Common People by Tony Birch

Author:Tony Birch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UQP
Published: 2017-06-14T04:00:00+00:00

I took it upon myself to pay for Sally Ann’s keep from the money I made selling newspapers after school. I didn’t mind. I loved the dog as much as anyone in the family, and caring for her kept me as close as I could be to Liam. But Sally Ann changed after Liam’s death. She became an angry dog. A debt collector turned up at the front door one afternoon demanding the money we owed on our time-payment television set. He yelled at my mother and she yelled back at him. He made the mistake of putting a foot in the door. Alerted by the ruckus, Sally Ann barrelled past my mother and clamped her jaws around the debt collector’s calf. He retreated, leaving a bloody trail on the footpath. A week later he returned and handed my mother a bill for the ‘invisible mending’ needed to repair the tear in his suit pants. They argued again and Sally Ann bit him a second time.

The following day a policeman turned up at the house riding a black bicycle. He picked up a broom in the yard and chased Sally Ann with it, waving the stick above his head. She circled him, barking savagely. Eventually he backed her into a corner, broke the broom handle across her back and proceeded to give her what my father would have called a good kicking.

Poor Sally Ann was stubborn when it came to authority. Only two days later I was coming home from the flat with Sally Ann at my side. It was getting dark, I was late and began running. We turned the corner into our street and crashed into a Salvation Army major, bowling him over. He’d been handing out prayer cards and collecting donations. He got to his feet, brushed the knees of his pants and barked at me to watch where I was going and to restrain my dog. Sally Ann whined and skipped nervously from left to right before leaping at him and taking a chunk of flesh out of his arm. Then she turned and bolted for home.

It didn’t take long for the police to come back to the house with a piece of paper granting them authority to take Sally Ann away. They came in a van with a locked cage and carried a large net. She put up a good fight, barking, snapping and tearing at the net with her claws but she soon collapsed with exhaustion and was finally captured. I went to the back of the van, where Sally Ann had her snout pressed against the wire cage. She licked my fingertips. A policeman driving the van hit the car horn and warned us to step away. We stood in the middle of the road until the van had turned the corner at the top of the street. That night I asked my mother where Sally Ann had been taken to.

‘She won’t be coming back,’ she said, coldly. ‘Sally Ann needs more space to run around.

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