SSC (2001) The Dog Catcher (5 page)

Sue and
The Dog stood trembling amongst the clay figures. She went up to Nige and
hugged her.

‘Thank
you, thank you, thank you. There’s somebody out there trying to kill me.’ Then,
indicating The Dog, ‘Kill us.’

‘Yeah,’
said Nige. ‘It’s the Day of The Dog Catcher.’

‘But he
shot Tony. Tony’s not a dog.’

‘Wasn’t
he?’ said Nige. ‘You should pay more attention. I tried to tell you when I
spoke about Despenaperros. They don’t distinguish between outsiders and dogs.
If they’re a nuisance they get rid of both of them, when the time is right, on
the appointed day. Half the kids in the valley are going to be doing cold
turkey when the snows close them in this winter because of Tony. Tony was a
mutt. Like I said, they let the dogs and the mutts run around for the summer
and then The Dog Catcher comes on the day when The Dog Catcher has always come
and deals with them both.’

‘What
about the Guardia?’

‘You’ve
seen the Guardia don’t count up here. It’s that strange mix of tolerance and
cruelty, remember Laurence talked about it? And there’s also that thing that if
you’re a local, a real local or a foreigner local, it doesn’t matter. Then you
know when The Dog Catcher’s coming. You lock yourself and your dog inside and
you’re safe.’

‘Shit
Laurence, the bastard! He sent me out this morning. He knew The Dog Catcher was
coming! And he sent me out, the old cunt!’

‘Well,
you’re a mutt. If you keep a mutt away from The Dog Catcher then you have to be
responsible for it. And you did steal his Rolex watch and you stopped paying
rent. That wasn’t very nice. He took you in when you were obviously running
away from something and you stole from him.’

Sue
felt a momentary shame replace her self-righteous anger but it faded. Nige was
going on again and getting on Sue’s nerves.

‘Let’s
face it, you have done a few things this summer, Sue. If you keep a mutt and it
kills sheep or steals or attacks a child or deals drugs, or turns tricks, then
you, not the mutt,
you
have to answer for its bad behaviour, and the
punishment is … well, you don’t want to know what the punishment is, they
learnt some things from the Inquisition.’

‘Holy
shit! But you took me in, you’ve saved me … Christ, thanks Nige… I won’t
let you down, I mean not that I’ve really done anything bad anyway. So I’m
alright as long as I’m locked inside when The Dog Catcher comes?’

‘Umm…
Well, yes usually you would be alright, if you were locked inside when The Dog
Catcher comes,’ said Nige rummaging in an Indian trunk.

‘Eh?
What d’you mean, usually that I would be alright?’ said Sue.

‘Umm…
What I mean is that usually you would be alright, fine, if you were locked
inside, except, you see, I’m The Dog Catcher.’ Nige turned back from the trunk
with a bolt action copy of a British Army Enfield .303 rifle, the kind that you
can still buy in the gun markets of Peshawar, the kind that the Peshawaris
called a ‘Britannia Mk 3’, held loosely in her hands. Nimbly she worked a round
into the breech and raised the gun to her shoulder.

‘This
is the first time they’ve allowed a foreigner to be The Dog Catcher. I don’t
suppose you ever can understand what a tremendous honour that is because you
simply do not comprehend what it is to be part of an ancient culture. I can’t
afford to screw it up by letting dogs go now, can I? They’d think we weren’t
serious about being here.’ And she shot Sue in the head, the round smashing
through her pretty forehead and taking a chunk out of the wall behind. In the
enclosed courtyard the concussion from the round was huge, Nige felt displaced
air from the passage of the bullet smack her in the chest and rock her back on
her heels.

As soon
as the gun went off The Dog leapt up, mad with terror and raced round and round
the rough stone walls, its ears back, urine streaming from its trembling
flanks. Nige worked another cartridge into the breech and tried to draw a bead
on the careering canine but it was impossible to get a good sight picture. Nige
felt stupid and dizzy trying to aim with a rifle at a dog indoors. She was most
likely to shoot one of her own sculptures so she simply lowered her weapon,
cradled the rifle in her arms and stood still, waiting for the creature’s panic
to subside. Eventually after fifteen minutes or so the beast slowed down and
flopped, its legs too weak to hold it up, whimpering in a corner, its black
eyes fixed pleadingly on Nige.

She
stepped up to The Dog and pressed the stubby barrel of the .303 against the
side of its long head. The creature’s ears flattened as it waited for what it
knew was its end. After a few seconds Nige lowered the rifle.

‘Fuck
it,’ she said to herself. ‘One more dog won’t make that much difference around
here.’ Then she spoke to The Dog, looking straight into its big fearful eyes, ‘Just
don’t cause any trouble, OK? You know what’ll happen if you do, don’t you?’

The Dog
nodded.

DESCENDING

The rider jumped away from
the pack as soon as he passed The Devil. He rose out of his saddle, stood on
the pedals and sent his bike powering up the last hundred metres of the Col De
Tourmalet. He thought he heard the whisper of a groan from the rest of the
peloton as they went out the back. He knew none of them had an answer to his
strength today plus, as insurance, his two remaining team members, his
domestiques, who had come to the front with him suddenly slowed, disrupting the
counter-attack and giving it no time to form before he crested the hill, after
which there was only descending. And no one descended like him.

The
plan had always been to jump as soon as The Devil was reached. The Devil was
really a bike builder from some Eastern German town who positioned himself and
his giant bicycle on a trailer towards the end of every stage of the Tour De
France, dressed in a full scarlet Satan outfit complete with trident, tail and
horns. When the leader appeared he ran alongside him, gibbering and jumping for
the TV cameras.

For the
last minute on the steep upward slope the rider had been riding through a huge,
screaming crowd in a space only just as wide as his bike. Hands reached out and
touched him on his head, his back, slapping him and trying to push him along.
Then he felt a sudden ice-cold shock, which he always forgot was coming. There
were always some of the crowd whose fun was to throw water in the faces of the
riders; they pretended they were helping to cool them down but really the rider
thought they were taking the rare chance to piss on the face of a sportsman.
This was one of the many ways in which cycle racing was the greatest, most
difficult sport of all. There was no other sport where you got a chance to do
that and for free, no entry fee at all.

Then
the crowd were behind the barriers, he was at the top of the hill and they were
gone. The very last five metres were almost vertical, suddenly he felt a stab
of pain in his chest and a spin of dizziness that put him in a confused fog for
a second; when that cleared he was at the very pinnacle of the climb — below
him was a twenty kilometre road more or less straight down the mountain to the
finish line at the bottom. He sat back briefly and zipped his top up to the
neck in readiness for the sandblast of alpine air that was to come. As long as
he didn’t crash, the stage was his and tonight the yellow jersey would be on
his back. All — all! — It was a very big all. All he had to do now was to
freewheel down the mountain at speeds of up to ninety kilometres an hour, not
touching his brakes, ass in the air, head on the bars, leaning in and out of
corners, slender tyres shimmying on the gravel at the bends, looking out to a
drop of clear oxygen miles below.

Descenders
are the bravest men in a brave sport. Sure the sprinters pushing to the front
in the last quarter mile risk slipping down and bringing fifty riders on top of
them, sure the climbers push themselves to bursting, pedalling fast up the
sides of mountains so steep that spectators standing looking back down the road
find that the tarmac is almost touching the back of their head, and sure every
rider in the Tour De France has pedalled for nine hours and more with leaking
abscesses in their skin and blood trailing from wounds in their knees, and sure
they all take the new drugs which leave no trace except that your life is
decreased by a month or a year or two and they all know that the average life
expectancy of a racing cyclist is fifty-eight, so what the hell. But the
descender goes through all that and still it is only the descender who risks
sailing out into space at ninety kph, legs milling away, like some aeroplane
explosion victim still strapped in their seat, his feet locked into the pedals,
unable to break free even when they bounce to the ground.

His
speed increases as the drop begins to pull him along the road, past the pine
woods that flicker away on either side in a susurrating rush. The rider changes
into his top gear, biggest front cog, smallest back, but after a few seconds of
grip his legs spin uselessly, the wheels turning faster in their belabouring
cones than he can pedal, gravity is doing all the work now but gravity won’t be
getting a bonus from the team sponsors tonight, gravity won’t be standing on
the podium in a yellow jersey waving a stuffed lion about and making sure the
cameras see the name of the insurance company that is written all over him,
gravity won’t be the winner of the Tour De France — he will.

He
notices the motorbike-borne TV cameras have gone and he is alone, their pilots
can’t keep up with a descending racing bike, titanium alloy and carbon fibre,
wires and chain weighing only seventeen pounds and a rider who weighs not much
more. He glances down at the computer on his handlebars, forty kilometres per
hour, forty-five kilometres per hour coming up and now there is nothing to do
except hang on.

Unusually
during a race he has time to think and to look around.

The
police keep all the cars and the crowds away from the drop so he is by himself,
himself and the onrushing air. For a few seconds the woods stop and the road
flattens, on one side there is a meadow coated with alpine flowers, a lovely
small, crystalline pond filled with water lilies. At the side of the pond a
family is picnicking. A woman, two small children, they wave and call to him in
his own language to stop and rest with them, are they crazy? This is the
culmination of his life. This day is what he has avoided the entanglement of
friendship and family for. He can’t stop now.

When he
had started racing as a boy the communists had still been in power, at the
academy they had told the boys and girls that their deeds brought honour on the
people’s republic. Well, not their deeds but their wins, their losses counted
for nothing. To win, they were told, was simple; all they had to do was to
dedicate their entire lives to the idea of winning. To only associate with
winners, to eat what winners ate, to think what winners thought. Sometimes
there was no medicine in the hospitals but the state’s laboratories could
always manufacture poison for him to put into his body, or there might only be
size two shoes left in the shops but he always had the latest Italian
components for his bike. He didn’t think about it, a winner didn’t.

After
the communists went and the democrat playwright briefly took over, and then the
democrat playwright went and the gangsters who seemed to be a lot of the old
communists took over, he joined a team based in Belgium. His life didn’t change
that much: the people’s republic was replaced by the insurance company, he didn’t
take much interest in the world outside of cycle racing, he never went to plays
or the cinema, never read a book, the only thing he watched on the TV was
sport. Somebody had told him that things were bad back home, he couldn’t
remember who or what.

The
trees seem darker now, almost black and very tall, shutting out a lot of the
light as he rips past. Then a gap appears and he gets a view of the valley
below: a man in strange old-fashioned dress is ploughing and behind him,
unnoticed, some kind of hang-glider with wings made out of feathers seems to be
about to fall into the sea. Sea? There shouldn’t be any sea here, he must have
imagined it. He can’t check, the trees close around him again, a fast
right-hand bend comes up, he sticks his knee out to add a little extra gravity
and hurtles round it not touching the brakes, then a plateau, and another gap
on the right. There seems to be a huge lake, black and polluted with dead trees
around its edge and half-sunken ships poking out of the tarry waters. Then that
vision too is gone and it is more rocks and scrub on both sides and steep
downhill again, faster and faster, flicking left and right and left again, not
slowing for a second.

The
road flattens now, almost coming to the end of the drop and a village is
approaching. Doesn’t look like a French village though, more like the wooden
board and picket-fenced houses from back home. Several of the buildings are on
fire and others are black burnt shells. In the main square just off the road,
an armoured personnel carrier pulls up to the door of an onion-domed church and
opens fire with its turret-mounted machine gun, the tracer rounds soon set the
building on fire. A woman and two children run out into the road and wave at
him but the rider swerves round them — after all, the Tour’s own corps of
gendarmes on their blue BMWs will be along in a second and they’ll be able to
deal with whatever the hell is going on. Some kind of farmers’ demonstration
perhaps.