dogs and monsters

We went to Hannah’s future home in Wickford for a takeaway curry. Her boyfriend Paul wasn’t there and she had to look after the dogs. The dogs are two German shepherds, Rocky and Tammy, the latter having a bit of a reputation. She bit (Hannah says ‘nipped’) my brother in the park (Hannah claims he was ‘behaving suspiciously’ at the time) and there have been other reported incidents. So I wasn’t wholly looking forward to the evening. I pictured the dogs looming over us, as in some totalitarian nightmare in which you might suddenly be condemned to death for a crime you didn’t even know existed - reaching for an onion bhaji ‘suspiciously’, for example. Of course it was nothing like that. Rocky, only two, is quite puppyish - disconcerting in a beast the size of a small horse, but not without its charm - and Tammy… well, Hannah was very careful to introduce Tammy to the room gradually, and she was really quite good, only erupting in frenzied rage when something out of the ordinary happened. Like someone standing up.

Amusingly, Tammy’s edgy forays into the room were always accompanied by Rocky ‘playing’ his squeaky rubber toy, heightening the tension with a crescendo of squeaks like something from a horror movie. It certainly worked for Mat, who was the most terrified out of all of us, and who seemed unable quite to believe that these beasts weren’t CGI. The presence of an ‘authentic’ light sabre in the room went some way towards soothing him.