EXTRACT:In an extract from her new book, Ordinary Dogs, EILEEN BATTERSBYtells how a dramatic rescue reinforced her sense of the superiority of dogs over humans
SEAWEED is such a theatrical substance, ideally suited to the darkest fairy tales. It makes me think of a mermaid’s hair, but more particularly of despairingly rejected girls who, stricken by impossible love, choose death by drowning. It conjures images of seahorses draped in its tangled fronds.
The Californian beaches I knew as a child extended for miles of dry, clean, pale sand, flanked by the Pacific Ocean, and were strewn with seaweed. In the sea it was thick, oily organic material floating in great dark browny-green masses, heaving and sighing, thick ropes of it, with its clean, fishy smell and its healing powers.
When washed up and landlocked it became home to various creatures, particularly armies of busy crabs, flexing their claws as they scuttled about. The salt in the seaweed became visible only after the fronds had been cast up out of the water on to the sand, where it shrivelled under the sun.
I had not given much thought to seaweed for years until I read JM Synge's wonderful book, The Aran Islands. It made me think differently about fantastical, serpent-like seaweed.
Suddenly the glamour and mystery vanished. Seaweed was a life-saving crop for starving fishermen. Synge wrote as a reporter, observing a culture concerned with survival. He watched the islanders, desperate for food, collecting the seaweed they called sea rods while patient donkeys, coarse baskets slung over their backs, waited. Today there are seaweed baths and shampoos and it is eaten as a health-food delicacy, but for those Aran islanders it meant survival.
Seaweed also enriched the poor soil on the islands. In order to showcase my gardening skills, and attract more commissions, I decided to transform my small patch into a subtle work of art, worthy of the Chelsea Flower Show.
What better preparation for barren earth than the rich tonic of seaweed? It needed to be dug in and turned with patience – one quality I always had in abundance – and I was in luck: my boyfriend had a car and an outing to the coast pleased him, as usually it was an effort to get me to go anywhere.
He was less enthusiastic about the idea of bringing Bilbo with us as he seemed to associate him with drama – I could not imagine why. Off we went, and as we neared the sea the smell as always made me think of the world made clean.
It was Bilbo’s first glimpse of the sea and he appeared to be intrigued. The drive to the coast had also seen his first encounter with motorbikes. One pulled up right beside us at the traffic lights; for once Bilbo dropped his cool, graceful demeanour and turned into a fierce, snarling wild animal, saliva streaming down the window as he clawed the glass, barking at the helmeted head and at the humming machine. His nails tore into my thighs. The lights changed; the motorbike roared off. Bilbo was once more his usual collected self. A strange interlude but one that had introduced me to an unexpected side of Bilbo: his fury.
We parked at the yacht club and walked along the promenade of Dún Laoghaire, a polite 19th-century seaside town, shabby yet still bearing traces of a weary elegance.
Yeats had often strolled here, as had Joyce and, of course, Beckett, who was given to pondering the hopelessness of all that water and of everything else. We would walk farther out, beyond the rocks, and – at least this was my plan – fill four large buckets and several builders-grade sacks with a harvest of richly fertilising seaweed.
Anticipating a vista of heavy floating seaweed masses, I led the way down the beach. It didn’t take long to discover that seaweed didn’t undulate freely here; instead it clung, fiercely, to the rocks. We wouldn’t be dealing with oozing armloads, we would have to pick and scrape it off the wet slimy stone. It was not what I was expecting, and the romance quickly ebbed out of the project. Our labour would produce very little but, having come all this way, we, or rather, I, true to my Calvinist nature, persisted. If not ropes of seaweed, I would gather enough to nourish my small patch of soil.
After all it was still seaweed, just of a more labour-intensive variety than the one I remembered.
Bilbo was browsing. The sun was shining, a gentle breeze softened the heat and sails were billowing in the distance against blue skies; all was well, at least in my little universe.
This was the dream, the dream of having a dog; a silent, highly intelligent, responsive companion who could read your mind with a glance and make sure you looked closely at everything. I felt a pleasant surge of contentment. To look at Bilbo was a joy. His bright fox’s coat was shining.
He would be with me as I dug all this stuff into the garden: he would be there. Not for the first time was I wishing that it was just my dog and me; the effort that went into a human relationship made me wonder if it was worth the trouble. It seemed so natural to be there with Bilbo. Since I was a child I had always been watching humans, trying to read their mood through their expressions and edit my conversation to suit. My then boyfriend never seemed to be all that interested in anything. It wasn’t that he didn’t say much, it was more that he could simply switch off. It made me uncomfortable. He always ruined our walks because he treated them as a chore. Bilbo, I decided, was not only better company, he seemed to want to understand me; he was always engaged with whatever was going on.
Then Bilbo darted away. By then, I knew he would rarely go far, even when he set off on one of his wild runs, his “crazy feet” sessions, which consisted of doing laps around me as if he were a horse on an invisible lunge rope. He invariably kept his amber eyes focused on me and stayed close.
He barked somewhere behind me and his bark became frantic. Had he seen a gull? Would it attack him? That familiar feeling of panic, the one I by now associated exclusively with Bilbo, began building in my chest. I turned just as a flash of black was disappearing: a cat, with Bilbo right behind. A yowl, the cat’s, a bark, Bilbo’s. He raced across the road. I heard a scream, and saw an elderly man with a stick, more screaming; a scream so loud, so shrill, that the sound was shocking. It was such a sharp sound, accompanied by the words: “The dog, the dog, over the wall.” I realised he meant Bilbo, but the wall didn’t look that high. Then I looked over it: it was such a long fall, down on to the railway track. A drop of 30 feet? Forty feet? and on to hard, solid stone. I couldn’t see Bilbo, but he was down there, somewhere.
No, no, I thought, not this. The man was still standing, looking down; two women had stopped and were comforting him. I knew that the railway line was not in regular use but that test trains were running on it; an engine could appear at any minute. Bilbo’s body would be mangled. I was barefoot.
How to get down on to the track? I needed shoes. “Leave it, leave it,” urged my boyfriend. He advised me not to look, that it would upset me. He kept saying, “Leave it, leave it,” and that Bilbo wouldn’t have had a hope. I ignored him and ran off. I ran back to the little inlet where we had been picking seaweed and grabbed at his pair of huge rubber boots, the ones that I had been wearing, several sizes too big for me, and clumped off. My boyfriend didn’t follow, even though he was wearing trainers. He seemed more irritated than sad at what had happened, and he made no attempt to help me.
But then, Bilbo was my dog, mine alone. Like most athletes, I suffered from the problem of being too fit to run fast, ironically, unless I had spent about an hour stretching, jogging and building speed through a series of gradual strides. In a short dash to a bus, the unfit office worker usually beats the athlete because the serious runner hovers between supreme fitness and ultra-fragility, the fear of sudden movement and injury to a tendon, a ligament.
If I tried to sprint from cold I could pull a muscle, and I did exactly that. A sharp, ripping sensation dulling to a pull meant that yet again my hamstring was torn.
I hobbled on, the immense rubber boots clugging along, banging on the ground. I was groaning and sobbing.
People were looking, no doubt assuming that here was a victim of a broken romance. My jeans were sticking to me.
And weighing me down, those awful boots, rubbing my bare feet. Sweat – or was it blood? – had gathered in the wellingtons, adding to the swampy sensation of running on the spot, in quicksand. I seemed to be progressing by mere inches. Where was the crossing? When did the wall give way to steps? It had to, but where? The more I ran in my hobbled state, the further I was moving away from the spot where Bilbo had gone over. When was the next test train due? Had he suffered? Had death been instant? Would the train driver see me? Or was it an automated test engine that wouldn’t stop? Never had running been so difficult. My feet were raw, apparently swimming in blood, the boots becoming heavier with each crippled stride. My body was shuddering, my hamstring was screaming. I felt hot, sweat was stinging my eyes, but I hobbled on, conscious of being a spectacle. “Try getting yourself some running shoes,” sneered a young boy.
His pals sniggered and one of them stuck his leg out to trip me, but I clumped around it, too flustered to swear at him.
Gates, white, with lights, signal lights. This was the crossing. I ran to the gates and clambered awkwardly over them, then turned to run back, parallel to where I had just come from, back to Bilbo. I ran on, remembering holding him, his habit of pushing his head under my chin and his scent of warm biscuits, a clean smell. Wood smoke in his fur after an evening by the fire, the sheer physical closeness of him, the way he had begun to anticipate my actions. The verge was stony; the stones were sharp, jagged, too sharp to run on. It may have been more dangerous, but it was easier to run down the middle, between the tracks. It wasn’t exactly straight; there was a subtle bend, a curve. Undergrowth of tall weeds with scattered trees became denser, heavier on the side near the sea. I ran on. No sign of him. I looked up and tried to pinpoint the spot where the old man had been standing – it had been near a spire or a clock tower, something tall. I remember thinking that the angle made it seem it was growing out of the man’s head. My side began to hurt. What a time to experience the first stitch of my life.
I snorted with laughter, mucus plopped out of my nose.
They were up there. People, the women. Heads, all looking down. Arms pointing. A woman shouted. “There, there, over there. Keep on, just ahead.” I looked up at her and then braced myself. I saw him, a flash of bright fur.
Bilbo was there in the corner, intently looking up. Standing at full stretch, staring up along the wall, quizzical, looking as if he was wondering how he could crawl up it. His front paws were reaching upwards, scratching the stone.
“Bilbo?” I called. He looked, jumped down and trotted over to me, tail wagging. I knelt down. I relaxed, feeling as if I had finished a race. I bent and ran my hands over his sides, felt his legs. Holding his head in both hands and peering into his eyes, I opened his mouth. No blood, no sign of injury. Only a mud patch on his left hip. My hair was wet with sweat; my clothes were stuck to me. The skin of my face felt tight. I became aware of a muffled buzzing in the distance. The small crowd were waving as one. I nodded back, too tired to speak, I didn’t have the energy to shout.
We walked back along the tracks. “Bilbo, Bilbo . . . And they called him Lazarus,” I kept repeating over and over again.
I couldn’t even speak to him. It was as if he was trying to test me, or someone was, intent on finding out exactly how far I was prepared to go with this bond I had formed with a young stray, the dog that had chosen me.
On the drive back, I studied Bilbo and suggested that we stop at a vet’s as Bilbo might be in shock or concussed.
There might be internal bleeding, brain damage. True to character, the boyfriend said nothing; his eyes stayed on the road, sick of the sideshow and my excessive engagement with this puppy. But I persisted, voicing my fears. “He’s fine. Just get him home,” he said in a neutral voice, turning up the volume of the radio.
Ordinary Dogs, by Eileen Battersby, is published by Faber and Faber (£14.99)
