Green Book Yellow Dog- Part 1 of 22

1



The yellow dog opened her eyes after two weeks and stared at her two front paws. Marooned in the corner of a cold room she was enchanted by her paws from the very start. They seemed lifeless yet she could move them at will. They appeared useless really, there before her in black and white, yet she loved them more than anything, more than life itself, and as weeks and puppies tumbled into the garden, she stared at her paws: in awe perhaps of their perfect shape and velvet texture.

Seven weeks in the damp room, dawn skies torched to vapid skies under glacial winter nights, and then eventually the yellow dog locked up and walked out. Her gaze transfixed on a sliver of dust and sun she staggered the full length of the burnt winter scrub outside; collapsing quite suddenly, as puppies so often do, falling asleep smeared with dead veldt, oblivious. White rays melting her velvet coat.

That’s how Susan found her. Before she’d seen any of the other puppies she saw a cool wet nose and two shuteyes in a crumple of fur rising and dropping as it snoozed in the sun. A nondescript mongrel with a soft fudge coat and creamy chocolate eyes; with a recently acquired penchant for travel and a new set of rubber paw pads to match. All that in a sparse bone-white landscape beside an ivory farm abandoned: a place so far from everywhere it was unknown. The old pioneer who lived there was anything but interested in the little girl who’d come to choose a puppy, she was vacant and wizened, but she smiled at the delight in Susan’s eyes. “What are you going to call her?” she asked seriously. “Fudge,” the appropriately serious reply. And so Susan had a new best friend, the yellow dog.

Fudge was carried away confused; Susan sang softly to counter the saddened sniffling and they were in the backseat of a car pinched by cracked imitation-leather seats along a network of main roads and side streets and alongside a school, grinded to a parking lot. Stones crunched and cracked under the tyres then shifted underfoot as sports ground sounds from the nearby school drifted under the bleached yellow awning and into the plastered enclave, picking out small bananas, a new delivery of carrots, fresh lettuce, green peppers, crisp watermelon and ripe pumpkin. The greengrocer’s wife picked Susan onto the counter and put her hands in the air with mock despair. “It looks like a wolf,” she told Susan. Fudge looked more like a hyena than anything else: her jaws and front legs extraordinarily chunky, a pronounced downward slope in her back and a strange laughing glint in her eyes; but Susan was in love regardless, and carried the little yellow animal carefully back to the car.

That night the yellow dog gobbled her cereal supper and was packaged in a cardboard shoebox with a black bear and an alarm clock to mimic a mommy dog’s heartbeat. As a doze dusted lightly over her drowsy eyes in the eerie hours of that winter night, the upheaval of her kidnapping was forgotten, lost to the world in a deep puppy sleep, nestled in its cosy shoebox in the corner of a room, somewhere in Africa.

In summer Susan always went to the Wednesday swimming galas to watch her brother swim. She took delight in swimming galas: watching Peter step up to the blocks, twisting his arms behind him and splashing water on his neck; and she would scream from the moment the gun went off to the moment he came in first, or second, or sometimes third. In winter, on Thursday nights, she watched him play hockey. After every hockey match, she'd rush into the lounge at home - their Mom would be sitting under a blue mohair blanket - and she’d explain exactly what happened. As long as anyone could remember Peter had always been: training for swimming, studying for school, playing hockey at the club, watching a movie, drinking a milkshake at the roadhouse, at a house party, dancing in the disco, with his girlfriend Jade, listening to music on his stereo, going to buy something at the shop, going shopping for new clothes, going to visit a friend, watching a programme on television. Jade gave Fudge her first present; hesitantly arrived at the house on a Saturday morning, her bright red hair spiked in long strands next to her elfin ears, fluctuating her voice and clumsily touching her face as she greeted everyone; like always. Perching on the edge of the bed and gazing at Peter she pulled a silver nametag out her linen fairy bag and fastened it on Fudge’s collar. A hot, shining sun, and underneath that in small cursive it said, “Fudge”.

The nametag clinked loudly wherever Fudge walked. The next door cat, a nasty tom with crinkled ginger fur, started ambushing her whenever she ventured into the garden and the Ibis, massive grey-brown birds that collected on the lawn in formidable numbers, always heard her approaching well in advance. They would turn around and glare in unison as she trotted unknowingly into the front garden, their long curved beaks shimmering in the light, their button eyes piercing and evil. An aurora of black and white light fluctuating around them, to Fudge’s horror. Even lizard hunting suffered: she couldn’t get close enough to the scaly little reptiles as they sunned themselves to a standstill in the brief morning glare. She took instead to chasing the odd stray leaf in the garden or the shadows of branches moving in the breeze, thankful every morning for the food in a plastic dish next to the fridge in the kitchen.

Weeks passed and Fudge assaulted clothes in the laundry basket, destroyed provocative pot-plants and chased back garden butterflies, all the time barking her spine chilling bark with unabated delight. Peter would chase her with his hockey stick when she stole tin foil covered chocolates strewn across his room: gifts of love and encouragement from Jade; but evenings she would always sit quietly and watch Peter monotonously pound a tennis ball against the back wall, as was his habit. Sitting close by she’d watch the ball bullet into the wall, trace the bounce of the ball against the concrete ground, the split second rebound against the brick wall, and the elegant arc back to his outstretched hand. After supper she got leftovers scraped into her dish and when Susan finally fell asleep every night, Susan’s breaths notably deeper to a dog’s well-tuned ear, Fudge would sneak into the bed. Cuddling up close and dropping like a stone into sleep.

Susan got a stomach bug, and, before everyone rushed off to work, she moved to her Mom’s bed, surrounded by a pile of down pillows in starched covers. Her and Fudge absorbed the sun as it filtered in through the lace curtains, winter rays glowing on dust timelessly dangling in the air, half listened to a dust covered radio whose incessant adult chatter failed to break the morning hush, an clay bowl of barley sweets and a glass of fizzing lemonade close by. They played together with bright balls of wool and a bucket of acorns collected from the garden, in the silence, and they slept for a few hours. When Peter came home that afternoon he rolled Fudge around on the carpet and she tried, furiously, to attack his shoelaces.

Susan wanted to study modern art in Paris, and she wanted to drive a scooter through the streets of Paris with Fudge. Not much later, maybe a few weeks or was it a month, Fudge went with Susan’s Mom to the school tuck shop and she sat in the corner of the tuck shop next to boxes of chocolates she could smell through the cardboard, watching the tuck shop ladies making toasted sandwiches and hamburgers, licking her chops. During the lunch break Susan took Fudge for a walk between stacks of asbestos classrooms, tireless stairs winding around every corner, to the storeroom behind the gym where students bunked class. To the headmaster’s office with its whipping canes, to the vacant change rooms that smelled of mildew and echoed decades of long forgotten school children. To an art teacher wearing pink hoop earrings and navy-blue eye shadow, framed like an old pastel painting in a burnished brick classroom with paint-drenched sinks in the corner. Dark, oily canvasses on the walls. Splashes of carefree teenage flair trapped behind dust covered glass, and teachers in synthetic, lavender-coloured dresses heading for the staff room to drink more coffee and put more pencilled paper in their bags, and classes empty like they always were at break time. The seething fields outside where wide eyed children jeered and jolted past, arguing spasmodically and clinging on misshapen jerseys, and dragging bags on the ground behind them. To an open concrete quadrangle where the sun was shining and more groups gathered: an alien soundlessness drifting between the boiling tumults of conversation. Susan and Fudge were illuminated in the crowd of strangers as Susan ate a sandwich and screamed hello across the way. Fudge eyed them all suspiciously.

Spring came along bright and cheery. Shafts of geese flew it in from North Africa: their feathers coloured black, orange, white, tan and green; propelled in rigid, arching motion across the sky then flailing down into the lake opposite Fudge’s house. Warmth and colour seeped through their brick walls. Masked weaverbirds engineered beautiful new homes of grass, tearing some apart in anger when they failed as masterpieces. Susan’s Mom did extravagant dinner parties on the patio, and Susan and Fudge sat for hours where the garden lay on its side: where a fallen white elm tree with fossilised bark had yellow tulips growing in its shelter. On warm nights Susan would wait there into the darkness with Fudge, blanketed by the lingering heat of the day. Or she erected blazing fires and they toasted marshmallows under the stars. The first purple blooms of the jacaranda trees prompted Peter to write a learning timetable for the end of year exams, allocating time to go through his work between busy swimming schedules. He followed it religiously, crossing off every day as it came to pass. The house fell silent, like a church. Susan wrote up a learning timetable too, stuck it on her door and tried to follow it but sitting on her bed with books laid out the hours would fly by as she daydreamed about, everything, occasionally reading a few lines from the books. Her and Fudge would stay there most of the afternoon, quietly reclusive in their room until night faded in, marking the end of the day and the abandonment of learning.

Deciding he needed to concentrate most on his maths and science marks Peter set aside Tuesday and Thursday afternoons for past papers, giving himself seven hours to work through two papers an afternoon. In the sessions he’d detail any aspects he didn’t understand and he’d do all the required background reading. Then he’d approach his teachers on Fridays with relevant questions from the week’s work. He managed to go through all the final maths and science exams from the past eight years, as well as learning all the theory in the process. On Wednesdays he’d read through his economics study guides, on Sundays he did accounts practical examples and on Mondays he learnt business management from his textbook. He had everything covered and the day before his final year exams began he spent two hours throwing his ball against the wall, quietly confident. Fudge left him that day to rummage through the herb garden, and she pattered inside to Susan’s room, sleeping wearily on the bed next to Susan, smelling of rosemary, oregano and thyme.

In the hall where they had assemblies and prayers every morning the rest of the year, and play festivals in March, and popularity contests in June, Peter wrote his final year exams. The rattled thoughts, the rushed flipping of pages. Metal school chairs scraping linoleum and teachers patrolling as waves of heat pricked through purple and black uniforms; only an old metal fan to vibrate against the oppressive air and the ticking eternity; the paranoid scribble of pens or their desperate silence. Exams superseded twelve years of hand writing in battered school cases burdened from one hollow classroom to another. Exams were superseded by the inevitable, “Pens down please”. Out the frantic hall into the wide-open spaces beyond with a feeling of triumph for another milestone passed. He’d spotted well for the economics and business management exams and had model answers ready for nearly every question. He cruised through geometry, chemistry, physics and accounting: the study guides and past papers worked for him. But for his algebra exam: they nailed him with three trick questions and it flustered him badly. Luckily he’d seen examples of the last theorem and answered it quickly, perfectly; that gave him time to go back and correct some of his other mistakes, but he still got nearly 40% of the paper wrong by his calculations. What did it matter though: he had enough points. Fudge heard him and his new prospective university friends coming up the street that day, laughing above the heat of the day as they embraced victory. They had a party in the garden. Susan and her Mom made salads and dessert and bought fresh rolls from the shop; Susan used the galvanised drum from the garage to make an ice bath for their beers and, struggling with handfuls of wood, she started a fire for them. The garrulous group spent the afternoon forging future alliances around the fire, Jade nowhere in sight. Grinding her hyena jaw slowly from side to side, Fudge watched at a distance, watched the marinated pork ribs on the fire.

Susan wrote some dragging tests as well, but mostly she watched two black crows flopping around in the sky outside, squawking and fighting with the world and with each other and with the sky and even with the sun it seemed. And then quite suddenly they were finished with tests, and procedures and evaluations, and everyone went home and the school was empty and the holidays began. She went to the park that afternoon with Fudge, trying to teach Fudge not to struggle like an animal on her new harness. They stayed for hours; chased leaves in a gust, a grasshopper and the cloud’s shadows, and watched all the passing people until the sun went down on their suburb.

Partially hidden under a canopy of lush alien trees and stooping itself in peaceful calm below a ridge, their suburb moved and concealed aspects of itself as if by will, branded and possessed by a geometrical array of streets. Hundreds of neat middle class houses with trimmed hedges: sparkling sapphire pools professed their own brilliance. Close by, a vast territorial collection of sports grounds where the grass was evergreen, the spotlights rising inert into the heavens, giving incandescent light on winter evenings and sweltering light on summer nights. Flat expanses of land below the ridge where three featureless schools had arranged themselves in a pentagon disturbed by Oak trees and a lazy stream leading to a lake where manic-depressive ducks spent their summers between swaying Cypress, Pine and Bluegum trees. The sun danced clear and white on the lake all day long, then set a glaring yellow as evening blew away and rustled past. Past the lake: the art deco airport, the blue plastic shopping mall and the neon ice rink. To the flashing amusement park and the bold maxi cinemas, and the scattered parking lots and the busy franchise supermarkets. To the landmark white roadhouse in the town centre, in a gridlock of grey roads all wide open and dead straight, with graveyards, tyre and exhaust centres. The houses drenched uncomfortably in concrete, the paint peeling, smoky, centipede cars would crawl through the main street at rush hour but at midnight there was nothing but ghostly emptiness and the phantom changing of traffic lights until creeping hours later shopkeepers busied in the stiffness of early milk, newspaper and bread deliveries, till later they aggregated at their shop entrances and watched the passing traffic. As time warp hotel bars, with decrepit fabrics and fallen letters, swallowed an odd limping assortment of hopelessness. Scratched, cracked, brittle, smashed street lamps, scuffed, bent lamp poles and staccato pedestrian walkways to mark the way in.

The scaffold headgears on the gold mines always caught the first glinting rays of each day. An alluring hue at the crack of dawn driving subservient mine workers out of square cardboard mine hostels, talking meekly along rusty caged walkways, and dark kilometres down into hell where their glistening sweat soaked into powdered dust; until the mine siren droned the noon shift-change for the entire town to hear. Rock blasts in the afternoon shuddered up through the reef like earthquakes and shook the community by its teeth.

The railway tracks cut two diametrically opposed worlds; beyond them the town was steely concrete, gritty diesel and visible hardness. Train shunted along the railway tracks and vanished into the yellow mine dumps, processed quartzite that slouched barefoot and pregnant over the town. The industries were a hazy smog skyline of carbon and metal in pockmarked craters where the seasons were unable to affect change, where disintegrating production, processed, over coated, cluttered iron, stacked warehouses and incorporations, were tied with industry power lines. Bolted factories reached into the atmosphere and spewed noisome and noxious emanations: continuously dead activity and sick litter blowing in the hot steel, chemical breeze. A reinforced highway rumbled out the industrial bowels, scattered industries in its wake and headed out for the coast.

They drove to the sea for their end of year holiday. Susan was so excited she spent the first two hours of the trip staring in wonder at the silent night hanging over sleeping houses and desolate landscapes. While Fudge and Peter slept. Then she fell asleep. By the time they reached the coast the sun was hopelessly lost, fluorescent orange trying to sparkle afloat the sea’s surface as the day drowned, water lapping its edges. Their beach-house halfway up a mountain overlooking a sluggish muddy river spilling brown dye for miles into the ocean. In a valley brimming with ink-green succulent masses and teaming, flying and screeching movement, along a wild stretch of coastline where fine, cream coloured beach sand neurotically washed by the filtering sea, accentuated by contrast the overgrown forest flowing in the valley. The winding path from their house led to a beach and Fudge, overcome by the impatience of a long drive and the wide open spaces all around, leapt off the rocks when they neared it, landing all fours in the sand five metres below. She careered into the sea and careered back out drenched in salt water. Howling with fiendish delight. Their holiday had begun.

Holidays were for waking up and heading to the beach. Putting sunscreen on and investigating the vast collection of rock pools along the beach. Fudge chased birds up and down the sand dunes, along the beach, around rocky outcrops and out to exposed sandbanks, and beyond until her tongue hung to the ground and her eyes struggled to focus straight. Susan would watch her with pride. Not for Fudge’s awe-inspiring speed or elegant agility, but for her blatant determination.

Some mornings Susan and Fudge watched Peter swimming out past the breakers and other mornings they watched bottlenose dolphins playing in the surf. Emerald eyed and black feathered, squadrons of cormorant kamikazes would fall out the sky from dizzy clouds, bullets into the ocean piercing plumes of salt water into the air. Or they’d just fly out to sea in tight formations beating silently against the sea’s face and navigating on their shadows; the cormorants.

When it got too hot they returned to the cool of the house for lunch: fresh bread from a little bakery, with butter, liver pate, cheese and cold ginger beer: flavours tainted in a dry, salty mouth. Warmth from the morning sun flushing through Susan’s skin as she sat on the balcony eating and drinking slowly.

Early afternoons were for putting together a 1500-piece jigsaw while Fudge dozed off and dreamed about catching birds. The late afternoons were for catching fish in the river mouth: waiting ages for anything exciting to happen at the other end of the line. Or collecting fresh mussels to make seafood suppers; hunting for sole along the shore with a small trident on a bamboo stick; stealing the red bait rag and pawing flopping and flipping fish destined for dinner.

Rigging for game with 1.5-mm thick No. 6 metal traces and 9/0 hooks on live grunter, running thirty-pound line on sliding pyramid sinkers. Despite his commitment and perfect conditions Peter struggled for a bite the first week, but in the end he hooked a Zambezi shark. The family watched it cruise steadily out to sea: the drag on his reel screeching an objection. Near the end of his line, after a three hundred metre run, he finally managed to turn it around, or it decided to turn and swim shoreward of its own accord, either way its escape diverted. He spent the next twenty minutes guiding the shark back and forth between the shore and the centre of the river mouth, delighting in the tedious battle and the few people that gathered close by. It swam alongside the ledge and volunteered a glimpse of itself to everyone, and not much later it was stranded on the beach and looked a lot less threatening. Looked almost sad as it lay motionless on the rough sand, its blunt snout pointed hopefully back at the sea, moving its small mouth in an apparent attempt to breath. Its body a dull grey colour synonymous with dreary winter seas and desperate despair, except for a fat white tummy that bulged on the sand. Fudge gave it a lick and then pulled her tongue away with surprise, the skin salty and raspy. It had been unfairly cheated of all the brilliant colours coral fish seemed to get, condemned to a drab existence in dirty, muddy seas. Peter, mildly joking with the small crowd that assembled, didn’t realise Susan had decided he was going to put it back.

In the evenings after washing the dishes and showering they’d read through a musty collection of books piled along a warped bookcase. Susan read one about a snowflake, but she and Fudge would usually fall asleep early on their pine bed, on the open balcony, to the sound of waves crashing in the distance. Breathing in the salty air as they slumbered peacefully, the genial nights drifting overhead until Peter’s exam results were published.

Peter’s well-balanced features blended into an attractive uniformity; he had eyes that looked relentlessly, pale brown hair that went dirty blonde during the swimming season and a permanent tan all the others marvelled at. The morning his exam results where published they packed a picnic to celebrate. They bought the newspaper, crowded round it at the table and found Peter’s results; then they crossed the river on a ferry and drove up the coast for the picnic. The man at the river crossing checked the fuel tank twice and fiddled with the ferry’s outboard motor before it bubbled into life cloaked in heady exhaust fumes. Fudge staring into the murky water as they chugged across.

The holiday floated on breezily, like youth seems to float along breezily, and oppression floats along breezily, and happiness floats along breezily. The sea a troubled, pale blue pounding incessantly against the shore as low clouds grouped in the distance. Susan walked down to the beach with Fudge. Sections of the gnawed reef were visible, part of a fossil spear submerged in the ocean lingering to brutalise metal ships. Two towering bastions of sandstone superciliously challenged the ocean’s supremacy; beach sand undulated between the eroded cliffs making everything around it seasick. The beach littered with chunks of powdery white limestone, jagged shards of black dolomite encrusted with salt, sandy knolls nested with dead grass, thick belts of crushed seashells and heaps of rotting kelp infested with midges. Dunes glowing yellow in the heat, rising into the blue skies then surrendering to a homogenous entanglement of brittle, deciduous shrubs cauterised bloodless by heat to parchment yellows and greens. A stagnant haze of heat hanging: blustered by a cool sea breeze but holding a sickening clutch on the beachhead. The numbing high-pitched rasp of insects drowned intermittently by crashing waves.

Fudge saw a moth eaten seagull dejectedly sieving through a heap of kelp and realising he was moving she tore after him, throwing sand high into the air. The seagull took off with a loud, “kwok kwok kwok”.

A cargo vessel had been wrecked on the beach fifteen years before and exerted an influence perhaps by its colossal iron presence and close proximity, failing to dominate. A metal carcass trapped, corrupted and diseased by the sea, the metal atrophied, coated in crumbling decay. The frothy sea would beat, break, batter and tear at it surreptitiously, until it dissolved into nothing. Fudge turned her attention to a wandering albatross floating breezily and effortlessly above, detached in its own careless solitude from the distant landscape. Turbulent currents of air carrying it, immobile.

Far down the coast that day the last southern right whale left for Antarctica, heaving itself out the ocean then crashing down majestically. And so those days drew to a close.