breed ever since. As soon as one starts to show signs of being about to check out, I am in touch with Mrs Wood, the breeder, to enquire about a replacement.
In theory, Dawn Wood and I should meet about once every twelve years. In practice, because of accidents and various health complications resulting in animals going belly-up before their time, the intervals between our meetings have sometimes been shorter.
They have never been so short, though, that we have failed to register the physical changes that have overtaken us both in the interim. We were in our early twenties when we first met; nowwere coming up to sixty and conscious of the fact that, if not the next dog, then the one after, will in all probability represent the last transaction.
This gives our encounters a poignancy of which I think neither of us is unaware. I notice the spread of melanin blotches across her hands, the painful torsion of the veins behind her knees, the fact that the loose flesh of her upper arms now reminds me of the skirting around a hovercraft, and that her hair is a more emphatic colour than it was (she looks younger when she lets some grey show through).
She takes on board the fact that the three-string necklace of creases round my throat has been etched deeper and that the thread-veins on my cheeks have grown more entangled; she sees that the fine skin around my eyes is growing tired and that the whites of the eyes are not a good colour, but of course both of us say nothing.
We rarely go very deeply into the latest cause of death: there isn’t much to say if it’s because of the heart packing up or one of the cancers (colon, bowel), which has generally been the case.
There was one occasion when I did go weepy on her, after a dog had died prematurely and in a particularly unpleasant way. And there was a period some years ago when there were problems in the family with a teenage daughter and she unburdened herself to me.
I held her hand under the buttony gaze of the Pinscher portraits on the walls. She said she felt she could talk to me more easily now I no longer cropped up on the television all that often. I detected a note of reproach in this (it’s a wild world) as well as some satisfaction that things were beginning to even out.
After that we became more reserved and formal. Our encounters have always followed an established pattern. Once the standard pleasantries have been disposed of (our eyes gliding over the latest ravages, our voices resolutely up), we are drawn by the smell of simmering bones and bagged biscuit meal to the kitchen, and from there to the outhouse beyond the kitchen where the puppies are whelped.
What would you call a smell so evocative that it has come to seem somehow fused with your existence, an indelible part of your life? One for which you can develop an irrational yearning and that you often find yourself trying (uselessly) to imagine? A smell for which you feel a kind of nostalgia even while you’re in its presence? Proustian? (Only if you were really pushed.) Primal?
You can smell the smell before the door to the outbuilding in Mrs Wood’s garden is unlatched – it out-smells the tarred weatherboard of the walls, the tubbed midget-pines making a path to it, and the leaf-rot which oozes underfoot in autumn.
The ingredients are simple, if unreproducible: milk from, for example, Smoky Ghost Sovereign Lady (that is, the mother – pet-name ‘Tara’); paraffin from the heaters; urine and creamy crap soaked into the shredded newsprint covering the timber floor; the tang of surgical spirit; the oiliness of glycerine; the nubby rubber of hot water bottles.
At three weeks, the puppies are still sexless and blind and squirm in a heap together like something under a laboratory microscope. They are as undifferentiated as oranges or melons. Choosing between them involves the same level of choice as a waltz along the produce aisles at the supermarket.
Or it would if Mrs Wood, with an unerring instinct
In theory, Dawn Wood and I should meet about once every twelve years. In practice, because of accidents and various health complications resulting in animals going belly-up before their time, the intervals between our meetings have sometimes been shorter.
They have never been so short, though, that we have failed to register the physical changes that have overtaken us both in the interim. We were in our early twenties when we first met; nowwere coming up to sixty and conscious of the fact that, if not the next dog, then the one after, will in all probability represent the last transaction.
This gives our encounters a poignancy of which I think neither of us is unaware. I notice the spread of melanin blotches across her hands, the painful torsion of the veins behind her knees, the fact that the loose flesh of her upper arms now reminds me of the skirting around a hovercraft, and that her hair is a more emphatic colour than it was (she looks younger when she lets some grey show through).
She takes on board the fact that the three-string necklace of creases round my throat has been etched deeper and that the thread-veins on my cheeks have grown more entangled; she sees that the fine skin around my eyes is growing tired and that the whites of the eyes are not a good colour, but of course both of us say nothing.
We rarely go very deeply into the latest cause of death: there isn’t much to say if it’s because of the heart packing up or one of the cancers (colon, bowel), which has generally been the case.
There was one occasion when I did go weepy on her, after a dog had died prematurely and in a particularly unpleasant way. And there was a period some years ago when there were problems in the family with a teenage daughter and she unburdened herself to me.
I held her hand under the buttony gaze of the Pinscher portraits on the walls. She said she felt she could talk to me more easily now I no longer cropped up on the television all that often. I detected a note of reproach in this (it’s a wild world) as well as some satisfaction that things were beginning to even out.
After that we became more reserved and formal. Our encounters have always followed an established pattern. Once the standard pleasantries have been disposed of (our eyes gliding over the latest ravages, our voices resolutely up), we are drawn by the smell of simmering bones and bagged biscuit meal to the kitchen, and from there to the outhouse beyond the kitchen where the puppies are whelped.
What would you call a smell so evocative that it has come to seem somehow fused with your existence, an indelible part of your life? One for which you can develop an irrational yearning and that you often find yourself trying (uselessly) to imagine? A smell for which you feel a kind of nostalgia even while you’re in its presence? Proustian? (Only if you were really pushed.) Primal?
You can smell the smell before the door to the outbuilding in Mrs Wood’s garden is unlatched – it out-smells the tarred weatherboard of the walls, the tubbed midget-pines making a path to it, and the leaf-rot which oozes underfoot in autumn.
The ingredients are simple, if unreproducible: milk from, for example, Smoky Ghost Sovereign Lady (that is, the mother – pet-name ‘Tara’); paraffin from the heaters; urine and creamy crap soaked into the shredded newsprint covering the timber floor; the tang of surgical spirit; the oiliness of glycerine; the nubby rubber of hot water bottles.
At three weeks, the puppies are still sexless and blind and squirm in a heap together like something under a laboratory microscope. They are as undifferentiated as oranges or melons. Choosing between them involves the same level of choice as a waltz along the produce aisles at the supermarket.
Or it would if Mrs Wood, with an unerring instinct
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