She
half-wakes to the howling from downstairs.
Mother: Okay okay well I’ll go
then
and this never contested.
Every single spring since his puppyhood
as a voluble splash of moving black
He howls again, and she rolls from the
bed. Lying there hoping, she had tried to picture the earth in its orbit of the
sun, spinning as it moved, spinning and rolling, tried to imagine a
simple two-sphere orrery to better visualise the exact... and then he breaks
into this again and she gives it up. It is easier by far to just go down there,
comfort him, feed him a couple of biscuits and let him into the lounge while
she makes herself an early coffee, and then to both take in some cartoons on
tv, or the news, anything.
Mother (yawning): I’m going, it’s
okay
to the silence of her sleeping husband.
If she can’t get a grip on this,
what hope poor old Judas.
As dawn counted itself back into the
earlier hours of each morning with the onset and progression of spring, Judas
would find himself alone and lonely for this reciprocal emptiness, and mew,
whine and finally howl his habitual confusion into the plastic-coated plywood
worktop that formed the ceiling of his bed between the cooker and the kitchen
wall.
She clumps downstairs, enters the
kitchen.
Mother: Come on Judas, it’s okay
rubbing the top of his head and letting
him sniff at her hair.
Mother: Come on, another week of this
and you’ll be used to it. Biscuit? Biscuit?
He takes them from her palm.
Mother: Let’s you and me get us some
coffee on.
She
wakes again, this time to the sound of descending footsteps: one of the girls,
who closes the lounge door behind her, so it’s her youngest. The kitchen door,
the sound of restrained and happy barking, and then suddenly she feels lost,
even with her husband right there, as if she’s somehow left the family,
and she denies herself the need to go downstairs and join again in whatever it
is she’s always shared with Judas at this time of year. She comes tearful,
denies herself that too, waiting for it to pass unaware that in less than a fortnight
Judas will refuse his food, stagger into collapse out on his nightly walk with
her husband, then the following morning die.
