I had dropped my son at school and was dragging myself home up Skinner Street. Several years earlier, when my son was three, I used to walk him to nursery every day, and I remembered this period as a time of profound psychological security. Even small encounters, the hey-how-are-yous where neither party broke stride or knew each other’s name, served to confirm something. As if they settled a question by fixing my position in the world.
When my son started at the same school as his sister, I told my wife that it suited me to take over one drop-off a week. I already missed those brief social encounters, and thought it would help my sanity to keep them up. But Nicole laughed, as if I made my offer mockingly and she was choosing to defend herself. She often made these jokes, implying that, because of a small number of accidents the children had suffered, I was incapable of caring for them without her.
The school was quite far, and when my daughter started my wife had occasionally ordered a taxi instead of walking to the bus stop, billing the charges as a management expense. After only a few weeks, before even that first wet and cold winter, she stopped mentioning the bus, and by the time my son started in reception my wife and daughter were on first name terms with many of the local cabbies.
At school birthday parties, I often found myself adrift, unclear about the rules of conversation. I found ways to talk around my absence from drop-off and the awkwardness this created. I implied I took an active role elsewhere in the home to explain why the other parents might not recognise me. I emphasised that taxis were Nicole’s one, rare extravagance, and sympathised with complaints about the morning crowds, as if I too squeezed myself among those close-packed bodies, instead of waving my family into the driver’s cab each day, standing on the doorstep in my frayed pyjamas.
*
The morning I dropped my son at school for the first time, before my embarrassing encounter on the journey home, I entertained the idea of getting out of the house early. My daughter was having a blood test, a rite-of-passage which equally terrified and impressed her, and my wife was chaperoning her at the hospital. I thought we might catch the bus together, my son and I. Perhaps we’d sit with one of his friends, alongside a parent on their way to work. With this in mind, I wore the suit Nicole had had tailored for our wedding, to give the impression I had somewhere important to go after, instead of returning home to my small basement office, where nobody cares how I dress, to write stories that baffle my intentions. But by the time I was ready we were already almost late, and I had no choice but to book a cab.
And so we met nobody, and I exchanged no words of greeting, and was wrapped in the unbroken patterns of my frustrated thoughts as I walked home from drop-off, when near the middle of my journey I stepped into the neglected public gardens off Skinner Street. Two paths lay before me: the longer concrete walkway, which curved around the fringes of the grass, past a pavilion that resembled a brutalist dining chair; and a dirt track, worn through use, across the middle of the grass. I chose the track, and was briefly disoriented by one of those vistas that sometimes surprise you in London. The angle of the trees and bushes conspired to hide any sign of the high-rises and traffic on Skinner Street. It was as if I walked through a wild, natural space, far from the ills of modern civilisation.
I heard a sound ahead. A woman’s voice. It sounded like she spoke my name, Liam. She was standing on grass near the end of the track, raised up slightly on a mound, close to the entrance to the children’s playground. She held a coiled leash, and raised her hands to her mouth to call my name again.
I looked into the foliage that hid the iron railings. I was expecting to see a dog. Nothing too large, a terrier or a Scottie or some other diminutive. She seemed to be calling into the bush that spilled across the grass in front of me, almost brushing my track. I was looking for any sort of movement that might indicate the presence of an animal. But not so much as a breath of wind disturbed the leaves.
I kept on walking towards the woman, and she kept on saying my name. Her voice had become sharp with irritation. I could tell she was growing impatient. She was middle-aged, somewhere between fifty and sixty. I thought of my mother when she was that age, when I went to university. Entering the menopause, my mother had become wild with fury, screaming at postal workers, getting banned from her neighbourhood delicatessen. This woman in Skinner Street Gardens wore a purple windbreaker and her dark hair cropped at the neck. Her expression of exasperation seemed worn in, directed not only at her unwilling dog but at her life, the whole world, and at me.
As she came closer, I felt a sudden shift in me. Perhaps it was the way she kept calling my name. Lee-um. Lee-um. The hairs on my arms bristled. They stood thickly against my skin. A liquid heat flooded my calves and wrists, as if my muscles were preparing for a chase. I imagined myself sinking my teeth into a wiry leg, an invading fox maybe, and saliva forced my tongue between the sharp ridges of my teeth. Lee-um. Lee-um. Wetly, I tried to answer, but all that fell from my lips was a mumbled yelp.
Lee-um. The woman looked through me. Her expression still bore a mother’s dissatisfaction, but I only had to bound towards her, shaking off the damp that had gathered on my feet, and nuzzle her hand, sniff the treats in her pouch. I would look up into that unsmiling face, the way I once looked up into my mother’s face, waiting for the shell of her anger to crack.
I’m not trying to imply that I became in that moment a dog. I hope this is clear. The woman had only said my name a few times, while pretending, as I saw it, that she was speaking to an animal. I thought that this was some kind of psychological trick, something my wife might have cooked up to entrap me and prove me incompetent. I was fully aware of my humanity, all the time this was happening. I kept telling myself, you are a man, and of course I knew this was not something a dog would be capable of thinking.
I drew close to the woman. She still looked through me, beckoning with her hand. I checked over my shoulder, the way you might if someone waved in front of you, in case you wave back and embarrass yourself. Something like this, exactly this, had happened outside the school, when a woman who resembled the mother of my daughter’s friend waved at somebody behind me. In the same manner, the woman in Skinner Street Gardens beckoned, and I knew it was me she meant. I was not a dog, but that was how she was addressing me. I glanced behind out of politeness, though I had already decided there was something terribly wrong with this woman, and saw, far behind in the bushes close to the entrance, almost where I had stood when I first heard my name, the lurking figure of a shivering and very frail greyhound.
Mee-um. Mee-um. I stared at the woman, who paid me no notice as I crossed her field of view. She strolled up the hillock, holding the leash above her head. “Come on, Mia,” the woman called, and with a stab of shame I hurried past, wondering at the strange turn of my thoughts, which had exposed a fracture in the certainty of my identity.
I was reaching the end of the grass. Before me, the dirt track met the outer path. An animal instinct revolted, repulsed by that flat concrete. It was the part of me that wanted nothing to do with the sculpted walkway and its journey through the unnatural blue mounds of the curated play area. But my steps continued. A firmer hand had slipped its leash back over those rebellious impulses. You are a man, I told myself. The beast lowered its wild neck, and for want of a choice, gave the impression it obeyed.
***
Joshua Davis is a fiction writer. His short fictions have appeared in the Fish Anthology (2019 and 2024) and were highly commended by the Manchester Fiction Prize. He has a degree in Classics from Trinity College, Cambridge, and runs Leather Lane Writers, a group he co-founded in 2014. He lives in London with his adored wife and paint-spattered children.