"What in hell’s that?" I squawked, almost dropping the supermarket bags as a piece of hearth rug detached itself and rose on four thin shaggy legs to the height of a small donkey.
He laughed then, and at the sound the thing rose on its hind legs like a grizzly bear, set its paws on his shoulders in a lover’s embrace, and jabbed its sharp nose at his face.
"What would it be, eejit? It’s a dog, of course. Man’s best friend. My best friend, anyway. My dog. Meet Cu. He’s a real Christian."
He averted his face from the thing’s lolloping ecstatic tongue. "Give him time to get acquainted. Don’t rush him, mind, and don’t be looking him in the eye at first. It only aggravates him."
"Well, and are you going to dance a foxtrot with it or help me with these oul bags?" I demanded, allowing a humorous yet plaintive note to creep into my voice. I hadn’t moved in yet, you understand, not as such, so I wouldn’t start throwing my weight about asserting myself, for fear of startling the game. He was a plain country boy, after all. City ways could prove too strong for his stomach. You might call him a bit of a bumpkin – I won’t say the thought had never crossed my own mind, nor the notions of silk purses and sow’s ears, either, if it comes to it.
I looked round that unloved draughty barn of a place, the dog-eared curtains and the wicked witch’s grime-blackened cooking-pots scowling on the dead range, and I thought to myself, well, girl, you may have to eat a pick of dirt before you die, but you don’t have to eat it all at once…
Later, once I was sure I’d managed to start the baby, we took the Landrover into town to get ourselves legal, if not blessed, even though he had his best suit on, ten years behind the fashion, shiny and scratchy and bursting at the seams over his bulging shoulder muscles. I nearly made him walk a few paces behind me so nobody would connect us, just in case I bumped into anyone from the old crowd; people can be very funny. I’ve been told I’m insensitive, but I have my pride. However, a bird in the hand, as they say, and the moment I clapped eyes on himself, at that country fair we’d all gone to, townies slumming it for a laugh, cursing and struggling to keep the mud off our good shoes, I recognised his potential, and I told the others I had a headache and to go on without me. Well, you have to seize the moment, don’t you?
He owned the farm, he told me, bellowing above the rumpus in the beer-tent, and he already with the watery glaze of the drink blearing his eyeballs, The Ould One and Herself being dead – ‘passed away’, he called it, fighting shy of plain speech, and I did a few calculations and a bit of fast thinking: no mother in law to scrutinize your housekeeping, finding fault, or banging on like that old Greek woman that fell in love with her own son, about her boy’s wondrous childhood and unique promise, all come to naught through miscegenation with your unworthy self; no lecherous oul feller, either, leering and pinching, pressing whiskery whiskey-kisses on you, and wandering about baggy and hairy in his underwear and shaming you before strangers, and stinking out the privy. Oh, I’ve seen Life, I can tell you, working for the Social in the city.
He appeared to have plenty of money, this one, and plenty of leisure, too, seemingly, with his fields let out or sold to developers and only a few bits of livestock to see to, more of a hobby, really. I was sick to the back teeth of the city, the hard pavements, the litter and the racket, the pursuit, the flight, the rejection, the betrayals, the growing competition from the teenage nymphs with their bare pierced bellies and their bold eyes and billowing manes and bouncing bosoms.
I’d been on the look-out for a handy escape route for a good while. Now it seemed my patience was to be rewarded. But I had to plan my moves: cooking dinner at his was a step in the right direction. Hence the shopping bags.
"Cu," he explained, expansive with a few jars, his belt loosened over a full belly, and the creature sprawling beside him, panting and fawning, and myself on my knees battling with the grudging old fire grate for a blaze and a bit of cheer. Cu was Irish for dog. Well, every Irish person knows that, don’t they? Because of Cuchulain. He himself had a desperate patchy grasp of myth, for an Irishman. (Are we not a people of the never-never land ourselves, the texture of our lives interwoven entirely with legend and fable, our fevered minds bedevilled by heroes and hobgoblins and moonlight?) He told me Cuchulain got his name because of a faithful hound who was charged with minding the infant hero. When the father, a chieftain, of course, all the men were chieftains and all the women beautiful, even the evil ones, so anyway, when the father returned from the hunting not sight nor sound of your infant hero, and the hound’s jaws and paws blood-stained, it was naturally assumed the hound had devoured the baby. Too late the infant was discovered safe and sound, and the corpse of the wolf that would have devoured him had the gallant hound not beaten it off and destroyed it was discovered also, making the innocent hound the first canine martyr in mythology.
Well, of course, I knew that was a load of old cobblers. The real story was different, but I held my peace. Our romance was in its early stage, where each encounter with the other should be a voyage of wonder and discovery. It’s only later that remorse sets in, and revisionist retrenchment, the barriers go up, events and confessions are reinterpreted in the cold post-passionate hindsight.
I have to admit the dog took defeat like a warrior, first relegation from the bedroom to the sitting-room, then from the sofa to a rag rug under the kitchen table. It accepted the new regime: no begging at table and no occupying furniture intended for humans. It didn’t appear to mind one way or the other.
Sometimes I sensed it studying me under its thick grey bangs, but I refused to meet its speculative sherry-tawny eye. It knew better than to growl or bare its fangs. Those teeth were quite something, six-inch ivory daggers set high in the rubbery black and scarlet dentellation of its jaw, revealed only in its businesslike shredding of the rabbit corpses harvested from their excursions to the woods and fields.
Slung over his shoulder, his rifle over the other, himself would whistle, teasing, "Does Cu want a bunny, then? Who’s a good Cu?" The huge dog, dignity for once thrown to the winds, cavorted and slavered about him.
"Feed it outside, for God’s sake," I cried, nausea stinging my throat, but even with it banished to the yard I could not escape the crack of bone, the gobble and slurp of flesh and fur as the hound sumptuously dined.
It’s not like I didn’t try. As soon as I knew I’d caught, I tried. "A dog in the house is unhygienic," I said. "Everyone says you should only get a dog after the baby, if the dog is to accept it," I persisted.
He laughed joyously, kissed me, spun me round in a breathless jig, and parried my objections with examples of devoted fictitious canine nannies, Nana in Peter Pan and his own garbled version of the Cuchulain story. Then the two of them sauntered off, with an unmistakable air of relief, into the twilight, him with the gun on his shoulder, and the dog loping at his side, like the very first hunter-gatherer and the very first domesticated wolf in the world. I sat with my feet up in the sofa from which in another petty victory I had ousted the hound. I scanned the glossy catalogues for cots and buggies with plenty of chrome and extras, and imagined the dash I’d cut in the dreary little backwater.
The baby, when it was born, was a girl. I was glad of that. Another pair of helping hands, not another male to wait on. We brought her home mewing in a pink-lined Moses basket. The dog sniffed at her without interest, turned its back abruptly and stalked stiff-legged to its bed beneath the kitchen table. Sinking down with a sigh, it covered its nose with its paw and stared introspectively into space.
"See, what did I tell you? Oh, it’ll all be grand. He’s taken to her at once,’ he exclaimed, watching the dog, a smile softening his dark face. I bit my lip and said nothing. Later he said, "If we did fancy stepping out to the pub, now, for a class of a celebration, we’d never find a better baby-sitter than old Cu there, not in life. Sure, who could come in and harm her at all, and himself on guard? Not even the fairies could steal her away!" He laughed, and rumpled the dog’s head. It rose and pressed against him, gazing deep into his eyes like a lover. I could swear the dog laughed, showing his merry red tongue.
The baby was plump and sweet and delicious.
When we returned from the pub I knew that the dog, too, had found her so. It was summer, warm enough for the thinnest of cottonmix babygros (pink, sprigged with rosebuds), a pale salmon matinee coat and extra bootees with pink bobbles (he said I fussed, but tiny feet can get very cold, even when the rest of the body is warm).
It had been an orderly massacre. Afterwards, the dog had cleansed its jaws by smearing the blood and the remnants of entrails and gristle on the sofa. All that remained were the scraps of mangled bloodstained clothing it had chewed along with the flesh and spat out, irritated, no doubt, by the little pearl buttons and the indigestible bobbles. This debris formed a package on the floor, neat as an owl pellet, but larger.
He said nothing, just went out with the rifle, his eyes empty, his hand on the dog’s head. I heard the shot, but it was much later when he returned and I did not hear his weary footsteps, sunk as I was deep in drug-induced torpor, my throat torn and bloody with screaming.
All that happened a long time ago. We never speak of it, and we don’t look at each other, for fear of catching that memory swimming to surface in the other’s eyes, and being forced to face it.
He did tell me he’d been wrong about Cuchulain. He’d remembered the right of it, now. In the real legend, he said, Cuchulain strangled a terrible savage watch dog and offered himself as a guardian in its place. He’d looked it up since, in a book, and that was the truth of it. Cuchulain killed the watchdog and took its place. Of course, I knew that all along, but I never said so.
He himself never said much after that at all. He’d mutter, though, on occasion, and it would get on my nerves.
"What’s that you say? What are you muttering there?" I could hear my voice growing sharper, becoming shrill; a woman needs to watch that, I’d be a middle-aged shrew before I could turn round if I didn’t take care.
He wouldn’t usually answer me, but if he did, he’d lie: "It’s cold, I said." Or, sometimes he'd mutter, "Hear the wind getting up," and I knew full well that wasn’t what he’d said at all. Only once, when I was wailing and sobbing, in the early days, bent double with the sharpness of my grief, he said it outright: "Losing the dog, losing Cu, that was the worst of it."
He never said anything ever again, after that. Not a word. That was when I first put the chain on. You can’t be too careful, I say.
He’s very good, really. Never complains. Knows his place, doesn’t try for the bed or the sofa. I perch my telly-dinner on my knee, and I scan the catalogues for cruises I shall never take.
He eats his dinner with his strong red farmer’s hands planted square each side of the big tin dish, wolfing down the offal and scraps. He’s clean about the house, scratches at the door to go into the yard. Well, the other was clean, too, you couldn’t fault him on that.
He sleeps on a rag rug under the kitchen table. I loosen the chain at night, but I never take it off.
He doesn’t seem to mind one way or the other.
But he watches, with his tawny eye.
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