Winning look
Jeremy Clarke
Sharon’s got a dog. It’s a basenji, an African hunting dog descended directly from the jackal and domesticated by the pygmies of the Ituri forest in the eastern Congo. She got it from the rescue centre up the road. It’s a strangely silent animal with a furrowed brow and it washes its face like a cat. As I point out to her, it’s odd that someone as devoted to the cause of animal rights as she is, and a staunch vegetarian, should choose a basenji, one of the most ancient breeds of hunting dog that money can buy. But she didn’t choose it, she insists, it chose her. She looked through the bars of its cage, their eyes locked, and that was it.
Which is how she chooses her men. No introductions. She just shoots them this lingering look from those big wide-apart eyes of hers that says, ‘Welcome to my world — enter at your peril.’ It stops you dead in your tracks. The trouble is, you find out later, when it’s too late and you’ve already made a complete ice cream of yourself, the look you thought was especially tailored for you is in fact an automatic, even unconscious, reflex that she shoots at any male over the age of consent she half likes the look of. And her world, which you fondly imagine to be an unpopulated sunlit Eden, turns out to be like the first day of an Ikea sale.
I know a bit about dogs. It’s a single boast that lends relief to an otherwise unremitting inferiority complex. I can pass a man or woman out with their dog and say, ‘What a lovely Manchester terrier!’ and they’ll say, ‘Good gracious me! There’s not many people know one of these when they see one!’ So I tell Sharon about the origins of her dog. She listens attentively and respectfully. Since being banished from Eden for being unattractive, I have been reassigned the subordinate role of fount of all knowledge. ‘Oo, Jerry, you’re so informative!’ she says. ‘Given the choice, Sharon,’ I say firmly, ‘I’d far rather be a sexually magnetic cretin than an informative munter.’ And instead of disputing ‘munter’ she says, ‘I’m so sorry, Jerry,’ as if she’s offering me her condolences.
I tell her, anyway, about the close jackal connection and about the breed’s long relationship with the pygmies of the Ituri forest. I can vouch for the latter, I say, because when I went hunting with the pygmies of the Ituri forest, years ago, we used a dog similar to Sharon’s in every way, except it was shorter in the leg. The dog’s job was to chase small game such as dikdik into a long net. The moment the dog achieved its goal, it collapsed with exhaustion. ‘We’ve caught two!’ I yelled, the one time I was first on the scene, before realising that one of the two inert creatures was the dog. Sharon’s respectfulness turns to outright reverence. Adventurism of any kind, whether it’s navigating between chaps or between continents, gets Sharon’s vote.
She puts on her face and we drive the short distance to the pub. Dogs aren’t allowed in the pub, so she ties Nelson to a table in the concrete beer garden. Then she kneels in front of it and apologises sincerely. The dog looks away in embarrassment. At the bar Sharon says to the barmaid, ‘Jerry’s been hunting with the pygmies in Africa, you know.’ The barmaid, born and raised in an era of low-cost flights, says, ‘What was the weather like?’, and scans my face for signs of a tan. ‘Hard to tell,’ I say.
We take our drinks and join a table of four blokes, Trevor amongst them. They’ve got this Wednesday-night-and-noone-has-got-any-drugs look about them, but the greeting is warm. It’s a long time since I’ve been in. Trev gives me a loud hoorah. ‘Jerry’s been hunting with the pygmies,’ says Sharon, reverently, as if I’m just back. ‘Have you, boy?’ says Trev, blinking with disbelief, but proud to be associated with anyone prepared to travel such unheard-of distances in pursuit of a manly hobby. ‘What did you hunt?’ ‘Dikdik,’ I say. This gets a big laugh. Trev faints sideways. They think they’ve been suckered into giving credence to what is, in the end, a sexual joke.
‘But he has,’ says Sharon, suddenly angry, thrusting her face towards them. ‘He really has.’ Then I look at her again and her eyes are brimming with tears, which she tries to hide by shoving her face into her pint. And so begins another Wednesday evening in the pub. When I bump into her later on, Sharon explains that it was because she’d run out of pot, and no one else had any, that her nerves were on edge. But everything was fine now.
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