Nut’s instinctive hour-long runs were as speedy as they ever were despite her increasing bulk. I never put her on the scales like I was supposed to, but she must have weighed in at least thirty pounds. Maybe more. Hold your hands in front of you at hip width, swivel them out around forty-five degrees, and that’s about how long she was at that time. I called her “my Chunky Nut”.
Each time Nut finished her habitual run she’d flop by my ankles or scramble onto the back of the sofa to sniff my hair, making sure I was still me. I learned which ways she liked to be touched, the meanings behind each little tilt of her head, and what she did with her body when she’d had enough and wanted some time to herself. I fed her titbits of my dinner, and discovered that her favourite nibbles were peas (offered one at a time on the palm of my hand), little prawns, and cheese, particularly feta. She wasn’t keen on fruit, and would wrinkle her entire face when taking in its acidic spray, her round eyes disappearing behind thick, fleshy pink folds. She hated tofu and would turn away in total disgust when I offered it to her on a palm. She sniffed my steaming cups of chai tea and milky coffee curiously, but never took a sip.
More to entertain myself than anything else I started to teach her tricks. I tried “sit” first, pushing down her back end as I repeated the word, but as her main position was on her rear or flopped on her side she didn’t seem to catch on. I had a little more success with “come”, by coaxing her to the opposite end of the living room with a pea or mini carrot. She’d amble over and push her face into my palm for her reward, and I’d rub her about the ears and reach underneath to tickle her belly. I’d repeat the process over to the other side of the room but by that point she’d have sniffed out some crumb or my plate of leftovers and would be helping herself. I’d flail my arms to get her attention but she’d just look at me over her shoulder and roll her eyes before turning back to her new discovery. I could never tell if she was too clever for the game or too stupid, but, ultimately, she always got her own way.
It wasn’t until our neighbours started to illuminate their dark bricks with Christmas lights that I started to relax a little again with Nut. Yes, I still felt the aftershock, but I had started to accept that nothing had actually gone wrong. Nut hadn’t escaped, she hadn’t fallen ill again. Our days just continued. We’d had her almost a year, and life had developed its own routine. It was a relief to let my body fall into that rushing stream without having to swim, or paddle, or fight. Finally, I could shut out the light and let the water carry me from shore to shore without fear of drowning. All I had to do to float was keep breathing, keep saying yes, keep being amenable. Yield.
This was to be our first real Christmas in the house. Last year we’d been too busy making sense of existences crammed into cardboard boxes to think about dressing the place in baubles and twinkling garlands. I had a few festive bits and pieces from my old flat, and even though the artificial green fir and strings of multi-coloured pompoms didn’t sit right with me anymore, I still brought them out and strung them loyally around the living room like the Ghost of Christmas Past. Some of them had been Luke’s, but I only realised once they were already pinned to the walls. I told myself that it didn’t matter, they were only things. Art twisted his face at the sight of them but having come across from Wisconsin with only two modest suitcases he had no heirlooms of his own. His Christmases were to be sketched on a clean slate.
The idea of festooning each room with only my outdated tat made me feel too naked, so I suggested that we make some new decorations. Art bought into this idea massively, ditching his desk to research homemade baubles. Not long after, I started to find small crumpled pieces of ruled writing paper in every room of the house. At first, I assumed it was Nut running off with Art’s notepads, but when I picked one up and noticed that the paper was too precisely folded, I realised what Art was doing. Every time I found one after that, I took care to open up the ball and turn it this way and that to work out what it was supposed to be. Sometimes I thought I had it all worked out and would mutter “Ah, a penguin,” or similar, and other times I’d have to admit defeat, shrug it off, and drop it in the recycling with the rest of the animal farm.
The sheer volume of paper-folding failures made me wonder if Art had given up writing entirely. I sat watching him one night at the dining table as he painstakingly cut the paper and pressed it with the flat irons of his forearms. Something about the way he forced his fingers down onto each fold had the same effect on me as fingernails down a blackboard.
He attempted robins, angels, snowmen, Christmas trees… None of them looked quite right to me, but I smiled encouragingly at each one he finished, finding a home for it on a mantelpiece or windowsill. This was Art’s concentration face; brow creased, the tip of his tongue peeking from between his teeth. I wondered if this was the face he wrote with, in those intimate moments
