Babs

This is a short story with a history of failure. It has been entered into several competitions and never got anywhere.

I’m adding it to my blog so it stands a chance of being read which is surely the reason many short stories get written and also to prove that old chestnut - if at first you don’t succeed, try try try again. You might end up with a Happy Families.

I did bump into Eric again as I always knew I would.

My ex- had demanded why I was moving to such a countrified place, bigger than a village, smaller than a town, closer to the sea and most importantly further away from him. He felt he had a right to know, but my feeling was he lost that the moment he gave up his promise to be loyal to me always.

Every weekend he had to drive an extra one hour and forty-five minutes to see the twins and in fairness to him he always did. In fairness to me, I never made it difficult for them to stay in touch, to play happy families. Except for the moving 200 miles away. Over the years, that’s been about 36,000 miles he’s had to rack up due to his wandering eye. Fair penance.

The snow meant everything had come to a standstill.

Ginny and Roe were still in bed. They’d spent most of the last evening clicking refresh on the school’s home page until at last, the longed-for message came up.

Due to inclement weather, school will not be in attendance tomorrow.

I pondered the archaic phrasing and the jaunty use of the comic sans font but the twins didn’t. They just whooped with glee and returned to their rooms where they were left to their devices.

Even with the curtains drawn, the bright white light through the window painted the insides of my eyelids a pale pink. The whole room was bathed in the pink of a daisy petal’s edges. I stretched myself into an L-shape, my legs kicking over onto the empty side of the bed, toes briefly peeping out from under the duvet, testing the temperature.  A rough tongue inserted itself in between my big toe and the next toe along. That was it. Time to get up.

Snow days are becoming ever rarer but in those early years, shortly after we moved here, the twins had an entirely different approach to them. It was all windows thrown wide open and small pink hands thrust out to catch the flakes as they fell, feet pounding up and down the stairs and squeals in nightie and pyjamas as they stood on the back threshold looking out at the garden under its new fleecy white blanket. The next day, snowball fights, snowmen, steaming mugs of hot chocolate that flushed their cheeks and made their noses run. All those childhood charms they’d once enjoyed were now replaced by the teenager’s voracious appetite for sleep. I wouldn’t see either of them any time before noon.

The strip of front yard, just big enough for the recycling bins and two saggy olive trees, lay glittering like Jason’s fleece as I opened the front door. Pristine, untouched snowfall; it was almost a pity to despoil it with my size 5s. Babs hesitated on the doorstep, sniffing the unfamiliar cold air before throwing herself forwards. She was three – a present to myself after the twins hit puberty and stopped needing me. She had never seen anything like it. She leapt into the unknown as if jumping off the duck board at the lake but instead of plunging underwater, she found herself spread-eagled like a trophy hunter’s bear rug. She scrambled back up, shook herself, her tight white curls spiralling this way and that before turning to look at me.

I meant to do that.

As we walked along like Amundsen and co in the tundra, you could hardly see her, the dot-dot-dot of her pawprints the only clue to her existence. She reminded me of the invisible dog I’d had as a child. It was just a toy, a dog’s collar and lead with some wire sewn into its length so it held stiff as you pointed it in the direction you wanted to go, calling out the fashionable dog’s name of the time. Back then, it was Lassie or Snoopy. A dog’s name for a dog. Now, you’ve got as much chance of meeting a canine Rover or Fido as a human one. No, they’re all Oscars and Poppys nowadays.

We crunched through the five minutes it takes to get to the park. All around us, pure white snow drifting up against gates and doorways eradicating the kerb, rising up to make the road level with the pavement, lying on the tops of walls and gilding the branches of trees. A trail of paw prints headed towards the bird table in one garden and Babs squatted to add a streak of yellow at their gate. It was the only hint of colour other than the smears of red and dashes of scattered brown feathers. A tiny detached wing lay there intact. For cats, as for humans, the wing is the least tasty morsel and often left behind.

The gate to the park was unlocked but unopened and it was this that made me think it would be safe to let her off the lead. Away from the main road and with the frosted spider’s webs suspended like doilies between the fence’s metal railings, I bent down to unclip Babs. She immediately raced off in a futile search for the usual canine Facebook hotspots – the bench with cigarette burns all over it, a dog shit bin with a lid that didn’t close properly, the lovers’ tree with the initials of long-failed relationships hacked into its bark – their odiferous codes now all completely masked by the snow.

I was distracted. When would the snow melt? Was it going to snow again? Would the twins’ father be able to come and collect them for his weekend? I didn’t even notice until she’d already disappeared. She wasn’t the sort of dog who ever let me out of her sight. She had to be here somewhere.

‘Babs! Babs!’ I shouted and I heard my own voice call back to me.

‘Babs! Babs!’ 

I tried to follow her paw prints but there had been so much mad dashing about, such a lot of rolling about in the snow, exposing startled looking patches of dandruff-scattered grass, the trails seemed to go off in all directions. I picked out the most promising set and made off that way, all the while crying out her name.

Nothing.

And then just as the children became Virginia and Rowan when they were naughty, so Babs became ‘Barbara! Where did you go?’

I told people I’d named her after Barbra Streisand whose nickname was Babs. The singer hated her full name so much but also didn’t want to change it so she simply removed the middle syllable. My Babs is not named after her.

‘Bar-bar-a!’

I turned left and right to look for any signs of a small black nose or escaping pink tongue. I was scanning the far end of the park, hand raised to shield against the low sunshine when something hit the back of my leg. I turned just my head to see what it was and a breathless-looking spaniel was looking up at me. Then, it was looking down at me.  As I lay sprawled, an unwilling snow angel yet to earn its wings, the dog opened its mouth. A string of saliva dangled from its piebald gums and landed on my chin.

I sat up and the spaniel sat down. The crimped fur of its long brown ears and its sloping muzzle made it look like George Eliot on the back cover of my student copy of Middlemarch.

‘Don’t suppose you’ve seen a small fluffy white dog? About this big?’

I held my gloved hands about as far apart as a loaf of bread.

‘Called Barbara?’

The spaniel barked.

Yes, I’m here.

‘Babs?’ 

No reaction

‘Barbara?’

The dog looked up and barked again, dislodging the ridge of white powder on the tip of its nose. Even though it was the same breed of dog you sometimes saw shoving past you at the airport, it was only snow it had been snouting about in.

There was a crunching behind me and I turned to see a man who was dressed for the weather. His jacket said Rab, his hat said North Face and his scarf said Dick Turpin as it was pulled up to cover the bottom half of his face. He was holding a shivering ball of fluff.

‘Eric?’

‘Toni?’

Eighteen years, six months earlier

We decided that Eric would come to me rather than have me try to negotiate which was his bedroom. And he already knew where the squeaky floorboard was.

‘No sex please, I’m British,’ I said as he crawled in beside me.

‘That was so embarrassing,’ he groaned, ‘I can’t believe you gave them a little bow back.’

It had seemed like the polite thing to do. In between our knocking the door and it being opened, we heard scrambling in the hallway just before oriental-sounding music came on. I say oriental because it seemed very much to be the guitar riff from Bowie’s China Girl, snipped together and played over and over again like the muzak in a cut-price greetings card store.

The problem was that after I bowed, hands clasped together in a mirror image of what Eric’s mother was doing, she bowed again. So I did too. And then, so did she.

This could have gone for some time if Eric hadn’t put a stop to it.

‘She’s from Ashby-de-la-Zouch, not Shanghai,’ he said.

He nudged his way into the hall, his rucksack knocking the middle one of three flying ducks askew. I straightened it with an apologetic smile.

‘Your room as usual.’ Eric’s mum called after us, ‘and Antoinette in the box room.’

‘You are kidding me,’ Eric muttered as I scampered up the stairs after him. He was facing the door of what was presumably the box room. Someone had draped a garland of Chinese paper lanterns across its MDF panels and it had been left ajar so the smell of Tiger Balm wafted across to us.

‘How do you like your room?’ Eric’s mother asked.

‘It’s very nice,’ I replied. ‘I’ve got a bit of a cold so it’s helped to clear my blocked nose.’  I sniffed for effect and my right nostril whistled a perfect middle C.

‘Your English is very good,’ she said.

‘Thank you,’ I replied, ‘so’s yours.’

She pressed a hand to the chest of her Marks and Spencer lambswool knit and gave a tinkly laugh.

‘Did you like the grub though?’

Eric’s stepfather leaned forward for the last pork ball. He dipped it entirely into the sweet and sour sauce that was curiously being served in a gravy boat before guiding it into his mouth. The pink of his mouth and the orange of the sauce clashed horribly.

‘It was very nice.’

‘She’ll make her roast for you tomorrow,’ Eric’s stepfather continued, ‘but she thought you’d like to have something that made you feel at home on the first night.’

‘Should’ve got some crisps in then,’ Eric slurred under his breath.

He’d been gulping the Merlot down like glasses of squash. Not that I could do the same. Asian aldehyde hydrogenase deficiency meant that a sniff of the barmaid’s apron turned me the same shade as an Oompa-Loompa. I wondered what Eric’s mother would have served one of them on a first night dinner. Chocolate probably.

I had to put one of the pillows over Eric’s head to block out his drunken snores.

Not all night, you understand. Only when I heard a door from one of the other rooms creak open and footsteps pad along the landing carpet. They hesitated as they went over the squeaky floorboard outside Eric’s childhood bedroom. I’d been allowed to go in to see it earlier on just as long as we left the door open. It was charming with its Tracy Chapman poster on the wall, football-themed wallpaper and curtains, cardboard boxes of clutter stuffed under the bed.

Whoever was outside carried on their way before hesitating outside the box room. I bit my ring finger, indenting the soft pad with the Morse code marks of my teeth, while waiting for the doorknob to turn. It didn’t. Soon enough I heard the stream of wee hitting the water in the toilet, the flush and the feet returning directly back to where they came from.

Eric exhaled so heartily when I took the pillow off his head, a small shower of saliva sprinkled across my hand. I wiped it on his Portishead t-shirt and snuggled back to sleep.

When I woke up, Eric was gone and I felt the disorientation of a night in an unfamiliar place. I sat up and stifled a squeal.

Eric’s mother was sitting on the end of the bed, holding a cup and saucer.

‘Good morning,’ she said, holding them out.

‘Um, thanks.’

I accepted them and took a sip. It was, and remains, the nicest cup of tea I’ve ever had.

‘How do you know how I take it?’ I asked.

‘It’s my talent,’ she replied, ‘strong or weak, milk or not, one sugar or two. I can just tell by looking. Even when . . .’

It was all so pleasant before the ‘even when . . .’

‘I hope I didn’t keep you,’ I looked around the room, ‘waiting here until I woke up.’

‘Oh no, I’ve only just come in with it. Literally, I have just come through this door.’

She patted my legs through the bedclothes.

‘I’ll leave you to get up then. You’ve missed breakfast but it’ll help you build up an appetite for lunch.’

There are two options for the afternoon after a heavy Sunday lunch. Hearty walk or hearty nap.

I’d expected Eric to come with me and I think he did too before the carbs hit his bloodstream. When I left to go to the toilet, he was putting on his parka but when I got back, he was slumped along the sofa, knees kinked over the arm, trainers just brushing the Axminster. I shrugged and headed for the door. Eric’s mother’s dog – an elderly Coton de Tulear – appeared at my ankles. I sighed and reached for the slim, diamante-encrusted lead that was hanging next to the coats.

For such a small dog, it moved remarkably quickly, short legs all blurry as I hurried to keep up. It clearly knew where it was going; all I had to do was follow. Perhaps there was a boy down a well? Past the paved-over front lawns of the cul-de-sac, out into the intermittent hum of Sunday afternoon traffic on the main road, along the wooden fence outside a primary school where chalk murals of blonde and sandy-haired children played ‘Ring-a-ring-of-roses’, straight up towards the row of shops belonging to the butcher, the baker, the Yankee Candle purveyor. Over the black and white of the crossing before ducking into a narrow alley to a stop by metal railings at the bottom of concrete steps leading down into a basement. The dog sat and raised its chin towards me expectantly until I hooked the loop of its lead over a fleur-de-lys finial on a metal post. It settled down with its chin on its paws. Loose skin and fur flopped over its face so the only way you knew where it was looking was because of the gunky tear stains beneath each geriatric eye.

‘Susie!’

‘Suzie!’

‘Suzy!’

I looked down at the dog whose ears flicked in recognition at the sound of someone desperately seeking a Susan.

‘Is someone looking for you?’ I asked.

It showed me the whites of its eyes.

I looked in the direction of the voice to see Eric’s stepfather standing in the entrance of the pub to whose railings the dog had allowed itself to be attached.

‘Suzy Wong!’ he said, smiling broadly at me before taking the steps up from the doorway towards me. He spilt some of his pint onto the dog and it turned around to lick itself dry with an air of expert resignation.

He placed a baseball glove of a hand onto my shoulder.

‘What you doing here? Where’s that Eric? He’s a fool letting an exotic little smasher like you out on her own.’

‘He fell asleep,’ I said, ‘we were supposed to go for a walk so I took the dog instead and the dog led me to here.’

I bent down to pick it up so I could get away from the iron grip that was kneading my shoulder like putty. I felt very sorry for Eric’s mother’s breasts. It’s not a thought anyone should need to have about their boyfriend’s mother.

‘Ah, the dog of the old ball and chain. It’s not the sort of dog a man should take to the pub really. Woman’s dog, you see. Too small, like. Still, he’s all-white, he is all-white.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Did I say all-white? I meant to say all right. He’s all right.’

‘Freudian slip?’ I asked.

‘Probably not, to be honest.’

‘In vino veritas, then?’

‘More likely, yeah,’ Eric’s stepfather said. ‘You’re a clever girl. Good at maths too, are you?’

I shook my head.

‘What about the violin then? Gotta hold that on a slant, haven’t you? Against the chin? Did you hear about my mother-in-law? She’s got more chins than the Chinese phonebook? Geddit?’

‘No, she hasn’t,’ I said.

We’d been to visit Eric’s grandmother in her cottage in France.

‘It’s a joke, isn’t it? Banter. Don’t they have banter in China?’

‘I don’t know. They have it in Leicestershire but it’s of a much higher standard.’

Eric’s stepfather sucked in a lungful of air before expelling it through pursed lips.

‘Ooh, get her,’ he said before chummily tapping the dog on the snout.

The dog didn’t quite see it that way. It curled its lips back revealing more whiteness – its teeth – which it sunk into a sausage-like finger, or from its point of view, finger-like sausage.

Eric’s stepfather screamed and balled his other hand into a fist but before he could plant his punch on its intended target, I turned quickly and took the full impact of the blow on my kidneys. I was shoved forward, my feet scrambling desperately, and successfully, to keep me upright.

Eric’s stepfather came towards us.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his eyes were full of alcohol-fuelled tears while his nose was emptying itself of alcohol-fuelled snot.

‘Well, I suppose there’s no harm done.’

Eric’s stepfather leaned in, his lips puckered. I stepped back to get away from him but found myself trapped against the railings. I closed my eyes and braced myself.

‘Oh Buddy, I didn’t mean it.’

I looked down to see Eric’s stepfather, his face pressed against the black crackled glaze of the dog’s nose.

‘It was just rough and tumble.’

The dog licked Eric’s stepfather’s face but I think it wasn’t so much out of forgiveness, more to enjoy the salty taste of his tears and runny nose.

I’d had enough. Man’s best friend is his wife’s dog. I left them to it.

Eric and I broke up the following December. I spent Christmas alone with a highlighter pen and a copy of the Radio Times and I considered it a Great Escape.   

When I got back to Eric’s parents’ house that Sunday afternoon, nobody answered the door. I pressed my face against the living room window. His mother must have taken Eric’s shoes off as I could see them in the hallway when I peeped through the letterbox. All I could see of the man himself were two mismatched socks propped on the arm of the sofa, ten little piggies visible above the high arches of his feet.

I walked to the end of the street and found the lane that ran along behind the houses. Each of them had high fences and neat wooden gates opening

onto gardens with back doors swung wide open for the convenience of young children and pets. It was an even smaller town back then.

As I walked across the lawn, I saw Eric’s mother turned away and facing the corner where the bins were kept. She jumped when she heard my footsteps and swiftly turned around, keeping both hands behind her back.

‘Oh, it’s only you,’ she said.

‘Are you on fire?’ I asked.

She shook her head before taking her cigarette back out. Although there was more than half left, she stubbed it out into a pool of water that had collected on the windowsill before placing it carefully into the bin she’d been using as an ashtray. She pulled a small aerosol from her cardigan pocket.

‘You won’t tell on me, will you?’ she said after she’d finished squirting into her mouth.

I shook my head.

‘Actually, can I have one please?’

She flipped open the top of the packet and held it out towards me. I took two out, found the old lighter in my coat pocket and lit them, handing one to Eric’s mother. She surprised me by taking it without hesitation and smoking it like a beagle in a lab until it was half gone. Then she repeated her cigarette disposal routine.

‘No-one must know,’ she said when she saw my raised eyebrow. ‘I wouldn’t hear the end of it.’

‘Well, Eric’s still asleep and the other one is down the pub. I left the dog with him. Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me.’

She dug her hands deeply into her cardigan. I could see her fists clearly outlined against the pale wool.

‘I’m so glad to meet you,’ she said. ‘All the others have been pretty blonde girls. Very much of a type. One time he brought a new girlfriend back and I didn’t realise it wasn’t the same as the one from before. I was trying to be nice, making her tea the same way, cooking the meals the other one liked until Eric had to pull me to one side to explain it was someone else. They even had the same name. You’re the first Antoinette though.’

She flushed pink.

‘Pretty name,’ she added. ‘French, isn’t it?’

‘My mum is French,’ I said.

‘Oh snap! So’s mine. She lives in the Luberon.’

‘Yes, I know. Eric and I visited her before Easter.’

‘Oh that was you, was it? I thought it must have been one of the other ones because she didn’t say anything about —’

‘Does it matter?’ I asked.

‘Oh no, of course, it doesn’t. It doesn’t matter at all to me but I want to be hospitable.’ She frowned. ‘I suppose I try too hard. Go too far the other way.’

‘Perhaps you do.’

‘I put my foot in it. But I mean well.’

‘I know.’

‘That’s my dog,’ I said.

‘That’s my dog,’ said Eric at the exact same time.

We were just how we used to be.

He put Babs down and she and George Eliot sniffed at each other. Pleasantries completed, they began tussling, taking turns to pin each other to the ground, planting experimental paws into faces and bellies, yapping and growling.

‘That could be us, eighteen years ago,’ said Eric. ‘Play fighting’

‘Play?’ I stretched my eyes at him before adding, ‘which one of them am I supposed to be?’

‘Duh, the little one. Your dog. You’re supposed to be your own dog.’ 

‘I didn’t know the Marquess of Queensbury made rules for dog proxy behaviour as well.’

We looked at each other for a moment too long. Then he clapped his gloved hands together.

‘So it is actually you. I thought I’d seen you around.’

‘Yes, it’s me.’

‘It’s been a long time

‘How’s everyone? How’s the family?’

‘We lost Mum last year.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Heart failure.’ His voice caught unexpectedly and it seemed the polite thing to ignore it. ‘Didn’t seem fair, she was so young.’           

‘She had a big heart,’ I said, ‘more of it to fail.’

‘We’ve still got Frank though.’

I looked puzzled.

‘My step-father.’

I’d forgotten his name.

‘Frank by name, frank by nature,’ I said.

Eric looked at me strangely.

‘You could say that. You only met him the once though, didn’t you?’

‘Oh well, I can usually tell quite quickly. I’m a good judge of character. It’s my talent. That’s how I knew your mum was so nice.’

‘It was mortifying that time you stayed over.’ He shuddered. ‘That was the only time you met her, wasn’t it?’

‘Oh no. I suppose I can tell you now but we kept in touch. Every time you were between girlfriends. We’d meet up, talk about you until your ears must have been red hot. I was going to Brussels every month back then and she’d ask me to get her some duty-free.’

‘Yeah, she used to love her fancy perfumes,’ he sniffed. ‘Are you feeling alright? You look funny.’

‘No, I’m fine.’

Could 200 Benson and Hedges a month be a contributory factor to heart failure?

‘We kept in touch until you got engaged, you know. After that, she felt it was disloyal to carry on.’  I sighed. ‘I wish I’d known she was unwell. Lovely Barbara.’

The dog formerly known as George Eliot stopped tussling with her tiny namesake and bounded over towards us. I rubbed the crimped fur along her ears.

‘You named your dog after your mother?’ I asked.

‘No, she named her new dog after herself. Something to remember me by, she said.’

Eric looked at my white bundle of fur who had come over to snuggle under his dog’s chin.

‘What’s yours called?’