George Falls Through Time

Chapter 0

My ex-boyfriend’s name was listed on my internet bill and I could not remove it.

One year ago we had moved into a new flat together—renting, renting, renting, oh how the wool gets pulled over your eyes with faux crossing-the-threshold assurances, live-work-play, rooftop solar panels, utopian architectural mock-ups of the sunniest day in London you’ll never see.

We set up our bills together like giddy kids, newlyweds but not wedded, and not new, pushing mid-thirties.

Water, heat, electric, internet, TV, rent, rent, rent—these things all happen in a smear so of course details get bungled, lines get blurred, names get put where they don’t belong and the names have to match, the postcode has to match, block capitals and the space, Google autofill always wrong—whose card is that anyway?

What are the last four digits? I hate talking on the phone, I hate dealing with people, I hate waiting, I hate telling strangers in intricate detail exactly how they can take my money and having to repeat that conversation up the call tree, around the maypole of managers.

By all means, come and get my money. Come knock on my door, I said to the woman on the phone.

But if you want me to pay this bill, then you’ve got to change the name on the account because my name is George.

No, listen to me. My name is George, there’s no one else using the internet, there’s no one else here and I won’t pay the bill until it’s in my name.

That was what I was doing when two of my dogs ran away. I had six of them (too many, pushing my luck) but while I was spelling

out my email address, confirming my postcode, my mother’s maiden name, with the woman on the phone saying, “I’ve just sent

you a text can you read me the code?” I looked down to check and noticed a fluffy white cloud missing from my periphery. No

fluff, just grass and shadow, dark green turning blue. It was getting darker earlier. Summer was winding down.

“Hold on,” I said into the phone but my cheek pushed the hang-up button on accident and ended the call. Shit. Ryley, the fluffy

white bichon frise, was missing. Vanished.

He was one of my regulars. For six months I had been walking Ryley four days a week and his presence was the moral foundation

for the five other dogs I walked at the same time. I could let Ryley off the lead without issue. He was levelheaded, calm,

less blatantly doglike than the others, he never barked, he never ran away. So shocking was his absence that it took me an

extra minute to notice that Matilda, an enormous Afghan hound, was also missing. Her owner was a Russian billionaire in exile

who was already upset with me over how much energy she still had after our walks. You don’t run her enough, he said. All your

dogs are too small, Matilda’s not like the others, she needs to be pushed.

She was gone too.

“Shit, shit, shit.” I looked around. I was in the middle of Greenwich Park, in an open field with shallow woods all around me, shrubs and summer brambles.

The walk was done and I was about to leave and return the dogs to their homes, but these stupid internet people, these stupid fucking bug people had finally returned my call to fix my bill and I had to answer or risk another delayed payment, another late fee, another dent of debt, tanking credit score, multiplying fees, did anybody read the letters they sent me?

Was anybody on the other end of the threats?

They sounded so oblivious over the phone, the whole hive of them nattering away in the background of every call.

“Matilda!” I hated calling the dogs by their twee little names. I spun in a circle. The four remaining dogs shuffled around

me, their leashes wrapping around my legs. I didn’t call for Ryley only because he was the sensible one—I wouldn’t be surprised

if he had gone and walked himself home—but not Matilda, no, she would be going berserk on her own, modelesque and dramatic,

tied up in sticks and nipped at by foxes.

I roamed the perimeter of the field, peering into bushes, scraggly trees.

Rain and heat had done a number on the woodland and it was lush, impenetrable, a nightmare of hay fever.

The sky was overcast, darker than usual and moonless as dusk fell, with Canary Wharf looming in the distance, the windows of empty office buildings twinkling piss yellow.

The four other dogs (a Yorkie, a Boston terrier, a mixed collie thing, and a princely Shiba Inu) had caught wind of something wrong.

Their faces were pointed and jittery, their trust in me waning.

Ryley was the best friend of the best friends—his absence alarmed them.

And as far as the pecking order went, Matilda was the prized racehorse and for them this was the desertion of God, it put their very existences askew, their dog world governed by genetic chaos and codependency.

No, I wasn’t supposed to be walking six dogs at once. The dog walking app has a limit of four but you can trick the system

with some timetable foolery and stack your pickups and lie about your drop-offs. I could do six at most. Once I had tried

eight and that proved to be too much—I had lost track of things and a kid got bit. Not badly! But dramatically. Catastrophically

for a London mum and a lawsuit was threatened and stalled mostly because I was nonresponsive—but more than threatened because

I got a letter, I got an email. Did you know you actually have to create a login if you get sued? You have to set up a username

and password of your own volition, as if to say yes, I’m happy to be sued, thank you very much, I’ll scan all these documents,

I’ll upload them to your portal because by the way I don’t have any money for you to take in the first place so what else have I got to lose. God, my internet

bill. Why had Matilda bolted? She was worth thousands. I was embarrassed to call her name. I was embarrassed when the kid

had gotten bit. I was embarrassed to be seen with six dogs. Four dogs. To be a shepherd of the ugliest sheep imaginable.

But this was what London did to a person.

This was a city that made you put up with such ordeals because otherwise you’d sit and stew too long on hypotheticals, imagining how much money you could earn by just selling all eight dogs instead of returning them.

OK maybe killing one (the Yorkie), but ransoming the rest, and not even on the black market because this was a city where you could get away with selling a stolen dog on Gumtree, where you could buy drugs on Deliveroo.

This was a city where you wondered if maybe your ex-boyfriend was legally responsible for paying your internet bill because his name was listed as the primary account holder, so technically the bill was his and maybe you had a case there and he should be getting all these letters and you should even go ahead and ask some not-free legal advice about all this from the same people who were suing you because of the dog that wasn’t yours who bit a kid you didn’t know.

This was a city where you acted out imaginary scenarios like this—near-cartoonish courtroom arguments—where you’d justify the actions you took for cruel commercial gain, the desperate measures your pride forced you to take.

That kid was asking for it! The bill wasn’t in my name!

You roamed the city like this, imagining blowout, end-all arguments with strangers, with tourists on the tube, with your boyfriend who wasn’t your boyfriend anymore and your boss who wasn’t your boss anymore.

This was a city where your boyfriend became your ex-boyfriend because you quit (you weren’t fired, no way) your data entry office job because you were beginning to imagine arguments in your head like this, actually mutter under your breath as you walked aimlessly in circles on your lunch break and ran into people, smacked shoulders, and your boyfriend was worried about you—but only worried enough to leave you, not worried enough to stay.

And not you, obviously I mean me. I mean I did all these things. I prowled the giant underground shopping mall in Canary Wharf on my lunch break cursing humanity, long before the dogs, long

before everything. I became one of those people you see muttering to themselves in public—it’s never the homeless, never the poor, it’s always the rich, those banker types, those Canary Wharf lads with their fat asses shoved inside their tight pants, muttering to themselves like sociopaths because they are sociopaths, and me in the background, their data entry fiend, staring at their huge asses without shame, at their steroid nipples jutting through their thin white shirts, cursing them to hell, cursing myself for lusting after them, for not having enough money to justify quitting my job (not getting fired!) but trusting that my boyfriend was making enough for both of us but apparently that not being the case, or at least he said

it wasn’t and I had to start dog walking and then we just sort of broke up. Less than broke up. He said he was worried about

me, he said it wasn’t about the dogs, and then he was gone. This was a city where you just sort of broke up. Case closed.

This was rental economics. This was actual living breathing mushy human beings dysmorphing their body clocks to fit six-month

break clauses and three-month renewal periods and one percent annual salary increases and timing breakups to match paydays

and due dates and all for the sake of a tiny one-bedroom shit flat because they’re all shit flats, they’re all mildewy and

smell like your cooking and fucked—even the ones you take your mum to when she comes to visit because she’s worried about

you and you need to get your mind off things. Have you seen the peeling paint in Buckingham Palace? Have you seen the shit

carpet? Even the new builds in Vauxhall, in Southwark, in everywhere a Shanghai developer has snatched and built a modular