In 2016, I spent a week in Berlin. My mum picked me up from the airport when I got back; when I climbed in the car, she took a moment to find her words before telling me that while I’d been away, our old Labrador Magic had taken a turn for the worse and they’d had him put down.
I nodded in slow shock as she described the pain he’d been in those last days. I understood their decision, but still: Magic had been my friend, and now he was gone. I felt the hollowness reserved for those whose dogs have just died.
They’d buried him in the bottom garden. When we arrived home, I went down there and found a mound of dirt beside the bench. I crouched in front of it and muttered to Magic what he’d been to me: my stalwart chum, gentle guardian, silent witness...
Back in the house, I told Mum and Dad what a nice spot they’d chosen.
'So we can sit on the bench and remember him,' I said.
Dad frowned. “Next to the bench?” he asked.
'No, we buried him beside the rhubarb,' said Mum. So I hadn’t been crouching over Magic’s grave, but a pile of empty dirt.
I tried to keep my tone as solemn as possible as I said, 'Are you kidding me?' Then I sighed and traipsed back down to the garden to say goodbye all over again.
*
Big as a bike, coat the colour of cream on the turn, tail crooked from when his mum sat on him as a puppy, Magic blundered into our lives when I was in fifth year at high school.
When we brought him home from the dog shelter, it soon became clear he wouldn’t be contained. The first day we left him on his own, we shut him in the largest, strongest crate we could find and returned to discover he’d bent apart the bars, slipped out, and chewed up the sofa. We took the crate to the skip and decided we could at least limit the damage by restricting him to the living room; next time we were out, he ate through our kitchen door. Accepting defeat once again, we consoled ourselves that in our absence, he was at least safe inside the house, until one day, while we were at school and work, he pawed open our bathroom window and catapulted himself through it to enjoy free roam of the neighbourhood.
Over time, he abandoned his escape attempts, but his rebellions continued in other ways. One night when my parents were away, I got some friends round to the house. We broke open the Kopparberg and Pringles, but just as the party was getting started, Magic let rip the most rancid of farts, an utterly devious concoction of hops, sauerkraut, and fish packaging left out overnight.
I tried to channel the stench out the front door, but the air flow just could not contend with the poison cloud within. Half an hour later, my friends had escaped in taxis, leaving me in the putrid living room with my cider going flat, my crisps going stale, and my dog staring dolefully up from his bed like, “Was it something I said?”
*
He was a fiend in more ways than one, but I loved Magic. I loved walking with him, especially in the woods behind the farm. One spring afternoon, I took him along our usual path by the field. He trotted ahead, wonky tail joggling behind him like a loose rudder. The wood rose on the left; a gap in the wall led through the trees onto the main footpath. He would usually wait at the gap until I’d caught up, but today, he headed right in.
I thought he’d caught the scent of another dog, but when I got closer, I saw what had drawn him in. A man stood in the middle of the footpath. With the foliage between us, I could only see him from the neck up. His eyes were closed, and he was slowly waving his bare arms above his head in the manner of a flight attendant indicating the exits. I recognised his movements as Tai-Chi.
I crept into the forest, keen to grab Magic and get away undetected, but after clearing some of the trees, I saw that the man was completely naked. A full business suit lay folded on a large stone by the side of the path, socks balled up and popped inside a polished shoe.
Magic crouched at the edge of the path, his gaze fixed on the man, working through his dog memory for something to compare this to. Just when I was about to catch him, he lunged forward. I hissed his name.
The man’s eyes snapped open and met mine. He must have wondered, “What’s magic? Am I magic?”
Magic stalled. I grabbed his collar, snapped his lead on him and tugged him away, my blood in my cheeks like I was the one who’d been caught doing naked Tai-Chi on a public footpath. Halfway across the field, I turned to see the man stumbling out of the woods towards us. He’d hoisted up his trousers, but his fly was open and his belt wagged.
“Come on, boy,” I muttered, trying with limited success to hurry Magic from his usual leisurely trot.
*
All those years later, when I returned to the bottom garden, I spotted the mound next to the rhubarb where my parents had actually buried him. Now I saw it, the earth there was clearly darker, damper. I bent down and prepared to give the same speech as before. How had I phrased it: had I called him my "stolid" chum? Or was it "stoic"?
I shook my head and wiped away a tear, and wondered who I was trying to fool.
“I loved you, boy,” I said from the heart, “but you could be a real pain in the ass at times.”