Table of Contents
Also by Stephen Foster
FICTION
ARE YOU WITH ME?
STRIDES
IT CRACKS LIKE BREAKING SKIN
NONFICTION
FROM WORKING-CLASS HERO TO ABSOLUTE DISGRACE:
AN 80S MEMOIR
WALKING OLLIE
BOOK OF LISTS: FOOTBALL
SHE STOOD THERE LAUGHING
For T.A., once more, with love
The Silver Grizzle Leaves Home
Dyou know what, I think hes thrown a litter of smooths! says the breeder Karen, as she rearranges half a dozen two-week-old pups, maneuvering each of them into the optimum feeding position. Every time she moves one she looks closely at its minute ears to see if theres any sign of the feathering that distinguishes the ears of their mother, Tareefa. It seems there is not. Tareefa is behaving impeccably, lying on her side, quietly sanguine, while six mouths work away ferociously at her nipples. Ive never seen pups this young at their feed before. They are no bigger than gerbils, their eyes are closed, and the only way they express personality is by being the hungriest. This is a keenly fought event, in which the competition is intense, and a winner is difficult to find, though the shy one is easy to spot.
By he Karen means the proud father, Farid. It was the sight of Farid with his beautiful gray coat and his unfeathered, smooth ears, and his relaxed and thoughtful attitude to go with the good looks, that inspired me to pursue an idea. The idea was one Id been worrying at for a while. The idea was to get a second dog.
Id had it in my mind for some time that, since Ollie (the subject of my previous book, Walking Ollie) had become more or less normal, what he really neededto encourage and promote the normalitywas a companion. Because I could already see him backsliding. Where, pre-normality, he used to be vaguely psychotic, post-normality he was beginning to show signs of going the other way, of becoming moody and withdrawn. I was not principally looking for a new dog for us; I was looking for a perk-me-up friend and companion for him.
It is not as straightforward as all that, though.
When Trezza, my partner, and I discovered Ollie in a rescue shelter five years ago, I knew nothing about dogs. While I am still no expert, I am more experienced than I was then. The long and short of Walking Ollie is that Ollie was a very awkward animal, one that I often wished could be sent back whence he came. However (the big however), I could never find it in me to load him into the car, turn the key, and drive him off in order to return him as if he were a faulty television. Dogs are not like that. Dogs get under your skin. After you have cared for one for a while (and you do have to care for them, they are not into looking after themselves), you find that, quite unconsciously, you have become absorbed into a cult: the Cult of the Dog Owner. In this way, it has to be conceded, you, too, have become slightly cultishwhich is surely another word for crazyjust like all the rest of them.
This is how, and why, you begin to think along these lines, the lines along which I had been thinking. Even without Ollies incipient personality change into the loner, it had been crossing my mind that, since he no longer runs away when he catches sight of me, since he sometimes responds to the call of his name, since he is less fearful of plastic bags and flies than he used to be, what must happen next is a matter of inevitability.
Each time the thought appeared, I pushed it away because it was a thought that would, in all probability, make life much more difficult than it needed to be. Keeping two dogs will not be any less trouble than keeping one, will it? And its unlikely that it will turn out to be just double the trouble, either. No, without pausing to recollect those incidents you have witnessed, or been part of, or have startedincidents involving a pair of dogs simultaneously going missing in opposite directionswithout bothering to recall moments of that sort, its still easy enough to guess that two dogs will be trouble multiplied and squared.
But (the big but, bigger than the big however).
But: I looked at Ollie lying in his basket, bored and fed up, fed up and bored, filled with ennui and actually sighing. I looked at him day after day, and the more I looked at him, the more I convinced myself that the cause of his apathy was the lack of a playmate. He has me; he has Trezza; he has Jack, my teenage son, who sometimes comes around; and he has Jacks friends, who also sometimes come around. He is not particularly interested in any of this group of individuals.
At least he sees the great outdoors twice a day, in fields and on beaches and around lakes. Here he has a number of friends (and enemies) to meet and greet (or not). Here he can normally be relied upon to be fairly lively. It is only all the many hours that he spends indoors, like a bored teenager who has nothing to do, that seem difficult for him. I can keep putting off the search for a companion for him for as long as this remains the case. The rational part of me is capable of thinking of it in these terms: Tough shit, Ollie. Here you are in the warm and dry being loved and fed and everything, what a hardship.
Its when he starts to become surly, withdrawn, and lethargic in the great outdoors that I really believe something needs to be done. He has always had these tendencies in the house, as well as many other special characteristics: for instance, there was a time he was frightened of everything, up to and including (most especially) me, his loving master. It was a huge problem, but after many difficult months we got through that. This left only a secondary raft of neurosis, including a fear of aprons and of flies, but the longer time went on, the more he relaxed and the more our relationship really became that of loving master and faithful, albeit disobedient and scatty, companion.
I surfed the Internet, looking at the rescue sites. I saw numerous deserving cases, some of which I considered at length, repeatedly revisiting the relevant web page, downloading the picture to my desktop, emailing it on to Trezzas computer downstairs, but in truth I was never going to acquire a companion for Ollie from these sources because here were animals who could turn out to be even more trouble than he was. And this matter crossed my mind, too: Ollie might not appreciate a rival in the special-needs stakes. What I was looking for was a pup, someone that Ollie could train into his ways. I did the mental checklist. Which breeds does Ollie most like; who does he play with? There is no definitive answer to this. He is selective; he has one Doberman he loves, a couple of terriers that he is always delighted to see, a pair of mutts that he rates highly, and a continental sparring partner, an Italian Spinone (an engaging animal, but one that is the embodiment of the Who album title Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy). So: not an Italian Spinone, in any event.
Ollie is a lurcher, a crossbreed, half Saluki, half greyhound. The greyhounds that we regularly encounter are quiet, retired animals who do very little. Ollie will occasionally have a run with one of these, but only occasionally, because nine times out of ten the greyhounds cant be bothered. Its probable, in fact, that its his greyhound side that is responsible for the incipient lethargy. I looked around my neighborhood. In a (single sample) proof of this theory I noted that the one greyhound we saw every day was an idler who slouched along behind his master, a curmudgeon who walks with a stoop and who is never without a cigarette that he spends most of his life relighting.
