Chapter 5 #2
Oliver was still nuzzling Spud with the effortless confidence of a natural dog-haver who, finally, after three decades in the wilderness, had been granted the chance to have a dog. “I’m not aware of your ever having tried.”
“Well, I can’t now. The dog’s beat me to it.”
“Lucien, unless you have a kink you’ve been hiding for a very long time, I don’t think you want to be in competition with Spud.”
He had a point. A bunch of points. On the kink thing, the competition thing, and the bonding-with-the-puppy thing. Gingerly, I approached the dog-and-barrister combo who looked slated to be a major part of my homelife from now on and crouched down next to them.
“Hi, Spud,” I said, trying not to sound too much like I was introducing myself to the cool kids at a new school. “I’m the other one.”
Spud gave me a look as if to say Well, they can’t all be winners and went back to love-bombing Oliver like some kind of canine narcissist. I tried patting him, but it increasingly felt like I was in one of those threesomes where the other two clearly wished you’d just leave them to get on with it.
Eventually Oliver decided the dog had lavished enough affection on him. “We should probably encourage him to explore his den a little.”
“Sorry?” I asked. “Are you talking to me?”
“No, I was telling Spud we should encourage you to explore your den.”
“Have you hidden any treats in it?”
“I’ve secreted some French toast under your pillow.”
Oliver stood, brushed off his jeans, and went to linger temptingly by the open door to the playpen. “Here, Spud,” he said, in an offensively charming singsong voice. “What have we got over here?”
“You sound like you’re kerb-crawling for a puppy.”
“Do you really think people who solicit sex workers go up to them and do this?” He patted his legs, continuing in what was clearly on track to being his dog voice. “Come on, boy, there’s a good boy. Come and see what Daddy Oliver’s got for you.”
“Oh, Jesus,” I yelped. “What are you doing?”
“I’m calling the dog over. Whatever is going on in your head is your problem.”
Tail metronoming happily, Spud had already trotted over and, having briefly investigated Oliver’s feet, was now inside the playpen unearthing the treats and toys that Daddy Oliver had, with typical fucking everything, tucked away yesterday.
“I think,” mused Oliver, watching Spud chewing the toy I’d been repeatedly told not to refer to as the butt plug, “unless it’s bedtime or there’s an emergency, we should avoid closing him in until he’s had time to develop positive associations with the space.”
“Sure,” I said, in the voice of someone who really, really wished he’d read more than zero dog books. “Sounds great.”
Oliver gave me the look of a smarter, kinder friend who knew I hadn’t done the homework and was doing his best to cover for me with the teacher. “He’ll be happy here,” he said, “if this is where happy things happen. It’s like the opposite of your old flat.”
“My old flat was fine,” I replied with semi-ironic defensiveness.
“But it had negative associations. Which is why when I met you it was a soulless wasteland of underwear and empty pizza boxes.”
“Oh yeah. You did see that, didn’t you?”
“Once. And then you cleaned it for me, which was breathtakingly romantic. And probably stopped us both dying of typhus.”
“Hey,” I protested. “I lived in that flat for years and did not die of typhus. Or cholera. Or scarlet fever. Or bubonic plague.”
“Yes.” Oliver was looking down at Spud, who was nosing under his blanket with his arse in the air, his tail still wagging. “If you’d died of bubonic plague, I’d have been much less inclined to pretend to date you. Or actually date you, for that matter.”
“Were we ever,” I asked, “pretending to date? Really?”
“For the sake of my pride, yes.” He frowned, still looking at Spud. “Hmm.”
“Hmm?”
“I think he needs to go outside.”
And, with that, Oliver swept Spud into his arms and carried him through the patio doors into the garden, where—continuing to be Oliver in every respect—he’d already prepared a designated toilet spot.
“Um,” I said, having followed at a poo-respecting distance, “I feel weird watching this.”
“It’s very important to watch,” replied Oliver earnestly.
“Is it, though?”
“I mean…” Oliver looked briefly flustered. “Not because of the…event itself. But we need to be ready to start positive reinforcement the moment he’s finished and not, and this is very important, a second before.”
“What happens if we’re premature in our celebration?”
“Well, then he’ll learn to come into the garden, do half a poo in order to receive a reward, and then trail the remainder back into the house to finish in comfort.”
“Oliver, this seems really complicated.”
“It’s not. It’ll be fine. We reward him for doing things we want him to do and not for doing things we don’t want him to. We just need to be very clear about what things are being rewarded.”
Spud was sitting on a patch of grass, looking up at us with a quizzical expression.
“And,” I asked, “what if he…doesn’t?”
“Then we go back inside and try again in a few minutes.”
“Won’t he just think that’s weird?”
“Probably, but he’s a dog, so he’s going to have to—oh.” Oliver’s voice swooped into a register I’d never heard it reach before. “Who’s a good boy? Who’s a clever boy? Here’s a treat for a clever boy. Well done, you. One more? Do you think you deserve one for being such a good boy? Go on then.”
To be fair to Oliver, Spud did seem absolutely thrilled, bouncing around like it was his doggie birthday.
“Um,” I said. “Yay. Good shit.”
“Why don’t you give him a treat,” suggested Oliver.
I really wanted to, but for some reason, the thought of giving my own dog a treat for doing what we’d wanted him to do felt incredibly overwhelming. So I made excuses. “I think I’ve missed the window. The all-important treat/faeces window.”
“How about,” offered Oliver, like he was giving me a treat, “you take him next time?”
“How about I keep providing moral support for you?”
Spud was briefly interested in the garden, but it wasn’t too long before he remembered Oliver existed and bounded eagerly after him, back into the house.
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 he will relieve 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, “I am 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.”