Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

The man goes on shaking his finger. ‘You should know you’re not meant to let dogs foul the footpath.’

‘That’s not the footpath. He wants the gutter, but your wife’s car is in the way. And on double yellow lines.’

‘In the way! You shouldn’t be walking him here at all.’

‘I take my dog,’ Henry says, ‘for walks where he wants to walk.’

‘And my wife parks where she wants to park.’

‘Then your wife and my dog have much in common.’

‘You’re a very rude person, you know that,’ the man says. Then, into his mobile, ‘Did you hear that? The arsehole!’

Henry wishes, as he has wished all his life, that he had the insouciance to go over to the man and crush him and his mobile between his hands. If Henry had crushed more people between his hands in his fifty-nine years he would be a happy man now — happ ier , anyway — whatever his other disappointments.

Instead, he shrugs. ‘Come on, Angus,’ he says. ‘Let’s see who else we can upset.’

He has started to hum to himself. It is almost like carrying a gun, he has decided. Walking with a dog, at least when you have never walked with one before, is like being armed. No wonder people who walk with dogs and guns bear themselves with such swagger.

‘I ought to get one,’ Henry thinks. ‘I ought to have one of my own.’

A dog, he means.

But he would also have uses for a gun.

It is possible Angus is able to feel what Henry is thinking through the lead. So far he has stayed close to Henry, keeping within the slack. Now he begins to put distance between them. If Henry is thinking about other dogs, then Angus will think about other dogs as well. And do it better.

Head down, he noses out an urgent trail along the pavement, his jaw like a hovercraft, floating upon the aroma, or aromas, coming up from the flagstones. Could there be several? To Henry’s eye it appears that Angus is caught between two rival and parallel temptations, now breathing in the one, now breathing in the other, sometimes, with a worried shake of his ears, attempting to breathe them both in at once. Whether they each veer into the doorway of the shop, or Angus has made his choice, Henry cannot tell. But having got here, Angus has another piss.

‘You’ve just done that,’ Henry says.

‘Hey!’ someone shouts from the shop.

This time Henry doesn’t stop to slug it out.

Then it’s off on the trail of other dogs’ piss. There are rivers of the stuff. Who would have thought it? What to Henry looks like dry desert slabs of cement and stone, are to Angus raging torrents of dog genealogy. And every trace engrossing. That’s what Henry can’t get over — how indiscriminately interested Angus is in everything he finds. Go on, Henry wills him, light upon a smell that leaves you cold, turn your nose up, say no to something. You’re seventy-five years old, you’ve been there, you’ve done it, there can’t be a surprise left. But there is. To Angus the world of dogs is as intriguing as it must have been the day he was born. Now there’s a stain at the foot of a parking meter, a congealed downward trickle burnt into the foot of a lamp-post, a telling discoloration of the bricks on the wall of a bank, just below the automatic teller, where, as always, there is a queue. Never mind waiting your turn, never mind people’s feet, Angus has to get to what he has to get to, it’s essential, absolutely beyond question, else he will miss — what? The site of a famous piss-in? Evidence of a spray-for-all which Angus cannot bear to have forgone? A haunting faecal memory? Is everywhere Pompeii for Angus — a normal dog day of another era, frozen for ever? What kind of life is this, Henry wants to know, where piss is all you ever think about, piss the centre of your every waking moment, and maybe of your every unwaking one as well, piss to sniff, piss to taste, piss to ponder, piss to piss on. A dog is meant to be man’s best friend, the animal world’s nearest approximation to us, not counting the eccrine-glanded chimpanzee, but any man who behaved one-hundredth as grossly as Angus would be locked away for life. Aren’t there said to be men who get off on sniffing girls’ bicycle seats? There had been rumours at Henry’s school linking the headmaster, Olly Allswell, MA, to a ring of degenerates who circulated among themselves soiled underwear belonging to women of the lower orders. Several of Henry’s friends had seen the postman delivering the parcels. To the school, would you believe that! ‘He’s probably sitting there with his face in them right this minute,’ Henry’s classmate Brendan O’Connor reckoned, ‘at the same time as he’s writing our reports.’ ‘Or with them on his head,’ Osmond Belkin guessed. ‘Or with our reports on his head,’ Henry jumped in. ‘You don’t suppose, do you,’ Brendan O’Connor wondered — Brendan, the handsomest boy in Henry’s class, eyes black as coals, but who would later waste his fires on the Catholic priesthood, perhaps as a consequence of this very conversation — ‘you don’t suppose he wears them for school assembly?’ No end, no end to the crimes you could ascribe to a pervert. Yet what was any of it compared to the improprieties of which Angus, without the slightest consciousness of shame, was routinely guilty?

And this is just the piss part. No sooner are they out of the high street into rural St John’s Wood Terrace — for he is sick of the shops now, Angus, and wants a residential street to defile — than they encounter what Henry at first takes to be an albino dwarf, but is in fact a miniature bull terrier with a blind face, sitting as proud as an heraldic lion on a wall, sheathing and unsheathing his penis. Henry pulls at Angus, hoping to get him to cross the road. But Angus is riveted. The bull terrier squints, unsheathing his penis, a cigar coming out of its wrapper. To Henry it is a windless early evening, still as the grave, but the albino dog can smell breeze. He tilts his head, blindly nosing the air for it, calling it to him; then when he finds it, relaxes his shoulders, spreading his limbs, allowing it to fan his cigar alight. Angus stares. There is none of that mutual embarrassment of which Thomas Mann speaks, nothing of the constraint which he believed obtains when dogs meet for the first time. Take me as you find me, the bull terrier appears to be saying. And Angus is mulling it over. Henry can hear him pondering. That’s good. So he is not entirely beyond reflection. To dogs, too, has the Almighty granted free will. With what there is of his, Angus reaches the decision to sit and unsheathe his own penis. It’s like a beauty pageant. First it was the bull terrier’s turn, now it’s Angus’s. What next — evening gowns? Already Angus is upping the stakes: not content with showing the judges his penis, he must show how well he licks it. Nothing elaborate or fanciful. Nothing you could even call sexual. More like Henry’s father cleaning his teeth. Now this side, now that, now in and around a bit, the tongue conscientious and searching, but the mind elsewhere. A hygiene thing, Henry takes it to be, putting the best gloss on it, an act of dog-to-dog consideration, given where they both know they’ve been. Whatever it is, the bull terrier looks unmoved in his impure whiteness. Finished with himself, Angus gets begrudingly to his feet, his age showing, and approaches the bull terrier’s penis with the sole intention — what else can it be? — of licking that. Rather than allow which abomination, Hebraic Henry hits the roof.

Are you allowed to strike another man’s dog? You shouldn’t strike anything aged over seventy, but then over seventy should act over seventy. Henry has picked up the wisdom from somewhere that you punish a malfeasant dog by rubbing his nose in his malfeasance, but given that Angus’s malfeasance is the bull terrier, that wouldn’t be much of a punishment. Removal, that’s the thing. Violent removal from the scene. Grabbing him by the collar, Henry pulls him away from St John’s Terrace like a dog on wheels, down Charlbert Street whimpering, along Allitsen whipped, then back on to the High Street, like a sled. Home, that’s where Angus is headed, home for three Hail Marys, a shower and a thrashing. He knows he’s done wrong. He can’t help nosing out more piss as they go, his love of the smell of other dogs’ piss as ineradicable as Henry’s love of the smell of other men’s women, but at least, Henry allows, he has the decency to hang his head. Periodically, he slows, looks up at Henry with pain in his eyes, and shrinks into himself, as though he wishes the earth would open up and swallow him. Which to Henry is a clear sign that he is capable of remorse.