Huffing and Puffing

“Ahh, she’d’ve made a lovely mother,” T11 said wistfully lamenting Lolly's utterly sterile status.

“Lovely pair of gloves more like,” said E in a tone that one can only describe as sour.

He was doing something male and important with the tool box (possibly stroking our filler) while Lolly skittered round the kitchen island, her galloping going nowhere since rugs and claws and wooden floors don’t go, for all the world like a moth on acid.

T11 meanwhile had his head at an admiring angle, and I wondered at his skewed view of motherhood.
He doesn’t say “You’re a lovely mother,” much to me but I hadn’t attributed this to my deficiencies in the skittering department, nor would I have said that this particular activity should sum up all that is fine and indicative of the properly maternal.

We had her lampshade taken off yesterday. We humans were rather fond of it by now since it conferred on her an unlikely bonneted dignity at strange odds with her ridiculous clattering.
After the initial fury, she had grown very patient, too, with getting blocked by it wherever she went. With all the predictability of rain on Sports’ Day she would bang into the Workmate en route out of the side door, but she didn’t tut, nor did she complain when she lay glumly obedient in its shadow in her basket.
I was quite excited on her behalf with how pleased she would be to lose it. I had expected a gleam of gratitude when it was wrenched off, a canine version of “Oh Mummy, thankyou thankyou thankyou!” and caught her eye ready for same but nothing crossed her face, her expression didn’t change. Not a jot. She didn’t even go into a massive shake, the kind she reserves, when wet, for my legs, and which I had assumed would be the very least of her reactions.
She is truly dim.
She just segued seamlessly from one state of being to the other without any reaction at all.
Really, she might as well be a dog on a trolley, with wheels for feet, for all the thinking that goes on. And it would cut down massively on the food bill.

I received my £4.70. Which was pleasing. I’d been rather tense about this for there was a cut in the bonnet over which I was prepared to go to war, like a infant school child, tearfully establishing that it was There Before We Got It. I’d been tempted to photograph it with my phone, for Petty is my middle name but had forgotten because short term memory issues are real and multiplying. In the end, although I pointed and started a half hearted mutter, the vet merely gave me an odd look and patted her pockets for change.

We arrived home, and E was staring gloomily at the ceiling. I had noticed an alarming crack a day or two before the earthquake: not a mere line we could call “settlement,” such as all the others are dubbed, but a definite bulging of brick which looked wrong, like a broken leg looks wrong sticking out at right angles from a knee. All to do with what should be where, but isn’t. He had raked it out and filled it with The Best Filler in the World, and every now and again one or other of us is to be found Daring to Look.
It occasions much huffing and puffing, and is, yet again, not the time to be considering giving up drinking. So, when F9, in the bedroom above, lands with all 14 feet in clogs from his bed we wince, glass in hand. When he stomps down his corridor like the big Billy Goat Gruff we clutch each other and eye the erstwhile crack and reach for the bottle.

The earthquake made no difference to it, however, which just goes to show how very very impressive our filler is, holding up the house all on its tiny ownsome, making me feel all but maternal towards its very competence. “Oh yes, I say airily to others –interesting conversation being very important – “we have excellent filler.” (I boast about it far more, for instance, than T11 getting into the grammar, which I took rather for granted. I must think that the filler’s superior qualities are an extension of my own.) It was the first thing I thought of when the rocking started that night.

Whereas cracks were not the concern of the friend I was standing with at one of several interminable football matches which have occupied gross chunks of this week.
She was talking about the earthquake. “Well!” she exclaimed, “I woke up and the bed was shaking, the walls were shaking, the whole house was shaking and I just said to Andy, ‘Andy,’ I said, ‘What ARE you doing!’”
We all chortled and Andy (at which point I am duty bound to say Bless Him) chortled, and looked at his feet and rocked in the mud on inappropriate shiny leather shoes, most pleased with himself, as ready to subsume all responsibility for house shaking properties as I am for filler and much as T11 ascribes skittering to motherliness. Not right, but it’ll do.

Light's off, Nobody's in

“We do charge, but it’s only a couple of pounds,” said the vet ringing up £4.70 on the till; her couple of pounds not chiming with my idea of same. Were the transaction being reversed, the Eyeore in me could expect around £1.20.
“And if it’s returned so that we can re-use it, we’ll refund you.”

Why on earth wouldn’t people return to have it re-used and be refunded, I snorted to myself edging Lolly into the truck-battered car. How lazy is that. How rich must they be.

I was feeling a little chastened, truth be told, for when the vet had asked if Lolly had been licking her stitches following her recent spaying, I had answered in the enthusiastic affirmative, expecting vicarious praise for this intuitive self-healing, which I had assumed would reflect well on me, fine mother of fine dog. Not for the vet to frown at fuckwit mother, mutter expensive-sounding things like “infection,” and rustle in a cupboard for a clear lampshade thing that is fated to keep Lolly from her bits for the next ten days.
“Just slide it onto her collar,” she said, “through the little loops.”




Once home, I snapped it on (with some difficulty I must say: never be conned by an instruction beginning “Just …” anything), patted her head, fed her a biscuit and went upstairs to stare at the study which would be prelude, in efficient households, to making a start on tidying it, and not mere introduction to several hours of blank inactivity.
Within scant seconds, and rescuing me from my torpor, I feared that we were having our second earthquake in 12 hours.
Much as the house shook last night, rocking our sturdy sleigh of a bed til I wondered if I were being auditioned as a Bucking Bronco Mother Santa, so massive thumps now resonated through the floor, and the stairs, and the ceiling, and I ran down to find that Houdini Lolly had managed to do in reverse in seconds what had taken me some cross minutes of finger-snapping pain (recalling Dyson belt issues). Namely, thrash around with sufficient violence to shake free her plastic prison.
I found it hurled like a Frisbee about 20 feet away, an item already well the worse for having been in our temporary ownership for about half an hour and making me fear for my £4.70. Shoddy plastic rubbish.
Meanwhile, well pleased with herself, Lolly looked, very much: That’ll be the end of that little episode. Very much: Get you, Mummy.

So I had to fix it back on again, but this time with no more Mrs Nice Guy tenderness. Delving much deeper into choke rate on the scale of Dog’s Chances of Living til the Weekend, and since then she has sat, as humourless and posed as Whistler’s Mother, dazed and confused and imagining a wax doll with my face on it which she could bite. Staring into a middle distance where life was good and the recent past hadn’t happened. Reminding me in essence of myself, frankly, following ten minutes at a Slide’n’Splash.

A friend (slim, gorgeous, athletic) had told me What Fun this evil dump was and I was fool enough to believe her. So, when we went to Portugal, I was happy enough to line up with E and the nippers and take my turn swooshing down some fabricated spinning tunnel of hell perched atop a greasy tyre before being plonked deep in a soup of fetid water rich in other people’s sweat and spittle. On landing, at neck-snapping speed, hard, in a slap on my back, to be immediately engulfed by a wave of grimy germs, piss and chlorine, with my straps in jeopardy and what the children call a wedgie happening down below, I could only wonder, in all seriousness, whether I had actually died or not. Whether that had been it. And whether I minded much.

Then I had to sit hunched, under a towel-for-a-blanket, all but catatonic, rocking slightly, while E and the children merrily continued sampling all of the other rides in turn, sometimes more than once; which took about four hours.
The stripping of dignity conferred by motherhood frequently makes me weep metaphorically, but this time it was almost for real.
With E, we are merely married: our connection is but a happenstance of chance with a little love thrown in, so I can ignore his hearty joy at the place, but the children share genetic material with me. How can this be so when not one jot of empathetic understanding passed their faces or informed their chat with me. Indeed the little buggers tried to cajole me into having another go Because I Might Enjoy It this time.

Sometimes you can only marvel at how little you are known.

Something similar inside Lolly is telling her that life has gone truly awry. Worryingly still, she sits, urging the two or three neurons which constitute her brain to re-position the broken pieces of her jigsaw. She needs her touchstone back.

That time in the Algarve, I at least knew that Things Would Get Better and, if the dog would only hurry up and learn English, I could take the opportunity to lard this occasion with a little stuff about gratitude, and taking for granted, and Mother is Best.

All she knows is that you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone. And she doesn’t even really know that because she is a little bit thick.

It’s going to be a long old ten days for both of us.

Of course, “us” is “her.”
I’m fine.
As long as I get my £4.70 back.