The Men and the Dogs

I saw the first man in the centre of town, out walking his dog, a little white terrier. The first thing to impress me about him was the awkward rigidity with which he carried himself. He was a man of presumably about fifty-five, judging by the grey curly hair sprouting from his head, the grey slightly sagging grimace of his expression. His clothing meanwhile was remarkably un-grey—slightly faded deep blue trousers, chinos, not jeans, and a jumper displaying a patchwork of colours, among them greens, yellows, and reds—which in combination with the diminutive size and general winsomeness of the dog ought to have lent him a level of idiosyncratic charm it did not, in fact, lend him. Instead the sense I got of him was overwhelmingly informed by his gait, his rigid bearing, the dimmed contemptuousness of his gaze. It was as if someone more whimsical than he was had curated his wardrobe. Even had the incident I am about to describe not coloured my perception, I believe I would have carried away with me the sense that something indecent lurked within the man. As it happened I had passed the man and was walking away from him when he began kicking the bin bag. I turned in response to the thump to see him first tipping the bag over with his foot and then setting to work kicking holes in it. It was one of those black plastic bags of rubbish left out on the kerb by restaurants to be picked up. I had paid it no mind until now, and had no notion what it might have done to offend the man. The man’s kicks were hard and steady, each succeeding the last in a regular rhythm. He kicked always with his right foot. He went about the task with intense concentration. I stood there watching the performance, along with several others in the street. None of us said a word. The man was kicking the bag noiselessly, with a quiet anger. His expression had changed only slightly; a look of cold hatred flickered in his eyes, which were fixed on the bag, and his lips were set in the same determined grimace. Scraps of food waste and disintegrating tissue paper were teased out of the holes in the bag by the wind. His shoe became increasingly stained with grease and slime, which he did not seem to mind. In his left hand he held the dog’s lead, paying no attention to the creature, which stood watching his actions rigidly, its fur blowing a little in the wind. I had the impression from the dog’s failure to display excitement or fear that this was not a wholly unprecedented performance. It gazed on the man’s work with stoic acceptance, viewing this as a private ritual in its owner’s life in which it, the dog, could play no active role. The man went on kicking the bag for about a minute, unaware of or indifferent to his spectators, and then straightened up to look at the destroyed thing with a sense of vindictive satisfaction: a job well done. The bag was a tattered mess, its contents strewn around it and thrown playfully across the street by the wind. The dog evinced no special interest in the scraps of meat and spoiled vegetable matter on the pavement, appearing to view them as outside its domain. The man brushed himself off, turned on his heel and walked back the way he had come, the terrier trotting obediently after him.

The second man’s dog was a Dobermann, and the man himself was younger, say thirty-five, with that sort of brutal swagger about him that serves to immediately alienate you from a person. That you can sort of see good and evil in people’s faces: this is a superstition but a tough one to be rid of. This man was heavyset, bald, dangerous-looking. His presence was felt as a disturbance bordering on a threat. He was out walking not only with his dog but with a companion, a man whom I have retained no strong impression of, perhaps a little older and more reserved but seemingly at ease in the other man’s presence. The man with the dog kept up a constant stream of talk as he proceeded through the park, discoursing volubly on his work in a worldly, matter-of-fact tone. The other limited himself to perfunctory expressions of agreement, absorbing the story passively but without evident impatience. I would not have paid much attention to the trio but for the habit the dog’s owner had of interrupting himself midsentence to yank on the Dobermann’s lead and bellow insults in its direction. Apparently it was misbehaving, refusing to follow its owner, stopping to urinate, to smell the flowers. Their relationship was essentially antagonistic. The owner would transition without pause for breath from what he was saying to the other man to these frothing imprecations of the dog, turning red in the face and tensing the muscles in his neck for the duration of each outburst and then resuming his story without apology, with the same good-natured bravado as ever. The other man absorbed all, unperturbed. He did not even flinch when the dog’s owner aimed a kick at the beast which one suspects was no feint, which had probably at least once before, perhaps in private, found its mark.

The third man was out walking his dog, some sort of poodle, in the rain, except the dog was not cooperating, was straining at its lead to be as far away from the man as possible. I might have thought it was afraid of the rain, trying to return home, except that it kept trying different directions, pulling the man first right then left, straining to be nowhere in particular, as long as it was away from the man. It would tire itself out in one direction and then try another, so that man and dog meandered like a wayward ship. The man himself was a little man who did not look the sort to harm the dog. He appeared embarrassed by its acting out, but unwilling to correct it verbally. He let it happen for a while and then picked the dog up with a practised, patient gesture the dog objected to less than I’d anticipated and walked on. It was not obvious from the dog’s expression how it felt exactly about the situation, but it did not strain to escape. The man made brief embarrassed eye contact with the people he passed, he gave each of them, gave me, the same little bashful grin.