The king of fetch

I want to hear the dog talk to me. I want it so much it's become
almost an obsession. When I wake up with his nose pressed under my
chin, the soft thrum of his tail as he realises I'm awake, I speak to
him. 'Hello, Rory. 'Can you hear me? Can you understand me?' He never
can, but I keep hoping; one day.

I remember a time, so long ago now that it might as well be another
lifetime away, running in the fields with the sun warm on my hair and
the ground hard beneath my feet, and dreaming of being grown up and
doing all the magic things adults do. Life was full of hope and
expectation, I was the happiest child in the world. I had it all going
for me, everything to live for. I don't know where it all went, but I
know this: I let it go freely, I threw it away. I made no attempt to
hold it back.
I can still hear the echo of that hope, that excitement. That's all it
is now; an echo.

There is loneliness, and aloneness, and I know them both pretty well.
Sometimes they overlap, and the feelings of emptiness and isolation
become pleasant, as if I have become something else, not really human
at all. I sometimes think people can't see me; that I've become
invisible. This brings an odd contentment, my own secret. My own secret
world.
I get up in the morning because Rory needs to go out. If it wasn't for
him, I doubt I'd get up at all. We go out into the pouring rain and
drive to the park while the radio talks about BSE and MMR and EMF and
various other abbreviations.
When Jack died, the solicitor talked about IHT and EPA and other things
I similarly had no idea about. Seemed that Jack was worth far more dead
than alive, in terms of cash, at any rate.
I miss him. It's not that I think about him, or that every minute is
full of desperate memories, sad island snippets of time. I miss him in
my body. It's an all-over ache, as though his death stripped some of
the life from me; took some of my years. I've gone through the seven
stages of bereavement. Amazing, nowadays, that you can deal with death
as though it's a correspondence course; "Well done! You've tackled
denial and won! Now it's time we had a look at anger.." I've got my
diploma, but it hasn't helped my career.

The people in the park are huddled into their coats, hoods up, while
their dogs look miserable, not because of the rain, but because the
humans are too busy staying dry to play with them. Rory looks up at me,
and I feel my heart pounding. Will he choose to speak to me? Is today
the day? He wags his tail half-heartedly and wanders off to search for
a stick for me to throw. He loves his sticks. No matter how far I throw
them, into the dense grass or into the lake, he always finds them and
brings them back to me. Puts them right back into my hand. He's a star.
The king of fetch

I was an unintentional accountant. I went to university with all my
school friends, all of us carried along in a sort of Brownian motion of
apathy, our parents providing the heat. I had no idea what I wanted to
do, so I did maths, because I'd been good at it at school. Then I got a
job as an accountant, because a man came to the university and promised
me lots of money and a chance of a partnership. This was in the
eighties, when money was everything.
I thought I loved every minute of it. It took Jack to show me the
truth, and then it was too late. While we were all scrabbling for
promotion and recognition, showing off our flash cars and talking about
house prices, he was teaching English in Streatham. Often he came home
with bruises, where the kids had had a go at him. I was suitably
appalled, not just with the violence, but also with his dreadful wages,
his zero prospects, and, if I'm honest, with the fact that he was doing
something he loved; that he thought he was doing good. Altruism didn't
sit well in the eighties.
Some days he would come home, his eyes ablaze with an incomprehensible
light, and show me a piece of poorly spelled, totally grammar-free work
that one of his pupils had handed in. He was as much at a loss to
understand my disdain as I was his excitement.
'Forget the grammar', he would say. 'Read the story'
And I would. But I never got it.
The night he died I was in a wine bar in Shepherd's Bush. The one along
from the old BBC offices. I was there with the bosses and a few minor
celebs, and I recall a woman upending her chair and falling backwards
down the step, screaming with laughter. She was a wine writer, flavour
of that particular month, but she forgot to spit it out that night. We
all found it hilarious, of course. I got the last tube home to Ealing
Broadway, trying to pretend I was sober as I sat there staring at the
wall ads and deliberately ignoring the kids snogging across from me.
Walking across the green to the flat I noticed the police cars, and for
a moment I did think, God, is it our house? As you do. Then I got there
and found that it was me they were looking for, after all.

The rain dripping down my scalp feels like insects, termites perhaps,
all off on an expedition south to find a new home. It's cold, from a
distance, as usual. As if my nerve endings have shrunk away from my
skin to hide deep inside. Rory brings his stick and I throw it, again
and again; he never tires of the game, and somehow, nor do I. We're
both like rugby players, grinning at each other in the mud, despite the
cold and pain. We've got the park to ourselves now, but I'm conscious
that we've been here a long time, and Rory's joints are not what they
were, so we go home, and I dry him with a fluffy towel, him twisting
and writhing in delight as I rub him. The smell of wet dog is a
wonderful, comforting smell like no other, and I touch my forehead to
his, and all at once I wish I could be him, I wish I could cease to be
me and merge quietly into his simple little consciousness. We could run
together, and I would regain that almost-forgotten joy. I would know
what he knows, and he would understand me, and all of us would be
together.
This is a stupid thought.

Jack never argued with me, except that one time. We disagreed about
pretty much everything, but we never argued. He loved me, you see.
Despite my self-absorption, my endless talk of profits and promotion,
my constant denigration of his job, his worth, he loved me. But that
time was different.
It just wasn't the right time. I was too young. Shit, we were both too
young. I was in the running for department head, and nothing was going
to step in my way. We were living in a nice flat, had a great social
life, hell; this was London, 1986! It was great! But a baby? No.
Jack astonished me with his delight, his immediate talk of plans,
decisions to be made, possible names. I stopped him.
'No' I said.
'No what? You don't like the name?'
'Jack, never mind the bloody name. This is not going to happen'
He stared at me, and I saw the hurt leach out of his eyes and down
through his shoulders into his chest. He seemed to shrink.
'But you can't!' he said, like a moody child. That's just what I
thought. A moody child.
'Jack. This is not the right time. There's plenty of time for us'
But, of course, there wasn't.
We still weren't speaking to each other when the police arrived at the
door that night. A carjacking, they said. He'd been stabbed and left in
the street. It was a new sort of crime, but one that was on the
increase, as if that mattered now.

Rory is asleep on the settee, running in his sleep. His eyelids flicker
to reveal the white sclera of his eye, and his lips flutter as if he's
breathing hard. Dog dreams. I close my eyes, wishing I could listen
in.
I had a letter from his school. It was in the usual state;
mis-spellings galore and no grammar to speak of, but that afternoon I
stood in our flat looking over the green, the autumn sunlight streaming
in on my well-chosen possessions, and read a scrap of paper from a
bunch of children one step from abject poverty, and it hit me like a
bullet in the stomach, knocking the air from my entire world.

'Dear Mrs Gabriel' it began,
'We are all very sorry about what happned to Mr Gabriel. He was relly
nice and always helped us and wanted us to be better than we is. He got
us to write storys a lot and it was good fun. Were very sorry and well
miss him'
There were hearts and kisses on the bottom, and inside the envelope a
note from the headmistress:
'I thought you might like to have this letter the children wrote to you
about our dear Mr Gabriel. He was such a joy, such an inspiration to
all the children. I can honestly say, if not for him, half of them
would not be attending school at all. He will be desperately missed,
and I can only offer my most profound condolences on your loss of such
a wonderful man'

I don't remember crying before that. Oh maybe as a child, in petulance
or anger or humiliation, but the tears came from me that afternoon like
an eruption. I cried until I was sick, until my body ached. Tears sped
from my eyes like wild spirits, possessing me, tearing at my safe
little personal empire, filling the cold empty shell of me. I cried as
a parachutist leaps from a plane, all life and hope behind him, and
nothing ahead but empty space and the hard ground.

There was, as I said, plenty of money. I moved to the country and
bought a house and a dog, and have been here ever since. I have not
worked. I don't know my neighbours. I've never been to the local
pub.
But one day, I know Rory will talk to me. He'll say, 'let's go to
Bradgate Park and run among the rocks, and I can play in the brook, and
you can throw the stick the way you like to do'.
And maybe later I can tell him about Jack, and the part of him that I
threw away, and the part of me that I threw away, long before, and
maybe, just maybe, he'll run off searching, as he always does.
And with his uncanny knack, he'll fetch it back.