Short fiction

Old Dog

Dotty was tired. Adjusting her Queen’s Head brooch, she breathed deeply as her son’s car crawled through the morning fog past a dusty newsagents, staffed by people she no longer knew.
    She didn’t particularly want to go, no matter how pleasant Sunset Springs Pensioners’ Village turned out to be. No amount of relaxation would retrieve the hours spent trying to get one of her sons to get the telly to tape her soaps. It had taken a few phone calls, as they all seemed to be working very far away. Never mind.
    She thought about when she’d hit Richard with a slipper after she caught him smoking, and smiled to herself. Now he said ‘Bloody hell, they need to get these lights sorted!’ Once she would have slippered that little boy for using language like that. All rulers have their reign, and then they die, she thought, as she unwrapped herself a Fox’s Glacier Mint.
    The car rolled suddenly over some speed-bumps. As Dotty readjusted the buttons on her dress, she remembered a little girl, running to an air raid shelter in the dark, terrified and exhilarated, the deafening blare of sirens carrying her on. Now, in the morning grog, all was silent outside the car. She wasn’t even moving, but she was panting. She realised she’d forgotten what it was like to not be tired.

* * *

    ‘There’s a bloke with the world’s biggest...y’know...penis!’
    Dotty awoke. The sight of the minibus swam back, and Stan’s words floated nebulously into her hearing aid.
    ‘EH?’
    ‘I’m serious! I saw it on that...This Morning.’
    ‘When?’
    ‘This morning.’
    ‘Oh.’
    Dotty looked around as the memories crawled back (they didn’t rush anymore). She remembered tottering, bags in tow, to the minibus. She remembered Jeanette, the paunchy carer woman who seemed to be constructed out of cheap skirts and disappointed sighs, clutching a clipboard and coughing at Ronnie’s cigarette smoke. She remembered smiling in acknowledgement at Ronnie and Stan, but wondering why, once one gets past a certain age, it feels as though everyone knows everyone. She actually knew very few of the people she chattered with on the daily bus; she wondered if everyone else was faking it too, or if their minds, as well as their bodies, had gone.
    She appreciated that Ronnie had agitated Jeanette. Dotty looked across at him now, watching him squint into his Daily Mirror, next to Stan. He was older than her, a dusty eighty-one to her slightly more feather-dusted seventy-nine. His face and leather jacket were battered beyond recognition, but he retained a handsomeness, his hair slicked back in some gentlemanly fashion, dripping with product. She could always smell it when he was around, expensive hair stuff and old cigarette smells breeding together in the air. It reassured her. That, and the warm glint of the army medals he wore every day.
    ‘Ah my dear Dotty! Fashionably late I see! Long night with all those strippers, was it?’ he’d coughed, revealing a joyous mouthful of missing teeth.
    ‘Bugger off, I’m twenty-six,’ she’d said,  ‘I can do what I like’. She wouldn’t say no to a couple of male strippers, though, she thought. Even old girls like her had their needs.
    They’d kissed awkwardly on the cheek. The worst thing about getting old was that bloody delay between mind and body. Easy tasks, so pure in the mind, like giving Ronnie a little kiss, stiffly drawn out because they felt like climbing Everest.
    In fact she wasn’t really sure if she was actually seventy-nine at all. The whole thing was a trick, a mistake in the admin; when she thought back, she knew she hadn’t gobbled up seventy-nine years of life. In the beginning, what she could remember of it (and her mind was still all there, thank you very much), the world had been new and mysterious, dangerous. Now, as teenagers offered to walk her across the road, as Richard helped her out of his expensive car and said ‘If you need anything, ring me’, she longed for just a little bit of danger.
    Still, as she detached herself from Ronnie, she’d recalled a little girl running towards an air raid shelter in the dark, and smiled. At least now there were no bombs falling out of the sky.
    ‘What’s up with Goebbels, then?’ said Stan, nodding towards Jeanette, who looked agitated.
‘Probably had to nip out early to get herself some new Fascist lipstick or something,’ said Ronnie.
    ‘Alas, Ronald,’ said Stan, adjusting the strings on his spectacles, ‘I fear even Mussolini would faint into his lasagne when faced with Kim Jong-Jeanette.’
    Old Stan was full of funny lines like this. He’d never married and so, Dotty had concluded, he must spend all his time alone in his house, thinking up witticisms in his vast bald head whilst watching daytime quiz shows. He laughed a lot, and when he did his false teeth rattled, creating an amusing harmony. Like Ronnie’s cigarettes and cologne, she always felt safe whenever she heard those dentures dance.
    ‘Yeah, charisma of a constipated bulldog, that one,’ replied Ronnie. Jeanette wasn’t so bad really, Dotty thought, but it was clear she hated anyone over the age of sixty. ‘Smoking isn’t permitted on the minibus, thank you, Ronald,’ she’d snapped, making sure he stubbed out the fag. As they’d clambered aboard, however, the driver had got off for his own cigarette, and, oddly, Jeanette hadn’t seemed to mind about his smoking.
    The minibus pressed on. Dotty, Ronnie and Stan had ended up at the back, and Dotty felt a strange smell waft past the stubbly hairs of her nostrils (another charming by-product of old age). She looked across at Ronnie; he was sucking excitedly on a cigarette.
    ‘Ronnie!’ she said, sounding outraged. She wasn’t actually outraged, but she thought she should be.
    ‘Oh come on, Dot,’ he said, ‘I’m eighty-one years old and I’ve earned the right to be disorderly!’
    ‘They’ve banned it in public places now,’ she said, only half seriously.
    ‘I won’t be told what to do by bloody kids in suits!’ Ronnie replied.
    ‘Oh my,’ said Stan, ‘the day has taken a rather anti-establishment turn!’
    ‘Oh shut it, Stan,’ said Ronnie, ‘and have a drag.’ Dotty chuckled as Stan sucked on the cigarette, spluttering. He looked so stupid, she thought, as his old spectacles fell off his face and he dropped his dog-eared copy of People’s Choice. She loved it.
    All the other passengers were turning round to stare darkly at the back-seat nuisances. It was at that moment she realised all of them were dressed in grey. Strange. Anyway, she’d sat on the number 28 bus often enough and had to listen to the youngsters on the back, playing out their strange sounds from their phones. All rulers have their reign... Now it was her turn.
    ‘Dotty?’ Ronnie held the cigarette towards her. The smoke seemed seductive. She hadn’t smoked since Jim died.
    ‘Oh.. no thank you.’
    ‘Oh come on, you old trout, grow old disgracefully!’
    She thought for a second.
    ‘Old?!’ She feigned offence, taking the cigarette and having a long drag.
    God, it tasted good.
    ‘Seventy-nine years young, my dear, and in my prime,’ she said.
    Ronnie was lighting up another when they heard the war-cry of stilettos.
    ‘What are you doing?!’ Jeanette thundered to the back of the bus.
    ‘The itinerary said this trip was for us to rediscover our youth,’ said Dotty, ‘so that’s what we’re doing.’
    For a second Jeanette looked livid; Dotty thought the woman was going to hit her. Then something within her changed. She smiled knowingly.
    ‘Tell Brian to stop,’ she said to one of the other passengers. Dotty suddenly felt frightened. She’d never been frightened by Jeanette before.
    The three of them were marched off the bus, and Jeanette told the driver to leave. Dotty looked around; they were by the sea, on a long open road. There were no houses, no life.
    ‘Now steady on!’ said Stan.
    ‘Haven’t you heard of human rights?!’ Ronnie barked. ‘What, do you think you’re allowed to perform a citizens’ arrest because I had a fag on your bloody coach?’
    Jeanette didn’t say anything, just started laughing. She seemed changed, older and stronger.
    ‘Can I tell you a little story?’ said Jeanette.
    There was silence. It was starting to rain.
    ‘There’s this young woman, beautiful she is. When she dances, the men go mad. It’s not just her body, but her spirit. They devour her youthful stench. The trouble is, one day she wakes to find fifty years have gone by. Her life has been snatched from under her pretty little perfumed nose, and her only crime was to live it. Eventually she finds herself hobbling about in a world she no longer understands, trying to seduce men forty years younger with her sagging breasts. She says to one young man, who rejects her, ‘‘You young people act like old men! You have no fun.’’ That night she dies in her bed, holding only a picture of when she was young, and the whole world had stopped to watch her dance.’
    Dotty’s heart pounded. She wondered if she was having a heart attack.
    ‘I hope you remember how to dance,’ said Jeanette.
    The ground felt like it was lifting up, and the rain fell harder. Jeanette clicked her fingers, and all was black.

*  *  *

    Dotty awoke again. She was lying face down on something rough. Wiping her eyes and sitting up, she could see sand. She looked around. She was sitting on a beach.
    Looking down at the sand, she felt something was off. She could see it perfectly, no, more than perfectly clearly. Trillions of grains, knife sharp, as though she was watching them in an hourglass. A strange something was nagging at her. Next to her two other people were sprawled face down in the sand.
    She looked around. There was a wood at the end of the beach, behind some deep-set black rocks; the lushness of the green was stunning. It seemed to roar, and swallow her up, and spit her back out again. The trees looked edible, blinding like the yellow sand. It reminded her of that H-Dee thing Richard had on his telly.
    She scanned everything around her, and not anywhere could she find a speck of grey.
    One of the men sat up like he’d been injected with an electric current. Dotty jumped. He looked no older than twenty-five.
    ‘Who are you?’ he said. The sound was a cathedral bell, ringing and blowing away those old cobwebs in her mind’s dusty old bell-tower. Staring into the fresh face, a baby to her, she had the strangest feeling of having met him before.
    Why couldn’t she remember? She felt as though her head was trying to squeeze an amount of knowledge the size of the beach through a needle’s eye.
    ‘I’m... My name is Dotty... please don’t hurt me.’
    There was a pause for a second, and then the man broke out into a smile. His face was handsome; it twinkled.
    ‘I’m not going to hurt you, you silly old trout!’ he said, laughing. His hair was chaotic; for some reason it looked wrong, and his battered leather jacket didn’t suit him, like he was wearing someone else’s clothes.
    Dotty didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything.
    ‘It’s me, Ronnie!’ he said.
    The inevitability of his words roused her. Dotty felt as though she’d awoken from a long slumber. Of course this was Ronnie. Of course, of course!
    But before all of that, she couldn’t ignore her instinctive feeling of how... well... how handsome he looked...
    ‘Ronnie?! You’re...different.’
    ‘So are you,’ he said ‘you old fart.’ Dotty placed a hand to her face. Her skin felt smooth, and her hair felt thicker and longer.
    ‘No, no, no,’ she said, jumping up and running towards the sea.
    ‘Oi, wait!’ Ronnie shouted. Dotty’s faded white pumps pounded down on the sand. She stared into the water, and a clear, young face stared back, framed by luscious dark hair, topped with pretty green eyes resembling two watery pools. It felt wrong, like looking at a photograph of one of her parents when they were children. She nearly cried out, but whether in joy or anguish she wasn’t sure.
    ‘You all right?’ Ronnie approached.
    She didn’t know if she was. Turning and hugging him, a big, greedy hug, she noticed the warmth of his fit young body, gasping for air in her arms; it made her ache. The smell of those old cigarettes was gone; he smelled pristine and untainted, like he’d just arrived off some production line. It disconcerted her a little.
    ‘Steady on!’ he said.
    Then another huge something bulldozed its way into her mind. What about Stan?! Dotty looked around.
    He was groggily dragging himself up out of the sand, his stringed glasses hanging snapped around his neck. He looked like a pale scarecrow, with a vivid blast of blonde hair. Dotty had never seen him with hair...
    ‘What happened, chaps?’ he said, rubbing his eyes.
    ‘Nothing,’ replied Ronnie, ‘this is how it should be.’
    ‘Is this a dream?’ said Dotty.
    ‘I don’t know, but I’m guessing not because I can’t see that barmaid from the Red Lion anywhere,’ said Ronnie. He lit a cigarette and laughed.
    Eventually Dotty and Stan laughed with him. The only thing missing, Dotty thought, was the sound of Stan’s dentures, doing their familiar paso doble. It made her a little sad, the sound of his laughter unaccompanied by that extra jingle, but she didn’t know why. Looking into his bars of shining new teeth now, she grabbed his warm hand, and Ronnie’s, and felt the sun, and the gasping palette of greens and blues and yellows burning all around, perhaps burning into her. She forgot the sadness. The oxygen tasted sweet in her little mouth.
    They seemed to stay there for a very long time, before Dotty felt something change. The sea beckoned.
    ‘Come on,’ Ronnie said.
    ‘Where are we going?’ said Dotty.
    ‘Away from the grey.’
    Dotty didn’t know what he meant.
    ‘I don’t know..’ she said. Stan let go of her hand.
    ‘Never mind not knowing, old girl,’ he said. ‘Life isn’t about knowing.’
    They walked slowly towards the sea. Ronnie turned and removed his jacket and shirt. Dotty felt excited in a way she’d forgotten she could feel.
    ‘Come on,’ he said with a big grin.  ‘What’s the point of being young if we all run about in old clothes all the time, eh?’ He stripped naked and flicked his cigarette away. Dotty ate up the scene.
    ‘Tally ho, dear chums!’ said Ronnie, laughing, and ran off. Before long Dotty too stood nude, throwing away her flowery dress, revealing skin clear as the water, her breasts pert and firm. The sun kissed the bare flesh. Then Stan stood naked too, strong, healthy, and happy. Dotty hadn’t been like this in front of another person since Jim had passed. Her heart beat just a little faster.
    ‘Come on then, you old farts,’ she said, ‘here’s to growing old gracefully.’
    She clasped Stan’s shaking hand, and for a second an image shot through her: a little girl running from danger in the cold and the dark, sirens blaring, when the world was a far simpler place. She turned, and together they ran after Ronnie’s sprinting silhouette, three solid forms hooting as they vanished into a glittering maelstrom of sunlight and sea.

Jonathan Shiel