Doug woke up and looked at the curtained windows of his bedroom. Winter light like weak tea seeped through them.

Where’s Chappy? he thought. He wedged his elbows back and raised himself to look around.

This wasn’t right. Every morning, Chappy woke him by bringing him his cigarettes. With a grunt, he worked his way upright and swung his feet to the floor, then leaned his weight forward until he was standing. Morning was always the worst. It got better once he got his old body moving.

He stretched as he wobbled down the hall, then stopped as he got within sight of the stairs. “Chappy?” he asked the dog, whose head was on the landing with a paw on either side. He looked up at his owner, a pack of cigarettes in his mouth.

As Doug got closer, he could see the length of the dog’s body, now more white than gold, awkwardly stretched down several steps. The carpet around his back haunches was dark with wetness. Another time, Doug might have hit the animal for this, or given him a kick in the backside. He wondered if that might have contributed to the weakness in the dog’s back hips lately.

Doug dropped to the floor and slowly stroked the dog’s head. The dog’s brown eyes looked at him with an odd expression; Doug couldn’t tell if it was asking what was happening, or telling him that it understood.

The eyes flickered open and closed, then the dog’s body began to tremble. Doug had known this day was coming but tried not to think about it. As he struggled to move around the dog and gather it up in his arms, he felt a twinge of guilt for wondering how much the vet would charge him.

~

“What’ll you do with him?” asked Doug, his arms around the dog.

“You can take him home with you, if you like,” said the vet, “or we can have him cremated.”

“You can take ‘im,” said Doug, picturing the tiny back garden of his council flat. “But I dinnae want ‘im sold for experiments or turned into pet food or suchlike.”

“I can assure you we don’t do that. Dead pets wouldn’t provide any useful feedback for experiments.”

He didnae say anything about the pet food, thought Doug. Hell with it. Anyone wants to eat that stringy old body is welcome to once Chappy’s gone oot of it. “Alright, let’s get this done.”

The vet shaved a patch of hair from the dog’s leg, prepared a needle, pinched up a vein, gently drove the needle in, then depressed the plunger. Doug watched the clear liquid vanish into his dog.

“It’ll just take a few minutes,” said the vet. “I’ll leave you with him.”

Doug nodded, trying to look reasonable and composed. When the doctor left, Doug buried his face in the dog’s musty fur. He could swear he felt the moment when the dog died, as if it gave a sigh, both with its lungs and its muscles. It stayed warm, but he knew the thing had left him. It wasn’t the first to do so.

Doug felt something warm on his thigh and looked down: Chappy’s carcass was peeing on him.

“Bloody hell.”

~

The dog had been a hairy millstone around his neck for the past eighteen years, thought Doug. Every time he left the house, he had to think about what he was going to do with it, or take it for a walk first, or tie it up outside the pub and deal with people giving him looks when he finally went back to untie him. The dog had been happy enough; he liked people, and there was a constant stream of them past the pub door. Doug assured himself he’d done nothing wrong.

He’d been a bit rough on a few occasions, he admitted to himself. But it’s no worse than what would happen in the wild. He was just establishing himself as the alpha male; that’s what they called it.

He looked around the flat. This was when he was supposed to take Chappy around the block. What in hell am I supposed to do with myself? he thought. He’d been having this same thought for the past three weeks.

This is getting desperate. I have to do something.

~

“That one,” said Doug, pointing at a multi-coloured patch of fur moving about on the wire mesh over a layer of newspapers. The pet store had a hot smell of animal life about it.

The shop assistant reached in, pulled out the little dog, and handed it to Doug. Doug smiled at it as it writhed about in his hands.

“So he’s the one?” asked the assistant.

He’s the cheapest, thought Doug.

~

Doug collapsed, tired, in his old armchair. The walk around the block had not gone well. Chappy Two wouldn’t walk when Doug wanted him to, so he dragged him along and swore at him, which drew nasty looks from people on the street. Then it saw something or another that Doug couldn’t see and ran to the end of the lead, nearly strangling itself.

Doug got an idea. He pushed himself out of his chair and went to the kitchen. He took an empty pack of cigarettes from the rubbish, took a slice of ham from the fridge, then rubbed it over the outside of the pack. He called the dog, but the little animal seemed to be unable to make the connection between the sound and itself, so Doug went looking for it. He found it in the bedroom in the pile of washing that was waiting for the care worker, chewing on a pair of his pants.

Perfect, thought Doug. He climbed into bed with his clothes on. “Chappy Two,” he called. “Hey!” The dog looked up from his place in the closet. “Here,” said Doug, and threw the packet at him. The dog nosed it, and, liking what it smelled, ate the cigarette pack.

“God damn it!” said Doug, getting back out of bed. He grabbed the dog by the scruff of the neck and carried it downstairs, where he found another pack of cigarettes and put the dog through several hours of drill with them, trying to establish a ‘fetch’ routine associated with the object.

He failed.

Slumped down in his chair, he lit a cigarette that he’d got for himself and turned on the television. He flicked through his four-and-a-half terrestrial channels several times before nodding off.

His head lolled forward and the motion woke him up. Blearily, he made his way upstairs and crawled into bed.

~

“What?” asked Doug, waking up to a tiny, wet black nose snuffling around his face. When he realised that it was his dog, his heart leapt for a moment: Maybe he—

But no. Chappy Two had nothing for him.

“What the hell do you want?” he yelled at the animal. It persisted in nosing and licking him, so he picked it up and took it downstairs. He opened the front door and threw the dog away as hard as he could. “Get tae fuck!” he called after it.

As he turned back to the room, he saw the small fire on his armchair. He rushed to the kitchen to fill a pot with water, then emptied it on the chair. The fire went out with a hiss and a plume of plasticky smoke. Doug dumped another potful on the chair just to be sure.

With the pot still in his hand, he opened his front door and looked out. All he saw was garden, fence, buildings, and sky.