SHADOW OF A DOG

By Steve Redwood

Artwork by Carole Humphreys

Leaning drunkenly across to kiss her, one hand on the steering wheel, the other crawling up her thigh. Moonlight, lipstick mixed with the strong aniseed taste of raki, a movement in the road, his foot searching for the brake…

The dog lay crumpled in the middle of the deserted road, which sliced like an old scar through the barren terrain, the fierce early afternoon sun beating down on it. In the distance, the glint of water – the Aegean carving a great arc against the city of Izmir staggering up from its shores. But here was only rock and aridity, and the flies and midges which had settled like minute vultures on the dog’s protruding tongue and shapeless jowls splayed on the scorching tarmac. 

A car approached, slowed, stopped.  The driver looked at the dog.

“I think it’s still alive.”

The woman beside him followed his gaze. “But what can we do?”

“Move it out of the road before any more cars come.”

She frowned, then nodded reluctantly. 

The dog whimpered as the man approached it cautiously. There was no blood, no tangible sign of pain. Just a paw scratching on the road, and flanks heaving in quick jerks. He stretched out a hand tentatively, and when the dog made no movement, half carried, half dragged, it to the side of the road, where he stayed looking down at it.

The woman came and stood beside him. 

With the featureless plain stretching behind her, she was like a bright flash of colour on a faded canvas, the gleaming yellow of her blouse and the cheerful blue of her shorts leaping out from the tired greyness of the surrounding landscape. She pushed a fly from her face, a face framed by long blonde hair, a face that, like her body, was healthy and vibrant and young, somehow out of keeping in this harsh ancient land.

“Has it been run over or something?”

The man, a few years older, strong and tanned, yet with thin, almost ascetic, features, looked up. “I can’t tell. But if it wasn’t run over, how did it get here, miles from anywhere?” His voice was strangely tense.

“Well, there’s nothing we can do, even if we’d got the time.”

He remained gazing at the dog. “We can’t just leave it like this.”

“What else can we do?”

“Look, we’re only just out of Izmir: why don’t we take it to a vet?”

“What about Ergün?”

“Oh, he’ll wait for us. And anyway, it wouldn’t take long.”

“Oh no? Your ‘just out of Izmir’ is more like twenty miles. Do you really think we’d get to Ergün’s by four!”

“So we miss a boat trip. Is it that important?”

“Yes, actually, it is!”

A small silence. Eyes locked. Then the woman suddenly smiled. “But not as important as keeping my future provider and bed-warmer happy! In the boot, though. I’ve heard some of these Turkish dogs have rabies. I don’t want you to start dribbling at the mouth – any more, that is, than you do over the girls in your classes.”

He evidently decided she had earned that small victory, for he made no rejoinder, just tweaked her nose affectionately.

Sweating profusely, he clumsily deposited the unresisting dog in the boot of the hired Anadol, which he tied partially open, to allow air in. He lingered a few moments, stroking its head.

The journey was an almost silent one, the woman showing a determined interest in the orange orchards floating hazily by. The man, too, seemed lost in his own thoughts, until he finally slid a hand over on to her cheek. She took it and pressed it and traced its brownness with her fingertips. But neither of them spoke, as if aware that the presence of the dog carried a subtle threat with it.

On the outskirts of the city, he stopped several times to ask about a vet, and was finally directed to a dingy building in a poorer outlying area. It stood opposite a small patch of wasteland, in one corner of which tottered a dilapidated çayhane, or teahouse, with the usual smattering of men lounging around – men who suddenly became alert when the couple got out of the car, like cats that have spotted movement in the grass. They stared openly, blatantly, at the tall blonde girl, so different from the dark-haired women of their own race. 

She looked round nervously, suddenly conscious of her bare pale legs, of her blouse clinging to her in the heat. 

“I’ll come in with you. All those gaping men, they give me the creeps.”

“Yes, in places like this, they do tend to twitch a bit when they see foreign women. Especially women as unbelievably scrumptious as you! But we won’t be here long.”

She took his arm, urging him forward, and they entered the building.

Within five minutes they were outside again. He was almost shaking with anger, while the woman, looking bewildered and frightened, clutched his arm. He leaned against the car, hands gripping the roof-rack. 

“But, John, what happened?”

He didn’t answer, just stared over the roof of the car, a vein pulsing on his forehead.

She burst out with sudden anger: “At least have the decency to tell me what’s going on – or am I supposed to have learnt Turkish in five days?”

He finally answered, his voice distorted with fury.

“That bastard, that stinking bastard...and I’m a bloody idiot, too! I should’ve known...”

She waited, looking at him with a compound of apprehension, sympathy, anger.

“Veteriner doesn’t mean what you’d think it would, sod-all to do with helping animals. They just check for disease in livestock. OK, my mistake, but he could’ve looked at it, I was willing to pay the bastard. But no, he wouldn’t even look at it!”

He was oblivious to the men gathering round them. 

The older men looked eerily alike – tough, sun-battered faces, crinkled eyes, carious teeth, stubble on their chins, all wearing dirty stained vests, grimy baggy trousers, some tied with string at the waist, dusty strapless sandals – but there was kindness in their eyes, dignity seared into their faces. The young men were different, drenched in cheap eau-de-cologne, hair slicked back, black moustaches obsessively curled, tight chest-hugging shirts, their dark strength vitiated by the desire to be modern, to nourish themselves on the husks of western civilisation. 

The woman spoke anxiously, urgently:

“John, let’s talk about it after, please! Let’s get away from here first.”

He became aware of the men around them, took a deep breath to calm himself, and nodded. But one of the older men suddenly said something, pointing at the dog, whose head was now thrust out of the boot. At first, the Englishman only answered politely, but a conversation developed, with more and more of the bystanders joining in, and he quickly became animated. A small boy left the group and ran down the street. 

“They say it’s probably been poisoned,” the man explained , “but that if we force a mixture of garlic and ayran – you know, that yoghurt-like stuff you tried yesterday – down its throat, it might be sick and bring the poison up. Could just work, too!”

“You’re not going to do it here, now!”

“Of course. The sooner the better.”

“What about Ergün?”

“Oh, a few more minutes make no odds now.”

She gazed at him with astonishment and dawning anger.

“Look, John, if you don’t care about keeping Ergün waiting, you could at least think about me.”

“Cathy, come off it, just a few more minutes, that’s all!”

“While I get stared at by all these filthy men? And in this stinking bloody heat, too?”

“These filthy men, as you call them, at least care about the dog – which is more than you seem to do!”

She glared at him. “It’s your precious Turkish friends poisoned the dog, not me!”

He made an obvious – too obvious – attempt to speak calmly.

“Cathy, I’m sorry, OK? I know you’re hot and fed-up, I don’t blame you. But now we’ve got this far, we may as well see if this ayran trick will work. Maybe we should’ve left the dog where it was. But we didn’t. We can’t just dump it here now.”

“And why not? Let your new friends work their miracle cure. I can’t see it makes any difference whether we’re here or not. Or do you think that dog will recover just because you’re near it? I just want to leave. Now.”

The tension that had been in him since they had found the dog flared to the surface.

“Bloody well leave, then! Have your bloody boat trip! Christ, you’re no different from that stinking vet!”

She looked at him incredulously, tears of humiliation springing to her eyes. Her hair was sticking to her face with the heat and dust; she tried to fling it back with a furious shake of her head, but only a few stray strands moved. The pathetically futile gesture dissipated his sudden rage. He reached out, pushed her hair from her cheeks with remorseful tenderness.

“Cathy, I’m sorry! That was stupid. Oh shit, what can I say? I wish we’d never found the dog, not when it’s coming to this. But… it’s… at first, I thought all we had to do was find a vet. But now there’s no-one else, now it’s just the dog and us. Don’t you see?”

Her eyes flicked to the men around them. He understood.

“Oh, these people are good with advice, but they won’t actually touch the dog themselves, oh no. If I don’t make the dog sick, no-one will. So you see it does make a difference, it really does.” He was almost pleading.

She turned away, her face set.  “I’ll wait in the car.” 

He stood back as she got in, his face taut with indecision. Just then, however, the boy returned with a bottle full of a whitish liquid which he thrust, grinning, into his hands. He swung round and moved to the boot of the car.

The dog’s condition was worse. As he carried it awkwardly across the road to the patch of wasteland near the teahouse, it hung limply in his arms, and when he put it down, sank immediately on to its stomach. It moaned and twisted its hind legs as if seeking to escape the jaws of some metal trap.

He lifted its head and began to force the liquid down its throat. It yelped, struggling to turn away, but he gripped it tightly under the jaw and continued to pour. Most of the onlookers had followed him across the road, offering vociferous advice. But the man seemed oblivious to them, to his surroundings, to the liquid staining his arms and clothes. There was a manic concentration in his actions, something desperate, almost brutal, in the way he jammed the bottle into the dog’s mouth. 

Two of the younger Turks had stayed near the car, which had both windows wound down. One of them offered the woman a cigarette, and laughed rudely when she shook her head. He rested his elbow on the open window, looking in at her. She shrank away, but her defensive gesture emboldened the man, who now leant his head, darkly handsome in a coarsely sensual way, on his elbow, and stared openly at her exposed legs, making comments to his friend, who now joined in the game – which was ceasing to be a game with every second – and moved round to the other window. 

She glanced helplessly behind, but the small crowd across the road was occupied with the drama of the dog. With the movement, her blouse tightened over her body. This – and her fear, the sense of having her trapped – excited the first man beyond control. He thrust out his hand, pushed it brutally, frenziedly, inside her blouse, grabbing and twisting at her breasts. The second man started to put his arm through the other window. With reactions speeded by near panic, she grasped the door handle on the side of the first man, pushed outwards with terrified strength. His head and shoulders trapped in the window, the man was jerked off balance. She crawled out of the car, stumbled a few feet, tripped, twisted her head round in time to see the men running off down a side street. She half knelt, half lay there, her breath ragged, before pushing herself to her feet and staggering across the road.

The reason nobody had noticed the assault was now apparent: an ugly pool of white flecked with yellow was seeping into the ground in front of the dog’s head. The man looked up as she reached him, excitement and triumph animating his face. 

“It worked! Look, look, it seems to have brought up everything that was in its stomach. We’ll have to wait for...”

“John, please, John, get me away from here!”

He noticed her expression. “Cathy, what’s happened?”

Her face was disfigured with humiliation. “Just get me out of here, for Chrissake!”

A sudden cheer went up from the onlookers. He swung round. The dog was getting up! One hind leg still dragged on the ground, its breath still came in great rasping gasps – but it was almost on its feet. It tottered, and the man caught it with a swift movement. For a second, the dog’s great head clasped in the man’s arms, cheek touching jowl, the two seemed like one single shapeless creature newly spawned from the ground itself. Then the dog slipped down again, its tongue scraping weakly over the vomit already drying on its mouth. Again oblivious to everything around him, the man tore off his tee-shirt, and wiped the vomit away.

The woman stood like some gaudy hollow scarecrow that would topple in the first gust. Even the younger men found their eyes drawn to the crumpled despair in her face rather than to her body. A fly walked unfelt over her cheek. Her arms dangled at her sides, a bruise discolouring one of them. Her eyes followed the man’s movements with the dull intensity of the victim mesmerised by the glint of the sacrificial knife.

The man finally rose. “It’s looking a bit better, isn’t it? This has buggered up your afternoon, but I’ll make it up to you, I promise. But now what? I don’t want to just leave it here. What if we took it to Ergün’s place? In the orchard, yes! The dog could stay there till it’s recovered.”

“Yes, John, you do that.” Tonelessly. “Leave it at Inciralti.”

“Cathy, are you all right?” With sudden concern, “Why, what’ve you done to your arm?”

“Nothing, John. Nothing for you to worry your head about. Can we go now?”

Ten minutes later, they were heading out of the city. With both windows open, it was almost cool in the car. The man was beginning to relax. The sweat had dried on his face, and his hair straggled over his forehead, giving him the strongly masculine appearance of a swimmer just emerged from the water. The woman was slumped in her seat, head thrown back, eyes staring at nothing. It was some time before the man realised that her responses to his light chatter were merely automatic, polite, distant. 

He took one hand from the wheel, rubbed the back of his fingers down her cheek. She didn’t move.

“Hey, not sulking, are we?”

No reply. He turned her face towards him, his fingers pulling on her cheeks, which momentarily became a shapeless blob, like the jowls of the dog when its head had lain in the dirt.

“Cathy, you’re crying!”

She tried to blink the moisture away, but it was a final effort. The next moment, she was frenziedly pushing him away, sobbing convulsively.

 He slewed the car to a halt, tried to comfort her. She recoiled from his touch, her body shaking uncontrollably. Seeing the uselessness of trying to stem the flood, he waited until it should subside, his face a mosaic of contradictory emotions – love, pity, exasperation, surprise, shame. 

When she had sobbed herself to exhaustion, she seized some tissues and wiped her eyes and cheeks slowly, roughly, distractedly, as though it were not her own face. When she finally spoke, her voice was tiny, quiet, as if it came from far away.

“We’ve been apart too long. Maybe we knew each other once – I like to think we did; or is that just a trick of memory, too?”

He knew no answer was expected.

“I was being selfish, you think I don’t know that? Wanting nothing to spoil my day. Wanting to hog you all to myself. And why not? You came here for a year, then it became another, and then another. And all those lovely young university students adoring you. But I had you each summer. Enough to give me memories, to keep me faithful. Faithful! How’s that for old-fashioned? But because it was you, I respected your quaint religious principles. And it all seemed worth it until a few days ago.”

He began to speak, but she cut him off.

“So what’s wrong, you’re going to ask. You tell me. I’ve been here five days, and I still don’t know. There’s something … different about you. Perhaps that’s why I was a spoilt brat going on about Ergün’s boat. I was wrong, I admit that.”

“No, you weren’t. I should’ve thought how it was for you in all that heat.”

She smiled bitterly. “Always fair, that’s you. That belief in justice.” The smile faded. Abruptly, harshly:

“When you told me to piss off back there, would you have tried to stop me if I had?”

“Oh come on, Cathy, you know very well I didn’t mean it. I was upset about the dog, that’s all.”

“Yes, of course, the dog. How could I forget the dog? You really wouldn’t have tried to stop me, would you?”

“All right, at that exact moment, maybe not. But it’s not worth getting…”

“You don’t even want to understand, do you? When I was in the car, did you stop one minute to see if I was all right?”

“I was busy with the dog, for God’s sake! Or would it have satisfied your vanity if I’d just abandoned it?”

“My vanity! Good God, he thinks this is all to do with my vanity!” She was staring at him with wild disbelief. “Oh yes, I’m vain all right! So vain I loved it with all those men leching at me, oh yes, I just lapped it up when those two bastards tried to rape me! I really only ran across the road to you so they could get a better look at my arse!”

“What the hell are you talk...?” Sudden remembrance, shock in his eyes. “Oh Jesus, of course, when the dog was sick! But you didn’t say any... Cathy, what...?

“... what happened?” Her voice cold and flat again. “I already told you. Nothing. Just mashed my tits around a bit, that’s all! Hardly worth mentioning, happens to thousands of women every day. What’s one tit among so many?”

He gazed at her helplessly, horrified. 

“John, don’t look so concerned! You just didn’t notice, that’s all. But, by God, it hurts to find you can just … not even see me like that!”

He shook his head in bemused, silent negation of her words. 

“I love you, Cathy,” he finally said simply, factually. “What happened back there must’ve been awful, I know...”

“No, you don’t know! Don’t say you know when you don’t, can’t fucking know, damn you!”

• He winced at her fury. His face took on an expression of irritation, alienation. 
• “Jesus, if you won’t even let me speak...!” He restarted the engine.

In his anger, he pressed the accelerator too hard, and the car jerked forward. 

Feeling the thud, the Moslem girl, terrified of being found half drunk with her English tutor, urging him not to stop, it had only been some wild animal, it would be all right…

He drove in silence before turning off into the tree-arched track leading to Inciralti, the nearest beach to Izmir proper. A gang of fishermen, their wiry weathered bodies glistening in the hazy light, were hauling in a net, as if in a tug-of-war with an invisible opponent. They shouted out friendly boisterous greetings as the couple slowly drove past. The woman flinched. 

A creaky hut stood a few yards from the water’s edge, beside an orchard straining with orange and apricot trees, and aubergines lying bloated and ugly on the ground. A light breeze was coming in from the sea, ruffling its surface like the hair of some shaggy leviathan, and mixing the smells of sand and soil and sea, of fish and fruit and debris. 

The man got out of the car, called Ergün’s name. No answer. 

“The boat’s not here, either. Why don’t you have a swim till he gets back?”

She sat impassively in the car. He moved towards the boot.

“Oh shit!”

She swivelled round at his exclamation. He was dragging the dog from the boot, laying it beside the car. She saw it writhing on the ground, its belly grotesquely distended. The hind legs jerked frantically, the filthy fur matted like long-dried seaweed. A mucus-like substance had congealed round the corner of the eyes, and a pungent fetid smell came from the mouth, which hung open, tongue splayed over the lower jaw, coated with dried saliva. The head snapped up, the eyes stared straight at the man, and it howled, the sound rasping the nerves. The sound ceased as abruptly as it had begun, but the head remained erect, and the eyes still open, open through all the agony, focussed on the man crouched over it, pleading from the other side of hell.

She stumbled out of the car.

The man looked up at her, and it was as if she were looking into the dog’s eyes. Screaming, too, for release.

“Three more hours of pain, that’s all I gave it, oh God, three more hours of ... this!”

Then, his eyes wild, his face suddenly twisting: “And I really thought I was getting a second chance!  Get back in the car, Cathy. I don’t want you to ...see.”

She followed his gaze to a rock a few feet away. It took her a moment to understand.

“No,” she whispered, “no, not after all that.”

“Because of all that. A job to finish.” His voice was almost unrecognisable. 

“John, it’s dying anyway. You don’t have to... Jesus Christ, no John! John, only a few minutes, maybe, and…”

“No, not a few minutes. Not this one! An eternity! Cathy, please...get in the car.”

Driving back, sobering up, the awful doubt, was it dead, or was it still lying there broken and bloody, waiting for the next vehicle to break off a few more pieces? Too late to go back now – only it hadn’t really been too late, had it, but the girl had wanted to spend the night with him, and he’d resisted temptation so long, and Cathy was so far, far away...

He moved to the rock, scrabbled frantically to wrench it free, staggered back to the dog. She turned away, stumbled towards the water’s edge, gazed out unseeingly at a seagull bobbing indolently on the glittering surface. Long minutes passed before she heard the first sickening crunch, then another, and another, and another...  

But why did you have to punish her? I was the one you wanted.

A sharp gust of wind lifted her hair. A sudden wave splashed over her feet. The seagull flew off screeching. She turned. Where the dog’s skull had been was now only the rock with bits of bone and blood and tissue sticking to it. The man was crouching over it, sobbing uncontrollably. 

She shivered in the August heat, then went and knelt beside him, wept on to the back of his bowed head, cradling him like a baby.