The Drying Rooms - Chapter Eight

Dogs

Cruel Matron’s puppies

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Listen to an audio version of Chapter Eight here

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Extract from Maudie

Maudie settled Big Ted on her lap and peered through the plane window. She could see her parents standing at the edge of the hot shimmering tarmac. Daddy had his arm round Mummy’s shoulder. They were both smiling and waving vigorously. Maudie sent back a frenzy of waves. I’m here. Over here. Look!  But her parents couldn’t see her. They just carried on smiling and waving as before.

The sugar-voiced air-hostess came down the aisle in her clippety high heels with her bright red smile. Stinking of perfume, she bore down on Maudie. She was holding out a little brass badge.

“Pop this on dear. Welcome to the Junior Jet Club. If you’re a good little girl, the captain will invite you into the cockpit after take-off.”

The burning lump in Maudie’s throat had become a jagged rock. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Not in front of sugar voice.

“Thank you,” said Maudie, digging her fingers into Big Ted’s fur.

“Ah, look at teddy! He’s almost as big as you!”

 Please just go away, thought Maudie. Just go away. She pressed her face against the window again.

Her parents had gone.

 Maudie bit the insides of her cheeks until the soft wet flesh was singing with pain. The rock in her throat was on fire. This morning was already a lifetime away. This morning she was dripping wet in the sun, eating sweet, juicy mangoes by the pool.

Tomorrow she would be back in the grey place – in a cold bath, staring up at Axe’s hateful face.

But Cruel Matron wasn’t always hateful. It was confusing.

In fact, for a while she was Cruel Matron’s pet, and she knows why. Even then she knew. It was because Cruel Matron likened her to a puppy. She was small and cuddly and had thick strokable hair, the same colour as Cruel Matron’s dogs. And Cruel Matron loved stroking her dogs.  

There is a photo. It is a press photo. She knows this because it is matt, not shiny, and completely different in quality and size to the handful of other photos she has from that time. And she is almost sure she can remember seeing it in the local newspaper, The Miseryfield Post.

Come here little one. Look at it closely. The puppies are adorable, aren’t they? Yes, I know, now we want to stroke them. Together. Gently. If only. But look at my face, and what is that thing pinned to my shirt?

This photo has emerged over the years, during house moves and sort-outs, but this is the first time she has noticed the thing on her shirt and the first time she has taken full cognisance of the expression on her face. It’s not a happy face – not the beaming smile that was probably expected of her. What happened? Did the photographer ask her to put her hand in the pail, stroke the puppies?  Is that why she is apprehensive, tentative? Nervous of little nipping teeth.

And that thing on her shirt is her Junior Jet Club badge! The one she always wore on the plane. She’s never noticed that before. Maybe – is this possible? — she had come straight from the airport, driven by Mr Nutt, the driver her granny used to hire to meet her. Maybe – could even this be possible? – it was Cruel Matron being kind. Providing a distraction from the agony of homesickness. Letting her be the star of the puppy show.

Cruel Matron had two dogs. Yellow Labradors — or was one of them a Golden Retriever? She knows nothing about dogs. She knew she was supposed to love Cruel Matron’s dogs, but she didn’t, because she was afraid of dogs. Right from the start. Was it one of her nannies, in those first five years of her life in Ankara, Amman, Cairo … or was it just her parents who drilled it into her? Don’t put out your hand; don’t touch dogs. Don’t go anywhere near those big dogs roaming the streets, or guarding dark tents in the desert. They will bite you, and if they bite you, you will die. She thinks it might have been her brothers who told her she would die. But first, they told her, she would go crazy and foam at the mouth. She can conjure them imitating her slow death with rolling eyes, hands clasped round their gurgling throats.

Cruel Matron loved those dogs. And they loved Cruel Matron. She remembers the cosiness of them asleep on Cruel Matron’s carpet while they watched Top of the Pops.

Even though Cruel Matron’s dogs weren’t like those untouchable strays in the hot streets of home, they were big and she was wary of them. She was going to say big and well-behaved –– but there was a moment, an indelible moment, when one of them (she sees a huge golden retriever) wasn’t well-behaved.

We are outside, on the scrubby bit of path and grass at the back of G-Block. Just us children. And one of the dogs. It has a name. Something earthy and windswept, like Bracken. And it is male. Turn away, little one. I don’t want you to see this.

She can still feel the rush of fear at the sudden landing of its paws on her shoulders, its animal weight on her back, the rapid rat-a-tat-tat thrusting of its strong body, her recoil of disgust. But in a flash it’s over and she and her friends are falling about laughing and screeching with delighted revulsion.

And somehow she had just gained a badge of honour — and an anecdote for life.

Many years after she left school — when she was in her thirties, or even forties – the gossip of Cruel Matron’s death reached her. Cruel Matron had died in a ditch rescuing her dog. ‘Died in a ditch’ was the phrase that clung on in her memory without question and it was always accompanied by an image of tangled undergrowth and dark matted twigs, until recently when it was challenged by an old school friend who had the word ‘lake’ in her head. This made more sense. Cruel Matron had died rescuing her dog, but not in a ditch, in a lake – a frozen lake.

She now sees this death in a cold, desolate place - unwitnessed, unheard and unutterably lonely.

And somewhere, in a wordless, penumbral place, she feels something. Something submerged – that may have the shape of sorrow.

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