Chapter 8 #2
Her eyes widened. “The dog?” she cried. “Oh no. Is he dead? He is dead, isn’t he? Luc, you should have said that your dog was dead. That was much more important than the Wordle.”
“He’s not dead. He’s right here.” I pointed at Spud, who, to be fair, was nose down and half asleep in the crook of my arm.
“That is your dog?” asked Mum. “I thought it was a potato.”
“Why would I be cuddling a potato?”
“As your mother”—she gazed loftily at the ceiling—“it is not my place to judge.”
This was hard to process. On the one hand, I’d rather my mum didn’t think I regularly got on video calls with an emotional support potato. On the other hand, it was nice to know that, if I did, she’d be there for me. “This is Spud,” I explained.
“So it is a potato?”
“No, we called him Spud.”
“Why?”
“Because when he was very little, he looked like a potato.”
“He still looks like a potato.”
“He does not,” I insisted, “still look like a potato.”
“Luc, are you sure that is a dog and not a potato?”
“Yes. He’s got ears. How many potatoes have ears?”
“They have eyes.”
A thought dripped into my brain like ice water. “Mum, are you winding me up?”
“Maybe a little bit.” She grinned unrepentantly. “Though, honestly, he does look like a potato.”
“You’re going to give him a complex.”
“Don’t worry,” Judy joined in. “Dogs are very resilient animals.”
“It is very sweet, though,” Mum added, “the way you care about your puppy. It is like the meme.”
On a global scale, a lot of extremely bad things had happened in the last few years. But on a personal scale, none of them quite beat my mum discovering the internet. “Which meme?”
“You know the meme. Where there is the man and he does not want the dog but then the family, they go against his wishes and get the dog anyway, and this causes a breakdown between the man and his family, which I think is why they are not in the meme. But then, through the pain and loneliness, the man turns to the dog and he finds the solace.”
I was silent for a long moment. “That is the bleakest take on the Dad and Dog meme I have ever heard.”
“It’s a very moving story, Luc, about a man who finds companionship in his lowest moment. Also,” she went on thoughtfully, “it has a deep and tragic irony because the family chooses the dog over the man, and then the man chooses the dog over the family.”
Somehow, like always, Mum had chaos-gremlined her way into being insightful. “Funny you should mention that,” I said. “Because I might be in a photo without Oliver in it.”
Mum nodded understandingly. “None of the photographs have you or Oliver in them. They’re all pictures of the dog.”
“No, I mean, a metaphorical life photograph.”
“Are you seeing things in a funny way again?” asked the woman who’d interpreted the Dad and Dog meme as a searing domestic drama about loss and healing. “I have known Oliver for a long time now, and I do not think he is the kind of man who would make you choose between him and a puppy.”
“And if he is,” added Judy, “you should divorce him. That’s what I did every time.”
I couldn’t tell if Mum and Judy’s inability to stay on topic for six seconds together made this conversation much easier or completely impossible. “How many times is that?”
“Two or three? Lost count.”
I had follow-up questions. But they were probably best left unanswered. “I don’t think he’s asking me to choose. Not really. If anything, Spud is.”
“Go with the dog,” Judy told me with generational authority. “A dog’ll never let you down.”
“I don’t think Oliver is going to let me down either.”
“That’s what I thought about my fifth husband. Then he went and took up backgammon.”
Definitely best left unanswered. “Everything’s fine,” I denialled. “It’s just Spud gets really sad when we go to bed, and Oliver won’t let him into our room. Which means I have to go downstairs to stop him crying—”
“Why is Oliver crying?” interrupted Mum.
“The dog is crying.”
She made a Gallic gesture. “That does make more sense.”
“So anyway, I’ve spent the past two nights on my study floor looking after Spud, which means I’m not with Oliver. And that’s sort of the opposite of being in a relationship with someone.”
“Want my advice?” asked Judy, one hundred percent rhetorically. “Ditch the bugger.”
“But I really like Spud,” I protested, squeezing him just a little bit tighter. “This was a big step for me, and I don’t want to unstep it.”
Judy shook her head. “Not Spud. Oliver. A man who won’t let a dog sleep on the bed isn’t a man at all.”
“Okay, but I really, really like Oliver. And I don’t think either of us want Spud sleeping on our bed for the rest of his life. We have other things we want to do in bed.”
“Luc,” put in Mum, “if you are talking about sex, you can say sex. It is like gay. It is not a bad word.”
I sighed. “Fine. Oliver and I don’t want Spud sleeping in the bed because that’ll make it harder for us to have gay sex in it. Happy?”
“Oui.”
“Will it?” asked Judy. “Is there a logistical issue I’m not aware of?”
“No,” I replied very, very quickly. “It’s just neither Oliver nor I want to have sex in front of a dog.”
“Why not? Dog won’t mind.”
“I will mind.”
“I do see his point, Judy.” Mum came to what, on a good day, might have been my rescue. “I would not want to have sex in front of a dog either. I had sex in front of Mick Jagger once and that was bad enough.”
Not my rescue, then. Some previously unknown pit of hell. “Back to me?” I suggested.
And, mercifully, Mum went with it. “You know I love you, mon caneton, but I think you may be making a molehill out of a teacup. It has only been two days, after all.”
“Yeah, but Oliver says if I keep messing this up, we’ll have to get rid of Spud.”
“Did he say exactly that?” It was the gentle voice Mum used when she was navigating my bullshit. “In exactly those words?”
“Well, no,” I admitted. “But Spud needs discipline and consistency and boundaries and…and everything. And I’m not doing that.”
“There is more than one way to skin a dog, Luc.”
I put my hands protectively over Spud’s ears. “Not the right phrase, Mum.”
“You know I love Oliver too,” Mum said. “But you are a person who makes molehills out of teacups, and he is a person who thinks it is his way or the autoroute. And that can be good because you will stop each other becoming complete arseholes.”
“Thanks, Mum.”
“I am complimenting you. I am saying you are not complete arseholes.”
“That implies that I’m at least some part of an arsehole.”
She shrugged. “Everyone is some part of an arsehole sometimes. But this thing with you and Oliver, he is not going to leave you just because you have a different philosophy on dog owning.”
“I would,” said Judy.
“Yes”—Mum glanced at her—“but Luc would not go out with you because he is a gay and you are very, very old.”
Judy slapped her chest proudly. “Geriatriccore. Old-girl aesthetic. Hashtag stillgotit.”
“I don’t have a philosophy on dog owning, though.” I yanked the conversation back on track. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“And, Luc, neither does Oliver. He is just better at covering it up than you are.”
“No but…” I squelched into a quagmire of my own inadequacy. “He’s, like, read all the dog books and things.”
“So what?” said Judy. “Never read a book in my life, dog or otherwise.” She snapped her fingers. “Michael of Kent, here, girl.”
And, sure enough, Michael of Kent bounced into view, hopped into Judy’s lap, and awaited further instruction.
“Good girl.” Judy pulled what appeared to be about a third of a chicken out of her pocket and fed it to Michael of Kent.
“Also”—Mum swivelled the camera away from the Judy/Dog/Chicken triad—“you do not have to be a barrister to read a book.”
“No, but you have to be, like, not lazy and hopeless.”
“You are not hopeless,” Mum told me. “And you are only lazy because it is easier.”
“Yeah. By definition,” I pointed out.
Mum struck a pose of smug wisdom that, to be fair, was at least moderately earned. “Ah, but is it easier now, mon caneton?”
Was there anything worse than the person you’d explicitly called for advice giving you the advice you’d explicitly called for? In the grand scheme of things? Probably. In the moment? Definitely not.