Of course. She’s talking about the dog. This happens more often than I’d like: being too exhausted to make simple conversation with someone at least twice my age. “Good idea.” I smile. “Might try it myself.”
She shoots me a look. “That will hardly endear you to the ladies now, will it?”
Ah, the Ladies. Who are they, again? Iris seems convinced there’s a queue of them somewhere, keen to put their lives on hold to hang out with a guy like me.
“Do you think he can cope?” she asks, gesturing at Rufus. “Out there, in this heat?”
I used to be a vet. I’m not anymore. But I think Iris takes comfort from my onetime credentials.
“It’s cooler today,” I assure her. She’s right that it has been warm lately, since we’re only just in September. “We’ll go down to the boating lake, have a paddle.”
She smiles. “You too?”
I shake my head. “Prefer to commit my public-order offenses after hours. More exciting that way.”
She lights up like my lame jokes are the highlight of her day. “We’re so fortunate to have you, aren’t we, Rufus?”
To be fair, Iris is pretty awesome herself. She wears earrings shaped like fruit and has a Premium subscription to Spotify.
I bend down to clip on Rufus’s lead as he eases to his feet. “He is still a touch on the heavy side, Iris. That won’t be helping his heat tolerance. How’s his diet going?”
She shrugs. “He can smell cheese from fifty paces, Joel. What can I say?”
I sigh. I’ve been lecturing Iris about Rufus’s food for nearly eight years now. “What was our deal? I’d walk him, you’d take care of the rest.”
“I know, I know.” She starts to shoo us from the living room with her walking stick. “But I just can’t resist the look on his face.”
•••
I’ve got three dogs in tow by the time I make it to the park. (I walk two others along with Rufus, for ex-clients who aren’t too mobile. There’s a fourth as well, a Great Dane called Bruno. But he’s socially unhinged and formidably strong, so I take him out after dark.)
Though the air’s freshened up overnight, I keep my promise to Iris about the boating lake. Unclipping the dogs’ leads, I feel myself brighten as they canter like horses into the water.
I take a breath. Attempt to persuade myself again that what I did last night was right.
It had to be. Because here’s the thing: almost my whole life, I’ve been having prophetic dreams. The kind of lucid, lifelike visions that startle me from sleep. They show me what’s going to happen, days, weeks, years down the line. And the subjects, always, are the people I love.
The dreams come every week or so, the ratio of good to bad to neutral fairly even. But it’s the dark premonitions I fear most: the accidents and illnesses, pain and misfortune. They’re why I’m constantly edgy, always on high alert. Wondering when I might next have to reroute the course of fate, race to intervene in someone’s best-laid plans.
Or, worse, save a life.
I track my canine charges from the bank of the lake, giving a group of fellow dog walkers a smile and a necessarily wide berth. They gather most mornings by the bridge, beckoning me over if I make the mistake of eye contact. I’ve kept my distance ever since the time they started swapping tips on sleeping well, their talk turning to home remedies and therapies, pills and routines. (I made my excuses and vanished. Haven’t hung out with them since.)
The whole thing just cut a little deep. Because, in pursuit of a dreamless night, I’ve tried the lot. Diets, meditation, affirmations. Lavender and white noise. Milky drinks. Sleeping tablets with added side effects, essential oils. Exercise so punishing I’d have to stop to spew. Sporadic periods of hard boozing in my twenties, under the misguided notion I could alter my sleep cycles. But years of experimenting proved my cycles to be untouchable. And nothing I do has ever been able to change that.
Still, simple mathematics dictates that less sleep must equal fewer dreams. So, these days, I stay up till the small hours, aided by screen time and a pretty hard-core caffeine habit. Then I allow myself a short, sharpspell of rest. I’ve trained my mind to expect it: snapping out of slumber after just a few hours.
Which is why, now, I’m in urgent need of coffee. Whistling the dogs from the water, I head back toward the path along the river. On the road to my right, real life is grinding into gear. Rush-hour traffic, cyclists, commuters on foot, delivery vans. A discordant orchestra, tuning up for a standard weekday morning.
It makes me oddly nostalgic for normality. I’ve not got too much headspace at the moment for gainful employment, friendships, or health. The worry and lack of sleep leave me constantly knackered, distracted, jittery.
If only to prevent the whole thing from burying me, I live by some loose-ish rules: exercise daily, not too much booze, steer clear of love.
I’ve confessed the truth to just two people in my life. And the second time, I swore it would be the last. Which is why I can’t tell Steve that last night, I was acting on a fevered premonition about Poppy. My goddaughter, whom I love like I do my own nieces. I saw the whole thing: Steve exhausted, forgetting to brake at the crossroads with Poppy in the back. I watched his car barrel into a lamppost at thirty miles an hour. In the aftermath of the accident, she had to be cut from the car.
So I took the necessary action. Which was worthy of that double whisky, if I do say so myself.
I put the dogs back on their leads and make for home. I’ll need to avoid Steve, for a while at least. The longer I can keep my head down, the less likely he’ll be to connect me to what happened last night.
