The Weight on His Chest

The flat was small and a little unloved, in the way the homes of men who lived alone and worked too much were generally a little unloved, and the only sound in it when Karl Jenkins put his key in the lock was the scrabble of nails on hardwood on the other side of the door.

Jargus met him in the hallway with the whole-body enthusiasm of a dog who had spent ten hours waiting for the only person in the world whose return mattered. Karl crouched to his level despite a left knee that had been complaining since the Owens' that afternoon, and he took the slobbery welcome on his face without flinching, and he scratched the spot behind the German Shepherd's ear that started the back leg kicking. He apologised to the dog for the day, and for the week before the day, and for whatever else he had been failing to be present for in the months before the week. The apology was a thing he could give the dog because the dog was not in a position to weigh it against any of his previous apologies, and would have forgiven him anyway.

The shower was as hot as he could stand it. He let it find the knots in his shoulders one at a time, and he kept his eyes closed because the steam had fogged the mirror and the mirror was not a thing he wanted unfogged tonight. Sarah's voice came up against his will from the carpark of the Derwent Entertainment Centre — the small phrase she had given him at the door of his car, the one about being a prick, which had been the kindest thing she had had available to her in the moment and which he had earned the harder version of and would not, tomorrow, be entitled to forget.

The bathroom door creaked open while the water was still on him. His body went tactical for the half second it took his ears to identify the sound of the dog pushing through the gap, and then the half second was over and the tactical was gone, and Jargus was sitting on the bath mat in his patient nightly posture with a clean towel held carefully in his teeth and his ears pricked forward in the small theatrical impatience of a creature who had a routine and intended for the routine to proceed.

Karl took the towel from him. He told him he was a good boy. The phrase was insufficient to the thing it was trying to acknowledge, and the dog accepted the insufficiency the way the dog accepted everything else.

The bedroom was dark and the duvet was cold. Jargus settled against him with the substantial weight of a ninety-pound German Shepherd who had decided where his head was going to spend the night. Karl reached for his phone in the way a man reaches for a thing he has been intending to do something with for several days and has not yet managed to. He tapped Killerton Ent into the search bar. He did not get any further. The phone was still in his hand when his eyes closed, and it was still in his hand for several seconds after that, and then his fingers loosened, and the phone slid down the side of his hip onto the duvet, and Jargus, without lifting his head from where it had come to rest on the centre of Karl Jenkins's chest, drew in a long contented breath and let it out again in the slow rhythm of a dog who had been waiting all day for the rhythm of his person's breathing to come back and meet him in the dark.

The thing in Karl's chest that had been hammering since sunset the previous afternoon at Berriedale slowed to match the dog's breathing instead of its own. He did not know that it was slowing. He was already asleep.