Dog's Reasons (standard:other, 1922 words)
Author: Siobhan McHenry	Added: Sep 23 2003	Views/Reads: 3297/2328	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
All about small town British Life

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

I don't know...they got in by a majority, the head of this mafia being 
the grandson of an Italian immigrant. This town is now full of big men 
walking around with their arms crossed, pumped up and proud, lots of  
Italian ice-cream vans are mysteriously driving around at night and 
there are more pretend blondes than you would care to see unless you 
were one of those oh so ‘proud' men....what this means for the future 
of this place, let alone this country I do not know, but it means my 
favourite Indian take-away has now shut up shop and the owners have all 
but disappeared... 

Elise, her real name...is in trouble, again. Just like that Andromache
in those greek tradegies, her ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend wants to 
kill her...and I witnessed all the drama unfold. We went to a barbeque 
at his house, us not being an item yet, and her still clinging onto the 
abusive git, who is a lot older than both of us...he keeps a machete in 
his kitchen drawer...and wears “designer” gear like Ted Baker and 
Hackett (enough said). Well, his new ‘girlfriend' a toned, muscley 
thing upped on copious amounts of vodka, sprang at us with the machete 
like a well-trained commando and started screaming about how much she'd 
like to cut us both up. We left early.... 

“ I was put into a mental hospital once..' Elise began. “ Why?”, I
asked. “ I've never been too sure, I had so many strange visions, 
perhaps it was drugs.  Gary has a habit, he used to work every day and 
leave me all alone with just weed to smoke. I smoked an eighth a day, 
just sitting in front of the telly, doing nothing...” 

Her eyes drifted away from me and she stared into the distance, quietly
picking at a loose thread on her sleeve...We were sitting beside each 
other in her bedroom, the moon shone it's silver light onto her hair, 
her face was serene and sad. Outside the wind was blowing the rain 
hard, it dripped down the window like a multitude of tears,  the noise 
was steady and constant, drumming against the walls. 

It was the middle of September, for most of the month it had been
extremely hot and sunny, tonight was the first of the rain...it seemed 
to fit both our moods...we sat in silence,  no T.V,  no music... “Do 
you still love him?,” I asked her. “I don't know, perhaps I was just 
clinging onto somebody for all those months, I thought he would protect 
me. After he helped me get out of the hospital, I followed him 
everywhere, so convinced that if I was left alone, someone would come 
and get me, the police or the doctors, and put me straight back in 
there.” 

She lived all alone in a flat on the eighth floor of a high-rise. The
room was messy, but not filthy, the floor was covered with her Art, 
paint pots, brushes, rags and paper. There was a single painting on the 
wall that caught my eye...a woman's face, in the style of Glimt she 
said, with long straggly hair, purple and brown, one dark eye drooping 
downwards, and splashes of blue tears... 

The next morning, the smell of fresh wet earth drifting upwards through
the opened window, our mood was a little better...we decided to go to 
her parent's house to pick up the “rat” and take him for a little 
walk....I went into the newsagents to buy some fags (cigarettes) while 
Elise and the dog waited outside,  shivering in the cold...I stood in 
the queue fidgetting impatiently and leaning on each leg in turn, 
dancing a little jig to shake off the coldness whilst the Indian shop 
keeper, smiling with soft, wide eyes and a fixed grin took abuse from 
two drunken teenagers, taking out can after can from the drinks 
fridge... “Oi, ow long ‘as this  bin in the fridge then?, I ain't 
buying this, it's outta date! Wass wrong with you?” No Answer. No 
reason why. They stumbled past me and out of the door. Catching Elise's 
eye, I saw her turn her face towards the ground as they loudly 
chortled, and began to annoy her. I got my cigarette's and hurried 
outside.. “This your boyfriend then?”, one of them asked. “Yes,” she 
replied. “‘Ere mate, look after her, awright?” They stumbled off down 
the road. I could not express to her the unspeakable joy I felt so 
suddenly, her boyfriend!!! We walked in silence together, she still had 
her face turned towards the ground. What if she'd only said that just 
to get those blokes off her back? We didn't discuss what had just 
happened,  I was too embarassed and confused to say anything more... 
“I'm starting to get chillblains,” she said, “Let's go to my cousin's.” 
“Erm, Ok.” 

Her cousin; a true metaller, tongue-pierced, aversions to baths...He was
the same age as us, twenty. He lived in his Dad's attic..he and his 
Dad's girlfriend had an equal hatred of each other, he called  her 
Clog, for reasons known only to himself. The attic was dingy, dark and 
full of the mixed putrid smells of B.O and pot smoke, on the walls were 
disgusting cartoons of aliens in unsavoury sexual positions, old prints 
of maps of the Thames, Gameboy scores, rotting doughnuts hanging on 
nails. He had a sensitive side too, Elise had said, he wrote poetry...I 
took up an empty space on the floor between pizza boxes full of fag 
butts and unwashed boxer shorts...he handed me a book of his “works”, 
one read: ‘Judy Garland eats Scat, fuck, shit, piss.' Suffice to say, 
we left early... 

So what is this all about? This story is about my first love, this story
is just a diary of a week in my unimportant life you could say, I 
haven't even told you about our first kiss.  If this story seems to you 
to be going nowhere, that is precisely because the whole point of this 
story is that all of us, every one of us here was going nowhere. It was 
an English, small town sensibility, we earn our money during the week 
on a minimum wage and then spunk it all on a weekend down the pub...if 
you are still living in this town after the age of eighteen, you can be 
sure, unless Lady Luck comes knocking on your door, that you will be 
living here for the rest of your little life. And that's the sad truth 
of it. There is no reason why...Everyone has their own excuses for it, 
bad childhoods, bad starts, bad opportunities. What is Reason? Reason 
is cause and effect, Reason is only an excuse... 


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