“Honestly mate,” Darren said from across the bank of desks, swivelling in his chair with a coffee balanced on one knee, “that dog gets more annual leave than I do.”
A few people chuckled without looking up from their screens.
He smiled too. Lately it seemed easier than doing anything else.
“Vet again?” asked Leanne.
“Yeah,” he said, eyes still on the spreadsheet in front of him. “They’re still trying to figure out what’s wrong with him.”
It was not entirely a lie. Barney had been unwell for months now, old age settling into him unevenly, his back legs stiff in the mornings, his stomach unreliable, his breathing shallow after walks that once would barely have touched him. He had started waking in the night needing to go outside and twice had failed to make it to the door in time. The vet appointments were real enough. So were the tablets wrapped in ham each morning.
Just not every Thursday.
He closed the spreadsheet and checked the time. Twelve twenty-three. His appointment letter was folded in his coat pocket downstairs in the car, though by now he knew the wording by heart. Oncology Outpatients. Level C.
He disliked having to read or say the word oncology. It sounded too large for the place itself. Too dramatic for the plastic chairs and weak coffee and overheated corridors waiting for him there.
“Maybe he just likes the attention,” Darren said.
“He takes after his owner then,” somebody muttered.
More laughter.
He smiled with them, a reaction that came automatically now.
The truth would have embarrassed him far more than the jokes did. He could not bear the thought of people lowering their voices around him or asking how he was with that careful expression people wore when they were already half-braced for bad news. Worse than that was the idea of becoming one of those office tragedies people talked to their partners about.
Poor bloke of only fifty-three who never even smoked.
The consultants spoke encouragingly enough, using words like manageable and positive outcome, but he had realised quickly that people changed around illness before illness even had time to change the body. He had seen it happen to his sister years earlier, neighbours looking at her with that awful mixture of sympathy and relief.
So instead, there was Barney with his bad stomach and expensive food and specialist appointments. Something easier to digest.
At one o’clock he packed his laptop away, aware of the small pause that always seemed to follow now when he started leaving before everyone else.
“Hope the dog’s alright,” Leanne called as he crossed towards the lift.
“Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”
Rain pressed softly against the windscreen while he sat in the hospital car park finishing a sandwich he no longer wanted. The bread left a metallic taste in his mouth. Across from him an elderly couple shared tea from a flask in silence, the woman staring ahead while the man held the cup in both hands as though warming himself on it.
Inside, the hospital smelt of disinfectant and stale heating. A volunteer in a purple jumper pointed him towards the clinic, her voice so relentlessly bright it exhausted him almost instantly.
“You’re looking well,” the nurse said later while flushing the line in his arm.
People kept saying that as though being ill should look more convincing than this.
By the time he got home it was almost six. Barney was asleep beside the radiator but lifted his head as soon as he heard the key in the door, tail tapping once against the carpet before tiredness got the better of him. He crouched slowly to stroke the dog’s ears and was surprised to find tears pressing suddenly at the backs of his eyes.
“You’re alright,” he murmured, though he was no longer sure which of them he meant.
The following week was his birthday.
Someone had wrapped curling ribbon around his monitor during lunch and there was a supermarket cake in the kitchen with his name iced unevenly across the top. Darren handed him a card with a grin.
“You’ll like this one.”
The front showed a cartoon dog wearing a nappy beside the words OLD, TIRED AND LEAKING SLIGHTLY.
Everyone laughed.
Inside, people had written variations of the same joke.
‘Hope Barney lets you have a lie-in.’
‘Get yourself and your dog a spa day.’
‘Maybe put him down and buy a goldfish.’
He laughed too because not laughing would have felt stranger.
Later, after everyone had gone home, he sat alone beneath the office lights turning the card slowly in his hands whilst rain shimmered across the dark car park outside. Thursday next week would be bloods first, then scans.
Beside his keyboard somebody had left a wrapped dog treat tied with a yellow bow.
He looked at it for a long time.
Then he slipped it carefully into his coat pocket.
And drove home to Barney.
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