Peppers

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Peppers

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The Hairy Dog

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A lady, acrylic on card, 6.5 x 9 cm

 

 

The Hairy Dog

 

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Featuring, in order:

Me

 Aubrey: a beautiful woman

Tom: a reprobate and friend

Two small, nameless, bearded men

A hairy dog

& 

A chestnut tree

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We both stood on the tiny balcony, avoiding the hubbub in the main room where, on a table, lay a Japanese spread: sushi, sashimi, gyozo, yakitori, wasabi, pickled cucumbers: perfectly formed delicacies on exquisite black plates. My friend Tom was there, picking away.

She had a lazy expression and long dark eyelashes and a honey smile. A turquoise chiffon dress revealing her neck: slender.  She had probably had things go her way most of her life just by showing up.

She said, picking lint from my shirt front, "tell me more about yourself." She leant in, "Is it true that you are  obsessed with...hairbrushes?"

"Me? "

 "Yes you, silly." She tapped my chest.

Her smile was so beatific, so full of promise, that I became quite weak at the knees. Moreover, she began fiddling with a button on my shirt front. "You know, we might discover a certain happiness together," she murmurred.

"Well, yesss." I took a step back, feeling the need to collect myself. "Anyway ...what about hairbrushes?"

"You know," she said, looking straight at me with those huge deep eyes.

 "Oh No no no! I know nothing. You got the wrong guy. I trained as an engineer. I am really very square!"

She laughed,  "everyone knows that people who say they're square are the kinkiest."

Then it clicked. "Have you been talking to Tom?"

Tom was my "friend" and Tom had brought me. But only a friend like Tom would have told a random woman at a party something so personal and potentially offensive about his invitee.

I looked into the room. Tom was still at the food table, albeit now accompanied by two very short, bearded men in check shirts who were watching us while grabbing sushi which they stuffed directly into their mouths with their fists. Rice and bits of raw tuna had lodged in their beards.

Tom caught my eye and raised a glass.

"Give me your number," said the beautiful woman.

 I received a message: "Aubrey X".

*

I didn't go out much and not going out much didn't get invited out much. I lived in my own hermetic way producing articles and reports on domestic appliances, sometimes sitting at a desk or attending meetings at VEM Engineering. 

I lived in a place off William Street. The neighborhood seemed just right: three story blocks gently ran down a incline. There was a huge chestnut tree, much loved, wise and knarly, and a bus stop  and a few small shops and it wasn't too far and it wasn't too near and was really quite humdrum. 

A decade back, one December morning, locals had awoken to find their beloved chestnut tree's long bare branches festooned with women's underwear. Bras and panties of all colours, but mainly pink, dangled high and low They swayed prettily in the winter breeze, lace and satin sometimes catching the occasional sunshine most agreeably.

London's gallant constabulary duly conducted an investigation,  as did the local newspaper. But their research led nowhere, failing to establish if the unusual decorations were the work of an industrious pervert, a prankster or a fustratrated lingerie salesman. Either way, the neighborhood had experienced nothing noteworthy since. 

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 I was walking home from VEM and looked to my side and I saw that I had a companion: a hairy dog. It seemed very concerned to keep pace with me.

The dog was probably a terrier and certainly unkempt, but it was friendly in  that unpresumptious medium-sized dog way. Its tail wagged in genial expectation.

After a hundred meters, I stopped. And so did the hairy dog. And I checked to see if under the wirey hair was a collar: yes. But no tag. 

The hairy dog seemed nice enough and I supposed it might be hungry: I stopped in the tiny shop and got a can of dogfood. Then up to my garret and the dog food scooped into a bowl. And another bowl with water. He was a hungry hairy dog and made a fair mess but most went into his stomach. And he then found a bed on my sofa for an extended nap.

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A day or two later Aubrey called me. "We are going to meet for spaghetti."

Thus, we met in Fratelli's, an Italian tratoria which hasn't changed since it opened in the thirties. The food is pretty lousy, but the place has a familiar amosphere and you can feel quite cosy in the little booths. Aubrey ate her spaghetti with incredible speed, sucking the strands into her mouth with such immense skill that I had difficulty keeping up with her. We demolished a half carafe of the house Chianti.

"You are very good at this," I commented.

"I practised for hours with string, just before coming out," she replied. "I wanted so much to impress you." And she proceeded, with lightening speed, to suck a strand from her fork into her lips.

We then went up to my place. The hairy dog lay on the sofa which it had fully annexed and where it snoozed most of the time, when it wasn't eating, or losing hair, or chewing one of my shoes.

"You need a hairbrush for that dog." commented Aubrey.

"I could just clip it."

"Let's get a hair brush. "

"Aubrey, didn't  you once accuse me of being obsessed with hairbrushes?"

"I just might have. Do you think I'm guilty of projection, Sigmund?" she said, coming very near. "Might I require correction?"

 

* 

 

We descended to the street to get the hairbrush.  I could see two small bearded men beside the chestnut tree eating crisps from a gigantic packet of Doritos while apparantly searching for something, looking under parked cars and around the chestnut tree. 

Of course, it was the pair from the party. As we got closer I could see that there were still fragments of sushi and rice in their beards, to which they were adding fragments of crisps.  And they were in the same check shirts.

"Hi!"

"Oh hello," they said simultaneously.

"Did you ever hear that story about this tree, some years ago?" I asked

"Oh we don't know anything about that," cut in one of the bearded men rather aggressively, his face turning a little red, while the other looked down at his feet, mumbled, "Wasn't us". Quickly, the first bearded man continued, "Have you seen our dog?"

 

* 

"Bye bye hairy dog," I said, as the two bearded men took it away.

"We can still get the hairbrush," said Aubrey.

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Read to Albuquerque Creatives Cyberscribes on 3 May, 2021, Edinburgh Creative Writers' Club 4 May, 2021 and The Cornwall Writers' Group, 5 May, 2021

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Woodland shadow

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Shadow

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Egg

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Egg

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Chair

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Chair

There seems to be quite a bit of discarded furniture round here, often on the pavements, otherwise in the unused lots that sometimes punctuate houses. 

There's something strange about indoor furniture outside. To me there idea of furniture has something to do with permanence, apart from maybe garden and camping or beach furniture. 

But this type of furniture does for me to imply settlement, belonging. It really shouldn't be outside,  should it? 

And the fact of it being overturned is somehow disturbing. On its back, it has been pushed over, or fallen, like a drunk, and no one has righted it. Undignified,  disturbing even. And because so many must pass this place and done nothing, it is worse: local society doe not care about order. Has it lost its compass?

Additionally, the  rattan seat lends the  chair a quaintness. It's a reminiscent of van Gogh's famous chair: it has personality and the abandonment has an personal aspect.

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Tall pines

 

 

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Tall pines

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Dinner at Billy's

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Vomiting man, pen on paper, 2021

 

Dinner at Billy's

 

 In which our hero goes to Billy's for dinner and is extremely sick...

 

This is another story about Billy.

I met him at the Prince of Wales and after we'd had a few we went round the corner to his flat for dinner. It sits to the back of some unprepossessing harled buildings, and you enter by passing between great grey wheelie bins. He served me Spaghetti Bolognese.  At least, that's what he called it.

There were two teenage children there. There were no conversations with them. They were fifteen and seventeen. I'd never met them before but I'd suspected they might be disagreeable and had hoped they wouldn't show.

 Both slouched menacingly in the kitchen while I ate, watching me, when they weren't obsessively prodding their smartphones. I remembered that one of them had recently been prosecuted for sticking a knife into another boy on the Edgware Road and occasionally would receive the attentions of a social worker. I wasn't sure which one it was and I thought it might be impolite to ask. Perhaps it was the one leaning against the wall, scratching his groin? Or it might have been the one with the peirced nostril and tatoos of an iron cross in a heart on one shoulder and the ying-yang sign on the other. 

There was also a dog of indeterminate breed. It took an immediate dislike to me, watching me and barking continually while I ate, the racket a matter of indifference to the household.

Even while eating, I began to feel quite sick. Not sick in the normal way that you might resonably expect to feel after eating dinner at Billy`s. I mean very sick indeed in the way you would feel tossed in a dinghy on mid-Atlantic in a tempest.  Ergo, projectile vomit and a deep sense of unease.

So Billy took  me to a hospital and I was laid up there for  four days. I fell in love with a nurse with unusually large feet, which were encased in gigantic white rubber clogs.  Never before had a nurse or someone with huge rubber encased feet captured my heart. Indeed, I think normally, the big feet would have put me right off: it's just not my thing: I don't write that to make others who have such preferences feel bad.

But in unusual circumstances things can be seen from fresh perpsectives. Registered Nurse Wendy had a brisk yet caring manner.  I lay watching with admiration and not a little jealousy how she busied herself in the ward, tucking the bedclothes round other patients, enquiring of their well-being, offering soothing and encouraging words and sympathetic smiles. I was enamoured.

But my feelings weren't reciprocated. For Nurse Wendy, I was just another vomit covered loser passing through the gastroenterology wards, meriting professional kindness but nothing more. And if I had romantic feelings then that made me no more than a cliche.

So I left hospital loveless, and quite angry about Billy`s cooking, even for a time wondering if he or his brats might have intended to poison me.

As soon as I was out on the street I called him.

"Billy, you bastard."

"Sorry mate," replied Billy.

 I stood about just near the hospital collecting myself, considering how to get home. I glanced down at the ground. Down there, a horde of tiny ants had discovered a dead dragonfly. One team triumphantly carried off the head, while another worked on detaching the thorax. A third group busied themelves around the abdomen. Would they leave the magnificent coloured wings behind?

 I didn't wait to find out: there was a twenty pound note curled up just there nearby. I went straight to the pub and had a few.

 

 

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Read to The Brentwood Writers' Critique Group, 1st May, 2021

 

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