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My ex-boyfriend’s name was listed on my internet bill and I could not remove it. One year ago we had moved into a new flat together—renting, renting, renting, oh how the wool gets pulled over your eyes with faux crossing-the-threshold assurances, live-work-play, rooftop solar panels, utopian architectural mock-ups of the sunniest day in London you’ll never see. We set up our bills together like giddy kids, newlyweds but not wedded, and not new, pushing mid-thirties. Water, heat, electric, internet, TV, rent, rent, rent—these things all happen in a smear so of course details get bungled, lines get blurred, names get put where they don’t belong and the names have to match, the postcode has to match, block capitals and the space, Google autofill always wrong—whose card is that anyway? What are the last four digits? I hate talking on the phone, I hate dealing with people, I hate waiting, I hate telling strangers in intricate detail exactly how they can take my money and having to repeat that conversation up the call tree, around the maypole of managers. By all means,come and get my money. Come knock on my door, I said to the woman on the phone. But if you want me to pay this bill, then you’ve got to change the name on the account because my name is George. No, listen to me. My name is George, there’s no one else using the internet, there’s no one else here and I won’t pay the bill until it’s in my name.
That was what I was doing when two of my dogs ran away. I had six of them (too many, pushing my luck) but while I was spelling out my email address, confirming my postcode, my mother’s maiden name, with the woman on the phone saying, “I’ve just sent you a text can you read me the code?” I looked down to check and noticed a fluffy white cloud missing from my periphery. No fluff, just grass and shadow, dark green turning blue. It was getting darker earlier. Summer was winding down.
“Hold on,” I said into the phone but my cheek pushed the hang-up button on accident and ended the call. Shit. Ryley, the fluffy white bichon frise, was missing. Vanished.
He was one of my regulars. For six months I had been walking Ryley four days a week and his presence was the moral foundation for the five other dogs I walked at the same time. I could let Ryley off the lead without issue. He was levelheaded, calm, less blatantly doglike than the others, he never barked, he never ran away. So shocking was his absence that it took me an extra minute to notice that Matilda, an enormous Afghan hound, was also missing. Her owner was a Russian billionaire in exile who was already upset with me over how much energy she still had after our walks. You don’t run her enough, he said. All your dogs are too small, Matilda’s not like the others, she needs to be pushed.
She was gone too.
“Shit, shit, shit.” I looked around. I was in the middle of Greenwich Park, in an open field with shallow woods all around me, shrubs and summer brambles. The walk was done and I was about to leave and return the dogs to their homes, but these stupid internet people, these stupid fucking bug people had finally returned my call to fix my bill and I had to answer or risk another delayed payment, another late fee, another dent of debt, tanking credit score, multiplying fees, did anybody read the letters they sent me? Was anybody on the other end of the threats? They sounded so oblivious over the phone, the whole hive of them nattering away in the background of every call.
“Matilda!” I hated calling the dogs by their twee little names. I spun in a circle. The four remaining dogs shuffled around me, their leashes wrapping around my legs. I didn’t call for Ryley only because he was the sensible one—I wouldn’t be surprised if he had gone and walked himself home—but not Matilda, no, she would be going berserk on her own, modelesque and dramatic, tied up in sticks and nipped at by foxes.
I roamed the perimeter of the field, peering into bushes, scraggly trees. Rain and heat had done a number on the woodland and it was lush, impenetrable, a nightmare of hay fever. The sky was overcast, darker than usual and moonless as dusk fell, with Canary Wharf looming in the distance, the windows of empty office buildings twinkling piss yellow. The four other dogs (a Yorkie, a Boston terrier, a mixed collie thing, and a princely Shiba Inu) had caught wind of something wrong. Their faces were pointed and jittery, their trust in me waning. Ryley was the best friend of the best friends—his absence alarmed them. And as far as the pecking order went, Matilda was the prized racehorse and for them this was the desertion of God, it put theirvery existences askew, their dog world governed by genetic chaos and codependency.
No, I wasn’t supposed to be walking six dogs at once. The dog walking app has a limit of four but you can trick the system with some timetable foolery and stack your pickups and lie about your drop-offs. I could do six at most. Once I had tried eight and that proved to be too much—I had lost track of things and a kid got bit. Not badly! But dramatically. Catastrophically for a London mum and a lawsuit was threatened and stalled mostly because I was nonresponsive—but more than threatened because I got a letter, I got an email. Did you know you actually have to create a login if you get sued? You have to set up a username and password of your own volition, as if to say yes, I’m happy to be sued, thank you very much, I’ll scan all these documents, I’ll upload them to yourportalbecause by the way I don’t have any money for you to take in the first place so what else have I got to lose. God, my internet bill. Why had Matilda bolted? She was worth thousands. I was embarrassed to call her name. I was embarrassed when the kid had gotten bit. I was embarrassed to be seen with six dogs. Four dogs. To be a shepherd of the ugliest sheep imaginable.
But this was what London did to a person. This was a city that made you put up with such ordeals because otherwise you’d sit and stew too long on hypotheticals, imagining how much money you could earn by just selling all eight dogs instead of returning them. OK maybe killing one (the Yorkie), but ransoming the rest, and not even on the black market because this was a city where you could get away with selling a stolen dog on Gumtree, where you could buy drugs on Deliveroo. This was a city where you wondered if maybe your ex-boyfriend was legally responsiblefor paying your internet bill because his name was listed as the primary account holder, so technically the bill was his and maybe you had a case there and he should be getting all these letters and you should even go ahead and ask some not-free legal advice about all this from the same people who were suing you because of the dog that wasn’t yours who bit a kid you didn’t know. This was a city where you acted out imaginary scenarios like this—near-cartoonish courtroom arguments—where you’d justify the actions you took for cruel commercial gain, the desperate measures your pride forced you to take. That kid was asking for it! The bill wasn’t in my name! You roamed the city like this, imagining blowout, end-all arguments with strangers, with tourists on the tube, with your boyfriend who wasn’t your boyfriend anymore and your boss who wasn’t your boss anymore. This was a city where your boyfriend became your ex-boyfriend because you quit (you weren’t fired, no way) your data entry office job because you were beginning to imagine arguments in your head like this, actually mutter under your breath as you walked aimlessly in circles on your lunch break and ran into people, smacked shoulders, and your boyfriend was worried about you—but only worried enough to leave you, not worried enough to stay.
And notyou, obviously I mean me. I meanIdid all these things.Iprowled the giant underground shopping mall in Canary Wharf on my lunch break cursing humanity, long before the dogs, long before everything.Ibecame one of those people you see muttering to themselves in public—it’s never the homeless, never the poor, it’s always the rich, those banker types, those Canary Wharf lads with their fat asses shoved inside their tight pants, muttering to themselves like sociopaths because they are sociopaths, and me in the background, their data entry fiend, staringat their huge asses without shame, at their steroid nipples jutting through their thin white shirts, cursing them to hell, cursing myself for lusting after them, for not having enough money to justify quitting my job (not getting fired!) but trusting that my boyfriend was making enough for both of us but apparently that not being the case, or at least he said it wasn’t and I had to start dog walking and then we just sort of broke up. Less than broke up. He said he was worried about me, he said it wasn’t about the dogs, and then he was gone. This was a city where you just sort of broke up. Case closed. This was rental economics. This was actual living breathing mushy human beings dysmorphing their body clocks to fit six-month break clauses and three-month renewal periods and one percent annual salary increases and timing breakups to match paydays and due dates and all for the sake of a tiny one-bedroom shit flat because they’re all shit flats, they’re all mildewy and smell like your cooking and fucked—even the ones you take your mum to when she comes to visit because she’s worried about you and you need to get your mind off things. Have you seen the peeling paint in Buckingham Palace? Have you seen the shit carpet? Even the new builds in Vauxhall, in Southwark, in everywhere a Shanghai developer has snatched and built a modular little circuit board tower, entombed in flammable plastic—or maybe it’s brick—let’s argue that it’s real brick, sure, it looks real convincing but it’s just plastic composite, just aerated fiberglass, blowing off in the wind, buckling in the heat, up in flames in seconds, all sense of permanence, of nesting and community nothing but big fat adverts on scaffolding because look, it’s a new month and your Singaporean landlord would like another two thousand pounds andyouhave to give it to them. God forbid they take it themselves.
(I don’t think I’d be able to kill a Yorkie. That was a joke.)
Messages started appearing on my phone.
“Are you on your way?”
“Where’s my Luna?”
“Did you forget to send your pic of Daphne today?”
These sick freaks actually demanded photos of their dogs on their walks. No, I can’t send a “pic” right now because me and Luna and Daphne and the other two bitches are climbing through bushes, sloshing through weeds. I pulled them along, forcing them to be the wild animals they didn’t know they were until we reached the deer enclosure in the far corner of the park. I searched the bushes along the fence. The deer on the other side were fascinated by us, these desperate barbarians.
“Ryley! Matilda!” I called into darkness.
The dogs by now had abandoned all possibility of trust. Luna, the Boston terrier, was dragging on her lead, refusing to go any farther but luckily she weighed about the same as a squirrel. More messages appeared on my phone. The owners had to use the dog walking app to communicate with me, which was a battery-suck, and I had already spent so much time talking to the internet people. 17 percent now 10 percent. Someone called, I answered. It was the Russian.
“Sorry yeah we’re just on our way, sorry.” I said. “Got a little sidetracked.”
“Sidetracked by what?”
“By, um...” I stopped. And there she was. Twenty yards away. Long-limbed, long-haired, with her hellhound sunken face. Matilda.
But she was behind the fence. Matilda was inside the deerenclosure. She was standing among the deer as if she were one of them, just as limber and gallant, only furrier. They didn’t seem to mind.
I hung up on the Russian and went to the fence. I walked along it, looking for a way around. I could climb it easily but what would I do on the other side? The dog was too big to climb back over with. I called her name and tried to lure her over, but she stayed put, watching me with her skeletal smile, taunting me.
I cursed aloud and decided to climb over. I could at least get ahold of her, then figure a way out of the enclosure. I tied the leads of the four other dogs to the chain-link fence—they were all in varying degrees of bafflement and peril but I shushed them, reassured them it was all fine. The Yorkie was trembling. The Shiba Inu was reverting into something more feral and wolflike, flinching at every sudden move. I made sure their leads were securely tied, then climbed over.
I landed on the other side and the deer scattered. “Stay!” I said to Matilda. She turned her head and contemplated running off with her new friends. I pretended I had a treat in my hand (I never had treats) and slowly approached. As soon as I was within reach I grabbed her by the collar and put her back on the lead. She shook herself and wagged her tail, letting her long hair wave and flutter like a 1970s glamor model. Her eyelashes were thick and coy. Her teeth were white and haunting against her black lips. I walked with her around the enclosure, looking for a way out. There was a large brick wall along the far side with no doors or easy exits, but farther down the meadow was a work shed and a garage where I could see a large wooden gate. The gate was locked up with chains, but there was a significant gap between it and the ground—this had to be how she had gotten in here in thefirst place and now we’d both have to squeeze back out. I headed toward it. The deer continued to scatter. More calls and messages chimed on my phone.
And then something happened.
Four things happened, actually, but all at the same time. These four separate events occurred at the exact same second and created what I can only describe as a rip or a kind of smear, like the world around me had boiled itself to an evaporated state and formed this millisecond injection of pure undiluted stress that I think would have killed my body if it hadn’t done what it did instead. These were the four events:
First, Matilda growled at a passing deer and I was afraid she was going to try and attack one of them, so I reached and grabbed her collar instead of just her lead to keep her closer to me.
