(Being the opening bit of a potentially lost novel)
There is that Dog Again
My sister and I are sitting by the side of the road in the early morning and we are waiting to be given a ride into town. The sun is still orange but it has come out of the shadow of the mountains and the air is almost warm. It is springtime now and the birds in the pine trees in the valley are singing. Three carts going to the market have passed us by, but no one has picked us up yet. Somewhere among the pine trees or on the other side of them there is a river which I can hear but not see.
My sister lights her pipe, spits into the dust and considers that for a moment, and then squints down the road.
“There is that dog again,” she says.
“I see him,” I reply, and there he is, back along the road, sniffing around at things and walking about in his strange way.
“Or is it even the same dog?” My sister asks. “I thought it was but now I wonder.”
“It is the same one.”
“Can you be sure? Any dog might lose a foot to a trap, or by going under the wheel of a wagon, or something else. It is a dangerous world. And not just for dogs.”
“That is true.”
After we have watched the dog for a while longer my sister says, “it does look like him, though.”
I do not say anything to that. If I were to say something it would be that the dog looks like him because it is him.
“He gets up and down the country well for a three-legged creature, do you not think?”
“Three legs is still one more than a man has,” I say, and my sister looks at me strangely then, but she knows I am right.
Here are some of the other things I am right about, mainly concerning the world and about my place in it:
- It has been a long cold winter as bad as anyone can remember, and my sister and I have had a hard time, and we are not alone in that. On our journeys from place to place and town to town, we have seen enough people on the edge of starving or freezing to death to know that we are lucky to make any kind of living. Even if it is a slim one. We have been close enough to the edge ourselves more than once.
- My sister is sixteen years old and she is the only family that I have. And you might say that I am lucky to have her, too.
- My name is Albert Zero, and I am ten years old or near enough, and I am dead.
- I am a monster.
- I am an abomination.
- I am a cursed and damned thing.
- I do not have any memory of ever being alive, but I was, once. I do not even know, for sure, how I died. For as long as I can remember, my sister and I have been travelling the country, and sometimes further, earning our wages by demonstrating the truth of my unholy condition.
- Before that I cannot speak with any authority.
- I am an offence to all creation, and I do not expect to be saved or forgiven.
After a short while a boy or young man who is heading into the town stops to offer us a ride.
He is thin and bent over and sad-looking. He does not get down from his cart so we climb up and then off we all go along the road in the sunshine. At the boy’s suggestion my sister is sat next to him and I am behind the two of them in the empty cart. It is his cart so he can have things however he wants them.
That is how the world works, and I am well aware of it.
“The cart is empty now,” our new associate explains to my sister as we travel along, “but soon I will buy and sell things and so make my fortune.”
“What things?” my sister asks.
“It does not matter what they are, just so long as there are people who are willing to sell them and buy them in turn, and so on. It is simple if you understand it.”
“You have clearly studied economics.”
“I have studied people. That is the wise thing.”
I have been counting the flea bites on the back of the boy’s neck and on the back of his head. There are more than twenty-five of them. As if he can feel my eyes on him, the boy turns his head to look over his shoulder at me. I look away and pretend I have been looking at something else all along. This is a trick of mine. I pretend to study the mountains but out of the corner of my eye I can tell that the boy is frowning and is uncomfortable.
This is how I always make people feel, on account of my being dead.
“Your brother does not speak?”
“He mostly keeps his own counsel,” my sister says. “He also has studied people.”
“And what about you?”
“I am a poor student. I do not have the patience for it.”
“I mean your business in the town, the pair of you”
“Just walking up and down and around and here and there, like everyone else.”
“That is a fine story,” the boy says, because he does not believe my sister.
“I am glad that you like it,” she replies.
We go on in silence for a time after that. The boy whistles a song to make us think he does not care about anything. The sun is climbing higher in the sky although it is still not warm, and will not be for the rest of today, and there are other carts and wagons on the road. Most are pulled by horses but some are pulled by donkeys or oxen. There are men by themselves and some children and some families. Everyone is going the same way because it is market day.
Eventually the boy can keep quiet no longer. This is a weakness that people have. Sometimes I think it is the cause of half of the problems in the world.
“They say that there have already been bread riots in the North, on account of last year’s bad harvest.”
“Is that what they say?” my sister replies, and I recognise that tone in her voice. I do not know if the boy gets it or not, but I do not think he does.
“What I say is this,” he goes on. “A man might be in a position to make his fortune by speculating on such things as the price of wheat, if he were smart. And that is just one example.”
“If he were smart,” says my sister. “There you have identified the crucial matter.”
The boy looks at my sister deliberately then, as if he is studying her, and says, “you are almost pretty. You have a wonky eye but I do not mind it. I have been with worse-looking girls than you.”
“You are right generous.”
“You would be more impressed with me if you saw me in a month or two’s time, when I will have made my money. Then you might consider a partnership.”
“Ah,” my sister says, “but I already have a partner here, do I not?”
By this she means me.
“I did not have to give you two a lift, you know,” the fellow says sourly.
“It is indeed a miracle you were able to find any room at all for us,” my sister says, gesturing at the empty cart. And that shuts him up.
When the boy lets us off at the gates of the walled town, he takes hold of my sister’s hand and stares into her eyes for a long while, and says, “if you see me again you will know that you were wrong about me.”
My sister waits until he has finished, and then takes her hand back from him slowly.
“And it will be the same for you, too,” she tells him.
***
This is how it always happens:
The town is busy on account of this being the first day without snow or rain for months, and in the market square we can only find ourselves a corner between a man who is preaching about the coming end of the world and a woman who is attempting to sell a single shoe.
I do not know if it is her shoe or not.
I stand and wait until my sister has decided that there are enough people roundabouts, then she gives a very loud whistle which gets the attention of a small crowd of exactly ten. I know because I have counted each one of them.
“What you have before you today,” my sister announces to those gathered, while indicating me, “is a mystery of modern science. A monstrous wonder of our age. A dead boy, walking among the living. Able to talk, and reason, and demonstrate his knowledge, but also impervious to earthly suffering – or earthly joy – in a manner that has confounded-,”
“How did he die?” an old man demands to know, rightly suspicious.
“Where did he come from?” asks someone else.
“Prove it!” says a third.
“I will prove it, sir,” my sister replies, “and in not one but four ways.”
Well, that has them temporarily baffled. And it is then, as it always is, that my sister produces the stained and torn document which is our most prized and only possession.
“First,” she proclaims, “by law. Here is a death certificate, written in the language of the country from which we came, far away to the East. And here is the boy’s name. And here it states that the deceased – this boy – fell from a galloping horse, and died shortly thereafter. What do you think of that?”
They all consider this, the ten of them. Some days it is falling from a galloping horse and some days it is drowning and some days it is a mysterious illness. I have died in rock-falls and been gored by bulls and bitten by snakes and frozen to death on mountain tops. Once I was mauled by a bear.
“Second,” says my sister, “by observation. Look for yourselves and see the sallow colour of his skin, the fixed expression, the strange and unnatural way that he carries himself, unlike any living boy.”
The crowd examines me more closely, and they agree that all those things are present. They start to appreciate the not-quite-rightness of me, and to try to understand what is before them, and to wonder if there might be some inhuman advantage that they can gain from it.
“Ask him what is three added to three!”
“Show us his teeth!”
“Can he recite the Lord’s prayer? Or name the days of the week?
“Tell us if it will rain tomorrow! And if my child will be a boy or girl!”
“Third,” says my sister, ignoring the questions, “by reason.”
She nods at me, and so I begin my piece.
“I know that I am dead,” I declare, “because I do not feel as others. I can neither understand nor contribute to the flow of natural human life, but instead am put apart from people. I am as a lost sheep, strayed from the path, and there is no shepherd’s hand to guide me back to the light. Some vital part or spark of me, which is the soul, is gone, and so I stand before you with eyes blinded and heart hardened to the affairs of the living.”
“He does indeed have a strange voice,” the audience notes, “and the yellowed eyes, somehow blank and lifeless…”
“And fourth,” says my sister, before anyone can interrogate my argument too closely, “by demonstration.”
And here she takes out the leather belt.
“Ooh,” goes the crowd.
“You will agree,” my sister tells them, “that if struck with enough force then surely a living boy would cry out, and seek to escape from the source of the pain?”
They do agree to it.
“Well, then,” says my sister. And then she slaps me across the face with the belt as hard as she can, three times in succession. And, being dead, I do not react.
We have their interest now.
“It is a trick!” someone shouts.
“But how?”
“A magic act! They have worked it out together!”
And so on.
Here is the next bit, though. My sister picks out a fellow whom she has just chosen from our small audience. He is thin and sickly-looking, and wears a red hat.
“What about you, sir?” she asks him. “Do you have a good strong arm to test our claim?”
“With an open hand, or…?” the man asks. He looks around him, nervously.
“As you like.”
“This moment?”
“Unless you wish to keep the dead waiting,” – there’s laughter at this – “and all these other fine people.”
The man is embarrassed now, which means he will put some spite into the blow, which is what we want. In fact, he takes a sort of limping run up and almost floors me by his momentum alone. But his swinging fist bounces off the bridge of my nose and, although I see stars, it is he who goes sprawling into the dirt – to more laughter and applause from the crowd. And still no tears or response from me, although blood has started to trickle down my face.
As the man’s friends help him away my sister asks, “now who else would have a go, for the price of only a penny?”
But they are all already queuing up to see who can make me cry out, rolling up their sleeves or readying improvised weapons, all eager to prove a point or make an impression or just be allowed to vent their awful rage at the world, for a brief moment, on something or anyone.
And this is how it always is, in this town and in every town. For a penny a time I am slapped and kicked and punched and strangled. I am hit with canes and switches and reeds and clubs and thrown horseshoes. I am beaten with lengths of rope or bundles of firewood or wooden buckets or live animals, or anything else that people have to hand. And if they have nothing to hand, for a penny more they can rent the leather belt which my sister carries just for this purpose.
“But no knives or pointed implements,” she tells them. “For even a dead boy can still be damaged beyond repair, like a table or chair or any other useful object.”
I am a useful object, and here are some of the injuries I have sustained during my career so far:
- Broken nose and jaw and ribs and fingers and toes (some more than once)
- Smashed teeth
- Sprained wrists and ankles
- Dislocated shoulders
- Concussion and unconsciousness
- Blood in my stool and waters
- Temporary blindness
- Severe bruising
- Loss of sense of smell
And I do not complain about any of this.
I do not complain about it because I fear and respect my sister and want her to love me, and because I know I would be unable to survive in the world, dead as I am, without her. And also because I take pride, or would if I were not dead, in my usefulness to her, and my fortitude and forbearance.
And, mostly, I do not complain because I am dead, and dead things have no rights. I do know that there are laws that protect dead bodies, and how they must be treated and disposed of and so on, and I assume that some of these laws might apply to me, but my sister says that this is a grey area, as I am a unique case.
“Can a bucket or a table have rights?” is what she argues. “Can a rock? Or a dog? They cannot. And do you know why? Because they do not have responsibilities. For the same reason that a child has no rights against its parents.”
“Even cruel or mistreating ones?
“Especially those. For what would be the outcome if children were able to rebel against their guardians, simply because they objected to the method of their guardianship? It does not bear thinking about.”
“No,” I agree. But I do think about it, all the same.
By the end of the day we have reached the arse-end of the crowd. It is an audience of drunks and worse, who can barely stay on their feet let alone knock me off mine, despite the damage that I have suffered over the last few hours. Some of them are ignoring me altogether. Money is exchanged for favours between the men and women, and sometimes no money is exchanged but favours are.
My dead body is still standing when the man with the red hat from earlier in the day, who has spent the afternoon trying to drown the memory of his humiliation, returns to the site of it and comes at me with a knife.
Apparently, we have underestimated him.
But we have not underestimated him by all that much.
My sister trips the fellow and is on to him before he even hits the ground, and then begins belting him around the face with the heavy leather bag full of pennies. She carries on until most of his nose and one of his eyes are done in. It is a sorry picture, and not made any better when I stamp on the man’s head for good measure, and then do it a second time before I am pulled away and the two of us scarper rather than wait for his friends to turn up.
And that, for us, is mostly what passes for an ordinary day.
***
Once we have put enough distance between ourselves and the scene of the crime, we stop by a water pump so that my sister can examine the sum of my injuries. She washes my face and I spit out two teeth into her hand.
“Not bad for day’s income,” she says. “Anything else?”
I hold up my hand to show her my thumb, which is sticking out at a strange angle. One of my legs seems to have gone out of true all of a sudden, also.
“Can you walk far?” my sister asks, and I shake my head.
My sister rubs her chin, thinking.
“Look there,” I tell her, and point to where the young man who gave us the ride into town this morning is leading his donkey along the street. He is weeping, and his cart is nowhere to be seen.
“Oh ho,” he says sadly when he spots us, and wipes his nose. “It is you two.”
“Where is your fortune?” my sister asks him.
“I made it, alright,” he tells us. “But then was robbed of everything.”
“It seems that you have had a busy few hours.”
“I fell in with a bad lot. And all that they have left me with is my donkey.”
“Well, I am sorry for that,” says my sister. Then she says “Oh!” with surprise when our friend throws himself into her arms and commences sobbing again. Still, she pats him on the back for a few moments until he has calmed himself down.
It is when he stops crying and starts to nuzzle her neck that my sister noisily clears her throat, and draws the lad’s attention to the knife which she has been resting against his groin the whole time.
“Oh no,” he says.
“We will have the donkey,” she says.
“I have never been lucky with women,” the boy howls. “Not once has it happened.”
“You are a bad judge of character, that is all it is,” my sister tells him.
He finally looks to me, as if that might help him, but finds nothing in my dead expression to provide him with any comfort at all.
That night my sister buys two bottles of wine with our day’s takings and the two of us get drunk under a tree, leaving the stolen donkey parked against a fence. The evening has been kind but I know that the air will turn cold later, and we will need the insulation of our drunkenness to help us sleep.
As is usual when she has been drinking, my sister is at first light-hearted, and between us we act out the same childhood pantomime that we have been performing, with variations, for longer than I can remember.
“And how did we escape?” I ask her.
“On stolen horses,” she replies. “Or by means of a tunnel.”
“Facilitated by murder? And disguise?”
“And a stormy night, too.”
“Hunted by dogs? Pursued by outraged townsfolk with pitchforks and flaming torches?”
“Those also.”
“And our parents? Brothers and sisters?”
“None, or all gone.”
“Gone where?”
“Where no one knows or can follow”
“And how I died? Drowned? Or by fire?”
“Or of fever or by poison or murdered in your sleep.”
“But then came back and digging my way out of the earth, my dead hands-,”
“That is enough, now,” my sister tells me.
“My dead hands torn to shreds, the tattered shroud-,”
“That is enough.”
“The tattered shroud hung about my shoulders-,”
And then there is the hard SLAP across my face, and I am quiet.
Guilty, my sister tells me, “Do not look at me as if your dead heart had the right to judge the living.”
“I do not,” I say, and it is true, but it is not enough. It is never enough.
“You want to be free of me,” my sister asks, “is that it? To strike out on your own and to make your fortune, like a boy in a fairy tale?”
I shake my head.
“Perhaps I will drink myself to death,” says she, “or throw myself in front of a cart, or cut my own throat, and then we would see how long you would last, what do you say to that?”
“I might fare better than you think,” is what I say, and then regret these words just as soon as I have said them. My sister’s eyes go dark and hard.
“What would you do, dead as you are?”
“I can count and I can carry and I can run,” I tell her, and she laughs sharply at that.
“They would run you out of town, that is the only place that they would let you run. Again and again and again. They would not let you settle anywhere. You would be forced into the woods to live alone, and still they would hunt you with dogs. And when you were caught they would chain you and whip you and exhibit you for the rest of your days for their entertainment”
“As I am exhibited now?”
“Oh, it would be worse, count on that,” my sister says, pointing a finger at me. “They would spit on you and stab you with knives, and then crows would come and peck out your dead eyes, and rats eat your dead feet. And soon there would be nothing left of you but your filthy undead bones.”
She begins to slap me and punch me, then, as she has often done before, until I have to make myself small with my arms over my head. Further enraged by this she sets about me furiously with the leather belt, and her boots, and I curl up into a ball to weather this assault until finally my sister’s decent heart or her wise financial brain gets the better of her.
“Oh what have I done?” she asks, and begins to cry.
And so I take my heartbroken sister into my arms, and pull her cape around us both as it starts to rain, and we sit under the tree while the poor donkey observes us sadly.
“How did we escape?” I ask my sister, and she sniffs and shakes her head, and I ask her again.
“On stolen horses,” she says quietly.
“Or?”
“Or by means of a tunnel.”
“Or facilitated by murder?”
“And disguise, and a stormy night.”
“Hunted by dogs? Pursued by outraged townsfolk with pitchforks and flaming torches?
“Those also…”
And we carry on in this manner until she falls asleep in my arms, the two of us huddled together as always, against the rain and the cold and all the world of the living.
All this happened so it must be true 