The Dog Has Opinions About the New Gate

The gate at number nine has squeaked for as long as I have walked this street, and it squeaked at a particular point in the swing, and the swing was caused by anybody going in or out.

Bruno used it as a clock. I did not know this until Tuesday, when the new gate went in — the same size, the same colour, silent — and he stopped dead about four metres before it and would not go past for a full minute.

He has done the walk in the same direction for eleven years. He knows it by a sequence, and one item of the sequence has been removed, and no amount of it being an objectively better gate is going to be explained to him.

Thursday he went past without stopping. Friday, this morning, he slowed slightly and then carried on. So it is resolving. I mention it because I would have said, before Tuesday, that I knew what he was paying attention to on that street, and it turns out I had no idea.

Wednesday it came down properly and we went anyway, because he is eleven and the alternative is a conversation I lose.

The sweeper was not out. The milk crates were stacked under the awning at the corner with nobody near them, which I have never seen. The photocopy shop shutter was down. The tea stall had a sheet of plastic over the front and the man was inside it, visible in outline, which was somehow the most cheerful thing on the whole road.

What struck me is how much of what I think of as my street is actually just the six or seven people who are reliably on it at that hour. Take them away and the buildings are not the point. The buildings are where it happens; they are not the thing.

We did the short loop. He was unbothered by the rain and enormously bothered by a drain. We were back by seven and the whole flat smelled of wet dog until about eleven, which is the price and everybody in this house has agreed to it.

Nobody brought it out. It was simply there one morning, of the type that is outside every second building in this city, slightly cracked at the back left.

For about three weeks it was communal. Anybody waiting for anything sat in it. Then some time in April it became understood that it was the older gentleman from the ground floor's chair, and the understanding arrived without anybody saying a word about it, in the way these things do.

It now has a position — hard against the wall, out of the drip line from the balcony above — and an angle, which is towards the corner rather than towards the road, so that he sees people arriving rather than passing. He did not choose that angle in one go. It moved by degrees over about two months.

When he is not in it, it stays empty. I have watched three separate people who were plainly tired stand next to it rather than sit in it. Nobody has ever been told anything. The chair simply became his, and the street ratified it, and there is no mechanism by which any of that happened.