Going Off Alarming: The Autobiography: Vol 2 (18 page)

Cushion in position, I decided to give Twiz the benefit of the doubt and snapped my head around to confront his gaze. His eyes were cold, dead and narrowed. Ignoring this, I confronted his mood outright.

‘What
exactly do you want, you moody old
git?’

This was what he’d been waiting for. Leaping toward the sofa he thudded his two front legs down hard on my chest and, thinking I was now pinned, bared his teeth, snarling, from about six inches away. I knew this was a coup and, like any ruling authority faced with the same threat, recognized I had to crush it immediately. Letting
go of the cushion, I balled up my fist and let him have it right in the ear.

Instead of going full-on with the knuckles I had landed the blow with my thumb wrapped across my curled fingers. This lessened the impact while letting him know I still had plenty in reserve. Twizzle jumped down and ran over to the fireplace, where he shook his head several times. When he turned again I saw his eyes were back to normal and his demeanour the usual loose-limbed playful mutt he was 95 per cent of the time.

I never had any more trouble with Twiz after that – at least, not in terms of the power struggle. He was to have plenty of other adventures with us though. One day we came home and on unlocking the front door were alarmed to find he wasn’t doing his normal
‘Welcome
back!’
dance in the hall. Indeed, he wasn’t anywhere to be seen, although we could hear a noise from the front room like a ceiling fan having a fight with a series of shower curtains. This description wasn’t too far from the actuality: on dashing in to find out the cause, we discovered Twizzle had become completely entangled in the white plastic blinds in the lounge windows. He was hanging in mid-air, his head looking toward us through the slats, one paw poking out further down and both back legs wrapped up in the string you raised and lowered the things with. I got the blame for this, having left the front-room door open when we went out.

‘You
know he’ll try and get anyone who
knocks,’
said Wendy huffily as she set about the difficult task of freeing our imprisoned pet as he wriggled and swayed high up in the window.
‘He
must have gone to jump through these blinds and got all mixed up. Struggling made it worse for him – he could have hung
himself!’

In fact it would be another two years before he succeeded in hanging himself, in what I count as one of the greatest metaphysical events of recent times.

Twizzle was not quite the undisputed leader of the lunatic animal fraternity in our neighbourhood. There was one other challenger for this crown, a more traditionally built mad dog called, of course, Rambo. This solidly built pitbull terrier lived in a junkyard close to the back of our house. The people who operated the business also
owned the alley that led up to it and this long thin lane separated the row of back gardens in our street from those in adjacent Trundley’s Road. It was in this narrow thoroughfare, littered with old fridges, car parts and pallet boards, that Rambo was allowed to roam, noisily taunting all his pampered domesticated peers who bordered the park in comfort.

Although Rambo’s home turf was directly behind our high garden fence, it was further sealed off and hidden from view by a long row of strategically planted trees, so even though you couldn’t escape Rambo’s incessant barking, he could only ever be glimpsed if you took the trouble to walk around to the gates of his scrap-metal kingdom.

Twizzle had never actually seen Rambo, but he certainly knew he was there. Alone among all the dogs in the area he would argue long and loud with his unseen bête noire, standing right at the far reaches of his own turf to the rear of our place, while on the other side of the thin tree line Rambo replied in kind. It was a tremendous racket and two or three times a day either Wendy or myself would have to physically bundle Twiz back indoors as he fought to continue his squabble to the last breath. One day, Twizzle – who, temper notwithstanding, was a supremely intelligent dog – spotted a way to break the verbal deadlock and have this thing out once and for all. Though he had many times thrown himself at the back fence in an effort to break clean through it, the old railway sleepers that shored up the bulwark showed no signs of giving way just yet. So Twiz, weighing the thing up and looking at the problem from all angles, came to the conclusion that he would have to go over the barrier, through a small gap in the trees that he judged sufficient to see him through. This would be no mean feat for a medium-sized dog, and would require he add several inches to his previous personal best: the wall around the allotments in Blackhorse Road (a feat prompted by the sudden appearance of a squirrel).

I have no idea whether Twizzle made any early abortive attempts at clearing the obstacle standing between him and his rendezvous with Rambo, because all I saw was the successful one. Walking out into the garden to cut some mint for a jug of Pimm’s I was preparing,
I was just in time to see his rampant old rear end, elevated some eight feet in the air, disappearing into the thicket above the fence. Screaming his name, I bolted back through the house. The reason for this was the only access to the yard beyond was to go almost fully around the block to the large metal gate at the end of the lane that led to the scrap piles. Tearing along our street, shrieking
‘Twizzle!’
to the utter bafflement of any non-locals passing by, I felt utterly sickened as I mentally prepared myself for the awful violence I would have to deal with when arriving at the point of battle. I had no doubt whatsoever that a dreadful bloody fight would be in progress, because both dogs had been fantastically vocal that day, right up to the moment I had set out on my mint-hunting expedition.

As I raced towards the yard, I was relieved to see the gate was already open. Fearing the worst, I rounded the corner into the alley.

I was stopped in my tracks almost immediately. There was Rambo, standing in the sun regarding the passage of a passing beetle, but not a sign of my dog. Far from appearing as if he’d been wreaking bloody carnage, the pitbull seemed remarkably calm and content. Had he eaten Twiz whole? I knew that in Looney Tunes cartoons – from whose lore I have drawn the majority of my life lessons – anytime Butch the bulldog swallowed Sylvester the cat, the act would be signified by a few inches of Sylvester’s tail hanging from the corner of his mouth. I saw no such evidence around Rambo’s jaws. In fact, the entire scene was one of utter beatific peace, broken only by the gentle hiss of CFC gasses escaping from abandoned fridge freezers.

‘Do
you want something,
mate?’
came a gruff call from outside the hut in the scrap yard.

‘My
dog,’
I called back, my thoughts a little fractured by the unexpected twist.
‘He
flew over the fence and now I can’t see
him.’

‘What
– this
fence?’
the latter-day Steptoe asked, advancing on me.
‘No
dog has come over that fence, mate. Rambo would have murdered it, I promise ya
 . . .’

What on earth had happened? Two further scenarios entered my reasoning. One: Twizzle had landed, hit the ground running and, seeing the size of his opponent, had carried on running straight out
the gate. Two: He hadn’t landed, having somehow sailed across the alley, clear through an open window on the other side.

I had just begun to say,
‘Well
, I definitely saw him leave our airspace
 . . .’
when I heard a slight rustling and there, several yards ahead, I glimpsed patches of chocolate brown amid the dappled green branches of a tree. It was Twizzle, dangling downwards, stuck fast and helpless, trapped by the neck and back legs just as he had been in the living-room blinds. The surface of the alley in which we were gathered was about three feet lower than the level of the gardens and what may have looked like the base of a tree’s boughs from our side was revealed as merely the middle of its limbs on the other. Twizzle had partially made it through what appeared to be a gap before becoming hopelessly snagged as he began his rapid descent. Rambo must have been elsewhere when Twiz arrived in the branches. I suspect, not gifted with a brilliant brain, he figured any Twizzle-like smells he caught a whiff of were completely normal. Twizzle, on the other hand, being a clever hound, had recognized he was temporarily at a disadvantage and decided to blend in with his surroundings until the cavalry arrived.

‘Mate,’
I said with extreme caution to the oncoming junk man,
‘mate
. Grab your dog. Don’t make a fuss – just take him
away.’
I measured my words as if each one were a stick of wet dynamite.

‘Why
should
I?’
he answered aggressively and I sighed, reflecting that there is a certain type of bloke who can feel disrespected by a baby’s gurgle.

‘Mate,
please,’
I urged him while trying to remain motionless.

‘He’s
harmless – he won’t hurt
ya!’
continued the tattooed salvager, still not grasping my urgency.

‘Mate,
I’ll give you a tenner if you just get your dog by the
collar,’
I now implored.

‘Come
here,
Rambo!’
he yelled, and grabbed the studded band at the animal’s bulging neck as if his life depended on it.

I walked past the dumbfounded duo and stood beneath the tree where Twizzle was imprisoned. He rolled his eyes toward me and licked a nervous lip. People who have never owned dogs don’t know how canines can register embarrassment every bit as clearly
as humans, but they can, and here was an excellent example of it. Underneath his sleek brown fur, Twizzle’s face was as red as a beetroot – as any face would be if it found itself wedged halfway up a tree in broad daylight.

As I reached up to bend back some of the limbs that pinned him, Twizzle suddenly began to thrash about. This in turn alerted Rambo that, far from this being just another idyllic day at the junkyard, he was in the middle of some sort of air raid. Pulling clear of his owner’s iron grip, the pitbull began leaping at Twiz, who was still trapped but strategically occupying the high ground.

The next ten seconds exactly resembled one of those huge dust clouds that Andy Capp used to disappear behind whenever he had a punch-up at the pub. By the time the man managed to wrestle Rambo away again and I had stopped frantically attempting to push Twiz back through the hole out of which he had recently arrived, people were leaning out of upstairs windows all around to see what that ungodly row had been. Dragging his enraged beast to the workman’s hut for safety, the scrap man advised me in no uncertain terms that I should
‘keep
my fucking dog in the
house’
in future. As I at last managed to extricate Twizzle from the tree, I resolved that while that might be impossible I would definitely get one of the brothers-in-law to heighten the fence that divided the bitter foes. This was done a few days later while Twizzle looked on with great interest. What we didn’t know was that his brilliant mind was already working on Plan B.

Like all great strategies, its genius lay in its total simplicity. Now that the option of going
over
the fence had been ruled out, Twizzle saw that the only alternative open to him was to go
under
. Waiting for overcast days when he could be sure that neither Wendy or I would be spending much time outdoors, Twizzle, I see now, created his tunnel in a series of shifts disguised by whining at the back door to nip out for a wee. Perhaps tunnel is too elaborate a word, but he did burrow quite a cavity at the base of the fence and soon was able to squeeze his head and shoulders under it. It was his impetuousness upon discovering that he could do this that led to his downfall. Had he taken away six inches more earth from the floor of his excavation
he might have been able to pop up in Rambo’s alley as if sprung from a trap, but the sheer excitement of suddenly being able to see the enemy got the better of him and Twiz started attracting attention as soon as his muddy nose broke through on the far side. Like a maniac, lost in a crazed red mist, he now attempted to take on this monster of an adversary with just his head sticking up through the earth.

This time I was only alerted to the fact that the persistent old bastard had once again invaded sovereign soil by the awful sound of a vicious fight in progress. Running to the garden to confirm my worst fears, I was startled to see that a good deal of my dog was, in fact, still in our garden. His sturdy back quarters were facing toward me, the legs beneath making repeated attempts to gain fresh purchase, causing his whole rump to rise wildly in the air. What was happening on the other side I shuddered to think. Grabbing him by the haunches, I yanked him back through the hole. The bout had not gone well. Despite some impressive bobbing and weaving, accompanied by a rapid offensive from his own, not insubstantial, jaws, Rambo had clearly landed quite a few telling blows. The revulsion I felt as I looked at Twizzle’s bloodied cheeks was only offset by the fact his wide eyes and happy panting told me that I had just interrupted the most fun he’d had in ages. I got the feeling that, had I applied grease to his cuts and sent him back through the opening for round two, he couldn’t have appreciated it more. In taking on the reigning Deptford champ without the use of his arms and legs, Twiz called to mind the insane black knight in
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
who refuses to stop fighting even when all his limbs have been hacked off. His actions had been horrifying, disgusting and downright wrong, and yet it was impossible not to feel a scintilla of admiration for a creature so recklessly determined to follow his dream. It was a goal that, on his next attempt at settling scores with the enemy without, would see him attain an almost God-like status whenever I sit with other dog owners who like to tell tales of unique canine characters they have known.