Januariad

Dad bought me my first dog when I was nine years old. I’d begged for years, but he’d always argued the cost was too high, or that it would cost too much to stoke it regularly, or that I wouldn’t take proper care of it. I could only argue against the last point, and I did, of course. Relentlessly.

On my ninth birthday he presented me with a wooden crate shipped from Nottingham. No wrapping paper. The rough planks were as exciting as any colour he might have swathed it in. We took over the sitting-room table for a week. He covered it with a clean, white sheet, ironed smooth. The tools were rooted out of the garage or borrowed from our neighbour Justy. My father was a great man for preparation: we took half a day ordering the wrenches, screwdrivers and allen keys around the table. The rest of the afternoon was spent opening the crate and removing each clearly labelled paper bag from the packaging straw.

The instruction manual was two-hundred pages long. My first job was to clean the core cogs with a wet cloth and arrange them to dry on the sheet. We assembled the engine with painstaking care, disassembling our mistakes with the same exaggerated slowness. My dad’s approach, in all our projects then, was an immediate fifteen minute break once we realised we’d fouled up a step. He’d sit in the kitchen, gently stewing over gently stewed tea, before returning to the table, outwardly calm and relaxed and rueing nothing.

I couldn’t see the point in washers. There were dozens of washers, hundreds. Dad tried to explain that they help the nut bite. That a bolt would be twice as fixed with a washer in place. I resented them, though. There were fifteen sizes to sort. I made a metropolis of them, stacked in the corner of the table.

Every moving part had to be greased. I rubbed each cog and piston with an oily rag before we screwed or bolted it into the machinery. Soon the tablecloth was half-blackened. We were half blackened. Some cogs simply hung on the frame, waiting to be fixed by an outer joint. The cotters were the most nerve-wracking, being almost unremovable once hammered into a rod. My father ran test procedures with trembling fingers, hand-cranking a key cog and watching as the whole framework crept into motion, a giant clock’s innards. Allowing himself a tight grin a the smoothness of it.

Once we’d the body finished and the legs attached, it began to look something like I’d pictured. Although it was still skeletal, headless, tailless. We screwed on the outer plates of polished tin, overlapping like a lizard’s scales. My father assembled the head, slipping the glass eyes into its skull and securing them with the outer mask. It was suddenly a dog.

We worked late on that last night, and Dad insisted we wait until the next day to start him up. I slept soundly, exhausted by the monotony of assembly. Still, excitement had me up almost before my father. He helped me lift the dog out to the yard. I pulled out the tray from the bottom of its belly and filled it with small coals and a few twigs to get them going. Dad handed me a glass of water and I held up the dog’s head and poured it down his gullet. Its throat was cold in the morning air. Once the fire was lit and the tray shut, we stood back. My father put his hand on my head. ‘You’ll mind him now, won’t you?’ I nodded into the hand. ‘You’ll keep him lit and give him a bowl of water every day and clean out his tray?’ I nodded. ‘And every month you’ll have to clean him properly, the full rundown.’ I nodded. Soft pings were coming from inside the dog’s chest. We stood silently after that, waiting for him to come to life.