For two nights running, I am woken by an auditory hallucination: the sound of our old doorbell. Both times, I sit bolt upright and think: it can’t be someone at the door – we don’t live there any more.
On the third night, I am woken by a shrill ring that turns out to be our new doorbell. The dog runs downstairs barking, and I follow. On the other side of the front door I find the oldest one.
“Where’s your key?” I say.
“I don’t have a key,” he says.
“Where have you been?” I say. “How did you get there?”
This is a question I ask everyone, because I barely know where I live. My children are very much at home among the outer rings of London’s transport system, but I am not. I have to ask Google how to get to the dentist, and the answer strikes me as mind-bogglingly unlikely. Every trip is an adventure.
“Where have you been?” my wife says when I return from a meeting the next afternoon.
“Where haven’t I been?” I say. “Underground, Overground, wombling free…”
Billy walks into the sitting room and gives me a sheepish, sidelong glance, as if to say: I can see this is a bad time.
“Billy,” I say, “where have you come from? How did you get here?”
Billy is a grey lurcher who suffers from chronic embarrassment. He’s not our dog – he belongs to the youngest one’s friend – but he was enough of a fixture at our previous address to have his own favourite chair. Our new sitting room is a pretty faithful recreation of the old one, and Billy is standing in the empty spot where his chair would be, looking mortified.
“Your chair is being re-covered,” I say. “It hasn’t gone.”
Billy turns toward the door, looking back at me with a pained expression that seems to say: I’m just going to go and lick the plates in your dishwasher.
“We don’t have a dishwasher, either,” I say. “Next week.”
Billy scrutinises the edge of the door frame with boundless regret, as if to say: I don’t do these things because I want to do them. I do them because I’m a dog.
To be honest, I find Billy’s awkward presence comforting. Our dog is unsettled by the new surroundings, by turns glum and hypervigilant, while the cat crouches on things and stares into the middle distance as if waiting for a bout of vertigo to pass. Billy, on the other hand, is equally ill at ease in any environment, familiar or unfamiliar. I also appreciate his willingness to travel, although it’s hard to imagine him on the bus.
That night I do not hear any doorbells, false or actual – just the smoke alarm at about 1am, when the youngest one and Billy’s owner attempt to make toast. I wake a little after 5am, as I’ve done every morning since we moved. I imagine it’s something to do with a lingering sense of dislocation, some combination of the dog’s vigilance and the cat’s confusion.
“It’s because there are no curtains,” my wife says. “And shut up – it’s 5am.”
I manage to sleep, on and off, for another hour, before getting up and starting work. My desk is presently six inches from the bed. It’s not an ideal situation, but it’s the only solution in the medium term, and it completely eliminates the need to get dressed.
Eventually, the sound of typing drives my wife from bed. At some point I catch sight of her reflection in an unhung picture, standing behind me, arms folded. I turn around.
“Can you pick up these trousers?” she says. “And there’s a clothes rail that needs putting together.”
“As nice as it is to have you here while the magic happens,” I say, “you need to go away.”
After she leaves, I end up staring at the screen, lost in thought. I hear a strange clacking rising toward me, and I turn to see Billy’s head poking above the stairs.
“Have you been here all night?” I ask.
Billy looks back, wearing an expression that seems to say: I’m so sorry.
