‘Bad Dog’ by Nathan O’Donnell

Sprinkle’s teeth are bad. They have been bad for weeks. But she doesn’t seem to be in pain. She opens her mouth and lets her tongue hang out and it’s a mess of gunge and all the little bristles, broken nubs.

*

I call the vet. The guy tells me to bring her in. I ask how much and he kind of hums for a second, like he’s thinking about it, but in a worried way, and it’s unclear if he’s considering my financial situation or the dog’s health – it’s probably the dog’s health – and then he says, well, it depends. He says it in such a way that it’s clear it depends on my decency. He doesn’t care how much money I have or whether it’s a stretch. He is judging me based on what I’m willing to do or not do for my dog. He hasn’t given me a figure, a ballpark even. This could be thousands of euro for all I know. I’ve never been to the fucking vet. He won’t talk to me about money. He thinks it’s distasteful of me to even ask.

*

In the morning she makes fitful complaining sounds, low like the bursts of a vacuum cleaner starting. This is only the beginning. In full flow her noise is an incessant full-throated glugging.

Once I take her out, she’s like a metal coil released. She springs and bends and bounds. She’s sniffing at the weeds, pissing on the cobbles. I stand over her while she squats and she looks at me anxiously, right in the eye, like she’s ashamed to be caught in the act.

We walk through the expanse where the flats used to be. Most of the blocks are demolished now. When I moved here first they were just like flats you’d find anywhere. By the end they’d become notorious, they were so neglected, gangs and stabbings and the kids like wild animals, heedless of people, like it was our fault – everyone’s fault – they’d been deserted. You had to steer clear. They’ve since bulldozed most of it. There are just one or two blocks left standing now in the middle of the burnt-out stretch of grass, most of the units boarded up apart from a few unhappy hangers-on: a window here and there still occupied, clothes lines hanging out of the dereliction. There must be families inside, refusing to budge. I don’t feel any sympathy. I know what they are like.

If Sprinkle takes a shit around here, I don’t even bother picking it up.

*

It looks as if the gum has grown around some of the teeth, little ominous nests in her mouth, blackened snaggles in the middle, a fleshy soup. It’s like she’s decomposing.

*

Some nights I stop off at the pub at the end of the road. My favourite seat is by the bar, with the old men who talk about the races, who put money on what and how much, or else they watch the news on the TV screen above the bar – the news these days is bright, telling us we’re safe and sound, we’re looked after, though we know, we feel, we’re not – and cast their jaundiced commentary on everything. Sometimes I see an old friend in the lounge and I’ll sit with them. Sometimes I sit alone in the corner, when the place is quiet, and the barmen politely pretend I am not there.

I know Sprinkle is howling while I sip my beer. I know she howls when I go out and keeps howling and does not stop until I get home. But what am I supposed to do about it? What do people expect me to do?

When I walk back from the pub the streets are febrile. People are trying to get home. They are in a panic, driving, like they cannot get far enough away from the city. Like the city is an infection, growing, spreading; a monster from which, every day, after working, or shopping, or whatever it is they have been doing, they must flee. They speed through the inner rings of the city, desperate for the suburbs, safety. They thunder by the corner as I am marching home, defiant.

I slam my front door shut behind me and catch a glimpse of my face in the mirror over the mantelpiece and I feel relieved just to see my own reflection, human, with human expressions: a face that is not melting.

*

Other nights I stay home and watch TV shows, long sequences of them. They do not have to be good. I watch good and bad, indifferently. I watch TV like I’m watching a long cylinder of compressed meat churning from a sausage maker, all the ingredients squeezed into a single monotone consistency, the same at every point. I watch people get shot, stabbed, raped, with the same indifferent eye, and once their torture is over I forget them. I forget one episode by the middle of the next. I confuse plot lines. Sometimes I don’t recognize a character though I’ve been watching them for hours. I open can after can of Carlsberg and I sink them into me absentmindedly. I feel the weight of the accumulating liquid press against the bulge of my belly and still I continue to pour it down.

Sprinkle looks on curiously from her bed. She watches me get up for a fresh can, roughly one every half hour, and then she watches me sit back down. When I stand up to go to bed, though, she’s up like a light. I don’t do anything different. She just knows. There is something in my gait this time that tells her: this is it. I suppose it’s her only occupation, studying me, attuning herself to every quirk and gesture, every slight shift of my weight, every intimate jerk of my body. I watch her, watching me, preparing to make my way to bed. I think: this is what reliance looks like.

I can see that her teeth are getting worse. They are ghastly, filed-down shards of bone, the gums rotting around them, little pools of black, like the teeth of a drunk. The sight of them makes me shudder. I think of my own teeth: I imagine them eroded, winnowed down to brown angry stubs. I take a drink from my can, the sugars washing around my molars, my canines. But my teeth are fine: they are robust, pearly white. I strikes me that perhaps it’s Sprinkle’s teeth I am destroying. Like the more I drink, the worse they get. They say people rub off on their dogs. Is that what’s happening? Once the thought enters my head I cannot get it out. I take a last swig from my can.

*

The night is slow in coming. It is silent but the air is full of agitation.

Every creak or stir in the house I mistake for the first volley of a fit of crying, the first maw or yelp. It is the middle of the night but I imagine her howling.

I lie in bed, feeling the fury swarm in my blood for transgressions that haven’t yet happened and might never, while Sprinkle sleeps, contented, at the end of the bed, at one with me, as happy as she’d be with someone better.

*

In the morning she’s at it again – whingeing.

My head heaves the way a ship heaves, or at least the way I imagine a ship heaving, adrift on an oceanic storm. My lips are chapped and sticky from gin, wine, last night, too much of both, so much I feel them threatening to come back unannounced, the salty brimming of them in my mouth as I realize I may throw up.

Sprinkle is still whingeing.

I can hear her on my way downstairs to put Solpadeine in a glass and wait till it stops fizzing. I pause and lay my ear against the inner stairwell wall. I will her to keep going, taking in every tremor. I purse my lips and scream, as hard as I can with my mouth closed. I make a ballooning desperate sound. For a few moments we maw at each other: mimicking frightful strangulated howls.

*

I never wanted her. She was not my idea. She was just an excuse, a substitute, a reason to keep a relationship with another person – a human person – going. She didn’t work.

People say you can judge someone by how they feel about their dog. Or they say some shit about civilization – dogs are a hallmark of civilization, that kind of crap. I don’t know. Maybe they are. But what about the people who’ve just wound up here, without planning it or thinking about it. What about us?

*

The morning radio is up full blast in the corner shop next door. They have solutions. They are putting measures in place. I don’t know what crisis they’re talking about. They say: new measures are being implemented. The government has redoubled its efforts. I buy a litre of milk and a dozen eggs and twenty Benson and Hedges and a scratch card. I can’t resist scratch cards. When I get home I’ll sit with Sprinkle and scratch it off, saying to her, look at this, this could be our lucky number, though I don’t know what I’d even do differently if I won 25,000 euro or 50,000 euro or whatever it is you can win. I just like the element of chance.

*

In the vet’s office, the guy behind the desk has burn marks all over his face. He speaks quickly and loudly, much too loudly for a small stuffy room full of anxious people and their pets, dogs straining at leashes, little boxes with cats in them, some man and his daughter with a rabbit wrapped in a bath towel. The vet asks me to follow him into the surgery. Bring the patient along, he says. I put Sprinkle on the table and he holds her snout while he inspects the gums, making irritable disapproving noises, little tuts under his breath. I want to tell him what’s happening: that it’s me who’s causing it. Her teeth are rotting in place of my own. But I can’t. He wouldn’t listen. He has his own diagnosis to pronounce. Peritonitis, he says. It’s quite bad. The bugs have gotten in under the gum. I don’t ask him what bugs he means; I imagine Sprinkle’s mouth swarming with little black lice. Most of the teeth will have to go, he says. Four hundred and eighty euro. Do I want to make an appointment? I tell him I’ll call him back.

*

I see it’s one o’clock in the morning and there’s only a dribble left and I’m sauced, yawning, half-reading my magazine, half-watching Say Yes to the Dress on the foremost tab of my internet browser, uneasily aware of all the other tabs open behind it, jostling for some share of my attention too, half-hearted email convos and twitter threads and news articles and all that tinny superfluous shit.

The dog’s not crying.

I have a song in my head I keep singing under my breath but it will not go away like they usually do, once sung.

*

In the middle of the night I come to in a panic, not knowing who or where I am, tearing at the bedclothes like I am searching for someone to calm me, to remind me of things, though there is, of course, nobody there.

Sprinkle is crying. What does pain feel like if there’s no prospect of it easing – no awareness, even, that it can be eased.

I get out of bed and go downstairs. It is three in the morning. I know what to do. I open the fridge. Sprinkle is following me, quieter now but still crying, looking at me with such helplessness I cannot bear it. There is no sound but the sound of her moaning. Everyone in every house around mine is asleep. I open a can of Carlsberg and I start to swig it and it’s so cold and crisp I could drink it forever. I am overwhelmed with thirst. Once I’ve started I can’t seem to stop. I finish the can and take another; then another. I am pouring them into me. Once all the cans are gone I take wine, gin, whatever’s in the house. I stuff my face with it. I get light-headed, blurry. As I drink I see the bugs swirl in Sprinkle’s mouth. I see the teeth rot visibly, accelerating as I pour the liquor down my throat, swirling it around my gums. I watch her teeth rattle out of her face, onto the floor, and the bugs along with them, beetles that scurry when they hit the floor, disappearing under the carpet, as the room goes blurry, becoming poisoned, stupefied, the last of her teeth coming loose, at which point she gets quieter, calmer, the pain having gone, everything having been extracted, and then I bend down and I hold her in my drunken stupor and I tell her to hush, the worst is over now.

From issue #10: autumn/winter 2020

About the Author
Nathan O’Donnell is a writer, researcher, and one of the co-editors of Paper Visual Art. He has published fiction and creative non-fiction in several contexts as well as critical writing on modern and contemporary art. He has edited and produced several project-based publications and zines and, in 2020, with Marysia Wieckiewicz-Carroll, he co-founded Numbered Editions, an experimental imprint for artists’ writing. He teaches at Trinity College Dublin and on the MA Art in the Contemporary World at NCAD, and he is currently writer in residence at Maynooth University.