When I walk into the house with the dog ahead of me, I already know what I’m going to say when my wife asks, “How was that?”
I’m going to say: “It was just awful.”
But my wife isn’t in the house; she’s in the garden weeding, and only briefly looks up when the dog starts circling her. In the end, I have to go out there and stare at a bush.
“Lots of weeds,” my wife says. I stare, and say nothing.
“What’s wrong with you?” she says. My prepared answer does not fit this question; I’m obliged to improvise.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say, stepping into my office shed and shutting the door.
The thing I don’t want to talk about is an incident with another dog, on a nearly deserted patch of open scrubland. Possibly I should have seen it coming; the other dog was small, and small dogs have a way of going on the offensive early, before suddenly changing their minds.
But we had already given this dog, and the couple who owned it, a wide berth. At this point they were just dots on the horizon, and I was throwing our dog’s ball in the other direction. Our dog ran after it and brought it back, over and over.
“And then she suddenly drops the ball and hares off toward them,” I tell my wife eventually. “From, like, almost a football pitch away.”
What our dog saw, even from that distance, was another ball being thrown. She is a thief of balls, but people are mostly understanding about this.
“I could see she was being friendly with the little dog, if a little too interested in the ball,” I say. “And so I started trudging over there. I was about halfway when the whole thing kicked off.”
The dogs were barking and running in tight circles and the woman was screaming and the man was swearing. It’s the kind of chaotic scene you sometimes see from a distance in a park and think: I’m glad that has nothing to do with me.
“How bad did it get?” my wife says.
“At that point I was running, so I couldn’t really see,” I say. By the time I caught hold of the dog’s collar, it was over. The woman checked her dog for injuries – it had none – while I apologised profusely, and probably still insufficiently.
“She’s been so well behaved,” my wife says.
“This was not the time to bring that up,” I say.
I spend the rest of the afternoon in my office, even though it’s a Saturday. The incident has opened up a big gulf between how I am and how I wish to seem, and I figure I will just sit there until the gulf closes up again, even if that’s never. But then I get hungry.
“All year I’ve been experiencing bouts of anxiety,” I say, opening the fridge.
“I’ve noticed,” my wife says.
“Which I put down to some combination of stress, grief, ageing and the general tide of world events. But now I think it’s just from having a dog.” It’s been a whole year of worrying the dog will run off, or get kidnapped, or eat something poisonous, or be carried out to sea, or leap off a cliff in pursuit of a grasshopper, or lose a fight with another dog, or win one.
“Anyway, I’ve ordered a muzzle,” my wife says. A pause follows.
“That seems a bit drastic,” I say.
“I know, but I can’t have you going on like this,” she says. For a long moment, I think the muzzle is for me.
“Fine,” I say, trying to imagine how walking a dog with a muzzle will make me feel. And more importantly, how it will make me seem.
The next day, the muzzle arrives in the post. My wife takes it out of the package in front of me.
“It’s supposed to be a soft one,” she says, holding it up. “But it doesn’t look very nice.”
“The thing is,” I say, “she doesn’t actually bite.”
“You were the one who went on and on about how awful it was,” she says.
“I suppose I was mostly worried about how I came out of it,” I say.
“Anyway, we have it in case,” she says, putting the muzzle in a drawer.
We both look at the dog lying on the sofa, one open eye staring back up at us. The dog’s tail thumps twice against the cushion.
“It would never have happened if I was there,” my wife says.
“Here we go,” I say.
