Liz is out of balance; at sixes and sevens, ‘discombobulated’ as her grandma used to say.
It started with minor irritations: one too many calls from Mumbai, people who say “aDvocado”, people who say, “I want to say one last thing” and then they say two or three, people who let their dogs loose in the mornings to crap on other people’s gardens!
Actually it was the combined effect of two unrelated episodes that shifted Liz into this state – the nits episode and the fingers episode. Liz teaches at a prestigious Girls Secondary College. She’s part of a program that offers extension studies for gifted and talented students. She’s never said it to anyone but she thinks that if such programs where on offer in her day, she would have been diagnosed G and T.
She’s an awesome teacher. Her classroom management is faultless. She makes an impact when she walks into a room. Petite in stature, she has a way of standing in a doorway, backlit – a silhouette – casting a long shadow that bends up the opposite wall.
Charles also trained as a teacher (primary) although he gave it away years ago. Liz has always said, ‘I could never do primary. The snotty noses, vegemite mouths, adenoidal breathing, after pasty farts and nits!’ It was the nits that really horrified her and she’s always believed that by working at the senior level she’s avoided the possibility of an infestation.
So it came as quite a shock.
She went to the hairdresser for a trim. Her hair is shoulder length, straight – she likes a simple cut. She’s been going to Felice for years and has an arrangement with him: if she washes her hair before, he’ll brush and cut. In this way she avoids having to enter into inane conversation with any of the apprentices. But on this morning, her escape is only partial. On arrival a young girl shows her to a chair, wraps a plastic cape about her shoulders and begins brushing. Liz picks up a magazine and begins reading, hoping to convey that she doesn’t wish to be interrupted. But she’s startled by an gasp from the girl. She looks up to see a horrified expression on her face. ‘Excuse me Madam. I’ll be back in a moment.’
Liz thinks nothing of it and returns to her magazine.
A moment later, she’s roused by Felice. He ‘He hemms’ to attract her attention. She looks up into the mirror at his handsome Italian face. He’s holding a note pad to the mirror and he’s written something on it. She reads RIAH RUOY NI ECIL EVAH UOY MADAM. It takes her a nanosecond to wake up to the fact she’s reading backwards. MADAM YOU HAVE LICE IN YOUR HAIR. Gasping for breath, she tears at the velcro that secures the plastic cape and clutches her throat.
Felice tries to placate her. ‘It happens to school teachers.’
‘But I’m a Secondary teacher,’ she squeaks.
Felice coaxes her to the door and eases her out of the salon. ‘Go straight to the Pharmacy and buy insecticidal shampoo. I can’t cut your hair till all the animals are dead.’
She stands on the pavement and looking in the window, through the black Venetians into the shop – she sees clean people under dryers, having chemical treatments, tips, foils, trims, scalp massages – content people. A minute ago, she’d been one of them but now she’s an outsider, humiliated and embarrassed. But there’s worse to come.
Liz has never liked animals as pets. The tolerances that cat lovers have for trays of dolomite and turds in their laundries and dog lovers for warm plastic bags of pooh, bemuses her. Doug once said to her, ‘Liz, picking up dog shit is humbling and stroking a dog reduces blood pressure.’
She said, ‘Well Doug, if being humbled is good for you why don’t you come over here and clean your dog’s crap of my front lawn!’
Doug and Liz are old sparring partners but in recent times their relationship has been strained to breaking point. It went pear shaped with the arrival of Boofda.
‘Only Doug could go dog shopping and come home with a three-legged Heeler with a degree in escapology and a talent for chicken murdering AND call it BOOFDA!’
Charles is of a different view, ‘I think you’re being hard on them Liz. Boof’s a smart dog and Doug is talented with animals. That dog will surprise us all one day.’
Boofda has mastered a technique for three-legged digging. It involves lying on one side – the side with the leg – and scratching away with two good front paws. If spotted, he freezes in this position and looks convincingly asleep. Doug collects the stuff off nature strips that folk put out with signs that say ‘PLEASE TAKE” and he’s made good use of much of the collection since Boof’s arrival. In blocking escape tunnels, he’s found a use for a porcelain toilet bowl, rusty exercise bike and a travel cot. But Boofda always finds another place to dig and when he’s out and about the first place he likes to visit is Charles and Liz’s. Their front yard is just the right distance for a dog to relieve himself and feel like he is not soiling his own patch.
Liz spoke through clenched teeth when she said, ‘Doug, if picking up dog pooh is good for your blood pressure, would you please come to my place and take the cure!’
Doug didn’t rise to the bait, ‘I’m right thanks Liz. You look as though you could do with the treatment more than me.’ Although he smiled when he said this, he was annoyed and he expressed this to Meg, ‘What makes her so bloody sure its Boof? It hasn’t got his signature on it!’
Things escalated.
Charles and Liz’s north facing front verandah is gloriously sunny in winter. Liz had the good sense to plant deciduous shrubs in their square patch of lawn. Boofda has taken a liking to this warm elevated spot. From here he commands a good view of the street and the doormat is just the thing on which to stretch out and soak up some UV. Three legs and a stump pointing skyward, head back and jowls slack – Liz does not believe he enhances her property. She says to Doug, ‘If I wanted an ornament by my front door, I’d buy a Chinese tomb warrior.’
Along with Doug, Boofda shares an interest in collecting other people’s discards. Pickings have been slim of late but good things come to those who wait. Well it wasn’t actually a discard.
George (whose property separates) Doug and Liz’s does a little butchering occasionally. Strictly speaking, it’s not legal but no one in the street likes to think about it too deeply. Recently he obliged a cousin who had a baptism party. The young man backed down George’s driveway with a bleating trailer and the result: a few days later, a sheep’s skin is drying over the roof of the chicken coop.
Boof is a strategist. From the moment the scent of that skin came to his nostrils, he’d been plotting.
It takes him three days to get under the fence.
On breaking through to the other side, luck is with him. The skin hangs down where he can reach. It’s easy getting it back under the fence. Getting it off his property and up to Liz’s, is a cinch. Doug may be diligent about blocking tunnels but he’s forgetful about closing the front gate at times.
The fleece is a dog’s delight. Boof rolls in it and shakes it with his Heeler jaws. He stalks it and pounces like a wolf. He tears great chunks out of it and fleece festoons the magnolia’s bare winter branches like snow. When at last he’s tuckered out, he lays on it, three legs and a stump in the air and falls into a deep, contented sleep.
This is how Liz finds him when she returns from the hairdresser.
She’s livid. She can’t face Doug so she gives him a serve over the phone. She says that Boofda is dysfunctional, says he has a sphincter problem and tells Doug that he has co-dependency problems.
Doug responds with a comment about her sphincter and then he says in a low, slow voice, ‘You know what you’re doing Liz? You’re projecting onto Boofda.’
(He’s not entirely sure what this means but Liz is.)
‘BASTARD!’ she slams down the phone and bursts into tears.
Can things get any worse?
Yes they can.
The following day Liz returns home from work early. She’s alone; she’ll have the house all to herself for a couple of hours. She’s worn out from the waves of anger that have tossed her about all day. She slides the key into the door. She’s juggling a handbag, a bottle of wine and stack of books, so she uses her backside to reverse into the door and close it, when she’s astonished to find herself, in her own hallway, staring into a dogs face! Boofda!
He locks his eyes onto hers and holds her mesmerised. Time expands and Liz feels herself drawn deeper and deeper into those dark pools. She’s not breathing; she’s marble-still. She is being lured by some canine magic and for the first time in her life, she gets it! She understands what it is, about dogs. (Days later when she tries to explain it to Charles she says, ‘It’s a communication that exists outside language. It’s a heart thing.’ And privately she wonders what else there is to be explored in that wordless realm.)
Boofda’s side are heaving; he’s struggling to breath. His tail is down and his head looks heavy. Liz drops everything and feels around his face and neck and discovers a cut under his ear. His jaws seem fixed and there’s drool and blood.
It’s the drool and blood that does it. Liz snaps out of the dog/human moment and coaxes Boof out of the house. She helps him into the car and drives at speed to the nearest Vet. To an observer she would have looked calm and in control but inside she is churning with confusion and rage. And she blames Doug. How the hell did his dog get into her house? Why is it now her responsibility to take it to the Vet? And how dare the dog look at her like that!
As she swings into the Vet’s, it’s obvious Boof is in serious trouble. She marches into reception and says, ’Quick. Somebody. My neighbour’s dog is choking in the car.’
The young Vet looks up from a computer and in that slow motion walk that medical workers do when the heat’s on, he follows her to the car. ‘We’ll have to get him inside. You take the rear and I’ll take the head,’ he says dragging Boof across the seat. Between them, they lug him into the surgery and lay him, like a slab of meat, on a stainless steel table. Without turning to look at her, he says, ‘This may take a while. Leave a contact with reception and someone will call when we know what’s going on.’
Liz feels dismissed and it stings a little.
The phone is ringing as she climbs the fronts steps. She hurries down the hall to beat the answering service. It’s the Vet. ‘It’s about your dog,’ he says.
‘He’s not my dog,’ she corrects him.
‘Well the dog that you found on you property. I have to tell you the matter is now in the hands of the police.’
‘The police!’
‘Yes. The obstruction we removed from the dog’s airway.’
‘And?’
‘We removed two human fingers.’
‘What’s happened to the dog?’
‘He’s dead. He suffocated before we could remove the offending material.’
Liz sways. She wants to throw up and lie down. She staggers back up the hallway to the bedroom and the on suite where she can do both. But when she turns the corner, she freezes. Her room has been pulled apart; clothes are scattered, drawers tipped upside down, cosmetics, contraceptives and jewellery everywhere. There’s blood sprayed over the lot and on the carpet, up the walls and dribbling down the mirror. And there’s a man on her bed. His hand is wrapped in her pyjamas. When he hears her, he raises his head off the pillow and in synchrony they breathe deep and scream.
The Police don’t have to knock. The front door is open. The woman guides Liz out of the bedroom and down to the kitchen where she makes her a cup of tea. An ambulance is called and the man is taken away. The policewoman says, ‘You’re lucky your dog was here. We know that man and he’s regarded as extremely dangerous.’
‘He was not my dog.’ Says Liz.
Charles arrives home and hears enough of the story to decide that it would be better if Olivia slept at her friend’s tonight. Liz says, ‘I have to be the one to tell Doug.’
She wraps herself in Charles’s padded parker. She drags the doormat to the top step, sits and waits. When Doug turns into his drive, he’s surprised to see Liz on the doormat instead of Boofda.
There is a space in the human heart created for the sole purpose of loving dogs. Boofda lives on in the hearts of all those who knew him.
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