The Blame Dog

Her name was Biscuit and she was not guilty of a single one of them.

I want to be precise about this, because precision is the only thing I have left to offer her. Over eleven years, in one house, in front of one family and an unknowable number of guests, my mother’s labrador was convicted — instantly, unanimously, and without evidence — of approximately four hundred acts she did not commit.

The procedure never varied. There would be a sound, or there would be the absence of a sound followed by a change in the room. There would be a pause of perhaps a second and a half. And then somebody would say, in a voice of enormous and entirely fabricated warmth: “Biscuit!”

And she would look up. That is the part I cannot get past. She would look up, tail going, at the sound of her name said kindly, because she did not know the word “Biscuit” was being used as a verdict.

The mechanics of the frame-up

There is a reason the dog is chosen, and it is not that the dog is plausible. The dog is frequently not plausible. Biscuit was, on many of these occasions, in a different room, or outdoors, or — on one occasion I have never fully recovered from — at the vet.

The dog is chosen because the dog cannot be cross-examined.

An accusation requires only that it not be immediately refuted, and the dog will never refute it. A brother will refute it. A brother will refute it at volume, for twenty minutes, and will bring it up again at Christmas. A spouse will refute it with a single look that costs you the evening. But the dog offers no defence, enters no plea, and — this is the genius and the cruelty of the arrangement — appears delighted to have been mentioned.

We were not framing an innocent party. We were framing an enthusiastic one.

Every family that has kept a dog has, at some point, watched that dog wag its tail at its own conviction. We tell ourselves it costs the dog nothing. We tell ourselves this because it is true, and because it is not the point.

What it cost

It cost her nothing, of course. That is the defence and I have used it myself. She did not know. She did not suffer. She got a great deal of attention every time it happened and she was, by temperament, a dog for whom attention was the entire currency of existence.

What it cost was borne entirely by us, and we did not notice we were paying.

Because here is what happened in that house over eleven years: nobody ever admitted anything. Not once. Not one member of my family, in over a decade, ever said the words “that was me” — and we were not, in other respects, a dishonest family. We paid our taxes. We returned things to shops. But we had installed, at the exact centre of our domestic life, a mechanism that made a certain kind of honesty completely unnecessary, and we used it four hundred times, and it worked four hundred times, and I am not sure a habit that reliable stays in its box.

I have thought about this more than is reasonable for a man of my age.

The last one

She died in March, at eleven, on a rug, in the afternoon, with my mother’s hand on her.

And about a week later — I want to record this accurately — my father was in the kitchen with the door open and it happened, quite loudly, and there was the pause, the familiar second and a half, and I watched him open his mouth.

And then close it.

There was nobody to say it to. The word had nowhere to go. He stood there with a tea towel in his hand and he said, to me, to the kitchen, to nobody: “That was me.”

Eleven years. Four hundred acquittals she never knew she’d won. And the first true verdict this family ever returned came about a week too late for the only member of it who had never once lied to anybody.

A note to the reader

If you have a dog, and you are about to say its name in that voice, I am not going to tell you not to. It is a very old arrangement and it works and the dog does not mind.

I would only ask that you know what you are doing. You are not blaming a dog. You are borrowing a small amount of honesty against an animal that will never ask for it back, and one day the account will close, and you will be standing in a kitchen holding a tea towel, and you will find out what the balance was.

Biscuit, 2015–2026. She never did a single one of them.