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by Tim Dowling

  ‘Idiot!’ I shout. ‘Out!’ It runs off. A moment later my wife walks in with the dog trotting behind her.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she says.

  ‘That dog,’ I say, mustering all the icy indignation available to me, ‘has just eaten my dictionary.’

  My wife stares at me. ‘It’s not your dictionary,’ she says.

  ‘Fine. Our dictionary,’ I say. ‘The point is—’

  ‘Did you leave it on the floor?’ she says. She’s trying to make this my fault, I think.

  ‘The dog doesn’t own the floor,’ I say quietly.

  When I go down to the kitchen at the end of my working week, my wife says I have to do something about the youngest one.

  ‘He comes home every day and goes straight to the television … He’s become institutionalized.’

  I shrug, because it seems to me that when you run an institution, the institutionalization of the inmates is a desirable outcome, if not the whole point.

  ‘Good to see he’s settling into a pattern,’ I say.

  Meanwhile, our most recent intake, the little dog, still refuses to knuckle under, conducting itself in a manner that runs counter to all stated regulations. In violation of my express wishes, it spends all day either barking downstairs or sitting on my lap pretending to be interested in the internet. The former is, I suppose, preferable to the latter, but I can’t accept that these are the only choices.

  Over the last year, I have been able to divine the meaning of most of the dog’s vocalizations, and our exchanges now take the form of arguments shouted from one end of the house to the other.

  Dog: Someone is walking by the window!

  Me: Shut up! I’m working!

  Dog: Letters are coming through the hole in the door!

  Me: That happens every day! Get used to it!

  Dog: Someone else is walking by the window!

  Me: I don’t care!

  One particular bark, which has a telltale plaintive squeak to it, features more and more frequently. It can be roughly translated as ‘Help! I’m trapped on the other side of the cat!’

  The little dog and the cat have never managed to achieve the uneasy detente that exists between the old dog and the cat, partly because the little dog and the cat are the same size, and partly because the cat has concluded – justifiably, in my opinion – that the little dog is an idiot. In all their past confrontations, the dog has come off worse, and now if the cat decides it wants to sit halfway up the stairs, it creates an obstacle the little dog cannot get round. Initially, these standoffs were an occasional accident of timing, but recently the cat has begun to do it deliberately, for sport.

  Apart from the barking, the arrangement suits me fine.

  Dog: Help! I’m trapped on the other side of the cat!

  Me: Good! I’m glad!

  Dog: Help! I’m trapped on the other side of the cat!

  Me: Perfect. As far as I’m concerned, you can stay that side for ever.

  Dog: What?

  Me: I said, as far as I’m concerned—

  Dog: Help! I’m trapped on the other side of the cat!

  My wife is not interested in hearing any of this. She seems to feel that the alleged institutionalization of the youngest one is a priority.

  ‘You’re his father,’ she says. ‘Go and talk to him.’

  ‘And say what?’

  ‘Find out if he has any homework, then ask about his likes and dislikes and report back.’

  I go into the sitting room. Minutes later, I’m back in the kitchen. ‘He says he did his homework already.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ my wife says.

  ‘And among his likes, he listed watching TV and me going away.’

  ‘That’s simply not good enough,’ she says. ‘Get back in there.’

  ‘He’s keeping his head down, doing his time, that’s the main thing.’

  I hear the little dog barking again. ‘Help!’ it says. ‘I’m trapped on the other side of the cat!’

  ‘Will you go and move the cat?’ my wife says.

  ‘I can’t carry on like this,’ I say.

  The next morning, I wake to find the cat and the little dog sitting on either side of my chest and staring down at me. I close my eyes slowly, wondering what kind of unholy deal they’ve struck in the night.

  My wife has been away for a week, and is returning in two days’ time. It is important to me that she finds nothing negative to say about my seven days in charge; consequently I am trying to figure out how quickly I can purchase a telly identical to the one smashed in her absence, when I notice that the small dog is malfunctioning.

  ‘What’s wrong with this dog?’ I say.

  ‘It’s stupid,’ the oldest one says.

  ‘It’s all red on the underside,’ I say. ‘And it’s chewing itself. What have you done to it?’

  ‘Nothing. It was fine yesterday.’

  There is no time to purchase an identical dog before my wife returns home. The oldest one and I bathe it in medicated dog shampoo. I wrap it in a towel and lay it on the bed, where it stares at me balefully. It is still staring at me when I wake up the next morning.

  By the afternoon the skin condition is slightly improved, but the little dog is lethargic and downbeat. It is not interested in the early-evening trip to the park; it just sits on the grass, staring at the ground, while the big dog mingles with the other dogs. One of the other dog walkers approaches us.

  ‘That one’s not very well,’ I say, pointing. The woman addresses the dog directly.

  ‘Are you not very well?’ she says. ‘Oh dear! What’s wrong?’ The dog stares at the ground.

  ‘It’s like a skin thing,’ I say. ‘Probably an allergy.’

  ‘It could be from stress,’ she says. ‘Have you not taken her to the vet?’

  ‘I was going to, but they’ll be closed now.’ I explain that I am busy, and that my wife is away.

  ‘Well, that’ll be it,’ she says. ‘She’s probably just stressed from being left alone with you.’ This had not occurred to me.

  ‘But I’m fun to be with,’ I say. The woman looks at me for a moment.

  ‘I don’t think you’re supposed to say that sort of thing about yourself,’ she says.

  The oldest one leaves to spend the night with a friend. I sit with the dog in my arms, contemplating the possibility that my company is stressful enough to drive an animal to self-harm. The dog stares up at me.

  ‘We’ve had some good times,’ I say. ‘Haven’t we?’

  It is my plan to take the dog to the vet first thing, but I find it sleeping. It cannot harm itself while it’s unconscious, I think. I decide to make a start on work and reassess at lunchtime, but I end up working straight through lunch. The dog comes up to my office in the afternoon and chews itself furiously. Fur floats on the air.

  ‘Stop!’ I say. ‘We’ll go to the vet in half an hour, just—’ My phone pings.

  It is a text from my wife that says, ‘Back at 4.’ It is, I notice, half past three.

  ‘What have you done to her?’ shouts my wife on first seeing the little dog. ‘She’s chewed all the hair off her tail!’

  ‘That’s new,’ I say. ‘The tail was fine this morning.’

  ‘Right,’ she says, scooping the dog into her arms. ‘I’m taking her to the vet.’

  When she returns half an hour later, the dog is wearing a plastic cone on its head.

  ‘The vet is shocked by your neglect,’ she says. ‘She had to have an injection.’

  ‘An injection for what?’

  ‘Allergies. Honestly, I’ve only been gone a week.’

  ‘So it’s nothing to do with me,’ I say. ‘I am fun to be with.’

  Lessons in primatology 3

  It doesn’t happen very often, but it happens: my wife has for some reason taken against something I have written. I’m afraid I cannot explain the situation more fully without first taking steps to disguise the identity of some of the people involved. Safeguarding their priva
cy will not, I trust, undermine the basic truth of the story.

  So, anyway, on Saturday morning I wake to discover that my life partner – you remember Sean – is already downstairs. This means I can expect a cup of coffee to be delivered to me shortly, even though making coffee on Saturdays used to be my role.

  As I lie in bed waiting, I reflect on Sean’s late and unlikely conversion to cosy domesticity. In recent months – ever since he gave up his part-time job at the behavioural primatology lab – Sean has taken up embroidery and begun producing large quantities of preserves. While it is possible that Sean’s domestic phase may be symptomatic of a personal crisis that will need to be addressed in the long term, in the short term I could do with a coffee. Eventually I tire of waiting and get out of bed. I am lying in a deep bath when Sean finally appears. He does not, I notice, have a mug in his hand.

  ‘You don’t know it,’ he says in a cold, hollow voice I’ve heard perhaps only three times in all the years we’ve been gay-married, ‘but you just fucked up very badly.’ He turns and walks out. I suffer two immediate and competing reactions: the first is a profound fear, the second a strong sense of blamelessness. I have, after all, been asleep for the last eight hours. What could I have done?

  I dress and go downstairs; Sean is looking at a copy of my most recent column. As I enter the kitchen, he reads out the offending sentence twice, the second time so angrily that the dog shakes. I realize I need to choose my next few words carefully.

  ‘I don’t see the problem,’ I say.

  Sean explains his distress through clenched teeth: I have summarized his landmark study on primate behaviour in a way that badly misrepresents his findings, making him a laughing stock, or something.

  ‘It could not be worse!’ he shrieks. Just then, Kurt, the youngest of our three adopted ex-research chimps, waddles into the kitchen and upends a box of cereal, leaving a pyramid-shaped pile of Shreddies on the table. He makes the sign for ‘milk’.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

  Kurt goes to the fridge and gets the milk himself, splashing it liberally on the pile.

  ‘How could you not see?’ Sean shouts, before declaiming the sentence one more time.

  Kurt makes the sign for ‘Why scream?’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Sean says.

  Kurt signs, ‘Please, I’m eleven.’ He puts his hands over his eyes and shakes his head from side to side. I take this to mean ‘You don’t have to hide things from me.’

  ‘It’s something Dad wrote,’ Sean says. ‘Read this.’

  Kurt tears out the page and eats it. He makes the sign for ‘whatever’.

  ‘I rather agree,’ I say.

  ‘You’re going to have to show me these things before they go out,’ Sean says.

  ‘Why?’ I ask. ‘It’s not as if I’d written about that time you tripped over the dog and knocked yourself unconsc—’

  Kurt begins a cycle of alarm screeches, banging his fists into the pile of cereal, before running from the room. I’m very fond of Kurt, but I sometimes find it hard to believe he shares 99 per cent of our DNA.

  ‘You can clear that up,’ Sean says, stalking past me. In the silence that follows, I can just hear the distinctive pant-hoot of our middle chimp, Anton, from upstairs. I think he’s saying there’s something wrong with the broadband connection.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Just about the time you finally begin to feel you’ve mastered the rhythm of fatherhood, you notice the first signs that it’s all coming to an end. Even in the midst of family life, you can feel the present leaching away. Best to ignore it, I think, until you can’t any more.

  Some years back a photographer came to the house, took me to the park over the road and lashed me to the trunk of a huge oak tree with my own rope. Then he handed the end of the rope to my three sons and told them to smile and pull. The result was used to illustrate some article I’d written.

  I can’t remember where the article appeared or what it was about, but you get the idea: I could not, even then, control my children. My wife had the photo framed and hung it in the hall, where it serves to remind me how eerily compliant I can be in the company of photographers. It also shows how long I’ve been pitching myself as a useless father.

  If only I’d known then how bad it would get. In those days, I was actually of some service to my kids. I could tie shoelaces. I could draw a cat. Now if one them says, ‘Dad, I need your help,’ it’s invariably because he’s trying to order something on the internet and has reached the stage of the transaction where you need a credit card number.

  Mostly, though, the photograph just makes me feel old. It’s clear from the way the children are dressed that only the oldest was of school age, and while the older two are grinning and tugging as instructed, the youngest is staring into the lens in perfect bewilderment and appears to be using the taut rope to hold himself upright. The man tied to the tree may be sporting a theatrically world-weary expression, but his face is hardly lined and his hair is dark and thick. Despite the rope digging into the flesh of his arms, he looks comparatively untroubled.

  I deliberately stop and look at this photo from time to time, to chart the progress from then to now. Through this regular monitoring, I hope to process my children’s growth, my own decay and the runaway train of change incrementally, or at least in manageable chunks. I do not want the passage of time to take me by surprise. I will experience change, inevitable as it may be, on my terms.

  Then one day the tree fell down. I hadn’t counted on that. When I went to the park with the dog before lunch it was there; when I went out after lunch it was lying on its side, all six storeys of it, surrounded by police tape. High winds had evidently blown it over, snapping the four-foot-thick trunk at its base. When I pass the photograph in the hall later, I think: ‘My ruse has failed. Time continues to pass in leaps and bounds.’

  The next day I drag my youngest son away from the television to go and look at the fallen tree.

  ‘Do you remember posing for that photograph?’ I say. ‘The one in the hall?’

  ‘Nope,’ he says.

  ‘Look, it’s like sponge inside,’ I say, kicking the rotten stump.

  ‘Dad, you’re breaking the law,’ he says, pointing to the police tape.

  ‘It’s amazing, really, that it stayed up as long as it did.’

  ‘Can we go?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I stare at the sheared stump for a moment, then gaze out at the horizon. Then I look at the stump again.

  ‘You know what?’ I say. ‘I don’t think this is the tree.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ he says.

  ‘No, I think that’s the tree. Over there.’ I point to another oak of similar size about thirty yards away. We stalk towards it through the tall grass.

  ‘Or maybe that one,’ he says, pointing to a third tree.

  ‘No, this is it,’ I say. ‘The background lines up with the picture. I always thought it was that one, but it’s definitely this one.’

  ‘Huh,’ he says. The wind gusts suddenly, and I look up into the churning mass of leaves above.

  ‘Let’s not stand here,’ I say.

  In spite of my efforts to process change as a predictable continuum, there were further alarming warnings that my offspring would soon cease to be children. If you’re a parent you will have likely witnessed many of them: they come home with short haircuts, suddenly transformed from schoolboys into trainee policemen. They begin to swear expertly in your presence. You rise from the sofa to remonstrate with one, and find yourself eye to eye with him. Soon everything they do seems to be some kind of preparation for their eventual disappearance. They completely take over your life, children, and then one day they get up and walk off with it.

  It is Tuesday morning and I can’t find any clothes. I know from bitter experience how dangerous it is to wake my wife with questions about my wardrobe, but I feel I have no choice.

  ‘Where is the white shirt I left out specifically?’ I say. A muffled s
tring of expletives emanates from under the duvet, to the effect that she has sent the oldest one off to his work experience placement in it.

  ‘In my shirt,’ I say. ‘I have to go on the radio today.’

  ‘Leave me alone,’ she says. I go to the closet and put on one of the shirts I had previously considered unsuitable, even for radio. Then I go back to the bedroom.

  ‘Where are the trousers I left with the shirt?’ I say. The duvet is silent.

  ‘You didn’t,’ I say. The duvet doesn’t say anything.

  ‘They were basically my only available trousers,’ I say. The duvet flaps down and my wife sits up.

  ‘They actually look better on him than they do on you,’ she says. ‘He’s got longer legs.’

  ‘They’re mine, though, and everything else is in the machine. You knew I had to go on the radio today.’

  ‘You can wear his jeans,’ she says, ‘the ones hanging up. They’ll probably be a bit big for you.’

  ‘You can’t just give him my clothes to wear. I don’t have enough.’

  ‘What’s the word for that thing,’ she says, ‘where your oldest son becomes taller and bigger than you?’

  ‘He isn’t taller than me,’ I say.

  ‘You know, when your own child begins to outstrip you in all things.’

  ‘There isn’t a word for it. It’s not a recognized phenomenon.’

  ‘Bigger, better-looking, more socially competent.’

  ‘Where is the belt that was in the trousers?’

  ‘I’m sure there is a word for it,’ she says. ‘You should write about it.’

  ‘I can’t write about things that haven’t happened to me yet. Please say you didn’t send him off with my belt.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about your belt,’ she says, folding her arms defensively.

  ‘I can’t wear these jeans without a belt. They won’t stay up.’

  ‘Wear another belt,’ she says. ‘It’s not my problem.’

  ‘I don’t have two belts!’ I shout. ‘I’m not the Duke of Windsor!’

  ‘Stop trying to talk to me about your fucking belt,’ she says, disappearing back under the duvet. I stride across the room, holding up the jeans with one hand, and pull open my sock drawer with such fury that several pairs of balled-up socks fly out of it. At the bottom of the drawer I see a curled-up belt – my emergency belt. I consider shutting the drawer for strategic reasons, but I’m running late, so I grab the belt and put it on.