The Hachiko Grief Society for Abandoned Dogs
So I’d barely started working at a cafe in Glasgow’s city centre, nothing
special, a slight thin space that could thwack out the odd
bacon sandwich or tea as backup to the register’s scrapes and wheezes
when one day the door punches open and a sizable platoon
of old ladies - anoraked, lightly drizzled, a small spattering of umbrella – ascends
the steps and orders, well, everything we have, so when I have a
second between extra hot waters dear and where are your napkins, son I ask
the queue’s head what prompted this particular maelstrom
of the elderly. “Ah, you see,” says the woman after a quiche with side salad,
thanks, “we’ve just finished a convention, thought we’d all have some
lunch.” She leans forward, eyes a-twinkle: “It was a prophecy convention, actually”
then the words are bubbling up in that part of my brain where
bad jokes go to die and then they’re frothing out in a great green spill and I go
“prophecy convention, huh?” Pause .“I wish I’d seen that coming,” and
then of course the joke doesn’t so much land as sneeze greenly over the ladies
before floating between us, mid-air, still-born, and the last thing I remember
before the curtain plummets over the scene is the thought “Well, there goes my
tip”. I couldn’t help but think of the Scottish prophecy club two years
later when a friend spun me the 1920s tale of doggie Hachikō, an Akita from the
North of Honshu who’d walk her master to the train and then, seeing
him off, would lower his haunches to the cobble and wait for said man to slide right
back. One day, though, when Hachikō’s professor shuttled off for work
his mortal coil got snagged in the train smoke and was whipped away to nothing
(that is, he died) but, ever loyal doggie, Hachikō sat sturdy at the
station for nine years in case her master came with lips parsed and grinning. He
didn’t, of course; yet save from prophesy, from stripping back some
time layers and finding out, how was yon canine to know? How were any of the
dogs sitting through history? How was Greyfriar’s Bobby, Skye Terrier, who,
when his night-watchman owner stood up to one last moon before being tucked
in snug underground, plumped himself down on his master’s earth
for a decade, to know? What about Polish Dżok, keening at the roundabout, or
Kostya from Russia, nose sniffing at the site of a car seven years
crashed? “Ah, you see!” say the writers. “Stop thinking of prophesy in the great
big Biblical sense; think of it as a closer peer into the present. That’s
what’ll get you moving in the right direction.” Take art critic, Victorian sage John
Ruskin, for example, naturalist in every sense, who couldn’t
help but scribble that “to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one”. Very
good, John, very good. Maybe with that foresight I’d have known that, bad
quip regardless, the patrons of my cafe would still be decent to sprinkle some
crowned metal beside the sodden teabags; maybe you as well,
John, squinting more closely at your present state, could carve a better path: you could
pick apart at the constant squabbles with wife, Effie, and see your
upcoming date with divorce; maybe you’d see the words unfurled by Rose, your next
love, and see she was only ever closed to you. Maybe you could save
yourself the pain. Maybe too, with eyes locked on the now, history’s long-lost doggies
would have teamed together, maybe at my cafe, and maybe I’ll serve them
biscuits as they sit circular holding name cards and group up to name their loss. “They
call me Greyfriar’s and my master’s kicked it”; “I’m Hachi, and today
I hit the papers for a new home. “There’ll be recovery, applause - but, after a
couple of extra hot waters, dear, after the tip and, home, after flicking
on their own kettles and hearing its thin whine, maybe each dog might still slink
out, back to their old haunts, their stations, their roundabouts;
might sit and pine for an old and familiar bone to break out, through.