A Very British Taboo

At the top of the steps, someone had opportunistically dug a stick into the drying concrete to scrawl their name, the W rising at its final angle like a frozen wave thrown up from the collected pool of water. Holding the bike under the seat above my shoulder, I stepped aside as two joggers panted quite heavily up. Both thanked me, the second, needlessly so by speaking instead of signalling as the first had, as though self-conscious at his sweaty appearance gasping behind his more poised companion, who jumped up and down elaborately on the spot when reaching the canal.

The railway arches under the bridge had a new work of art created entirely in mud, juxtaposing interestingly with the jostling colours of the graffiti and I realised I either hadn’t noticed this earlier or it had happened in the last few hours. On the opposite side, the faded Question everything! and the slightly more vibrant Why? underneath had been around before the concrete steps had finally replaced the steep, determined desire line indicating the quickest route to the canal. I realised the image was the Nosferatu silhouette, climbing the stairs. Through the small wooded area I noticed a group ahead on the narrow bridge with smallish dogs about to pass one another. Neither dog on a lead, they began a noisy standoff so I pulled over to take in the fast flowing, high and murderous-looking river to allow the noise to die down and everyone to pass.

Quickly losing interest in the confrontation, the dog in a sort of hi-vis coat moved to stand in front of a well-dressed 30ish man who I realised wasn’t with either party, but attempting to squeeze through the commotion on his way to the canal. The dog jumped up enthusiastically leaving muddy prints on his navy blue trousers that stopped fashionably just above his naked ankles. Dismayed by the inaction of the owner and somewhat intimidated by the excitable attention of the dog, his discomfort only grew as he stiffened into a silent, helpless resentment.

My best friend when around 10, who I loathed, owned a large German Shepherd. I always thought the beware of the dog sign outside their house underplayed the danger that lurked inside. It seemed that Albert* could sense my presence a pretty long way off, before being dragged out to the garden because of it, which sent him into a shocking rage. My friend played on this fear and would often threaten to let the dog in, sat restlessly glaring through the opaque glass pane of the back door, going into a frenzy once more whenever I approached to use the downstairs toilet with the same flower patterned frosted glass in its window. If we decided to play in the back garden, I’d go out the front door and close it behind me as softly as possible before crawling toward the tall wooden gate at the side of the semi-detached house. Back inside with my scent in his nostrils, Albert tore up and down searching me out. The gate would open and my friend appeared, embarrassed and aggravated by my attitude toward his dog. Albert’s menacing, imprecise bulk appeared on the other side of those flowers, shifting his gaze petal to petal to try and see me better.

We almost never observed each other any other way.

There wasn’t anything unusual about our bickering that day, but we both knew exactly what he was doing when he pulled off one of his boxing gloves and flew toward the back door, leaving the punch bag he’d been working furiously a moment earlier swinging about on its rusty hook. Albert emerged. I heard the door lock then before my friend appeared in his sister’s bedroom window with a terrible expression still wearing the other glove. Almost bewildered, as if unfamiliar with the surroundings, Albert let out a series of shattering barks that seemed to reverberate underneath the low grey clouds of the cul-de-sac like thunder, before launching toward me twisting and turning about the garden in what seemed a kind of silent whirling dance until I felt his teeth sink into my side. I cried out, my school shirt torn and bloodied. Some months out of Winson Green prison, my friend’s dad appeared, the curls in his thick dark mop of hair moving as he shouted. Albert shrank as if struck by an object.

The man in the navy blue suit was eventually released and I tried to catch his eye. One of his white in-ear headphones had worked loose and swung about on the cable as he passed, looking firmly to the ground, blushing, he went to fix the earphone back in but paused to listen to the woman in her 40’s, insulted at his not playing along with her dog, call out loudly, “Oh it’s such a big problem isn’t it,” before turning to her friend catching up to ask, “Did you just see that?” I felt for the man in the suit, harassed-looking and completely alone with his feelings as if expecting little sympathy from the people on the bridge.

I wanted to tell him about the table of people I joined the other day in a local pub where the person I knew introduced me to the couple sat opposite. They took turns to go out for cigarettes, shuffling along the red faux leather seats to be released out of the booth, handing over a lead attached to a sleeping dog underneath the table. The dog woke up as we drank and they pulled it onto the seat between them. Both getting up for a cigarette, one of them handed me the lead and I instinctively refused it, before she asked in a confused manner if I minded looking after the dog whilst they went to smoke. I said that I did mind, adding, “I don’t like dogs.” The dog disappeared with them both and the person I knew gave me a long, fixed look as though summing up a new characteristic he hadn’t previously noticed and didn’t much like. “But now they think you’re a twat,” he said.

I protested that it is easier in British society to speak of loathing children than it is to mention a dislike of dogs. “I can’t tell you how many non-maternal women I know,” I said, “nobody bats an eyelid!” Never mind the sheer perversity of this behaviour, this long devolving of wolves to assuage our eternal, all-encompassing loneliness. A way to fill the colossal void the estrangement from our fellow human being has created. That I’ve never understood the confusion in a dog owner’s eyes when their pet runs over in a park and you don’t do whatever it is you’re supposed to do in that situation, or the look in a friend’s eye; a real, genuine, adult friend, when you say you’d rather not come round because of the dog. With more or less the same look in his eye, I told him also about a homeless man and his dog one freezing cold night—another bridge; irritated by that look now, who had a kind of clamped-looking hand as if thoroughly penetrated by the cold: “‘It was the dog that sold it for me,’” this woman said, crouching down to stroke the dog with a vague embarrassment in her voice hearing what she’d said out loud. What did the homeless man do? He looked on from some place within staring and not staring. Reacting and not reacting, as if his very thoughts froze the moment they occurred.

Of course I didn’t say much of anything in that booth, and didn’t say anything at all to the man in the blue suit. I just thought it. I did go and buy that homeless man chips, I recalled, climbing back on the bike, feeling the weight of the bag on my back filled with alcohol and snacks at that moment, as if these things were in my bag now—a fresh pouch of tobacco on my way to see a man without a dog. To my surprise the homeless man unwrapped the chips only to clutch a pile onto the ground, before wrapping them back up and putting them away inside his coat. The bright orange hi-vis jacket blurred across the small park to the left as I turned off to the right, the dog’s attention on something new. At the junction to join the busy road, I waited for a break in traffic next to the curiously still in service, barely vandalized telephone box. The contrails in the clear blue sky above were like shaving cuts that would steadily heal.

*Albert’s name has been changed