Ollie’s first summer was of the type we get only once in a while in England, the kind in which a heatwave arrives which blisters the tarmac and buckles the rail tracks.
On one of the hottest of all these exceptional days I took him for a walk just before Sunday lunchtime. Why I mistimed this so badly, I don’t know; the thermometer was heading up to 100° F, and there I was out with a mad dog in the midday sun. The only slight intelligence I’d brought to bear was that we set off in the shade, using a river path overhung by trees. The river ultimately meets the broad at the university (by now I knew every single approach to the campus, in addition to different complex internal patterns that you could make within the walk itself).
At a convenient point, Ollie leant forward as far as he could to take a drink, and fell into the river. He refuses to swim – lurchers tend not to (because, I discovered, they don’t have webbed feet, like water-loving breeds) – but he can save himself from drowning and can clamber out well enough. Otherwise this part of our walk was incident-free, albeit sweaty and mosquito-heavy. And then we reached the broad.
Sundays were a difficult day for me at the best of times. In addition to the weekend Labrador stiffs, you encounter the whole compendium of other weekend peril: skateboarders; toddlers who are as skittles to a moving dog; fascist all-terrain pram-pushers competing for lane space with the fascist cyclists; family groups with elderly people in the pastel uniform – magnetic in their attraction to a dirty dog’s dirty paw or a wet dog’s shake; BMXers; kite flyers (multiple tangling opportunities); skateboards being pulled along by parachutes (multiple tangling opportunities squared); games of football, cricket and rounders; picnickers with a rug laid out, and a surplus of joggers. You name it, it’s there. And then there are many more dogs than usual too, dogs who are not even Labradors, out for their once-a-week stretch and dump. Nation of dog lovers my arse, nation of fat idle bastards more like. This is the mood Sundays put me in.
On this particular Sunday, we arrived at the broad to find quite a few fishermen as well. I’m not generally keen on fishermen, who all too often seem to have a touch of the mass murder about them: loners obsessed with hooks and knives and twine. In turn, they are not generally keen on Ollie, who has a penchant for raiding their maggots. Fishermen are often aggressive in their attitude, territorial. They own the place, don’t they? No one must lark about, or swim, or row a boat, no one must disturb the water – it is their crucial activity that takes precedence over all else. Fishermen tend to see Ollie off in short order, without any intervention required from his Master. They are stationed lower than I am, down by the water’s edge, and typically hidden behind umbrellas – I hear their oaths, sometimes I catch their dirty looks, but I am already off on my way, quick, in order to avoid any discussions about dog control, discussions in which I would not have a leg to stand on.
Ollie went down to annoy the first of the fishermen. I called him and he turned the deaf ear. He stayed in there and, even by his own poor standards he was overly persistent. An unacceptably long time elapsed while he remained, leaping from one side to the other of the small inlet in which the fisherman was stationed. This forced me to intervene, to field him out of the way. As I attempted to act he flew into the fisherman’s equipment, scattering it. The fisherman cursed and I did not blame him. It was beyond the pale for me not to pretend some sort of authority, so I overturned a ground rule and I shouted at Ollie. This did have the effect of clearing him. I apologised to the first fisherman. Ollie repeated his performance with the second fisherman. I tried to get hold of him, to more hopeless avail. He shot on to the third fisherman.
I surveyed the area for a moment. There are low decking platforms at frequent intervals around the lake, platforms which are built for the purpose of fishing from; every single one was occupied, as well as much of the intervening bank. There must have been a hundred rods. I had never seen this taking place before, but it was apparent that what we had here was a fishing contest. I may not care for fishermen, I may find the idea of a fishing challenge in an artificially stocked lake faintly absurd, but all the same I fully appreciated that these men were engaged in the serious business of sporting competition.
Sporting competition is an activity in which I partake – as participant, spectator and punter – many times a week; sporting competition is a human endeavour of which I am wholly in favour; sporting competition is the antithesis of pantomime. It was my clear responsibility to protect the fishermen’s rights not to have a stupid animal jeopardising their chances. Ollie returned to the first fisherman. The first fisherman had had enough and asked me if I couldn’t control my fucking dog, for fuck’s sake. It was over 100 degrees now, I had been put into three embarrassing positions in a row, I’d been chasing the stupid animal, I was perspiring profusely, and the answer to this question was a negative, though I did not give it. I shouted at Ollie again, even though I couldn’t actually see him. He emerged being chased by another fisherman who was brandishing a keep-net at him.
Even taking into account my normal problems in respect of returning him to the lead, there would be absolutely no chance of catching him now since he had been provoked into a state of panic by a combination of brandishing and shouting. So I chased him off down the path, which I knew would do no long-term good, quite the reverse, but I had to do something to restrict his chances of infuriating all the other competitors. Even in mid-pursuit, he still had a go at a couple more, though by now they were prepared, and were waving tripods and poles at him, practically walkie-talking each other and putting out an APB.
I rounded Ollie into the clearing at the end of the broad. I paused, collected myself, mopped my face with my shirt, and began to offer him the cubes of cheddar that were oozing in my pocket. He backed off, his spine arched, his tail between his legs touching his chest, his ears flat to his head.
To all the assembled Sunday Labrador walkers et al, I must have looked like the local dog-batterer. I offered him the cheese again. He ran away over the footbridge. On the other side of the bridge lay the pitches, where further sporting contests were taking place. I’d had enough. I mentally declined the prospect of chasing him across a cricket wicket. I was steaming.
‘I’ll abandon the little shit,’ I thought. ‘Why not? I’ll tell Trezza he ran away and I couldn’t find him.’
I doused my face in water from the river and turned. I pulled down my shades so I could pass by all the fishermen incognito, and I retraced my steps on my way back to a normal life. I felt like lighting a cigar. Halfway down the broad I took a right into the shady path beside the river. I never looked back.
Some way along the path, about three-quarters of a mile from where I’d last seen Ollie, a stretch of decking had been laid down to compensate for a patch of swampy ground. As I walked across it I heard the scratch of claws behind me. I turned. His body language was unimproved since I’d last seen him, to the extent that he was actually managing to walk with his back up and his tail between his legs. He took two more steps, then stopped and trembled.
I looked him in the eyes. I made an interpretation of the expression I saw there. It was a complex message which said, ‘Listen, we can’t go on like this. I want us to be friends, but I don’t know how we can do that because I am petrified of you.’
I paused, then I crouched. He sat, continued to tremble, but didn’t move. We stayed there like that for a long time until eventually I put him onto the lead.
There were many more vastly irritating days ahead, but as we faced each other while we melted under the midday sun, on the decking over the swampy ground, we had turned some sort of corner.
***
Tale-of-woe rescuers aside, there were frequent occasions when other dog owners, who’d had a rescue in the past, whose minds may have been clouded by time, would offer their thoughts. ‘From the home, you say? They’re the best, they’re so true and faithful; they never forget what you’ve done for them.’
These words were another way of saying the old truism: Man’s best friend.
In making the effort to find me after I had abandoned him, Ollie had demonstrated how this sentimental tosh actually works. Discovering himself alone, he’d marshalled the crude and admirable urge for survival. He has the saving grace of beauty, talent in abundance, but like all too many humans, he has no strategy to go alongside any of this. If he is autistic, then this is its manifestation: he relies only on instinct. Act first, think later. It’s a common complaint, a common autism, and one that I share. I came to writing the long way round, through many rash misjudgements that bypassed anything you might call a thought process. And even my instinct is dodgy – as I’ve already said, I am Mann’s sort of writer, the kind who finds writing more difficult than other people (it normally takes me five drafts before I’ll even send a postcard). I thought about this syndrome in terms of Ollie and I came to a conclusion. Ollie, I think, is the sort of dog who finds being a pet more difficult than other dogs.
There was never a worse day than the day of the fishing competition. As we worked our way forward I thought about the famous Groucho Marx one-liner, a take on the old truism: ‘Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend; inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.’ I came to think of this less as a joke and more of a perceptive comment about the canine soul.
It was still many months before we settled into anything like a normal relationship. How we negotiated our path in the weeks that followed the fishing competition, the methods we used, I really can’t relate, because I don’t know what they were. Patience is the only technique I can pass on. The moment we spent crouching and looking at each other by the river stood as a watershed for all of our time together up until that point; it had been harrowing, and the immediate aftermath was post-traumatic for us both. As a matter of self preservation, as a method of healing, your mind often goes fallow in these periods, and I guess that’s what happened to us.
The sort of dog who finds being a pet more difficult than other dogs
We managed to break our cycle little by little, day by day, and all the other mantras associated with modifying destructive behaviour. But, like a pair of lovers giving it one more try, we had no tactics. We had a little hope now, that was all. If I could say anything, I’d say that we began to build a fragile confidence by determining that we preferred not to fail; we are both boys, after all – we don’t like to be beaten at things whether we’re good at them or not. The one tangible decision I made, if you can call it that, was to give up entirely on the notion of apportioning time in a pre-dog, normal-life manner. I guess I dedicated myself to ‘Project Ollie’.
I recall long evenings in the summer when we’d be out late enough to see the sky drift to purple as the light slipped away. I’d talk to the shift workers and the poachers and the itinerants who hang around out of hours, I’d share a sip of their beer while Ollie ran himself ragged with their dogs. I remember on the longest day of the year we arrived back after dark. So as a consequence of the volume of time we were sharing together, we got used to each other better and, while we were at it, Ollie found his exhaustion point, which made him easier to handle. I found I had less trouble getting him to return to me when he was lying down, panting, wasted, and wanting to be carried home.
The nights drew in and the clocks went back, and for the first time this had a practical effect on me. You can let some dogs roam in the dark, but Ollie isn’t one of them. The gap between our first and second walk in the short winter days was so brief that sometimes we’d be out and about for most of the daylight hours. And, as bit by bit our confidence together grew, and experience began to show that (albeit eventually) he could be relied upon to return even when he wasn’t exhausted, I began to be able to use the time to think. This, I could vaguely regard as work. I had not been able to think while we were out together before because so much of the time had been typified by crisis, and crisis does not allow for thinking, crisis is panic, and panic prevents thought. This I know well, because I began to suffer panic attacks some years ago; I’ve had them on and off for the biggest part of a decade.
At first I ignored them, like you do with intermittent toothache, hoping they’d go away. And when they didn’t go away, and became more frequent, and started happening in weird places where there was no danger or stress or anything you could use to explain them – say, paying in a cheque at a bank counter – I tried some conventional medicine.
I went to the doc, my blood and urine was sampled, I was referred here and there, but all to no avail. I was offered beta blockers, but I knew they only gave you a heart attack so I never took them. I tried some homeopathic remedies which were as potent as wine gums. My main approach after these treatment failures was to revert to plan A and pretend that nothing was happening, that everything was okay. And much of the time everything was okay, the attacks were episodes, moments. But they were long moments when they came along, moments during which my heart would be racing, I couldn’t breath properly, and I was sweating even without chasing a dog in 100of. In fact it could start in a cold room. It’s difficult to pretend this isn’t happening when, in fact, it is. In the aftermath I would feel spent, unable to think, good only for a lie down in a dark room.
In Ollie’s second summer he went through a sequence of injuries that necessitated many visits to the vet, and I began to have these attacks at the surgery. It was during a period in which they had been getting worse anyway. I could more or less guarantee one if anybody started encroaching into my personal space and messing about with me, say, at the dentist or the opticians. Something about proximity to other people, while at the same time being out of control, of lacking authority, brought it on. And so, without going into detail of the therapy involved – because it’s not pertinent to this story, and because I’m superstitious that talking about it will reverse the good it has done – I forced myself to get some alternative help, which – and here I touch the wood – has worked pretty well: I’m about ninety per cent better than I was.
The unlikely rescuer
That humans use dogs as a psychological crutch is not in doubt; I see people talking with them every single day. Owners often describe how their animal can sense their distress if they are upset, how they will move to comfort them, or put on a happy face if they are feeling low. It’s never been this way for me and Ollie (though I do conduct conversations with him). If anything, dysfunctional as it’s been, it’s me who is his emotional support. And of course, I look after his physical well-being. The vets business was the final straw for me: I could put up with a certain amount of disruption to my own life as a result of these attacks, but I could not accept a situation whereby I could not take my dog to a surgery – for him to be cured for fuck’s sake – without me suffering a crisis and people having to worry on my account instead of about the real problem, the gash in his front pad. The way I see it, it was Ollie who finally forced me to the therapy from which I had so long shied away (my attitude to the visit of Attila says it all). In this sense, it was Ollie who rescued me.
***
One morning as we were beginning our walk I met an old boy who had lost his dog, a Staffordshire bull terrier. The animal had been missing for an hour or so, which, by all accounts, was uncharacteristic. In my experience, Norfolk males are amongst the most reluctant in England when it comes to showing emotion; all the same I could see that the man was in misery.
‘What’s he look like?’ I asked.
‘Big,’ he replied. (This is a typical exchange of information with a Norfolk man.) I said I’d keep an eye out for the animal, but without any hope that I’d find him, which I didn’t. By the time we got back to the car, and I was opening the tailgate to let Ollie in, I had forgotten about the lost dog. It took a second glance to notice that the creature sauntering in my direction up the middle of the road was a Staffie, a big one, with a red spotted hankie knotted round his neck (it would have been worth a mention, in the description, the red hankie, I thought). The only other information I had was that he was of good temperament, so I made my way towards him and I attached him to Ollie’s lead. As I turned and walked back to the car, wondering what to do next, I saw Ollie staring out of the window and looking cross. He had his head tilted to one side as if to say, ‘Oi! What’s all this?’
The lost dog had a phone number on its tag. I called it – a mobile – and arranged to meet round the other side of the park. I put the animal in the passenger seat, to prevent a disturbance going on in the back. Ollie glowered at me through the rear-view mirror. ‘I’ve never been allowed to sit there,’ the look said. ‘What’s the game?’
After owner and pet had been reunited, and I had the tenner reward forced on me, I opened the tailgate so the old boy could have a better look at Ollie. To show his proprietorship, Ollie made as if to lick my hand, a first.
The old boy drove off in his car, a MkI Ford Granada with doors in different colours. I notice cars – I noticed that model because it reminded me of the car some hoodlum friends knocked about in when I was young, and even more so of the opening titles to the Seventies cop show The Sweeney, of which I was a devotee. There was a time I used to covet a Ford Granada (the 3-litre was ‘an absolute torque monster’, as one of the hoodlum friends put it) but the moment passed. You don’t get many of them about these days – the last time I’d seen one it was up on blocks at a boarding kennels and had a bull-mastiff living in it.
In the very worst of Ollie’s early days we booked a last-minute holiday to Greece. We needed a break – not just from him, but he was part of it. In the same last-minute spirit, we’d had to take such kennelling as was available at short notice. The woman sounded fine on the phone, but when we got there we didn’t like her, or her attitude. She was careless, offhand, maybe not entirely sober, and the Ford and its resident did not seem a good sign either. But we were catching a plane out of Stansted in two hours’ time – it was either leave him there or forfeit a holiday. As we drove to the airport Trezza fretted and cursed herself for not personally checking the place in advance. I said to forget it, there’d been no time for checking, that we’d sort out a nicer place for the future (we did), that however five-star a kennel might be, for him it’d still be a kennel, wouldn’t it, away from his selection of beds and duvets and throws. ‘He’ll be fine,’ I said. Though I thought it unlikely he’d come to any harm, I didn’t entirely believe my own words, I was saying them primarily to calm her down, and at moments through the holiday I entertained piteous thoughts about him and his circumstances.
The flight back from Greece was due to land early in the afternoon, which would have given us time to collect Ollie, but it was delayed. It was a Friday, and the last pick-up time allowed at the kennels was 6 o’clock. By the time we were finally driving out of the carpark I was pushing it to make this deadline. Missing the cut would have condemned Ollie to a further weekend’s board because the nasty owner didn’t open on a Saturday. It was a typical holiday return, rain coming down in buckets, articulated lorries pulling into the overtaking lane for no reason, an accident on the A11. None of this helped me. If the Sweeney had caught sight of us at any point along this drive I’d have been well-nicked: I U-turned on main carriageways, overtook badly on B-roads, cut corners at junctions, lane-hopped, and sped like a torque monster. I was a menace. All of which enabled us to pull in through the kennel gates at 18.01. The woman glanced at her watch and gave me a look, which I returned with interest as I handed her the folding.
With monsoon conditions continuing, it wasn’t possible to tell whether Ollie was pleased to see Trezza or not; he took a soaking simply by making his way from his pen to the car. He leapt in, shook himself, and shivered. At that time he was certainly unmoved to see me, and displayed no sign that I might even be considered an improvement on a rain-lashed kennels run by a drunk and featuring a bull-mastiff living in a Ford Granada. Yet I had risked life and limb to get there, just to save him from a couple more nights in a place where I imagined he would prefer not to be.
You lose your marbles when you’ve got a dog, that’s what happens.
***
Ollie is just over two now and I would not be without him. I worry about how I’ll replace him when he dies, and already I know it won’t be possible. Where I used to notice a pretty girl walking down the street, these days my attention is as likely to be caught, in the first instance, at least, by the good-looking Pointer that she’s walking. Worse than a person who keeps a dog, I have become a dog lover. Sometimes I surf websites imagining a playmate for Ollie. Not breeder sites, from where we could get ourselves a sensible puppy that we could train from the outset, but rescue sites, because now we have come through this, I could repeat the exercise.
In my own world I have become the dog guru I sometimes pretend to be. And as I have come to know one lurcher, lurchers have become my dog. I am ‘in the breed’, as they say (even if it is an unclassified breed). I know of the distinctions between the different crosses, I know about ‘long dogs’ and all manner of lurcher ephemera which a couple of years ago would have interested me as much as knowing what sort of tree a birch is. If someone offered me a lurcher fridge magnet now I would take it, and after accepting it, I would probably even use it.
You lose your marbles when you’ve got a dog; that’s what happens
The thought has crossed my mind that I could rescue a very young dog and take it over to Shay in Galway for some tuition. But then the counter thought has crossed my mind that to be in the company of an accomplished rabbiter might make Ollie feel inadequate. So, for the moment at least, I think better of it.
There will be another dog one day. It’s bound to happen.
But there will never be another Ollie.
He slit the pads on his front paws three times in six months, accidents acquired simply by running and catching his feet on glass or flint, each wound requiring stitches and bandages, each episode laying him off for three weeks. At the sight of Ollie our regular vet, Gerhard, shakes his head and reaches for his suture kit. During his periods of convalescence I have sat on the sofa with him, and our trust together has grown to the extent that, in the absence of his friends Milla, Charlie, Louis and all the rest, he has made do with play-fighting me: I put my hand in his mouth and pull on his lower jaw, we have a tug-of-war.
It is three weeks after the third slit pad has healed that he gets knocked over, the accident I mentioned to the young whippet owner at the beginning. I am not with him at the time, he is out with Trezza. In a completely unpredictable manner – going off the path at a point he’d passed a hundred times before without going off the path – Ollie shot sideways, cleared a ditch, and ran into a car (it seems he had sighted a rabbit). The driver had no chance. Trezza was in pieces afterwards, as was I. Fortunately he has been blessed with more lives than a cat, and he needs them. The impact of the collision threw him back into the ditch, his radius and ulna fractured and punctured through the pelt of his front right leg.
The drive to the vet took place through late-night Christmas shopping traffic, lasted a long time, and was particularly harrowing. He was patched up and put on an emergency drip, which he managed to disconnect at some point in the night. Still, he survived that. As he caught sight of me as we arrived to pick him up in the morning, and even with the leg encased in a thick temporary dressing like a human plastercast, he tried to run towards me. It was heartbreaking, and at the same time the embodiment of the type of thinking that got him into trouble in the first place. We drove to an orthopaedic surgical specialist in North Norfolk where he stayed for the best part a week (though they discharged him early – he didn’t like it there, and they were anxious to get rid of him, ‘before he did any more damage to himself’). He had a six-inch metal plate and ten screws set into the bone, but, apart from this serious injury, the rest was just cuts and bruises: to run headlong into a BMW and live to tell the tale isn’t bad going.
Back home his three month rehabilitation programme started with trips round the block, on the lead, building up from just five minutes a day in week one to 60 minutes a day in week twelve. The early period of this curtailed activity was particularly trying because, as Gordon, the orthopaedic specialist, said to us, ‘He’ll feel fine, as though he could behave as normal.’ In this way, a five-minute walk could take half an hour because Ollie developed a routine featuring any number of sit-down protests all the way round the block, i.e. every ten steps.
As the trips lengthened, and in contrast to our beginnings, it was he who came to pester me to take him out at night-time. He is a very strong dog – to complete the reversal of the early days, it was he who dragged me round the scary streets down to Carrow Road and back.
As the time neared when he received his clean bill of health, as his bone density returned, each day we went jogging together in parkland, still using the leash, just to get him moving a bit faster, and to warm his muscles. All this enforced proximity finalised our bond.
He actually came up to my office and wagged his tail. He will sit under my desk while I type now, and sometimes he will lick my bare feet, which can only mean they taste nice, like horse manure.
As the moment came closer for his life to return to normal, as I counted down to the official off-lead date, I found myself itching to slip the ring and let him go. Because there were two things I missed during the period of his confinement more than I would have imagined possible. One was watching him run. The other was walking with him, out in nature, seeing him free, and being free myself.
