—What d’you think you’re doing?
The two of them breathing hard.
He didn’t hit her back. He didn’t even think about it, or lift his hand or anything.
He knew immediately what she meant, and why she was furious. Now that she was. He could see.
—That’s how you train them, he said.
—No, it isn’t.
—It is.
It was how they’d trained their dogs at home, when he was a kid. Nose in the dirt, out the door. It had always worked.
—What other way is there?
He never mentioned the fact that she’d hit him. He never brought it up again, that the only one who’d ever been violent was her.
She signed them up for training classes. One evening a week, for eight weeks. They brought the dog to a big barn of a place, an actual barn beside an abandoned farmhouse, at the back of the airport. It was a strange, flat landscape. There was the ruin of a castle on one side of the road and the airport runway on the other, just a couple of fields away. He could look straight up at the bellies of the planes. The dog trainers were lovely, three soft-spoken girls who loved the dogs and the racket and the smell. He enjoyed it. They both did. The dog was quick on the uptake, all the sits and the stays, and she was fine with the other dogs. He enjoyed getting there, and coming home. They had to drive through Ballymun and over the M50 motorway. They’d comment on the changes, all the old tower blocks knocked down, the new buildings going up. There was once, on the road that ran right beside the runway, they saw something ahead – two things – getting clearer and sharper. It was two horses, pulling buggies, racing, on both sides of the road. He drove onto the hard shoulder, and they watched the horses trot past, and two Traveller kids in the buggies – they didn’t even look at the car as they flew by.
—Jesus.
—That’s disgraceful.
—Is it?
—It’s dangerous.
—That’s for sure.
He got out of the car – she did too – and they watched the buggies till they were too far away, waiting to see if any other cars or trucks came at them. But the road was empty.
—I wonder who won, she said.
—Don’t know, he said.—A draw. I’d love to do it myself.
—Yeah, she said.—Not here, though.
—No.
They got back in and went on to the training centre.
Another time, they drove past a family of Romanians, gypsies, about seven of them, walking along the same road, beside the runway. It was like they’d just climbed over the perimeter fence and they were making a break for the city. But, really, they were strolling along and he’d no idea where to. He couldn’t even imagine. There wasn’t a shop or a house.
—Why would they want to be out here? she asked.
—Reminds them of home.
—Stop that.
—They’re left alone out here, he said.—That’s my guess.
—You’re probably right, she said.—It’s like a noman’s-land, isn’t it?
—Yeah, he said.—It’s nowhere.
—It’s sad, though. Isn’t it?
—I suppose it is.
Driving back home, after the training, they saw the Romanians again, off the road this time, on the island in the centre of the M50 roundabout; there were kids going into the bushes. He realised it slowly, and so did she. The car was off the roundabout and going through Ballymun before she spoke.
—They live in there, she said.
—What?
—The Romanians, she said.—They’re living on the roundabout.
—It looked like it, alright.
—In the bushes.
—Yeah.
—Jesus.
—Yeah.
They brought the dog to the barn every Wednesday night, for the eight weeks. The dog could walk, stop, sit, stay and shit and there were no more rows or misunderstandings. She fed the dog. He picked the shit up off the grass in the back garden. And he brought the dog down to Dollymount strand for a run, on the mornings when he didn’t have an early start. And those mornings were the best thing about having the dog. He’d park the car and walk towards the wooden bridge and the docks and the city behind it, and Dun Laoghaire to the left, across the bay, and the mountains. He saw herons one morning, two of them, standing still in the water. He’d never seen herons before; he hadn’t even known that there were herons in Ireland. They didn’t budge when the dog ran at them, until the last second. Then they were up together, and they flew off slowly, dragging their legs behind them, and they settled again, in the shallow water further down the beach. It thrilled him to see that. He loved the whole thing. Even when it rained – when the rain came at him sideways, straight off the sea, and he was soaking before he’d really started – he loved it. But he’d never have done it on his own. He’d never have been comfortable by himself, walking along the empty beach in the morning. He’d have felt strange. What was he doing there, all by himself? But with the dog it was fine. He didn’t have to explain anything, to himself or to anyone else. He was walking the dog. Throwing a ball. Both of them getting their exercise.
Then the dog went missing.
He came home, and Mary was already there. Her eyes were huge and angry and terrified.
—You left the gate open.
—I didn’t, he said.—What gate?
—The side gate.
—I didn’t.
—It was open.
—I didn’t touch it, he said.—Oh fuck, the dog.
He’d forgotten about the dog.
—I went out, she said.—I couldn’t find her.
—She’ll be grand, he said.—Hang on.
He went out to his car and came back with the street atlas. He divided the neighbourhood; he stayed calm. They’d get into their cars. She’d go right; he’d go left.
—She can’t be gone too far.
He didn’t believe that. He was already thinking about the next dog.
—D’you want a cup of tea before we go? he asked her.
He thought he was handling it well. She was crying. He wanted to hug her, but it was a long time since they’d done that. He knew she was angry. He’d look – he’d genuinely look for the dog. He’d stay out all night. He’d search everywhere. And he’d be delighted if he found it – he could feel it in his chest. But they’d been away all day. Nine hours. He’d left first – he remembered shouting ‘Seeyeh’ up the stairs, just before he’d closed the front door. But he hadn’t been outside, in the back garden. He’d let the dog out – he remembered that. He’d been first down to the kitchen. The dog had stood up and stretched. He’d gone straight over to the door, to let her out. He’d had his coffee and his banana, and he’d gone. But the gate. He hadn’t opened it. The night before? No. He couldn’t remember touching the gate. It hadn’t happened.
They went out to the cars together.
—What if she comes back when we’re gone?
—It’s not likely, is it?
—I just thought—
—I know, but she’s never been out on her own before.
—I know.
—Let’s stick to Plan A, he said.—What d’you think?
—Okay, she said.
He was looking at the side gate now, open.
—Would you prefer to stay here? he said.—In case.
—No, she said.—It’s better if we both do it.
—Grand.
They didn’t find the dog. He stayed out till after midnight. He drove past the house, twice, until he saw her car parked outside. Then he parked his own and went in.
—No luck?
—No, she said.
She didn’t look at him. She was sitting at the kitchen table. Then she looked, and stopped.
—The bloody gate, she said.
—It wasn’t me, he said.—I don’t think it was. It isn’t bin day.
—Bin day?
—Yeah. Bin day. The day in the week when I put out the bin. When I op
en the side gate. Every fuckin’ week for the last twenty fuckin’ years. Sorry.
He sat. He stood up. She looked at him.
—I’m sorry too, she said.
He sat.
—What’ll we do?
—I don’t know.
They went up to bed together and fell asleep, more or less, together. He was first out again in the morning. He didn’t shout ‘Seeyeh’ up the stairs. He couldn’t.
He hadn’t opened the gate.
He looked at it before he started the car. It was still open. He got out of the car and shut it.
It was open again when he got home.
—In case Emma comes back, she told him.
—Oh, he said.—Fair enough.
They were out again that night, putting up little posters she’d designed and photocopied, in the shops and on lampposts. ‘Missing’, and a photo of the dog, then ‘Emma – Beloved Pet’. And their phone number, and her mobile number. He went left, she went right. He was home first. He fell asleep on the couch. She was in bed when he went up. She wasn’t asleep – he knew – but she didn’t move or say anything.
They got a few calls.
—I seen your dog.
—How much is the reward?
—I ate Emma.
Kids mostly, messing. And a couple of weird ones. At three in the morning.
—Hello? Are you Emma’s dad?
—Emma’s a dog.
—Yes.
He was putting the phone down. He could hear the woman at the other end still talking. He put it back to his ear.
—She asked me to tell you she’s fine. She’s happy.
—She’s a fuckin’ dog.
—Yes.
He lay back on the bed and knew he’d be getting up in a minute. Sleep was gone.
—Was that someone about Emma? Mary asked.
—Yeah.
—Another nut?
—Maybe we should take the posters down.
—No.
—Okay. You’re right. We’ll keep at it.
Then there was the website. She showed it to him – www.missingdogs.ie. She’d opened her own page. The same photo of the dog; the location last seen – a little map, their house filled in red. The dog’s personality: ‘outgoing’.
—Will people look at this? he asked.
—Yes, they will, she said.—Dog lovers will.
—Grand.
—And there are links to other sites, she said.—All over the world.
Some prick in Hong Kong was staring at the picture of their dog.
He said nothing.
Nothing.
That was the way their life had drifted. They never recovered from the dog. They didn’t get another one. He wasn’t blaming the dog. Things had been heading that way before the dog. The dog had even saved them for a while, or slowed down the drift. They’d had something new in common for a couple of months, and the excursions to the land behind the airport.
He hadn’t opened the gate. He hadn’t left it open.
But he’d failed. He could have pretended. Cried a bit, let her console him, take over – he didn’t know. It wasn’t about the gate. It was about grief. She grieved. He didn’t. Simple as that. He should have pretended. It would have been a different kind of honesty. He knew that now. He thought he did.
He’d said they should get a new one. She’d stared at him and walked away. It wasn’t a house you could walk away in; she had to walk out. She came back. They had another row, and he walked out. It was his turn. He stayed away for hours. He went to the pictures. He came back.
The walking out stopped. The rows stopped. The talking too; it was a wordless life. They’d drifted. But, actually, they hadn’t drifted, and that was another problem. One of them should have gone. They should have looked at each other one night, over the dinner or something, and smiled, and known that enough was enough. But that wise moment had never happened. He hadn’t let it. He’d wished for it, but he hadn’t let it happen. He hadn’t let his eyes sit on hers.
Now she was taking off her new coat.
He didn’t know her. Didn’t know her hair, didn’t know why she’d have wanted a tan in January – didn’t really know how it was done. Some sort of a lamp, or a bed. He didn’t know.
—Your coat’s nice, he said.
Animals
He remembers carrying the water tank into the house, trying to make sure he didn’t trip over a step or a child. The boys were tiny. And the girls – the twins – must have been so small he can’t even imagine them any more. He can’t remember filling the tank or dumping the fish into the water, but he sat cross-legged in front of it while the boys gave each fish a name and the eldest, Ben, wrote them in a list with a fat red marker. There were seven fish, seven names – Goldy, Speckly, Big Eyes, and four others. They taped the list to the side of the tank and by the end of the day there were black lines through three of the names and four fish still alive in the tank. The tank stayed in the room – in fact, George left it there when they moved house two years later, long after the last of the fish had been buried.
The animals always had decent, elaborate burials. Christian, Hindu, Humanist – whatever bits of knowledge and shite the kids brought home from school went into the funerals. George changed mobile phones, not because he really wanted to, but because he knew the boxes would come in handy – it was always wise to have a coffin ready for the next dead bird or fish.
He came home one Saturday morning. He’d been away, in England. The house was empty. Sandra, his wife, had taken the kids to visit her mother in Wexford. George put his bag down, went across to the kettle, and saw the brand-new cage – and the canary. And the note, red marker again: ‘Feed it’. And he would have, happily, if the canary hadn’t been dead. He had a shower, phoned for a taxi, waited an hour for it to arrive, and told the driver to bring him to Wacker’s pet shop in Donaghmede.
—Are yeh serious? said the driver.
—Yeah, said George.
—What’s in Wacker’s that’s so special?
George waited till the driver had started the taxi.
—Pets, he said.
He was pleased with his answer.
—Alright, said the driver.
He went through the gears like he was pulling the heads off orphans.
Wacker – or whoever he was – had no canaries. Neither did the guy beside Woodie’s. Or the shop on Parnell Street. When the kids got home the next day they found that the canary had turned into two finches. George explained it to them, although they weren’t that curious; two of anything was better than one.
—A fella on the plane told me that finches were much better than canaries. So I swapped the canary for these lads here. A boy and a girl.
—Cool.
He’d no idea at the time if that was true – the male and the female – but it must have been, because they made themselves a nest, and an egg was laid. But nothing hatched. Sandra bought a book and a bigger cage and better nesting material, and the two finches became three, then five, then back to four, three and two. More funerals, more dead bodies in the garden. They got an even bigger cage, a huge thing on wheels. The finches, Pete and Amy – he knows the names, as solidly as his kids’ names – built a nest in the top corner, a beehive of a thing. Amy stayed in there while Pete came out, hung on the bars of the cage and looked intelligent.
George went to his mother’s house one day, to change a few lightbulbs and put some old crap up into the attic for her. He made a morning of it, smuggled the book he was reading out of the house, bought a takeaway coffee, drove to the seafront and stayed there for an hour after he’d finished at his mother’s, parked facing Europe, reading, until he got to the end of a chapter – The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love – and needed to go for a piss. He drove home and walked into the end of the world. Sandra had decided that the morning needed a project, so herself and the kids had wheeled the cage outside and started to go at it with soapy brushes and cloths. A child opened the hatch
, Pete flew out, and George found four hysterical children in the kitchen, long past tears and snot, and a woman outside in the back garden, talking to the hedge.
—I can hear him, she said.
—Where?
—In there, she said.
She was pointing into the hedge, which stretched from the house to the end wall. It was a long garden, a grand hedge.
—I can hear him.
George could hear the kids in the house. He could hear lawnmowers and a couple of dogs and the gobshite three doors up who thought he was Barry White. He couldn’t hear Pete. But he did hear – he definitely heard it – the big whoop of a great idea going off in his head.
—Listen, he said.—I’m going to bring the kids to Wacker’s, to see if Pete flew back there. Are you with me?
Sandra looked at him. And he knew: she was falling in love with him, all over again. Or maybe for the first time – he didn’t care. There was a woman in her dressing gown, looking attractively distraught, and she was staring at George like he was your man from ER.
—While I’m doing that, said George,—you phone Wacker’s and tell him the story. You with me?
—Brilliant.
—It might work.
—It’s genius.
—Ah well.
It did work and it was George’s greatest achievement. The happiness he delivered, the legend he planted – his proudest moment.
All of the gang in Wacker’s were waiting, pretending to be busy. George carried the girls up to the counter; the boys held onto him.
—Dylan here’s finch flew away, said George.—And he was thinking that maybe he flew back here.
The lad behind the counter looked up from the pile of receipts he was wrapping with an elastic band.
—Zebra finch?
Dylan nodded.
—He flew in twenty minutes ago.
—Flaked, he was, said an older man who was piling little bales of straw and hay.—Knackered. Come on over and pick him out, Dylan.
There were thirty finches charging around a cage the size of a bedroom. Dylan was pointing before he got to the cage.
—Him.
—Him?
—Yeah.
The older man opened a small side door and put his hand in. He was holding a net, and had the finch out and in his fist with a speed and grace that seemed rehearsed and brilliant.