The air is warm, the sun is shining and the dog is capering across the bedroom, claws clacking against the floorboards, under the impression that 5.30 in the morning counts as morning.
“Stop it!” my wife says, from somewhere under the duvet, but the dog continues to prance and spin, celebrating the promise of the day ahead. Four weeks ago we thought it was about to die of some weird mystery ailment; a month later the dog is not just healthy but jubilant, and we are daily forced to endure its newfound appreciation of the little things.
My wife opens the bedroom door, pushes the dog out and returns to bed. From the other side of the door I can hear the dog chasing the cat up and down the stairs. A few minutes later I hear the cat flap explode outwards twice: once for the cat, once for the dog. After another minute I hear the flap pop inwards: the cat returning. Then the dog begins to bark in the garden. It is still not quite 6am.
“The thing is, you’ve already been up once,” I say to my wife.
“That makes it your turn,” she says.
“But I can probably sleep through the noise,” I say, rolling over and closing my eyes. Then, in an unusually gracious moment, I slip out of bed and go down to the kitchen, where the dog is standing just outside the flap, afraid to enter in case the cat ambushes it from the other side. The cat isn’t even in the room. I hold the flap open so the dog can see the coast is clear.
“You’re good to go,” I whisper. The dog squeezes in, and I congratulate myself for my patience.
It turns out this gracious moment was actually a dream: I’ve been asleep for 10 minutes when my wife comes upstairs from letting the dog in.
“I hope you’re pleased with yourself,” she says. I think: I really was, until I woke up.
I am still thinking about this later when I’m gazing out the kitchen window into the garden – that in old age my dreams have become tedious re-workings of existence in which I behave marginally better or worse than I do in real life. It’s as if I’m rehearsing for a future where I’m either slightly more of a jerk or slightly less of one, depending on which medications I end up on. Maybe, I think to myself, I just need more sleep.
“I have to hand it to you,” my wife says.
“What?” I say.
“I wouldn’t be able to just stand there while someone – my wife, say – unloaded the dishwasher in front of me.”
“I was a million miles away,” I say, becoming dimly aware of the clinking of glasses and cutlery.
“But evidently you can,” she says. “Hats off.”
After lunch, with the sun high and a light breeze coming through the open door of my office shed, I develop a strong sense that I am being watched. Leaning sideways in my chair, I see a cat sitting in our kitchen window staring back at me. It is not my cat.
Next door’s kitten is half the size of our cat, and considerably bolder. It climbs our tree, stalks the top of our trellis and chases bees across our lawn, unfazed by the presence of either our dog or cat. But it doesn’t normally hang out in our kitchen – there is territorial encroachment, and then there is colonisation.
I cross the garden with the kitten watching me. It watches as I step through the open back door, and then goes back to batting a distressed fly against the glass.
“Hi,” I say.
The kitten says nothing.
“Can I help you with something?” I say. “Because if you hadn’t noticed this is actually my …”
The kitten jumps sideways to reach the fly, putting its foot in a bowl on the windowsill. The bowl teeters and falls, and I catch it.
“What I mean to say is, we’re not taking any new applications for cats.”
The kitten jumps off the sill and sits at my feet, tilting its head 45 degrees.
“You’re cute, but we have a cat,” I say. The kitten rolls onto its back and looks up at me. I reach down and scratch its ears.
“It’s my understanding that you’ve been accepted for a position elsewhere,” I say. “And anyway, this is highly …”
I look up to see my cat glaring at me from the other side of the room.
“Oh there you are,” I say. “I was just …” The cat turns and leaves the room.
The expression on the cat’s face haunts me for the rest of the day. My only consolation is that I may one day have a dream in which I handle the whole thing a little bit better.
