossy with the dog as she is with me. So nothing adds up. Ugly has been a disappointing birthday present. It's as if Mum got the present, not me.

And Ugly does mean things. He pounces on me and bites my ankles. A few weeks ago, he got into my room and pulled my Ancient Greece project off my desk. I'd made the famous temple the Parthenon out of squillions of matchsticks. Ugly chewed up the lot. The carpet was covered in tiny bits of wood like straw.

On top of that, I've had enough of being told off for not properly controlling or doing my bit for Ugly.

On the day I ran away, the whole family was on my back.

‘Have you fed the dog? You keep forgetting.'

‘Ugly's just pulled Mum's apple cake off the kitchen table.'

‘There's no water in Ugly's bowl.'

‘Ugly's digging a hole under the fence into Grandad's vegie garden.'

‘Ugly's stolen Gretchen's lace knickers and torn them to pieces.'

‘Ugly's had an accident on the kitchen floor. Get a bucket of water and a cloth and wipe it up.'

‘Ugly's chewed one of Dad's antique chess pieces and another one's missing.'

‘Ugly's dragging Gretchen's tights around the backyard.'

‘When was the last time you took Ugly for a walk?'

Well, just to answer that question: on that horrible day that I was sent to my room, the last time I'd taken Ugly for a walk was an hour before I ran away. And what did he do on that walk? He took off after another dog. He pulled me along on his leash until I tripped and gashed my knee on stones. I lost hold of the leash and nearly killed myself trying to get across the road to grab him. Then I had to pull him away from a fight with a nasty big black dog. Ugly thought it was really funny. His tail was wagging hard. When it hit my legs, it hurt. I yelled at Ugly.

The black dog's tall owner, a man with a dark beard, told me I shouldn't yell at a dog and that I needed to have more control over him.

‘Whose dog is it?' asked the owner.

‘Mine,' I said.

‘Well, you should know better.'

But is Ugly mine? I get told off by everyone about him, but he's really Mum's dog.

I tried to explain this to Mum by using an idiom we had learnt in class. She went ballistic. She didn't like what I said even if I
had
been taught it by our teacher
.
Just the other day, Miss Jolly taught us all these famous sayings like
crocodile tears,
which means pretend tears, and
snake in the grass,
which means someone who's sneaky. Miss Jolly calls them
idioms
. An idiom is understood in your own language, but if you tried to say the same thing in another language (like Japanese or Italian, for example) people would get very muddled. Maybe you would speak to someone in Italian and tell them they were a snake in the grass and they'd stare at you and say, ‘I am not a snake. There's no grass here. I'm a human standing in my kitchen!'

There's one idiom I especially remembered. It's
Indian giver
. It's where someone gives you a present and then takes it back.

When I got home from that last walk, all bloody and scratched from rescuing Ugly, I'd told Mum what had happened and what the black dog's owner had said.

‘Well, there's some truth in his words,' said Mum. ‘You don't do enough for Ugly. You've been quite lazy.'

There it was again. Blame me.

So I said to Mum, ‘You're an Indian giver. You stole my dog. He's your dog now and you're both hopeless.'

Boy, did that start something. Mum looked red in the face like a volcano about to spew lava. She chased me round and round the kitchen table, all the while shouting things like, ‘Wait till I get my hands on you!' and, ‘In my day, they'd have washed your mouth out with soap and water,' and, ‘You're not just a lazy lump; you're a whingeing little creep!'

So Mum thought I was a lazy lump as well as a whinger and a creep. Now I knew for sure. Mum didn't love me.

‘You love that stupid dog more than me!' I yelled back. ‘You're a bad mother!'

‘How dare you!' cried Mum.
Wham.
I felt a wet dishcloth on the back of my neck. Mum was as out of control as Ugly had been with the black dog. I don't know what she'd have done if she'd caught me. As it was, I escaped to my bedroom, and that was when I started packing my things to run away.