The Dog Walker

Of course, after Alice started school, finally I had more time to myself and was able to do all the things I'd been planning. Oddly enough, though, I didn't really end up doing most of them. I thought I'd redecorate the house or start a class or make a friend who I could meet for lunch or, well, I don't know what, really: but, actually, what I ended up doing most was walking Ferrero. Twice a day, normally: up and down, up and down the path next to the house. I don't know why I didn't end up even thinner than I normally was, as I walked such a lot: but I suppose, like they say, you can never outwalk a bad diet, and still I used to come back and eat packets and packets of biscuits and stare at the wall. Much as I had done, in fact, most of the time when Alice was there with me. Still, at least she was at school now for a couple of hours a day and there was someone else to pretend they were interested in her. I only had to start pretending from when they all came home to when she and Toby and Emily went to bed. And then I could take Ferrero for his evening walk while Robert was on child duty. And then I could open the wine.

I always found it hard to assess how good I was at pretending. Everyone used to smile and say hello and seem pleased to see me when I came back into the house. Ferrero knew, though, and he used to run off up the path and right away from me as soon as I let him off the lead. Most walks, I never ever saw him until I called him back at the end.

I remember that evening, because when I came back Robert was cooking linguine with scallops and chilli, which I like. Robert likes cooking, and it isn't a problem that he does so much of it, he says. He started when we went through that difficult time, and he ended up taking redundancy: I think he got into the routine then. Anyway, he was wearing his ridiculous apron that he seems to think you need for cooking, and frying garlic in the pan. And when I came in he didn't turn round because he was concentrating, so he just said, oh hello, love, I'm so glad you're back, I didn't check if it was going to be a normal length walk, did I, and it just struck me when I put the linguine on that it wouldn't really wait. I think the kids are asleep now, they've been quiet since they went up. Is there anything you want to watch on the TV or shall we sit at the table and chat? And all the time I felt as if I was wearing a big dark cloak of terror that I couldn't take off. It was like that time in the British Museum.

I don't know if you know the British Museum at all, but if you go right to the back at the other end of the big hall with the shops and the toilets and the cafe, there are some stairs down and an African gallery. I was sitting there one day waiting for everyone to come and meet me. I know other people enjoy going out with their kids and introducing them to culture and suchlike: but, when you have three, and Robert as well, it's basically just one long round of someone needing the toilet/ needing a drink/ needing a sit down/ needing to stretch their legs. It's just managing the physical. I have no time to think, apart from on my walks. Anyway, Emily is old enough now that she can take Alice, and of course Robert can always go with Toby, and then I suppose they were all going to look in the shop again afterwards: because, if they aren't wanting to either drink something or piss it out afterwards then they're wanting to spend my money. So I was sitting downstairs, waiting, in the African gallery, on a wide wooden bench looking at some wooden African carved idols or Gods or something, in a display case. And as I looked at one of them, I had a feeling of evil from it, so strong that I couldn't look away: and then I had to look away. And it was odd: because when I had looked just before I had to look away it seemed as if there was a soul behind its carved wooden eyes.

Do you get that? Where there are some things you look at and they are clearly real, not like the mass of things you see sitting there or walking about, who are dead, dead, dead, dead? I used to wish I got it with the children, or Robert, or Ferrero, or any of the women at the charity shop, and God knows how they'll all be getting on now. I used to wish they were real. But no, I look at their eyes, nothing there. They might as well be carved wood. But the wooden idol, I saw instantly straight through its eyes, and what I saw scared me. I moved benches and sat on the other side of the gallery and turned my back to look at some boring godforsaken display of African wax-print fabric. But I could still feel its eyes boring into my back, in recognition. When the children came and found me I was genuinely pleased, which was good, because I know Robert watches me with them: so any bit of authenticity I suppose helps things along. Which is what they used to say to us, actually, when I used to act at University: use an authentic feeling, use it. Anyway, I'm getting beyond myself, and I should do my story in its proper order. All I mean is, it was the same feeling I got when I saw the hunched shape walking along the path.

Let me explain the path to you, first: like everybody always says, I'm very lucky with where Robert and I live. Very lucky. We bought in the nineties just before house prices got really ridiculous here, and Robert's always earned a lot of money, apart from that period when things were a bit difficult and he retrained as a counsellor, but then he almost immediately after that got a job in development on almost double what he'd been on before. So yes, I am lucky, but we've worked hard to live in this area, or at least Robert has, or at least Robert's father did, who gave us the money for the deposit before he died. And thank God he did, because I bet we'd have had more trouble with Robert's mother. And I've always contributed as well, I suppose. After all: all those children! And then just as I was getting ready to get myself back and go back to work and after I'd done all those bloody days at the bloody charity shop reacclimatising to the workplace I discovered I was pregnant with Alice. Like a final insult.

But back to the path. This house, more a cottage, I suppose, and everyone always says how lovely it is, faces on to the river: and we have a gate that only we can open that gives us access onto the river path. And people, I mean normal people, members of the public, are allowed to walk along the path, but really, who would come this far up: there's nothing here. Although I suppose sometimes fishermen do, and we have lots of runners: and Ferrero enjoys barking and wagging his tale at them if we're sitting in the front garden when they go past. And I suppose the children like to wave. I sit in a chair and drink tea and watch the children and watch Ferrero to see how they do things. And we have a gardener twice a week, because Robert says we all feel much better if we have somewhere lovely to sit outside, and he may do, but all I see is the river, quiet and whispering in summer and then getting louder and louder until in winter it screams at me, I know what you did, and all those people who say how lovely my house is, and all our children, should try to live here when the river stares you down 24/7 and it's all you can do to stop yourself walking out of the gate and straight into the rolling water. All you can do. All you can do. And I said to Robert, why don't we move and have a new start, and he said, look darling, we know these are unhelpful thoughts and they don't make you a bad person, but, what if we move and you fixate on something else, and then we've moved the children for nothing. And I'm sure he's right.

Back to the path. So eventually, instead of trying to shut out what the river was saying, I listened to it and I said to it no, not yet. And so now I walk alongside it, and I think. And the path to the right goes into the city, and that's the way I walk in sometimes with the children, and they seem to enjoy it, I suppose. But on the left it goes to fields and to nowhere, inbetween houses and the river. And that's the way I march Ferrero, rain or shine, once in the morning after I've dropped off Alice and seen Toby and Emily on their way, and once in the evening while Robert is putting the children to bed and beginning our dinner. And Robert says the exercise does me good and I seem calm. Certainly I'm exhausted. So, the houses peter out after a while - and ours is the nicest, anyway, so I don't really bother looking at the others - and then all there is on one side is fields, and all there is on the other side is river and fields, and there is no way off the path until you get beyond the lock, and then your choice is a lonely road over the level crossing bringing you out where that runner dropped dead a while ago, or a path over a lonely field on the other side which brings you back eventually to Fen Ditton. So there is no escape from the path, not until after the lock at least, and then not much of one. There is nowhere to go. You march up, you march down. There is no escape.

So the night when Robert was cooking the linguine and I came in feeling as if I was wearing a cloak of dark terror I had been for my usual walk with Ferrero, up the path as far as the lock and a bit beyond. And it was early October so it was dark, and it wasn't cold as such, but fresh, and that scent of autumn in the air that the children always point out to me. And Ferrero had run up ahead, as he does, and I wish that he would hear the river calling instead of me, because then I wouldn't have the trouble of him any more: but it wouldn't be my fault, and the children couldn't be upset with me. And I was cupping my hand to light a cigarette and focusing on the match.

I imagine Robert knows I smoke at the moment, but I don't smoke a lot, and I don't smoke around the children, and I imagine he probably thinks that on the scale of things he'd rather that than that I went back to the unhelpful thoughts of previously. And I remember looking up and looking at the mist along the river, up towards Waterbeach, and then seeing out of the corner of my eye the lights on in someone's houseboat and thinking that apart from that houseboat there was no-one to see, and no-one to see me if I fell in the river, and no-one to see anything that might happen to Ferrero. And suddenly, and it was very odd, I was transported in my mind over fifteen years back to when I was at university, and standing in the kitchen of our shared flat, just before all the unhelpful thoughts started the first time. And I frowned to try to bring myself back to the present day, took a long drag of my cigarette, looked up again at the same stretch of river, and saw it.

It hadn't been there before. It was a shape. I couldn't make it out at first. And then I thought perhaps it might be a person. And it started to move towards me. And it seemed to be walking along the path. It was dark, and hunched, and I couldn't see that it had any kind of a face: and its edges were blurred and raggy, so that it wasn't clear to me until it got quite close that it wasn't just some kind of odd shadow from one of the overhanging trees, although I don't know how a shadow could move, so I knew that must be wrong. And I felt such malevolence from it I don't even know how to describe that feeling other than to say, it was one of the things that was real to me, like the wooden idol, and I was scared again. And I'm never scared. And we were alone on the path and there was nowhere for me to go unless I listened to the river finally, but suddenly I didn't want to. And as it got to within about 50 feet of me I felt my heart beating in panic and I closed my eyes. And when I opened my eyes it had gone.

It had gone. And I was so freaked that I half-expected it to come up behind me and say, 'boo!', like a bad pantomime villain. I was shaking. I called Ferrero, who appeared, suddenly. Ferrero hadn't noticed anything. I noticed my hands shook as I clipped his lead to his collar. I took his furry face inbetween my hands and kissed his nose, which shows you how scared I was. He looked as if he was smiling, but, all labs do, don't they. I stood up straight, and I strode out purposefully back towards the lock and beyond it to home, and at every step I can promise you I expected to feel sudden cold hands around my neck or a knife in my back or just something terrible, terrible that I can't talk about. I can't talk about it. So I talked to Ferrero on the way back. 'Come on, Ferrero' I said, cheerfully. 'Soon be home, and then we'll get you your dinner, and daddy will be cooking my dinner, and the heating will be on, and the children will be in bed after another lovely day, and you're very lucky to have such a lovely home' and I don't know what rubbish I told him, much like the kind of rubbish they used to tell me when I was having the second lot of unhelpful thoughts, just after Alice was born. All the way home I told myself I had been mistaken and in fact had seen nothing, or, I had seen a shuffling old man who had suddenly ducked into the bushes to pee just at the moment I closed my eyes and who I had left far behind with my long, confident stride and my good boots.

And then when we got home I am good now at acting and it was ok. I unclipped Ferrero, dusted him down a bit, went in to say hello to Robert, and found him in his apron as I mentioned to you earlier. I tipped Ferrero's dinner into his bowl and watched him eat it. I went upstairs to get changed. I peeked into Emily's room. Even though she is older now - 10 at her last birthday, yes, I'm almost sure it was 10 - she still likes to sleep with a teddy tucked under her chin. Robert's mother bought it for her when she was a baby. I don't remember ever getting attached to toys when I was young but Emily is different to me, I suppose. I watched her sleeping, the long eyelashes lying on her cheek, the Farrow and Ball paint on the walls. I told myself how lucky I was. I went downstairs and ate dinner with Robert. The cloak of dark terror lifted slightly over the following week. It was an odd feeling.

I want you to know that I do have some self-awareness. I told Robert when we got Ferrero - for the children - that I didn't want a dog. I told Robert that it made me uncomfortable. I don't know if I told him, properly, about what happened that time in the flat. How I was just so irritated that Sarah had bought that puppy when we had so much to do and we were out all the time and it wanted so much attention from us. So much attention! I know I tried to. It's sometimes difficult to tell people things they don't want to hear. Robert never wants to hear the things I tell him, although I know that's because the things I tell him are wrong: but, sometimes, I think it would be nice for him to hear me, just once, just once, when I say something true. Rather than when I say, Toby did well in his SATs, didn't he, or, isn't Alice looking pretty in that dress your mother bought, or, isn't Emily growing up, we'll be at her graduation before we know it.

Robert thinks I don't like his mother, for example, but that isn't true: the truth is that I don't think about her at all. Robert thinks that because I didn't have a mother it makes things difficult for me, but that isn't true either. How can it be difficult when I don't know any different? And he knows as well as I do what my mother was like: we both read the Social Services file on me. How would having her around have been better? But he doesn't hear me when I talk to him, so I gave up talking. He used to try to hear me, but then he did the counselling course after that difficult time when I was having the unhelpful thoughts, and now when I speak I suspect he translates what I say into his course notes. I can almost see him doing it.

So: what you would have thought would have happened then, I suppose, would have been that I stopped my walks for fear of seeing The Thing again, but I didn't. I won't say I exactly thought, bring it on, but I kind of halfway almost did.

The funny thing is, I spend a lot of my life hiding from things and not wanting to confront them. Despite his counselling course, Robert never understood why I couldn't, for example, pay the gas bill even though we always had enough money in the bank, or ring people I hadn't seen in a long time to ask how they were, or apply for jobs without leaving it right to the last minute, or any of a million little things that other people just do without thinking about it. I don't know why he wasted his money on the course, to be honest, because if he'd listened to me, ever, I could have told him. I spent so much of my energy running from that one single thing in the flat fifteen years ago that I kind of got into the habit. It started to feel like anything I ever did brought me back there. It was like walking down the path along the river forever and ever and ever but with only that moment at the end of it: the flat, the cheap red carpet, Sarah's puppy, and me with the kettle of boiling water in my hand. 

And then everything started to only really work if I kind of skimmed over things. I was sorry for the children, yes I was: I tried to be kind, although it was difficult because I didn't really know what the rules were. I used to read children's books sometimes and copy the parents in that. I do think that was successful as a strategy for quite a long while. I think by the end you'll agree.

Anyway, I know I'm going round the houses again, but the point I want to make to you is this. OK. I saw the figure again about a month later. Alice's school were gearing up for Christmas - they make a big fuss of it when they're that age, I remembered quite enjoying it with Emily - and Ferrero and I were later for our morning walk because I'd been talking to Alice's teacher about what role she was going to play in the end-of-term show. I mean, who cares, really? I suppose Alice is a pretty little thing, long blonde hair and what they used to call a pretty colour, so I can see why they wanted her to play Mary: I probably would have done, too, if I'd been doing the casting. So her teacher seemed to want something from me and after I'd done about twenty minutes of wow, that's amazing, Robert and I are really proud of Alice, etc, I wasn't sure what more I could give: so, I pretended I had to get away to meet someone, and of course in a way I was right. Ferrero was off his lead, and I must have been in a good mood because I was throwing him a stick and letting him fetch it, when we came to the same stretch of path I had been on before: but this time, of course, we were in broad daylight, in crisp cold frosty air: and I bent down to pick up the stick, and when I stood up again the figure was down the path in front of me.

Well: I felt less scared than before. Let me try to explain: I felt a jolt of fear, of excitement, and then of fear again. It was less shuffling and raggedy than before: it was walking upright, in fact, it was striding, almost confidently. Because this time it was bright daylight - it was one of those bright late autumn days with bright cold sun -, or, because I was less scared, I don't know: but, I could see more of it, or around it, or something. It was definitely human. Last time I hadn't been sure. It was wearing a coat - quite a nice, expensive coat, almost like one I would have chosen myself. Of course, now I make sure we spend all of our money on the children, and then I buy my clothes in the sale: I watched other mothers at the school, and that seems to be the thing to do. I still couldn't see entirely clearly. There hadn't been fog on the river before, but fog seemed to have descended now, suddenly, and as I closed my eyes just for a moment to see if I could focus better, the figure, which had almost got almost quite close, disappeared. Just out of thin air.

This time I was convinced it couldn't have ducked into the bushes: also, as it had seemed quite expensively dressed, that didn't really seem like something it would have done willingly, necessarily. Through a hedge backwards, and all that. So I didn't know where it could have gone, unless it had, I don't know, crossed over from a parallel universe that only briefly intersected with mine at this point of the path and at this point of my emotional state: and that didn't really seem like the explanation I should be going for first. And I was still feeling that odd jolt of excitement, although the cloak of fear was wrapping itself around me again: but this time I could see Ferrero happily playing in the distance and I wasn't worried that he wouldn't come if I called, and, God help me, I even had a quick look round the bushes because it struck me that a better and simpler explanation might just be that there was a path leading off somewhere in this area that the figure knew and I didn't. Perhaps something part-hidden behind the bushes. Or perhaps the figure came from the traveller camp a few fields down. So I had a look around. And of course there was nothing. Of course there was nothing.

And with Ferrero carefully clipped back onto my lead, once more the walk back down the path felt at every step as if something was following me, breathing down my neck, waiting to strike. But something very odd happened. I mean, it isn't odd in itself, but if you knew me better you'd know it was, because honestly I can't even confront the smallest, silliest things, like I said, when I'm trapped in the unhelpful thoughts: but, I stopped once or twice and turned round to catch whatever it was. To catch it! What would I have done if the something behind me had still been there? Worse than the gas bill! It was mad. But I walked home somehow wearing my cloak of fear with a new lining of bravery, if I can inflict a tortured metaphor on you. And that night I didn't walk Ferrero again, I gave the poor sod a break, and I made us all a cake after I'd picked the kids up, and we sat and talked about their day. And then when Robert came home I helped him with dinner and we chatted. I think Robert enjoyed it. He asked me how I was feeling and I told him I was feeling braver. I don't tell him things like the river calling out to me, because he says things like that aren't true. And I feel so sorry for these people like Robert sometimes, because there is nothing behind their eyes at all.

Robert's mother came to stay with us for Christmas. Robert's mother is a funny one, really. Like I say, he says I don't get on with her, but I don't know where he gets that from, as I don't really feel any differently towards her than I do towards the woman with the green eyeshadow who serves in the Co-op, or the gardener, or the children, for example. Indeed, sometimes when I look in her eyes I almost feel as if there is a person there. Not as much as when I looked into the eyes of the evil idol in the British Museum, admittedly, and nowhere near as much as when I see the Figure On The Path: of course, she isn't as real as either of those. But sometimes there are flashes. Sometimes I think she understands more than she says she does. Certainly she understands more than Robert, who understands very little about anything, I think, although he is a good man, and tries his best. Sometimes I used to walk round this house and pick up the things in it and look at them and put them down again. All these things Robert has bought for me and the children, I used to think, and imagine what feeling grateful would be like. Perhaps I did feel a little grateful? Who knows.

When Robert was in the throes of his counselling qualification he came home one day and asked me about my mother, again, and then asked me if I'd ever been diagnosed with attachment disorder. Of course I looked it up on google, and some of it seemed like it might resemble me, or anyone, I suppose; and some of it didn’t; so I wondered what the point of it all was. Of course, Robert didn't know properly about my mother until we'd been involved for a good few years, and I was  already pregnant with Toby and Emily by then. Until it was too late, I suppose you might say, if you were cynical. To start with, I just told him she hadn't been around, and he seemed uncurious, although perhaps he was just trying to be kind and give me space. It's very difficult to know. Anyway, Robert says although sometimes some of my thoughts are unhelpful - and they were particularly unhelpful in that time after Alice was born, although in the end there was no harm done to her of course, and anyway apparently this happens to other women too - it's not worth labelling them 'good' or 'bad', because people are not 'good' or 'bad', and he can see how much I adore the children now, and no bad person could love the children so much. Which makes me think that perhaps all that cribbing in Enid Blyton about how I should behave has been worth it and I think perhaps I should have been an actor, or, one on the stage, not just in life.

Anyway. Robert's mother is not quite the same as Robert. She came that Christmas bearing gifts, which we secreted away in the attic with lots of laughter, and advent calendars for each of the children even though it was already halfway through December, and chews for Ferrero. 'I hope you don't mind me bringing these, Cassie' she said to me, carefully, as we all sat drinking coffee I had made for us and eating my biscuits. 'Of course not' I said, and I meant it. Why would I mind? I was looking at the clock surreptitiously and wondering if I would be allowed to take Ferrero for his evening walk, or if Robert's mother being here meant the normal rules didn't apply. The children were excited, of course. Alice was particularly animated, chattering away artlessly and showing Robert's mother all the pictures and decorations she had made at school. Emily wanted to show off some of the new steps she had learnt in ballet. Toby was just happy to be with us all, listening, and stroking Ferrero absentmindedly.

I decided it would be too awkward to take the dog out again, especially given that he'd already had such a long walk that morning, which would have been noted, I can assure you. I helped Robert with the dinner, and we made plans all together for what we would do the next day. Robert's mother would sit with the children in the morning to give Robert and I a chance to get into town to get some last minute shopping, and then in the afternoon we were going to go back in all together and have hot chocolate at the Christmas market, and then see a panto at the Arts Theatre. This was something of a Christmas tradition: I won't exactly say I enjoyed it, but when Robert's mother was there there was someone else to deal with the treadmill of, mummy, I need a drink, mummy, where is the toilet, mummy, did you text Tom's mum about going round tomorrow, mummy, I'm hungry, etc, and I liked sometimes to look at the actors. It's behind you.

I look back now and try to think how I felt on that evening, just at the beginning of Christmas, when the glitter hasn't yet come off and everyone still believes in the magic. I won't exactly say I felt happy: but, I felt a certain contentment. I looked at the ornaments, and the dog, and the children, and Robert, and I thought, all of these things are mine. I even think I felt for a moment that having all those things - them being mine - validated my funny, grey, half-life. I went to bed before Robert, and I must have drunk a little too much wine, I suppose, because I woke right in the dead, black part of the night, thirsty: and I got up without noticing if Robert was in the bed next to me, and I went downstairs into the kitchen and filled and drank a glass, quietly, quietly so as not to wake Ferrero and make him bark, which wakes the children, and then I have to deal with them. And then I heard voices.

And so, quietly, quietly, I went to the open kitchen door to listen. And Robert and his mother were in the study next door, talking. And Robert was sitting on a chair, crying. And his mother was standing, with her hand on his shoulder, and her head bowed. And I stood silently, silently in the doorway. And I heard the words, years and years of this. And I heard the words, don't know the effect it must have had on the children. And then I heard, she is just so terribly damaged. And I looked around me at all the things that were mine: and then I went silently back to our bedroom, got dressed, and left the house. It was a long, long way from sunrise: but it felt as if grey tendrils of light were just beginning to disrupt the velvet dark. And then I walked along the path, on and on, right to the silent part just beyond the lock, where the boats were sleeping in the almost-dawn.

And on the way there I thought about many things. I thought about my mother, dead all those years ago in prison, and about the sisters I never knew, dead by her hand. And then I thought about the puppy, and my hand on the kettle, just about to tip the boiling water and finally kill the fucking, fucking thing, when my flatmate Sarah came home and stopped me. And I thought about the look on her face, and the way she silently melted from my life after that moment, along with all my other University friends. And I knew that that had been my last ever authentic action in this life, my hand on the kettle, before they stopped me, and frightened me, and shut me down. And I thought about how the real me, the brave me, the true, genuine, real me, had walked away on that day: and how she walked, still, somewhere: and how what had been living in that house with Robert and the children was a sad ghost.

And so, this time when the figure came, tall and beautiful and fierce and true, she came right up to me, and I knew without needing to look that she had my face. And we held each other briefly, and kissed. And then I pressed my door keys into her hand. And this time she continued down the path, and I set my face towards the rolling river, and stepped out.