AN EXISTENTIAL DOG NAMED PHIL

So, I wrote a novel! Not sure if it'll ever make it to paper, but I figured for my first go at a book, it's not too shabby a job. Here's a sneak peek of the introduction & first chapter. Enjoy!

CLARE | h e r

I imagine my life without you. You said that to me once. That it’s only been two months but you couldn’t imagine your life without me. Now it is my turn to wonder. Maybe I wonder too much.

I watch your face from the side. We are driving, and you have one hand on the wheel and the other rests on the gearstick. You never seem to drive with two hands. But that has never been a problem. I don’t complain.

You don’t look at me like I look at you, but I think that’s mostly because you’re driving. You laugh at something I say. It’s a laugh that is more of a grin than a laugh, and I see divots in your cheeks, and your eyes are crinkled. Wind digs into your hair that is mostly curly but too short to be true ringlets.

My legs are warm from the sun streaming in through the window, cutting squares in my thighs and across my kneecaps. I look out and I see a world through pieces of my hair around my face, and in my mouth. I brush it from my cheeks, and then I look at you again.

You are still smiling. It is a smile that doesn’t seem to leave your face for a while. When I ask you why you are smiling you risk a glance at me – your eyes leave the road for a moment, and I catch them in my own for only the briefest second. You say that it’s nothing. I look back to the world outside. I secretly hope it is me.

HARRY | h i m

You sit with your knees up and you talk with your hands a lot. You are telling me about history, which I don’t normally find interesting, but you manage to tell it in a way that sounds like a story. You tip your head forwards and your fingers are in your hair, and I see your dark roots along the tapered arch of your neck.

You tell me about history and something you’ve been thinking about a lot, and your words are muffled as your fingers twist your hair into a knot and you use an elastic band to secure it. You sit back up and your words are suddenly clear again.

You talk with purpose and then you start using your hands again, now that your hair is off your face. I know I shouldn’t but I imagine coming closer, but you’re too far away. There are sheets between us. Your hand gestures. You are talking about history.

I nod like I understand, which I don’t really. I should make clear this is not from a lack of interest. I always find you interesting. It’s one of your most redeeming qualities. I just get lost along the way sometimes.

You seem to be finished so you lie back and let your feet uncurl and curl, your toes small, and I lie down next to you. We don’t say anything for a long time. I imagine you sitting here and staring at your ceiling. I wonder how many hours this ceiling has spent being stared at.

You say something I don’t quite catch, but when I ask you you say it isn’t important. But I feel like it is important. Your head is against my shoulder and I don’t say anything, but I don’t let it go, either. I wonder what it is you said. I stare at the ceiling as I think this.

1 | O N E

She met him in early spring, when the Jacarandas were thick and full with purple blossoms, and you could sit outside and watch the sun melt into the horizon without getting cold. She felt as if these days were seamless – too similar to feel interesting, coming and going like the cyclical motion of the tide. And she was the moon. She was watching her life unfold in front of her and this month was going to be fast, she knew it.

She was changing in the dark as she thought about this, in the shadows where she was faceless and only an outline, and she wondered if this was always how it was going to be. Changing in the dark. Sex in the dark. Everything in the dark. And she knew she wasn’t fat, she knew this, really, but she couldn't help see the dappled cellulite in her legs as she bent over and tied her shoes. Darkness was easy. She could work with darkness.

When she walked from her room she was quiet, because it was a Saturday morning and everyone was still very much asleep. Her footsteps were swallowed by the faded runner to the front door, and the house creaked as she walked. The air was still and completely silent, aside from the persistent ticking of an old clock beside the refrigerator in the next room. At the door she slipped out, shuddering at the briskness of the early morning outside.

She had her earphones in and the ambient drone of an old 70s band swum between her thoughts as her mind begun to turn, and she could hear the steady thump of her feet hitting the pavement beneath her as she started to run.

She was not entirely sure why she had started running. Maybe it was this whole weight issue. Not that there was really an issue. She knew that. But she had always been a big eater, and her jeans from last summer didn’t quite fit around the waist. As she ran she remembered how awful it felt to sit on her bed with her jeans halfway up her legs, staring at the carpet, wondering how did we get here?

So she was running now, for whatever reason. Perhaps it was even some kind of absentminded attempt at procrastination. She was very good at that. Mostly because her brain was the type of brain to wander like a dog without a leash. She’d see something, and where most people would think huh, that’s cool, she’d end up coming to very profound worldly conclusions within a good ten minutes. People talk about having your most deep and philosophical thoughts in the shower – for her, life was always a shower.

She turned the corner, the early morning light soft against her face and her eyes. A man clad in Lycra gripping unforgivingly to every angle sped past on a bike in a gentle rush of wind, and she watched him pass from behind, his legs pumping, head bobbing from side to side.

Then she was thinking about men, and boys, and the total and crushing absence of any in her life. It was miserable, really, when you were seventeen-years-old and boys were nothing but an unfamiliar species you’d sometimes stare at on the bus.

And she’d given up on anything coming from these runs the third week she’d started them. There was the obvious fantasy of bumping into an incredibly attractive man on the street, and she’d be witty and beautiful, her cheeks flushed but only in a flattering way, of course. And she wouldn’t look twelve. Not at all. Not despite the sports bra, and the lack of makeup, and the way frizz curled around her hairline, she would not look twelve, and she would be mature and approachable and everything that any boy would ever want.

She couldn’t remember exactly when that fantasy had shattered. It had probably been when she’d looked in the mirror one day after her run, and realised the gently-tousled hair and flushed cheeks was really an image she’d created of herself in her mind, and it was incredibly unlikely anyone would find her attractive with sweat curling around fuzzy baby hairs on her forehead and not a boob in sight.

She had passed the park, now, the one she’d sometimes stop in and stretch, which was really only ever an excuse to catch her breath for a few minutes. She always stopped at the same spot – by the bottle green park bench littered with dead gum leaves, beneath a massive eucalypt that would have to be at least one-hundred years old.

She found the ideas of tree-aging fascinating – that you could never truly know a tree’s age until you decided to cut in in half, which would, quite ironically, end its life then and there. She found this very interesting, and quite beautiful, in its own, poetically bleak way.

And she realised she was doing it again, this whole thinking thing, as she let her speed drop. She was breathing hard, feeling the familiar knotted sensation in her chest, her breaths coming quick and tight. She noticed him almost immediately, and she watched him from behind, although she felt strange doing it, like she was spying on something she wasn’t meant to be looking at.

He was by the driveway, in nothing but a pair of blue boxers, hunched over as he bent down to something on the ground. She watched his back, the arches of bone and muscle, twist and ripple as the thing in front of him writhed. She felt her fantasy sprouting again, flowering amongst the hard tightness in her chest.

She pulled out her earphones, jogging past, but watching him the entire time. For some reason she stopped.

The boy looked over his shoulder at the quiet girl breathing heavily, although obviously trying not to. She was either blushing, or puffed – he couldn’t tell. Maybe both.

She looked down at the small, furry creature at his feet. ‘Is your dog okay?’ She asked. She wasn’t sure why she asked. She didn’t even know if there was anything wrong with it.

‘Yeah,’ he said, patting the dog’s side. ‘I think so. She was whining, so I came to check it out.’

‘Oh,’ she said. She paused. ‘Did you check she doesn’t have a tic or something?’ The girl blushed again. She didn’t know anything about dogs – she had two cats. ‘I’ve heard that can make them pretty sick,’ she added. She brushed at the front of her hair, which had gathered unattractively around her ears, in a blend of frizz and sweat.

‘Yeah, no tics. I think she’s just hungry.’

‘Do dogs make that noise when they’re hungry?’

‘I dunno. I think so.’

They looked at each other a moment longer. The girl tried for a smile, but her breathing was still too fast. ‘Well, I hope she’s alright. See you ‘round,’ she said. Then she started jogging again. He watched her go, her hair flicking from side to side. He turned back to the dog, who was panting.

...

She saw him again in Coles. He was in his uniform and was with a woman in a white blouse and blue jeans. He had his bag on one shoulder and his hat was between his fingers, and he was mumbling something to the woman and facing away.

She was staring at him from the fresh fruit section, and thinking about how convenient this opportunity was, and that this was irrelevant because it wasn’t like she was going to make anything of it. But it was an opportunity nonetheless. She felt very much alive, beside the red vine tomatoes and the avocados, thinking through impossible situations and imagining nothings which felt like somethings as she stood with her basket at her feet and the fresh produce untouched beside her. People passed her but all she could see was the back of his head, muffled in brown curls, moving as he talked to the woman and reached down for the carrots in the steadily humming refrigerator, tucking his hat under the crook of his arm to do so.

A part of her wanted him to see her, to walk over and revive a conversation about canine pests and their various side-effects and how the dog making the strange sounds was going, to find a commonality and wring the most out of it. But she saw no eloquent way to do this, and every path she could was unrealistic and reminiscent of something out of a badly-written Bargain Bin romance novel. So as he passed by, she turned away and took two avocados in her hands and squeezed them purposefully, and turned them over in her hands and tried to look like someone who knew a lot about the ripeness level of avocados. Her hair was around her face, and she wanted to look at him but she couldn’t, not without making eye contact she was not sure she wanted to make.

And she looked up when she knew he was nearly gone. She saw nothing but his back, an outline, the red shopping basket gripped in his hand, the woman by his side pointing to something nearby. And then he was gone and she was left with two mildly warm avocados she felt she was now expected to buy.

She thought about him on the train ride home. About his shoulders beneath his bag and then his blazer and then his shirt, and she was watching the trees blur outside her window and listening to the creaks and screeches of the train braking as they came to another stop. People filtered on and she heard someone sit next to her, but she was lost in a conversation that had never happened, and something had come from absolutely nothing. She looked down at her unnecessary avocados and she wondered what she might make from them.