Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

‘Hello?’

‘Xan? Mal Bale. He’s dead.’

‘Who is?’

‘Joseph Andrews.’

‘How?’

‘Road accident. And another old bastard copped it and all. Simon Finger. Smashed to pieces he was. All over me BM. Thought you’d like to know. You all right?’

‘Yeah mate …’

He hung up and sat still for a moment and closed his eyes.

He closed his eyes and saw the yellow dog.

Into the yard Xan had come, and heard a sound seemingly designed for his unease. The sound had a rhythm, like a murderous act of love: a grunt, then a muffled, slushy impact or convergence, then an answering moan. And over and above it the crying, the choric wail of the yellow dog. He moved past the stake where the animal was chained.

The yard — with its stacks of planks, its sinks and toilet bowls, its black entanglement of tyres — was the place where his sentimental understanding had so far been formed. He had trailed his sister Leda when she took her boyfriends there on summer nights, and watched her on her knees behind the disused cement-mixer, or up against the wheelless van with her skirt round her waist. The sometimes pouting, sometimes snarling pinups and calendar-girls tacked or gummed to the workshop wall; the dogs (earlier dogs) stoically stuck together in coition and awaiting the deliverance of the bucket; and — even further back — the hectic hen coming running to the screeching cock.

He tipped open the shed door and saw his father seated on another man’s chest, straddling the flattened shoulders with his knees: Mick Meo over Joseph Andrews. How he kept raising his bleeding fist and letting it drop with a grunted oom , the wet slap of the blow, and the countering retch from beneath. And how weary it was, how sick and tired. For this, that. For that, this. ‘Hey Dad ,’ he had said, coming forward to rush and quell. And how the man’s greased and distorted face had filled with fresh fury as he rose up to envelop his boy.

While it happened (and he didn’t remember much: at one point he was in mid-air, and taking an intense interest in the nature and texture of his destination) you could hear the yellow dog. Whining, weeping, and rolling its head as if to ease an aching neck, working its shoulders, trying to free itself of this thing — this thing on its back.

* * *

Just after seven he opened the door to the garden and watched the comet with the child in his arms. ‘Yook!’ she said, pointing, but pointing as infants do: the bisection-point of thumb and forefinger was the direction intended. The comet bustled east across the sky — a white light — with futile industry, like a terrible old man on a terrible old errand. Mustn’t stop, mustn’t stop. And utterly committed, suicidally committed, to Jupiter and its gravity. He imagined for a moment that he could hear it: a weak hiss of execration. Then came the affronted honk of a car in the street, and another honk sounding in defiant response, and he shook his head and smiled, returning to the small and the local concerns.

He was fetching some water for Sophie when he saw his wife coming past the front of the house. She was slightly hunched over, with an air of conscious remissness — as if, having been out too long, she was now stealing back, but confident of exoneration, and of frictionless readmittance. He heard her enter upstairs; he heard her throw her keys on to the hall table, and give the indignantly aspirated hoot she gave when something or other, in the exterior world, just hadn’t worked out. ‘Down in a minute,’ she called. And he heard her running up the stairs; and, after a while, the clatter of the shower on the tub floor.

He turned. And there was someone else in the room: a new kind of person. Sophie was standing beside the heap of toys, not walking, just standing, unsupported — unconnected except by her feet to the floor. She was delighted, but she was delighted about something else (the scrap of paper in her hand), and didn’t yet see that she had changed.

Xan moved forwards, saying, ‘Baba, you’re—’

It came to her. She was up: now how to get down? Her arms sprang skyward, her legs dipped at the knee — and she flipped herself backwards into the rubble of the building-blocks and Sticklebricks … When he reached for her she took his whole arm in both of hers, and when he hoisted her up he felt her hot wet snorting in his ear — but it wasn’t serious, wasn’t serious, wasn’t serious at all.

As, nevertheless, he sat comforting her on the sofa, he looked at the lashes of her eyes, their tear-freshened zigzag — and he remembered her birth, and the zigzag, the frantic scribble of the heart-monitor as Sophie toiled within. He was already crying when she came (as he had cried when the boys came): not because of what they faced but because of what they had already suffered, all alone and at their very smallest. And minutes later, when Sophie came, for the first time in his life he was contemplating the human vulva with a sanity that knew no blindspots … She slipped away from him now and started moving round the room, from handhold to handhold. And he thought, with numb tautology: in this project of their protection, the hopelessly painful thing, when they were small, was their size, their small size, their very small size.