Review: The Mistress’s Dog

Title: The Mistress’s Dog: Short Stories 1996 – 2010

Author: David Medalie

Publisher: Picador Africa

Genre: Short stories

What follows is a description of what most would term a “small” life. Now living in a small bedsit in a retirement home – her small life having precluded being able to afford a larger cottage – she soon befriends Gwen, who can and does afford a large cottage, and soon Stella is manipulated into a friendship with this newcomer. A newcomer whom no one else is comfortable befriending, and yet Stella makes excuses for this, even as her own isolation within the home grows as her friendship with Gwen assumes largeness.

It’s when Gwen’s grown-up, forty-three-year-old, soon-to-be-divorced son, quaintly named Vernon, visits for the first time, that the balance of power shifts, and the desperation of loneliness and old age come shuddering to the fore of Stella’s life. She’s nourished the “worms of meanness” and finds herself “too greedy to spare Gwen even a scrap of the repast that has come to her so late in life”. This is one of the most powerful stories in the collection, a story that thrums with the effects of a life lived on the margins, a small, too small life, and the coruscating effects of that existence.

The title story of the collection, “The Mistress’s Dog,” is another powerful piece, again centred on the effects of ageing, but its protagonist, Nola, is caught in an entirely different web. For she finds herself literally looking after her late husband’s mistress’s dog, an ailing, wheezing dog clinging to life, long after both her husband and the mistress have both passed on. In this story, though, the dog becomes metaphor and vehicle for all sorts of unanswered questions Nola has about her life and the way she has allowed it to simply “happen” to her, passive recipient of past experiences, to the point that she finds herself living her last days in the presence of a vivid reminder of her late husband’s infidelities and failings.

It’s a startling gem of a story, and received the Thomas Pringle Award in 2008.

In other stories relationships also form a centre focus and are dissected with needle points of finesse. In “The Wheels of God” we are introduced to the triangle of Sue, visiting Ina, the mother of her dead lover, Glenda. Sue is bringing Sello, the child she and Glenda adopted, to meet the grandmother he has never seen. It’s a story that circulates and loops back through time, and time heals, even if the repairs remain somewhat jagged around the edges. In “Toothless Tiger” we again witness a triangle of relationships: a father, his divorced daughter and her son are on holiday in the Kruger Park. Not so quiet tensions come to the fore, and the secret of cancer will eventually be forced out into the open. Meanwhile, in “Friendly Fire”, a long-ago childhood incident in the lives of two sisters, Pam and Linda, form the spine, of their continuing ways of relating to each other.

In the forward to this collection, academic and editor Michael Titlestad writes that “[modernist] short stories might be uniquely appropriate to … the contours of our experience”.

Medalie’s sharp, tightly focused stories of lives formed by the vagaries of experience certainly fall into the modernist camp – and Medalie as storyteller offers no neat, pat resolutions to the twists and dilemmas these characters fall into and through. I find that supremely satisfying.

Medalie’s stories shine brightly: each are highly crafted, and end where they should, and yet, so often, the road ahead is clear, ambiguously open-ended, but lucidly clear.

REVIEWER: Arja Salafranca is the author of The Thin Line, a debut collection of short fiction published by Modjaji Books.