We came across Milla some time after our darkest days. Milla is a Dobermann rescued from the streets of London, then named after the Cameroonian footballer Roger Milla, who celebrated the goals he scored at Italia ‘90 by doing the Makossa – the rhythmic step-forward dance – around the corner flag. An odd name for a dog, you might think, until, that is, you see Milla (the dog) shaking his booty.
Milla is the opposite of Sparky in the sense that he is one of Ollie’s closest friends. More often than not, the first I knew of Milla’s presence was that, in his excitement to get to Ollie, he bowled me over by smacking into the back of my knees. I’d look behind as I got onto my feet. Where was Milla’s master? (Like parents at the school gates – ‘Oh, hello, are you Naughty Victoria’s mum?’ – I mainly know the dog’s names, not those of the owners.) Milla’s master was nowhere in sight: in this respect, at least, Milla’s master was like me.
Every time Milla and Ollie met, each jubilant occasion which began with gangsta handshakes and high fives, the two of them would be united by a single ambition: to better the quality of the rumble they’d had the last time. It began with Milla chasing Ollie, in a figure of eight, through a chicane, then a reverse, then a playfight, then picking a playfight with another dog, then picking a playfight with a second dog, and a third, and so on, with time-outs given for group brawling.
Milla’s master would finally appear, having been left behind in a copse some way back. Milla would ignore him entirely, choosing instead to dive-bomb my pockets where he knew treats were kept. He must have weighed three times Ollie, and he was a Dobermann. The Dobermann – a blend of Pinscher, Terrier and Rottweiler as The Giant Book of the Dog will tell you – is a breed developed over a century ago by a German tax collector and part-time dog-catcher, a breed designed to protect the taxman whilst he was out dog-catching. In short, a breed developed to be fierce (it makes a terrific family pet, obviously, given firm handling).
Milla comes to say hello
In my pre-Ollie days, I would have gone out of my way to avoid a character like Milla, and even now that I knew a little of dogs, I still found him fairly alarming. He has the maddest orange eyes, like shattered marbles. Was Ollie frightened of him? After they’d done with their fighting, or sometimes during it, Ollie would try to hump his friend. As mentioned, Ollie has been neutered, but having his equipment decommissioned doesn’t stop him from feeling horny, and he makes no distinction between dogs and bitches either. Experienced owners told me he was displaying a form of dominance. (This was where I got my line for the Labrador owner at the outset; this common lore is the way in which the word is passed along.)
Ollie’s humping was an activity which appalled Jack, if it happened to take place when he was around. Jack has the characteristic homophobia associated with teenage boys and routinely uses the word ‘gay’ as a term of abuse.
‘That dog’s gay dad,’ he’d say in a suitably horrified tone.
‘Bisexual,’ I’d reply.
But whatever his preference or orientation, his behaviour out here in the open was not easy to square with his indoor persona. My best guess was that he felt safe engaging in these lurid acts because he knew that if it came to the crunch he could use his talent – his agility, his speed – to remove himself from danger. This could not apply back in the cage of our home.
I watched him rear-ending Milla. Here you had the full Ollie-paradox: frightened of flies, aprons, curtains, his loving owner, yet prepared to attempt anal intercourse with a killer-dog. On occasions I’d seen him try it on with a Great Dane, a Rottweiler and a bull-mastiff, all male, all four times his size.
‘Behaving himself, is he?’ Milla’s owner would say, as he finally caught up referring to his own charge. ‘Oh yes, great,’ I’d reply. And I meant it. Because Milla was one of the other naughty kids in class, the ones who help cast my own little angel in a better light.
Through the course of their game, which typically sprawled into the biggest available space – the football and rugby pitches – the other dogs that came and went provided more or less of a distraction. Ollie might try his luck, taunt a bonus run out of a distant Labrador, and often he’d get it. He could cross the ground in seconds. The distant owner would invariably be calling their dog on, not keen.
They continued to bemuse me, these people. Early in the morning, the sun out, nature showing off her new blooms, yet the prime pleasure they seemed to take in all of it was to exert authority over an animal who only wants to play, to demonstrate a superiority over rogue owners like me and Milla’s master – reprobates who introduced dogs into the public domain which were out of control.
Labradors can be very fit, athletic dogs, incidentally and, though it’s probably too late to save myself insofar as Labrador owners are concerned, Ollie numbers many friends among this breed, as in turn I have come across many excellent Labrador owners who ARE NOT STIFFS.
***
But before we ever met Milla we were still in our darkest days, and at the conclusion of our walks Ollie persisted with his neurotic evasions.
When at last I got hold of him, or someone else did it for me, I was all too often in a filthy humour, a black mood, blackened further because my options to act were so restricted. I knew that to shout, like Sparky’s owner, or to whack him on the nose – or make as if to – as I’d seen others do, would only increase the fear and confusion that was already swimming in his eyes, an expression that remained unchanged even as I gave him his treats in the back of the car, his reward for being good enough to drop his guard so low as to finally allow himself to be caught.
After a particularly grim morning outing, replayed an especially grim scene from it in my head as I fed Ollie his bits. He had dashed behind the long hedge to sledge some timid puppy, ruining someone’s day (I was left in no doubt about this), a someone who probably had to get to work, a someone for whom time was limited and precious, not a cloud-cuckoo-land dweller like me. As I fed him, it dawned on me much more clearly what had been going on with the staff who taught in one of the middle schools that Jack went to. This school had a high number of statemented pupils, children who would receive a team point or a gold star on those happy days when they didn’t throw chairs round the classroom or bite a fellow student on the ankle. The catch-all expression used to exonerate the antics of these headbangers was ADS, Attention Deficit Syndrome. I had a problem with the method the school teachers employed to deal with these cases, the system of reward. The problem I had was that it was all the un-statemented children who paid the price as the classroom was cleared while negotiations with the offending individual took place and lessons were lost. It was this politically correct half-witedness that was the principal reason that we took Jack out of that school. I recalled the methods employed by the teachers while Ollie took his last piece of steak, and I had the blinding flash: I could suddenly see how the owners of the normal dogs out in the park might see things. Did Ollie have ADS, I wondered? What was this animal’s strategy for survival?
Insofar as our relationship was concerned he didn’t appear to have one: in fact he seemed to be going backwards. Once I’d found him a few extra mouthfuls of old cheddar from my B-stash of treats, and he had semi-settled on his sheepskin throw in the car, he might relax enough to accept a stroke without fully flinching. This remained the standard; this was as good as it got between us in any confined space.
Back home I experimented with some new tactics aimed at improving relations. I tried ignoring him, but he just ignored me back. I lay flat on the floor to be lower than him, in a passive, submissive position, to see if he’d try to dominate me as he would a bull-mastiff. He’d occasionally glance my way to see if I’d gone yet. I’d try him with a squeaky toy: scary. Everything I attempted spooked him. From his point of view, my not being there was definitely best.
Additionally, and to heap on the irritation, he began to express delight upon catching sight of one of my male friends, Smut, a carpenter. Smut and I used to work together. Smut smells of dog, workshop and sawdust. Aside from these excellent characteristics, his appearance at our house could also be a signal that his own pair of canine companions, Charlie and Louis, might not be far behind (though I didn’t think that was the whole reason for Ollie preferring him to me). He would go beyond wagging his tail at the sight of my friend, he would rotate it like a propeller, and even put his feet up on his shoulders and lick him, the treacherous little bastard.