Free Byron Easy by Jude Cook

disobedient, a fallacy she had gleaned from the cornucopia of dog books borrowed from the library during our preamble to buying a mutt (the furthest she read in the time I knew her). I, meanwhile, was convinced it was because they couldn’t understand what the hell you were yelling at them, their names lacking the single smart consonant necessary to catch a playing dog’s attention.
    We acquired Concepcion first. I can still picture the sun-settled May afternoon we zipped through Shepherd’s Bush to collect her from a gay Chinese dentist who was, apparently, an eminent and respectable breeder of smooth-coat chihuahuas. A spring snowstorm of blossom was everywhere: on the streets and in the breeze, every shade of Japanese pink and cherry. We whisked illegally through the junctions’ plenteous ambers in whatever Sierra or banger she had at the time before she developed a profligate taste for sports cars and the slavering, stubbled mechanics who would later sell them to her. My hand-wringing disapprobation of the very idea of getting a dog, let alone ruining ourselves with a costly pedigree, had of course fallen on deaf, impatient little ears. It was all arranged, so I was told. I was merely along to restrain the vomiting, shitting, whinnying bastard on the return journey in the absence of a suitable travel-box.
    I sat in the passenger seat in the choicely conifered Close, wearily watching privileged brats act out some urban drive-by fantasy on spankingly minted BMX bikes, while she vanished with great purpose through the dentist’s front door.
    A last, dog-free fifteen minutes elapsed, during which I gloomily tried to convince myself that dogs only smell if they’re not your own dog. Then the car door opened.
    And then I fell in love.
    Into my unready hands was placed squirming, smooth-coated, hot-pawed Concepcion. The dinkiest, most beautiful rat-faced little yapper you ever saw in your life. The engine growled into throbbing anticipation of take-off and the car—me, the wife, and Concepcion cradled like a hot pie in the crook of my arm—yanked backwards in reverse.
    If you can still love someone after they’ve puked and defecated on you (twice) then I reckon you can call it true love. Poor Concepcion. Her maiden voyage in a motorised vehicle certainly didn’t agree with her. After five, dumb-struck, trembling minutes cowering under my fatherly palm she looked at me, her pupils zigzagging wildly, with a kind of pleading abattoir-fear. Then she started to foam greenly at the mouth, the shakes coming at regular intervals, like the spasms of an exposure-victim. After this she remained still, as if contemplating (like a seasick drunk) whether she could make it to the toilet in time. Then it was all over. Pigeon-like retching was followed by massive fumbling for the kitchen towel we had presciently taken along.
    As her most recent meal dried sadly and wetly on my newly laundered lap (just not slick enough on the draw with the old kitchen towel), a rank, excretal honk, an ordural cloud, began to fill the car, requiring swift window-windings on both sides. By this time even the driver had begun to have serious reservations about dog-ownership. A few nippy corners, and another whimpering voidance later, and we were home; me staggering with guano-spattered flanks passenger-side, the wife aborting the driver’s seat, all five senses fairly blotted out by the pungent flavour of cacation.
    Once inside, diminutive Concepcion—surely convinced that she had experienced the most traumatising twenty minutes available to any mammal—was gently set down to await the attentions of our three shark-like tomcats.
    It took a while, as it always does for a new animal, to get the run of the place. To stop vibrating under the bedclothes hoping the hellish, unfamiliar world they’ve been plunged into will vanish and be replaced by the comfort of their old stinky pen and the company of their mother, father, brothers and sisters. To stop