Well Street Common
A short story about classism, dread and a neighbourhood dog owner group chat
The first time Willow and I met Terry was outside the Tesco on Morning Lane, though later I would wonder if he’d appeared before that without me realising. Maybe somewhere in the background of other days: on a bench at Well Street Common, or a brief hello as we popped for coffee in Victoria Park Village. Though perhaps I added those details in my mind afterwards.
Willow had stopped to sniff around, maybe at some gristle from a discarded chicken shop container or a rotting apple core. But suddenly a man was beside us, crouching down, knees buckling against the pavement. He had an anorak on, the sensible kind, not the fashionable kind, the sort that was slightly too baggy, a brand you’d never heard of, with a hood that had a peak to it. A Sainsbury’s bag-for-life was hanging from one wrist, carrying only one or two items, causing it to sag and graze against the ground as he knelt.
As his other arm extended towards Willow’s tilting head, I braced for her to flinch and jump back. “Border collie,” he said; not really a question. “Beautiful creature. Very smart too.”
His hand hovered there a bit too long: pale, lanky fingers, bony wrist. Willow, a sensitive, vigilant kind of dog who barked at most strangers, was leaning into this man’s palm, closing her eyes and nestling her plush merle coat against his side.
The man looked up at me and smiled. His face was kind but odd-looking: a high, broad forehead over small, closely attentive eyes. There was something both unsettling and disarming about him. As he got up I noticed a slight hitch in his step, a faint limp, his body seemingly favouring his left side.
“She clearly likes you,” I said. Even then I regretted saying it, right as the sentence left my mouth. It wasn’t meant as an invitation to enter our lives, just some throwaway remark that I’d say to most, but instead I’d handed him something I couldn’t take back. Or maybe I hadn’t felt that at the time and only thought so later, looking back.
As he held his smile, I noticed his coffee-stained teeth and, as he looked back at Willow, the dandruff that had collected on the crown of his balding scalp.
His anorak looked like it was engulfing him as he bent, and he had the look of someone who’d recently lost weight, or been through something that had shaved him down a bit. Something registered in me then: maybe sympathy or pity.
“I’ve always been good with dogs, I have,” he told me, still stroking Willow. “People, well, not so much.” He laughed, and I laughed too. Then he looked up at me again. “I’m Terry, by the way. What’s your name?”
“Sienna,” I replied. He repeated my name quietly to himself, as if filing it away.
We made small talk after that. He asked about my day, what my plans were for the weekend. Then mentioned that he’d just moved to Hackney, not specifically saying from where, only that he’d “always been a Londoner.”
Terry was recently divorced, newly retired, kids long moved out, with a lot of time on his hands these days. Too much time, he said, but he didn’t smile or laugh this time. Instead his voice sounded slightly wilted at the edges.
I was about to wrap up the conversation when he mentioned that he was recovering from surgery, gesturing vaguely at himself without saying what for. “Walking dogs gets you back on your feet,” he said. “Literally, in my case.” He smiled at this, so I smiled back.
When he then offered to walk and sit Willow, for a very reasonable price, it seemed like a good idea. He wasn’t trying to make a fortune, he said, just liked the company.
I thought about all those mornings of dragging myself out of bed at half six, hands and back stiff from days in the studio. I thought about all the extra exercise Willow could get too, all the fun she could have. This was a high-energy breed and she was cooped up all day while I was working on my craft. I often felt guilty about this. So I said yes and took his number.
That was March. By April, I couldn’t remember what our life had looked like before Terry. He walked Willow every morning and most evenings, hours at a time, sending photos throughout the day: Willow in Victoria Park, Willow at Well Street Common, Willow sitting at the old man boozer at the end of Roman Road. The photos were always slightly off-centre, always slightly blurry, like Terry had been half-hiding when he took them.
After the first few weeks, he stopped charging altogether. Five pounds an hour became ten quid for a whole day, then he simply brushed off any talk of payment with a swipe of his spindly hand.
“The pleasure is all mine,” he’d beam as I picked Willow up at 8pm, standing outside his boxy council flat, me feeling eager to get home after a long day sculpting. Terry liked to talk though, so I’d often humour him for ten or fifteen minutes, it was the least I could do.
He never actually invited me in, come to think of it, so my mental image of his place was constrained to whatever I could glimpse through the partly opened door. It often looked stark and bare for what I could see, but I attributed that to him simply being a man.
On certain days Willow would stay at mine, Terry’s flat being “out of service.” I never asked why, but it meant he’d pop over every four or five hours to check on her and take her outside. Soon enough this became routine, and the spare key became simply Terry’s key.
Sometimes he’d even ask to join our weekend walks. We’d head out for coffee and flowers from Mare Street and Terry would tag along, never buying anything. I don’t know why I let this happen, though it seems odd now. Maybe I felt sorry for him. Maybe I thought he was harmless enough.
After these walks he’d occasionally send photos he’d taken of Willow without me knowing. In some of them I appeared in the background, bending over or the cropped outline of my hip as I perused some whole foods. Slightly blurred, but definitely me. I noticed this, but didn’t say anything.
In May, Terry created a WhatsApp group. “Hackney Dog Lovers,” he called it. There were eight of us in all: me, Terry, my neighbour Martha, a couple with a spaniel I always stopped to talk to, and others I recognised from the park.
Terry seemed to love being the elder statesman of what was, on the surface, quite a hip young group of dog owners. He made a point of introducing everyone by their profession: someone worked in fashion, another in music, there were two graphic designers, and me, a pottery maker.
At first the group chat was useful. Tips about dogs adapting to apartment living, crowd-sourced suggestions for the best local vets, the odd warning about certain irresponsible owners who’d let their XL bully bum-rush others with no care for anyone’s safety.
It wasn’t long before Terry organised walks for the whole group: me, Martha, the graphic designers, all of us. Saturdays at Hackney Marshes, the dogs invading seven-a-side football matches, or the odd Sunday trek to Epping Forest when the weather was especially nice.
But mostly we’d take the dogs around Well Street Common. And during these walks, Terry would act like a proud parent on a family holiday, often lingering at the back and photographing the group, but never sending the pictures around afterwards.
I can’t remember when the chat lost its novelty exactly, but at some point it did. Maybe when it became obvious that Terry was the type to post constantly. “Good morning all, Willow looking especially majestic today.” Sometimes I’d read that and think: she’s not even your dog.
And that’s before the endless dog memes, or BBC News stories about dogs, or the long-winded messages about petitions for more poo bins around the Common. Terry was very passionate about that especially.
But the thing is, he was still nice. You couldn’t really argue that he wasn’t. At least not at that moment. He offered neighbourly advice, sent pep talks, remembered everyone’s birthdays.
He sent a voice note on Martha’s 30th that lasted almost four minutes, his voice earnest and slightly too saccharine, with the uncanniness of a children’s TV presenter who’d forgotten they were no longer on air. She forwarded it to me privately with a row of question marks.
“Is this weird?” she then wrote.
“He’s just enthusiastic,” I texted back, feeling virtuous for defending him.
But I can’t say I didn’t cringe a little when I thought about how we must have looked to others on those Sunday walks. The rest of us in reclaimed denim from a warehouse in Walthamstow, COS bags or Wales Bonner shoes. Terry always the odd one out, decades older in his trusty anorak and mud-stained Lonsdale trainers.
Martha once suggested we take him to Uniqlo, help him purchase an entire new wardrobe. I laughed at the thought, then felt bad for laughing.
Our Sunday walks always started at Well Street Common. We’d meet at the corner by People’s Park Tavern, the dogs already straining on their leads as Terry came into sight. Maybe their clear love for him was why we all accepted him as part of this hodge-podge group without question.
Terry would always arrive wielding his bag-for-life in one hand and a cardboard coffee holder in the other: two coffees from Greggs, always for Martha and me. We never had the heart to tell him we’d have preferred to get them ourselves from the place on Mare Street that did them properly.
After the dogs had a tear-about on the Common, we’d walk through Victoria Park Village and sometimes pop into the shops. Then over to Victoria Park, the dogs loose on the grass near the bandstand. But Victoria Park at the weekend was hectic: fun runs, picnics, dogs everywhere. So Well Street Common became the fixed point; the place we returned to, where Terry felt like he was on his own turf, the centre of this little world he’d created for himself.
You only had to be with Terry for five minutes to realise that he knew the name of every dog in the area, and their owners’ names too. Within our group alone, his memory became a thing of legend. He knew everyone’s address, phone numbers, daily schedules, preferred walking routes.
But things deeper than that as well: he knew Martha worked nights at a pub in Homerton, he knew I was struggling with a commission, that one of the spaniel owners was trying to quit vaping.
He had a gift for it, genuinely. One Sunday he turned up with a pack of McVitie’s because he’d remembered someone in the chat mentioning having a bad week. He spent twenty minutes of one walk helping another draft a complaint letter to their landlord about a broken washing machine, patiently working on the wording as he threw a ball for Willow.
When Martha came off a brutal shift and posted in the group that she was too tired to walk the dog, Terry was at her door within the hour.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she wrote.
“I was going that way anyway,” he replied. “She’s a good dog, aye. Just take care of yourself.”
That was the thing about Terry that became harder to talk about afterwards: he really was, for a while, quite good.
“You’re so good at bringing people together,” someone said once, and Terry’s face lit up in a way that unnerved me slightly. It had this hungry gratitude to it, like he wanted to savour the compliment whole. Though maybe that was just the face of a lonely man being told that he mattered. I went back and forth on this a lot, back then and more so now.
But there were moments where it felt too much, even then. Like the time that he sent me a meme at two in the morning, waking me up in the process: a confused-looking cartoon cat spinning a pottery wheel, with the caption: “the anxiety never stops throwing clay lol.”
I tried to work out what it even meant, then just stared at my phone in the dark, struggling to remember if I’d told him about my anxiety, or if he was telling me that he suffered from anxiety, or if he’d meant to send it to someone else. I decided to ignore it and go back to sleep.
But it stayed in my mind and I showed it to Marcus when he came round for dinner that week. Marcus had been a friend for three years, ever since we met at a private view in Bethnal Green where we’d ended up outside smoking until everyone else had left. He made bespoke decorative ceramic tiles, was slightly too tall for my flat’s doorframes, and always made me laugh in the specific way that felt easy.
“That’s just a sweet dad text,” he said. “The guy’s just being friendly.”
“It was two in the morning,” I objected.
“So what, he’s a night owl, that must mean he’s a total rotter,” Marcus laughed, topping up our wine.
But it was enough to unsettle me. Gradually I started to use Terry’s services less and work from home a bit more, even though there’s not much pottery that can be made from the comfort of a one-bed flat.
I didn’t cut Terry out entirely, maybe I was afraid to. I had considered it but was worried it’d seem too obvious that something was wrong or that it would offend him. Instead I just slowly started to move away from daily walks, asking to do every other day, and then finally just once or twice a week.
Back walking Willow again most days, I often felt like I was noticing Terry in different places. One early morning as the dew and the fog lingered across the Common, I could have sworn I saw his hunched-over silhouette in the distance. Then one afternoon, spotting him outside the Tesco on Morning Lane where we first had encountered him. That time I was certain it was him, but when I prepared myself to say hello, he had already retreated down the street.
Late another night, as I was getting ready for bed, I saw him beneath the streetlight opposite my building, looking up. He had his shopping bag so I knew for certain that it was him. I panicked and went to turn the lights off, to pretend we were asleep or not home, but when I checked again, he was gone.
Probably just going for a stroll, I told myself, you know how lonely he gets. Or maybe he was walking another dog, though I hadn’t seen a dog with him.
When I texted my sister about it, in something of a blind panic, she didn’t have a trace of sympathy: “You’re always doing this. Finding reasons to make people seem suspicious. Making them into something threatening or sinister, so you have a reason to pull away. It’s all in your head, Sienna.”
I thought about that for a long time, but it didn’t help the unease that had settled into my body. My shoulders felt constantly tense whenever I thought about Terry, my chest suddenly tight as I would clip on Willow’s harness for a walk.
I’d wake at three or four in the morning and my heart would be going so fast for no reason. I could actually feel it, through my chest, through my t-shirt. And I’d be convinced that I’d heard something. But then I’d check the flat and it’d only be me and Willow, fast asleep, curled tight in her bed next to mine, the flat exactly as I’d expect it to look in the middle of the night.
So I tried to tell myself that it was only me, Sienna’s mind doing Sienna’s mind things, until Martha side-messaged me, away from the group chat. “Weird one babe, but do you think Terry’s limp has gotten worse recently? He said the surgery was six months ago.”
The message sat there unanswered for a day or so before I apologised for being busy and changed the subject.
One evening in June, Marcus came round to the flat. We opened wine and put something on in the background that we didn’t end up watching. It was a beautiful summer evening, the sun soaking the flat in warm orange.
We had dinner on the balcony and then, two bottles later, we were kissing. It just happened but felt natural enough that we moved towards the bedroom. Soon, I was pulling at his jumper as he backed me onto the bed.
And that’s when I saw it, slightly over Marcus’ shoulder: Willow’s pet monitor. I had placed a few around the flat when she was still a puppy to try and help with her separation anxiety, just those small round ones you can get for cheap online. There was one in the living room, one on top of the kitchen shelves and one on the bookcase in my room. But I hadn’t used them for years, hadn’t touched them or really thought about them in that time either. There wasn’t ever really a need, I was always at home with Willow and when I wasn’t, Terry was. And I had trusted Terry without thinking.
The bedroom camera, naturally, had always been angled slightly towards Willow’s bed. But now, as Marcus began to unzip my jeans, I noticed that it was pointing towards us. And the small red light was on.
I froze.
“What?” Marcus said softly, kissing my neck.
“Nothing,” I said, my voice running cold.
My mind was racing now. I was trying to work out when I’d last moved it. I knew, with an icy certainty that I couldn’t fully justify, that I hadn’t taken something off that shelf in weeks.
Could I have accidentally knocked it when I was hoovering last weekend? Yeah, maybe. But that didn’t explain why the monitor was now on, flashing red, watching me while I fuck my best friend.
“Actually,” I said abruptly, my body stiff. “I’m sorry. I think I need you to go.”
I inched my trousers back up and tossed Marcus’ jumper back at him, slightly pushing him away by his chest in the process.
He didn’t make any protest, but did look quite concerned, and a little sad. We both got dressed again in silence, me turning away from both Marcus and the camera. On the way out, he asked gently: “Everything okay?” I told him that things were fine and that I was just tired.
The door had barely closed when I rushed back into the bedroom, unplugged the camera from the socket and held it in my palm.
Terry had a key, I thought to myself. I had been thinking this the entire time. He’d had a key for months. He’d been in my flat. He might have even been in my bedroom, in my bed, while I was out. He might have even been watching us tonight.
I carried the camera to the kitchen and placed it on the table, facing it towards the wall. It was unplugged and I knew I was being irrational, but I sat there for a while to check if the red light would come back on.
Finally, after an hour or so, I decided to go to bed. When I went back into my room, Willow looked up from her slumber, clearly sensing that something was wrong.
I checked my phone as I got undressed in the dark. Marcus had texted: “We okay?” I quickly replied, “yes, of course,” and tried in vain to get some sleep.
Marcus came round again the following week but things were back to how they were: easy chat, cooking pasta, watching RuPaul’s Drag Race. Neither of us mentioned the other night or the kiss. But I was still thinking about the red light of that camera.
In July, I went to Eastbourne for three days to help my sister with her new baby. I had asked Marcus if he could pop in a couple of times daily to feed Willow, but he was away on holiday. So was Martha. As were the spaniel couple from the group chat. I tried a dogsitting app, but couldn’t find anyone there either.
So, with no other real option, I asked the only person I could think of that wouldn’t be on holiday: Terry. I didn’t want to see him beforehand, so I told him he could just let himself in with the spare key that he still had.
“Do we really have to talk about your bloody dogsitter?” my sister scolded me as I tried to bring up the subject of the red light blinking on the camera. “It’s your first time meeting Felicity, can’t you just enjoy this. Anyway, Sienna, you do have a habit of not remembering you’ve done things. Hobs being left on, doors left unlocked. Maybe you’d put that camera on ages ago and had never noticed that you hadn’t turned it off.”
I muttered something like “maybe,” gave the baby back to her and then excused myself to go to the loo. There, sat on the toilet, I opened the app for the pet monitors. I had set them up again before I left, telling myself that it would provide peace of mind about Willow while I was away. But really it wasn’t about that.
As I looked from room to room, rotating the cameras remotely from left to right, panning up and down, it became clear that Terry had already been for the day. The dog food had been served, now only a tiny bit remaining in the bowl, and Willow was sprawled out happily on the sofa.
I checked many more times over the next three days and only caught Terry in the flat on one of the occasions. He was cleaning up the dog food containers for the recycling at the time, topping up the water bowl, then sat on the sofa for a few minutes stroking Willow. She really did love his company.
For a split second, I thought I saw Terry looking directly at the camera, maybe he’d seen the red light was on, but I couldn’t be sure. After Willow finally went to sleep in the bedroom a couple of moments later, he got up, checked all the windows were locked, checked the balcony, and left again.
When I returned home on Thursday, Willow was fine. The flat was clean and everything seemed normal at first. I took Willow out for a quick pee and then texted a simple “thank you” to Terry. He replied right away but I didn’t read it.
As I settled back into the flat, something felt wrong in a way I couldn’t pinpoint straight off. Then I noticed that the spices on the kitchen shelf seemed to be arranged differently, still tidy but in the wrong order. Usually they were colour coordinated, now they seemed to be alphabetised. Odd, but fine. Maybe it was Terry just trying to be nice. I guess it’s hardly a crime to be odd but nice.
Then I went to the bedroom and right away saw that one of my jumpers was folded on the bed. I didn’t remember leaving it there; I thought I had put it in the washing basket. Had he taken it from the laundry, washed it himself and folded it on my bed for me? What other items of my clothing had he gone through? This seemed more than odd now, this brought back the feeling of the red light blinking again. I stood in my flat and felt cold.
I tried to tell myself that I was just imagining it. I thought what my sister would say. She’d tell you that I’d probably been packing in hurry, and that I’d had a cold that week, maybe I hadn’t been thinking straight or remembering things correctly. My sister would also tell you that I’d sworn that I’d lost my phone once, only realising days later that I had somehow left it on top of the fridge.
Or she’d take great glee in telling a story of how I once left a full bath running for six hours when we were kids, flooding the whole downstairs of our family’s Lake District cottage. That I have a habit of moving things and then accusing other people. These were all true things about me, but it didn’t feel like that this time.
That night I checked the group chat. Terry had posted seventeen times since I had been home. Photos of my neighbour’s spaniel, updates about his battles with the council, crime numbers for various nuisances that he’d reported and a long paragraph about how he’d met one of the local XL Bully dogs and how they had really warmed to him.
Then I saw a photo he posted a few days ago in the chat that I somehow missed. I must have been helping to feed Felicity or something. It was a photo of Willow sleeping on his lap on my sofa, with a text reading: “This little one’s been snuggled up to me all afternoon.”
“All afternoon.” He was only meant to be here for a quick visit to feed her. Not all fucking afternoon!
I messaged Martha: “Does Terry seem a bit intense to you lately?”
She replied after her shift: “Oh my god yes. I didn’t want to say anything, but it’s driving me mad.”
Then, even though it was late, I texted all the others from the chat separately. It soon seemed that everyone had their own story, their own worries about Terry.
It was at some point in August that I started up a side-chat for the group called “Hackney Dog Lovers Anonymous.” By this time, I’d stopped Willow’s walks with Terry altogether, and fewer and fewer of the original gang went on those weekend walks.
Soon, everyone was sharing their fears and concerns in the new group. Some of the things were minor, like Terry showing up uninvited to drop off dog treats he’d bought from Poundland, or tagging along a bit too much when they saw him in the street.
But there were more unnerving parts too: Terry mentioning details about their lives they’d never told him, like where they worked, who they were dating, what they’d done for Easter.
“He knows my sister’s name,” someone wrote in the group. “I’ve never mentioned my sister.” Someone else chimed in: “I saw him outside my flat late at night once, just standing there.” Then Martha: “Do you think the surgery was even real?!”
We went through his Facebook together that night, sending screenshots back and forth. It was a whole gallery dedicated to the group of us: candid photographs from our joint walks, photos of our dogs, pics of us we didn’t know existed.
Sitting on the bench at Well Street Common. Coming out of the Pembury Tavern. Buying coffee at the Pavilion in Victoria Park. Meeting by People’s Park Tavern on a Sunday morning, oblivious to the fact that we were being documented. All of us in our nice coats and good trainers, all taken by Terry in his anorak.
The captions tried to display a degree of intimacy that wasn’t quite true, sometimes veering on proprietorial: “My close friend Sienna and her beautiful doggo Willow.” Another: “Sunday strolls with the crew.” And another: “Lucky to have found such an amazing dog-mad community.” In every photograph, we looked happy. We looked like we loved him.
Some of the photos were of things I didn’t even remember happening. There was a shot of the dogs, for example, having the time of their lives at Walthamstow Wetlands: Willow, Martha’s dog Fisher and all the others. I couldn’t recall Willow ever going with Terry to Walthamstow Wetlands, didn’t even think you were allowed to take dogs there. Had he edited these photos? Manipulated them somehow? And if so, what else had he done with photos of our dogs? And of us too.
“I feel sick,” Martha wrote back. I did too. We all took photos of our pals and posted them, but this felt too off. Like the crossing of a line.
Had Terry always been like this, or had he changed? Or had we changed, now that we were looking for something to seem wrong? I sat with the thought for a long time: surely both of those things couldn’t be true?
Over the next few weeks, I often found myself scrolling back through the original chat history. Hundreds, maybe thousands of messages, most of them from Terry obviously.
I would pause on questions that seemed friendly at the time until you read them in a new light: “What time do you usually finish at weekends, Martha? Just wondering if you ever needed late-night sittings.” Or “Sienna, I noticed you use that studio in Fish Island, do you have a regular day? I’m often walking past.”
He’d sent me a photo once of an antique bowl in the window of a charity shop on Wick Lane. “It reminded me of your work, Sienna.” It looked nothing like my work, this was an old-fashioned Rococo-style bowl, but I specialised in new experimental and sustainable pottery. At the time, I assumed he was being thoughtful. Now I could see that his obsession with us manifested everywhere he looked.
Marcus came round that week and I showed him screenshots that I’d taken from the chat history, a selection of Terry’s most unnerving comments that I had saved in a folder called “Terry’s Bad Bits.” Marcus read through them all carefully, almost a hundred of them, the messages going back months. As he did so, I had the urge to kiss him, but I didn’t. There was something about this whole Terry thing that made me unable to put my trust in someone like that.
“What do you actually think he’s done though?” he asked as he came to the end of them.
“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s the problem. I can’t work out if there’s something actually wrong with him or if he’s just a bit oblivious. But either way, it’s making us all feel weird and unsafe.” Marcus just nodded along.
It was around this time that people started to leave the group. First one, then two more, soon everyone had dipped out except me, Martha and Terry. He didn’t say anything about it at first and, despite it just being the three of us, his messages actually increased.
First, like they had been before, they were innocent enough. “I bet Willow could really do with a walk in weather like this!” Or “Martha, are you still working at that pub in Homerton? Did you say it was called The Kenton? I was just in there but you weren’t working. Asked for you though, said we were old friends.”
But every now and then, Terry seemed pressed to bring up the dwindling state of the group. “Is everything okay with the others? Have I done something wrong? I thought we were a big happy family.” Martha and I barely responded to any of his texts, but ones like these felt impossible to know how to reply.
I kept drafting texts and deleting them, asking Marcus for help. We’d sit on my sofa for hours talking about it, with RuPaul in the background as usual, until, just like my sister, Marcus seemed fed up with it all. “Look, I love you, but honestly? I think you’re going round in circles with this and just sitting here going over it again isn’t going to do you any good.”
It felt like only Martha truly knew what I was going through. What we were going through. Why hadn’t we left the chat with the others while we had the chance? And why did he only buy us coffees and not the rest? And remember that time that he referred to us once as his “special girlies” and we grimaced but didn’t think too much of it? Was it because we were a tiny bit younger, a tiny bit cooler, a tiny bit more attractive than the rest of the group?
Then on a Tuesday in September, once again at three in the morning, a long message appeared. It was from Terry and I read it in bed, Willow pressed warm against my legs, the phone light harsh on my face.
“I don’t know what happened. I thought we had a good group. When I moved here I didn’t know a soul, and you lot made that easier. Sunday mornings at the Common, that was the best part of my week. And honestly, I thought I was good to you all too. I tried to be. Even when I felt a bit taken advantage of, if I’m being truthful. If I did something wrong I’m sorry. I just… maybe I care too much. Always have done.”
Before I could finish reading it, Terry sent another text: “My kids don’t really call anymore. Yvonne’s moved on and I don’t blame her for that, I genuinely don’t. I’m not after sympathy. I just thought I’d found something good here. At my age, that’s not nothing. And after the surgery too... that took a lot from me. More than I probably let on.”
I was going to check if Martha was awake and had read the texts before Terry sent a final one: “Sorry for this. Forget I said anything. I’ll leave you all to it.” With that, Terry left the group chat and it was just me and Martha remaining.
I sat there for a while, re-reading the messages. They weren’t threatening, they weren’t totally self-pitying either. Sure, they were a bit like being guilt-tripped by a parent you rarely go home to see, but mostly they just felt like the musings of a confused old man, a person falling through the gaps in their life and not understanding why.
Martha didn’t reply until the morning, by which point the other group chat had blown up. It became clear that Terry had sent the exact same messages to everyone individually, word for word. As the day went on and the jokes accumulated. Memes, funny comments, someone posting a photo of a statue being toppled in Baghdad with the caption “the dictator is dead.” I felt less and less sorry for Terry and more and more relieved.
About a week later, I heard from one of the other dog walkers on Well Street Common that Terry had moved out of his flat. His rent arrears had been mounting for months and the housing association had finally gone to court about it. Word was the bailiffs were due any day, so he finally gave in and up and left. She said that he’d moved to South London somewhere, that he’d told people that he wasn’t being kicked out but that he’d suffered bullying in the area, that he felt excluded by his neighbours for no reason.
Maybe he was right. I’d been asking myself whether that was the reality of this for months, but maybe the true picture had been blinded by all the second-guessing and paranoia. Perhaps the problem was us.
By October, I was still catching myself looking for Terry in places, even though I knew he probably wasn’t within miles of me. Sometimes I’d keep an eye out for him by the Tesco on Morning Lane, where we first met, or check behind us as I walked Willow along the towpath of Regent’s Canal.
I threw away the dog monitors but still felt a bit nervy, even considering changing my locks one night until Marcus talked me down from it.
Sometimes I checked on the now-empty WhatsApp group, which even Martha had now departed, trying to work out whether it was possible for Terry to rejoin again after he had already left. But he never did, never tried to text me either, and it was simply a graveyard of old messages.
Soon, I started to enjoy getting back into the swing of walking Willow in the early mornings again. It was just the two of us, the blank morning sky and the odd labourer going to work or late-night straggler still coming home. As I launched the ball and she brought it straight back to me, then reaching up on her hind legs for a cuddle, knowing that she’d done good, I remembered why I had originally gotten her in the first place.
We started to all walk the dogs again as a group too, every Sunday at Well Street Common like before, using the new chat now to coordinate things. “We’re under a new regime,” one of the spaniel couple joked.
We still stopped for coffee, this time from Pophams instead of Greggs. We were still all dressed in our weekend best too: Wales Bonner trainers replaced by Merrell or Salomon hiking shoes now that the weather was starting to become soggier.
Slowly but surely, the dread that for so long had taken hold of me started to lift. Like I’d been frozen with fear for so many months, but now was beginning to thaw. My sister said during one call: “You weren’t right for a long time, you know. Something was off with you. I wasn’t sure what. And I don’t think it was even just the dogsitter thing. But I can hear the difference now, I think.”
She was right and I felt lighter just hearing her say it. I thought not about Terry for once, but about Marcus. Maybe I was ready to actually date him? If he even wanted to at this point.
Then in November, I took Marcus to a friend’s exhibition in Peckham. She was a painter and the room was wall-to-wall covered with these bright coloured, abstract paintings. They felt like the world bursting into life. It was inspirational and the space was crammed with people, the exhibition having been listed in some newsletter about free things to do in London.
I was stood topping up mine and Marcus’ wine glasses when I saw him enter the room.
It was Terry.
I wasn’t imagining it this time, it was definitely Terry, his hair cut shorter, wearing a different anorak to before, this one slightly newer. As he moved through the crowd and made his way in our direction, I noticed that his hitch had gone, that limp from surgery suddenly no longer ailing him. Had he recovered or had Martha been right about that the entire time?
He hadn’t clocked me yet but I felt sick as he approached. Then he stopped, crouching down to greet someone’s dog. “Miniature greyhound,” he said. “Beautiful creature. So gentle too.”
He extended one hand, his other holding a plastic bag from one of the market stalls on Rye Lane. A young couple were smiling down at him, clearly lapping up the attention that their pup was getting. They looked about five years younger than me: mid-twenties, annoyingly fit, her in a Charlotte Simone coat and him with an Acne scarf and chunky Cubitts glasses.
I watched him say something that made them laugh. I watched them take out their phones and take down his number. I felt like I was watching my own life repeat itself, that peculiar foreknowledge of understanding how a particular story goes. An uneasy feeling held by someone who can’t quite intervene and isn’t even sure that they should. What would I even say? “This man is a bit creepy!” Was that enough?
So I just kept watching: the young woman was smiling the way I had smiled at him, once, on Morning Lane. Her dog leaned into his hand, getting tummy rubs. I could see that she was thinking something like: “she clearly likes you.” I couldn’t quite hear the conversation, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had said that out loud.
My focus was broken by Marcus nudging me. “Everything alright?” I looked at him blankly. “You’ve done that thing again. You know, going cold.”
I set down my wine and told him I just needed some fresh air, that I’d be back in a second, then I walked towards the exit, making sure that I was blocked out of Terry’s view by strangers as I tried to work my way out through the crowd.
Outside, I ducked around a corner, lit a cigarette, smoked the cigarette, lit another and then smoked that too. I paused for a second and looked across to the McDonald’s. It was packed with people and I just watched them for a while. Everyone was so young and cool here.
Then, without really thinking about it, I started walking, down Rye Lane, passing the last of the market traders packing up their stalls. Down past the bus stop outside Primark, turning onto Peckham High Street, where I found my speed starting to pick up as the smell of jollof momentarily traced past my senses.
Soon I was at Queen’s Road station. I thought about going back, but knew that I couldn’t. So I texted Marcus instead. “I’m sorry. I think I need to go. All is fine, I’m just tired.”
The train then came, so I got on it. I felt my body start to unwind again as I changed lines at Whitechapel, but I still could think of nothing else.
Somewhere behind me, in that warm lit gallery, a young woman with a dog was giving Terry her name, and I could picture the pleasure on his face. Him repeating it to himself. The hungry gratitude of him finding something good again. The unbearable burden of him caring too much. How Sundays, now at Peckham Rye Common, would soon be the best part of his week once more.