Perry Dog

A novel
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78770-472-5
Verlag: Europa Editions
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

'DOG is a novel full of deft humour and escalating tenderness - a tale about misfits, human and canine, and the currents of hope and courage that bring them together.' -Ross Raisin, author of God's Own Country When 18-year-old Benjamin Glass goes to look at a dead whale that has washed up on the beach, he meets an unfamiliar dog who follows him home to his caravan. Benjamin isn't equipped to take care of a dog - he has a chronic fear of germs, and is currently living alone while his grandmother is in hospital.  But when a delivery driver recognises the dog as The Mighty Gary, the fastest greyhound in the country, and tells Benjamin about his unsavoury owners, Benjamin is forced to trust the stranger on his doorstep and devise a plan to keep Gary safe. As Benjamin becomes more attached to the dog, it becomes clear that his trust in the delivery driver may well have been misplaced. He will have to leave his comfort zone, take some unhygienic risks, cross paths with dangerous and powerful men and confront his very worst fears if he has any hope of protecting what he loves the most.

Rob Perry was born in 1987. He is a graduate of the UEA Creative Writing program. In 2020, his novel Dog was shortlisted and highly commended in the Peggy Chapman Andrews First Novel Award. In 2019 he was selected for the National Centre for Writing's Escalator programme. He's been shortlisted for the Bridport Short Story Prize, the Bristol Short Story Prize and the Fish Short Story Prize. He won the Nottingham Short Story Prize and was first runner-up in the Moth International Short Story Prize and The Winston Fletcher Memorial Prize. Rob was a copywriter for several years, and has worked as a firefighter and a weightlifting coach. He lives in the Peak District.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Perry, Rob

Leseproben

ONE

Benjamin Glass was on his way to see a dead whale when the dog started walking beside him on the sand.
‘I’m going to see a dead whale,’ he said out loud.

He didn’t normally encourage dogs he didn’t know, but this one seemed sad. It was dragging a red lead and looking around.

‘You probably shouldn’t come,’ he said to the dog. He said that because he didn’t know what a dog’s grasp of death was—didn’t know if it had the tools to cope.

Benjamin found out about the whale in a newspaper at work. When his supervisor Camille put him on tills, he used newspapers to obscure the scanner so it wouldn’t make him go blind or mutate his cells. She jabbed her finger at a grainy picture on one of the front pages.

‘You should go and see it,’ she said, balled fist hovering over her heart. ‘You should see how it makes you .’

Camille had already seen the whale, she said, as part of her complete and intrinsic connection to all the animals of the earth.

‘I wouldn’t like that,’ Benjamin said, spraying antibacterial cleaner onto the conveyor belt.

‘Maybe that’s why you should go,’ she said.

Benjamin stood upwind of the whale and took shallow breaths in case whatever killed it could leapfrog between species. He’d been worrying about airborne pathogens since he heard about a man who arrived at Gatwick airport with a highly contagious respiratory condition. Some of the newspapers said the illness came from East Asia because people were eating bats. Camille was standing by the vending machine with a diet fizzy in her hand when she heard that. She squeezed her eyes tight shut.

‘Poor bats,’ she’d said. ‘Poor, poor bats.’

That afternoon she cleansed her chakras and increased her intake of certain homeopathic remedies.

‘He’s dead,’ Benjamin said, pointing.

He was eyeing the whale’s large mouth and blowhole. The dog sat down a few feet to his left. Even though the whale didn’t seem particularly damaged, the sand underneath it had turned red. It made Benjamin think about blood slowing to a stop in veins the size of water pipes. He looked at its sad old eyes, dried out by the sun, and imagined the whale’s internal organs all pressed up against each other as gravity weighed down on its body out of water.

‘Where’s your owner?’ he said to the dog.

The dog didn’t acknowledge him, just sat gazing at the whale, blinking and breathing. After a while, it walked over to the whale and licked the blubber.

‘Fucking hell,’ Benjamin said, glancing around to see if anyone had heard. When the dog came back, it pressed its wet nose against his hand. ‘Fucking hell,’ he said again.

Benjamin inspected the new patch of moisture just above his knuckles, the cluster of fine, red hand-hairs that had stuck to the skin. All the while, the dog watched him through distant, amber eyes. Slow blinks like it had just woken from a dream.

‘I’m going to have to go home now,’ Benjamin said.

Benjamin walked between the dunes with the saliva hand held out in front of him, the dog following loosely behind. As they made their way along a sandy track, snaking up the side of the California Sands Caravan Park, the dog stopped to sniff at vacant crab shells and bits of plastic washed up from the sea. They reached a hole in the mesh fence.

‘I don’t think you should come through here,’ Benjamin said, pulling his sleeve down over the clean hand—the one the dog hadn’t licked—for protection. It took a few steps forwards and shivered. ‘If you get tetanus you’ll get lockjaw,’ he said. ‘Which means you won’t be able to eat.’ He demonstrated a few chews. ‘Your jaw will seize up.’

Then he squeezed through the gap. He didn’t look back in case the dog got the wrong idea, just walked through the caravans—eyes forward, trainers slipping in the mud—past a flatscreen TV box sagging in the rain and a bike frame with no wheels.

At the caravan, Benjamin looked back along the track. There was no sign of the dog so he walked up and onto the wooden decking. When he turned to check again, the dog was there with its tongue hanging out. It stared, glassy-eyed and mouth ajar, as Benjamin slipped through the door and left it standing on the porch.

Benjamin leant against the wall and drew oxygen into his lungs. He slid off his jeans and put them in the washing machine, then thoroughly washed his hands in the sink. He crept to the window and peered out between the curtains. The dog was sitting on the decking, watching the caravan park’s flag wobble on its pole. Every now and then it closed its eyes for just longer than a blink and swayed. When it looked at Benjamin again, he stepped away from the window and picked up the phone. He called directory enquiries to get the number for an animal welfare organisation and asked them to put him through.

As he waited for a call-centre specialist to become available, Benjamin took two puffs of his inhaler. He held his breath until he felt light-headed, listening to faraway-sounding pop songs crackling through the receiver like the signal was bad. Eventually a lady picked up the phone. She had a Welsh accent and a friendly voice. She said her name was Laura.

‘Hi, it’s Benjamin Glass,’ he said.

‘Hi Benjamin Glass. What can I do for you?’

‘I’m calling because there’s a dog that won’t stop following me,’ he said. ‘I found him on the beach by a dead whale, which he licked. Then he followed me home.’

‘A dead whale?’ Laura said.

Benjamin felt like she’d missed the point a little. It wasn’t the whale on the decking.

‘Yes. On the beach. Do you think he could be infected?’

Laura didn’t answer so Benjamin continued.

‘I get wheezy when I’m stressed,’ Benjamin said, hoping her silence was just the time she needed to come up with a solution. ‘I’ve had to take my inhaler.’

‘Let’s start with what sort of dog he is,’ Laura said.

So Benjamin thought about it. The dog was like other dogs, only his chest was deeper and his legs were longer.

‘He looks like a racing bicycle,’ he said.

‘Right.’

‘And he has an exciting coat. Like a tiger.’

‘Okay. Anything else?’

‘Some of his ribs are poking out,’ he said. ‘Not in a hungry way. I think they always look like that, don’t they?’

‘What do?’

‘These dogs.’

‘Possibly.’ Laura said. ‘Is he a greyhound, do you think?’

Benjamin could hear other telephones ringing in the background. Chairs knocking into desks.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think he is.’

Laura didn’t respond immediately. It seemed to be her way.

‘Does he have a name tag on his collar?’ she said.

‘I don’t know. I’m trying not to touch him.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘I left him out on the decking.’

‘Right. And he’s still there?’

‘I don’t know. Shall I check?’

‘If you could.’

Benjamin crawled to the door, stretching the cord as far as it would go, speaking louder because the handset didn’t quite reach the side of his head. When he peered out through the letterbox, the dog was looking directly at him through the slot. It licked its lips and shivered.

‘I found him. He’s still there,’ Benjamin said. ‘He’s shivering now.’

‘Is there a chance you could let him in?’

‘None at all,’ he said. ‘He’s a germ factory. I just need you to come and get him.’

Benjamin opened the curtain. He felt bad saying things like that because the dog had emotional eyes and because it was cold, but he didn’t want it rubbing its genitals all over the soft furnishings and spreading microbes around the caravan.

‘Is he injured?’ Laura said.

‘Not really. His left eye is a bit bloodshot, I think. It’s hard to tell from here.’

‘Does he look like he’s eaten recently?’

Benjamin examined the dog through the window.

‘Other than the rib thing?’ he said.

‘Yes. Does he look hungry?’

Benjamin didn’t like the pressure of having to decide on the spot. He wasn’t a dog expert.

‘Wait there,’ he said, balancing the phone on the sill, running over to the cupboard.

He took the last slice of a white loaf from the bag and stuffed it through the letterbox. The sound of the dog sniffing was amplified by the slot as it investigated, but it didn’t eat the bread.

‘He’s not hungry,’ Benjamin said.

Benjamin could hear Laura explaining the situation to someone in the background. While he waited for her to finish, he scratched an itchy bit on the inside of his forearm and made the skin go red.

‘Benjamin,’ Laura said eventually, ‘are you still there?’

‘Yep. Still here,’ he said.

She hesitated.

‘The problem we have, with this situation, that you’re . . . , is that we don’t pick up healthy dogs.’

Benjamin didn’t understand. It wasn’t his dog. He thought maybe he’d misheard so he asked Laura to repeat herself.

‘We don’t pick up healthy dogs, Benjamin,’ she said.

In the silence that followed, Benjamin thought about things. About the dog’s tongue touching the blubber. About its uncovered feet leaving contaminants on the surfaces and about the fact that...