I’D MISLED HIM, apparently.
I’d confused him.
Everything I’d done, they explained, had combined to encourage him in his delusions.
Apparently I should never have fed him straight from my plate; I should never have given him my bacon rind, my left-over roast potatoes, the fatty ends of my lamb chops. I should never have thrown him peanuts from my handbag as we strolled down the hill to the beach.
Apparently it made him feel important.
Apparently I should never have let him ride in the front seat of the Renault, or on the raincover of the baby’s pram and let him poke his big shoe-shaped face inside the dark hood and lick the baby’s face with his big sloppy tongue. Apparently it made him think he owned us, it made him think we belonged to him. I should have stopped him—they explained—when he lunged at the people who came over to say hello, or to admire the baby. I should have grabbed him when he launched himself off the raincover, I should have yanked on his collar when he started racing round my legs and the wheels of the pram in a huge swerving protective parabola of flashing orange fur and yellow teeth. Heel! I should have said when he chased cars and bicycles and far-off noises and anything else that seemed to threaten the safety of his little family.
I should have insisted he stay on his blue wool cushion in the corner of the kitchen when he was in the house; I should never have allowed the snare-drum patter of his feet to follow me across the parquet floor of the hall into the sitting room. I should not have permitted him to lie on the sofa, to spend his afternoons lounging among the cushions with me and the baby.
Above all, I should never have allowed him upstairs at night.
I should never have let him spread his long wolfish body across the threshold of our bedroom, I shouldn’t have stooped to stroke his sunken flanks on my way to the bathroom while he lay there, snoring softly and blinking his narrow yellow eyes. It only encouraged him. No, I should have said, on the nights when Ian’s work took him out of town, and he started creeping into our bed, stretching out in the empty hollow on Ian’s side. No, I should have said, because when Ian’s taxi brought him home from the airport very early one morning, and he tried to slip into bed next to me, Boot didn’t like it, he didn’t like it at all.
We had two options, said Ian, tight-lipped and white with shock.
Either we took Boot in hand—firmly, properly in hand—or we drove him back to the pound that afternoon.
I nodded.
I’d finished washing Ian’s wound and it was dressed now in a clean gauze bandage. I looked over at Boot, still sprawled on our bed amid the mangled sheets, smiling and panting a little.
‘Maybe we could try taking him in hand,’ I said.
Ian said he’d make some phone calls, find out what to do.
Everyone he spoke to said the same thing—that I’d been much too soft with Boot, that I had confused him and misled him into thinking he was important, into thinking he was in charge. As one of them put it, I had misled Boot into thinking he was Ian.
They told us what we needed to do.
We were to give him only dog food—just biscuit and a very little meat—once a day. He was to sleep on his blue cushion in the corner of the kitchen and he was never to be allowed upstairs. He was banned from the sofa; there were to be no more pram rides; no more sitting in the front seat of the car; no more peanuts on our walks down to the beach.
On the advice of an old college friend who was now a vet’s assistant, Ian borrowed his sister’s cat, Beulah, and let her eat from Boot’s bowl whenever she felt like it. From the pet shop next to the bus station he procured a long-haired black and tan guinea pig which he took out of its cage twice a week in the evening when he came home from work so it could take a stroll along Boot’s deluded puffed-up spine and remind him that in the new pecking order, he came last, right at the bottom of the pile—lower than Ian, lower than me, lower than the baby, lower than Beulah, lower than the fat piebald guinea pig.
For a while, Boot tried to fight back. There was the odd skirmish with the cat; once or twice he swung his head round and snapped at the strolling guinea pig. Early on, he would sometimes raise his nose from the cold kitchen floor and look up at me beseechingly with his sad watery eyes as if he thought there might be a roast potato or the fatty end of a lamb chop still going, but all he ever got now was a sharp kick from Ian to remind him of his place in the world.
Boot changed.
By the end of a few weeks he was a different animal. Quiet, docile, humble. He slept obediently on the kitchen floor. When I came down in the mornings, he just lifted his shoe-shaped nose in a sort of muted, gentle greeting. He lost his twitchy, neurotic look when people came up to me and the baby in the street. He no longer launched himself into a wild, jealous helter-skelter around the pram whenever there was some unwelcome distraction—a new face, an approaching car, a strange noise.
He was like an old man.
On Sundays, if the weather was good, we loaded up the Renault and drove the short distance to the beach—Ian at the wheel, the baby next to him in her car seat, me in the back with the towels and the rolled-up windbreak, the deckchairs, the rug, the picnic; Boot on the floor at my feet with the baby’s bucket squashed down hard on top of his head.
Usually we set up somewhere not far from the water’s edge, and that’s what we did on the Sunday I’m remembering now. We set up the deckchairs and the windbreak and laid out the tartan rug. I dressed the baby in her yellow swimsuit, the one with a ruffle like a ballerina’s, and I watched her go crawling about after crabs and shells and bits of seaweed to pop. Ian went for a swim and I went to the kiosk for an ice-cream and then I settled down in one of the deckchairs to eat it.
A short distance away from me Boot was lying by himself on the sand.
The tartan picnic rug was of course too good for Boot.
I knew that. I’d been told.
‘Give Boot an inch,’ Ian reminded me nearly every day over breakfast, ‘and he’ll take a mile.’
I watched him lying there, meek and quiet, scarcely flinching when the baby began sprinkling handfuls of cold pebbles on his back and trying to bury his tail in the wet sand. If he was aware of her, he gave no sign; he just lay on his side like a vegetable, gazing blankly out across the water.
What can I say?
Only that it killed me to see him like that. Only that I knew I liked him better the way he was before, that I preferred things the way they used to be, and that there had always been more than two options.
Ian was a while in the water.
I remember watching him come walking out through the shallow waves, the surf fizzing around his knees, then his ankles. I remember how he started jogging when he reached the dry sand, shouting when he was still quite a long way off.
‘What’s happening Nicky? What’s going on?’ he was saying, a little breathlessly because he was running quite fast now, his head tilted to one side, his face scrunched up in an expression of bewildered concern, but by then Boot was already on the rug, half way through his Cornetto and I wasn’t really listening.