Puppy Day

The little white puppy was hiding in my shoe. I couldn’t bear to look at him. How could I have failed so spectacularly so quickly? Packing up his blankets, towels and toys was like leafing through broken dreams. Each soft and snuggly item was an artefact of hope, excitement and joy. They now cut cruelly to the quick – disappointment, failure and despair. The white puppy’s liquid eyes watched me in silent rebuke and painful surrender. Whispered promises I had crooned into his ear on that first day lay shattered between us.

“We will be best friends forever. You are a dream come true. I’ll protect you and cherish you always.”

Laying down a half-folded towel, I sank to the floor and wept.

*          *          *

I cannot tell you how much I had always wanted a dog. My favourite storybook as a child was Dogger – the Shirley Hughes classic about a boy’s love for his snuggly and beaten-up toy dog. My favourite book as a child was a huge A3-sized encyclopaedia of dog breeds. I barely had the strength to hold it up, but spent hours immersed in its glossy pages. My favourite toy was a scrappy and formerly white Grundy hound. Named Mutsy, he was a greying soft dog with brown button eyes and a still-white, still-fluffy patch tucked beneath the label on his ear, a label I had always refused to take off. He smelled of My Little Pony bed-linen, fierce childhood hugs, and Johnson’s baby shampoo. I still have the book and the toy, carefully stowed in the drawer beneath my bed. Packed away, but always close by. Just in case. For emergencies.

Indeed, I took Mutsy the toy dog with me to University. Disorientated by life in halls of residence, by strangers rapidly becoming friends, and by independence laden with expectation, Mutsy secured me and comforted me. At night I would crawl into my narrow bed and feel for him beneath the pillow. I hid him there during the day. My new flatmates and I lived in each other’s rooms, and no one needed to know about my security blanket and little fragment of home away from home. Popping an audiotape cassette into my stereo, I would snuggle into his worn fur.

A feature of halls of residence is the continuous nature of night-time fire alarms. Drunken students burning toast mostly, confused by the domestic arts and the efficiency of university smoke detectors. I kept a backpack next to my bed in readiness for our communal trudge out into the carpark. Mutsy would be slipped into it while I blearily found my shoes and shrugged myself into an outsized jumper. Shivering in the cold with my fellow pyjama-clad students (and a hilarious handful of one-night-standers still in their glad-rags from the night before), I was safe in the knowledge that my most precious possession was curled in the bottom of my bag. Safe and close and patiently waiting for the frustrated firemen to finish their lecture about misusing smoke alarms and endangering lives by distracting them from real emergencies.

If only I could care for this little white puppy with as much love and tenderness as I cared for that worn-out toy dog all of those years ago.

*          *          *

The day had finally arrived. Thirty-one years in the making. It was Puppy Day. Five years of postgraduate study and three years of precarious short-term employment had forestalled my dream of dog-ownership for long enough. I had been in my permanent academic post for two years now, giving it the requisite time to settle before taking any major life decisions. Being sensible. Bring responsible. Being the version of Me I thought I was supposed to be. In a couple of weeks I would be moving out of my flat into a house with a garden. The move itself was entirely designed to facilitate my getting a dog of my own. I would be moving further away from friends and family, but somewhere where I could afford a garden and still be close enough to visit frequently.

The move itself had been interminably delayed. One house had fallen through and the whole process had been forced to start again. Everything was slow. Solicitors and estate agents proved their worth by generating delays and crises that they could solve. Papers inched their way across the country. Why use email when paper is so much slower? After all, a slower process means more billable hours. I was supposed to have moved weeks ago, but the avalanche of paper was still at the creeping stage, not yet having reached the critical mass of ‘contract exchange’ whereupon everything suddenly tumbles down the mountain, sweeping vendors, estate agents and solicitors aside as it goes.

But Puppy Day could not be delayed. Puppy Day had been arranged for a long time. A 10-week-old bundle of curiosity and a barely contained bladder was waiting was for me. A brand-new travel crate was strapped into the passenger seat of my car. Two ceramic puppy bowls sat poised and pristine on a paw-print mat in my living room. A basket filled with worn-out towels and shiny new toys awaited its new inhabitant. Puppy Day had arrived and I was beside myself with excitement.

Bless his heart the little white puppy almost made it all the way home without throwing up. Forty minutes into the forty-five minute journey the sickly smell of half-digested puppy food wafted into my nostrils. I clucked soothingly,

“Never mind little fella. We’re nearly there. You have done so well.”

The little white puppy looked up at me with trusting eyes before gently and contentedly starting to lap up the little pile of puke. Parking up quickly I scooped him out of the crate and away from his impromptu meal. That could be cleared up later. I climbed the stairs with him snuggled against my chest. I could feel his heartbeat racing against my own.

“Here we go my little happy chappy. Home sweet home. Or at least”, I added sardonically, “home for a few more weeks… if we are ever able to move.”

We. That “we” felt good. I was no longer an I. We were a We. I was no longer alone.

Being a (reluctant and frankly chronologically borderline) Millennial, I almost immediately whipped out my phone. Tucking the exhausted pupster into his new basket I snapped a quick picture and uploaded it to Facebook.

“Childhood dream realised today”, I tapped. “Meet Teddy.”

Little did I know then that in one short week I would be packing up his hopeful belongings having torn myself apart with Anxiety, and tipped myself into the worst Depression of my life. Its speed was matched only by its ferocity. The White Dog was helpless as the Black Dog came gnashing into our lives.