by Tim Dowling
‘Why are you so angry?’
‘This house is like a zoo,’ I say. ‘A bad zoo. A zoo of shame.’
‘Found one,’ she says. ‘In here.’ She is holding a stereo speaker to her eye. ‘How do we get it out?’
‘We don’t,’ I say, unplugging the speaker and shoving it in the cage. I go to sit in my office for a while, thinking of many convincing arguments against getting another dog. I imagine how embarrassing it would be to walk two dogs at once. I go down to the kitchen, where the youngest one is doing his homework and my wife is talking on the phone using the especially bright voice she reserves for strangers she wishes to charm.
‘Marvellous!’ she says. ‘We’ll see you then!’ She hangs up.
‘What’s that?’ I say.
‘Nothing,’ she says.
‘I’m not walking two dogs,’ I say. ‘People will think I’m a dog lover.’
‘It’s really for him,’ my wife says, pointing to the youngest one. ‘It would be his responsibility.’
‘No, it wouldn’t,’ I say. ‘It would be my responsibility.’
‘Actually, it would be my responsibility because it would basically be my dog,’ says the boy.
‘What about that dog?’ I say, pointing to the dog. ‘We could make that dog your dog.’
He starts humming and leaves the room.
‘We can’t get another dog,’ I say. ‘It’s a terrible idea for many, many reasons.’ I list a few, but feel as if I’m speaking in green ink. My wife no longer appears to be listening. ‘So to sum up,’ I say, ‘there will be no dog.’
‘Fine,’ she says.
‘What do you mean, “fine”?’
She starts humming, but I don’t need an answer. I know what ‘fine’ means. ‘Fine’ means she has already got the dog.
The day is at an end and I feel drained of life. It could be because the red wine I ordered off the internet doesn’t agree with me. Or it could be because my children are not in bed even though I have sent them to bed with strict instructions that they must actually go to bed. I can hear the football bouncing off the walls upstairs. I press myself to a second glass of wine – I have a whole case of it to get through – and lie back on the sofa to watch the TV flicker.
‘They’re playing football,’ says my wife.
‘I know, but I can’t face the stairs,’ I say. ‘Maybe I’m not getting enough sunlight.’ Above I hear running footsteps, shrieking and a slamming door.
‘Will you shout at them?’ says my wife. I open my mouth to shout, even though I know I’m too tired to make myself heard. From upstairs I hear howling laughter which is, I notice, from this distance almost indistinguishable from distress. As I mentally log this observation for future use, it becomes clear what I am hearing is actually pure, undiluted panic. The noise is coming from all three children. My wife and I run up the stairs.
The middle one, it transpires, walked into his room to find the cat inside the snake tank; a small woodshaving had got lodged in the groove in which the door runs, leaving a gap big enough for the cat to insert a single claw and tug. By the time I get there the cat has been removed, but Mrs Hammerstein is lying lifeless on the floor of the tank with her mouth hanging open and her neck bent at an unnatural angle. Her long red body is dotted with puncture wounds.
‘That can’t be good,’ I say. I look at the youngest one, who is horrified. The middle one is beside himself. The oldest one turns and leaves the room.
‘Oh dear,’ says my wife.
Mrs Hammerstein isn’t even our snake. Our snake is safely tucked into the back of his favourite tin can.
‘Mr Rodgers is fine,’ I say. ‘But Mrs Hammerstein …’ I don’t finish the thought, which is that we might as well let the cat have her now. What are we going to tell the owners? They entrusted us with a healthy snake, and now we’re going to give them back a belt. A damaged belt.
‘Oh dear,’ says my wife, again. I reach out to stroke Mrs Hammerstein but it turns out that I am no more comfortable touching a dead snake than a live one; I end up giving her a reluctant, unseemly poke. The neck unkinks, the mouth shuts, and she slowly begins to curl round herself.
‘It’s moving,’ I say. The oldest one comes back into the room.
‘This happened to a guy online,’ he says. ‘If they get bitten they shed their skin straight away, apparently.’
‘You mean it’s fine?’ I say.
‘There’s a danger of infection, so it needs to go in a separate cage on some paper towel. And everyone on the snake forum criticized the guy for not having a proper lock.’
‘It doesn’t look fine,’ I say. ‘It’s just staring madly, without blinking. Do snakes blink?’
‘Go and get some paper towels,’ says my wife to the middle one.
‘Are we saying this snake is fine?’
The next day, on the vet’s orders, we give Mrs Hammerstein a bath in an iodine solution. She is, it must be said, some way off fine – she lacks verve and seems to suffer from a curious inability to turn right – but if you’d told me the day before that I would be suffused with a renewed sense of optimism and energy just because someone else’s snake wasn’t dead, I’d have mumbled incoherently, poured myself a third glass of red wine and changed the channel.
A fortnight later Mrs Hammerstein remains alive, if not exactly well. The vet said there was a problem with the snake’s jaw – it was either swollen or dislocated, or possibly both – and there was a bit of a kink in her neck, although I accept that ‘neck’ is an imprecise term when you’re talking about a snake.
Against all my instincts, I take to monitoring the snake closely, opening its cage once a day and poking it to see if it moves. It’s hard to tell the difference between a snake that’s getting better and a snake that’s going downhill, but you only have to look at its companion snake, Mr Rodgers, to see that Mrs Hammerstein remains some way off fine. From time to time I consult the middle one, in whose room the snake tank sits: ‘Is Mrs Hammerstein, you know, improving at all?’ I say.
‘Yeah, I think so,’ he says. ‘She’s moving more, um, realistically.’
‘Does she eat?’
‘Nope.’
We put the snake in the bath every few days, as a precaution. We have no idea whether it’s drinking its water – no one has the patience to try to catch it in the act – and an occasional swim is supposed to help it stay hydrated. But it goes four weeks, then five, without eating anything. It’s lethargic, and its bright-red colour has dulled. To me, the ultimate prognosis seems obvious. My wife takes it to the vet again, half hoping to be offered a dignified way out. Instead, she gets a lecture on the general resilience of snakes. If Mrs Hammerstein is to die, it will be on her own timetable.
A week later, I can bear no more. I want to once again be the kind of father who recovers pets from pipework; not the kind who says, ‘Oh well. Fish die.’ I go off in search of the middle one.
‘It is time for this snake to eat,’ I tell him. ‘Fetch me a dead mouse and some tweezers.’ I carry the snake to the bath. We dangle the mouse in a variety of ways, to no avail. Mrs Hammerstein doesn’t seem to see the mouse if it is introduced from the left, so we try the right. She strikes a few times, but ends up biting her own body, which I find disturbing. When she does briefly clamp on to the mouse, it’s clear she can’t open her jaws far enough to get hold of it properly. It’s too big.
‘Maybe half a mouse,’ says the middle one.
‘Guess whose job that is,’ I say. He goes to the kitchen and returns with a neatly scissored mouse torso. I pick up the bite-sized chunk of gore with the tweezers. We take turns for another half-hour, without success. Mrs Hammerstein is clearly exhausted, and the boy is distressed.
‘This is incredibly frustrating,’ I say, feeling myself unaccountably on the verge of tears. ‘Poor Mrs Hammerstein.’ At that moment my wife walks into the bathroom.
‘What’s going on?’ she says.
‘Mrs Hammerstein still won’t eat,’ say
s the boy.
‘She seems to lack the motor coordination necessary to take prey,’ I say. ‘Frankly, I don’t see how we’re ever—’
‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ my wife says. She picks up the snake, pries open its jaws with a finger, takes the half-mouse off the end of the tweezers and pokes it down its throat. Then she pinches its mouth closed, massages the mouse down past the kink and hands Mrs Hammerstein back to the boy.
‘Hang up that towel,’ she says on her way out.
A large pull-out quote from the pages of an open magazine snags my eye. ‘Animal hoarding is now a recognized psychological condition,’ it says, alongside a picture of two dozen cats living in a crawl space. How ridiculous, I think. Then I look around the kitchen and think: if you don’t have the condition, mate, you’re certainly suffering from the symptoms.
To say that the new dog is settling in well would be to imply that it has had to adjust to our routine in some way, which is not the case. Despite its having a cage all its own to sleep in, I still wake up most mornings to find that I am wearing it like a hat. In the first two weeks I could still walk into a room and think, ‘A turd? On the new carpet? How incongruous’, but these days this regular occurrence is just a grim reminder of our lack of progress in that department. The new dog does what it likes, where it likes.
The old dog maintained a pained denial for the best part of two weeks, steadfastly ignoring the little animal that yapped in her face and hung by its teeth from her ears. Recently, however, they have started to get on, which is to say that they play-fight for hours at a time, rolling from room to room, snarling, growling, barking and clacking their claws on the wooden floors in a desperate bid for traction. It is impossible to read a newspaper while this is going on, but it’s also quite hard to watch. Every once in a while I look up to see that the little dog’s head has disappeared inside the big dog’s mouth.
‘Don’t do that,’ I say. ‘It will end badly.’ But they do not listen. If the little dog is troubled by being partially eaten, it does not show it.
I don’t like walking two dogs. I know how pro-dog it must look, and I sense vague disapproval from a certain sector of the community that regards multiple ownership as a sign of wrongheaded enthusiasm, if not a recognized psychological condition.
I also find it difficult to accept a compliment on behalf of something cute; I would much rather apologize for something ugly. I have, for example, no suitable answer to the question, ‘Isn’t it darling?’, which, though rhetorical, still seems to demand some response.
‘What’s it like having two?’ asks a woman with a Labrador.
‘Well, it’s, you know,’ I say. ‘It’s just awful.’
‘Yes, I was thinking of getting another one, but I …’ She stops and draws in breath sharply as the little dog rears up on its hind legs at her feet.
‘Oh! Isn’t it darling?’
‘Hmm,’ I say.
My wife arrives home in the early afternoon. I hear the little dog yapping in the hall, pausing only briefly, I imagine, to turn a back flip.
‘What’s this?’ my wife says, in her squealy dog voice. ‘What’s this on the floor?’
It’s a turd, I think. Another turd.
‘Have you walked the dogs?’ she shouts to me, suddenly dropping her voice an octave, if not two.
‘Not since this morning,’ I say.
‘Shall we walk them together?’
It’s just preferable, I suppose. This way, nobody need know that the cute little dog is mine, or indeed that the woman striding ahead of me and being uncharacteristically exuberant about the outdoor life is my wife. And when we are stopped halfway round by a woman who is walking a pug, a terrier and a whippet, my wife has a ready answer to the question, ‘Isn’t it darling?’ It’s quite a long answer, but it’s better than nothing.
A few weeks later my wife is cross with me and, as is her wont, she is venting her dissatisfaction on the first person to ring her. ‘He called me immoral for putting a dog turd in a garden waste bag,’ she says to whomever is on the other end.
‘It’s made very clear on the side of the bag,’ I say. ‘Green waste only. No soil, no stones, no any other type of rubbish.’
‘Well, exactly,’ she says into the phone. ‘Where am I supposed to put it?’
‘The old dog,’ I say, ‘was never allowed to shit in the garden, much less in my luggage.’
The old dog raises one eyebrow, then the other, in the fond hope that I might be saying something about food in a bowl. The new dog gnaws on the old dog’s leg.
‘You know what he’s like,’ my wife says. ‘He’s afraid of authority.’
To be honest, I’d be ecstatic if the new dog could be compelled to perform its toilet at the bottom of the garden. This time around, the whole house-training regime has been haphazard, ineffective and punctuated by alarming setbacks. It has been ten weeks, but we are still a long way off any sort of graduation ceremony.
I am, I accept, part of the problem. Because my argument against getting the new dog went unheeded – indeed un-acknowledged – I have refused to play any part in its education. For the first few weeks I was content merely to indicate to others the location of the latest puddle of pee. After a while, I couldn’t be bothered even to do that. If it was in my way, I cleaned it up; if it wasn’t, I left it. I weighed the effort of maintaining a grudge against the inconvenience of stepping on the occasional tiny turd, and decided that, for the moment, it was worth it. I learned to check inside my shoes before I put them on.
My wife will say there has been some improvement, but she is being optimistic. Occasionally I hear her trying to discipline the puppy, but you don’t have to be in the same room to know that the dog is refusing to make any connection between the note of disapproval in the scary lady’s voice and the tidy heap of faeces on the landing.
The next afternoon I come down to the kitchen to find another pool of pee on the floor. The sun is shining, the back door is wide open and the little dog is sitting in the garden. I think it now comes inside specifically to pee.
My wife enters the kitchen.
‘Some pee there,’ I say, pointing. She sighs. The little dog comes in from the garden.
‘What is this?’ my wife says to the dog. ‘What is this?’
‘I think that dog is defective,’ I say. ‘You should take it back.’
‘She’s learning,’ my wife says.
‘Wrong,’ I say. ‘It learns nothing. It’s completely untrainable.’ My wife extends one arm and snaps her fingers. The little dog begins to walk around the room on its hind legs.
The next day is a Sunday, and I rise late. There is no pee on the landing, no turd behind the front door. My wife is already out walking both dogs.
For the first time in a long time, the house seems a quiet, civilized, vaguely hygienic place. The oldest one is sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast and reading the paper, and I decide I will join him. I get a bowl out of the cupboard. As I walk over to the table I step in something that crackles unpleasantly as my bare foot sinks into it. I shudder as I lift my leg, letting the foot dangle in mid-air. The oldest one slouches and leans sideways to look under the table.
‘Did you just step in that pile of Rice Krispies?’ he asks. ‘Worst feeling ever.’
In the park I meet a neighbour I haven’t seen in a while. Her dog is sitting on the path, refusing to complete the journey to the shop. My two dogs are wheeling in tight circles ahead of me, growling and nipping at each other. The woman gives me a sympathetic smile.
‘How’s the bonding going?’ she asks.
‘Oh, you know,’ I say. ‘They get on, most of the time.’
‘No, I meant you and the little one,’ she says.
‘It likes me,’ I say, ‘but I don’t like it back.’
‘You’ll have to bond with it somehow, for everyone’s sake.’
‘Really?’ I say.
We’ve had the new dog for six months, and I still have fantasies a
bout giving it away. It smells. It chews things. Last week, it gnawed an enormous gouge into the sitting room floor trying to get at a peanut wedged between two floorboards. My wife is devoted to the new dog, but she is not home with it all day.
After we return from the park, it spends the rest of the morning haring up and down the stairs. Then it skids into my office, climbs onto the back of the sofa, presses its nose against the window and growls. This goes on for fifteen minutes until I stand up and look.
‘Are you growling at that man?’ I say. The man in question is smoking a cigarette in an adjacent street, about 200 yards away. The dog looks at me, looks at the man, and growls.
‘He’s entitled to stand there,’ I say. ‘In any case, it’s none of your concern.’
I sit down and return to my work. The growling continues, rising occasionally to a stifled yap, presumably because the man in the street has looked at his watch. I think back to a time when the only distraction I had to cope with was the knowledge that the old dog was sitting behind me staring at the back of my head. These days the old dog spends a lot of time downstairs. The little dog growls at the man again, then yaps.
‘Quiet!’ I shout. This gives it a jump, causing it to slip and fall down the back of the sofa. There is a horrible muffled scratching as it tries to claw its way back up.
‘I can’t work like this,’ I say, standing and walking out of the room. The dog is at my heels before I’m halfway down the stairs. On the landing we meet the cat, which arches its back and makes a noise like a distant air-raid siren. The dog sits down, looks at me and whines.
‘Don’t try to involve me,’ I say, continuing down the stairs.
By the afternoon the little dog has calmed down; it pads inoffensively around my office as I write. I think about what my friend in the park said about bonding. Maybe if I made more of an effort, it wouldn’t be so difficult to live with. It might even stop shitting in my luggage.
The front door opens. The little dog’s ears stand up. I look down to see that it has just finished chewing the cover off my dictionary.