Dog Days

George

(Where is Ellen?)

IT’S SEVEN SIXTEEN ON Wednesday night and Ellen still isn’t home from her book club. George hasn’t had his dinner, which Ellen always cooks from scratch and always has ready on the table with his half-glass of beer at five forty-five.

After she serves something warm and British (George doesn’t believe in any seasoning other than salt and lots of it, always sprinkling some liberally before checking the dish needs it), Ellen does the washing-up, dries the dishes, then lays the tea-towel over the tea-towel holder he made for her thirty years before. She snaps the cloth out before she hangs it, three times quickly, then once again. It will dry in the slow breeze that comes from the back door, which they always leave ajar for this reason. It will be ready to polish the plates after the boiled egg, and marmalade on toast they will have for breakfast the next morning at seven thirty. It will be washed that afternoon and hung on the line, which George put up five years earlier, after the first one collapsed in a storm. (George was cross about this. He’d planned for that washing line to see him out.) The tea-towel will hang alongside the sheets, towels and George’s white underpants, which Ellen washes on Thursdays.

On Wednesdays, Ellen leaves for her six o’clock book club at five fifty-four because it’s at Sue’s house, only three doors down. Sometimes they hold it at Barbara’s house, ten doors down, and then Ellen leaves at five fifty. They never hold it at George and Ellen’s house because George hates Ellen’s loud, opinionated friends, and he hates books even more. He also hates the nibbles Ellen makes that he is not allowed to eat because of his cholesterol. George doesn’t believe in cholesterol, global warming or baseball caps.

Ellen’s book club finishes at seven. George sits in his chair and his stomach hurts and now it’s seven eighteen and Ellen still isn’t home. Sometimes George stands at the bay window and watches her walk back towards him, sees her stop to say hello to next-door’s cat, which George wants to shoot because it shits on his shingle.

Today, he doesn’t go to the bay window to watch Ellen walk back to him, because Ellen won’t be walking back. Ellen died eight days ago. Her book-club book is on the walnut side table next to the beige sofa. George made her that table, dovetailed joints she’d cooed over. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine. George hates this book most of all, and the fact that Ellen was often reading it instead of cooking his dinner, and now she’s dead and there’s no one to look after him.

The clock ticks. The early-spring evening sky tie-dyes itself yellow, orange and red. George ignores the glorious sun setting outside the window and continues to stare at the dining table where his dinner won’t appear. Finally, he gets up and slow-shuffles to the kitchen.

Before the funeral, he’d been living off the Tupperware boxes that were placed quietly on his doorstep by neighbours who couldn’t stand him but loved his wife. George had watched them tiptoeing up the path, then scurrying back down it before he could get to the door. As if he’d thank them.

He had eaten the soggy stews in his pants and vest, flicking out bits of broccoli along with anything pink and suspicious. He had washed down claggy mashed potato, and thick gravy skin with gulps of water from the tap, cupping the liquid in his hands after he’d realized he couldn’t fit his head under it. He soaked the front of his vest, his sagging brown nipples visible. He didn’t care.

At the funeral, Barbara-from-the-fucking-church-and-the-fucking-book-club had plied him with two curled-up egg-and-cress sandwiches. He had put them into his mouth to stop himself telling Barbara how much he disliked her and what she could do with her patronizing smiles and arm pats. God works in mysterious ways, she had told him. God could fuck off, as far as George was concerned, and he let Barbara know as much once he’d swallowed the second sandwich.

George thinks perhaps he should eat something now. It might make him feel better. He’s at the age where his diabetes is controlled with tablets, but the threat of injections looms. He knows he needs to sort out his blood sugar, although he doesn’t know what blood sugar is because he doesn’t listen at the doctor’s appointments. That’s Ellen’s job. He’s sure it means he should eat something sweet.

He opens the bread bin and this is where he spots the letter. He has to look twice to make sure he’s not seeing things. It’s really there, though, with his name on it, in Ellen’s handwriting.

She’s never written him a letter before. She’s never needed to. Sometimes she left him notes: Didn’t want to wake you. Remember to pay the milkman when he comes. I’ll be at Knit and Natter. Money on the side. Be home at 3.35 p.m.

This is a letter, though, in an envelope that looks thick and expensive.

The bread bin also houses a single green bread roll. George pokes it and powdery mould stains his finger. He goes to the fridge and pulls out a tin-foiled box of what might well be shepherd’s pie, which George has on Mondays and which Ellen makes with a fake meat called Quorn that George hates. He once read that the mould used in Quorn was developed to feed the Germans in the First World War. It’s not true, but George has never let the truth ruin an opportunity to vent his vast opinions on what is wrong with society. Every time Ellen serves him this shit, he gives her a Nazi salute. She always ignores him, and hunger wins.

He leaves the pie on the counter and picks up the letter. His glasses are on the side table along with the remote control and his pill box, which is empty because Ellen sets up his medicine on Sunday nights and she’s been dead for over a week. He opens the envelope and reads.

George,

Please make sure you eat regularly and that you take your pills. I’ve restocked them for the next three weeks. The boxes are in the bathroom cabinet and I’ve written a note on how to do it yourself when you run out. If you have any problems, that nice girl Sophie from the pharmacy can help. You can have a biscuit from the tin if you’re feeling whizzy. There’s a shepherd’s pie in the fridge that you can microwave and there’s more food in the freezer. Don’t forget to feed and walk Poppy. She needs you.

Love, Ellen

George finishes reading the note, screws it up and tosses it at the bin. He misses. The time is now 8.01 p.m. and the sky is navy blue. George shouts, ‘FUCK,’ as loudly as he can, then stomps into the kitchen to retrieve the meal. He hasn’t turned on any lights and fumbles with the tin-foil lid. When he finally prises it off, he’s hit with the sweet smell of fermentation. He drops the container on the floor by the back door, then makes his way to the laundry room, where Poppy has been impounded. Barbara still comes in to walk her twice a day and pick up the piss-stained newspaper, but she’s told him it can’t carry on much longer. He’ll have to start doing things himself.

George keeps his radio on loud enough to ignore Poppy’s crying and barking. The smell is harder, but he gave up washing a week ago, so the stench could be coming from either of them. He closed the windows when Ellen died and hasn’t opened them since.

Poppy scrambles out, tail wagging, short legs slipping, long body wiggling. She stops by George’s feet and looks up at him. He points to the food. She barks. He pushes her with his slipper towards her supper. She barks again, three sharp yelps that make George clench his jaw. He hasn’t got his teeth in, though, and all he makes is a wet noise, like a baby.

‘Eat,’ he tells the dog, ‘eat, you ugly mutt. Eat and shut up.’ Poppy rolls onto her back and gazes at George with sorrowful eyes, like she pities him. Her long pink belly is exposed. Bald, save for the odd bristly black hair and uneven nipples, like the skin tags under George’s armpits. She is more piglet than dog, her pencil-thin tail swinging like a pendulum between her stubby legs. If a dog could smile, that’s what she was doing, smiling at him, coquettishly, like a lady of the night trying to pick up a punter, ‘Like what you see, sir?’ as she shimmies on the floor, her body curving into a question mark. ‘Go on,’ her raised ginger eyebrow says. ‘Give me a tickle. You know you want to.’

George watches her in disgust. He’s never liked flirty women, and flirty dogs are no better.

‘Filthy strumpet,’ he says, and staggers to his straight-backed chair. His ship in the storm. When he is sitting in it, he is a captain, capable of conquering the stormiest of seas. He’s Scott of the Antarctic in that chair. It won’t leave him when he’s not looking. Won’t drop dead on him with no warning. It creaks now and again, as old things do. When it does, George takes it gently down to his shed to glue and fix, and straighten and polish, and then he brings it back again. Sits it in the grooves the angled feet have indented in the shell-patterned carpet that was not his choice. His chair is reliable, not like Ellen. George imagines himself spraying her with WD40, with wood oil. Imagines he’s going mad. Clutches the walnut arm rests and shouts at the dog.

‘Don’t eat, then,’ he says. ‘Don’t matter to me.’ Poppy stops gyrating and gets to her paws, evidently realizing she’s not going to get a belly rub. On the way back to her room she pauses by the food. George watches her recoil at the smell and back away, leaving a trail of wee. I’m the boss round here, George thinks, not you.

Ellen came home with the dachshund puppy three weeks ago. She didn’t tell George she was getting a dog. Didn’t ask him first. Ellen knew George hates dogs. Especially small ones. It was the first thing she had ever done without consulting George first. And then she died, which was the second.

Dan

(Enter Atticus, stage right)

DAN’S STAR WARS ALARM clock wakes him at 6.30 a.m. He rolls over and punches Darth Vader on the head, then climbs out of bed and stretches. In the corner, his yellow Labrador, Fitz, yawns, and it sounds like Chewbacca, which always makes Dan laugh. Together they pad downstairs, Fitz’s tail drumming a beat on Dan’s bare legs as they go. Fitz checks that the garden is as he left it while Dan fires up the coffee machine. Dan counts the whirs and ticks but manages to turn the tap on and off only four times. Fitz comes back in time to hear the hiss of hot water, then sits and waits for the milk from Dan’s cereal bowl.

Dan has a new client today and that makes him nervous. It takes him longer than normal to button up his shirt and he sweats with the effort. He thinks about having another shower but doesn’t have time. This makes him sweat more. He knows the only way to stop the sweating is to start the counting. He tells himself it won’t really stop the sweating. The left side of his brain knows he’s being stupid. The right side tells him this three times, then three times more. On the second set of threes he turns the light switch on and off. On the third set he counts his vinyl records. He wants to reorganize them by era, not colour, but he knows this would make him very, very late.

He pats Fitz sixty times instead. Fitz licks his nose with a wide pink tongue. Dan breathes him in deeply, fur and dog and friend, and says he’ll walk him later. Fitz offers a paw, which Dan shakes. ‘Deal,’ he says, and Fitz gives a single solemn bark in return, then lumbers back out to the garden. ‘Don’t chase that seagull,’ Dan says. ‘It’s not just your garden. You need to share it with the birds,’ but it’s too late. Fitz is already haring down the narrow pathway to yip and yap a symphony at the trespasser.

Dan is seven minutes late to work. His new patient isn’t due until ten, but he likes to have a full hour to study the referral notes beforehand and he worries he might miss something vital with the seven minutes he’s lost. Even after two years and seven months, Dan is still waiting for someone to realize that he is entirely unsuited to being a counsellor. Waiting makes him nervous. It always has. His mother called him an impatient child, but it wasn’t that. It was the not-knowing, the unforeseen in any circumstance. He was not impatient, he was uneasy.

He’s twenty-five now, and still fears what might lie ahead, beyond the next bend. The sooner Alan, the owner of the practice Dan works for, realizes that Dan is masquerading as a compos-mentis professional and fires him, the better.

The door opens at 10.02 a.m. and in walks Atticus, without knocking. Dan knows he should stand up and introduce himself, protocol, professionalism, but the order of the universe flips over in a second too brief for him to count. Dan thinks it might have something to do with Atticus’s shoes. A man confident enough to wear tongue-pink tasselled suede loafers cannot possibly require any of the knowledge Dan has gleaned from his person-centred counselling degree. The shoes have spoken, have clicked their heels together three times, and, without a word, Dan is the patient and Atticus the counsellor. Because of this, Atticus does the introductions.

‘Daniel James, I’m Atticus. Your ten o’clock.’

It’s just a sentence, but the way he speaks makes it a statement, a question and a suggestion all at the same time. Dan jumps up in the same instant that Atticus flops down onto the sofa, kicks off his loafers and flings his arms above his head. One shoe hits an ornamental Chinese vase that sits inside the disused fireplace. It wobbles, and they both watch to see if it will fall. Dan tells himself that if it smashes he will have reasonable grounds to refuse to offer therapy to Atticus.

‘Prone to aggression,’ he’ll tell Alan. ‘Best referred to Anger Management.’ It’s not Dan’s speciality.

As the vase quivers, Dan practises the line ‘Sorry, I can’t be your therapist. Here’s a referral to a colleague I trust’ in his head so that it won’t sound too forced. Or relieved.

The vase finally stops vacillating, choosing to remain erect and intact. Dan tells himself to make eye contact. He feels like he’s been shot when they look at one another that first time. He has to glance down at his clipboard just so that he can breathe. He had clutched it to his chest when he stood up and knows he looks awkward now but doesn’t know how to be anything else.

He tries to commit to a seat. Normally, he would take the blue chair next to the sofa, but today there doesn’t seem to be enough space between the two pieces of furniture. Atticus is sprawled out, long limbs stretching into the middle of the room. Dan has to walk carefully around them as he makes his way to the red chair in the corner, which is only there to cover the damp on the wall. NHS. Cuts. Lack of funding. Old buildings.

Dan knows Atticus is studying him from his spot on the sofa. He dips an eyebrow at Dan’s socks as if to say, ‘Star Wars? How very cool of you,’ but by the time his gaze drifts back to Dan’s face the smirk has been replaced with a lazy grin that Dan instantly understands is his trademark.

‘So, tell me, Daniel James,’ he says, from under unusually long eyelashes, ‘how exactly are you going to fix me?’

The notes Dan has been given on Atticus are brief. Male. Thirty-two. Seeking help for generalized anxiety. Has attended counselling various times. Never stayed for the whole six weeks.

Dan repeats these snippets in his head and tries to work out the best way to respond. Atticus has done this before so he must know how counselling works. He is aware that Dan cannot fix him. Dan doesn’t offer cognitive behavioural therapy, or any other kind of therapy, really. He is simply a counsellor. People talk and he listens. Rephrases their words and offers them back, carefully, with soft hands. His patients receive them like pebbles, smooth and warm in their palms.

Dan organizes people’s brains. That is what he does. That is what he is good at. He is a gentle gardener, concise as he prunes his way through their thoughts. He parts their words like leaves, finds the fronds and petioles. Digs, careful of flints, until he hits milky root. Dan removes the bindweed, tugs at scutch grass, churns the mud until it is rich, chocolatey earth again.

But Dan has no idea what to do with, or for, Atticus, can’t think while his long bare feet are pointed at him, like an accusation.

Dan thinks of Fitz, and counting, and dominoes falling in perfect rows. He thinks of ironed creases in white shirts and his sparkling cutlery drawer, spoons all facing the same way. He thinks of books that have yet to be opened, straight spines, his apple-cutter and the perfect eights it makes.

He says none of this, though. Instead he says, ‘I can’t fix you, Atticus. That bit is up to you,’ then pauses for a beat too long. Atticus makes all the colours in the room bleed. He makes Dan glottalize his ‘t’s. Dan never does that. Missing ‘t’s in words is as bad as skipping over numbers when counting.

The chair squeaks in protest at being sat on after a year spent acting as a prop. Dan has to speak louder. ‘I’m here to help you on your journey.’ He groans inwardly and wonders if he always sounds so clichéd and cringy. He’s got nothing else, though, so has to keep going. ‘This is your fifty minutes. You can talk, and I will listen. Anything you say will be kept within this room, unless you tell me something that puts yourself or others at risk, and then I am obliged to report it to your doctor and any other relevant healthcare professionals.’

Normally this speech comes out smoother. Normally Dan smiles reassuringly as he says it, and the patient smiles back confidently to assure him it will never come to that. Then they say something like, ‘Oh, I’d never hurt myself or anyone else. It’s nothing like that,’ before launching into a rambling speech about why they have come and Dan pictures secateurs in his hands, bends down and starts pruning. By the third session, Dan will realize the first reason the patient gave for needing counselling was not the real reason. Nor was the second. He’s been pulling out begonias, not the weeds, bird’s-foot and moss.

‘Why are you in counselling, Atticus?’ Dan asks suddenly, needing to know, more than ever before, why he’s been given the privilege of asking personal questions of a stranger without having to give anything of himself away.

Atticus shrugs and spreads his hands, palms facing up, long fingers curled slightly at the tip. Dan looks at them, briefly wishing he was a fortune-teller.

‘I was lonely,’ Atticus says simply.

Dan didn’t expect an answer. He didn’t know what he was expecting, but it was not loneliness.

‘And now?’ he asks. There is a beat of silence. A meeting of eyes. A tectonic shift in the universe. Day-blind stars are realigned.

‘And now I am not,’ Atticus says, and it is as simple and as complicated as that. Dan knows that six weeks will never be enough for Atticus. Nothing Dan can do will ever be enough for Atticus.

Counselling sessions are fifty minutes long. Dan gives himself at least ten minutes between clients. Always, when a session ends, Dan closes the door softly, then lightly mists the sofa with a lavender spray and opens the window to air the room. His nan always used to do that when people left her house, especially ones she didn’t like. Dan likes to think it makes the atmosphere clean and fresh for the next patient – him, too. Then he drinks a glass of water while he records notes to type up in detail later. Sometimes, he adds in the odd ‘Good boy, Fitz,’ because they’ll listen to the recording together, Dan frowning and scribbling, Fitz wagging his tail with joy that he hasn’t been forgotten. Dan does all this as quickly as he can so he has enough time left to straighten his socks, plump the cushion and line up his pencil before there is a knock on the door.

After Atticus, though, Dan does none of these things. He just stands, staring blindly into space, and would have carried on doing so all morning had his next client not arrived, pulling him from his reverie.

Lizzie

(Maud refuses to listen)

LIZZIE IS WEARING TOO many clothes. This is nothing new, but dog-walking is and she’s sweating in the thick fluffy socks from Lost Property. None of it is actually lost, it’s donated, but that doesn’t roll off the tongue as nicely. Lizzie finds it easier to wear a lost pair of socks than a pair given to her out of pity.

Lizzie doesn’t trust the dog. She’s not used to them. Never wanted to walk it in the first place. She can’t understand why people bring animals into their home, with their fangs and claws and potential violence. They could kill you for looking at them in the wrong way, for approaching them as they eat. Are a wet nose and wagging tail really signs of happiness? And when has happiness meant safety? There is so little people can control, not even themselves, yet they still place faith in the flesh-eating descendants of wolves, leave them alone with babies, and let them think they are in charge.

Lizzie has no choice, though. Tess took her in, when she needed succour, and in return she must take out Tess’s dog. It was on her list of jobs – ‘Take out Maud’. Initially she thought Maud was an old, or mentally impaired, woman. When she found out Maud was a dog, she felt briefly relieved. Then Maud sniffed at her, investigated her with her snout, and Lizzie froze.

Lizzie shudders as she clips on the lead and tells herself Maud is probably too old to do more than bark. Two brown eyes stare up at her crossly. Lizzie once read you should never look a dog in the eye, but neither of them can seem to break contact.

Lizzie also read up on what to do if a dog attacks you while she was researching them at the library. Forewarned is forearmed, after all. Lizzie, an excellent scholar, now knows that a bloodhound’s sense of smell is so finely tuned that it has been cited in court as evidence. She also knows that up to 30 per cent of Dalmatians are deaf in one ear, and that all dogs have three eyelids.

Maud’s eyes remind her of the teddy bear she had as a child. Lizzie wonders how many mites live in the dog’s long black eyelashes, remembers the delighted squeals of disgust when she taught her class that in a science lesson – how we are slowly being eaten alive by infinitesimal insects gorging on our skin. How they spend their whole lives travelling the planet of our face, mating on our nose, laying eggs in our eyebrows, dying on our lips. How they love the dark and secret places, the moist holes and hidden folds. The children scrubbed at their eyes with tiny fists, their faces screwed up in appalled disbelief. She had them then, in the palm of her hand. You could have two thousand follicle mites eating the dead skin around your eyelashes and you’d feel nothing. Lizzie quite likes the idea of oblivion, leaving things to Fate, although she doesn’t trust Fate any more than she trusts