The cigarette butts are piled high in the ashtray beside Mrs Bruchner. She has no sooner finished one than she has started another, the smoke still rising from the last imperfectly stubbed butt.
She is a tall woman, big boned, but plain in the face, with unfortunate breasts that fell flat to her stomach from an early age, and consequently has no figure to speak of, although she is only twenty-nine. Her hands tremble when she raises the cigarette to her mouth to light it. Her hands always tremble, especially when she raises her lighter, which she often does. Even when she smooths her brittle hair, her fingers will sometimes become ensnared in her curls and they will stay there briefly, trembling, until she frees her hand and places it back in her dress pocket where she keeps her lighter.
From her lounge-room window she can see the procession of families passing along the street to the Englishman’s house. She is wearing her best summer dress, which hangs loosely over her shoulders and falls undisturbed from her neck to her knees, no swells or curves to invest it with shape. She has long ceased to care about fashion, especially summer fashion. At least in winter she can wrap herself in cardigans and jumpers and feel as if her body has shape. She suffers the summer.
Lipstick stains the filtered tips of the cigarettes and the smoke mingles with her perfume. In her mind she can still hear the dog howling. Her husband, a short, stocky man with a head full of tumbling black curls that he brushes back, with a part down the middle, in the style of a matinee idol from the previous decade, is still in the bathroom. He is broad across the shoulders and chest, with thin, spindly legs. This tapering effect, from shoulders and chest to feet, augments the sense of physical power that he brings to a room, despite his shortness of stature. He is humming to himself now, but all she can hear is the dog.
Every time he feeds the dog, a large Alsatian, he will make it crouch on the grass at the back of the house as he lays a large piece of fresh meat before it. The meat will be no more than a foot away from the dog’s nostrils, but the dog will not be allowed to devour it until the instruction is given. And, more than often, Bruchner will keep the dog waiting, especially for the amusement of visitors. Its hind legs will shift about in anticipation and its front paws will claw at the grass while its eyes will look up to Bruchner, listening for the word ‘Now’. But he will always keep the dog waiting, pointing to the shifting hind and front legs, and boasting that the dog would never move without his instruction.
Until today. Bruchner, a plasterer, was showing off the ritual to a fellow worker earlier that afternoon. As always, he lay the meat before the crouching animal then stood back, chatting to his visitor as the dog eyed the fresh meat. He won’t move, was Bruchner’s boast, until I say. And we could stand here all afternoon, Bruchner boasted again, and the dog still won’t move. To prove the point they stood before the crouching beast longer than usual, until the dog’s front paws began to claw up the grass in front of it to reveal the dirt beneath. And yet still they chatted casually of that Saturday morning’s work, pretending to ignore the dog. Then they weren’t pretending to ignore the dog any longer, but became intensely involved in a discussion of considerable technical detail. And while they were lost in the details, while they were animated and engrossed in the technicalities of their current contract, the dog suddenly leapt forward and began devouring the meat.
At first Bruchner looked down at the dog in silence, but then he heard the laughter of his workmate as he pointed to the hungry animal, then to his wristwatch, indicating that he’d stayed long enough and that it was time to leave. And it was then that Bruchner first hit the dog with his bare fist. Once, then twice, he hit the dog on the side of the head, then the side of the jaw, for it was now his belief that if the dog could at least be forced to drop the meat from its mouth, then something of his boast might yet be salvaged. And so he belted the dog again until it did, indeed, drop the large lump of meat back onto the lawn. But when Bruchner looked up his fellow worker was already waving goodbye and the dog’s subservience went unnoticed.
It was then, with his workmate now strolling along the driveway and out into the street, that Bruchner took a stick that he kept in his shed and set about teaching the dog a lesson.
These are the howls that Mrs Bruchner can still hear as she sits in the lounge room with the piled ashtray beside her, lighting one cigarette after another with her shaking hands.
The beating went on, the dog crouched again whimpering before the semi-chewed meat, taking one blow after another. And even when Joy Bruchner opened the kitchen door and begged him to stop, Bruchner had merely looked up for a moment and replied that the dog must learn, before returning to the beast.
When the beating finally stopped, the dog slouched to a corner at the back of the yard and licked its hind legs and front paws without sound.
That silence, Mrs Bruchner now notes, as she lights another cigarette and listens to Bruchner walk from the bathroom to the bedroom where he will put on the new summer shirt she ironed that afternoon, that silence is almost as disturbing as the howls themselves, just as the stillness that came over the yard afterwards was a menacing stillness.
As he is buttoning up his shirt Bruchner is piecing together the fragments of the afternoon, still puzzled by the dog’s actions. For some reason he is going over the conversation he had with his workmate. He had been making an important point. In the past, he said, contracts were often hard to fulfil because materials were hard to come by.
‘Now,’ he had said, with emphasis and with his finger raised, ‘it is no longer the case.’
Bruchner suddenly realises why the dog pounced on the fresh meat. So simple. The dog had waited for the instruction after all, and all he has to do is point that out to his workmate. He will do so on Monday morning. In the meantime the dog will have forgotten all about the beating. And when he steps outside to feed the animal it will bound towards him and crouch low, its hind legs shifting about in anticipation, its front paws clawing at the grass, waiting for the game to begin all over again.
The Bruchner house was constructed in anticipation of children, but no children came. The lounge room is wide, with curved corners, and the floorboards, of the best Tasmanian hardwood, are polished and shiny like glass. The plastered walls are perfectly finished. In the evenings their footsteps echo throughout the house. As she pushes a half-smoked cigarette into the ashtray she can hear Bruchner’s approaching footsteps in the hallway, and she realises how much she loathes that sound.
Outside, through the curtains, she sees Vic, Rita and Michael pausing by the paddock opposite. If she weren’t so worn out she could have sobbed. Just one, she is noting, just one makes all the difference. Just one more makes a couple a family, and she dwells upon that simple fact as she reaches into her dress pocket for the lighter and Bruchner enters the room.