Tim Dowling: having a tortoise reminds you that life is long

My wife got ours when she was eight, and he came to live with us soon after we got married. I don’t remember anything about that in the vows

It is the first truly bleak day of autumn – the sky is a deep grey and a steady drizzle is falling. Sitting in the unflattering light of a kitchen downlight and looking out the window, I think: this is it now, until spring.

Except it isn’t, quite, as a few hours later the cloud begins to break up and a shaft of watery sunlight reaches the brick step just outside my office shed. When I open the door to let in the warm afternoon air, I find the tortoise sitting there.

There aren’t many pets that allow you to forget their existence for any length of time. The cat reminds me that I have a cat twice a day. The dog will not let me forget I have a dog for half an hour. But it has been at least a week since it even occurred to me that I have a tortoise.

“All good?” I say. The tortoise winds its neck anticlockwise, so it can fix me with its right eye.

Certain experiences – raising children, say, or stepping into the path of a bus – remind you that life is short. But many other experiences remind you that it’s long – mostly things breaking, and then breaking again. I have measured out my life in dual-function push-button kitchen tap spray head replacements – they last, on average, about three years, and according to my order history, I’m on my fourth one.

Having a tortoise is definitely the latter sort of experience. My wife got ours when she was eight years old. At some point he escaped for a whole year, was found, went to live on a farm for 20 more years and then, when the farm was sold, was suddenly returned to us. By that point we’d been married for six years. There had been nothing about a tortoise in our wedding vows.

That was almost 30 years ago. Since then, the tortoise has outlived two dogs and three cats. Over the decades, I’ve spent countless hours searching the garden beds for him after dark. I’ve discovered him on his back and set him right about a dozen times. He’s bitten me at least as often. On occasion, when he was in a dormant period of reduced metabolic activity, I used him to prop open the kitchen door. And there were many years when I had to fish him out from the gap under the washing machine to tell him that spring was here.

I consult a weather app. “You know what?” I say. “I think it’s about that time.” According to the forecast, the tortoise could spend another night outside, but I will not find him this easily again.

I pick him up and carry him into the kitchen. He looks miserable, but that’s really his only look. I open the fridge, peel off a lettuce leaf and set it down in front of him. He sniffs it and then looks away disdainfully. When I check again an hour later, both the tortoise and the lettuce are in the same spot. An hour after that, both have disappeared.

That evening, a friend’s grown son drops by. As he looks around, I can see it dawn on him that he hasn’t been in our house since he was a child. In fact, the last time he was in our house, we lived somewhere else.

“Do you still have that tortoise?” he says.

“Yeah, look, he’s right there,” I say, pointing to the spot next to the dog’s bed where the tortoise sits, legs and head withdrawn.

The dog comes running into the kitchen, to remind everyone that there is a dog in the house. The cat, a coward, hides somewhere until all non-family members have left the building. Many friends who visit our house regularly have never seen him. Some don’t believe we even have a cat, but we have pictures.

The next morning, the tortoise is standing in the middle of the square of sun coming through the skylight, awaiting more lettuce.

“I was just thinking about him,” my wife says.

“Yeah, exactly,” she says. “How did you find him?”

The morning after that I wake early, in the dark, oppressed by a heavy weight. The dog is standing on my chest, looking down at me. The cat is also there, squatting on the pillow alongside my head.

“What?” I say. The dog yawns theatrically. The cat presses a paw to my lips.

All this reminds me that I have a tortoise and that, thankfully, he doesn’t do stairs.