I cannot identify with deciding to break a living creature’s legs and so the act sticks in my thinking. I cannot climb down into the mindset of somebody who would do that … It’s a puzzle I return to because it’s got no solution. Picking at something with no solution is a nice low-grade kind of self-harm I can really get behind.
But I would rather not have this on-board — not any of this information.
The Emergency Section, the rescue people — I couldn’t do their job. I would be constantly furious.
Some of them are. Like David, he does look constantly furious. Except when he’s sitting on the grass in one of the exercise gardens and letting the dogs come and make a fuss of him. They can tell he needs affection.
Hector was a master at that: the provision of timely love. He had greeted Meg when she came in, fresh from her hospital appointment — fresh was the wrong word, but it would do — as if she were his best, best girl. He’d nuzzled very delicately at her hands and hadn’t bustled. His courtesy had made her unsteady, blurred the room for a moment. And he had kept closer to her than usual ever since, which she wouldn’t have thought possible without her wearing him strapped around her in some kind of harness.
He’s a proper liability if you’re trying to get downstairs — right under your feet every step. Always manages not to trip you, though, which is the way with spaniels. Otherwise there’d be mountains of pensioners killed by them every year. Heaps of dog-owning corpses found on suburban landings and in stately hallways.
But Hector’s generally careful — abused animals are. He knows when he’s being annoying and he stops then before you get cross. The prospect of a human getting cross makes him craven, sets him sliding along the floor away from anticipated bad stuff to which neither of us should particularly give headspace — bad stuff that happened earlier.
Like in the kids’ shows I used to watch — ‘Here’s one we made earlier.’
Hector the cautious, nervous case.
It’s reasonable to be a cautious, nervous case.
And I’m not an idiot. I do know, I have worked it out: people who’ve been damaged by people go and work with salvaged animals because the animals have also been damaged by people — but they aren’t people, so they’re OK.
And the animals are also not idiots.
Hector’s bright. He’s probably brighter than me. He’s the lots-of-greats-grandson of that first clever wolf that trotted up out of the dark and lay by some human fire somewhere and looked useful and fond and dependable: a trainable asset.
Smart, but not smart enough to know that we might hurt him.
He does try, though, to be safe. If you’re loved, you’re safer, so you need to induce love.
Hector is training me to love him.
No need to argue about whether I need a fresh education from a dog with shocked ears and a bathroom fetish. I’m a bankrupt accountant — two words you don’t want in the same sentence, or anywhere near your CV. I’m working part-time, because I couldn’t cope with full-time, in a home for broken animals … I’m clearly in need of help and advice from any quarter, thanks. I’ll have whatever’s on offer, thanks.
I should always say thanks, even when I don’t mean it, because it is good for me to be grateful.
Borrowing the brains of a dog — that’d be lovely.
And he borrows my scent. If I’m with him all day, he smells of me. He smells of having decided he would like a life with me. He smells of wanting to survive and guessing I could help him do that and I admire his faith and his — patchy, but even so — banishment of fear. I breathe this in and out and so does he and I trust him and maybe he does the same with me.
And I am grateful for that. Really.
I am also grateful for the way the trees fit up into the sky and seem completely right and I am glad of all those other places, fissures in the world’s hardness, where I can find what’s right, sweet, harmless.
There is beauty. I cannot avoid it. In patches. In pieces.
We convince each other of this — if not the world and I, then Hector and I are often quietly confident about it.
And when I come here in the mornings, he’s changed a bit overnight and started to smell like the kennel and the kennel maids and stuff, which isn’t me. So I reclaim him — he encourages that. He would like me to decide that our problems would be solved if he just came and stayed at my house. Most of what he does is trying to make that plain.
They’re clever — the things that want to live with us.
But in my case, the things are probably unwise.
I could be wrong, though. I let Hector decide.
When she wasn’t being manipulated by a dog, Meg spent her days not doing GFH’s accounts. She could be near the paperwork, could even look over the figures sometimes to be helpful, but that was it. She was officially an absence in the financial-planning sense, which felt lovely.
Meg was here to keep up with admin, write begging letters and maintain the GFH website. Admin was just admin, she could do admin — it required a love of numbing repetition. (Meg loved repetition. Or else she certainly loved being numb.) And it wasn’t hard to get into web design, learn the basics — coding was supposed to be fashionable now, all the kids were doing it. It was even less hard if the one site you had to deal with already existed and was very simple and you were determined and had a lot of time on your hands to learn about HTML and CSS, because you had become — just for an example — unemployable in your original profession.
Meg wrote most of GFH’s rehoming ads and took the display photos of each inmate. Paul who was tall and from Purley (Tall Paul from Purley: you wanted to say it all the time in your head) helped out on the site when he was around. Susan was a gatherer of information and finder of problems. (She was also an ecology bore and fond of discounted designer luggage.) Those two were the other purely administrative staff. (Which was to say, people who never had to deal with fluids or excrement at any time.)
There was Laura, too.
Laura did have to be mentioned. She was based partly in the office — that couldn’t be helped — but she knew nothing about computers and wasn’t allowed near them, because she fucked things up. Laura knew about empathy and how to screen candidate owners and how to arrange events to generate publicity and funds — at least that’s what she claimed and it was fairly true … As Meg knew nothing about empathy and was often able to claim she was electronically busy when consulted about possible events, Laura was kept slightly at bay.
When necessary, Meg spent time updating the information on hard-to-move animals. Recently, the chief exec, Mr Davis — he could be called Peter, GFH wasn’t hierarchical — had allowed her to make little films designed to give visitors a better idea of who they might like to have, all new and grateful, about the place and on their furniture and ready for fun and companionship and excursions. This wasn’t difficult or expensive and wasn’t intended as a fiendish grab for institutional power, as she’d felt others might see it.
Or as my paranoia about others seeing it might see it.
Christ, I’d be better off if I had a stroke, got stabbed in the forehead — then at least some of this crap would shut up, surely. I would leave myself alone.