Chapter 8
During our lunchtime texts, I,d told myself I’d let Oliver know about the whole might be losing my job thing when he got home.
When he got home, I told myself I’d let Oliver know about the whole might be losing my job thing after dinner.
After dinner, I told myself I’d let Oliver know about the whole might be losing my job thing before bed.
Except now I was in bed, and I was fucked.
Fucked in the emotional sense, not in the fun sense.
Or, I reasoned as Oliver was brushing his teeth, I’d been deeply unselfish.
Because he’d had a hard day in court—apparently it wasn’t so great when the defendant showed up wearing the exact clothes he’d been caught on CCTV in—and he deserved to play with our new puppy without being burdened by a problem that still might not lead to me losing the only job I’d been able to hold down since Miles left.
Or, I reasoned as Oliver climbed in next to me, that was complete bullshit and I was being a coward.
After all, what was the worst that could happen?
I’d tell him the situation and he’d be supportive and insightful, and I’d have to…
deal with my feelings and stuff. And I didn’t want to do that because it was very, very important to me that working at CRAPP sucked and I hated it.
If that turned out to be less than entirely true, I honestly wasn’t sure I’d psychologically recover.
At least Spud had calmed down. Maybe me spending the night in the pen had helped him understand that we’d always be here for him, even after we’d left the room. Maybe Oliver, and all his dog books, had been wrong.
“Oliver,” I said. “I’ve got somet—”
“Arrooooooou,” said Spud, from below. For a little dog, he had a set of lungs on him. “Arrooooooou.”
“Fuck.”
Oliver nestled his bookmark neatly into The Man Who Died Twice. “Were you about to tell me something?”
(“Arrooooooou.”)
“No.” I buried my head under the pillow.
“Are you sure?” he asked. “Because normally when you’ve something important to say, you put it off all day and then hint vaguely at it once we’re in bed.”
“That’s…” I flailed for a devastating put-down, briefly considered calling him bum-face, and then settled on, “very insightful. And annoying.”
(“Arrooooooou.”)
“Yes”—somehow, even through the pillow, I could tell when Oliver was smiling—“I realise caring about your feelings is one of my worst traits.”
“It really is.”
“I’ll try to do better in future. But, for now, what’s wrong?”
“Arr-arrr-aroooooooooooou!!”
This kind of conversation was hard enough when there wasn’t a sad puppy downstairs. Which meant it wasn’t technically a lie when my mouth, with the tacit consent of my brain, said, “It’s Spud.”
“I did actually think about that.”
Reaching into his pyjama pocket—apparently I was in a long-term relationship with the kind of man who wore the kind of pyjamas that had pockets—Oliver produced a little plastic drug bag. And, for a moment, I thought he’d gone for the extremely unbarristerly solution of getting stoned off our tits.
To be honest, I’d have been up for it.
“Happy second day of having a dog,” said Oliver, dropping a set of blue rubber earplugs into my hand.
I appreciated the thought, but… “You know it’s not the noise that’s the problem, right?”
“I do, but it’ll be easier if you can’t hear him.”
“Arr-arrr-aroooooooooooou.”
“I’m not sure,” I tried, “I want to make it easier to ignore my crying dog.”
Oliver sighed. “And that’s very kindhearted of you. But ignoring your crying dog is the best way to stop your dog from crying.”
“Okay, but—” I was floundering. Not having read all or indeed any of the dog books was putting me kind of on the back foot here. “Isn’t that, like, teaching him toxic dogsculinity? Aren’t we just training him to repress his feelings?”
Any thought I’d had that Oliver was being heartless evaporated when I saw the look in his eyes, all compassion and sorrow.
“Lucien,” he said, running his fingertips along the line of my jaw, “I am so pleased we took this step together. But this is supposed to be our space. Our time. If it’s going to become the place where we worry about Spud, I don’t think that’s going to work for me. Not long term.”
“Arrooooooou.”
When he put it like that, it wasn’t going to work for me either.
I made a semi-committal I suppose kind of noise and tried the earplugs.
On a very literal level they worked. I couldn’t hear Spud or much of anything else.
But all that meant was that I went from listening to my dog arooooouing his heart out, to imagining my dog arooooouing his heart out. Which, if anything, was worse.
Oliver leaned over to kiss me good night. Then, despite having just given me earplugs, he said something.
“What?” I asked, not completely sure how loud I was being.
He said the something again. It was clearly meant to be a comforting something. So I just nodded and nestled into my usual trying-to-sleep position in Oliver’s arms.
* * *
“Lucien,” said Oliver the following morning. “This isn’t sustainable.”
Spud and I poked our heads out of the blanket nest that I’d built for us. “I know. I just…”
Except I couldn’t think of a just.
There was a longish, not-great silence while Oliver gazed down at me with an expression that made me really miss anger.
“I’m running late,” he concluded.
Oliver had never run late in his life. But part of the reason for that was that he always felt like he was running late. And he always felt he was running latest when he was upset.
“Oliver,” I tried. “I—”
“Please take care of Spud. He’ll need feeding and taking outside. I’ll see you this evening.”
At which point, my amazing barrister boyfriend strode out of the house, trailing sadness like a piece of toilet paper stuck to his otherwise immaculate shoe. Toilet paper sadness that I had stuck there.
“Ruff,” said Spud, sticking his tongue in my ear.
“Not the time,” I told him.
And I must have sounded firm because he made a discouraged “Mruff?” and looked away.
Which made me feel doubly shitty because while the universe had presented me with a situation where I could have a not-sad dog or a not-sad Oliver but couldn’t have them both be not-sad at once, I apparently had the power to make them both not-not-sad as much as I liked.
In an effort to be a slightly less rubbish dog owner, I fed Spud—much to his delight—and took him outside—much to his delight—and then, hoping to win back some Oliver points, filled in the Defecation Chronicle (7:05 did a poo and some wee, looked normal I think).
Despite not having any meetings at all that day, I put on trousers so I could feel at least a little bit professional while WFHing.
We were a couple of weeks post–Beetle Drive, and I had a fair bit of work to do chasing up people who were dragging their feet on donations.
Work that I mostly managed to do, although the whole business with the earl was still preying on my mind (no updates), as was the business with Oliver (no updates, not even at lunchtime) and Spud (updates entirely toilet- and treat-related).
By about two I’d had enough of pretending to be a serious grown-up who knew how to compartmentalise. So I flopped down on the sofa and FaceTimed my mum. Or, at least I tried to FaceTime my mum. What I actually FaceTimed was a wall that greeted me with a boisterous “Luc, m’boy.”
“Hi, Judy,” I said to the wall. “Could you maybe turn the iPad round? And,” I added, after receiving an intense close-up of her left nostril, “move it slightly farther away?”
Eventually, Judy managed to get a manageable visual. “Odile’ll be here in a minute or two. She’s just in a rather sticky situation at the moment.”
“Oh my God.” I jolted upright out of a sense of duty. Because I knew the one time I didn’t, my mum would be genuinely dead. “Is she okay?”
“Honestly, not so much. She’s perilously close to chucking it in entirely.”
My heart gave a nervy thwip. “Wait? What?”
“You know how it is. You get to a certain point, and it just doesn’t seem like it’s worth carrying on. It’s like you’ve tried everything and you can barely imagine a way forward.”
My heart un-thwipped itself. This did not sound like Mum. Or rather it did but only in a very specific context. “Is she having trouble with Wordle again?”
“How’s it going, Odile?” Judy yelled.
“Do not distract me,” Mum yelled back, despite clearly being in the same room. “This is important. I am hanging by a thread here.”
“How many guesses have you got left?” I asked.
“One. This is life and death.”
I resigned myself to temporarily communicating with my mum by shouting through an octogenarian. “Can I help?”
“Non. Nobody can help me. I must do this alone.”
“Mum,” I said. “I’m actually having a bit of a freak-out about, like, my relationship and my dog and shit. So could we maybe… I don’t know how to say this in a way that doesn’t sound ungrateful, but could we maybe focus less on guessing five-letter words and more on, say, me?”
“But her streak, man,” cried Judy. “Her streak!”
“No, no, no,” declared Mum, immediately appearing in shot.
“My son is more important. Although”—she grinned slyly—“if you happen off the top of your head to know a five-letter word that goes something-o-something-e-r, that would be very helpful. Alternatively, it will destroy me entirely. It will depend if you are right or not.”
Surreptitiously, I googled today’s wordle solution in another tab. “It’s cover.”
“Could be mover,” suggested Judy. “Or lover. Or hover.”
“It’s cover,” I said. “Trust me.”
Mum gave me the I know what you did look that I knew too well from childhood. “Luc, you did not use the Googles.”
“No,” I lied.
Begrudgingly, almost defiantly, Mum typed the answer in. “You were correct, mon caneton, but I wish you to know that I do not feel good about this victory. Now. What did you need your maman for?”
“It’s”—I shifted uncomfortably—“it’s about the dog.”