Deborah Forster

Alfie, my eldest grandson, was to have his swimming lesson. On this day, the grey sky was edged in yellow like a cut peach. Clouds were coming apart. Leaves were still falling but in ones and twos and the wind flipped by now and then and knocked your coat a little.
We walked into the big steamy swimming place and the smell of chlorine was a high sharp note. It was warm in there and dotted with wet people dripping in puddles. Alfie had to wear a yellow wristband because he’s five. He guided me through the procedure of arrival with comfort. He described the café and his hopes for chocolate milk on the way home. We got him changed and then found that he didn’t have his goggles, they were at home on the kitchen table. What to do? Well, I asked the swimming teacher and she came up with a very flashy pair with sequins and love hearts and though they were glamorous, they were also hard to see through. A little girl in the lesson liked them and delicately touched the sequins on Alfie’s face as if they were jewels. She came back to check on them a couple of times. Alf wasn’t wrapped in all this attention but he swam like a champion and I was thrilled to see my beautiful boy growing up. At the end of the pool, the window was steamy and outside the grass seemed greener than possible. A ghost gum stood like a great smooth white leg.

We finished the lesson and he was awarded the Friendly Fish Award! So we got the chocolate milk, thought about buying a spare pair of goggles, decided against that and then he did what he’s done a bit lately, he said ’Tell me what it was like when you were a kid Nan.’ It’s startling when you realise there is an independent mind working beautifully in this little boy and that the baby has retreated. I scrabbled around trying to think of something and told him that when I was a kid my best friend was a dog named Mick. The things that happen so long ago are hard to pin down, the sides spill out. I’ve had years to process Mick and I still love him but love is often an interruption, as was the arrival of the determined Mick.
He was wandering the street when I called him over and told him that he was a lovely boy and patted him. Then he followed me home. My brothers and I hid him in the shed and fed him for a while. We weren’t allowed to have a dog, I suppose because my father didn’t want one. Anyway, in the end, Dad found out and kicked him out. So Mick stayed by the front gate for days. We weren’t allowed to feed him but of course, we did because kids understand kindness. He was a shaggy fellow, pretty big, grey, loyal and clever. Dad caved in the end, once he’d seen the calibre of dog we were talking about here and they became true friends. Mick never went into the house though, that was the rule. Dad gave him a proper name, Michael O’Hooligan because he was rough around the edges. And we gave him a bath. He would never walk on a lead, he stole food from the neighbours, he pooped in Mrs Frisk’s front yard habitually and all this was seen as a minor inconvenience. Now it would be war.
He walked to school and back with us. I still see his outline waiting by Mr Broadhead’s shop. He’d start moving once he saw one of us and we always walked down the lanes. Often I would read as I walked and it all came together, the words, the overgrown lanes, the cats Mick would chase as a point of honour but never catch, as if it had been agreed.

Once in the supermarket, he knocked a whole display of cans over when he went with Dad to buy beer. The beer carton was on Dad’s shoulder and Mick was skittering around not handling the lino. ‘Whose dog is this?’ someone yelled and no one answered but Dad laughed all the way home.

You tell a child a story and bits catch. Alfie liked that Mick was naughty and funny. He wanted to know what happened to Mick and I couldn’t tell him, just because it was one of those deaths that is natural but devastating and five years olds don’t need it. He got cancer and the vet sent him home for a bit before he put him down. Dad fired up the Barbie and cooked him a big pork chop and fed it to him piece by piece when it cooled. I watched in disbelief. So much kindness.
Alfie, I said, he just got old and rested in his bed more and more until he went to sleep.