Page 82 of The Good Boy

“You were very brave, Genie,” Rory says when we get home, me carrying the box of Amelia’s things while he helps me out of the car and opens the front door. “You were hurt and scared, but you were brave, and I am very proud of you. Would you like a biscuit? You can have two if you like. I would give you more, but there are only two left because I ate all the others. But I did leave you two. I mean, I licked them, but I did leave them.”

“Thank you, Rory. I really appreciate that. But you know what—I’ll pass,” I say, glancing up at Miles’s house.

“What do you think about the other thing Granny Rita said?” Rory asks me as he puts the kettle on. There are some advantagesto turning your dog into a human. Training them to make you endless cups of tea is one of them.

“I don’t know,” I say, reflecting on what Mum suggested before I left. “I’m not sure. I mean, how is it going to help me find my true self? It’s a work in progress. It’s not like there’s a deadline—it could take years. I don’t want to run before I can walk. And that is the past. I saw a motivational poster once that said you should never look back.”

“Did it have a kitten on it?” Rory asks me.

“Might have,” I admit.

“I rest my case,” he says. “But anyway, there is a deadline. You want to find yourself and I want to be a dog. And every day I spend in this stupid pink body I can feel a bit of my dog-self crumble away. What if by the time you find yourself you turn me back into a dog that wants to be a man? Or what if my human years and dog years don’t match up and it takes you another decade to deal with your stuff, and puff—I go back to being a dead dog? So yeah, I think there is a deadline, Genie, and also that dealing with stuff from your past so that you can move forward is one of the basic principles of therapy, and finally, that you should never accept advice from a kitten.”

“You’re right,” I relent. “You know, you actually could be a good lawyer.”

It had been quite a while after we had looked in the box, a long time in which I sat on the sofa with Mum’s arms around me, my head on her shoulder, before she had said, rather hesitantly, “You know, Aiden manages the restaurant at the Carlton Hotel these days.”

“Aiden my ex?” I’d replied, my voice tight and cold at themention of his name. “Aiden who studied art and planned on being an anarchist?”

“Yeah, I went for lunch with Lisa from yoga the other day,” she’d said. “And there he was, behind the front desk. I was going to turn around and leave but he came after me. Went out of his way to stop me from leaving. He asked me to give him five minutes. He asked me how you were. He said he’d been thinking a lot about how he’d treated you then. Leaving you and never getting in touch after you lost her.”

“Right,” I’d said. When I tell the story of my past in my head, which I do not do that much in the first place, I always dismiss Aiden as a bit part. I always say it wasn’t him that mattered, that it was Amelia. That when he walked out on me I took it with a pinch of salt. That he was meaningless. That’s how I like to think about it. That works.

“He asked me to tell you that he is so sorry about the way he treated you then, and the person he used to be. He said he wished he could talk to you, apologize and make amends. I said hell would probably freeze over first.”

“You were right,” I say. “He’s nothing to do with Amelia or me. He didn’t even come to the hospital to hold her.”

“I know, darling, and that was impossible to understand. But people do change, you know. He’s married now, got two kids,” Mum had told me. “Both at primary school.”

“Good for him,” I’d said.

There was a silence in which I could sense Mum running over different variants of the same sentence again and again in her head. Eventually she settled on one. It took courage.

“Actually, I think maybe it would help you to go and see Aiden,” Mum had said. “To have closure. I thought it then, when I sawhim, but I knew there was no point mentioning it. Now I’m not so sure.”

“But I am,” I’d said, pulling out of her arms. “There’s no point.”

“Just listen for a moment,” Mum had said. “The way Aiden treated you then, it was wrong. He hurt you, but he hurt himself too. He knows that now, and he wishes he could put it right.”

“Well, I’m fresh out of wishes,” I say.

“What if you could grant yourself a wish?” Mum asks me. “A wish for you to be free of hurt and regret for good. Because there are some wishes that don’t need magic to come true. Just a willing heart and an open mind. So, I’m telling you, because you are my daughter, and I love you: forgiveness will healyou.”

“I’m not going to see Aiden. I’m not going to make life easier for the man who couldn’t bring himself to have anything to do with my baby or tell him that there are no hard feelings, because there are. A lot of them.”

“I know, darling,” Mum had said. “But it’s the hard feelings that you need to let go. Not for his sake, but for yours.”

“I don’t know,” I say now. “I know Mum is trying to help, but I just don’t know if I can face it.”

“I don’t know either,” Rory says. “I know that I am afraid of that man, from the dark time, before you came to get me. And I know if I saw him now I’d still be afraid of him and angry. When I saw him I was just as scared as I was when I was a little puppy.”

“Because dogs always live in the moment, maybe you find it hard to separate the past from the present,” I say. “I guess that’s not always good.”

“It’s hard to remember with all this human stuff floating around in my head now, but if I think really hard and I rememberwhat it was like before the wish, and when it was just me and you, I was really happy. Sometimes happy and hungry.” He thinks for a minute. “Always hungry, actually. But always happy too, because I felt safe and loved.”

“In the end I think that’s all that any of us wants,” I say. “I know that’s what I want.”

“I’m going to get Miles,” Rory says. “You need a human more experienced in all the complicated stuff.”

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