I trailed along too.
“You do realise,” Oliver reminded me, “that I’m in court tomorrow, so you’ll be lone-parenting Spud.”
Fuck. I had known that. And I had remembered that. I’d just not confronted the full enormity of it until that moment. “I don’t think I’m ready.”
“You’re ready,” Oliver told me with so much certainty that I believed him for almost three seconds. “And even if something goes wrong, a difficult fact of being a dog owner is that hewillrelieve himself in our house at some point. Probably more than once.”
It was a bit sad how reassuring that wound up being. “You mean it’ll be okay even if he shits in my study?”
“Well, probably less so for you, but developmentally speaking, as long as we don’t encourage it or frighten him into undesired behaviours, he’ll be fine.”
“This feels like it’s setting me a very low bar.”
“And isn’t that comforting?” asked Oliver, who already knew the answer. “Now”—he showed me a little notebook—“this is Spud’s toilet diary. While we’re training, we’ll need to record when he goes and what he does.”
“Oh my God, I’m writing a poo memoir.”
“Technically, it would only be a poo memoir if it was your own poo. This is a poo biography.”
“I am ghostwriting Spud’s poo memoir.”
“Right now,” Oliver pointed out, “Iam ghostwriting Spud’s poo memoir.”
I sighed. “Is this what you dreamed your life would be? Recording the details of a dog’s bowel moments in a book with a pen tied to it?”
Oliver glanced up from his poo memoir, giving me the sort of look that could still reduce me to emotional custard. “Lucien,” he said very, very seriously, “this is everything I’ve ever dreamed of.”
Chapter 6
Apart from the tiny, insignificant detail of having a dog in it, the day passed pretty normally. Or at least, it passed pretty normally for Oliver, who went about his lazy-yet-inexplicably-productive Sunday routine exactly as he would have if hewasn’tsuddenly a hundred percent responsible for the survival, comfort, and socialisation of a new living creature. So he prepped his casework for the morning with Spud on his lap, and he read a chapter ofThe Man Who Died Twicewith Spud beside him, and made dinner (I was on washing up, which was our usual division of labour for Luc-is-an-awful-cook reasons) with Spud happily eating his own dinner in his little dog-pen.
I, on the other hand, spent the whole day feeling like there was a wasp in the room. Only it was a brown fluffy wasp as long as my forearm that wouldn’t sting me but might potentially wee on my shoes. Once or twice, Oliver suggested that I stash some treats in Spud’s den, which I dutifully did, knowing full well that tomorrow, when I was on my own, I would totally forget. And then all of Spud’s positive associations with his very special doggy space would go up in smoke like our oven that one time I tried to make banana bread.
Between the excitement of a new place and a general puppyish lack of self-control, Spud wound up needing to go to the little dog’s room—okay, little dog’s designated bit of garden—way more oftenthan I’d expected him to that evening. And every time he did, Oliver treated him like he’d cured cancer just in time for Christmas. Then, afterwards, he’d note down the time and what exactly happened in the Dump Diary. While he was doing all that, I was standing back, trying not to get in the way. In my very slight defence, Ididthink I was learning to spot the signs of a loo-needing puppy fairly quickly—he’d start sniffing the ground and walking in a circle in a way that stood out once you’d started to notice it. I just had no faith in my ability to follow through on those cues in a competent and timely manner. And then our puppy would go from being a well-adjusted, den-loving, outdoor-pooping ball of joy to a neurotic mess living in his own filth somewhere he hated. Fuck. I was going to turn our dog into me. Five-years-ago me, admittedly. But still very much me.
Eventually bedtime rolled around, and Oliver ushered Spud into his pen and clicked the door closed. Spud—busy seeking out the treats I’d hidden—was initially chill with this, especially because we’d been (well, Oliver’d been) shutting the door on him every so often to get him used to it. He was even okay when we left the room because we’d been leaving rooms all day. But around the time I was cleaning my teeth, he realised how brutally we’d betrayed him, which he expressed with a series of heartbroken wails.
I dropped my toothbrush. “Oh my God, he’s not okay.”
“He’s fine,” said Oliver, who was making sure the hand towels were all perfectly aligned on their racks. “It’s just a little separation anxiety.”
“It might be, but he’s a puppy. How is he supposed to know we’re coming back? For all he knows, we’ve decided we’d rather be international rock stars than raise a puppy so we’ve fucked off and he won’t see us again until we’re in our late sixties and we think we’ve got prostate cancer for no reason.”
“I normally avoid armchair psychoanalysis”—having donewith the hand towels, Oliver had left the bathroom and was climbing serenely into bed—“but there’s the tiniest chance you might be projecting.”
“Fine. He might not think that exactly because I don’t think dogs have a concept of rock music or, like, prostates. He’s still going to think we’ve abandoned him.”
“And in the morning,” said Oliver, way too calmly, considering a tiny dog was yelping pure trauma on the floor below, “he’ll discover we haven’t. Over time he’ll learn that nighttime is sleep time and we’ll be back the next day.”
I ditched my toothbrush, much as we had ditched our dog. “Counterpoint: Listen to him.”
“Counter-counterpoint: You can’t let yourself be emotionally blackmailed by a puppy.”
“Objection! Badgering the witness.”
Oliver gave me a sleepy look that was just on the right side of indulgent. “You know that isn’t how it works. But wedoneed to leave him. If we don’t, we’ll be making things a lot harder on ourselves in the long run.”
“It’s quite hard now.”
