Everybody Died, So I Got a Dog

by Emily Dean

  I gave the Crown Prince the spoiler alert of a grin so that he knew we were safely out of crap alley.

  ‘He’s probably one of the most honest people I’ve ever met. He’s sensitive and kind. You know those people who make you happy when they walk in the room? That’s how I feel about him.’

  The unapologetically male Crown Prince must have had something in his eye, because he stoically wiped away a bit of moisture.

  I did a similar thing with the Belgravia Blonde, who had become a close confidante, the lawyer who gave me a daily stomach ache from laughing. And the wary introvert from the airport, who was in fact a super smart and intuitive person underneath that label I’d initially slapped on him.

  Then I braced myself for the onslaught of reactions people had initially had to me. Don’t worry, I got mine all right.

  ‘Very overly analytical.’

  ‘Really not in a good place.’

  ‘Intimidating and hostile.’

  ‘Incredibly serious.’

  ‘A sad darkness.’

  ‘Putting on a front.’

  ‘Judging everyone.’

  At least trolls had the good manners to hide behind an egg avatar.

  But somehow I didn’t take any of it personally. You don’t when someone owns their own messed-up reactions. And if I was really honest, some of it was true. That probably was how I’d come across, strapped into the fake armour I wore when I felt vulnerable. They had simply been responding to the false me. Who, it turned out, was a bit of a dick.

  The group listed qualities they associated with the me they had got to know more intimately. They weren’t words I thought anyone would have reached for before. Someone called me ‘unafraid and honest’. Another said I was wise. I even got kind. But the Crown Prince used the word I never thought I’d hear. ‘Loveable!’ he said, and smiled.

  It was a shit sandwich that was incredibly powerful. I don’t advise you do it outside of a controlled setting, by the way. Telling the Ocado man that you experienced him as ‘hostile, unhelpful and dismissive – a bit like my mother’ will probably get you reported for customer abuse. But I could see that asking myself why I responded in a heightened way to certain situations was something that could be useful in my day-to-day life. And that mostly? It had absolutely nothing to do with anyone but me.

  ‘But what if someone genuinely IS being a prick, J?’ asked one of our troupe. ‘Sometimes people just behave badly no matter how reasonable you are.’

  ‘That’s true of course. But you don’t have the power to change their behaviour. You can control how you choose to respond, though.’

  It wasn’t all joyful warm moments. There were some tough ones, where I started to question the whole process. We were doing an exercise about forgiveness, trying to feel compassion for our parents, when I felt a hot fury descend on me. I was angry at the thought of others walking out of here, able to potentially heal the past with actions. What was I meant to do, have a cosy chat over a bunch of tombstones? I stormed out as we finished and started to cry in a corridor. The Crown Prince rushed over and asked someone to quickly fetch J.

  I hadn’t cried this violently since I was a child.

  ‘I can’t make my peace with my dad. He’s not here, J. Do you not get it? It’s too late.’

  ‘But what if there was a way to make your own peace, Emily? Forgiveness comes from within. I think it’s possible.’

  The evening after my mini-meltdown I wrote a letter to my father and felt immediately lifted. I told him that I now understood why he kept running away. That I knew he had been frightened. And that it had felt easier to keep hunting out fresh starts than to confront the mess inside that always made him leave. I thanked him for our best bits – his wit, his brilliant mind, his wise insight and his refusal to conform – the things that I’d benefited from, rather than the things I never got.

  And it turned out that J was right. You really don’t have to have someone standing in front of you in order to forgive them.

  One of the final things we did was to talk about our future and the life we wanted. I knew what I wanted. Things that I had always felt belonged to the others. Things that involved, to borrow Frank’s phrase, doing to the world rather than letting the world do to me. I made a list.

  1. A beautiful space to live in, a home filled with things I love. One that reflects my weird passions, rather than stuff I’ve seen in interiors magazines. My brief to myself is ‘French farmhouse meets spoilt child star bedroom, with a hint of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane chic.’

  And I’m going to buy that lamp that someone in fashion told me was a bit ‘two years ago’.

  2. A new career devoted to doing what I love – writing things I feel passionate about and radio presenting. I want to interview people not in hotel rooms for half an hour about perfume while a publicist glares at me, but chatting to them honestly about their lives. And I am going to write a book. Not tell people I’m writing a book while I look at YouTube videos of reality shows – but actually commit to writing the sodding thing.

  3. I am going to get a puppy.

  No really. I’m going to get a puppy.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Three months later

  ‘What are you going to call him?’ asked Mimi from the passenger seat, juggling our live chat with WhatsApp conversations, which I suspected had liberal uses of the crying-laughing emoji.

  We were driving down to Hampshire to meet some Shih Tzu puppies.

  ‘I’d kind of like an old pub regular’s name, like Derek or Harry.’

  ‘Or Raymond?’ she replied.

  ‘Raymond! Then we could nickname him Ray.’ Ray had been Rach’s nickname. ‘I really love that idea.’

  ‘Ohmigod, you HAVE to call him Raymond!’

  She had been choosing music from my phone and we’d been singing along to Taylor Swift and Katy Perry. Shortly after our Raymond revelation she settled on a Spice Girls greatest hits album. The ballad ‘Mama’ came on, and I sang along, even though I had always been more drawn to their leather-clad desert ninjas phase, when they moaned about boys throwing ‘far too much emotions’ their way.

  Maybe it was because I was listening to a song called ‘Mama’ with Mimi. Maybe it was just the power of cheap pop music bringing back memories of applying Nineties lip liner in bar toilets with my sister. But Emma Bunton’s sugary voice managed to break me.

  ‘Well, this is awkward, I’m crying at the actual Spice Girls,’ I laughed, adopting Mimi’s vernacular to make the moment less awks for her. I noticed that she’d briefly abandoned her phone, and was looking at the countryside whizzing past, wiping her own tears away.

  ‘I think it’s kind of nice when we remember her like this,’ I said, reaching for Mimi’s hand. ‘Like we’re being honest that we still miss her. And how much she’ll always mean to us.’

  She wiped her nose on her sleeve. ‘Yeah, I know. She’d be so happy you’re getting a dog Em.’

  ‘I think she would. And I love that you’re coming with me to find one. Because I really think that would have made her even happier.’

  It had been less than four months since I got back from the Hoffman Process.

  It had felt quite odd re-entering the world after those eight days of seclusion. I’d booked into a Dublin hotel for a couple of nights as a kind of half-way house, something that was recommended to help reintegrate ourselves back into the noise of everyday life. ‘You can land with quite a bump!’ we were told. ‘Rest, eat well and try to spend some time on your own reflecting.’

  Waking up in the hotel the first morning, I felt different. I hadn’t rushed to drown out my solitude by scrolling through Twitter, or sending texts. I’d just sipped my tea and sat with my own thoughts for a bit. It felt very grown up, like a heroine in a French film. I’d had the same feeling when I wandered through Dublin, abandoning the instinctive urge to check out clothes in the department store filled with noisy crowds. I’d popped over to the park instead, to go for a wa
lk. I had never just gone for a walk before. What kind of freak did that? My kind of freak, now.

  The next day I’d spotted a jewellery shop. I remembered Jane once telling me that she bought herself a piece of jewellery every time she successfully completed a movie script. I had written a new script in a way, I decided.

  ‘Can I see that bracelet, please?’ I said to the friendly shop assistant with fuchsia hair.

  It was rose gold and raised like a bridge. It was perfect.

  ‘Do you want anything inscribed on it?’ asked Fuchsia Hair.

  There were two words I was thinking about. They were not words I would have chosen a week ago. I would have worried about smart, literary people thinking they were sentimental or ‘self-help book, a bit “basic bitch”.’ I would probably have said those very things myself. I didn’t now. I wanted to inscribe the bracelet with something that felt right – not something that looked right.

  ‘Love and Truth,’ I said, resisting the urge to apologise for my route one, gap-year tattoo choice.

  ‘That’s so lovely!’ said Fuchsia Hair approvingly.

  She handed it over when it was done and I admired it on my wrist.

  Truth was something I was getting more comfortable with – we were still struggling through those awkward first dates, slowly getting acquainted. But I was going to try and treat it like a keeper rather than a brief fling.

  Love had undergone a bit of an extreme makeover for me. It was now nothing like my old view of it – as something you showed off to the world, that made you feel validated and romantically desired. I was starting to see it as something you gave out rather than a thing you acquired, spread among everyone you cared about, not a goal to seize and win for yourself.

  I’d also realised that there was a basic requirement for love that there was no way round – you had to risk being unloveable to get it back from anyone.

  I had never really got how love could co-exist with flaws before. I had begun to assume that feeling insecure or in need of reassurance made you defective. And I was drawn to dynamics where that message would be reinforced. I thought voicing your doubts and fears and anger, as a woman, always ended with you being dismissed as ‘fucking mad, mate!’, the high-maintenance, psycho bullet someone had dodged. I hadn’t known it was okay to express those feelings. And that not feeling free to express them was an issue you shouldn’t ignore. I hadn’t known you could find a way to do it calmly and directly, without lugging an entire baggage hall into the room.

  I hadn’t known that you could accept how you had once felt as a child, but that those feelings didn’t need to get erected as stone tablets that could never be rewritten. That it was okay to see my parents as flawed and it didn’t make me weak to still feel love for them. One of the most powerful lessons I learned on the Hoffman Process was contained in just eight small words.

  ‘Everyone is guilty – no one is to blame.’

  And the minute I reminded myself of that, it was hard to stay pissed off at anyone for too long.

  My Hoffman friends and I communicated regularly, via our WhatsApp group. We referred to ourselves as ‘The Geese’, flying separately but supporting one another, always there if someone was having a moment.

  My friends at home noticed a change in me as soon as I got back. ‘How the fuck has it changed your skin?’ said Polly. ‘You’re so much calmer,’ said Cathy. ‘You seem different, kind of serene,’ said a friend of the Rosses, James. ‘I’m not saying you weren’t before,’ he rushed to reassure me. But he didn’t need to. It was true; no one would ever have used that word to describe me.

  Sue was happy to see how much I’d benefited from the Hoffman Process. But mostly she was proud of me for having taken the decision to go. Leaving the bootprint on the world for once, not the flip-flop. And we kept up our regular sessions. We weren’t yet quite at the sign saying, ‘You are leaving bear country.’

  I was aware that the newly evangelised, like the suddenly sober or the recent convert to exercise, could be really fucking annoying. Or those new parents who tell people, ‘Honestly, you don’t know what love is until you have a child.’ (Rach’s recommended response to this, by the way, was always, ‘Does that include Fred West?’) So I watched myself. I tried not to be one of those idiots who offer unsolicited advice. ‘Perhaps, as a child you witnessed your father’s anger and it scared you?’ is after all quite a punchable thing to say to someone who just wants to offload about a marital row.

  It was impossible to maintain the tranquil outlook constantly. I slipped up, lapsed into old patterns and habits, had bad days and even bad weeks. But it was a bit like those song lyrics you learned off by heart when you were a teenager – they’re stored away in the back of your mind, and sometimes you just recall them automatically, without even trying.

  Within weeks of returning home I discovered that my magazine had been a victim of the economy and was moving online. I was offered the chance to take a pay-off, and I grabbed it.

  A month or so later I was chatting to Polly over coffee. ‘By the way, there’s an executive at The Times who does all their podcasts and loves your radio show. Maybe you should talk?’ she said.

  There was a time when I would have absorbed that brief hit of praise but not acted on it. What if he was just being polite? Maybe he meant someone else? But this time I decided to be proactive. I sent him an email. I wanted to suggest hosting an interview-based podcast for The Times.

  When we met he said, ‘I don’t know what you think of this … but I wondered if you could do it over a dog walk. Are you a fan of dogs?’

  The Times asked me to write a feature to launch the new show. I prepared to write the sort of piece I’d always written. A sunny, joke-littered, ‘aren’t dogs the absolute best?’ type of thing. But I couldn’t write that anymore. Instead I poured out the truth. About losing Rach and my parents in just three years, about the emotions it had thrown up and the Hoffman Process. I wrote about Giggle and the way he’d helped with loss, and about my decision to finally get a dog. I ended the piece not with a wry aside but with something Hugh Laurie once said in an interview that had stayed with me. ‘There is no such thing as ready – there is only now.’

  It felt frightening spilling out my guts for the judgment of strangers. I had never revealed this much truth to anyone before. The comments started piling up on my Twitter page; people were sharing stories of dogs that had helped them through tough times. Hundreds of pictures of Labradors with tongues hanging out, dozing terriers, excitable poodles and every mixed breed imaginable. Staffies that kept people going through depression, border collies who comforted families through cancer, rescue dogs inherited from lost loved ones. Or people simply urging me to make good on my promise of getting my own dog, tempting me with pictures of puppies, saying, ‘Ruby and Spike welcome you to the world of dog people!’

  People’s kindness stunned me. I realised that you could devote your life to being the one with all the answers, to looking cool and funny and sharp and sorted. You could reach for the smartarse over the honest. Be spiky and unyielding instead of raw and scared. But the only thing that ever really connected you with anyone else was the truth.

  ‘Well, you’d better get a bloody dog now, after that piece,’ texted one friend. ‘Are you absolutely sure? They’re an awfully big responsibility,’ said another, until I reminded them that they had several children. ‘Whatever you do, avoid sausage dogs – the vets bills are terrible!’ advised someone else.

  I decided not to listen to what anyone else thought. When I met him, I would know.

  ‘We’ve got some super boys and girls,’ said Theresa, the friendly middle-aged lady who was ushering Mimi and me through the gate leading to her Hampshire house, decorated with brightly coloured hanging baskets. We were hit by a cacophony of barking. She went off to fetch tea and the wriggling litter of new arrivals, who were all in the running to be, if not exactly America’s next top model, then at the very least Britain’s most spoilt dog.

&n
bsp; I had spent several weeks researching my puppy with the tireless dedication of someone scrolling through an ex’s Facebook page. And I had decided three things.

  It could do with being on the petite side. I couldn’t really picture a Great Dane navigating its giant paws around my bijou home. I flashed forward to it crashing over lamps and struggling to wedge its vast frame round my cottagey wooden stairs. So it was a no from me. Even if their reputation as affectionate couch potatoes did fit my likes column.

  Compatibility was something we needed to establish from the off. A dog whose dating profile would read, ‘Adventurer! Marathon runner! Just back from hiking round the Lake District!’ was not going to work well in my world. The listing I was looking for was, ‘LOVE cosy nights in, cuddling on the sofa and major LOLZ. Prefer pooing during scheduled walks to dumps on the kitchen floor.’

  I wanted a dog that was silly and slightly strange-looking rather than sleek and polite. One with a ridiculous face that made me laugh, and a weird personality – the kind that would have totally got my family. And I wanted to avoid any dog with what Sue calls ‘an avoidant attachment style’. Though perhaps I wouldn’t mention that to the nice lady in Hampshire.

  I had done endless online quizzes about the right dog for me, answering questions like ‘how do you react when another driver cuts you off?’ (Assume immediate guilt.) ‘What do you do when a friend tells you a story you’ve heard many times before?’ (Nod but hurry them along.) These responses, for reasons that still remain a mystery, paired me with a toy poodle.

  The various rehoming charities brought up pictures of sweetly vulnerable whippets and various mixed breeds. There was a lovely terrier called Ricky who was ten years old. But I decided that taking in a dog in the mid or closing stages of his life was not something I was up to quite yet. I needed a companion at the very start of his journey.

  There was a website I began to obsess over, a sort of TripAdvisor for dog breeds, with no-nonsense reviews highlighting traits like rowdiness, bad breath and, more alarmingly, ‘legal liabilities’. I avoided the world of doggy electronic ankle tags and investigated the Pomeranian, looking under the cutesy heading ‘What’s good about ’em, what’s bad about ’em …’