My wife and I are driving back to London with a puppy in a cage on the back seat. The puppy, dark brown apart from a white bib shaped like a downward-pointing arrow, has commenced a pitiful, high-pitched keening, the kind of sound you can feel in your bones, a noise to scratch holes in your soul. We’ve had possession of this dog for about 15 minutes, and I’m already thinking we’ve made a terrible mistake.
After one last, rasping cry, the dog promptly falls asleep for the rest of the two-hour journey. Unfortunately, the two-hour journey ends up taking three hours, and for the final 20-minute stretch the dog sets up its pitiful wailing again.
“Nearly there,” my wife says, even though we are standing still in a queue at clogged intersection.
“Anyway, welcome to Acton,” I say.
“Nooooooooo!” says the dog.
Two of my sons are already waiting in the house for what promises to be an irrepressibly cute moment. The puppy does not disappoint, skidding from person to person on the wooden floor, tail wagging, delighting everyone except the old dog, which is plainly traumatised by its arrival, and the cat, which has left the building.
While everyone shouts out potential dog names, I go and get the cage from the car. The idea of the cage is that the puppy has a cosy little prison in which to spend its first weeks – door open in the daytime, door closed for brief but increasing periods at night – in the process developing both good toilet habits and an independent spirit. We tried it with the old dog 14 years ago and it was an unmitigated failure: the dog was still shitting in my shoes six months later. My wife maintains this was a failure not of cage theory itself, but of our resolve.
The new dog chews the corner off some rush matting while more names are shouted out. We are evidently still at the stage where there are no bad ideas.
“Louise,” says the middle one
“Regina Blitz,” says the youngest.
“Baby Sister,” says my wife, in all apparent seriousness.
“Viv,” says the oldest, by text.
The dog plays, eats, pees on the lawn and spends an hour sitting on the sofa, ears at attention, watching Netflix. I sit next to it, harbouring twin resentments – at the way my life has been so thoroughly upended, and also at the idea that you cannot call a puppy Carole. It’s not even allowed on the shortlist.
“Why not?” I say. “Pam is still on the short list.”
“Little Pam!” my wife says.
At 10pm the still-nameless dog is shut in its cage in the kitchen. I stay up, watching the news and listening to the dog’s plaintive, saw-toothed wailing. Even from a room away it feels as if it’s wearing the enamel off my teeth. After half an hour, I vow to give it another half-hour. Ten minutes later, I go upstairs to my wife.
“This is madness,” I say.
“You’ve got to give it a chance,” she says. I go on to make my many objections to the whole cage system plain, in a manner that no one would suggest is the best version of myself.
“Fine,” my wife says. “What is your plan?”
“My plan was to never get a puppy, but it backfired,” I say. We listen to the dog wailing for a bit.
“A lot of people,” my wife says finally, “think it’s OK for the cage to be in the bedroom.”
I carry the cage up to our room. After that things proceed predictably: the dog whimpers, and I open the cage door and lie on the floor in front of it to offer reassurance. Eventually the dog falls asleep, and so do I. I wake up at dawn in our bed, with the puppy staring at me. We are sharing a pillow.
“That went well,” I say.
“It will get better,” my wife says.
“Tonight I think I might sleep in the cage,” I say.
By 9am upheaval has become the new normal: the cat is living a parallel existence, coming and going from an upper-storey window and being fed by appointment on top of the back garden wall. The old dog has found a high-seated sofa that the new dog cannot – for the moment – climb on to in order to chew the old dog’s ears.
And despite a troubled night that is destined to be the first of many, I have retreated to my office shed to write, just like always – except that I am typing this with one hand because I need the other one to stop a sleeping puppy from slipping off my lap.
