I t’s a Saturday morning and I’m walking the dog on a vast bit of scrubland. The path in front of me is parched and deserted. Up ahead, the dog turns the corner at a patch of brambles, and I hear the excited voices of two women. My immediate reaction is one of alarm; I whistle, but the dog doesn’t reappear. The voices rise.
Only when I turn the corner myself do I see that everything is fine: the dog is dashing from one woman to the other, tail wagging, and the women are both delighted. Meanwhile, their own dogs stand to one side, staring balefully at the ground, leads trailing.
“I think we know this one!” says the first woman.
“Isn’t she lovely!” says the second. “What’s her name again?”
“Um, it’s Jean,” I say.
“Hello, Jean!” she says. “We’ve met Jean before! Haven’t we, Jean?”
I think: I also have a name.
“Let me give you one of these,” says the first woman, handing me a bit of paper from a stack. It’s advertising a dog show, taking place on the same scrubland the next afternoon.
“It’s for charity,” says the second woman.
“We’ve got a celebrity compere,” says the first, mentioning a name I’ve never heard.
“Really?” I say. “Well that sounds … ”
“Anyway, you can register online, and Jean would be most welcome,” says the second woman.
“I think she’d do very well!” says the first.
We chat for a little while longer, and then the dog and I continue on our way without seeing another soul for the rest of the walk.
“It was like we were being headhunted,” I tell my wife later. “They made it sound like we’d clean up. Like it was in the bag.”
“She is very well trained now,” my wife says. The dog does have a dog school level 1 certificate, although she dropped out halfway through level 2 to pursue other interests.
“I don’t think it’s really a discipline thing,” I say. “It’s more like, waggiest tail, best trick … ”
“She does tricks,” my wife says. It’s true – the middle one has taught the dog a few tricks. Unfortunately, her best trick is the one where he pretends to shoot her with a gun and she pretends to fall down dead.
“Maybe not for export, that one,” I say.
That evening, I think about other dog shows we’ve been to – three, possibly four. They are charming events, but with a bit of an edge. So many excited dogs in close proximity, along with children and a tense air of competition.
The last time we attended one, more than 10 years ago, my wife and the old dog were beaten into second place by a six-year-old girl, whose spaniel sat down at her command. My wife spent the rest of the weekend saying she’d been robbed.
“What can you do?” I said at the time. “It was cute.”
“It’s not supposed to be about cute,” she said. I didn’t say: I think it is.
The next morning, my wife is uncharacteristically despondent.
“I don’t think I can face the dog show,” she says.
“No?” I say.
“We don’t even have teenagers to bring,” she says. “If we show up, just a dog and two old people, and start taking prizes off toddlers … ”
“You seem very confident,” I say.
“It would just look so desperate,” she says. “Like, what am I trying to prove?”
We take the dog to a different park in the morning. In the afternoon, we avoid the scrubland until 4pm, and even then proceed across it with caution.
“If the dog thing is still going on, we’ll have to turn around,” I say. “Because if those two women see Jean we’ll be forcibly registered, and they’ll probably rerun the whole contest for us.”
“There’s nothing here,” my wife says, looking over the empty expanse. “Are you sure you didn’t dream these women?”
“I showed you the leaflet,” I say.
Back at home, my wife explains her decision to the middle one.
“It’s sad,” she says. “I remember when you were little and we went to that dog show in Wiltshire and won all those rosettes. It was all so sweet.”
“I don’t remember that,” he says.
“All gone, for ever,” my wife says.
The middle one straightens his forefinger, cocks his thumb and pretends to shoot the dog. Charmingly, the dog drops dead.
