1001 Nights Cast

Ode to Jay:

If Dad didn’t have the dog he’d be fucked.

We were never dog people. Mum was from a farm and thought it was cruel to keep animals in the city. But we did have a dog once, in the 1970s—JJ (named after a character in Cop Shop.) We got him through someone at Dad’s work. He once ate some bread dough that was outside in a bowl in the sun, proving—and spent the next couple of hours vomiting. I thought of it expanding in his stomach.

JJ was a Collie dog, with a long pointy face, long and thin, with dark brown and light brown and white hair. My younger sister had been a bit of a fatty. Then in her early teens she stretched out—she got taller and thinner, quite suddenly. I came back home one weekend. She was wearing beige cord Lee jeans and a brown checked Miller shirt. She had long straight white blond hair. Her face was thin and pointy. My sister and the dog ran together in the park, the wind streaming their hair behind them—all stretched out—long and thin and beige and brown and blond.

And then JJ got run over. It was 1975, Mum and Dad were away on their world tour (Paris, Rome, London, Sweden and Albuquerque, New Mexico), and I was looking after my younger brother and sister and the dog. When I picked him up off the road his eyes rolled back in his head. I knew you weren’t supposed to move people after accidents because of internal injuries—but I didn’t think there were such things as dog ambulances. I put him in the back seat of the car and we drove to the vets. He died in my arms.

We got Jay when Mum got sick, from a breeder in Shepparton. He did not make any sound. He didn’t bark, he didn’t even snuffle. It was actually difficult to tell if he was breathing. He was very timid. I thought maybe he was a dud. Speaking to a friend, a farmer, he assured me: ‘sheep dogs’, he said, ‘are either all bark or all eye’. He qualified this: ‘sometimes they can be half bark and half eye’. Jay is a Sheltie—a Shetland Island Sheep dog—like a miniature Collie. He is probably the reincarnation of JJ. He is very eye.

Although recently he bit my brother 11 times.

What’s good about dogs:

1) They don’t talk
After Mum died, Dad complained that she ‘never talked’. He complained about this when she was alive too. She didn’t talk much in recent years. One of the reasons she may not have talked much, was that Dad talks all the time. Not to anyone (certainly not with anyone), it’s just him talking, continuously. I went on a holiday with Dad after Mum died, he never stopped talking and always had a biro in his top shirt pocket.

Jay doesn’t talk. Dad complains about that too. But, not really. It’s okay that the dog doesn’t talk. We make amends. We take it into consideration. We slow down to his pace. We make up other ways of relating to him. No one bothered to do that, with Mum.

2) Taking them for a walk
It is boring going for a walk by yourself. I used to think wouldn’t it be great to be a dog, that you would get really excited just about going for a walk. I now like taking Jay for a walk.

3) Patting and cuddling, and other forms of physical contact
Jay was Mum’s dog. One day I smuggled him into the hospital. He spent his time under her bed. He was quiet as usual. One day, I don’t know if it was that day, we had a conversation about cuddling. Someone said how good it is to cuddle Jay because he is warm. (Although Jay doesn’t actually like cuddling much, as such.) Mum complained, ‘I haven’t got anything to cuddle’, or ‘I haven’t got anyone to cuddle me’. There was no come back. She was all skin and bones: there was nothing to cuddle.

It must have been my younger sister, the youngest in the family. I remember her lying on her back as a baby, naked, and Mum blowing raspberries on her stomach and the baby giggling and kicking its fat legs and clenching and unclenching its fists. Mum saying: ‘you’re so delicious I could eat you all up’. Sometimes, I think of blowing raspberries on Jay’s stomach. But I haven’t yet.

4) You know them, but you don’t. They’re different.

5) Playing games
I play games with Jay. I know how to play the games, but I don’t understand them. I don’t really understand what the point of them is, what the game is about. We just play the games.

6) They like you
And you like them. Would it be the same with all dogs, any dog? Or is it only this dog?, I think. We think, that somehow, we got the ‘right dog’.