Byron Easy (8 page)

Once inside, diminutive Concepcion—surely convinced that she had experienced the most traumatising twenty minutes available to any mammal—was gently set down to await the attentions of our three shark-like tomcats.

It took a while, as it always does for a new animal, to get the run of the place. To stop vibrating under the bedclothes hoping the hellish, unfamiliar world they’ve been plunged into will vanish and be replaced by the comfort of their old stinky pen and the company of their mother, father, brothers and sisters. To stop pissing like a Tiny Tears doll the moment they’re picked up. To stop barking at you or their own berserk reflection in the bedroom mirror. To make friends with three grimly established and territorial tomcats (or jungle lions, as they must appear to a chihuahua) … But Concepcion managed it somehow. She pulled it off by pretending that she—the smallest dog in the world—was in fact the biggest dog in the world. Her impersonation, standing all of six inches in her stockinged paws, of a drooling, terror-toothed Dobermann or pit bull was really something to be witnessed. She would bark herself to a croak at approaching postmen, friends, vets, in-laws or televised dogs, her rancour becoming progressively more intense (and striped with a certain concussed bewilderment) as she discovered the reaction she invariably received was not fear, but laughter. Oh, what amusement she caused in the street! On the rare occasions that she consented to walking on a lead in that scampy, pizzicato way that all lapdogs have (as opposed to her usual method of transportation—that of being dragged unwillingly across pavements on her belly like a kind of canine sleigh), the looks she and we used to elicit were treasureable. Small children would point in frenzied amazement: ‘Mummy, mummy, look at the puppy!’ And that was when, at eighteen months, doomed Concepcion was already a fully expanded, six-nippled bitch. Grown men, scaffolders, labourers and tattoo-wristed car thieves would weep openly as the little doll did her heartbreaking, scurrilous wiggle down the sweating High Street. Owners of mangy pooches and lactating Labradors would turn up their commoners’ noses with envy when they saw our formidable miniature approaching.

It was then, genetically fascinated, and also not a little sorry for the poor circus-attraction wretch, that we decided it was a good time to find her a mate. Enter Fidellino, or rather, enter a fantastically libidinous hairy Swiss roll called Rusty Gold, sold to us by a devious builder in Totteridge for a hundred and fifty quid. Obviously, he couldn’t stay Rusty Gold. After all the Ricios and Juans and Xaviers and Joaquins had been worked through, I timidly suggested Fidel, as his straggled pubic hairpiece of a coat reminded me of Castro’s beard. With a slight alteration, Mandy loved it, and Fidellino he became. It was Spanish-sounding after all. We both hoped he would gallantly go on to sire many children.

Didn’t I mention my wife’s name was Mandy? Always hated it. Wouldn’t you, O hip and cultured reader? Wouldn’t you despise its silly vowels? Wouldn’t you wince slightly at the altar or tatty registry office desk as your sober marrier spaketh the sentence: ‘Do you, Mandy, take this …?’ Or maybe you’re married to a Mandy already and the name has become a kind of phonetic blank, something not heard any more. I
always
heard it; always had a problem with it. Always cringed at having to introduce her, at seeing it on an envelope, or calling her name in a public place, or saying the sentence: ‘Mandy, I love you.’ It was that perky, tooth-decaying last syllable that was to blame. Dee. Like Suki or Debi or Plebi—those abysmal, made-up Page Three monikers. (And before you ask, plain Amanda was never an option. Not even her mother had called her Amanda; her daughter having been conceived to the castrato strains of 10cc’s ‘I’m Mandy, Fly Me’ in the deluxe wedding suite of a Bayswater hotel.)

I used to exhaust myself with tumours of research into an appropriate nickname for her. I even considered cooking up an
acronym
, but there aren’t any, not sufficiently romantic anyway, for any girl’s name anywhere—unless her initials spell L.U.V. All I came up with was ‘Man’. (‘Hi, here’s my woman: Man. And my name’s Tarzan.’) Or Dee. Or worse, Dee Dee. But the name refused to conform to any meddling, so there it stayed: irreducibly, eternally, miserably, Mandy.

Let me stop now, lest this effort of hate deform me for ever.

Fidel and Concepcion never did produce that baying litter of fluffy pedigrees (Mandy with one rapacious eye as always on how much she could flog them for). The ratted, roasted beige carpets of our flat never ticked with the patter of tiny, costly paws for the simple reason that the bitch was too small. Concepcion, that is. Mr Morris, our morose and farmyard-odoured vet, gravely broke the news to us one rainy, work-dodging morning after Mandy had failed to obtain the exact date and hour of when she could expect a female chihuahua to reach her first season. For this information we went to Antonia.

Antonia, Mandy’s best friend, was also dog-mad. Mandy had called her at
Acquisition
, the fiendishly elitist antiques quarterly she worked for. Antonia, a diplomat’s daughter who had grown up on a farm surrounded by pedigree dogs, had just returned from New York, a city she claimed to have first visited while still in the womb. In general, I was distrustful of people who had been to New York early in life—it spoke of more vivid, more worldly upbringings than my own. After all, NY was the great aspirational visit. The one you talked and worried about until you had the money or the luck, or both, to go there—and Antonia had been to the Big Apple lots, and (if she were to be believed, the truth always being negotiable with her) when she was very young.

‘Hon’, I’m up to my eyeballs in Pembroke tables,’ Antonia had purred, when Mandy finally got her on the line. She had one of those upper-middle-class voices that somehow purify and pollute the air at the same time. ‘How can I be expected to give advice on your babies? Try talking to Mr Morris—I’ll give you his number.’

So Mr Morris it was. A day later he was standing before us on the opposite side of a slab-like, green-vinyl examination table, where he imparted some sobering information.

‘I’m afraid you can’t breed her.’

‘What—you mean she’ll never have kids? That’s the only reason we got her,’ said Mandy, Spanishly alarmed.

I cradled Concepcion on the comfortless butcher’s board of plastic, shielding her ears slightly from these harsh words.

‘I’m sorry, but it’s too great a risk to breed her,’ growled Mr Morris in a significant basso profundo as he snapped off his condom gloves. ‘There’s a ninety per cent chance she’ll die giving birth or that her litter would be dead. She’s simply too small. Where did you get her again?’

‘From a gay dentist,’ I offered helpfully.

‘Ah, Mr Tonka. I know him well. He should have told you. Although, I have to admit, he’s become slightly more unscrupulous about whom he sells to over the years.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ persisted Mandy. ‘We’re the best parents she’ll ever have. She’s our little baby’

And with that, she yanked Concepcion from my tender grasp and held her upside down in a pieta-like cradle. I couldn’t help but notice the stunted bunny’s eyes glance anxiously towards her father, as if to say: ‘
Don’t put me down. I promise to walk properly. I promise to grow bigger, if I can.
’

‘I’m sure she is Miss, er, Haste, but that’s all there is to it. You’ll have to keep her from any male stud when she’s in season. I recommend a locked pen.’

‘And an armed sentry,’ said I. Mr Morris lowered his forehead towards me, as if the only way of training his eyes on something was to physically move his rotund head.

‘I’m serious. I’ve seen male dogs jump through plate-glass windows to reach a bitch in heat.’

‘I know how they feel,’ I muttered, trying to remember the distant era of the past, the period during late antiquity, when Mandy and I last had anything to do with each other sexually. I unhooked the clasp of my wallet in readiness to pay his scandalous consultation fee. ‘Anyway, breeding isn’t the
only
reason we got her.’

‘Oh, I wish I was dead,’ hissed Mandy, and left the room; dumping the terrified dog in my clammy hands on her way out. Yes, Mandy certainly had a negative capability, though not in the sense Keats intended. I turned to the vet, marvelling at how she always left me (literally) holding the baby.

‘Sorry about that. She’s joking. We got her because we … because we loved her.’

‘Always the best reason,’ nodded Mr Morris, holding the door for me and my trembling cargo. ‘That’ll be forty-three fifty plus VAT. You can pay at reception.’

‘Cheers.’

All this came as grave news indeed to little Fidellino, a dog, if ever there was one, who was born to reproduce. If, in a sick parallel universe (Hamburg maybe), dogs were ever enlisted as porn stars, then Fidel would have been Big John Rocco Fidel; or Fidel The Fuck Machine; or simply, The Satisfier. In the previous few months our dimpled Castro’s beard had grown into a tautly haunched priapic love-engine, a young thing never too busy, tired, or Chum-hungry to turn down the briefest of copulations. The fact that most of these acts of love were with virginal sofa armrests, cuddly toys or strangers’ legs didn’t seem to deter or confuse him in the slightest. For me, there was an admirable simplicity in his basic urges: when a guy had to do it, he had to do it—Hell, yeah! And he wasn’t going to stick around to hug or reassure his inanimate partner before trotting off refreshed for a nourishing meal, either. Way to go, big man! I didn’t know of any bloke not in prison with such shameless fidelity to his own impulses. But Big Fidel the Fornicator hadn’t, as yet, got the chance to practise on another living, breathing animal.

And this was why what we had to do hit him so hard.

At first he thought we were being bloody-mindedly contrary, feeding him and his adorable Concepcion at different times of the day and in different parts of the house. Dogs always keenly notice any incremental change in their owners’ routine, but this to him was a grim disaster. Initially, our concupiscent crawler tried to pretend he wasn’t crouching satyr-like under the kitchen table at bedtime when it became necessary to separate them overnight. As the potential rapist was carted off upstairs his eyes would plangently, pleadingly meet those of his smooth-coated Juliet (by now wiggling her arse in a randied, readied frenzy at every opportunity) as if we were cruelly extinguishing an epic love. Then he would look to me, the Man, as if to say: ‘But you’d do the same, wouldn’t you? Given the chance? You understand how I can’t help myself?’ And I would have to avert my eyes lest the clearly transmitted meaning of his doggie-stare received the thumbs up from me.

Night after night we were woken by pussy-crazed scrabblings as Fidel attempted to gain gallant access to his beloved’s bedchamber, the kitchen. By day four of his helpless lust the lino had to be replaced and the door re-glossed where he had clawed the paintwork to splinters. By day five he’d begun speaking Swedish. And it wasn’t just him in a lather. On the other side of the divide, fair Concepcion would be whimpering in rampant expectation; an unwitting conduit for Nature’s Way, as Fidel tried—finally, one night—to shoulder-barge his way through a locked oak door. Oh, the carnal reveries we denied him! Oh, how he hated us, as no end of spankings and admonishments failed to souse his thundering desire! Behind the impenetrable cell door there yapped gagging-for-it Concepcion, dressed (in Fidel’s mind) in stockings and suspenders, a filthy brothel-glint in her eyes; while we, his cruel deprivers, slumbered on upstairs.

The sound of two dogs shagging, when the bitch is clearly in discomfort, is not a sound you forget in a hurry. It resembles, frankly, that of a small baby being murdered with a kebab scimitar, or, at the very least, someone sawing a cooker in half with a hacksaw. It was this catastrophically distressing sound that had me leaping bare-bollocked downstairs in the early hours of the last day of Concepcion’s season. One of our tenants, it seems, had disobeyed the clear felt-pen notice on the kitchen door and had left it ajar after a nocturnal sally for a glass of water. And there, as the overhead light exploded on like a police flashbulb, was famished Fidel crouched over his squealing prey in the guilty act of debauchery. On seeing me, he ran like a missile shot from a silo through my legs, leaving his half-raped concubine palpitating in fear.

‘Fidellino!’ I screamed at his cowed, retreating haunches. But he didn’t stop. And then I remembered: he never did stop when called. The name Mandy had given him was about as recognisable to the dog as Morse code, or hieroglyphics spoken out loud.

After that close call, and after Fidel had been taken away to stay at Antonia’s in order to undergo a course of cold showers, we decided, to my tearful regret, to sell Concepcion to a babbling old bat with a big house up in Hampstead. If our darling ever did fall pregnant by the unquenchable Fidellino then we never found out.

All I can say is that, as first-time newly-wed parents, we tried our level best.

I find it hard to illuminate, O hip and cynical reader, just how bleakly painful these recollections are to recount. A thwarting emptiness, a cardiac heaviness is expanding inside my chest as I re-run these flickering Super-8 scenes for your delectation. If this were a real film-show, the tickering projector throwing prismatic light through a smoke of dust, then you would find me creased with tears on my plastic chair when the living-room spots went up. And why? Because these were vignettes from a bigger, better, richer life. Despite all the arguments for filing for divorce after the first week (which I’m working up the nerve to get to later), these and other faltering flashbacks constituted the
good life
, the days of laughter and involvement, not the days I torpidly wake up to now: the gruesome impoverishments of a drooling, penny-hoarding bachelor.

They all seem so long ago, the days. Was it really then? It’s like looking into the wrong end of a telescope, the detail condensed and miniaturised. All painted from memory, of course. I didn’t take any photographs with me. I didn’t have the time, what with the haste in which I had to leave.