Free Byron Easy by Jude Cook Page B

lest this effort of hate deform me for ever.
    Fidel and Concepcion never did produce that baying litter of fluffy pedigrees (Mandy with one rapacious eye as always on how much she could flog them for). The ratted, roasted beige carpets of our flat never ticked with the patter of tiny, costly paws for the simple reason that the bitch was too small. Concepcion, that is. Mr Morris, our morose and farmyard-odoured vet, gravely broke the news to us one rainy, work-dodging morning after Mandy had failed to obtain the exact date and hour of when she could expect a female chihuahua to reach her first season. For this information we went to Antonia.
    Antonia, Mandy’s best friend, was also dog-mad. Mandy had called her at Acquisition , the fiendishly elitist antiques quarterly she worked for. Antonia, a diplomat’s daughter who had grown up on a farm surrounded by pedigree dogs, had just returned from New York, a city she claimed to have first visited while still in the womb. In general, I was distrustful of people who had been to New York early in life—it spoke of more vivid, more worldly upbringings than my own. After all, NY was the great aspirational visit. The one you talked and worried about until you had the money or the luck, or both, to go there—and Antonia had been to the Big Apple lots, and (if she were to be believed, the truth always being negotiable with her) when she was very young.
    ‘Hon’, I’m up to my eyeballs in Pembroke tables,’ Antonia had purred, when Mandy finally got her on the line. She had one of those upper-middle-class voices that somehow purify and pollute the air at the same time. ‘How can I be expected to give advice on your babies? Try talking to Mr Morris—I’ll give you his number.’
    So Mr Morris it was. A day later he was standing before us on the opposite side of a slab-like, green-vinyl examination table, where he imparted some sobering information.
    ‘I’m afraid you can’t breed her.’
    ‘What—you mean she’ll never have kids? That’s the only reason we got her,’ said Mandy, Spanishly alarmed.
    I cradled Concepcion on the comfortless butcher’s board of plastic, shielding her ears slightly from these harsh words.
    ‘I’m sorry, but it’s too great a risk to breed her,’ growled Mr Morris in a significant basso profundo as he snapped off his condom gloves. ‘There’s a ninety per cent chance she’ll die giving birth or that her litter would be dead. She’s simply too small. Where did you get her again?’
    ‘From a gay dentist,’ I offered helpfully.
    ‘Ah, Mr Tonka. I know him well. He should have told you. Although, I have to admit, he’s become slightly more unscrupulous about whom he sells to over the years.’
    ‘What do you mean by that?’ persisted Mandy. ‘We’re the best parents she’ll ever have. She’s our little baby’
    And with that, she yanked Concepcion from my tender grasp and held her upside down in a pieta-like cradle. I couldn’t help but notice the stunted bunny’s eyes glance anxiously towards her father, as if to say: ‘ Don’t put me down. I promise to walk properly. I promise to grow bigger, if I can. ’
    ‘I’m sure she is Miss, er, Haste, but that’s all there is to it. You’ll have to keep her from any male stud when she’s in season. I recommend a locked pen.’
    ‘And an armed sentry,’ said I. Mr Morris lowered his forehead towards me, as if the only way of training his eyes on something was to physically move his rotund head.
    ‘I’m serious. I’ve seen male dogs jump through plate-glass windows to reach a bitch in heat.’
    ‘I know how they feel,’ I muttered, trying to remember the distant era of the past, the period during late antiquity, when Mandy and I last had anything to do with each other sexually. I unhooked the clasp of my wallet in readiness to pay his scandalous consultation fee. ‘Anyway, breeding isn’t the only reason we got her.’
    ‘Oh, I wish I was dead,’ hissed Mandy, and