The Garden

She was only a little girl. When she was born they said, "Oh she's a little girl." She was a little girl at Christmas, a little girl when she started school, and then when she had a little brother- she was still a little girl- Christopher was a little boy.

  Sylvia and Christopher played in the garden every day. There was no grass, only plastic turf, which was badly burnt all over. The next door neighbour was mad and drank wine. She often threw cigarettes over the wall and then laughed about it the next day, screaming down the phone to her friends and lovers and then crying in the bath. They heard all this, because they lived out in the garden most of the time with the cat from up the road. 
  On the other side was a man’s house. He was very interesting as he had an enormous television and loads of musical equipment, like radios and speakers and plastic eggs that recorded sound. He had no sofas or carpets and only one tea cup and his house smelt heavy like a sickly kind of smoke, but he let the children climb over the wall and come inside when it was raining in their garden. Sometimes the students who lived at the top of the huge wall at the back of the garden leaned over and said, "Hi!" They dropped gummy fried eggs into the garden and Christopher ran round and round in circles with his hands out.

  He never caught any.

  The cat- he is very dull. He pisses in the large garden pots and flicks shit behind him through his back legs when he tries to dig holes in the plastic grass. He is also an idiot and licks his own cat cock. A year ago Sylvia stole a camera that lay dusty in a drawer of relics and memorabilia. If the film was ever developed it would show several pictures of a hot family holiday in France, cross brows in the heat and trips on a man's shoulders. Then twenty-seven pictures of the cat; the monotony of his fat belly pulled out to the cloudy sun. Sylvia pushed her face up against his lazy eyes and pressed the button. SNAP. It looked as though they were having a great time.

  There were other animals in the garden too. The two children pushed thirteen snails into a jam jar and then as many leaves as they could fit on top of them. They watched the snails over the next few days, eating and eating and finally drying up and dying in the jar. Sylvia said the snails reminded her of humanity and Christopher said he felt sick. After the last one fell to the bottom of the glass they lay on the spiky turf and looked at the sun until they could see toenails of light when they closed their eyes. The weight of the cat crushed Sylvia’s chest and they felt the brick walls closing in all around them.

  At 8.30pm the garden door was unbolted and the children came through the spider room, which was dank and so dark that Sylvia imagined her skin to be alive with legs and pinpricking fangs. They rarely saw their mother since their second cousin Mary had come to look after them. Mary pushed them around inside the concrete house and threw a can of sausage and beans at Christopher's head. Nevertheless, Sylvia wrote her mother long letters, detailing Christopher's progress, how he had read paragraphs, then whole novels, front to back and later with comment and annotation. Mary promised that she had delivered them and smiled. When Sylvia had run out of note paper she wrote on a sheet of toilet tissue; "Dear Mother, It may shock you to learn that Christopher died this morning. Please do not worry or concern yourself. Yours, Sylvia." She slid the paper into the darkness under her mother's door and waited to hear the creak of springs as she heaved her soft perfumed body out of bed.

  It was a humid day and the cat yawned and rolled onto his back. Christopher sat in the corner of the garden digging with a piece of flint and eating nasturtium petals. 
  Sylvia climbed onto the wall, which was a little taller than she was and jumped, with her limbs flailing in a way that she thought might cause her to break her leg or die when she hit the hard ground. She lay on the floor for several minutes, then put on her boots and looked at the cat who yawned again and half closed his eyes, his black lips curling up at the sides like part of a smile. She imagined the cat with another family on the next street along. They fed him salmon in a little silver dish. A bead of sweat broke free of her hairline. She kicked the cat in the softness of his stomach three times and when Christopher cried she kicked him too so that he screamed and swore. She tore at her dress and threw a rusting bicycle at the heavy door. The woman from next door squawked “Shut up you brats!” and the man from the other side looked worried from behind the smoke in his upstairs window. Three students heard Christopher screaming and popped their heads over the wall in unison and said, “Hey! Leave that cat alone!” But still their mother did not come out of her bedroom. 
  Sylvia looked at Christopher who was lying on top of the obese cat and realised that she would probably never be a little girl ever again.

He's good-bad, but he's not evil

Now you say you're lonely?

Jesus Almost Got Me

Bath Time

I stood dripping on the bathmat and watched pieces of grey material float up from the hole. “It really is disgusting,” I said to myself. My voice sounded like the voice of a man and made me jump. 

I looked in the mirror feeling frightened. 

The pieces of grey material got caught up in the whirlpools that the water escaping was causing and they looked kind of threatening- like deckchairs and garden sheds flying around in the coils of a tornado. It took ages for the water to drain and when it did all this grey sludge was left coating the sides and the bottom of the bathtub. I don’t exactly know what the grey sludge and grey material is made of and it really makes me sick. Although, if I were to make a guess, I would probably say that it is a collection of years and years of skin from all different people and the backs of their necks and behind of their ears. Or a rat that got into the pipes and died when somebody finished washing; scrabbling in the darkness. The rat would have turned into grey mulch after five or six years.

I was too scared to call Mr. Francis because I thought that he would probably blame me and charge me a lot of money. This is what happened in my last flat when the key got stuck in the door and I went to the shop and bought some margarine and smeared it all over the lock but I couldn’t get the key out and the landlord, Mr. Welsh, charged me a lot of money. This time I think I would have got away with it until the end of my contract when the new tenant tried to have a bath and was outraged, but then Maureen from downstairs, who has Alzheimer’s, was getting wet from a leak in bed and they told her she was mad but then the home help saw the water trickling down the wall and came and knocked upstairs. She shouted, “It’s the home help from downstairs. Something up here is leaking into Maureen’s bed.” I thought that she would go away but I could hear Maureen muttering and the home help banging for a long time. I shouted, “I’m very unwell!” and ran into the bedroom.

Mr. Francis called several times and then passed my telephone number and e-mail address to the plumber, who said that the building would collapse if I didn’t attend to the issue immediately. I wondered how much I would be charged if the building collapsed but then I realised that I would probably die anyway if I were to fall through the floor suddenly while I was sleeping one night. I would probably not even have time to wake up before I was dead in Maureen’s kitchen. In the end, on a Tuesday, the landlord gave the plumber a key and he came in without knocking, right into the bathroom and he pushed the towel rack over. He was very angry with me for wasting his time. I had just got out of the bath and was standing in front of the mirror and brushing my hair. The plumber looked at the grey material flying up from the plug hole and the grey sludge that was starting to form around the edge of the water and was disgusted. Then he looked at me in my towel which was quite short and not as clean as I might have liked. I suddenly felt like my skin was shimmering with thousands of little grey bugs and I looked down at my toes and my feet and the bottom of my legs and they were covered with moths with enormous wet wings that stuck to my flesh.

Sophie stared at the film that had developed on the top of her coffee for several seconds. The microwave was dirty and everything in the kitchen was covered with a sour smell. The drains were blocked throughout the entire building and the words hung in the air like nicotine. He said she bought him down and she looked at the cellulite patterns that had bitten her thighs during their relationship. 

  Walking down the King’s Road she felt tears on her cheeks but the only people around were young people who were partnered in ones and twos and threes. They rustled swear words through the breeze and for a while Sophie walked ten paces behind them letting their laughter run over her. She thought about calling out to one of them, ‘Hey what’s going on tonight?’ Eventually they slouched onto the skeleton of a yellow bus that was going out to the suburbs. 

 Sophie tried to imagine herself at the doors of several different colleagues, her jaw locked as they asked her, ‘What’s the matter hun?’ 
 She’d grind her teeth and they’d say, ‘Are you working on the Sullivan project Soph? Jeez we’ve got to be up early haven’t we?’ 
 A few years after Sophie has stopped bleaching her hair and using mascara she realised that during conversation she could watch pupils ticking back and forth like the hands of a clock. Men and women glanced behind her and counted the seconds they had to spend talking. 

  Sophie crossed the road and walked towards a homeless man who was resting in the cool darkness of a tall doorway. She looked into the shadows.‘Thank you miss! That has made my day!’ he would say as she placed a 50pence piece in his hand. Next to his sleeping body a giant Alsatian, growled and brushed the pavement with his left paw. She cleared her throat, “Excuse me!” The man did not stir when she raised her voice, “Hello there!” She sat down on the step and looked at the dog, noticing chunks of vomit between his ears. Sticky threads of yellow weaved through his fur and sealed one of his eyes half shut. The dog cocked his head and growled at her again.

He hit me (and it felt like a kiss)

He hit me (and it felt like a kiss)

He hit me (and it felt like a kiss)

He hit me (and it felt like a kiss)

He hit me (and it felt like a kiss)

He hit me (and it felt like a kiss)

He hit me and I knew he loved me

Welcome to the world of love and laughter baby

Flies

Angela put the pint of milk down on the table and looked in the hallway mirror at the fat which gathered on the tops of her legs. Securing the phone between her shoulder and her cheek, using the sweat trickling down from her hair net as a kind of glue, she sucked her teeth. “I don’t remember getting a call from you last night Drew.” She used both hands to pull down her shirt, which was riding up around her belly. 

  As much as she tried, Angela was not a demure and sophisticated woman. She rarely left the house but when she did she tripped down the stairs on buses and popped down the aisle, grabbing at the rails as part of an electrocuted dance. At the beach she got in the way of badly disciplined children, who threw stones or lolly sticks and whose parents came tumbling out from behind their sun umbrellas, apologising profusely. Angela would stand hot and red with the white shape of a flat stone over her breast bone and part of a rum and raisin ice cream in her hair. She was convinced that these incidents would no longer happen if she lost ten-to-twelve pounds and saved up enough money to buy a new car with tinted windows.

  On the other end of the line Drew imagined murdering Angela and running over her body several times in his pick-up truck. He watched flies mating in his living room with his mouth damp in the corners. It was a very hot day. 

  “I can’t meet you this afternoon Drew” said Angela, “I’m sorry but I’ve made plans.” 

  She patted her hair, which was wholly stuck to her head, and waited for a response. When Drew said nothing she said, “I’m just meeting a few friends, if you must know Drew. I’m sure you can go to ASDA by yourself can’t you?” 

  She pulled a loaf of bread out of the cupboard and listened to Drew’s breathing. 

  “Don’t you want me to have friends?” His silence was making her tap her fingers and she walked to the other side of the room to turn on the radio. 

  “How about I bring you some fish and chips on the way back then?” She sucked her teeth again and opened a packet of jam tarts.

  Drew was still watching the flies, six, seven, eight flies; Angela offered him mushy peas and he felt nausea rock his stomach.

  “Hey Angela,” he said. 

  “What is it honey?” 

  Her voice was thick, he imagined her pouting at herself in the hallway mirror, her top button undone and her shirt stuck to the tops of her breasts, ‘honeeeyyy, sweetie, dahhhling’, she said.    “Did I tell you about Mitch the cabbie who lived up the road from Mum’s?” he rushed over the words. 

 “What are you talking about Drew? Who is...?” “Someone called the police because the windows, they went all black and it looked like it was moving. The glass was rippling Angela. D’you know what it was up there?” 

  He paused to breathe imagining the black tide and carrying on in a whisper, “The window was moving because every inch was covered with flies, because old Mitch had been dead for five weeks and when they smashed the door in his eyes were gone and the flies were all inside of his brain and...” 

  Angela hung up and Drew listened to the dial tone for several seconds, breathing heavily.

It was unusual for Francis to be in such a pleasant mood. In the queue for the checkout she watched a fat old man, who looked like a large toe wrapped in scarves, shouting at the girl who worked behind the blue glass. 
  Francis smiled. 
  She put her hands in the pockets of her fleece and felt the ten 'lucky seven' cards she had bought the week before. They were scratched smooth, curling like grey slugs.
  It had been raining when she sat on the vast flight of steps outside the market scratching them. She laid them out in front of her sensible shoes and blinked at them in disbelief. 
  She had not won a pound. 

  Francis was sure that there had to be another way out. 
  She reached the counter and shouted through the glass, “you got a bin back there love?” 
  The girl scowled as she peeled the tickets off the counter, “you’re not very lucky are you?” She had short blonde hair, which was dark at the roots and a nose piercing. 
  The line of customers reached to the back of the home-ware aisle and a woman in a museli patterned dress was crunching her trolly wheels. 

  “Don’t worry Hun,” Francis said. 
  She tried to pat one of the girls long fingers, but the blue plastic separated them. 
  The girl was bathed aquamarine light.
  “You’re going to be famous soon.” 
  She opened up her wallet and held up card to the glass so that the cashier could see. She pointed to her photograph and to where it said, ‘Psychic Network’ and wiggled her eyebrows emphatically.   “You’re gonna be famous Hunny."  
  Francis cupped her left breast and said, "I can feel it.” 
  She left the supermarket feeling better that she had in years.

“Do you want to hang out for a bit longer Jase?” said Peter.

  “Not really. They’ve got this programme on T.V about all the biggest animals in the world.”

   “Lions?”

   “Yeah probably Lions. Only they’re not alive. They cut them up and look at how powerful their claws are and how big their bellies are.”

  Peter looked at the sun for a couple of seconds and even though he wearing shades he could still see bright white toenails when he blinked. He said, “But they’re not very powerful when they are dead are they?”

   “I know.”

   “Nothing is powerful when you can just gun him in the face.”

   Jason made the sound of a rifle and pointed two fingers at the sun. 
   Peter laughed.

If you're so special, why aren't you dead?

Claire was not attractive when she had been crying. She ran down the road, narrowly missing a heap of dog shit, brushing gravel from the bottom of her feet and gripping the sleeve of Ethan’s shirt with her other hand. “Don’t go,” she said. Her eyes were still wet and Ethan thought he could see moisture around the base of her red nose. He watched a bluebottle on the window sill behind her head and remembered Claire performing in the college production of Midsummer Night’s Dream last year. Ethan had left during the first interval, through boredom more than anything else and Claire had run after him, her limbs painted purple and her hair covered in white fluff. “Don’t go,” she said. He had laughed at her, standing in the car park, and she had cried. Today, he followed her back to the house, dragging his feet and then sitting in silence while she listed all the different kinds of drinks she could make him. Later, fumbling with the DVD player she put on a film that she said was her favourite of all time. “Do you like it? I think the scenery is beautiful.” “Yeah,” said Ethan and looked at the ceiling. He felt her squirm in his silence and a warm amusement creeping over him when she changed the film several times. At half past five he said “gotta go babe,” and left her sitting on the carpet with her wet eyes.

Tell me we both matter don't we?

On Bohemia

“You have always been a medium sized man.”

“Well no, not before we met.”

“I bet that before we met, you were a medium sized child.”

“At some points in school I was actually tall for my age.”

“Don’t say that or I will ring your mother and ask and then I will hand the phone to you and you will be stuck in the hallway for forty-five minutes. Then you will be depressed again.”

“What is so bad about being medium sized anyway?”

“It is just quite boring” she paused “you can’t help it though. Being medium.”

****

It was more or less thirty years before my parents got divorced. He, Adrian Harvey was a bruised car salesman with a loyalty to a tie covered in sunflowers that nobody, even my mother, could understand - she, Virginia Harvey, an ethereal shoe shop manager who had felt huge grief with every promotion and proved it with tattoos that showed up on her aging skin like a cow brand. Right up until the end they sat with their fingers locked in painful jubilation, him drinking too much, and my mother not drinking enough.

After the break-up it was no stranger than before, they instantly seemed to spring apart in their differences as though they were two people that could have never even inhabited the same room, let alone the same bed. I mainly saw my father at night. He always had trouble sleeping so we would go to the late night cinema showings and drive around, up onto The Downs to watch the sunrise. One time we stumbled into the most rundown cinema in the City and found ourselves, father and daughter, confronted with huge orange breasts so close to the camera that their brown aureoles blurred. We sat through the whole film, both of us wearing our office uniforms, even though we could almost feel the heat coming off each other’s faces. When the lights came up we sat until the cinema emptied, Adrian avoided my eyes but said, “That was smashing actually” and I said “Yeah.” When we sat eating limp ice cream in a dark McDonalds I guessed he was thinking about what my mother would have said. Adrian imagined Virginia could never have sat on the itchy seats, bitten by microscopic insects and surrounded by orgasms with her only child, even if she did play the guitar once for The Slits.

We made the same mistake a couple of times, once with a boyfriend of mine Karl Grating, who sat in horror as the fleshy credits rolled up, while my father and I glowed next to each other in pleasurable bohemian tolerance, chewing on a bag of foam bananas as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Sometimes we talked about the subtext to the rough sex or the tone of the plot, whether we found it progressive or not. We found special ways to share in our own pretensions, and would often discuss colour schemes and design faults in crisp packets and burger wrappers. At home we were drowned by my mother's stories of Keith Moon, acid trips and body prints. Enough times for me to remember, which must have been considerable as I would only have been six or seven years old, my father pulled the living room curtains closed and switched off the lights to project films on the wall above the mantelpiece. He invited neighbours over to show my friends and I, thrust into adaptations of Pinter plays, draped in robes and symbolic colours. Adrian struggled to keep the little girls silent during Pinter's dramatic pauses that lasted for thirty seconds at a time, during which Virginia talked at me loudly about other productions she had seen in Jazz Bars in Soho.

My father had several affairs, all of them wretched and most of them lasting for less than two weeks. The most significant of his women was Edna, a talented musician who played the clarinet in a Church in West Worthing and irregularly to the elderly on visiting evenings. She had very thin ankles which meant she could probably not control the slipping of her stockings, which were constantly in a mess around the tops of her shoes. We came face to face with her in the supermarket one Tuesday morning and her face turned a shade of ruddy pink. When she saw me looking at the price of beans behind Adrian, she smoothed her hair and deadened her eyes, as she concentrated on acting as though he was completely unfamiliar. I thought I could see her mouth twitching as though it longed to break out all her wine-stained teeth and to shout out verses of popular love poems, right there in the supermarket. My father span on the heel of his faux leather business shoes and said, "I'll buy us a cherry gateaux if they are cheap," as though I was five years old again. "What do you say?" he asked me earnestly. He steered me down to the frozen food section but there were no cherry flavoured deserts left. Edna would often telephone the house and my mother sang loudly in French and sometimes Latin while my father whispered to her on the hallway telephone.

The morning after my father left the sky was like a peach. I drove out to the small town house my parents had lived in, located to the side of a square of art galleries and fish and chip shops. While I walked through the house collecting up the rubbish she sat in a grey dressing gown in her small, fruitless kitchen. I noticed that pieces of the house were missing, the good arm chairs and the eight steel bottomed saucepans. Without them, the house looked like a toy box, filled with worthless crap. Virginia’s eyes flickered towards the kettle and the heap of messy cups. The insides of the marigolds had been damp when she peeled them off and left them on the draining board for weeks. I put my fingers in and the plastic was filled with light, furry mould. When I leant on the dashboard and looked out of the window at the empty drive she said, “Don’t worry about me sweetie.” She sighed, twirling a strand of her greying hair around a finger before trying a bashful smile. My mother, the brave movie star, brushing the ghost of a tear from her cheek. “Are you making coffee? Oh I'll have it black, three sugars. I can’t take it any other way.” As if I didn’t already know.

I put her to bed that evening, her head small in the enormous bed of cushions and Indian blankets. My father’s spare set of pyjamas trailed on the floor as I sloped over to his side of the bed. A stack of self- help books covered in cigarette ash and orange peel stood in a precarious tower by his bedside cabinet. I wondered if my father had read them while my mother slept, oblivious to his feverish page turning. The sheets were softer than I had imagined but the bells that were sown into the faces of elephants jangled all night long and I didn’t get much sleep. My mother had given in to the large brandy which I knew would put her to sleep but before I turned out the light she slurred into my ear, with hot breath, “He just couldn’t offer me the stability I needed honey…” She stretched her arm around me and shivered lightly, “…he was just too... too...” she sighed “…too bohemian, or something.”

Why does everyone in the world get old and cut their hair?

Well what colour are his eyes?

I don't know he's always wearing shades

This world is filled with total idiots.

The argument had been going on for several hours. They strode around the apartment, cutting corners and avoiding an inevitable touching of hips or feet in the corridor. They were like hot flies. The bathroom door had fallen, a dead cadet, during a previous pinching evening last July, which meant that Ellis had been holding her bladder tight since the morning. Tom was inclined to burst out of the bedroom and walk past the door while she reached for the toilet roll. Later that evening she arranged herself in the bath so that the tops of breasts floated through the soap and let her arms drop down by the sides of the tub. She gazed down the corridor, her eyes outlined in black and her expression one of total boredom. Ellis relieved herself in the water and waited until she was cold for Tom to come out of the bedroom.

She looked at the couple sitting opposite them, who were both wearing denim and plain white shirts, and thought about how, just once, it would nice to say something like, "I just prefer wine with soda, it takes away the bitterness, don't you think?" Or, " I really like pickled onion crisps, they remind me of my childhood. What reminds you of yours?" She rolled the start of a sentence around in her head before remembering that they were both tired of the sound of her voice and deciding to suck on an ice cube instead.

I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way

"Outside the building, she started to walk west to Lexington to catch the bus. Between Third and Lexington, she reached into her coat pocket for her purse and found the sandwich half. She took it out and started to bring her arm down, to drop the sandwich into the street, but instead she put it back into her pocket. A few years before, it had taken her three days to dispose of the Easter chick she had found dead on the sawdust in the bottom of her wastebasket."

SURFING UNICORNS

When John took Samantha away to meet his parents in Southend that year Samantha said she wanted to watch the waves crashing against the pebbles. She told him that she could see hundreds and thousands of jumping unicorns in the surf. John looked into her small face, while her eyes fluttered from his, to the sky behind him. He kissed her on her pink mouth, which was filled with overlapping teeth. It wasn't for another five years, while watching television on their small television set, that he realised that she had stolen the unicorns from a popular film. He felt cheated of his bohemian, poetic wife as she pressed her own sports socks in the living room.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

"Women who have a dramatic haircut are always about to encounter an enormous change in their lives." She cut off the length of her hair, shaving the sides close to the tops of her ears and held tight onto the mirror waiting. When her mother arrived home from work singing and slamming the door she jumped, realising that she had been still for some time and the mirror slipped onto the floor, cutting her shins and feet quite badly.

She sat in the back of the taxi looking at the country that passed, while her mother's eyebrows emulated their concern from the front seat. Her hand was crushed by a brother who had been called back from Law School, until they arrived at the quietest hospital she had ever known and she was injected in several different places. She wondered why she had ever paid any attention to such a stupid magazine anyway.

Despite being horribly concerned she found her mind drifting and began to wonder if she had bought cat food at the supermarket earlier.

There is a company in California that takes the two of your names and makes a professional mould type thing which they then stamp into the tree. After that they take a photo of it and mail it right to your home address. If you ever happen to be in the area you can even go and check it out and it will most probably still be there if there hasn't been any property developments on the location. For our twentieth wedding anniversary I made an order and as luck would have it the picture arrived on the morning her family turned up with the kids in tow and a huge gift and all that. I've always kinda wanted to impress her dad, Dave, and I could see that he was made-up when we unwrapped the picture, which they had framed with a pearl border. Caroline was staring at it for an age and I guessed that she didn't want to look up cause there were tears in her eyes. So I took a couple of minutes to explain to Dave about what a great idea it was and all but then Caroline looked at me coldly and asked me why I hadn't just carved it in the oak at the bottom of the garden myself. I think it was disagreements like this that led to the eventual break-up of my marriage three years later.

I looked out of the window, in what I imagined was a whist full manner, but a dog was pissing on a lamppost directly in my view and I turned back quickly.

The insides of the marigolds had been damp when we peeled them off and left them on the draining board for weeks. I put my fingers in this morning and the plastic was filled with light furry mould.

The Library

She sat with her eyebrows raised, as though it gave her a better view of the words that made her front teeth protrude as part of a small smile. Her foot tapped the rhythm of the words on her chair leg, until her brows snapped down like the metal blinds of a supermarket and she looked up, catching my eyes. When she grinned, lines spread across her face, which crackled like fire. As she walked through the library she turned back and spread her hand in a wave before the alarm system jangled through the silence. I moved to the window and watched the old woman, running across the courtyard, with the book clutched to her chest.

Toff Rents Out Front Step To Hobo

When I was walking home last night I saw this guy curled up by Co-op down by Queen's Road. I started off by wondering if I could ask him to move out of the way because I happened to be running low on bread and milk and he was positioned quite awkwardly, with his legs right in the way of the automatic door. Then I got to looking at the guy and I started to feel sorry for him and everything because he really did look very uncomfortable and he had this dog and it was spread out right over his chest and I started to feel sorry for the dog too. 
  So I thought I should do something about it, considering I was feeling so sorry and all, but I wasn't sure if the guy was asleep or drunk or what so I figured I'd have to shout because I didn't want to get close to the fellow in case he was drunk and aggressive and most probably even mad. So I shouted "Hello fellow, what're you doing down there?" and after a few seconds he answered me and he didn't look aggressive or mad and I asked him if it didn't annoy him what with people treading over him all day and night. After a while I stopped trying to understand what he was saying and an amazing idea came to me. The guy was showing me a trick that the little dog could do and I had to interrupt him and the whole time I told him the idea I had this really warm and happy feeling because I was thinking about my porch and how much wider and more sheltered and private this fellow would find it.     So I told him my address and he looked embarrassed I think, what with someone being so kind and everything. I wasn't sure whether he would come and sleep on my porch that night or not but the next morning, when I went out to get the paper and my bread and milk, I was careful to step over him and his little dog without waking them.