On its way from the bedroom to the stairs, the cat comes across the dog, which is standing in a corner between two doors. The cat, as is its wont, lashes out with extended claws. The dog, unusually, does not react; it stands its ground, regarding the cat with a cold indifference that borders on pity. The cat takes another speculative rake in the dog’s direction, gives up and stalks off.
“Well done, for once,” I say to the dog. “Bare your teeth a little next time.” The dog looks up at me with cold indifference, holding my gaze for an uncomfortable moment.
“Yeah all right, whatever,” I say.
Later it becomes clear the dog wasn’t being brave; it was just too ill to care. It stares at everything with cold indifference, then lowers its head to leave a little heap of sick on the floor, and then moves on.
“You’re not very well, are you?” my wife says.
“It’s just my arm,” I say. “I can raise it to about there, but then—”
“Not you,” she says, pointing to the dog, which is suffering yet another paroxysm of silent heaving.
“Ugh,” I say.
“I’ll ring the vet tomorrow if there’s no improvement,” she says.
That night I find the dog lying in a pool of its own vomit, like a rock star, but in my bed. I end up giving it a bath at 2.30 in the morning, wrapping it in a towel and keeping watch. It has been many years since I spent the night lightly flecked in sick, making small talk with a creature that doesn’t speak English. I haven’t missed it.
The next day a question mark hangs over the precise definition of the word improvement. The dog has stopped being sick, but it has regained none of its former idiotic enthusiasm for life. To me that constitutes an improvement; my wife disagrees. She hauls the dog on to her lap and gazes into its forlorn eyes.
“You’re probably quite hungry,” she says. “But I’m afraid to feed you.”
“I’m afraid to sit next to you,” I say.
“Maybe a bit of dry food,” my wife says, carrying the dog into the kitchen.
Twenty minutes later, while I’m cooking, I hear a familiar gulping and spewing sound at my feet.
“Oh dear,” my wife says from the other room.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “That was the cat.” We both know that the cat being sick isn’t a symptom of anything, other than being a cat.
The next day I walk past my wife as she is sitting at her computer. There is something about the image on the screen that arrests my progress.
“I’m buying a new sofa for the kitchen,” she says. “Zero interest.” For a long moment I can’t think of a reply.
“You’re buying a new dog sofa?” I say finally.
“This one won’t be a dog sofa,” she says, clicking the mouse to make the sofa on the screen change colour.
“I don’t remember designating the old one a dog sofa,” I say. “But no humans have sat on it for 10 years.”
“Because it’s collapsed,” she says. “Anyway, it was the old dog’s sofa, and the old dog’s dead.”
She’s right in one way: the old dog colonised the kitchen sofa, while the little dog colonised everywhere else. Still, it seems a rash purchase in the circumstances.
“Can we afford to replace a sofa no one uses?” I say. My wife looks at the computer, then at me.
“I figure we should fiddle while Rome burns,” she says. I look at the sofa on the screen.
“In that case,” I say. “What should I buy?”
