Come to Chalk Hill for a holiday, they said.
It’ll be fun, they said.
‘Bloody liars,’ Isabella Passmore grumped to herself as the magpies outside her window heralded the start of another glorious Chalk Hill spring day.
She pushed herself out of the comfy warm bed and found a pair of clean knickers before pulling on all of yesterday’s clothes. She was always a big fan of layering, but adding and deleting those layers to match the Chalk Hill weather at this time of year almost required another uni degree.
She grabbed her glasses off the bureau and shoved them on her face, bringing herself into sharp focus in the bevelled wood mirror. Lovely. Her hair looked like she felt: lanky, dull, with no prospect of thrills on the horizon. She pulled a brush through it, then bunched it at the back of her neck and tied it there. Nobody cared what her hair looked like. Tonight she’d give it a wash, but for now coffee and toast were more important and, with that thought, Izzy marched from the bedroom.
‘Right, Bruno,’ she announced to the kelpie-staffy cross lying in his basket in front of last night’s fire, now gone out. ‘What will we do today?’
Bruno slapped his tail against his basket in response and Izzy dragged the toaster out of its cupboard and set it on the kitchen bench.
‘A walk, you say? Wow. How exciting. Where shall we go?’
Bruno bashed his tail harder and Izzy poked the switch to turn on the coffee machine and took the soy milk out of the fridge.
‘The main street? Again? Can you handle the excitement, puppy dog?’
Bruno put his snout in the air and staffy-growled agreement that indeed he could, stretched his front legs out of his basket and arched his back.
Izzy dug in the freezer for the bread and came up to see the black dog watching her every move, tail wagging like a flag in a hurricane. Her heart softened. ‘You’re a good boy, Bruno. Don’t listen to my grizzling.’
She shouldn’t be surprised that Bruno had turned into a great little dog. Her friend Taylor never did anything by halves. Bruno would have been through the best puppy school Perth had to offer after Taylor picked him out from the handful of rescue dogs at the back of Izzy’s small Perth-based animal vet clinic a few years ago. Izzy could mark Bruno down in the ‘positive’ column in terms of the dogs she’d managed to successfully rehome and save. She wished there were more stories like Bruno’s. She wished there were more responsible pet owners like Taylor.
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