I BOUGHT THESE DOGS TO SHOW HIM HOW TO LOVE

Romy Ash

When Charlie slid out of her she cried. The tears slipped over her face and pooled in her ears. Now they aren’t touching, but her skin still sweats the shape of him. The sheets are cool. Aya feels strange. It’s like grief, but sweet too. She can’t shake the vibe. It’s why they’d fucked. It still hung about her like someone else’s perfume. They are looking to buy a service station in the middle-of-fuck-off-nowhere. It’s a beautiful building, from the 1950s, strung with thin metal supports, like its skeleton is on the outside. Even the real estate agent seemed to sense it. Beautiful bones, this one, he had said earlier that day, shaking his head at the wonder of it all. His hair slicked into place, unmoving. He adjusted his tie, and Aya wondered at the short sleeves on his white shirt. She just didn’t think it was done, short sleeves and a tie. It made him look like a schoolboy. Charlie had leaned over her shoulders, encasing her in a hug, and whispered, That’s a euphemism for it needs a shitload of work.

She looks up at the motel ceiling, at the rings of water damage circling a bare bulb. It’s her life she’s grieving, the life they haven’t yet given up.

‘Do you think we’ll become like them?’ she asks.

‘Who?’ says Charlie.

‘Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about,’ she says, rolling onto her side. Her body, which she liked when she lay flat, pools onto the sheet. When he still doesn’t say anything she says, ‘The old couple, from the servo, the owners.’

‘I don’t think we’ll become like them,’ he says, but he sounds sleepy, happy. She harrumphs, and he turns to look at her. ‘Have you been crying?’ he says.

‘No,’ she says and gets up, walks the two steps to the ensuite, turns back to him. ‘You know, when you went outside she whispered to me, I bought these dogs to show him how to love. He doesn’t know how to love.’

She can hear their claws now, the clack clack on the floor. Two sausage dogs, one with long hair like a shaggy blanket had been thrown over it, and the other sleek, with a brushed-velvet rump. She plays it back in her head as she pisses.

‘Three-thousand-dollar dogs,’ the husband said, pointing his chin at the sausages.

‘It’s the colour,’ the wife said. ‘It’s a very expensive colour.’ They were the colour of a saddle.

‘Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dee.’

‘King and Kong. Their names are King and Kong,’ the wife said.

Charlie gave Aya a look. He was measuring. He flicked the tape, and it hurtled across the room and sucked back into his hand. Why was it her job to make the small talk? It’s not like she was good at it. She wasn’t. She had the sort of personality that got better with time, like a stew, her mum said. Actually, he was much better at being friendly. He grew up in the country. He didn’t have that thing in him that meant you looked away when someone met your eye.

The wife had the dyed hair of a teenager, blue with purple streaks, and in her pink gardening shorts her legs were tanned, wrinkled and skinny. She had a bit of tropical bird about her. The man looked like all the men around here did – board shorts and a beer belly that hung over the top of them. Wearing a big shirt to compensate for the belly. He had a face that should have known sunscreen.

‘Where’d you meet your hubby?’ the wife asked.

‘This guy?’ Aya said, looking at her boyfriend. There was a pencil behind his ear. The tape measure, out again, was held in front of him like a divining rod. The wife looked at her like, Yeah, who the hell do you think I mean? They weren’t married, but Aya liked to wear her rings on her left hand, because that’s where they fit best. Aya just laughed. And then, after a while, thought it could help things if she gave a little.

‘We met in a cafe. I was waitressing, he was the chef.’ She had a vision of him, long black hair tied in a ponytail, and a hangdog face, crying over an unraised loaf. He would say, I wasn’t crying, and she would say, I know. It made him mad when she turned things into stories for her own amusement.

‘You’re a chef!’ the wife said, turning on her heel and fluttering over to Charlie. ‘I watch all of those shows.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Charlie said.

The husband rolled his eyes and threw a chip into his mouth. The wife had a tall, cool drink that dripped.

Charlie didn’t chef anymore. He barely made her a sandwich. But he could show an onion who’s boss. Maybe he was like a TV show. She liked it when he fucked her with his fingers. Like how he kneaded dough, gentle and hard at the same time, that’s what made it feel good.

‘So you want to be a shopkeeper?’ the woman asked. Aya laughed uncomfortably. She looked around for the real estate agent. She saw the shape of him through the glass, heard his salesman voice, mobile at his ear. She felt abandoned. A shopkeeper, Aya thought. Of all the things she had imagined she might become, this was not one of them.

‘If you buy this place, don’t you judge the people that come in here, don’t you judge. If you sell fuel you’ll get everyone. It’s just an old woman’s opinion,’ the wife said.

Aya got to wondering what the old woman thought she’d seen. ‘I’ve seen my share of roughnuts, don’t worry,’ Aya said.

‘That’s what I’m talking about: roughnuts,’ said the wife.

‘They are roughnuts, some of them,’ said the husband, throwing in another chip.

‘They’re just people,’ said the wife.

‘I didn’t mean anything by it,’ Aya said.

‘Sure, love, I know,’ said the wife.

The sound of the dogs’ claws on the tiles. She felt their fur against her bare calves, and then the licking started. She used cocoa butter – it was cheap and it smelled like chocolate.

‘Shoo,’ Aya said. ‘Shoo.’ Trying to shake them off. But they started up with short, sharp barks and a squealing in their throats. The licking became more frenzied and the hairy one bit her. She stepped back into a Twisties stand, knocking it to the ground. The dogs, frightened now, ran to the wife. She scooped them up in her arms and looked at the younger woman. The husband was trying to swallow a smile, and when she turned to her boyfriend, crushing a packet of Twisties under her sandal, he had the same swallowed-smile face.

The real estate agent flung the heavy plastic fly strips out of his way as he re-entered, with a face that said, Anything I miss?

In the parking lot, the real estate agent talked to them very quietly. ‘It says on the website “quick sale due to illness”, but it’s not illness. He’s been unfaithful, for a long time, if you know what I mean. “Sex romps” was the phrase she used, and I’m not telling you both this to be crude. I’m telling you because these folks really need to sell, and it’s an opportunity you can’t miss. Once in a lifetime, round here – it’s about to boom.’

People always say it’s women who gossip, Aya thought, but every woman she’d ever known kept secrets.

‘Sure thing, mate, thanks for the info,’ said Charlie, like the guy had been telling us about asbestos in the ceiling. ‘I’ll talk to the missus and get back to you.’

Aya wondered if they moved out here, would he start talking like this full-time?

‘Don’t you snooze,’ said the agent. ‘I’ve got other buyers, there’s a lot of interest.’ The men shook hands and Aya looked across the road, a dairy farm. She watched the cows lumbering towards the milking shed, their teats brushing against green pasture.

*

‘Fuck it’s hot,’ her boyfriend says, rolling his body from the bed. ‘I’m starving.’

He gets up and and gives her a kiss. She can’t remember what made her love him, just that now she does.

‘Let’s go to the pub, they’ll have something.’

‘Like a beer?’ he says.

‘Yeah, like a beer,’ she says. They are in one of those motels with the close ceilings. She doesn’t mind it. There is comfort in claustrophobia. It’s opening the motel door and looking out over paddocks to the blue of the surrounding hills that makes her feel funny.

*

‘Do we drive home?’ Charlie says.

‘Why is it always the woman who’s the designated driver?’ Aya says.

‘Because you don’t like drinking as much as me.’

‘But I mean generally, on a worldwide scale, why is it always the woman?’

‘It’s not. You just don’t like drinking that much.’

‘I do like it. I like it right now.’

They both keep drinking, and she matches him beer for beer, and the barfly who has his spot up from them, glued to the stool, who doesn’t even ever piss, says to her, ‘Slow and steady wins the race,’ and salutes her with his pot.

‘What do you do if someone’s had too much to drink?’ Charlie yells over to the barman, who has a beard he could tuck into his belt.

‘Someone come pick you up?’ he says, running a rotten cloth over a clean glass.

Her boyfriend laughs too loud. ‘Nope.’ Heady with it, with the knowing no-one.

The barman shrugs. If they hit a tree they’d just be transformed into two of those white crosses by the roadside, plastic roses stabbed into the earth beside them. What did he care?

‘You’re an idiot,’ she says as she opens the driver’s side door. She is looking for a fight, but he just laughs, so happy all the time. She sprays dust as they leave. She winds the window right down and feels the cool night air on her face. The high beams light a tunnel ahead. The road cuts through the cane, and she can smell it. The dusty sweetness in the air. She listens to the rush of the dry leaves as they pass.

‘What will become of us?’ she says.

‘Us?’ he says. He answers with a squeeze of her upper thigh.

‘Yeah, us.’

‘From the outside we’ll seem like a real steady couple. But I’ll start going on wild sex romps, leaving for weeks at a time. Then I’ll just pretend like nothing’s happened. I’ll get diagnosed with bipolar disorder, because they don’t have a name for what I’ve got. You’ll buy two sausage dogs, and we’ll have to sell up for a huge loss.’

She rolls her eyes in the dark. ‘Poor woman,’ she says.

‘Yeah,’ he says, with the cane rushing past, and laughs. ‘When I first got my licence, we used to turn the lights off,’ he says, ‘and just barrel down the straight for as long as we were brave. A lifetime in just a couple of seconds.’

Aya hears the warmth in his belly, how the beer’s made him round and soft. She touches his thigh and switches the headlights off, flooding them with black. It comes sudden, cool and weightless, like the moment on a trampoline before you fall.