Dog's Reasons (standard:other, 1922 words)
Author: Siobhan McHenry	Added: Sep 23 2003	Views/Reads: 3294/2327	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
All about small town British Life

“the diversity of our opinions, consequently, does not arise from some
being endowed with a larger share of reason than others, but solely 
from this, that we conduct our thoughts along different ways, and do 
not fix our attention on the same objects.” Descartes 

Dog's Reasons. by Siobhan McHenry. 

Every scar on her hands told a story she said, the round one that looked
like a cat's eye happened to be one she was particularly proud of...she 
had a dog with bulging eyes that looked like a rat on steroids...her 
nickname was Asbestos, that was a name given to her after a period of 
halitosis when friends couldn't bear to go near her and she had spent a 
week as a recluse brushing her teeth twelve times a day. 

We met outside the Working Men's club though neither of us were working
men, as it were. Her left hand was bleeding profusely, the result of 
yet another fight with her ex-boyfriend...I had been concerned by her 
bloodied hand, (yet it looked as though she had dipped it in a pot of 
scarlet paint) and had gallantly offered my assistance. I could see the 
tears welling up in her eyes. I took her back inside the club and tried 
unsucsessfully to chat her up. The few things she told me were pretty 
weird and funny, i don't know whether she had made most of it up, she 
was obviously very pissed  and most of the time she just sat there 
sucking her hand like a vampire... 

Nothing more amounted that night, some shit on a motorbike kept his
engine running right next to us, gassing us on the fumes, like there 
wasn't already enough smog in this smelly old, industrial town, so she 
decided to head home.  I managed to write down her phone number which 
she shouted to me from across the road  wobbling dangerously on the 
edge of the curb. I waved her off, as she said her goodbyes and watched 
her zigzag precariously down the street on high heels. 

I thought I'd give her a day to recover from the previous nights
drinking before i called her, my stomach felt pretty mashed up too, the 
dregs of alcohol felt like they were burning my insides...She did 
remember who i was after all when we spoke two days later... 

We talked about all kinds of things, she related stories to me about a
bloke who had drunk her sister's piss and had then tried to cop off 
with her, how she was meant to be going to church that evening with her 
nan, and that she blamed her madness on being a Catholic and part Irish 
and all. 

I told her about my bastard lack of doing anything, visiting the job
centre nearly every other day, when I could get up early enough, and 
then not even getting any phonecalls for interviews. 

I told her I had wanted to be a writer, but everything seemed to be
determined to dishearten me on that ambition. And I always seemed to be 
‘blocked' by something, by what I don't know, either my environment, my 
life or just plain old talentlessness. “One thing that really gets to 
me,” she said, “Is how after all this doing stuff  we really don't 
achieve a thing. Maybe it would be good for you to keep a diary about 
your life, no matter how crap you think it is, there must be something 
here to inspire you.” My inspiration perhaps was all in her..... 

The first time we took Ecstasy together was one of those lucid
dream-like states where even inanimate objects seemed full of wonder, 
and I spent half an hour running my hand through the flame of a candle 
amazed at it's movement, the floating flame seemed to be in all places 
at once and Asbestos babbled like a child for hours...we didn't go out 
this time...I'd had already had too many bad experiences on this drug 
in clubs...I once took a Rolex, after going all day without food, and 
went to a heavy metal club, the loud thrashing of guitars was fucking 
with my head, like being locked up in a room full of barking dogs...I 
had spent two hours, which seemed like ten minutes in the loo's telling 
a friend to come find me if I wasn't out in ten minutes cos that would 
mean I was dead and dying on the piss-covered floor, bleeding from 
every orifice...but he didn't, so I just sat on the floor in my own 
watery vomit, my head lolling backwards, staring at a single blue light 
on the ceiling and thinking I had found God... 

My parents have voted for those “honest” thugs, the BNP, the British
Nationalist Party, Britain's version of the Ku Klux Klan. Why the hell, 


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