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 he wasn’t suddenly 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 of The Man Who Died Twice with 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 often than 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, I did think 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 done with 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 we do need 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.”
“Well, think how much worse it would be if we never get to have sex again because there’s a dog permanently sharing our bed.”
Damn that Oliver. Going straight for my Achilles penis. “Is there not some kind of middle ground between ‘Never have sex again’ and ‘Let a dog cry itself to sleep every night’?”
“In the short term? Not really.”
I slouched into bed next to him. “This is some Victorian-parenting bullshit.”
“And I agree,” murmured Oliver, rolling over to face me, “that treating a child like this would be very bad. But, wonderful as Spud may be, he’s not actually a human being. Dogs need boundaries and consistency. The more we reinforce those, the happier he’ll be.”
“He doesn’t sound very happy.”
“Lucien.” He pressed his mouth to mine, meltingly soft. “I love how much you care, even if you’re usually pretending not to.”
“You’ve really lowered your standards if you think being upset by a sad puppy is unusual.”
“I just mean, you work so hard to hide this side of yourself.”
Oliver kissed me again.
And then again.
And then his kisses started sort of trailing downwards, in a way I was normally extremely into.
“Oliver,” I cried. “Are you trying to sex me right now? Are you trying to sex me to the soundtrack of a distraught dog?”
“I was trying to distract you from the dog who, I repeat, is and will be fine.”
I actually pushed my very hot, very smart, very principled barrister boyfriend away from me. “I am not in the mood. I have never been less in the mood. And that includes that one time we both had food poisoning.”
“I’m sorry,” said Oliver, looking—to his credit—a bit embarrassed. “I’m aware this is difficult for you. I…just… Sorry.”
I propped myself up on one elbow, leaned over him, and brought my face to a distance from his face that was only acceptable if you were in a long-term relationship and you’d both recently brushed your teeth—and sometimes, frankly, not even then.
“Are you seriously not at all bothered by…” I paused and let Spud, who was still howling mournfully, speak for himself. “That? This.”
Oliver let out a gentle sigh. “Of course it’s not pleasant. But I know it’s for the best—for Spud and for us—so I feel the responsible thing to do is see it through.”
“What if we just…checked on him?”
“Then he’ll be reassured for a few minutes and then feel abandoned all over again when you come back to bed.”
Snuggling down on Oliver, I began to suspect I was having a philosophical crisis. “I don’t think I believe in being cruel to be kind. I think that’s just being cruel.”
“And I would normally agree with you,” said Oliver, calm again, now he’d given up on misplaced horn. “But this isn’t cruel. It’s necessary.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s how cruel people justify being cruel.”
“It’s the consensus recommendation amongst experts.”
“Then…fuck experts.”
One of Oliver’s eyebrows arranged itself into a condemning arch. “In the current global climate, I’m not sure that’s a sentiment anyone should be endorsing.”
“Oh, come on. This isn’t Brexit or vaccines. This is an adorable puppy who is ours, who we are making unhappy.”
“Lucien.” It was his rarely used short-on-patience voice.
Which he generally only used when he was caring really hard about something that he couldn’t fix.
“We have three options. We can go downstairs and check on Spud, which will change nothing the moment we come back to bed. We can set a precedent of letting him do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, in which case we will be—and I want to stress this—extremely irresponsible dog owners. Or we can continue with our current course of action.”
Okay. He was doing a rhetoric. And I knew he was doing a rhetoric.
I’d been with Oliver for long enough that I understood how he thought, and I knew how he argued, and I could even, sometimes, on a very good day, beat him at his own game.
This was not, given it’d started with my friend going into labour on the Millennium Bridge and ended with my dog going through the stages of grief in my study, a very good day.
The problem was, Oliver was technically right.
Leaving Spud to cry his little doggy heart out was the best thing to do if we were thinking about our long-term futures as people who wanted a well-trained pet.
And we did want that. Especially because if we couldn’t train our pet properly, it probably meant we’d suck at all kinds of other responsible family stuff, and that said bad things about our ability to look after a…
after any other dogs we might want to get in the future.
Except I also wanted to stop feeling sad, like, right now.
And I wanted Spud to stop feeling sad. And I wanted Oliver to stop feeling sad, too, which I was pretty sure he was, behind the rationality, tough love, and closing arguments.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t say that without sounding like an arsehole.
Like I cared more about my own comfort than Being a Responsible Dog Owner.
This was the downside of having a partner who’d honed his debating skills at Oxford and the bar when I’d honed mine at three in the morning in a bar.
So I sighed and rolled over, muttered a noncommittal “I suppose,” and tried to sleep.
* * *
For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, I was sneaking out of bed while Oliver was asleep.
It was, honestly, kind of annoying how good at sleeping he was.
I mean, even when I didn’t have a vocally miserable canine to contend with, my own brain had long ago decided that sleep was a privilege I didn’t always deserve.
Of course, the fact that Oliver got up early, worked hard, went to the gym, ate fresh vegetables by choice, kept a regular schedule, and didn’t look at his phone in bed, while I did the opposite of those things, might have had something to do with it.
Anyway, I’d tried. I’d tried really hard. But I fought the puppy and the puppy won. I just wasn’t whatever-personality-trait-it-took-to-sleep-through-a-crying-dog enough to sleep through a crying dog.
The second I set foot in the study, Spud went from traumatised wailing to happy ruffing so fast that I couldn’t decide if I felt loved or faintly manipulated. Which, honestly, Oliver and my mum aside, was my general experience of relationships.
“I’m a fucking bellend,” I told Spud, who wagged his tail cheerily at me.
Fucking bellend that I was, I knelt down and opened his pen, and he rushed into my arms like a princess rescued from a castle.
For whatever reason, while he’d coyly licked Oliver’s nose, he decided to lick my entire face.
And, on the one hand, it was probably incredibly unhygienic, especially since he nearly got my eyeball.
But on the other, I kind of felt like a real dog owner.
Because you had to really care about your dog to be okay with his saliva literally on your face holes.
“I’m taking that as a compliment,” I said. “But I’m still wiping it off.”
Which I did, as quickly as I could, using the sleeve of my T-shirt.
Spud’s excitement at my return didn’t quite win out over his obvious tiredness, and after a few minutes of sniffing round me to make sure I was all there, he curled up in my lap and started making snuffly, sleeping noises.
“Okay.” I attempted a reassuring whisper. “You know we’re still here, and now you’re unconscious. So Daddy Luc”—oh my God, I couldn’t believe I’d just said that, although I also didn’t entirely hate it—“is going back to bed.”
I gently transferred my bundle of puppy back into the pen, clicked the door closed as quietly as possible, and then tiptoed out of the study. I got one foot over the threshold when I heard the first tragic “Arroou?”
Fuck. Why hadn’t I listened to Oliver?
Half turning, half out of my mind from sleep deprivation, I decided that the best plan was to reason with a dog. “It’s all right. I’ll just be upstairs. Oliver and I will be with you again in the morning.”
“Arroou?”
“I promise.” With hindsight, it was quite a nuanced cultural concept to expect Spud to understand. “Look,” I tried instead. “You just have to get used to this.”
Spud did not look like he wanted to get used to this.
“You’re not allowed to come into the bedroom because then I’ll never be able to have sex again.”
“Ruff!”
“No not ruff. Arroou. Very arroou.”
“Ruff!”
“Great,” I said. “Since you’re feeling so ruff, I’m going to bed.”
“Arrooooooou.”
Double fuck. How-slash-why did I keep doing this to myself? I went back, opened the pen, and sat down next to Spud. “I’m only staying until you’re asleep.”
Spud smooshed right up against me.
I patted his little head, right between his little mismatched ears. “Just so you know, I wouldn’t rather be living the life of an eighties rock star than looking after you.”
“Mrrffhhh.”
“I’m not going anywhere. Even if I temporarily go somewhere.”
“Mrrffhhh.”
“Unless I die or something. Or Oliver dumps me. Because in that situation, the dog courts would one hundred percent give custody to him.”
Spud’s fur was silky under my fingers.
I closed my eyes for, like, half a second.