Poodle

Poodle

When Maurice retired, he walked and walked most days. Motion was everything. He could lose himself in the rhythm of his own footsteps, counting sometimes. He embraced the physical challenge of making himself part of not caring where he walked, so long as he was in motion, so he could feel only the physicality that these long walks engendered, the ache in the legs, the tightening of his stomach, the clean air in his lungs. He was nowhere on his walks, the place he retreated to no matter the geography. His walks often encompassed Lake Burley Griffin with its pathways from bridge to bridge or further. Leaving his flat in Kingston, he could wander the Lake or go up through Forrest to Red Hill and its tracks. 

He’d tried with a bushwalking club but found the people unbearable, inquisitive. He disliked sliding down muddy slopes and creating new tracks through grasses that had grown to mask a number of popular trails. The bush had exploded in growth during the wettest year on record. It was better to be lost within himself, his own marching in the suburbs and around the artificial lake, than to be navigated from place to place by these lean limbed enthusiasts. He found he didn’t need their company.

Maurice’s other pastime was writing. He’d started a retirement journal. He had received a prize in a short story competition, entered under a pseudonym, for his life-emulating story of a woman drowned rescuing her child. The central part of his journal was in remembrance of his wife and daughter. He wrote about them because he felt compelled, urged by something he couldn’t pin down. This was exactly the same as the physical sensation he occasionally felt: a shudder that was the ghost of what it was like to be held in his daughter’s loving embrace. He had adored her, had seen the future through her optimism. Oddly, he thought, he didn’t miss the occasional attempts at passion with his wife. She had stopped making love to him well before she drowned trying to save their daughter. It only took a few moments for their daughter to be caught in a nasty rip, a mother-daughter, morning swim whilst Maurice lingered over coffee in the bed and breakfast accommodation that they had booked online. Treachery Beach had lived up to its name. He missed the nurturing of his daughter far more than he felt the absence of the body of his wife. He missed his daughter with a sensation that wasn’t a memory, more a physical reaction as if to a ghost limb that had been amputated but still generated sensations of pain.   

But the feeling he had about his wife hadn’t supressed thoughts of other women. The nights he couldn’t sleep, especially when it was raining outside, he often found himself troubled by an erection caused by thoughts of a dark-haired girl who was unreachable but exotic, her features lost in a dark red mist. If he had to describe her he’d say she was a Rapunzel from the sub-continent a dark presence that tempted and inveigled. This troubling tumescence would retreat as light broke and he’d roll over in bed, sleep late, waking mid-morning with another layer of dissatisfaction, another pinpoint of grit under his shell. Those were the days when the walks were longer, where he pushed himself just to feel the weight of his body’s strains.   

He had met a woman through the bushwalking club with whom he had an occasional glass of wine, someone who forgave his solecisms that came from his feeling that he had somehow managed to outlive himself, that when his wife and daughter died so did he. It was as if everything on awakening each morning was a surprise. Bernadette was married but seemed to live her own life. She liked drinking wine, she said, but her husband no longer drank because he’d had a mild heart attack and he wanted to live as long as possible and was now a teetotaller vegetarian. This was a story that she’d volunteered as they sheltered from the wind to eat their sandwiches mid-way through the Granite Tors walk, in the Namadgi National Park. She was about five or so years younger than Maurice, he surmised, but with a firmness that obviously came from the sort of walk they were undertaking. At the end of the walk, they exchanged telephone numbers and she’d later called him on a Friday for drinks at the Kingston foreshore later that afternoon.

He’d been inexplicably shy at the first drinks meeting. He put it down to the fact that the appointment was unimaginably real, unlike other elements of his life now. He had maintained a grip on reality through the plenitude of his journal and the occasional imagining of other stories that were at one remove, a safe distance, from the memories of the drownings. There was no such satisfaction in being a character in his own story. The unreality was compounded by the name of the bar: Magoo’s. He had disliked the bumbling cartoon character when he was a child of ten, annoyed by Magoo’s antics, not at all amused by the misadventures that occurred because of Magoo’s near blindness. It was the wrong cartoon for a plump boy who wore glasses.

Bernadette did most of the talking, letting him know that she loved her work in the public service and that she loved her dogs: she had two. He felt nauseous when she had called them her “fur babies.” He had rushed his first glass of shiraz and as she declaimed about her dogs and the routine of their care, he stared at the disparity in consumption. She’d hardly sipped her wine. Maurice had to be very careful when drinking because he couldn’t let himself lose control. There lay the abyss or more dense, impenetrable red mist.

It ended pleasantly after two glasses of wine and the promise that they would catch up soon perhaps for another drink by the sculpted foreshore harbour. 

The next week, Bernadette called Maurice and asked him to dinner. Her husband would be away in Sydney and she was feeling lonely and she loved their conversations. He agreed that he would come to dinner on Thursday at 6.30pm. Maurice arrived on time with a bottle of local shiraz viognier, an indulgence given its expense. It was a cold night and the house’s heating was on and, as well, there was a fire burning in the fireplace in the lounge room. After they sniffed Maurice and wagged their tails at him, the dogs, a small poodle and a mongrel with a fox terrier look, splayed themselves in front of the open fire.  When Bernadette and Maurice sat at the dining table in a room next to the kitchen, the dogs followed. Bernadette served a dish made with lentils and lamb that matched perfectly with the wine and Maurice felt comforted by the heat and this astonishing feast that was so much better than the small meals he cooked for himself. Throughout the main course, Bernadette provided titbits of lamb to the two dogs who sat watching her at the feet of her chair, their gaze following the pattern of her consumption.

Bernadette suggested that they sit in front of the fire before dessert so they could digest their food and enjoy the flames.  Maurice lumbered back to an armchair located to the right of the fire as Bernadette turned on a red-shaded lamp.  Bernadette sat on the brown leather couch directly in front of the fire. The dogs took up their position on the couch, one each side of Bernadette, the poodle then splaying out on its back, legs in the air.  Bernadette told Maurice that she loved winters because she could make the house toasty warm and revel in the heat from an open fire. He agreed that a log fire was a unique pleasure. Bernadette then started stroking the poodle after first gently rubbing its stomach. She placed the dog on her lap, running her hand in slow repetition across its body. Maurice stared, mesmerised by the motion, following the way that she caressed this pet, how the dog melted into Bernadette’s body, relaxed, carefree. This dog had perfect happiness, warmth and the stroking comfort of love.

Maurice stood up. He walked towards Bernadette who smiled at him. He gently took the poodle from her and stroked its back, cradling it in his arms. He walked towards the fire as if to regain his seat in the armchair but instead placed himself in front of the fire and lifted the black fire screen. He placed the poodle, now struggling, into the fire and pushed the screen back in place. The dog squealed and jumped into the gap between screen and grate, its hair alight, its squeals increasing in pace like a demented alarm. Bernadette screamed, hands to her head, seeming bound to the spot in front of the couch where she now stood. As Maurice let go of the fire screen, he informed Bernadette that he wouldn’t stay for dessert and left, intent on walking off the meal that sat heavily in his gut.