My dog Audrey has no teeth. Not in a metaphorical, “she’s soft” way. Literally none. They all fell out a few years ago and she has been operating on gums and vibes ever since. She eats slop. She gums my hand for affection. She is, without exaggeration, the kindest creature I have ever met.
The dog in Dead Dog Barking is the opposite of Audrey in every way. He barks. He doesn’t stop. He has all his teeth. He is loud, demanding, and he has personally cost me two relationships and a bathroom renovation. (Long story.)
I needed to write about both dogs to make the book work.
One is a soundtrack. One is a reason.
Doug — the fictional dog in the novel — is a soundtrack. He’s noise. He’s the thing Charlie can’t escape, the thing that won’t let her settle, the audible representation of every thought she’s tried to outrun by going to India. He’s the chaos.
Audrey, behind the scenes, was the reason. She’d sit on my feet under the writing desk. She’d follow me into the kitchen at 2am when I was stuck. She’d listen — really listen, head cocked, gums working — when I read chapters out loud to test the rhythm. I wrote the entire book at her pace.
Old dogs and the case for slowing down
Audrey is fourteen. She walks like she’s wading through honey. We do laps of the same paddock every morning and it takes us forty minutes to do what a younger dog could do in eight. I used to find that frustrating. Now I find it instructive. Books also take forty minutes to do what they could do in eight, if you let them.
Most of the best lines in Dead Dog Barking came on those slow laps. I’d be three steps behind her, watching her sniff the same tuft of grass she’s sniffed every morning for a decade, and a sentence I’d been chasing for a week would just walk into my head.
Dogs in fiction, dogs in real life
I get nervous when writers put dogs in books, because I know what they’re about to do to them, and I refuse. There is no dog death in Dead Dog Barking. The title is misleading on purpose. (Charlie threatens. Charlie fantasises. Charlie does not deliver.) If you can’t bear losing a dog in fiction — and I can’t — you are safe here.
To everyone who has ever been kept awake by a neighbour’s dog and considered, just for a moment, the unspeakable: I see you. I wrote you a book.
To Audrey: thank you. You’re the good one.