The new dog is now a year old, and her bedtime habits are firmly established: when I retire for the night I invariably find the dog already lying on my side of the bed, her chin resting on my pillow. At this point I usually push her off, whereupon she will retreat to her own – perfectly nice – bed, or sleep on the bare floorboards, depending on the night-time temperature.
At around five the dog will leap back on to the bed and tunnel under the duvet head-first, stretching out between my wife and me, leaving only her back legs sticking out the top. That’s how things remain until one of us decides to get up. It’s not ideal, but it’s a routine.
The daytime routine is looser. The general rhythm is well established – eat, walk, sleep, walk, eat – but there are random moments when the dog seems to require additional, unspecified engagement, when she sits down next to me on the sofa, places a gentle paw on my forearm and gives me a look that says: we need to talk.
“I’m just watching this,” I say, pointing at the television. The dog turns to look at the screen, and then slowly rolls her eyes back toward me. It’s easy to read too much into a dog’s expression, but at times like these I sense deep wells of frustration. Maybe, I think, she just wants me to change the channel to a show with dogs in it.
The next day in the park the dog is lively but obedient, off the lead but never straying out of sight, playful with other dogs but willing to take no for an answer. She behaves perfectly right up until the end, when we encounter a woman in a long coat with two dogs of her own. Shortly after we pass by, my dog suddenly stops, turns and hares off after them. I whistle and call her name, but the dog ignores me and follows the woman – a complete stranger – in the other direction, all the while staring up at her with a look of true devotion.
“Well, we had some good times,” I say, twirling my lead. Eventually the woman is obliged to stop and head back towards me. We meet halfway, my dog still fixated on the woman, who smiles at me and shrugs.
“It’s because I have …” I don’t quite hear the last word – something like “spraahtz” – which in the discomfort of the moment I take to be a foreign term for a powerful form of canine magnetism, perhaps as practised in remote parts of Belgium, or maybe Poland. Then the woman reaches out and hands me a tiny dead fish.
“Oh, sprats,” I say.
“They love them,” she says.
That evening my wife, my oldest son and I are watching television, while the dog sits next to me and stares at my ear.
“So the take-home message is: we need to get some sprats,” I say.
“I’ve seen them in the pet store,” my wife says.
“Apparently they can’t get enough of them,” I say.
“Be quiet,” she says. “I’m trying to follow this.”
Suddenly the dog barks once, leaps from the sofa, slides across the coffee table and lands on the other side.
“What was that for?” says the oldest one.
The dog sits and looks up, staring at nothing with fearsome concentration.
“What is it?” my wife says.
“It’s like she’s witnessing some kind of apparition,” I say. Perhaps an apparition holding a little dead fish.
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“Have you seen a ghost?” my wife says. “Is it my mother?” The dog stares, unflinching.
“Actually I think she might just be watching a bug,” I say.
“If it’s my mother, give me your paw,” my wife says. The dog takes two steps forward, and places its right paw into my wife’s outstretched hand.
“It is my mother!” my wife shouts.
The oldest one and I exchange a brief glance as if to say: bit weird.
“Give me your paw again if she misses me,” my wife says. The dog obliges.
“That dog only knows one trick,” the oldest one says. “And that’s it.”
“A tiny hovering insect,” I say. “Or a baby spider floating on the draught from the windows.”
“Thank you for the message from beyond,” my wife says. “Now go lie down, I’m trying to watch this.”
The dog climbs on to the sofa and curls up next to me, wearing a look of profound dissatisfaction. We watch the telly in silence for a moment.
“So yeah, sprats,” I say.
“Oh my God,” my wife says. “We’ll have to rewind!”