The Dog Who Conquered Loneliness

By Evan Johnstone

The Dog Who Conquered Loneliness and other life-lessons for the perplexed is a collection of short stories about a variety of outsiders, human and animal.
Some of the animals struggle to interpret the human behaviour they observe, while the others and the humans struggle to fit in to society by conducting inadvertently parodic attempts at living.

Loneliness is a recurrent problem for the characters, as is aspiring to an amorphous ‘more’ to their lives. Their aspirations are not satirised, merely thwarted by quirks of their own personalities, the indifferent hand of fate, or the general absurdity of the human condition. They are far from rebels, but are not quite comfortable in themselves or in the world.

In the world of these stories, a lonely dog achieves acceptance by excelling at hang-gliding, but is then carried across a distant range of mountains by freak winds and ends up lonely again; a lobster escapes from a tank in a Chinese restaurant but cannot find a fulfilling career; a mouse loves browsing in bookshops and deeply regrets his inability to read; and a sheep loses his mobile phone and immediately becomes invisible to the rest of the flock.

The events that befall the characters may be absurd or fantastical, but these imaginative tales of misfits are united by striking images, an ironic and individual narrative voice and dark humour, presenting a satirical view of the world we live in.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Dec 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781925739398

Evan Johnstone

Evan Johnstone was born in Sydney and still lives there.He collaborated with Peter Fairlie on Simply Living Magazine’s Worried Animal Calendar 1987.In 2001 he published Abandoned Places, a collection of short stories, and in 2010 Miloslav Navratil’s Prague Calendar, containing an introduction to a non-existent Czech author and photos of Prague with captions from Navratil’s work.

Book preview

The Dog Who Conquered Loneliness

A certain dog – not an Airedale – ambled along the paved streets of the village in which he had grown up. Smoke seeped gently from rows of chimneys and a yellow glow from the street lamps shone from damp paving stones. Mist clung to him in a friendly fashion, tickling his nose and ears and making him shiver.

This dog was no down and outer. He had a home to go to, a two-bedroom kennel in a good neighbourhood, with a warm basket and rug, deep feed bowls and even an iPad. Yet on this night, as on most nights, he could not really be described as on his way anywhere. He ambled, on a night when not many would stir abroad by choice.

He stopped outside the trendy pub not far from his kennel and peered in, but recoiled from the uninhibited noise issuing from the crowded room. In any case, he knew no-one there. ‘You can’t just walk in and start barking…’ he thought. He moved out of the bright light and on into the evening quiet, hardly noticing the ancient reflections in the canal, nose and tail sweeping the ground fore and aft. A Bruckner symphony, perhaps the seventh, with its moving tribute to Wagner, a pot of steak-essence tea; the time left until he could plausibly go to bed would soon pass.

Next day he found an advertisement in his letter box for the village Hang Gliding Club. He threw the advertisement into the recycling bin. A social club! – and something new! He had spent years avoiding activities with such qualities. True, there were occasions on which he became aware of a certain…emptiness. He searched the bin and uncrumpled the advertisement.

The club members were very friendly. Of course, the social functions were not easy for him at first, but his skill at hang gliding, at which he achieved immense distances, facilitated his acceptance. The females, in particular, were most attentive, and easily maintained the mysterious rituals of conversation with only a minimal contribution from him.

One day the committee of the social club decided that he should attempt a record-breaking glide. They propounded a number of reasons, among them the undoubted boost to his personal development, a lifetime honorary membership of the social club, and the spiritual exaltation of a flight across the full width of the valley, soaring over giant trees, green sunlight and deep ravines. His modest acceptance of the proposal was received by the committee with quiet satisfaction.

On the Saturday that the dog was to attempt his history-making glide, everyone in the Social Club assembled on a mountain peak overlooking the village. Such was the excitement that several of the more amusing passages in the President’s speech were completely drowned out by spectators barking, growling and howling amongst themselves. The dog barked a brief thank-you to club members for the encouragement, and enthusiastically kissed the all-female farewell committee in turn. He staggered a little under the weight of the glider, but reached the take-off point with tail erect and fur bristling with anticipation. He hummed a few bars of ‘There’s a Rainbow ‘round my Shoulder’ (‘I’m happy, so happy, just walking on air’) and stepped off the platform.

Wind currents were strange that day. After a while he disappeared over the far range of peaks and was never seen by a member of the Hang Gliding Club again.

In a village in the next valley the dog passed his days and nights quietly. He had soon found that there was no pedestrian path back to his village. Some nights he would amble through the streets, past the pub, nose and tail sweeping the ground fore and aft.

No-one in this village had even heard of hang gliding.

Bleak Mouse

A cat – tortoiseshell, with four white socks, chest and tip of tail – was becoming peeved, almost annoyed. Its tail twitched tellingly while engaged in brusque colloquy with a small mouse. ‘Look, are you going to run away and give me something to chase, or not?’

‘I can’t be bothered,’ replied the mouse. ‘Living has worn me out, despite all my lack of effort.’

‘Is that why your fur is so grey and your body so shrivelled?’

‘No, I was always like this, old before my time. But,’ the mouse added wistfully, ‘life has clung to me with the persistence of the bougainvillea in the back yard.’

‘The what?’ said the cat, still more peeved.

‘That abundant plant growing along and over the back wall.’

‘Ah yes, I’ve met the long spikes when I run along the top of the wall.’

‘Thorns,’ corrected the mouse, although not certain that the sharp points which graced the plant were in fact thorns, botanically speaking. ‘And it also has purple and red and white flowers, green leaves, woody stems and is poisonous when its sap is alembicated and consumed in, say, a liqueur.’

‘Where and why did you learn all this nonsense?’ the cat demanded. ‘I don’t know much beyond sleeping, eating, chasing, resting and purring, but at least I have the energy to fulfil my obligations.’

‘You don’t leave much time for thinking.’

‘My instincts are fully expressed in the activities I mentioned. Thinking is only necessary when instinct fails you.’

‘When I grew tired of running away from cats and rats and other nasty animals, including other mice, I had a lot more time to read, and the more I read the more knowledge I accumulated, whether I liked it or not.’

‘That’s all very well, but as you know so much, you obviously know the alternative to not running away from me.’

‘That’s the point, of course. I’ve lived and not prospered for long enough, more than long enough.’

‘But that’s not fair, and selfish into the bargain! Your indifference to your life undermines my own natural role in life, my vocation. I was born to chase things that move, play with them cruelly for a while and then kill them. If you mice refuse to participate, and that attitude spreads to other rodents, even birds, where would that leave me and other career-minded cats?’

‘Like a shag without a rock?’ replied the mouse. ‘But that’s hardly my worry. My intention is only to cease upon the midnight with no pain – or not too much.’

The cat, fed up with all this babble, curled up for a nap, correctly assuming the mouse was unlikely to go far. Sure enough, when it awoke three hours later and had catesthenically stretched extravagantly in every direction, it found the mouse exactly where it had been, but reading. ‘Listen to this,’ piped the mouse in its squeaky tenor. ‘According to this book, The Moth of Sisyphus, There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. From what I understand, Sisyphus toiled at a pointless job all his life, or even longer, and his pet moth was trying to decide whether it should fly into a candle flame, assuming it could find one.’

‘So?’ said the cat. ‘Isn’t it obvious that there’s no intrinsic value to being alive? You don’t have to read to know that! Meaning is arrived at by our actions, such as, for a cat, sleeping, eating, chasing, killing; for a mouse, sleeping, eating, and running away.’ The cat applied special emphasis to the last two words, almost worthy of italics.

Stalemate.

‘What if you were to fall in love?’ said the cat, trying a long shot. ‘You might decide that life had something to offer after all, and that it might be worth your while to run away from me, to try to save your miserable life. Suppose,’ continued the cat, ‘you were to meet a mouse who’s so cool she’s really hot?’ The cat did a fair impression of finding a hot mouse attractive, perhaps served with a cherry sauce, a strong flavour to offset the gaminess of rodent.

‘Is such a paradox likely to come to pass in this sublunary sphere?’ replied the mouse tersely, his pale, pink lips pursed as if for a kiss. ‘The prospect of an end would be far more revivifying.’

Losing patience at these prevarications, the cat replied, ‘In that case I think I can help,’ and pinned the mouse under its left paw, its

claws fully extended. Then, slowly and thoughtfully, it began to nibble at the mouse, not killing it immediately, and disregarding its shrill shrieks of pain and pleas for mercy as irrelevant to their discussion.

Before finally dying, the mouse had more than enough time to waver in its sincerely held philosophical position.

Misfits

When the waiters were at their most busy, I managed to clamber out of the tank using strands of seaweed twined together to form a rope. From the glass edge of the tank I fell briskly to the floor, and took a minute or so to recover enough to stumble towards the door of the restaurant. With every step I expected to be picked up and returned to the tank. I heard a customer or two laugh at my progress, but no one raised the alarm: customers seem to take the side of food even when it’s escaping. And any diversion, especially one with all its legs moving slowly and as fast as they could, gives them something to talk about over their grey business lunches. I had wondered how I would get the door open and was pleased when a customer in a neat two-piece suit held it open for me.

It was late morning on a clear day in Dixon Street; the patches of shadow and sunlight were hard-edged. I was passing the Jade Dragon when I noticed a mussel shell near the wall. It was in shadow, and if I hadn’t been so close to the ground myself I wouldn’t have seen it. The mussel seemed to be trying to crawl out of its shell. I was hurrying towards a broken ventilator in the wall of the pub on the corner, but couldn’t resist stopping to make enquiries.

‘Why?’ I said, getting straight to the point.

The mussel looked surprised. ‘I’d prefer not to be eaten,’ it replied, ‘even with ginger, shallots and rice.’ It was silent for a moment. ‘Or any sauce for that matter.’ I had to concede that there was something in this view. I also did not care for shallots, nor any pungent bulbs.

‘Besides,’ it added scornfully, ‘look who’s talking.’ I glanced around, but