The night I moved into Sadie’s flat, we sat around drinking wine and directed most of our conversation towards her dog. The dog, whose name was ‘Nurse’, was fluffy and heavy-set but with the high-arched hips of a racing hound. At one point Sadie grabbed Nurse by the snout and said, ‘You, my friend, are debris from the wreckage of two people who were briefly in love.’

I nodded sagely and then asked which the day the rubbish was collected on.

Apparently Sadie had bought Nurse with an ex-partner who had left her heart battered into ‘a rag of flesh’. At her first delivery of this violent description, Nurse wagged his beige, bushed tail over the rug. I resisted cracking a joke about the dog’s bloodlust.

When I eventually got down on the rug with him and rubbed his ears, Sadie smiled at us with a mixture of approval and the sour remnants of heartbreak. I asked why she’d chosen to name the dog ‘Nurse’ and she rolled her eyes and explained it was her ex’s idea.

‘I wanted to call him Tequila but apparently that was ridiculous,’ she stood up. ‘Listen, make sure you don’t leave strands of dental floss anywhere,’ she said, looking around the room as if trying to recall what else she’d forgotten. ‘Don’t leave floss piling out the bin, down the side of the toilet, anywhere. Nurse would have to get his stomach pumped if he ingested any.’

When I lay in bed that night trying to sleep, I couldn’t stop thinking how odd it was, that some series of events had led to the three mammal hearts, one of them mine, all beating between the same walls, none of us trying to kill the other.

*

I’d been working at a boutique on Kings Road called ‘Chime’ for over four years. The garments were chic but essentially vacant, all of them in warped pastels and illusive, rectangular shapes. There had been a plan, at one point, for me to get into the industry, get some work as a stylist. But I was always so short on money. At any networking parties I attended, I became odd and self-deprecating enough to not be invited back. The brand was fashionable, despite the fact its clothes were deeply unflattering to most people. My theory was that Chime dresses were the sartorial version of misplacing your keys. As soon as customers saw themselves in these dresses, they would recognise that something in their lives had gone astray, but the feeling was so tantalising they would end up buying a dress in a futile effort to regain what they’d unwittingly lost.

I managed the till, invoiced stock, helped people in the fitting rooms. Having worked at Chime for longer than anyone had worked there in the history of the branch, my boss had begun to refer to me as ‘the old rock’. I disliked this nickname intensely.

One Tuesday morning I checked the rota. Someone new was on to work with me. The idea of showing this person the ropes — ‘Tish’ was her name — left me with a numbness tinged with a vague sense of superiority. When Tish walked in, I thought she was a customer. She had the rich blond petiteness of a local and looked far too calm for someone on the first day of a job.

‘My god,’ she said, crouching down and spitting out a glistening wad of gum into our woven wicker receipt bin. I reached down with a tissue over my hand and yanked it off, but she didn’t apologise. ‘I just bumped into my uncle and he was so sweet,’ she said. ‘He was on a mission to find the perfect crème caramel.’

Tish started peering at the dresses in the shop. She was almost aggressively attractive, a physical attribute had been added to the room, like a fresh bunch of flowers left on a table except the flowers were actually meant for someone else. As I showed her around and explained how to work various things, I found there was no limit to what she felt she could talk about: how she had very arched feet, how she loved Mary Poppins, how she once caught her ex doing a line of coke off a bathroom shelf whilst urinating with one hand and clutching a bottle of beer in the other. Yet she didn’t seem verbose somehow, just delightfully conspiratorial. The rain began to clear outside and we got a few more customers in, and she charmed them too. The shop felt like a sweet European coffee house in which people would take refuge. People began buying more garments than usual. Tish would usher them toward certain items and I’d put them through the till. In a quiet moment, Tish came over to me and leaned too close.

‘Don’t you love these women who look like Greek statues? Sometimes you see people and it’s like they’ve walked right out of a museum.’ Her face reminded me of a little girl at her own birthday party. I realised she hadn’t even asked me my name and the thought of her far-flung observations began to offend me.

‘I’m called Naomi,’ I replied slowly.

‘I know that!’ Tish laughed, giving me an odd, shocked look.

But I did not think she did know.

*

Each evening I returned to the flat that week, I found that Sadie was out and Nurse was in. Nurse seemed bigger on his own. Always, he was indiscriminately happy to see me, wagging intensely and spinning around in crooked circles, absolutely desperate to be let out for a piss.

On the Saturday night, I made a salade niçoise and let him lick the tuna can; after he finished it, he looked up at me gratefully. ‘Look at your beautiful black eyes,’ I said to him, and he put his paw onto my thigh. I laughed with delight and then reached down and pulled a sock off. Nurse immediately bit it and initiated a tug-of-war. I pulled off my other sock and Nurse got all excited about playing with that one too. Inspired, I came up with the idea of tucking one sock inside the other and making a ball, which I then threw for him. As I did, Tish came to mind. A thought did enter my head that she would not be creative enough to invent a game like this. It was a hopeful thought, straining to be true. The happy glow from this lasted all of two minutes.

Sadie burst through the door, causing Nurse to bark loudly and defensively.

‘Jack Nicholson looked old when he was thirty-five, but women still found him sexy.’ Sadie was drunk and struggled to untie her laces.

‘Did he?’ I asked.

‘He looked like hell. Balding, overweight, kind of evil. I wonder if people noticed that at the time, when he was thirty-five. I think it’s almost freakish. I’m thirty five. Jesus, look at that,’ she said, pointing at Nurse. ‘He’s choosing to sit with you instead of me.’

Nurse was sat on the top of my feet, glaring at Sadie.

‘Chinatown has more mystery than any modern movie,’ she said, her eyes closing and head leaning back onto the sofa. I got her a glass of water and then left her there. Nurse followed me into my room and slept on my rug.

*

The next day I was working with Tish again. The shop was swarming with customers. I took the hefty payments, yanked off security bars, wrapped silk in tissue paper and sent people on their way. I spoke to a particularly demanding mother and daughter about the best bra to wear under our Oat Scallop dress. Tish seemed distant, airy; she chewed gum and looked bored. I tried to ignore her. At midday, she went out for her lunch break and didn’t return to the shop for two and a half hours. I became so desperate to pee that my forehead began to sweat; I started to wonder if some of the urine in my bladder had actually begun to force its way out through my face. My mind kept returning to my new flat and Nurse; how often I found him waiting by the door, clearly desperate to relieve himself. Eventually my need became so great that I dug around the shelves under the counter for a receptacle and found a high-class insulated bottle, left here by an unfriendly Dutch boy who didn’t turn up for his fourth shift. I was considering how I could piss in it, when Tish walked in.

‘Apologies!’ she whispered sweetly. ‘I bumped into an old friend from school and we couldn’t stop chatting. Or I couldn’t stop moaning, to be honest. Don’t you get the urge to offload about how boring our job is?’ She smiled at me for a second, and then stood back. ‘Oh, but I’m being rude. I guess you’re better suited to the job than me.’

Tish noticed the fact I was gripping the till. ‘Gosh, look at your hand. Are you okay?’

As I was about to explain how much I needed the toilet, a customer arrived. I heard them compliment Tish on the size of her wrists as I ran to the bathroom.

An hour or two before our shift ended, one of my regulars came in. He was an elderly homeless local that I inwardly called ‘Ole Jolly’ on account of his long beard and marine limp. He and I had a lovely, practically wordless thing going. He would simply pass me his mug and I would take it back to our sink and give it a wash and fill it up with boiled water. He liked to make himself soup with Oxo cubes and dried garlic, so it always had quite a complex scent and a decent amount of granulated texture. I know he appreciated me not bothering him or asking questions, as he was a serious, silent man who had probably seen too much darkness to maintain any capacity for light or humour. He didn’t understand my life and I didn’t understand his, but I would always feel a sense of calm come upon me, listening to the kettle bubble as I scrubbed the mug bone clean. And indeed today, despite my ill thoughts toward Tish, silently washing Ole Jolly’s mug reminded me that I had a capacity for goodness, perhaps even selflessness — I recognised struggle. Tish might be more charming, sure, but she would probably find someone like Ole Jolly repulsive or he wouldn’t register with her as a person.

As I came back from the staff room, Ole Jolly’s mug brimming with fresh piping water, I could hear Tish laughing with a man. It was presumably some poor woman’s boyfriend getting harangued by her frothy stories or showy little movements. I noticed the laugh was fairly gruff and wheezy before I made any connection, even when I stood before the two of them, it took a few seconds for me to comprehend the sight. Tish stood there, clutching at her middle, erupting with laughter next to Ole Jolly, whilst he waved his hand in front of face in a futile attempt to contain his mirth.

‘Oh my god,’ Tish cried, beckoning me over. ‘Brian has told me the best stories about the locals. Madame Paw Paw! I can’t believe she scares children like that just for fun.’

Ole Jolly then raised his arms in a way that mimicked a large taxidermy bear, and the two of them fell about laughing again. His laugh was so throaty and melodic; I felt acutely aware of never having heard it before.

‘Have you made tea?’ Tish then asked me, peering at the cup.

‘It’s for his soup,’ I said primly, handing over the mug, trying to engage him in a conspiratorial smile. ‘It’s our routine.’

‘Oh god, you’re not having instant soup are you? Brian. It’s all salt and chemicals.’

‘I put garlic in it,’ he said, clearly delighted by her chastening. ‘Good for the immune system.’

‘Well, la-di-dah!’ Tish mocked, going over and opening the till and pulling out a tenner. ‘Take this. Get yourself a bacon sarnie and a nice cup of coffee. Just make sure Madame Paw Paw doesn’t get to you first!’

Facing each other, they both did the odd impression of the bear-woman again, arms reached up high into claws, comical grimaces, then fell about laughing.

Ole Jolly, or Brian should I say, glanced at me and said, ‘What a lovely girl you’ve hired.’ Then he was off.

‘I’m not sure that we’re allowed to take money from the till Tish,’ I said quietly.

She smiled but didn’t seem to hear me, as she was spraying air-freshener around the room, presumably to mask the briny, vaguely urinal scent he’d left. She excused herself to the bathroom. In the several minutes she was gone, I noticed she left her cardigan by the side of the till. It was a mohair maroon thing, size XS. I picked it up and sniffed deeply at the armpit. There was a faint scent of butter and of lavender, actually a smell that was evocative of a holiday I’d gone on as a child to the Languedoc region, the year I first overheard my dad talking to his mistress Sandra on the phone. A customer came and spent £380 on a dress the colour of weak breakfast tea.

Before Tish came back, I took the cardigan, and hid it in one of the returns bins.

*

When I got home after a shift. Nurse was always wild with excitement to see me. He would grab an object like a shoe or a hat to keep in his mouth to prevent himself becoming too overcome. Often, I worried Sadie never walked him, only I did. She always loved to mention that he was half-greyhound and they didn’t need sustained exercise. Nurse’s frustration used to emerge sometimes when we got outside; pulling at the lead, snarling at lamp-posts, trying to devour squirrels. I started taking him out in the evenings. It was usually dark by the time we got going. I’d walk out by the river, see the intricate black outline of the trees stretching over the water, blurry red car-light and people’s smeared, exhausted faces on night buses. I’d walk past pubs about to close, see the last orders being called out, remembering relatively recent patches of my life when I’d been sitting around those tables myself, not badly employed and in a flat share with a negligent dog-owner.

In an unfortunate development, I began to find that when I felt particularly swollen with loneliness, some masochistic quirk of my subconscious would make Tish come to mind. Like a callous sort of imp, she would charge through my thoughts and illuminate her own life with riotous grandeur. Either from her announcements at work or my own uncontrollable fantasy, I would have to counteract the warm glow of Tish-images: her being adored on a date, giggling and drugs in the bathroom of a party, warm cups of hot chocolate and gossip with her mother. When this state would get particularly bad, the only thing I could do to distract myself was to stare at the back of Nurse’s head, and let him lead me around the city. It was interesting to see how far he’d go, and if he would try find his way home. There was a relief in the powerlessness of it all.

Even though Nurse and I frequently went out walking late, Sadie always seemed to come home later. ‘Look,’ I said to her one night, when she had just got in. I handed her my balled socks, only slightly damp with saliva. ‘He absolutely loves this.’ I waved it above my head and then threw it forwards so Nurse could catch it triumphantly in his mouth.

Sadie laughed, pulling off her coat and tossing her keys on the side.

‘My turn!’ she cried, as I took the sock-ball from him and passed it to her. ‘Nurse! Nurse, look!’ She swung her hips from side to side and shook the sock ball in the air like a maraca. At first Nurse looked up at her, wagging his tail quickly. But then, seemingly out of nowhere, he began snarling and barking and flew through the air, fangs open to pull the sock-ball out of Sadie’s hand. She screamed and leapt back, whilst Nurse ran back towards me, a mucky look of pride on his face.

‘He got me!’ Sadie cried, holding her hand out in front of her. ‘Look, there’s a mark.’ Her cheeks pink, she showed me the dent in her hand, the size of a grain of rice. I tried to comfort her, went to get her a wet paper towel to press against it. Nurse followed me to the sink, still carrying the sock-ball in his mouth. I wrenched it out and threw it in the bin.

‘What is wrong with you?’ I hissed at him.

He just looked up at me, and then leant his flank against my legs, relaxing his whole weight on me. Sadie came into the kitchen and when she saw Nurse being so amenable with me she swore loudly.

‘Have you got liver in your pockets?’ she chided cruelly. ‘Chicken bits down your bra?’

‘Sorry Sadie,’ I muttered. ‘I’m really not sure why he’s gotten so attached to me.’

‘Well, enjoy it,’ she said, with the phone in the crook of her neck as she rang the NHS line. ‘I’m sure it’s passing.’

That night, when I was trying to fall asleep, I could hear Nurse scratching and whimpering at my door. I could also hear the sound of Sadie’s television shows, the swell of the theme-music every thirty minutes like chimes on a church clock. I let Nurse into my room and we fell asleep within ten minutes.

*

A flirtation of warmer days seemed to bring more customers into the shop, people hoping that the tepid, pastel sacks might kickstart some interesting looks for their new Spring season. In a quiet moment at the till, I actively encouraged myself to smile at Tish and then decided to tell her about my sock game with Nurse, focussing only on the invention of the game itself, leaving out the unfortunate conclusion with Sadie. Tish listened seriously, nodding slightly at the information.

‘You love animals,’ she said quietly, at the end of my story, like she was snuffing out a candle. The solemn finality of her response was disheartening.

My boss asked me personally to stay after closing to unpack the new season stock (nobody knew the order codes like the Old Rock did, she said). It was already getting dark when I pulled the grates shut out front after all the customers exited, and I was left looking at an obscenely large delivery in the stock room, a tower of boxes the same height as me, all of them to be steamed and tagged and ticked off the inventory. I hacked into the boxes with our metal opener, pulling out the packages wrapped in tissue paper, seeing all the new designs for spring, colours subdued enough to make a person squint. The list of garments read like vacant poetry: Dried Eggplant Corset, Barley Haze Bralet, Beaten Heather Smock, Motherless Violet Slip. All of them almost cynically ugly to me; there must have been something I didn’t understand.

Without customers or colleagues in the shop, the silence in the room became overwhelming, and I kept finding myself wondering how these designers did it, churning out this stuff again and again and again. I sat on top of the till and Googled ‘fashion futility motivation’. I found an interview with a designer who had got a scholarship to Central St Martins design course, who described the epiphanic horror of visiting a vintage store once and looking in the ‘denim closet’. This backroom contained five vacuum-packed shipping containers of Levi’s jeans, all of them compressed and strewn over each other, like fatty veins and intestines around a giant organ. Apparently there are enough jeans that currently exist in the world to clothe the global population for one hundred and fifty years. The designer ended up having a depressive breakdown and retraining as an orthodontist. I got off the till and lay on the floor for several minutes, listening to the sound of my breathing.

There must have still been four or five boxes piled up around me, making the room ugly and laden with work. I suddenly felt they were encroaching on me, bearing over me, so stuffed full of these sad, useless garments. The idea of methodically sifting through these boxes filled me with dismay; I cut them all open, ripping the cardboard into flat rafts, flinging the shards of it around me. Tearing through the tissue paper faster, I tossed the dresses into piles of their ungodly colours, not bothering to tick off sizes or quantities. Standing upright, I pushed over an opened box, watching it topple and thud across the floor like a child’s counting block. Next, I pulled out the piles of dresses and began throwing them in the air, watching them flutter to the carpet, the tags jangling up and out. I ripped up the tissue paper and scrunched into endless piles on the floor, I wrung out slips and flung them like rags around the furniture, I caused such a ruckus, I left the place so ransacked that the garments all merged as rags. A delightful sense of carnage came over me, a tremendous reckless energy came through my bones as I turned the pristine shop floor into heaped piles of chaos.

Outside the night was black and shiny with darkness and raindrops fell on my hand as I locked up the shop from the outside, bolting the padlocks that secured the chains that wove through the grates. I kept walking past the tube stop, past any point I could pick up the bus, feeling the rain sink through my hair and onto my skull. The night was empty, wet and dark as it was, and I passed almost no other pedestrians. The only other person I saw as I walked the hour home was a homeless man and his dog under a shopfront. The man was sitting with his dog, a wolfish, hound-like animal, much like Nurse. They both glowed underneath the yellow light on the shop sign. I pulled out a tissue from a packet in my pocket, wrapped up the Chime keys like something unspeakable and then tossed them into the recycling side of a street bin.

*

It was heaven for Nurse, that week after I walked out on my job at Chime. It had basically just been the two of us in the flat the entire time, me taking him for longer and more elaborate walks each day. I felt no need to relay my change in situation to Sadie, seeing as I had two months rent in my savings. And anyway, Sadie was out most nights; her thin plastic bags of pre-chopped stir-fry vegetables would frequently descend into forgotten mulch at the back of the fridge.

One afternoon, Sadie did take Nurse out with her and neither of them returned home until the evening. Somehow or other, Nurse managed to get into my room, and when I woke up in the night he was asleep in my bed. It was a tender and disgusting thing to have him there, his snout dry, his smell like the complicated warmth of a butcher’s, his paws stretched out and suspended in the air. I reached over to my phone to check the time, and saw that Sadie had texted me. ‘Nurse bit my friend tonight. They have to go on antibiotics. Make sure to keep your distance from him in the morning.’

I felt the dog, so relaxed and vulnerable in my arms.

‘You been biting people Nurse?’ I whispered to him, making his ear twitch like a rabbit.

The next morning, Nurse and I crept into the kitchen together and I poured him a pre-breakfast bowl of kibble. Sadie came into the kitchen, looking greasy and bleary-eyed. We both stood and watched Nurse finish his bowl of food. When he finished, he wagged appreciatively and came and stood by me. Sadie looked saddened, or perhaps mildly disgusted, by this. She described how Nurse had really gone for her friend, how quick and violent it had been, the several stitches, the endless hours they’d waited at A&E.

‘It’s not good,’ Sadie said. ‘This biting. He’s too big for that sort of behaviour. It’s dangerous.’

I looked down at Nurse, who was drooling slightly.

‘People become martyrs to their pets,’ Sadie shook her head. ‘And for what? Just because it’s not cute to admit that the reasonable decision is to give them up sometimes. I didn’t know he’d get so big.’ Sadie’s voice became softer and less defiant. ‘Nurse weighs thirty-eight-kilos and is now an aggressive dog. What if I have a child in a few years? Will I have to worry about him trying to rip it to shreds?’

Sadie was wearing a vest top and pants; I could see the hard, cottony bump of her nipples and also the scratchy peak of pubic hair edging out from her underwear. I felt a faint sense of sadness, seeing these things, as they felt like a mirage of intimacy that Sadie and I didn’t actually share; a tempting fantasy of how close and comfortable she felt with me, but in fact it was just because Sadie was unabashed about her body, in the same way some women would stand in the changing rooms with their breasts splayed and ask me to bring them a larger size.

‘Don’t you think Nurse could be helped with the proper training?’ I asked quietly.

‘That’s naive,’ Sadie scoffed. ‘Those dog-trainers are just countryside nonces. Honestly, we have about as much chance of redirecting Nurse’s aggression as my Grandmother does her politics.’

‘Right,’ I muttered. Nurse laid down on top of my bare foot.

*

Nurse strained on the lead as I took him down the slope of the high street. The scent of a chicken shop evoked a wild delight in him and made him try to eat a cigarette butt off the floor. He snapped and growled at other dogs and even once at a toddler, but in a way that was sweetly protective of me and merely expressing his own delirious happiness. It took twenty minutes of shops and houses before we got into the woods, that distinct North London type of woods with its meagre offering of nature and crowds of slow-moving people. I kept my head down, and became distracted by the sight of people’s wellies, all of these shoes they all probably only wore three times a year. Ever since that last day at Chime, I’d been finding it difficult to not get stuck in endless image-trains of clothing or footwear, an infinity of cupboards under stairs, crammed with mismatched, beat-up, once-worn coats and ugly little loafers. I used to find it captivating, looking at everyone’s outfits, but now almost every piece of fashion I saw would taunt me to the point of nausea.

Nurse drew me out of my thoughts by trying to attack a passing Vizsla; I had to use the strength of both arms to pull him off. We kept walking further and further up, until we reached the most bushy and wild part of the woods. It was quieter up there; most of the walkers only did the main loop before slinking off to the pub. There were parakeets and magpies flying around the branches, squirrels and a couple rats scurrying around the leaves. Nurse charged forth ecstatically. I laughed as I tried to keep up with him, my hands rubbed raw by the force of the lead.

A dog walker was up on the landing with four different breeds, cartoonish in their contrasting sizes. All of the dogs were running around freely as the dog walker threw a pink rubber ball with one of those high-flying contraptions that made it go for miles. To my surprise, Nurse displayed no aggression to the Spinone, Labrador, Cockapoo, and French Bulldog that were all charging around. He seemed only interested in the ball; he was entranced, whining and wagging his tail into a blur. I yanked him back repeatedly, tried to tempt him into another part of the woods, but he was obsessed. I relented, and together we watched as the dog-walker threw the ball again and again, and the members of his pack organically took turns in retrieving it. Nurse howled sweetly with anguish, he looked up at me and waved with his paw to me in order to gain some kudos. I smiled down at him, crouched by his side and kissed his head.

With one easy movement, I unclipped the lead from his collar, just at the second the man threw the pink ball high into the air. With a mighty wrench, Nurse took off; a great whoosh, a galloping blur, he went charging into the woods. The ball had landed roughly twenty metres away, under a large oak tree. The other four dogs began circling the tree, their noses to the ground and tails wagging furiously. Nurse didn’t stop at the oak tree. He didn’t stop at all. I watched him run, rapidly increasing his distance from me, bending bits of bracken and tossing leaves in the air behind him. Through the woods he went, further and further, until I could no longer see him at all.