EXTRACT: Einstein by Miles Gibson

1.
Charlie Nelson was watching TV when the stranger appeared on the roof. It was a cold night in late September and the streets were shining with rain. All day the wind had roared through the dirty city, snatching at rags and hamburger wrappers, newspapers, beer cans, plastic bottles, sucking them into the shimmering sky where they sailed like flocks of fabulous birds. Handbills swarmed over Piccadilly. A flight of empty cardboard boxes turned and tumbled over the river. After the wind came the rain, exploding from clouds the colour of gravy, drowning the city in darkness.
Charlie was slumped in his favourite armchair watching a woman in a cocktail dress flirting with a dancing pig. The pig wore spats and a jaunty topper. They were singing in praise of a microwave dinner. They were singing, laughing, dancing in circles. This tasty microwave miracle was an Instant Gourmet™ Pork Surprise. It would certainly be a surprise for the pig in the jaunty topper.
Charlie yawned. It was hot and crowded in the room. The walls were loaded with books and pictures, pencil sketches, watercolours in cheap gilt frames. Beneath the window a large pine chest supported trays of dusty houseplants, pots of exhausted cactuses, twists of ivy, a faded myrtle in a china bowl.
Beside Charlie’s chair a bag of peanuts spilled on a varnished coffee table. Beneath the table an old dog moaned and snuffled in a troubled sleep. His whiskers twitched and he paddled his paws. The dog was called Einstein. He must have been dreaming of Instant Gourmet™ microwave dinners.
Charlie didn’t know that a stranger had landed on the roof. In a few hours the intruder would be stepping through the shower curtains like the Jolly Green Giant and Charlie would be screaming and his entire life would be rushing before his eyes. But now he was eating salted peanuts and watching a woman dance with a pig while Einstein snored and the rain came hissing against the window.

2.
At midnight Einstein woke up and cracked his head against the table, spilling peanuts over the floor.
‘It’s raining,’ Charlie said, as he watched the dog trot towards the door. ‘Can’t you wait until morning?’
Einstein grinned and scratched the carpet. He looked like a child’s drawing of a dog: a square body and a cone for a head, his tail a dash and his nose a squiggle. His coat was white, his ears and feet black, one eye was green and one eye was yellow. He wore the cordial expression of the violently insane. He was a small mongrel with a loaded bladder.
‘You’ve got to stop drinking at night,’ Charlie grumbled as he struggled into his overcoat.
It was cold in the passage. The walls gave out a damp, sour smell. Above their heads a small bulb flickered in a chipped glass shade. He locked the apartment and followed the dog down six flights of stairs to the windswept street.
At the entrance to the building they paused, breathless, bracing themselves against the freezing darkness. ‘You’ve got three minutes,’ Charlie shivered. ‘Three minutes or you stay here till morning.’
Einstein growled, hesitated for a moment, and then he was running forward, his ears flying like flags, the rain on his back like a saddle of sequins. He scampered to the corner of the street and cocked his leg against a sack of rubbish.
Charlie huddled miserably in the doorway. And then he spotted the old man. He was dressed in nothing but pyjamas and a pair of swollen slippers. The rain sprayed from his face. Water spurted from his sleeves. He was standing alone in the middle of the street, his head thrown back and his mad eyes fixed on the rooftops. He looked wild. He looked crazy. He looked like he’d just seen a flying saucer. He was smiling, smiling, and his face was shining with a bright, unholy light.
‘Did you see it?’ he shouted, when he caught sight of Charlie. He staggered forward, stopped and turned his face to the sky.
‘What happened?’ Charlie said, from the safety of the doorway. He peered up and down the empty street. There was nothing but rain and the rumble of drains.
‘There!’ the old man shrieked. ‘There!’ He raised his fist and stabbed with a bony finger at heaven. He began to laugh.
Charlie squinted into the sky, hidden by a curtain of sodium light. He shook his head and shrugged. What? What had happened? But the old man wouldn’t wait for him. He was splashing away down the street, shouting and laughing into the rain.
Charlie caught Einstein, took him back to the safety of the apartment and dropped him into his basket. It was twenty minutes past midnight. The dog sneezed and grinned.
‘Sleep!’ Charlie said.
Einstein shook himself and turned three circles before he settled into the basket. Steam curled from the top of his head. His wet coat leaked a comforting stink.
When the little dog had made himself comfortable, Charlie snapped out the light, pulled off his shoes and shuffled into his bedroom. The room was warm and dark and familiar. There was an oak wardrobe against one wall, a chest of drawers and a small chair. An alarm clock chattered under the chair. The mattress farted when he climbed into bed. He lay beneath the blankets and blinked at the ceiling, waiting for sleep to press down on him.
At two o’clock in the morning he started to dream. He dreamed he’d been carried away from the room and was shrinking into the sunlit past. He dreamed he was back with his mother and father, in a house behind a privet hedge. He was three or four years old, sitting on the carpet in the shadow of his mother’s skirt. His arms were wrapped around her knees and his head was buried in her petticoats. He could hear his father in the room and smell the barber’s cologne as it wafted from his clothes. His father was shouting and clacking his dentures.
Charlie groaned and rolled his head in the pillow.

3.
The dog grunted and cocked his ears. It was three o’clock, cold in the room and rain still hissing against the window. He sat up in his basket and shivered. Something had shaken him from his sleep, teased his whiskers and dragged its fingernails down his spine.
He leaned forward, hung his head from the broken edge of the basket and watched the floor for the scampering shadows of mice and beetles. Nothing moved. He snuffled suspiciously at the air. Nothing. For some time he sat in his basket, perplexed, swinging his head from side to side, trawling the darkness with his nose.
And then, through the comforting household smells, came a strange and unfamiliar odour. It was the most sublime smell of wet earth, warm goat leather, soft cow dung, sweating horses, a rich and pungent flavour that seemed to gather around him like smoke. He slobbered and slapped his snout with his tongue. He was hypnotised with delight.
He scrambled from his basket, padded quickly across the room and followed his nose into the hall. The trail evaporated. He was left with nothing but the stale smell of carpet. He sat down, astonished, and looked around him. Released so abruptly from his trance the dog felt confused and frightened. He listened to the distant rain, the creak of the furniture, the tapping of his own heart and the trumpeting of Charlie’s breath as it penetrated the bedroom door.
The thought of Charlie gave him courage. The stump of his tail began to quiver. He sprang to his feet and conducted a jaunty patrol of the hall, snapping and growling at ghosts. There was nothing here to threaten him but the cooling scent of his own dreams.
And then, very gently, a doorknob turned and the bathroom door swung open. Einstein snarled and sprang back in surprise. A shaft of sunlight spilled into the hall like the memory of some distant summer. It was warm and fragrant and sparkled with pollen. The light carried with it a concentration of tantalising odours, grain sacks, warm hay, salt air and cedar, the sprayed scent of the wild fox, the soiled sand of the rabbit hole.
Einstein crouched against the floor. But now he was trembling with pleasure. He dipped his snout into the light and sucked at the smells that tormented him. He mewed. He whimpered. He crawled on his belly into the source of the miracle.
And the door clicked shut behind him.

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