‘Very defining characteristics, wouldn’t you say? I learned their names in only one lesson. Most of them I still can’t remember. I’m always grateful for ugliness, or better yet disfigurement.’
He was sufficiently agitated that he could not be further provoked. ‘But what,’ he asked plaintively, ‘am I to say to the parents?’
‘Tell them the truth. Tell them that one of the boys, wholly without permission and entirely dishonestly, contravening every law of privacy and good behaviour, opened my diary, and – what is worse – read the contents to his fellows. I have some idea of who that was, and I suggest that he be expelled, and that the angry parents assault him with sticks and rocks.’
‘I really don’t think your levity appropriate here.’
I have no time for the schoolmaster’s pastoral role, which most use as a way of cosying up to the gentry and currying advance favour with the soon-to-be celebrated, rich and powerful. I will not do this. ‘I’m a teacher, not a damn curate.’ In spite of my insouciance, I never managed to say ‘fucking’ to the Head. ‘Let them move on to pastors new.’
The headmaster winced. ‘Must you, James?’
I was dismissed. Not from my position, but from the study. The Head would no more fire me than rusticate the culprit. I’d have respected him more if he’d done both. But, as often happens in schools, the matter blazed merrily for a few days, and then was forgotten, though attendance in my class diminished somewhat.
Only a couple of years later, to the not entirely secret pleasure of his staff, he died of a cerebral haemorrhage, rather than the emphysema he had courted so assiduously. He should have drowned in his own Latakia-infested sputum, lungs burbling like a hookah. Instead, he was found slumped over his desk, looking rather peaceful (according to the school secretary, who found him), that smirk of wimpish sanctimony wiped finally from his features. Lucky bastard.
Spikedog, sadly, was more reliable in his attendance than my former pupils, and I don’t need any mnemonics to remember him. He had a thick black collar with fearsome nails sticking out, which, had he aimed properly and generated the right momentum, might have crucified a toddler. I didn’t know his owner’s name. Spike too, probably. Ugly enough, though without the muscles, but equally dangerous. He bore more than a passing resemblance to his brutal pet, and if he lacked the neck-nails, he had various bits of steel protruding from his ears, nose and lips. I suspect many other bits of him were also highly metallic. God knows how they got him through security at airports. Though proud of his doggie – he tended to simper at the mutt – he never did anything as normal or desirable as taking him for a walk. Instead, every evening he would let the dog loose in the garden for a crap, and leave him there for an hour or so, while he retreated to his flat to receive his conjugals from his visiting girlfriend. I never heard her name. She was a Gothic, dark, black-clothed, steely, pale, skinny, silent, miserable.
Spikedog hated being excluded from the fun, and would first yap, then whine, and finally howl at the back door, demanding to be let in. He never was, and he never learned. He knew enough to do his business on what passed for a lawn – a bit of uncut scrubby grass – before returning to demand readmittance. Every now and again Spikeman would open the bedroom window, which overlooked the garden, and shout ‘Shut the fuck up!’ First asked to stifle the mutt, then begged, then severely admonished by neighbours leaning out of the windows of the adjoining flats, he soon said the same to them.
Considered as an exile, it might have been possible to see something representative in Spikedog’s abject misery. Had he merely whimpered, I might have pitied him, felt some fellow creaturely feeling. But he had no restraint, no consideration for the feelings of others, sunk in his howling canine narcissism. I could do that too, I recognised in him a shadow self, mon semblable, mon doggy frère. But I am not a brute, I howl not, though I’ve been known to whimper.
From my first-floor window I had a perfect view of the scene. By the end of the week the garden would be replete with piles of dog shit, until at the weekend a resentful crop-headed teenager – a gristly leftover on the plate of divorce – would appear with a handful of plastic bags to clean up the mess. The first time he was required to do this, he vomited copiously, and was ordered to clean that up as well, which is less easy. He didn’t do that again.
There is no use arguing with such a dog, or such an owner – both more anxious to bite than to placate. No, to influence the behaviour of such animals, you have to attack before they do, get in the first blow. But I am a pacific fellow by nature, most distinctly unmartial. When I was ten, the class bully punched me on the nose, I daresay not very powerfully, but I recurrently find myself feeling it to make sure it isn’t bent out of shape.
But what I lack in courage I more than make up for in cunning. If the dratted hound would not shut up, I needed him to develop a fear of the garden, to associate it so thoroughly with pain that he would refuse – whatever the punishment – ever to go there again.
In my next Waitrose order I included three bottles of tabasco sauce, and a pound of Aberdeen Angus aged fillet steak, an extravagance I justified on the grounds that its tenderness might make it sop up more of its lethal marinade. On its arrival, I cut a piece an inch and a half square (saving the rest for a celebratory dinner), pierced it with a knife and hollowed out the centre, which I filled with half of the bottle of sauce. The tabasco had a pungent aroma that teased the nostrils, and would have brought tears to the eye if I’d got too close. But I never cry. I do not approve of it. Once you start, it would be impossible to know when, or how, to finish. I have observed this in infants and women. There is nothing agreeable about the process, which is largely used to wound or to manipulate.
That evening I waited until Spikedog ascended to his highest pitch of declamatory desolation, so that he would associate that noisome activity with the punishment to come, and tossed the meat into the garden next door, hoping he wouldn’t be put off by the smell. The dog saw it land, not so many feet away from him – I was rather proud of my aim, it’s not that easy from a half-opened window – and sniffed it expectantly. As I had hoped, he ate the piece in one slobbery bite, leaving no trace of my malign intervention in his life.
A few moments of blessed quiet followed, as he stood stock still and interrogated the new sensation burning his mouth. He whined a little, but exhibited no signs of the extreme distress I had anticipated. The tabasco did quieten him for a few moments, during which he paced the garden, returned to the patch where the steak had landed, and sniffed it with what seemed – could this be possible? – a sort of longing.
He wanted more. When I repeated the trick the next day, he couldn’t eat the meat fast enough, and the following day I could swear that his howling was directed not at his copulating owner, but at my window, demanding some hot stuff of his own.
I’d made a friend.
We oldies are almost without exception narcissists and bores, until the blessed lapse into silence in the corner armchair in the old folks’ home, unvisited by relatives and ignored by staff. If you asked the elderly what they really want to talk about – after all of the stuff about the weather, what’s been on telly, how rotten the food is, and by the way how are the grandchildren? – what were their names? – most pressingly what the old want to talk about is the state of their bowels. Dutiful daughters will listen sympathetically, but not for long; their husbands will find a reason, screaming silently and metaphorically plugging their ears, to get a coffee, talk on the mobile, or even visit the WC, which is a bit hostile really.
The sad irony is that, if a human (like a Spikedog) is a machine for producing shit, it is not a reliable long-term mechanism for expelling it. I’ve gone three days without a visit this week, which is my normal pattern. Eaten the statutory fruits and vegetables, ingested my revolting mixed seeds, like a parakeet, for my breakfast. Indulged my favourite ritual, more delicious than efficacious: the making of the morning coffee.
One of my little treats, a few years back, was the purchase (almost £5,000, I didn’t let Suzy know) of a restaurant quality – and size – Gaggia espresso-maker. And, also essential if I was going to get the best out of my new machine, a Super Caimano burr grinder.