Dead Dog Dad

The little brown, curly-haired dog didn't look like it was dead.

As usual for a Saturday morning, I had come downstairs to get breakfast started before Sharon joined me. It looked just as if Fifi was fast asleep in her basket, but the total absence of movement and a vague odour of shit and piss was clear evidence of her demise. Fifi was only a few months old and I was surprised she must have died in her sleep sometime during the night.

It wasn't my idea to get a dog. Sharon and I had been trying to start a family and as far as I was concerned non-humans were not included in our thinking about what that would entail. I had a questionable early track record with tropical fish and I didn't want to be bothered with caring for pets, large or small. While it was still only the two of us we had no ties to bind us to our home base and we enjoyed the freedom to roam. We live close to Edinburgh Airport and were able to take occasional weekend breaks in other parts of Europe that could be reached by direct flights.

Sharon and I had been married for a few years and had settled into a comfortable routine on Saturdays. We usually had plenty of good wake up sex in the morning, followed by a lazy breakfast before tackling any domestic chores. In the afternoon, Sharon invariably headed out for some retail therapy with her mum or a girlfriend, while I went to watch the local amateur football team. Neither pastime cost us much. Entrance was free for the football and Sharon was careful with her spending. She had insisted on having a house with a garden, so paying the mortgage was the number one item on our budget, followed by funding a few weekend breaks in Europe.

This comfortable state of affairs changed a few months ago. When I got home from watching football one Saturday afternoon, Sharon was clearly bursting to give me some news. She was grinning from ear to ear as she fetched me a bottle of Bavarian lager from the fridge and a glass. Sharon knew from experience it was always best to let me get comfortable before she started in on me with whatever she wanted to tell me, whether it was a burning issue that was troubling her or some sort of news or gossip she could hardly wait to share.

Part of the ritual was making Sharon wait and she was visibly growing impatient as I settled into an armchair, poured myself a glass of the golden nectar, drank generously and placed the glass on a side table, sighing in appreciation. From the broad smile on her face, I thought this was likely to be good news.

"So, what's up, Sharon?" I asked.

"Well, Jim, you know how we said it might take a while before we could start a family," she said, pausing and checking to make sure I was paying attention.

I gulped, not because I was drinking one of the finest lager beers in the world, but because I was wondering if she was in the family way.

"I hope you don't mind," she happily continued, "but I bought us a puppy!"

I gasped with surprise and some relief. I definitely wanted kids, but I didn't mind waiting a bit longer for that to happen.

"Don't worry," she quickly continued. "I know I'll have to make time to care for it, but I'm sure it will be fun. What do you think?"

"I don't mind," I said, faced with a fait accompli and trying to look pleased, "as long as you remember this was your idea. I don't want to end up being the only one taking the dog for walkies. Where is this puppy anyway?"

"The dog breeder brought her this afternoon and she's in her basket in the kitchen," said Sharon. "I can't wait for you to meet her. Her name's Fifi and I know you'll just love her to bits."

Faced with a fait accompli, I went with the flow and tried to appear enthusiastic.

At this point I should explain that Sharon is a lovely woman, both in appearance and by her nature. Her upbringing was so sheltered that she was a virgin when we met. She was eighteen and I was in my mid twenties. Believe it or not, as our romance blossomed I found myself having to explain to her about the birds and bees. To match her innocent nature, she has a very positive outlook on life and takes people at face value.

In my eyes, Sharon's innocent nature, or naivety if you prefer, is an endearing quality, because there's never any sort of hidden agenda with her. However, it means she can be quite gullible and I enjoy gently pulling her leg from time to time. April Fools' Day is a highlight every year and without fail Sharon falls for a prank. I think the best one was when I told her about the disastrous spaghetti harvest in Italy, resulting from unseasonal snowstorms. Convinced there would be a shortage, she rushed off to the supermarket and bought a dozen packets of dried spaghetti. Thankfully, she has a good sense of humour and laughed along with me when I revealed she had been duped.

It was not much of a surprise that someone managed to sell her a pup. In hindsight, letting Sharon go to a dog show the previous Saturday without me was a mistake. Heather, one of her more sensible girlfriends, went along with her, so I didn't think there was any chance she would end up buying a puppy. I had no idea what had happened until Fifi made her appearance a week later, dropped off while I was out. That was no doubt a deliberate ploy on the part of the breeder, to avoid a surprised husband refusing to take delivery of the dog.

Sharon said Fifi was a cross between a poodle and some other type of dog. This was important, according to Sharon, because Fifi had been especially bred to have short, curly brown hair that wouldn't moult and was easy to wash and dry. At least, that's what Sharon said the breeder had told her. I thought Fifi looked more like a curly haired gerbil than some sort of poodle. To add insult to injury, Sharon eventually confessed she had paid the dealer five hundred in cash for the dog.

To be brutally honest, I never liked Fifi. It was Sharon who loved her to bits. I found looking after the dog was inevitably added to my domestic chores. Very occasionally, Sharon took Fifi for a walk, but I still had to go along and it was my job to scoop poop with a little black plastic bag whenever necessary. As time went by, walkies with Fifi became almost solely my responsibility.

Standing in the kitchen, confronted with the dead dog, I knew I would have to spend a fair amount of time comforting my wife, so I decided to go ahead and make myself some coffee anyway. I needed to be in a reasonable frame of mind before I could deal with cleaning up Fifi's last mess and doing something about disposing of the body. Coffee would help, but first I opened the kitchen windows. As I poured the Vietnamese Arabica coffee beans into the bean grinder, the thought struck me that, for Fifi, this was literally a case of life's a bitch and then you die.

Of course, because Sharon loved Fifi to bits, giving her the bad news was not going to be easy. Making it even more of a challenge, Sharon was now in the early stages of pregnancy, she had morning sickness, she was tired and her emotional state was fragile. Sharon had become pregnant not long after Fifi arrived and now we were looking forward to the birth of our first child. The silver lining in the cloud of Fifi's demise, as far as I was concerned, was that I would no longer have to worry about any eventual incompatibility of dog and baby.

After I finished my coffee I went upstairs with a cup of tea for Sharon and broke the news. Sharon was much more distraught than I had expected, even allowing for her fragile emotional state. You would have thought a close relative had kicked the bucket. She was almost inconsolable, moaning and wailing about how this wasn't supposed to happen. That much was true, as Fifi was only a few months old, but I was surprised by the huge outpouring of grief. I guessed the major waterworks were a result of Sharon's hormones being seriously out of whack from having a bun in the oven.

Disposing of a dead dog in Scotland is not difficult. The simplest and cheapest way is to dig a hole a few feet deep in your garden and bury the thing. This was totally unacceptable to Sharon. She insisted she needed to know why Fifi had snuffed it, which would entail an examination by a veterinarian, and she wanted Fifi cremated, so Fifi's ashes could sit in an urn in our lounge. I phoned the local veterinary clinic and they were very helpful. That was probably unsurprising, given how much I was going to be paying for their services. Anyway, I made an appointment to bring the dead dog to them later that morning.

The receptionist arranged for me to enter the clinic by the back door, to avoid other customers and their pets seeing me with what was obviously a dead dog in its basket, albeit covered with an old dish towel. The deceased Fifi and I were quickly ushered into an examination room by a gray haired man in green scrubs, who introduced himself as Dr Terry Macassi, the clinic's chief vet. He removed the dish towel and took a quick look at Fifi, asked me a couple of questions about the dog and then sent me to the waiting room, while he examined the dog more closely.

It wasn't long before I was called back to the examination room, where Fifi's remains had been transferred to an examination table, but were once again covered by the old dish towel.

"I'm sorry, but your wee bitch died of organ failure," the old vet told me. "Her heart and lungs more or less gave up on her."

"So it's just bad luck?" I asked.

"Not quite," he said. "Sadly, this sort of thing is happening more frequently these days. It's fairly commonplace when unlicensed amateurs breed dogs. The puppies don't live long, because they're simply not physically viable in the longer term. Most are variants of poodles that have been cross bred with a Heinz. You know; fifty seven different varieties. We call these puppies 'canoodles', because they're a mix of canis vulgaris and poodle. As you may know, canis vulgaris is the Latin for common dog."

"So what you're saying is someone conned my wife?"

"I'm afraid that is indeed the case," he said.

"At least we know why the dog died," I said, "but I'm still puzzled about what happened. My wife told me she bought the dog from some guy called Roger, who was a breeder she met at a dog show, so I assumed it was a bona fide deal."

"She probably met someone claiming to be a dog breeder at the dog show. Unfortunately, all sorts of dodgy characters go along to dog shows, looking to make a fast buck from the unwary. I suggest you check whatever paperwork your wife got from the breeder, but I suspect the deal she got was more boney Fido, than bona fide."

The vet allowed himself a brief grin as I groaned in appreciation of his feeble pun, which was no doubt intended to lighten the atmosphere and bring our discussions to a conclusion. We agreed the clinic would arrange for cremation of Fifi and they would let me know when I could collect the urn with her ashes.

Sharon was still grieving for Fifi when I got home. As gently as I could, I explained that Fifi had passed away in her sleep as the result of some of her internal organs being a bit defective. This revelation resulted in a resumption of major waterworks. It took me a while to get Sharon calmed down sufficiently for us to have a conversation about the circumstances relating to her purchase of the dog.

I had decided not to interrogate Sharon when Fifi first arrived, because there was little I could do to change things. Besides, any implied criticism would have ruffled her feathers and got me in the bad books. Now, with what Terry Macassi had told me, I was more than a little curious.

"Maybe we can get hold of Roger and get a refund or a replacement for Fifi," I suggested, putting an arm around her as we sat together on the sofa. She turned her head into my shoulder and her sobbing continued unabated. At this rate I was going to end up with a soaked shirt.

"Have you got his mobile number?" I asked her.

"Yes. I tried to call him while you were at the vet's," she sniffled into my shirt, "but all I got was a recorded message saying the number's out of service."

"How did you meet Roger anyway?" I quietly asked, as her sobs gradually subsided. "Did he have a booth at the dog show?"

"No," she replied. "Heather and I went to the refreshments tent after we finished going round the show. We had a cup of tea and then Heather left to catch her bus. I was still finishing my cuppa when Roger sat down at the same table and we got chatting. He was really nice and he told me all about his work as a dog breeder. He's got a degree in genetics from Edinburgh University and he's worked at the Roslin Institute. You know, that's where they bred Dolly the sheep, the first successfully cloned mammal in the world."

"And you believed him?" I asked.

"Yes. He's obviously a very clever man."

"I think we can agree on that," I sighed in exasperation. "Did he say where he was from?"

"Not really," she replied, "but he told me where he's from there are lots of people in breeding."

"Sounds like Fife," I replied. "Maybe we can still find him. His contact details are probably on the registration papers for Fifi."

Sharon immediately cheered up a bit and went off to look for the paperwork Roger had given her. I hadn't bothered to check it before now, having little choice than to go along with what Sharon wanted. Inevitably, when Sharon returned with a couple of sheets of paper I quickly determined the registration certificate was a fake. Sharon didn't seem to think so, but the evidence was as plain as the nose on your face. I don't recall all the details, but the dog's name was stated as 'Josefine Fifi La Belle'. That might have been okay, but the breeder's name was 'Roger M. Daillie' and the registration had been countersigned by 'Ken L. Klubb'. I was pretty sure the address on the attached receipt for payment was also bogus.

I couldn't change the past and it would be hurtful to take Sharon to task for her gullibility. That is just the way she is. I decided it would be best to let sleeping dogs lie and we could get on with our lives.

If I'd thought that was the end of the matter, I was much mistaken. Over the course of the next week, Sharon kept coming back to the manner of Fifi's demise. She was like a dog with a bone, repeatedly going over what the vet had told me about organ failure. I tried to be patient, but I was getting a bit annoyed that Sharon wasn't showing any sign of coming to terms with the death of the dog. If anything, it appeared she was becoming increasingly fretful, occasionally casting rueful glances in my direction.

Eventually, by the following Saturday morning I'd had enough. Sitting at the kitchen table after breakfast, I asked her outright why the heck she was so concerned with what had happened to Fifi.

"Look," I said, "I know you were very attached to Fifi, but we can't change what happened to her. What I can't understand is why you keep coming back to how the dog died. It was simply in her genetic make-up that she couldn't survive. It was in her nature to die early. Why don't you just accept that?"

"You probably think I'm crazy," she replied, "but I'm worried the same sort of thing could happen to our baby."

"That's highly unlikely," I reassured her. "We're both fit and healthy individuals, so our baby is likely to be fit and healthy."

"I really hope so," she said, "but it still worries me when I remember what Roger told me about the science of breeding."

"So what did he tell you about the science of breeding and how would he know anything about it?"

"I told you he's got a degree in genetics. He explained it's all about making sure the best genes get selected during the breeding process. That means selecting dogs with desirable features and getting them to mate with the bitch. Only dogs from good breeding stock are considered. Roger told me the same principle applies to all sorts of animals, including human beings. That's why it's usually the fittest that survive. It's simply evolution."

"Okay. I seriously doubt Roger has a degree in genetics, but I think we can agree that evolution is based on natural selection in the animal world. It's not necessarily the same for human beings. We have evolved to the extent that we choose our partners for many different reasons, not just because they run faster or are stronger than others."

"That's exactly what Roger said when I told him we were trying for a baby. Roger thinks human beings should be able to select desirable features for their children without relying entirely on natural selection. Just like dogs can be bred to meet specific requirements."

"That sounds like a nice idea in theory, but in practice it would be difficult to arrange and no doubt there would be ethical issues involved in obtaining additional genetic material and then injecting it into a human egg or embryo."

"You might think so, but Roger said he could easily provide additional genetic material. He told me he's been doing this for years. He has a high IQ, he's tall and strong and his skin is slightly darker and therefore more sun-resistant thanks to having an Afro Caribbean grandfather. All those genes make Roger good breeding stock, so I accepted his offer to provide a course of injections. It was very good value."

"You mean you actually paid him for a course of injections?" I asked incredulously.

"Of course I paid him. He told me he usually charges his clients a thousand pounds for a two week course of treatment, but because I bought Fifi from him he only charged me twenty pounds in cash for each weekday visit. He even included one free visit on the Saturday in between, when you were at the football."

As the conversation progressed I had felt initially puzzled and then a bit uneasy, but now a horrible suspicion was beginning to form in my mind.

"So just exactly how did Roger give you these injections? Did he use a syringe?"

"No," she candidly replied. "Roger explained we had to join together for the process to have the best chance of success. It was just like dog breeding. To get maximum penetration Roger mounted me from behind doggy style and he did his absolute best to make sure I got thoroughly treated. Every session lasted a couple of hours and he went hard at it. I got at least two injections every session, just to make absolutely sure the additional genetic material would be thoroughly absorbed."

"So, let me get this straight" I said. "Almost every day for a couple of weeks he visited you here and gave you a couple of injections with his equipment and to top it off you paid him for his efforts."

"Well, the Saturday session was free of charge," she replied. "I got the impression he wasn't really in it just for the money. It was more like it was a favourite hobby he was happy to spend a lot of time and effort on."

"Yes, you're probably right about that," I replied with sarcasm that went unnoticed by Sharon. "I'm sure he enjoyed it."

It seems my wife really is crazier than a box of frogs. Now I understood why she was so upset about Fifi's death. She was worried the 'additional genetic material' provided by Roger might have a harmful impact on our baby. She didn't realise it might well have been the generous injections from Roger that caused her to get pregnant. We had been having sex frequently ourselves, so maybe the baby was mine. What choice did I have? I really love that sweet, gullible woman and she had been conned by a randy bastard who took advantage of her naivety.

"So, do you still think our baby will be okay?" asked Sharon, worriedly.

"Of course I think our baby will be okay," I replied, smiling through gritted teeth, as I sought to reassure her. "Although I think you should avoid obtaining additional genetic material in future, just to be on the safe side."

To some extent I was shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted, but I wanted to avoid any possible repeat of this utterly ridiculous mess. I'd have to wait and see whether our baby was a darker shade of pale. Losing my temper with Sharon and explaining how she'd screwed up wouldn't help matters. She was pretty much clueless and I loved her enough to forgive her for her mistake, but if I ever find Roger I will gladly cut his balls off.