Reader, I Married Him

DANGEROUS DOG

KIRSTY GUNN

IN A WAY, I could start this short story with a dream I had last night in which I was attacked by two rogue Labradors who’d seemed sweet at first but then turned mean. This was at the gates of the park where I normally go running, and the Labradors went for me right there, one biting my hand, holding on and not letting go, the other mauling my clothing. I could start with that, I suppose, because the same park features heavily in the story I want to write and it works as a nice “gateway to narrative” – a phrase Reed has taught me and the kind of thing I come out with now as casually as terms like “core muscles” or “aerobic as opposed to muscular fitness”, which have been a natural part of my professional vocabulary as a fitness trainer and personal body-development coach.

So yes, I could start with that dream, with me reaching down to a pair of dogs who were sitting just outside the gates to the park, just reaching down to pat their soft black heads – and wham! Just like that they were on to me, one with my hand in its mouth, the other grabbing on tight to the hem of my jacket. “Hang on a minute, you two,” I heard myself say, “this isn’t what you’re supposed to do. You’re Labradors, for goodness’ sake.” At which point, hearing myself speak, I woke up.

Of course everyone knows about dreams like this, about Jung and Freud, those dream counsellors with their unconscious-world this and their myths-and-meanings that. And sure, we all know about the biting-dog dream: that it’s about either sexual repression or confidence. Or fear of sex. Or too much, or not enough. Whatever. So I suppose it could be that the dream itself might be a little short story if I wanted. It’s starting the writing classes that got me thinking this way. You, whoever you are, are reading now because you like reading, you’re used to it – even something like this, a short story from a writing class – and you’re used to thinking of life in a fictional sort of way; you probably write short stories yourself. But for me, finding meanings in the day-to-day, using them to create a written piece of work … It’s weird and it’s exciting. Now I think back on so many things that have happened to me and find shapes in those things, patterns … Like how come I went through most of my adult life in and out of relationships when I know I’ve got my own ways of going about things, always have had, so why should I be surprised they didn’t work out? Of course it comes of being a professional athlete, my mother used to say, as well as having my own business and telling people all the time: You’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that.

And here I am, still doing those things – giving the aerobics and weights lessons, signing up new clients for training, etc. etc. – but also taking writing classes, and everything changed for me because of that. And maybe it’s what the dream was telling me – reminding me of that connection between life and art. Who knows. All I can tell you is that when I started this particular exercise – the title we were given: “Something that really happened that has far-reaching consequences” – I just thought, first off: Hey, get the biting dogs in, Kitty. Start with that.

The class I go to isn’t strictly short story writing. It’s “Life Writing” with various approaches to prose. We, to quote the course leaflet, “draw from material that has occurred in the student’s life and from that fashion stories and non-fiction articles – ‘prose artworks’ – that both transform the original and stay true to its shape and turn of events”. Amazing, right? That a class could deliver that kind of result with a bunch of men and women in their thirties to sixties, taking two hours of night school per week to “hone their writing skills”? Well, that’s Reed Garner for you, that one man. He developed the course and teaches the whole thirty-two weeks’ worth of it, and he knows what he’s doing because he is an American short story writer who himself writes from life, creates those “prose artworks”, and though no one here has heard of him he’s quite a big name in the States, with stuff in the New Yorker and collections of short fiction and has won big prizes over there too – all this information I have at my fingertips, now, you see, and can write about with such authority and ease. I also know that he has taught at Princeton and Yale and is Visiting Professor of Short Fiction at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, which is where my mother used to go. So, hey. I guess I was bound to feel a connection. Because my mother was a big presence in my life, I must tell you, massive, and my dad, too, and I miss them both more than I can say.

Still, even with all these credentials running from him like water, he’s a teacher who doesn’t make a big deal of that. From the outset he said, “Guys, we’re all in this together. Just because you’re starter-writers and I’ve been doing it longer doesn’t make me your professor any more than it makes any of you a student. You’ll be teaching me easily as much, if not more, than I’ll ever be able to show you.” And then he did this thing with his hair – he has super-long hair that’s white as white because of being part Native American and he has to keep flipping it back to get it out of his way – flipping it back and then with one hand gathering it up and twisting it into a pretty little rough ponytail or bun, talking all the while. “So teach me,” he was saying. “I’ll be paying attention to you all.”

For my part, I couldn’t listen hard enough, pay attention close enough … “Reed Garner. Just say his name out loud, Kitty,” I used to murmur to myself as I was walking home, those first few classes. Not even thinking about going for a run or working out. Just going over ideas about fiction and prose and Reed Garner, saying his name. One day he cycled past me as I was in this kind of daydream and when I lunged out of my thoughts to shout “Hi!” he nearly fell off his bike, took a sort of tumble to avoid hitting me, but then went on his way.

Already that feels like a long time ago, when we sort of crashed into each other like that on the street … But I know it’s got nothing to do with my “gateway” and “Something that really happened that has far-reaching consequences”, so I’d better get on with all that now.

Well, I was running, as I do every morning, through the park, coming back around seven, getting to the front gates, and there up ahead I saw, seven o’clock in the morning, remember, a gang of kids, teenagers I thought at first but more like in their early twenties, and they were laughing at something, a shouting and jeering that sounded like a crowd – though I saw when I got closer that there were only four of them. The thing they were all looking down at was a dog, a pit bull terrier, with a black, flat expression in its eyes. Its ears were back, and its head down, its tail level, and it was pretty unhappy, twitching and twisting on a chain because those kids were tormenting it. One was bent over and jeering at the dog and poking him with a stick to make him mad and he was spinning around and snapping at it. Another was yanking on the chain. “Nah, Rocky!” one of the kids sneered at him, and tickled his balls when the chain was pulled back so tight I could see the little dog was nearly choking. “Yah, pussy!” the kid said, and made to kick him when his friend released his grip.

Now I may be a personal trainer and strong, but actually I’m quite small. And I may be super-fit, I am, but I wouldn’t describe myself as brawny. Still I hate to see a dog being taunted – any animal, but dogs especially. Perhaps that’s because I’d always had dogs as a kid and my parents, when they were still alive, used to take in strays and mutts, “orphan anything”, my mother used to say – I was an orphan myself, you see, and my mother and father took me in – and I’d always thought I’d have a dog one day, when I quit the personal training … Anyhow, when I saw those kids, well, young men really, they weren’t kids at all, when I saw them taunting that little dog so that he was snapping and growling and starting to look as if any minute he was going to slip his chain and make a lunge and then there’d be trouble … Well, I saw red.

Professor Garner – just joking: I mean, Reed – says we must never use clichés in a story. “Do anything to avoid ’em, kids,” he says, in his American way. Yet sometimes, like just then, it seems there is no way around them. Because I did … see red. We’d been reading Jane Eyre in class, as part of a study of “the intersection between Life Writing and Fiction”, and looking at how that novel by Charlotte Brontë seems for all the world to be just the story of a particular woman’s life, a study of Jane, and not the usual kind of fiction with a plot that has been figured out in advance to make it seem exciting. The red room in that book – it’s there towards the beginning when Jane is being punished by her terrible aunt – and the idea that it might surround a person, that colour, might make her see things in a particular way … well, that detail stayed with me. All that opening section, actually, because I related to it, maybe, with being an orphan too and my parents only adopting me when I was four so I can remember that other part of my life, not in detail, maybe, the orphanage or “home”, as people always called it, but I can remember my mother and father walking towards me that day they came to collect me, and my mother getting down on her knees in front of me and opening her arms and I ran towards her … And I can remember, too, exactly how I felt, being held in her arms that first time … So yes, the early section of Jane Eyre, it stayed with me, how it must have been for Jane to have that terrible aunt and not someone like my mother and what it must have been like, growing up so alone … And “seeing red”, well, altogether it seems a likely expression for me to use – cliché or not – when that book had been so clearly in my mind.

I saw red with what those kids were doing. So instead of walking on, I went straight up to those boys, young men, whatever, and said, “What on earth are you doing?”

Let me tell you, that was a moment. A moment, right then, of silence. Then one of the men said, “Fuck off, bitch,” and the one beside him, “Yeah. Fuck off,” and then someone else said, in a low and dangerous voice, “Get her, Rocky. Get her,” and the dog turned.

Now again, as I say, I’m not tall and what do I know? And I’m not brawny in any way and I’m not confrontational with strangers, but neither do I believe anyone is inherently mean, human or animal, boy or dog … I just don’t believe it. It’s like bodies. You can be overweight or your tone can be shot to hell or you’ve got no endurance, no core strength … but I can work with you on that. Take my classes and you’ll see, straight away, how together we can improve things. I’m saying all this as a kind of metaphor, I guess, as a way of showing that I wasn’t about to walk away from that situation, even though the boy who held the dog lengthened the chain and the dog lit out at me and someone said, “Get her, Rocky,” again, but then the boy with the chain pulled it back just in time, so that nothing happened, even though the little guy’s teeth were bared and his eyes like a shark because he was ready to get me all right, he’d been commanded.

“You’re being very cruel to that dog,” I said then. “How old are you all, anyway? Twenty? Thirty? You should know better. Here …” and at that point I got down on my knees, just like my mother got down on her knees that day at the orphanage, and the little dog looked at me, and his expression changed. His ears went up. He put his head to one side.

“Look at him,” I said to the boys, for now I could see that they were just boys, I’d kind of made that up about them being twenty or thirty, just to flatter them, because they wanted to be very, very tough. “Look,” I said again, from down there, though one of them was lashing some other chain he had, and another was muttering over and over in a dark low voice, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” just like that, and another turned to spit.

“Look,” I said again, for the third time. And then I put out my balled fist and the dog stretched his head towards me. Then he stood up, took a step or two, his head still tilted to one side, while all the time I kept my fist in front of him, quite steady. Then he let out a little whimper and sat down again. He had a lovely face. His eyes, which had been black and scary-flat like a killer fish, were now full of thoughts and interest. He gave a little bark, like a puppy. He was really just a puppy. He put out his head towards my hand and smelled my hand all over and then he licked it. And I opened my hand then to let him sniff my palm and then, when he’d done that, too, I gave him a little scratch around his ears and fondled his muzzle.

“There,” I said to him, and sort of to the boys as well. “There, you see? Everything’s all right.”

The boys kind of shuffled, reassembled slightly. The one with the chain just let the chain hang.

“You see,” I said, “you think you’ve got a mean dog here, boys. But” – I wasn’t looking at them as I spoke. I was just looking at the dog – “he’s not mean at all.”

“He should be fucking mean,” said one of them, the one who had been swinging a length of chain attached to his jeans, though he wasn’t swinging it now. “He should fucking be.”

“But he’s not, Steve,” said the guy holding the actual dog chain. “Look at him. He’s a pussy. He’s a mummy’s dog.”

“My old mum wouldn’t be seen dead with a dog like that,” the third boy said. “She wouldn’t be seen dead.”

“His name’s not even Rocky,” I said then. “It’s Mr Rochester. Little Roc, for short, because look, he’s only a puppy …” By now the boys could see that the little dog was wriggling with pleasure, tail wagging, only wanting to play. Not the kind of dog they’d thought he was at all. “He’s named after a guy I’ve been reading about in this book about someone’s life,” I said. “That guy is a bit like this little dog of yours. He may seem all tough and mean but really …” And I gave Little Roc a lovely rub all over his haunches and down his back. “Really,” I said, “this little guy wants – like all of us want – like you boys yourself want” – and by now I had the puppy snuggled up right by me, his eyes closed with pleasure – “someone to give him attention and to love him and to love them back.”

“Hah!” they all went then, the four kids, and snorted like young ponies.

“You be some crazy bitch,” one of them said, the third one again.

“Well, this book I’ve been reading, that I was telling you about, Jane Eyre … She seems crazy too, I suppose, but her story is not so different from Mr Rochester here, this little guy, not so different from all of you, too, I reckon. Listen …” I said then, and I stood up – and I still can’t believe I did all this, spoke that way to total strangers, acted so cool and so assured, because all the time, let me tell you, my heart was beating, it was going like bam, bam, bam as though those boys could hear it because, remember, this was seven something in the morning, inner London but in a park, there was no one else around – and I started speaking then, like it was all prepared. I told them about my life and about Jane Eyre and the writing classes and about my mother and father and how I missed them – and really, this is the heart of the short story, the reason Reed said I should write it in the first place, because I had a central “incident” or “pulse moment”, as he calls it, the unexpected bit coming – bang – just like in Jane Eyre, you might say, a certain thing happening that’s like – whew! – this doesn’t seem like real life, but it is. And I said then, “Listen, boys. Why don’t you let me have this dog? I can see he’s not yours. And you don’t know what to do with him.”

“That’s the truth,” one of them said.

“We didn’t even want the fucking dog,” said another, right away, but looking at me as he spoke, and then saying, “It wasn’t my idea, you know.”

And then someone else said, “Yeah, Keith. She’s right. You didn’t know what you were going to do with him. None of us did.”

And so the conversation went on. And Keith, for he was the one who’d taken on Mr Rochester in the first place, told me he’d promised to look after the dog for someone who didn’t want him but might be able to sell him on, but that if Keith took him off his hands, he could have the money, if there was any. They’d only got him the night before at the pub and someone there had said that the guy who had been interested wasn’t even around. They had the choke chain, a bit of food in a bag, but no bowl, nothing to feed him in … All this came out, bit by bit, as the boys started telling me their story, why, that same morning, after being up all night, roaming around with a dog they never really intended to have, it was a good thing I’d come upon them, walking out of the park from my morning run … And, as for me, well, seeing some young men with a little dog, and leaving, after the conversation I had with them, with a pit bull terrier on a chain – one of the most dangerous dogs in Britain, all the papers say, with the most attacks on babies and toddlers, getting mauled in dog fights, all of it, you name it – it just shows how interesting life is, in stories and out of them. Because not only did I leave that morning with Mr Rochester on his little chain, but by the time I left I’d told his previous “owners” pretty much the full plot of Jane Eyre, and though all four of them thought it sounded “pretty fucking lame”, they agreed that the scene in the red room had its merits. “Yeah,” Steve said, quietly, as though to himself, after I’d finished telling that bit, “my gran used to put me in a room like that.”

Anyhow, I’ve gone on and on, and Reed gave me, he gave all of us, a word limit and I need to start counting words now. But the reason I wanted to get it down as a story for class is because it was due to the events I’ve described that my life went into a change position when I came upon Mr Rochester that day. That was the “incident”, the “pulse moment”, you see – Reed said that straight away when I told him after class about what had happened to me in the park that morning. “This is all a story, Katherine, a great story with a pulse moment that kicks the whole thing into life. I think you should write it all down sometime,” and then we arranged to meet the next day and have a dog walk together because it turns out he was a pit bull man himself, he used to have one when he was a boy. “Let’s go for it,” he said, referring to the dog walk idea and doing that thing with his hair that I like so much, twisting it back with one hand so that he looks diffident and shy.

And change, yes, change. Because now the story is done and I’m still training, of course I’m still doing all that, but I’m writing more, too, and reading, and Mr Rochester is a total peach and we take him to the park, twice every day, Reed and I, and we sometimes run into the guys there – Steve and Keith and Dave and Kevin – and they take a look at Mr Rochester then and I might tell them a bit more about his namesake because they occasionally ask after “Jane” and what else went on in that book and apparently, it’s written all over me, Reed says, I “could bring fiction to troubled kids in a new way”.

And Reed? You’ve probably guessed. I married him. We decided that pretty soon after he said “Let’s go for it” about the dog walk but also meaning the idea of the two of us together. He said the whole thing lit up for him, as it did for me, the second I told him about my meeting with a so-called “dangerous dog” and the boys who gave him to me and what we talked about that morning, the boys and I, and what happened then, and what happened next. After that, as he said, it was just a case of writing it down.