When Dogs Cry (16 page)

Slap. Pause. Slap.

The blood was still dripping slowly to the ground, only this time, Jarrod fell down with it. It was in his hair,
his hands and on his clothes. At one point, I thought he might drown in it.

The only problem here, was this:

It wasn't real.

It wasn't real because Rube and I waited down by the old train yard and the guy didn't show up. The shadows we saw in the alley turned into a different side street, leaving us stranded alone at the bottom of the street.

‘He's late,' were Rube's first words at a few minutes past eight. By eight-thirty, he was annoyed, and by quarter to nine, he was about ready to put his fist through the fence.

That was when I saw the imaginary fight. It was a fairly typical scene where Rube was concerned. Admittedly, it was unusual for him to get in so early. On most occasions the other guy would try to surprise him, but Rube was always too fast. So this time, for variety, I imagined Rube being the one to start out. If that ever happened, it was over before it began. Rube was a killer in a fight for quite a few reasons. He didn't hesitate, he wasn't afraid to get hurt, he loved winning, and he had brilliant timing. Even if he didn't hit someone hard, it hurt, because he timed it perfectly and hit them exactly where he intended to.

‘Maybe he got the time wrong,' I suggested, but Rube shot me a look of
You're kiddin' me aren't y'?

‘We'll wait till nine,' he concluded. ‘If he doesn't show up then, we'll go home.'

We waited, even though we knew it was pointless. The guy wasn't coming. Rube knew it. I knew it. Personally, I was annoyed because I could have been with
Octavia. Instead, I was standing on a filthy-cold street, waiting for someone who was never going to show up.

Still, I wasn't as angry as Rube.

He started prowling the fence line, repeating one word.

‘Bastard.'

He said it countless times, and by nine o'clock, he turned around and grabbed the fence by the woven wire. I expected him to intensify further, but to my surprise, he relaxed. He only stared for one last moment and then we began heading home. The last thing he did was lightly hit the fence. It still rattled.

‘What are y' gonna do now?' I asked, when we were nearly home.

‘About this bloke who wants to kill me or tonight?'

‘Both.'

‘Well, about the bloke—I'm just gonna forget him. And tonight, I think I might hit the bag in the basement. I'll take the radio down, turn it up loud, and I'll hit it till I can't stand up any more.

That was exactly what he did, except for the not being able to stand up part. What happened was I called Octavia to tell her nothing happened, and I went down to the basement with Rube. When Sarah came down as well, she took a good shot of Rube hitting the bag. His face on that picture could only be described as intense, and you could see how the bag was flinching at the force of his hands.

‘Not bad,' he decided when she showed him.

He didn't ask to have it though, so Sarah took it up to
her room, before returning with cards. For a long time after that we sat around in the basement, playing cards with the radio calling out around us.

A few hours later, Sarah was first to go to bed, leaving Rube and me in the basement.

On his way out, he gave the bag one last punch, unplugged the radio and took it back to our room.

I slept easily for a change and spent Sunday with Octavia down at the harbour.

It was like that on most Sundays. I did school work in the morning and caught the train to the quay. If I had time, I walked. Octavia still came on Saturday afternoons, and during the week she mainly came on Wednesdays. Sometimes, before she left, we walked Miffy. A lot of those Wednesday nights, it was me holding the leash, Octavia smiling next to me, and Rube checking that no-one we knew could see us. As always, Miffy pranced along, sometimes coughing, sometimes licking his snout, and sometimes barking, if Rube was in the mood to stir him up.

Sometimes I'd go to Octavia's place and we'd see a movie down there. I didn't ask any more about inside the house. Sometimes I even forgot all about it. I was just grateful that I was with her and she was okay.

There were times we were together when I couldn't help but smile.

‘What?' she'd ask. ‘What is it?'

‘I don't know,' was the only reply I could come up with. There was no particular reason for it. I'd look at her and listen. That was enough.

Every Sunday she played her music down at the harbour, and on most Saturdays that was where she came from when she arrived in the afternoon. I could hear the change jangling in her jacket pocket.

A month passed by and one Saturday night I took Octavia to meet Steve. He liked her, and played her some old records that impressed her.

‘Some good stuff here,' she said.

‘I know.'

On the way back home that night, she said, ‘He loves you too, you know.'

I tried to shrug it off.

‘No Cam.' She pulled me to stop on the footpath. ‘He does.' I realised then that, with this girl, there were no truths I could hide.

‘He looks like he's sorry about the things he said to you,' she continued as we kept walking.

‘But glad he said them.'

She agreed.

It was a cold Tuesday night at the start of August when Rube finally got another phone call. This time, though, it was Julia. She told him she'd gone back to the previous bloke—the Phonecaller, as Rube and I came to know him.

‘He's still after you,' she warned him.

‘Really?' Rube was bored. ‘What the hell'd I do this time?' He listened. ‘Well you just tell him to come on over some day and we'll get it over with in the backyard.'

Julia hung up.

‘Scrubber's gone for good?' I asked.

‘Scrubber's gone,' he confirmed.

It all seemed to be over, and like he'd told me, Rube didn't have another girl in the picture yet. All he did was work hard and hit the bag in the basement. The phone calls still came for him, but nowhere near as often. Sometimes he'd abuse friends because he thought it was the Phonecaller again.

‘Ah, Jeff,' he'd laugh. ‘Sorry mate, I thought you were someone else.'

He came down to the harbour with Octavia and me a few times, but he always ended up leaving us alone and going his own way. He wasn't unhappy or lonely. That wasn't in Rube's character. Something always happened when he was around. If it didn't, he went looking for it.

‘No offence Octavia,' he said one Sunday night, ‘but I'm off women.' We were on the porch after walking Miffy.

‘Till the next one,' Octavia countered.

‘Of course,' and he flashed us his trademark smile and went inside.

Down in the underground that night, everything seemed in place. Octavia and I waited for the train and it was like the world I lived in had finally found the right direction.

A few days later, a tragedy unhinged itself and landed at our front door.

 

okayness

For the first time, a city crowd confronts me on this journey through night, street and darkness. There are swarms of people coming towards me, and each one, I notice, is faceless. A blankness shrouds their eyes and they have no expression at all.

We turned onto a street and there they were, flowing towards us.

The dog weaves his way through, and I follow him, picking my own gaps in the surge of people.

Occasionally, I see a face that's kept its form.

At one point, I see Sarah finding her own way through, and at another, when I trip, a hand helps me up and it's my father's face that meets me when I look up.

I continue. I have no choice.

The thing is, I don't mind.

I want the crowded world to turn the way it is
—
to make me find my own way through it, even if that's a fight sometimes.

As I make my way through, I feel okayness reaching through me.

The funny thing is that
okayness is
not a real word. It's not in the dictionary.

But it's in me.

T
ORRENTIAL RAIN POURED ITSELF DOWN, BATTERING THE
streets and rooftops of the city on a darkened Tuesday afternoon. Someone was smashing their fist into our front door.

‘Hang on!' I yelled. I was eating toast in the lounge room.

I opened the door and there was a small balding man on his knees, completely drenched.

‘Keith?' I asked.

He looked up at me. I dropped the toast. Rube was behind me now, asking, ‘What's goin' on?'

Keith's face was covered in sorrow. Dribbles of rain drooled down his face as he slowly picked himself up. He fixed his eyes on our kitchen window and said it, with a crack running through his voice.

‘Miffy.' He almost went to pieces again. ‘He's dead. In the backyard.'

Rube and I looked at each other.

We ran out the back and clambered over the fence as the back door slammed behind us. Halfway over the fence, I saw it. There was a soggy ball of fluff lying motionless amongst the grass.

No,
I thought, as I landed on the other side. Disbelief held me down inside my footsteps, making my body heavy but my heart wild.

Rube also hit the ground. His feet slapped down into the sodden grass, and where my footsteps ended, his began.

I kneeled down in the pouring rain.

The dog was dead.

I touched him.

The dog was dead.

I turned to Rube who was kneeling next to me.

The dog was dead.

We sat there a while, completely silent as the rain fell like needles onto our soaked bodies. The fluffy brown fur of Miffy the pain-in-the-arse Pomeranian was being dented by the rain, but it was still soft, and clammy. Both Rube and I stroked him. A few stray tears even sprang into my eyes as I recalled all the times we walked him at night with smoke climbing from our lungs and with laughter in our voices. I heard us complaining about him, ridiculing him, but deep down, caring for him.
Even loving him,
I thought.

Rube's face was devastated.

‘Poor little bastard,' he said. His voice struggled from his mouth.

I wanted to say something but was completely speechless. I'd always known this day would come, but I didn't imagine it like this. Not pouring rain. Not a pathetic frozen lump of fur. Not a feeling as depressed as the one I felt at this exact moment.

Rube picked him up and carried him under the shelter of Keith's back verandah.

The dog was dead.

Even once the rain stopped, the feeling inside me didn't subside. We kept patting him. Rube even said sorry to him, probably for all the verbal abuse he'd levelled at him almost every time he saw him.

Keith arrived after a while, but it was mainly Rube and me who stayed. For about an hour or so, we sat with him.

‘He's getting stiff,' I pointed out at one stage.

‘I know,' Rube replied, and I'd be lying if I didn't say a smirk didn't cross our faces. It was the situation, I guess. We were cold, soaking wet and hungry, and in a way, this was Miffy's final revenge on us—guilt.

Here we were, just about frozen in our neighbour's backyard, patting a dog that was getting stiffer and stiffer by the minute, all because we'd consistently insulted him and then had the audacity to love him.

‘Well forget this,' Rube finally said. He gave Miffy a last pat and told the truth with a wavering voice. He said, ‘Miffy—you were undoubtedly a pathetic individual. I hated you, loved you, and wore a hood on my head so no-one saw me with you. It's been a pleasure.' He gave him a final pat, on the dog's head. ‘Now, I'm
leavin',' he pointed out. ‘Just because you had the nerve to die under your clothesline in the middle of what was practically a hurricane, I'm not about to get pneumonia because of it. So goodbye—and let's pray the next dog Keith and his wife decide to get is actually a
dog
and not a ferret, rat or rodent in disguise. Goodbye.'

He walked away, into the darkness of the backyard, but as he climbed the fence, he turned and gave Miffy one last look. One last goodbye. Then he was gone.

I hung around a little while longer, and when Keith's wife came home from work she was quite distressed about what I was beginning to call ‘The Miffy Incident'. She kept repeating one thing. ‘We'll get him cremated. We've gotta get that dog cremated.' Apparently, Miffy was a gift from her dead mother who insisted that all corpses, including her own, had to be burned. ‘Gotta get that dog cremated,' she went on, but rarely did she even look at him. Strangely enough, I had the feeling it was Rube and me who loved that dog the most—a dog whose ashes would most likely end up on top of the TV or video, or in the liquor cabinet for safe keeping.

Soon, I said my last goodbye, running my hand over the stiff body and silky fur, still a little shocked, by all of it.

I went home and told everyone the news of the cremation. Needless to say, everyone was amazed, especially Rube. Or maybe amazed isn't quite the right word for my brother's reaction. Appalled was more like it.

‘Cremate him!?' he shouted. He couldn't believe it.
‘Did you see that dog!? Did you see how bloody soggy he was!? They'll have to dry him out first or else he'll never even burn! He'll just smoulder! They'll have to get the blow-dryer out!'

I couldn't help but laugh.

It was the blow-dryer, I think.

I kept imagining Keith standing over the poor mongrel with the blow-dryer on full speed and his wife calling out from the back door:

‘Is he dry yet, love? Can we chuck him in the fire?'

‘No, not yet darlin'!' he'd reply. ‘I'll need about another ten minutes I reckon. I just can't get this damn tail dry!' Miffy had one of the bushiest tails in the history of the world. Trust me.