SURF's Up

Dropping off the dog, one last time

Today on my way back from dropping off my dog for the final time, he was just a little bag of ashes in a box with his name on for all the world to see, 
'Hunter Halpin'
A name that I can bet he would never have recognised 
Unlike...
Hunty
Hunty Bunty
Humble
Himble Bimble
Huntsperson
Hartle Bartle.
I can actually hear him turn in his grave, his tummy towards me, ready to be tickled, yet resolutely unamused.
The box, when I picked it up, weighed almost as much as the dog did alive, at least in the late afternoon of his life 
2.5kg of nips and gnashers, 
A Liitle Big Man 
Heart racing like a thoroughbred, light as a feather and dead as a dodo.
I left Uncle Keith choosing a casket and headed home. 
This time, being the first time that I have actually seen the ashes of a cremation, human or animal. 
What remains, of the remains, is a strange 'face powder' consistency. reminiscent all those white faced nights dressing as Souixie, ashen faced and ready to rock.
Ashes to ashes,
Funk to funky
Just like it says on the tin.
Strangely free from the physicality of a creature who, for the past four months I have coaxed and cajoled, tempting his little body to come back to life.
Recently the collapses came three times in an hour. 
Unbowed and unaware,
I carried him, mostly throughout that time, his paw holding onto my hand, as I ran my fingers through its pad, checking for whatever worried hm, as he gnawed at his leg.
We walked, his stomach tucked neatly into my left hip, when things got bad, a squeeze too many ended in an accident, as he lost control, his head thrown back, eyes at the skies, unfocused, staring into the depths, off and out into the great beyond. 
Oh Hunter!
The tell tale sign of a warm wet leg, his fluids leeching all along my left hand side, down into my shoe.
In those final weeks, we became as one being, just as he had always wished, both moving in time, two hearts beating as one. I would take my stethoscope to count the beats of his heart, knowing what a dog sees all along, that which is beyond words. 
This afternoon without him,  walking home alone, I saw a woman, sat on a wall, smiling and giggling to an unseen force, a ghostly choir, beyond her reach. On the floor beside her was a bag of washed out, dashed down shopping, consisting solely of cleaning products, the bleaching of a dirty mind perhaps. 
This solitary woman, a being defiled, sat surrounded by bottles of Domestos, opened containers of a white sulphuric powder, caustic sodas and a small unopened box of bright pink SURF. 
As I passed her I  half whispered 
"Are you OK?" 
This woman's ears were blocked to me, listening instead to the cackle and crackle of an invisible chorus who sang of 
that damned spot ne'ar to be cleaned. 
I walked on, thinking
'Today is the day when I can't get involved in your story.'
 I told myself that if I saw a policeman I would tell them, but what could they do for a poor despoiled creature in whose addled mind the only salvation was to be found in the chaos of the dregs at the bottom of a bottle