I threw the covers off…

I threw the covers off. I sat up.

My father’s dog, across the other side of the room, sat up too, because I did.

Then she lay back down again when she realized what had woken her was only me.

Dogs were generally meant to be company.

Companionable.

Companion able.

I’d heard the stories of people who, when isolated or imprisoned or lonely or suchlike, had found companionship in all sorts of unexpected places or things.

A small stone in the pocket.

A fragment of bone sewn inside a tiny leather pouch, bone said to have once been inside the body of a saint, passed down and down from parent to child to parent to child and clutched in the hand at every school exam or testing or troubled time in the life till it got passed down to the next generation to do the same thing with it. That kind of ritual thing, still meaningful even if it was nothing but a bit of a bone of a chicken sold as a piece of saint by a mountebank to someone who really needed a piece of a saint or thought it’d be useful.

Yes. A belief.

A belief was no doubt a companionable thing.

Sometimes just a tune. A song.

The words of a song.

The words of anything, a remembered line, even only half-remembered.

I’d heard the stories of people incarcerated, people in hostage situations, whose memories or minds, as they sat there in the fear and nothingness of whatever their situations were, literally opened like books and gave back so many things they thought they’d forgotten or didn’t know they’d known, like they themselves were all the books they’d read and all the things they’d learned and done in their lives.

Books.

People said books were very companionable things.

Much like dogs were said to be companionable.

In the old days I had believed, too, that all of these things might well be companionable.

Alexas. People often said their devices were comforting, like sort-of friends, maybe like those palm sized Japanese games all the kids had twenty years ago where you had to press buttons when the devices beeped to tell you they were ‘hungry’, because pressing buttons ‘fed’ them, and if you didn’t press the buttons on time the ‘life’ in the device ‘died’.

Radio.

People always said radio was very companionable.

I had my father’s radio.

Sometimes in the middle of the night or the early hours of the morning I switched it on.

I’d gathered that programmes existed where, say, someone with a mic stood at the edge of a Venetian canal and just recorded the sound of the lapping of the water and then someone made a programme where nothing happened except that sound of water lapping in Venice. I’d have liked to find myself listening to something like that and I know I could easily have opened a laptop or used my phone to search then download or catch up on the likes of it. But there was something important, something that was the whole point, in the thought that I might chance to be listening to such a thing at the same time as random other people connected by real radioplay time were doing it too.

Instead, when I switched the radio on in the middle of the night over the course of this year, the kind of thing I encountered was news story after news story featuring government spokespeople telling me, much like they were reciting advertising copy, how this country was number one, first in the world, listing the things it was first in the world at and telling me how the thousand or so people still dying in this country every week was something we had to just chum along with now and how generous our government was being to everybody in the country by paying out so much public money to government friends and donors, how patriotic by picking fights with other countries. I’d heard how Black people were terrorists for organizing themselves into a protest movement that demanded equality and an end to racism. I’d heard how environmental protesters were terrorists for organizing themselves into a movement that demanded we attend to the ruination of the planet. I’d heard, beneath the lines, beneath the lies, how

new laws would be voted through parliament so that protests like these would be outlawed and protesters like these would be curtailed and jailed.

I’d heard how more new laws were on their way to stop anyone who asked for refuge in this country from getting here or getting help and to stop Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people from being able to live their ancient and traditional ways of life. I’d heard how the ancient rivers running through the country were filling with completely legal excrement (I knew how dangerous this was already because one of my recent temp jobs had been in admin in the office of a water conglomerate and since our country had picked fights with the bloc where the treatment chemicals for sewage farms were made the conglomerates had been unable to source them and had been left with a surplus of untreated shit. I also knew that the virus loved to leave traces of itself in shit). I’d heard that the official advice for women who’d been stopped by, say, a member of the police force they sensed might want to coerce, attack, hurt, abuse and murder them was for them to try to flag down a passing bus to ask for help. I’d heard how some refugees who’d arrived in this country God knew how against all the odds were now being housed in the real cells of an old decrepit prison that had been being used till then as a sort of visit-a-prison theme park. I’d heard how inept and how callous this government was in abandoning thousands of people in Afghanistan now in danger for their lives because for the years of our presence in their country they’d worked with us.

I’d heard all this. Then I’d listened to a cabinet minister declaring that TV and radio etc should feature only programmes that celebrated distinctly British values.

PURE move. These were the words printed on the front of my father’s radio, move presumably because you could easily carry it around while you went from room to room, PURE because of the persuasive lying crap that product branding generally is.

But anyway. I was past caring.

Here’s the exact moment I passed it:

I’d spent the afternoon at the hospital. I’d come home to my rented space. I’d switched the kettle on. I’d switched the TV on. I did these things because I always did them. I didn’t even notice myself do them; there wasn’t much in my head that day beyond the lit windows of a high building I couldn’t get into, my father up there in one of those squares of light.

A commercial for a fresh food delivery service came on TV. It was a vision of nourishment in which all sorts of bright colourful fruits and vegetables burst explosively out of cornucopic delivery boxes and families looked delighted as they did.

I stopped to watch it because the soundtrack to these fruitful images was a pop song I knew from years ago. It was a satirical song about the American aircraft that had dropped the first atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima in Japan in 1945 which directly killed between seventy thousand and one hundred and twenty thousand people and injured another seventy thousand people.

POW! as they say in the cartoons.

What a lifestyle thing life has become, I thought. We used to march in protests. We had nightmares about our eyes melting in their sockets. Now a whole new kind of communal melting of the eyes was happening in front of mine, on primetime TV, and I’d understood fully, as I stood and watched it with my mouth open, why no government was ever going to give a fuck about and no history was ever going to think it worth recording never mind bowing its head even momentarily to the deaths and fragilities of any of the millions and millions and millions of individual people, with their detailed generic joyful elegiac fruitful wasted nourishing undernourished common individual lives, who were suffering or dying right now or had died over the past year and a half in what was after all just the latest plague and whose gone souls swirled invisible in shifting murmurations above every everyday day that we wandered around in, below these figurations, full of what we imagined was purpose.

What is there to say to that loss?

Everything becomes trivial next to it.

I sat in front of the TV watching the happy faces of the adverts.

A string inside my chest snapped, much as if I was a small stringed instrument tuned too tight.

Ow! as they say in the cartoons.

But then it stopped hurting and after that nothing did and I no longer cared what season or what day.

As to my father. I’d boarded up the broken window. I’d taken the dog.

I went regularly to the house and picked up the mail and checked there were no leaks, that the roof was okay and the heating still worked.

I had his radio.

I had his hat and his coat.

I had a few of his books.

I had his bank card. I found it on the bedside table the first time I got back from the hospital, it had a note crushed round it and his pin number scrawled on the note with the words if I die take out as much as you can for as long as you can before you tell them Im dead youll need it.

I had his watch, which was still going, at least the last time I’d looked at it, and had the shape and the sweat-darkened mark, the scent of his wrist, in the leather in the inside strap.

I had his glasses in his wornout glasses case with his name and the address of the house he lived in two houses ago written inside it in pen in his neat hand.

I had his old dog.

My taciturn father.

His taciturn dog.

Black labrador, ageing now, arthritic in the hips. She spent most of her time now she lived with me standing stiffly on the paving slabs of the back yard staring at nothing or sitting stiffly in the back room with her back to me staring out through the patio door at the same nothing in the yard. She slept in my bedroom on her blanket under the radiator because if I left her in the kitchen she whined all night. She ate what I put down for her twice a day. She asked to go out then asked to come back in then asked to go out, and so on.

What I knew about this dog was that an arthritic old dog knew more about my father than I did.

What this dog knew about me was that I wasn’t my father and that I had a tendency to wake in the middle of the night and act as if there was an emergency happening somewhere that I had to get to.

Still.

Think about it, Sand.

Turnup for the books.

Tonight I’m not choking myself awake in a blind panic like I usually am at this time of night.

No.

Something about the story of that old lock mechanism had unlocked something in me: