Poppy scrambles out, tail wagging, short legs slipping, long body wiggling. She stops by George’s feet and looks up at him. He points to the food. She barks. He pushes her with his slipper towards her supper. She barks again, three sharp yelps that make George clench his jaw. He hasn’t got his teeth in, though, and all he makes is a wet noise, like a baby.

‘Eat,’ he tells the dog, ‘eat, you ugly mutt. Eat and shut up.’ Poppy rolls onto her back and gazes at George with sorrowful eyes, like she pities him. Her long pink belly is exposed. Bald, save for the odd bristly black hair and uneven nipples, like the skin tags under George’s armpits. She is more piglet than dog, her pencil-thin tail swinging like a pendulum between her stubby legs. If a dog could smile, that’s what she was doing, smiling at him, coquettishly, like a lady of the night trying to pick up a punter, ‘Like what you see, sir?’ as she shimmies on the floor, her body curving into a question mark. ‘Go on,’ her raised ginger eyebrow says. ‘Give me a tickle. You know you want to.’

George watches her in disgust. He’s never liked flirty women, and flirty dogs are no better.

‘Filthy strumpet,’ he says, and staggers to his straight-backed chair. His ship in the storm. When he is sitting in it, he is a captain, capable of conquering the stormiest of seas. He’s Scott of the Antarctic in that chair. It won’t leave him when he’s not looking. Won’t drop dead on him with no warning. It creaks now and again, as old things do. When it does, George takes it gently down to his shed to glue and fix, and straighten and polish, and then he brings it back again. Sits it in the grooves the angled feet have indented in the shell-patterned carpet that was not his choice. His chair is reliable, not like Ellen. George imagines himself spraying her with WD40, with wood oil. Imagines he’s going mad. Clutches the walnut arm rests and shouts at the dog.

‘Don’t eat, then,’ he says. ‘Don’t matter to me.’ Poppy stops gyrating and gets to her paws, evidently realizing she’s not going to get a belly rub. On the way back to her room she pauses by the food. George watches her recoil at the smell and back away, leaving a trail of wee. I’m the boss round here, George thinks, not you.

Ellen came home with the dachshund puppy three weeks ago. She didn’t tell George she was getting a dog. Didn’t ask him first. Ellen knew George hates dogs. Especially small ones. It was the first thing she had ever done without consulting George first. And then she died, which was the second.

Dan

(Enter Atticus, stage right)