Dogs
1
I would see him walking the dog most afternoons. This was several years ago, during a virus that left most people with time aplenty. I was living alone in a flat near Pilrig Park, and I often sat on a bench even during the winter months, reading a book, and with a flask of tea and a hot water bottle to keep me warm. I nodded but never said hello. But at a moment when contact with strangers was forbidden, when going round to a friend’s place for a tea, or popping out to the pub with a mate for a beer, was outlawed, these occasional gestures from others almost constituted companionship.
The dog was a Shiba Inu, a type I wouldn’t have known but discovered when I looked online for a fox-looking dog, and this was the first image that appeared. It was a beautiful animal, and if he’d had it since before the pandemic, the dog would have received attention from others and, in turn, he would have too. Even during this time, he would have probably met people in the park and elsewhere who acknowledged the pet and made the smallest of talk at a safe distance. This might have been reason enough to envy the man, but after some months of seeing him passing through the park alone, I saw that he also had a partner, an elegantly dressed woman around his age, which must have been about thirty, and whom I supposed managed to get into the country during a period when locking people down was less strenuously applied. It was often difficult to keep up with the various demands and expectations, where people could travel, and from where, and what vaccinations were required and how safe they were. I didn’t follow the restrictions because I had no need to break them: I had no desire to travel anywhere, nor did I have close friends nearby whom I was tempted to visit, nor a girlfriend living in a flat somewhere else in the city.
I’d moved to Edinburgh after my mother passed away in a small village fifty miles to the north. As an only child, I had found myself looking after her in her final years and, with a mixture of guilt and hope, knew I would move away once she had passed. She lived at one end of the street and I at the other. I had bought with the awareness that I needed to be close when she became ill, but not so close as to move once again back into the house. Living nearby gave my life freedom, but somehow no autonomy, and my days were structured around work for the local council and visiting her twice a day. While the care nurse was responsible for the activities my mother would least like her son to help her with (bathing and using the toilet), I often made her dinner, helped feed her, and sometimes, when she felt especially weak, put her into bed. A year after she passed away, I got a job with Edinburgh City Council and bought a flat off Leith Walk. I would begin to live, I thought, after years, helping someone to die. I knew such thoughts contained resentment, and I couldn’t quite alleviate the feeling that while keeping my mother alive with the hope of her son’s regular visits, I was killing off whatever opportunities I had to live my own.
Such ideas were sometimes on my mind when she was still living, and they caused me no pain. They seemed idle thoughts without consequences, and any guilt was immediately alleviated by an activity — by visiting, by cooking dinner, by chatting with my mum while we watched television. But after, there was no deed that could counter the remorse, and I was left bereft and deedless.
Perhaps I wouldn’t have dwelt much on these notions if three months after arriving in the city, the government hadn’t announced strict rules on going out, though I’d yet made no friends to go out with. Pubs and cafes were closed, visiting people was banned, and even couples living apart couldn’t see each other initially. The government was saying it needed to follow the science; others said this shouldn’t be the detriment of civil liberties. I suppose many were paranoid and conspiratorial about what was happening, but I don’t think many could have topped my suffocating self-absorption: that the pandemic rules were revenge for wishing my mother dead. There I was, moving from a small village where I could at least work in an office and go to the local pub, say hello to the locals and visit my mother nearby, to a city where I couldn’t visit anyone or go anywhere except to places like the park where I often noticed the man with the dog.
2
It would have been close to a year after the first lockdown announcement that I initially saw Jake with Miranda. I sensed in their body language that this was not a new relationship but that they were newly reacquainted, and while many a couple has been separated through working in different countries and on different continents, there must have been something original in these recouplings, just as there must have been never before quite the sense of claustrophobic closeness in couples living so completely in each other’s company. I remember a couple who I also saw often in the park, and noticed their familiarity lacked the very intimacy that was so evident between Jake and Miranda. This other couple seemed like strangers, yet were no doubt close: people who appeared to have nothing to say to each other, who offered no physical contact, and revealed constantly in their proximity that they had been partners for many years. They had a daughter who was about four; it was as though they decided to have her to alleviate the loneliness that their togetherness would have otherwise existed within. I had no more evidence for this than my own eyes, but I felt that this was a child who would allow them to have something to say to each other in the years that followed. She would go to school, and they could discuss how she was doing. They would think of the presents they would buy her for Christmas and on her birthday. When she became sick, they could discuss whether to take her to the doctor or whether plenty of rest would be enough. What was it in their body language that made me think such thoughts, I wondered, worrying that this was the projections of a lonely man looking to see in couples no more than a different sort of solitude.
I suppose I saw in the child a prop, somebody they never seemed to play with, or revel in, but that the obligations they felt towards her seemed like a purpose. When the play park opened again after closure during the first lockdown, I sometimes saw the father in the park, looking on at his daughter, like an absent-minded security guard in a museum who has little interest in the paintings on the wall but was aware of the value and importance while protecting them. This might sound like a prejudice against many museum staff, and a heavy simile, but there is a reason why it comes to mind, and at that moment, I wouldn’t quite have formulated the perception that way. What I would have seen and mused over, however, was how he looked at his child as though with one eye on the young figure’s security, the other elsewhere. I guessed that when a parent looks at their child with both eyes, the security meets with affection and fascination — the child absorbs them.
It was this absorption that I saw in Jake and Miranda’s affection towards each other. They could spend hours in the park, either sitting cross-legged at opposite ends of a bench, intensely conversing, or lying on the grass, entangled. Sometimes I would also see them on a park bench with him seated and Miranda lying with her head in his lap, stroking her hair. When I saw them together during this period, I usually detoured so that I wouldn’t feel obliged to say hello, nor create the expectation that Jake should reciprocate. But if he was alone, and walking the dog, I nodded, and he nodded back. He wasn’t the only person I would acknowledge; there were two or three I saw around during the first lockdown, and I would say hello. It came, I suppose, from how few people went out initially. Those who did could hardly ignore a stranger when this might be about the only person they would see outside that day. When government restrictions became looser, or when people became braver, there were enough people around to make ignoring them seem less insulting.
3
In time, places opened up, vaccines were introduced, and people returned to their jobs, reacquainted with friends. Most of the faces I would see in the park, I rarely saw again. But I continued going to the park often, and sometimes saw Jake and nodded or said hello. I didn’t know his name then, never offered any more than a word or two, and assumed he would continue to be a familiar stranger. I would rarely see Jake and Miranda together in the park, though I occasionally saw her walking the Shiba Inu instead of him. I sometimes passed them on Leith walk, or noticed them sitting together in a cafe or restaurant. There were then several months when I didn’t see them together at all, and, after that, a period where I saw Jake occasionally in the park without the dog.
I would be in the park usually at weekends and lunchtime, when I was working at home two days a week. It was good to be back in an office, speaking to people, usually about work issues, but they were conversations nevertheless. Sometimes in the work canteen, I’d join others at their table, and while I rarely joined the discussion, they seemed happy to have me there, or at least I wasn’t unhappy sitting with them. I may not have felt included, but neither did I feel unwelcome. Occasionally, someone would ask me about the vegetarian option I usually chose, or people would speak about a film or TV show and ask me If I’d watched it. I gave brief replies even if I had seen the film or TV series, and I guess people thought I was content with my own company, but not so contented that I wished to sit alone in it. Even in the pub in the village, I had rarely said much; it was as though chat was a wavelength whose dial I could never quite find. The social static was always interfering. For others, it seemed they turned on the radio and immediately had perfect reception.
Was this simply social anxiety? Perhaps it was, but I might now think I was looking for a channel that I couldn’t find; the choice was too limited. Again, I may sound arrogant and metaphorically clumsy, but it was as though people’s questions were both too blunt and too obligatory. They felt they ought to ask and, in the asking, were in no need of a specific answer. But how often did I ask anybody a question, specific or general? I didn’t, and yet found myself doing so when one afternoon, around six months after the last time I’d seen Jake in the park, and alone, I passed the bench he was sitting on, and he looked up. Rather than only saying hello, he added: How are things? It was the most mundane of statements, but seemed to demand a reply that was more substantial than ok, and so I said not too bad and asked how he was. I realised in the asking that I wanted to know, as I’d given thought to his partner’s absence and even more the dog’s. He laughed, but there wasn’t much lightness in it, and said maybe one day he would tell me. I said I’d like to hear about it, then added that I was on my lunch break. I offered it as a thing to say, but Jake took it to mean I must be in a hurry. We could chat next time, he said, and I could see that he did really need to talk, and that forty-five minutes wouldn’t be time enough.
4
While many at work would always sit with the same people at lunch, I sat wherever there was a place, and didn’t mind eating in silence while listening to others talk. It was as if putting food into my mouth allowed me to assume no words need come out of it; that my reticence was a sign of my good manners rather than my social awkwardness. I sometimes nodded, and of course said a few words when asked, and became increasingly comfortable with a level of communication that allowed me to be in company without exposing my solitude. At any given table, there were usually a couple of people who liked to talk, and they were either quick eaters who were happy speaking with their mouths full, or who would politely wait for a moment of self-quiet before taking a mouthful, chewing on it and continuing with their anecdote or opinion. They would then have half a plate of food in front of them when others finished, and then ate it even more hastily than the volubly ill-mannered. Jack was one of the latter, and I knew if I were to sit at his table, there would be a lot of laughter and banter, usually instigated by him, but his personality was generous enough that he never quite appeared to be holding court. He seemed more to be holding the group together. However, occasionally his tales could appear crueller than he might have realised, and one he offered perhaps reflected worse on those who laughed as he offered it with wryness but not quite with humour.
It was nearing Christmas, and the virus was deemed in retreat enough for the citizens of the country to travel, to shop and to meet in smaller groups in each other’s houses. And then, tighter rules were going to be in place on Boxing Day. Jack was in his late twenties, lived alone and was from Australia. He arranged on Christmas Day to eat in solitude, speak afterwards to his family, and then arrange to spend the night with a woman he’d slept with three or four times already over the previous few weeks. But knew he wanted no longer to see her, and saw the Covid restrictions as a great way to end the affair. On Boxing Day, as we all knew, or at least some of us remembered, far tighter restrictions were being brought in, and there he was with the perfect excuse to say they wouldn’t be seeing each other again. He was aware that she wanted a relationship, not a fling. As they had Breakfast in her bay-windowed lounge, in a flat she shared with two others, he said they were already breaking the law, and he wouldn’t want to do it again.
She was sad, cried a little and suspected she cried a lot more after he left, and maybe in the days after as she sent several messages hoping they could resume the affair when restrictions weakened, and there he was half-hoping they would be extended so that he wouldn’t have to go through the difficulty of breaking up with her again, or having another conversation about why he broke it off in the first place. He said Covid reminded him of a short film he’d seen. In it, a plant couldn’t get enough light; the building nearby was blocking the sun. Then one day, the sun came streaming through the window and the plant was nourished. The plant was in an apartment in New York City, the day was September 11, 2001, and the Twin Towers had just fallen. Catastrophes contain small mercies, he added, and I think he wanted no more than a wry laugh that recognised the irony of life, not a laugh that joked about the pain of others. But some guffawed loudly, and I looked around at the seven people who were also at the table, other than Jack and me, and saw a mixture of laughter and discomfort, but on one woman’s face a look that suggested distress.
I had noticed Liz before, but while she was always polite, she also appeared self-contained, someone who gave nothing away rather than a person who had nothing to give. We would say hello in the corridor, and she would always make a point of acknowledging my presence whenever I sat at the table where she was sitting. Most of the time, she would sit with Jack and the group of those who heard the anecdote, and I might have believed she liked Jack without giving it much thought. That look after the story he told made me think for more than a few moments that she was drawn to him, or that in the telling, Jack had told a story from one side of an affair in which she’d been on the other. I wondered if this tale didn’t just reflect an incident in her past; it revealed to her what might be waiting in the future if she did decide to date Jack.
Jack wasn’t so much a particular type as a type women would particularly be attracted towards. He was blandly handsome but with a piercing in his nose, a skin fade haircut, a three-day stubble, and probably at least an arm tattoo his work shirt would be hiding, he offered the accoutrements of stylistic appeal. Remove the nose piercing, the stubble, and give him a different haircut, and much of that appeal may have been lost. He was slightly built, perhaps even skinny, and not very tall. Liz may well have been beautiful, but it was though she insisted on hiding its possibility. Her skin was pale yet prolucent, and her eyes possessed a dark warmth that drew you into her gaze, no matter how brief might be her look upon you. She dressed in clothes that were inconspicuous within a walk that showed a surprising confidence, even sultriness. If anybody in the centre looked like they might have an alternative life, I would have imagined it would have been her. Yet that might be to say more about my wish to imagine her over any gap between her working life and private one. Yet I looked upon her speculatively more than as a product of my fantasies.
5
I didn’t see Jake in the park over the next month, even though I would usually go there two or three times a week, and where if the weather was passable at lunchtime I’d sit on a bench and have a homemade, but sometimes shop bought, sandwich, a flask of soup and a cereal bar, or take a book and read at the weekend with a flask of tea. I wondered if he was avoiding the place, as though too much was said for me to remain a stranger, and not enough to become a friend. I also wasn’t sure if I wanted to meet him again during lunch: if the story he seemed to want to tell was going to last an hour, I’d have to interrupt him in the middle of the telling, which would have been even ruder than cutting him short before he had started.
In the meantime, at work, I saw no sign that Jack and Liz were getting closer; indeed, usually Liz would sit herself at another table, as if determined to get some distance from the anecdote Jack told, and the laughter that followed it.
Sitting sometimes at Jack’s table, I might have felt implicated, as if I too had laughed loudly at the tale he told and the analogy with 9/11. Yet Jack never told another like it, as though ashamed less by the telling than the response it received. If Liz might have thought I was weak, continuing sometimes to sit at the table, I would have seen myself as weaker, still avoiding it because I might have been judged by someone whose judgment I was projecting onto her and then back onto me. I usually sat wherever I could find a space; sometimes this would be at the table where Liz sat, and I had to acknowledge that nothing indicated she was judging me at all.
The next time I saw Jake it was six weeks or so after our last meeting, and on a Sunday afternoon. It was warm, early June and this park, which could often be quiet, and never as hectic as others in the city, like the sedately busy Princes Street Gardens or the heaving, youthful, energetic Meadows, was at least lively. I might have missed Jake as I was walking along the path if he hadn’t called out and said hello. It seemed an especially significant gesture: to call out a friend, to call out to someone whose name you at least know, risks less ridicule than a hello that might have various strangers looking in your direction. I stopped, apologised for needing to rush off last time and, as he said I should join him, I sat down on the dry grass, though it had rained modestly two days earlier. He introduced himself, I told him my name, and he said that was good to have: he didn’t want to have to yell out hello in the future. It was a nice gesture, and whether he wished for us to become friends or not, I took it to mean he might, and I relaxed more than I would have without it. It may have been why I was unusually forthright, asking if he wished to continue telling me what he wanted to say last time. He shrugged, saying he would tell anybody who’d listen, but some people didn’t want to hear of others’ woes. Somehow, he felt that I might. I asked him why he thought this, and suspected it rested on a loneliness he perceived, but he said I looked like a good listener. This didn’t quite alleviate the sense that I must have been because there wasn’t enough going on in my life to make me bored by those of others, but it was couched as a compliment, and I couldn’t resist taking it as one.
He asked first how long I’d been in Edinburgh, and I spoke briefly about the village, my mother’s death and the transfer to the city. He listened attentively without looking like he was in a hurry to talk about his life, and I even mentioned a couple of things that wouldn’t have occurred to me as of any importance. I told Jake that my father died when I was thirteen and my mother was never the same again; that a healthy woman became invalided by her loss, and I became simultaneously mature at an early age and arrested in my development, as I never quite escaped the feeling that I needed to be there to look after her.
He said it must have been hard when she passed away; that when someone was relying on your love, it can seem devastating when it is absent. I said it was disconcerting, knowing that with no brothers or sisters, no close relations, and with parents now gone, I felt freer but vulnerable. The walls hadn’t so much fallen in, but fallen down, and I felt exposed, though not as unhappy as I expected. I think I was unhappier when the new walls came up, and we could all barely leave our homes. I then asked Jake about his dog.
6
The dog’s name was Jodie. He and his partner bought Jodie from a breeder on the Borders a couple of months before lockdown, but his partner left for Spain and got caught there because of various restrictions, and to look after a nervous mother who was terrified of catching the virus. She stayed for many months, and he was left taking care of a dog he didn’t initially want but felt very relieved to have when it was the only company he could rely upon. It got him out of the house, forced him to exercise, and it was nice to share a home with someone, however inadequate the conversation. A dog is a machine for loving, he said, not for talking. He recalled the machine for loving bit from an Iggy Pop song and said what he initially took to be cynicism, he could see was the opposite. He saw this not in listening to the song over and over again, but living with Jodie alone for almost a year.
His partner came back and, for several months, they weren’t just happy, they were blissfully so, and he apologised for what might seem like an exaggeration. He supposed this was how a couple with a young child felt, a couple who need hardly ever leave home. He worked from the flat as a computer programmer, and while before the pandemic he commuted each day to an office in Livingston, getting up at 715 to be there by 9, with breakfast consisting of a croissant or some other pastry and a cup of coffee he bought at the station, and consumed on the train. During the later stages of the lockdown, he could get up an hour later, still go along to the cafe at the end of the street, sit for half an hour alone or with his partner and Jodie, and be at his desk at home by 9. Sometimes he would get up at the same time when he would commute, and take the dog for a long and leisurely walk, then sit with a coffee and a pastry. He would then turn up for work without at all feeling the pressure of the day. For a long time, he thought he didn’t like his job, but working from home made him see that what he didn’t like was the anxiety of the morning commute. He would often have dreams that weren’t quite nightmares about missing buses and trains, and sometimes saw fellow commuters in these dreams who would look up from scrolling on their phones, before seeing their faces melting away into anonymity.
He never did miss having to commute, and while he now went into the office usually twice a week, as long as he was there for eight hours, he could arrive later if he wished. What he began to miss was the space in the flat that, before, felt roomy, and then became cramped. The place hadn’t become any smaller, of course, but his partner was also working from home. He worked mainly from a box room with a skylight, off the bedroom, while his partner occupied the sitting room, which also incorporated the kitchen. When living alone, he would usually work in the box room but then go through and sit next door for variety. But this was where his partner would then take meetings, work on her copy, and shoo him out of the room when he came in to make tea. Sometimes he went out for a reluctant lunch, wasting money on food he didn’t want to eat because he couldn’t get near the fridge. They started bickering, then arguing and then fighting. He started working in cafes but increasingly felt locked out of his home. The mortgage was in his name; his partner paid some of the other bills. It was his flat, not hers, and there he was, the one who often worked in environments that really weren’t conducive to the concentration required for programming. Within a year of her returning to Britain, they broke up.
7
His partner accepted that the flat was his, but that Jodie wasn’t. He tried to claim he had become the dog’s rightful owner while she was away. How would Jodie have survived without him? She said they wouldn’t have had a dog had it been his decision. He didn’t want one; she had to plead and cajole to get Jodie, and there he was trying to claim Jodie didn’t belong to her. No, she said. She went to stay with a friend and took the dog with her, but he suspected that, after a few weeks, the flatmate would be fed up. The friend may have felt guilty if she were to throw her out, but she would have known that Jodie could easily return to him. But no, for three months his ex-partner stayed with her friend, and after that she moved into another flat in the same part of town, over near the canal. She said he could see Jodie whenever he liked, but this meant seeing his partner too and, while he missed Jodie, he was relieved that this was not a child they would have to share custody with. He could get another dog and never see his ex-partner again. If dogs are machines for loving, they are interchangeable ones. He supposed we put the love into an animal that we want to extract from it ourselves. They don’t quite develop personalities, as humans do, and whether Jodie was six months or six years, it would look and act the same.
Was he being fair to the animal? I didn’t know. I’d never had a pet except a goldfish, and while I fed the fish diligently, I could never say I expressed love towards it. But in thinking this, I wondered if Jake was right. His feelings were his and had little to do with whatever feelings Jodie had for him. He said he might not have realised this had it not been for an incident several months earlier. Mostly, he stayed on this side of town, venturing as far as the bottom of Leith Walk or across to Stockbridge. Occasionally, if he wanted a very long walk, he carried on all the way out to Cramond. When he lived a few years ago in Marchmont, that was the side of town he covered, often going round by Arthur’s Seat, through the Braids and sometimes out to Portobello. Yet there he was in Morningside, after an online date that turned into a one-night assignation. The next morning, she proposed he stay for breakfast, and Jake enjoyed her company but didn’t want to make the situation any more domesticated than it needed to be. The point of the encounter was to help him forget his ex, not embark on another relationship. He was enjoying his solitude, liked his space — a term he hadn’t given much thought to before the pandemic and only occurred to him sharing with his ex an apartment that couldn’t accommodate people working from home, or at least one person like him. No, the encounter needed to remain fleeting, so he suggested they get brunch out, have a walk, and then he would return to Leith in the afternoon.
She appeared happy with this proposal, as though the encounter was calibrated to her ego but not to the development of any feelings. Had he left before morning, Joanna probably would have felt insulted but not hurt. This brunch suggestion was hardly going down on one knee and offering a commitment for life, but perhaps by online dating standards, it may have been. She seemed to respect the gesture: a man who was content to share some time in daylight. After eating at a corner cafe in Bruntsfield, where they sat outside less because the weather was nice than because the interior was full, he said he hadn’t walked through the Braids for several years, and so off they went. They travelled down Morningside, up the road to the park and, entering, he remembered how much he used to enjoy walking through this part of Edinburgh, reckoning that, more than in any other area of this most nature-oriented city, he was in nature. This tranquillity lasted about five minutes, as he saw a man walking towards him with Jodie. The dog bounded up to him, and Jake stroked him and played with him for a few moments, while managing to give the impression of being a dog lover, not quite its former owner. The man, several years older than Jake, looked on indulgently and, afterwards, Joanna said she hadn’t quite seen him as one for animals. He said in some ways he wasn’t, but didn’t tell her that this was the one animal he’d ever shown any interest in. During the rest of the walk, they said a few words, but he supposed the conversation was stilted because the alternative would have been tantamount to a confession. He believed that if he were to tell her that it had been his dog, that his ex-girlfriend now lived on this side of town, that this was the first time he’d seen Jodie in some months, and that it left him both enraged and pained, the one night stand would start to take on the dimensions of an affair he didn’t want to sustain, and nothing in her behaviour indicated she wanted to sustain it either. He didn’t say anything about it to anybody, then saw me in the park and sensed that the importance of Jodie to him would have been understood by me: that is what he was going to tell me about that day when he recognised I didn’t have much time.
8
He tried to understand his rage and believed it was far greater than if he had seen his ex-partner with her new man. He might even have been a little less angry if he had seen his ex-partner, her boyfriend and Jodie. A happy family, he would probably have looked at with contempt, and she, in turn, may have looked at him, wondering who this person he was walking through the Braids with happened to be. It would have been potentially mildly comic and for all he knew the person she was with might have been a friend, a neighbour, a work colleague (assuming she was sometimes back in the office), accompanying her while she walked the dog. But he was sure this person now was Jodie’s co-parent, and seeing this man alone with Jodie struck him as an injustice. For a year, he looked after Jodie, and she had no one else in the world but him. Now she was being walked by another man, and Jake didn’t know how to control his fury.
He tried to contain, perhaps even resolve it, by walking far more than he ever did when he had Jodie. He started regularly walking to the Braids. I looked surprised, and he said he wasn’t surprised that I expressed surprise. He was surprised too, saying he didn’t know whether he was doing it, determined to find the man again and rough him up or to walk out of him the energy that he needed to dispel and would stop him from doing anything silly. I said I hoped it was the former, as I expressed, with more humour than I was usually capable of, that I didn’t mind hearing a story; I didn’t want to be party to a complicit confession. If there was a body buried somewhere around the Braids, he should be speaking to the authorities, not to me. He said I needn’t worry — as far as he knew, the man was still above ground and not six feet under it.
Jake said he wondered what he would have done if it had been winter. Maybe he would have started work much earlier in the day and finished at 2. Perhaps he would have worked in the morning, taken three hours off and worked into the evening. The distance was five and a half miles; eleven as a round trip. He thought of getting a bike. Yet he liked the walk, liked even the madness of it. To have gone for a medium-length cycle would have seemed too predictable: throwing on some lycra, high viz, a helmet and off he would go, another man looking to lose a couple of kilos. But the walk made him feel like a madman, and since this was how he felt, why dilute the distance and the craziness with a bike?
He would go to the Braids about four times a week, and while he didn’t see his ex or her partner, nor Jodie, he did see Joanna. He was thirsty and hungry, popped into the well-heeled supermarket in Morningside, and she was there, working, it seemed, as one of the managers. All she’d said about her job was that it was in retail, but he wondered if she remembered that she hadn’t told him about the specifics of the supermarket. While he may have been stalking his ex’s new boyfriend, it might have looked, instead, as if he was stalking Joanna. She seemed pleased to see him, asked what a man of Leith was doing in Morningside, and his lack of an answer made it look as if he was searching her out. After a moment or two, he announced that the days were long and so he needed walks to match them. She said she was finished in thirty minutes; they could go for a drink if he liked.
What could he tell her as they sat in a Bruntsfield bar on a Thursday evening,and he found himself talking to her about many things, but not about why he was in the area. It somehow seemed unimportant, rather than that he felt he was being deceitful. While during their online date they both appeared to be playing the role of online daters, asking the right questions, moving towards the likelihood of a sexual encounter, this time it was as if the expectations were weak next to the chance encounter, which he admitted to Joanna it was, even if he didn’t tell her, if he had bumped into the man they last time saw in the park, he might have acted with what would have looked like intentionality. If he didn’t feel he was keeping things from Joanna it was more that they had other things to talk about, as much of the evening they discussed the problem of dating based on the assumption of a date, and one chiefly generated by a middleman who was making good money out of people’s need to meet others.
It was as though the dating websites had become like agents: to meet someone in a park and say hello, to engage in chat would be an imposition, a bit like an unsolicited manuscript rejected because it hadn’t passed through the appropriate channels. They discussed their past dates met online, and while Jake only had half a dozen encounters to talk about, Joanna had five times as many. Very few of them ended up in bed, she insisted, saying that usually the man revealed, in their respect for the formulaic, a lack of interest in her. They wanted to get someone into the sack; that someone happened to be her, and it was her purpose to make sure it didn’t happen. Jake asked why she went to bed with him. She said he looked like he didn’t quite believe in the formula and possessed a warmth that was revealed more clearly the next day. It was a good sign that the dog in the park liked him. She didn’t trust people animals didn’t like.
It was the moment Jake should have mentioned why he was in Morningside, but he didn’t, and he thought so for several reasons. The discussion they were having was intimate and warm, and would have been diluted by a revelation which would have included his ex-girlfriend. It was also now so complicated a tale that he wouldn’t have quite known how to explain it without appearing to hijack the evening, to turn it into a version of our present discussion in the park. He offered a shrug as if to acknowledge that I was showing more patience than he deserved. Thirdly, it was true that animals seemed to like him and, while Jodie showed greater enthusiasm than most dogs when seeing him, animals were usually drawn to him, more so, he supposed, than people often were.
This seemed a necessary gesture towards self-deprecation as the telling looked as though it was becoming self-aggrandising — after all, it seemed Jake was about to tell me that he was once again going to bed a woman he’d already slept with and who had turned various men down. But he explained they didn’t sleep together that evening, and while Jake might have wished to convey to me that people weren’t always so keen, I thought this was probably untrue. Like Jack, he looked like someone who could, without much difficulty, hold people’s attention, and not only mine in this instance.
He walked her back to her flat, and they hesitated over the main door entrance. Jake supposed she wished to invite him in, but somehow saw it as too predictable after an evening that was pleasantly surprising, and he didn’t want to enter, as if in failing to reveal why Jodie was so enthusiastic to see him, he needed an act of renunciation. He said that he would like to do this again, liked that this evening had seemed more real than the previous one, and she concurred. They also both had a good excuse that would minimise any feelings of rejection on his part or hers: they were both working the next day.
Since then, he said, he’d seen Joanna several times, and was no longer in Morningside trying to see Jodie, his ex and her partner, but more healthily seeing another woman. As we parted, he said I was a good listener; a rarer quality than listeners tend to think. It was as if he wanted to boost my confidence after perhaps believing that, throughout the telling, he had inadvertently been boosting his own. But I didn’t quite see it that way, and this may have made me a good listener, or someone happy to have someone to talk with
9
Jake and I didn’t exchange numbers, and there wasn’t really any reason to do so, though I wasn’t quite sure whether this rested on our conversation as a one-off or that we assumed we would see each other soon enough in the park. Whatever the reason on Jake’s part, I didn’t see him again for several months, and when I did, it was out of my window, which faced onto a small part of the green. I saw him walking a dog that at first I took to be Jodie, but then noticed it had lighter fur and a different tail. I wondered for how long he’d had the dog, and whether I hadn’t seen him in the park with this new pet because he would often take it over to Joanna’s and walk the dog through the Braids. My assumption proved correct when I saw him around ten days after, as I was walking in the Park and witnessed him standing with his hands in his pocket, the dog on a leash as it rummaged around in the bushes. Needs must - he said, when I came towards him. I mentioned I’d seen him walking the dog from my window and at first assumed he was once again in possession of Jodie, but then noticed a couple of key differences. He said he supposed that just because he believed that dogs were emotionally interchangeable, that needn’t mean they were physically so. But he said he wanted another Shiba Inu, but they weren’t available in Scotland.
I walked with him around the park, and he asked me about work, and I found myself telling him about the story Jack told all those weeks ago, and did so perhaps because Jake had spoken to me about his assignations with Joanna. As I told him the story Jack told, I asked him if he would have spoken of Joanna and the initial encounter, and then their later contingent meeting, differently if he had told it to a group of people, perhaps during lunch or at a dinner, or over drinks in the pub. He paused for a few moments and said he hoped not, but wasn’t sure. I asked him this after saying that Jack seemed a kind enough person, and that he appeared a little shocked that people laughed at the story he offered, even though he must have been at least a little aware in the telling of its probable effect. Jake said on occasion he would go to the cinema on a Saturday evening, and though the film was sober and sombre, people would laugh anyway. Their evening demanded it, and the film was there to entertain them. By the end, the sobriety of the work would be clear, and their mood would eventually be changed by the film they were experiencing. Yet often, rather than seeing the film as one of depth and texture, they would accuse it of taking itself too seriously. There were a few occasions when he was in the pub with friends after they had all seen a film together, and this was the response. He surmised it was what made him, if not a cinephile, then at least a serious viewer. He could distinguish one work from the other. I smiled and said this made him more of a film lover than a dog lover.
He said perhaps, but I apologised for the joke and believed how he described people’s reaction to films that didn’t meet their mood might help explain Jack’s anecdote, and that his lapse of judgement wasn’t especially in the telling, nor even in offering it to someone else. But, in telling it to a group of people whose expectations were more important than the story, he might have been best keeping it to himself. The thing is, Jake reckoned, you can say almost anything to anybody — to keep secrets is to risk a solitude far greater than ridicule. It sounded like a quote, and I supposed it must have been one. The sentiment didn’t sound out of character, but the phrase was. I didn’t ask him about it, yet I did ponder on it after we parted, though we talked for an extra twenty-five minutes as I joined him for a further two circuits around the park with Jock.
10
In what sounded like another quote, Jake told me he had moved from solitary anger to symmetrical absurdity; he no longer felt the rage he did after seeing his ex’s new boyfriend with Jodie, and this was revealed to him in a walk he, Joanna and Jock were taking through the Braids when, in the other direction, coming towards him were his ex, the partner and Jodie. There he and his ex were in reformulated relationships, making the smallest of talk for a couple of minutes while the dogs sniffed around each other. Jodie seemed happy to see him but less pleased to note that there was now a rival, and Jodie did little to hide her animosity towards Jock. If Joanna and his ex felt any acrimoniousness towards each other, they kept it well hidden, and he no longer appeared to feel strong anger towards the new man that left him for weeks, only a few months earlier, believing that with a wrong word, he would have wished to beat him up. Would those feelings still have been there if it weren’t for Joanna and Jock, or had enough time passed for them to weaken? He didn’t know, but he supposed the combination of time passing and a new emotional reality made the encounter no more than mildly awkward rather than aggressively intense. Yet he also thought that talking to me had very much helped. It wasn’t that he hadn’t said a few words to others about his ex taking Jodie, nor about his encounters with Joanna, but nobody else listened as intently as he believed I had.
I might have said in reply that others he chatted to had plenty else going on in their lives, and so they offered polite attention. But they were unlikely to be as engrossed in it as someone who had little going on in his own. Yet I’d also read often enough about people whose loneliness so absorbs them that they have no capacity to consider the lives of others, and after we parted, I thought more about this alongside Jake’s comment that keeping secrets was a greater catastrophe than revealing them. Yet I wondered if I should have said to Jake that what was worse than keeping or revealing secrets was having none to reveal. My life was devoid of secrets, or at least the type of revelations that might appear ethically dubious in the telling because they involved others. My life may have been private, but it wasn’t secretive, and while some live in the full glare of fame, and others in the more modest public exposure of a family life that never leaves them with time to themselves, it seemed that I had no public life in which secrets could become evident.
Yet rather than collapsing in on my own mind, I seemed to have the habit of showing interest in the thoughts, motivations and actions of others. Jake was far from the only person whose life interested me during the pandemic, as I mused over the people I would pass on the street, walk by in the park or see from my flat window. If most people are too caught up in their own lives to attend to those of others, and if some were so isolated that they had no life and allowed their thoughts to become ever more self-absorbed, I would have been happy to have found out more about the various people whose lives I had speculated upon if they had wanted to talk to me about them. Jake was a rare example of someone who happened to do so.
11
However, perhaps nobody’s story interested me more than Liz’s, and it came about due to the look she gave Jack after he told that tale. It was if she might have been able to understand my own musings on secrets and their absence, on when a story should be told and to whom, and this seemed to be confirmed when some time after Jake offered his tale of symmetrical absurdity, I was seated again at Liz’s table when someone called Alan started speaking about their previous job. The conversation was about awkward moments at work, and Alan was employed in London at a finance firm. It paid well, but the company regarded even your free time as theirs, and it wasn’t uncommon for staff to be called into the office on Saturday mornings. He saw the email when he woke up and, rather than replying, quickly showered, got a croissant and a coffee, and after taking five minutes to eat and drink them on a bench, walked the twenty minutes to the office. He arrived at 9.30, and the place wasn’t quite as empty as he expected. There was a security guard, several cleaners, and on his floor, he saw a few people at their desks. He also saw, as he came towards the office that usually housed around ten colleagues, the boss, and with him a cleaner who he was pushing up against a wall. At first, he assumed the boss was sexually abusing the worker, and he was about to intervene, then didn’t do so, not because he was afraid he would lose his job, but because he began to see this was a mutual encounter. He went across to the coffee machine in the corridor, sat for fifteen minutes looking at his phone, and then returned to the office, where the boss was at his desk, asking what had taken him so long, and why he hadn’t replied to his email saying he would be coming in to work.
There was no sign on the boss’s face that only a few minutes earlier he was engaged in penetrative sex with a fellow worker, and were he reliant on the look on the man’s visage, he might have believed the incident had been a figment. But a couple of hours later, when he was walking along the corridor, he saw the cleaner pushing a trolley full of cleaning gear, and he saw on her face a complicit look. While his boss had his face turned towards the wall during the act, the cleaner had hers looking outward, and she must have seen him open the door, hold it, and then retreat. She smiled as if the secret was between them even more than it was between her and the boss, and whenever he saw her thereafter in the corridor, they would smile but never speak. Before leaving the job six months later, to take the one here, and months before the pandemic, he tried speaking to her, but she spoke almost no English, as he saw the sum total of their complicity would be those smiles they would share as they passed.
People didn’t laugh, of course, at the story as they did with Jake’s, but they did ask him a few other questions. Where was the cleaner from? Did he think it was a one-off encounter with the boss; did the boss suspect he had seen them that morning? But it was Liz who asked the most pertinent one. Did Alan hope for a sexual encounter with the cleaner as well? Alan looked surprised, perhaps aghast, and for a few seconds may even have blushed. He said he was just telling a story, nothing more.
I wondered what something more than a story happened to be, and I supposed Jake had come closer to it than Jack or Alan, and this might be where a tale becomes, or at least contains, confession. It may have been unfair of Liz to expect this from Alan, as he was sitting around a table of people running with the theme of awkward occasions at work, but I also didn’t believe that Liz wanted merely to undermine Alan, no matter if he looked deflated and embarrassed by her question. When I passed Liz in the corridor, I noticed she no longer smiled. Yet oddly, I didn’t take this as a form of rejection but almost as an invitation, and to ask her what constituted a story for her.
The opportunity arose when, a fortnight after Alan’s tale, I arrived late for lunch, and she was just starting hers as others had half-finished. Everyone had left the table except the two of us, and she said to me that I didn’t talk much. I said I didn’t have much to say, and she proffered that neither do most people - but that didn’t stop them. I asked her what saying something meant, what constitutes something said, and assumed she didn’t think what Alan offered was worth saying. She looked at me curiously, saying it wasn’t really to attack Alan, Jack or anyone else who would regale us all with stories over lunch, but it might be to attack the expectations of such an audience, and that a proper story isn’t contained so readily by the desires of the collective listeners. This wasn’t quite how she put it, and we only had around ten minutes that lunchtime to discuss the topic, but it is what I took away from the conversation. It also made me realise that if she were ever attracted to Jack, the interest probably started to evaporate with the tale he told.
12
When we next passed each other in the corridor, Liz once again smiled, and it was as though the smile she gave and that I returned contained far greater complicity than before. It was extended one lunchtime, in late November, when Jack once again told a story. This time about his weekend. People were discussing their riskiest ventures, and one person had said they once sky-dived; another bungee-jumped in a country where, only a fortnight after they did it, someone died because the rope was too long. A third said they had parachuted several times. Jack reckoned his story wasn’t much of one to tell, but it was at least very recent. He was hiking near Loch Lomond when the weather turned, and the fog was so heavy he wasn’t sure if he could find the road, let alone his car. He was walking alone, and though he had a torch, it wasn’t able to penetrate the dense atmosphere. He started getting worried. He’d spent the previous night sleeping out in conditions that weren’t convivial, but weren’t catastrophic. It was cold, but his sleeping bag was thick enough to tolerate conditions well into the minuses, and the tent could sustain heavy rain. What worried him were strong winds, and while the weather reports hadn’t predicted the fog, they had indicated gales, and that was why he intended to stay only one night and not two. Where he was, it wasn’t easy to dig deep into the earth with the tent pegs, and if the fog remained and the wind picked up, he would indeed be caught between a rock and a hard place. Luckily, as the wind gathered, the fog eased, and he found his way to the main road where he had parked. After he told it, a couple of the others noted that it was a lucky escape, and Jack managed to convey to us all his good fortune, but even more, I think, his adventurousness. Nothing in the telling showed personal vulnerability, only being caught in a vulnerable position due to precarious weather.
As I looked across at Liz, a half-smile appeared on her face, and I allowed a half-smile to appear on mine. It was as if in Jack’s telling, and our non-telling, we had increased further the complicity between us, and I knew if the chance arose we would be able to use this as another example of a story that can be offered to pass the time but doesn’t help us to understand any the better the person telling it.
I told Jake about Liz when we next saw each other in the park. I again walked around it several times with him after I asked how things were going. He said with Jock, looking down, or with Joanna? I meant it generally. He said things were going fine with Jock, but not so fine with Joanna. They had parted over a stupid argument, with Joanna claiming that he was more interested in the dog than he was in her, and only bought the dog because he couldn’t get over Jodie’s absence, which really meant he hadn’t got over his ex. Was it so stupid, I asked. Maybe not, he admitted, but perhaps worse than even she had imagined. It was as though he managed to get over Jodie and his ex with both Jock and Joanna: he perhaps needed to come across his ex, her partner and Jodie with an equivalent unit of his own. There they were, his ex, her partner and a dog; and there he was, with a new dog and a new partner. That absurd symmetry. He didn’t feel he used Joanna, but maybe he did, and maybe used as well this little pug in front of him, he believed, stroking him as we sat down for a few minutes on a bench. It was a cold, early December afternoon, and we didn’t sit for long, as I thought whether all that Jake had told me would pass for a story in Liz’s eyes, but perhaps only in Jake’s telling. If I were to tell it, the story would lack the force of confession, even if it contained within it the thoughts and limitations of someone else. Yet I was also reminded of the idea that it isn’t always what is said but how it is told, and perhaps a certain type of telling can pass for a confession itself. I looked at Jock and thought of Jodie, and that a dog’s life, whatever it might be, needn’t contain the complicated potential misery of expressing themselves with a vast potential vocabulary, a temporal awareness, and the problem of our interlocutor. The leash was long, and Jock wandered off a little, growling lightly, barking briefly, before sniffing another dog’s backside.
© Tony McKibbin