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The women in her family have always shown dogs They keep pictures of the dogs on the wall beside the staircase, a line-up in thick, bubble-like glass The pictures are hung in a series of black oval frames When she was a child she would look behind the sofa and through the hall door and see them there, hanging silently like a row of pinned beetles   The pictures go back to sepia prints from the start of the last century, the first being her great-grandmother’s prize-winning Pekingese, Cob In these the dogs look athletic, their eyes small dark buttons The pictures become gradually more detailed and colourful as they descend the stairs, ending in a series of young dogs that look like goblins, illustrations for a hallucinatory children’s book   Beneath each one her mother cuts out a small square of paper and tacks it to the wallpaper with gold pins These squares document each dog’s achievements Damson’s Best of Breed Maggie’s Best in Show Deano, Agility Champion Ugly Maura who never won anything but did once rescue a mouse from drowning in a rain-filled bucket   The family’s usual photographer is dead by the time she wants pictures of her own dog, Marie She has to find a new one on the internet, on a website whose landing page is shaped like an unfurled scroll The cursor becomes a white quill and the photographer’s name is scrawled out in an animation at the top of the page   He has a studio above a stationery shop in the centre of her town, and wears double-lensed glasses that make his eyes spill across his face He calls the dogs things like ‘arrogant’ and ‘stately’ and chews the edges of his fingernails to scabs   He pulls down a screen over a metal set of drawers and the dogs sit in front of it The first screen depicts a pink sky and white clouds, and he tries others: a castle on a hill, a rainbow, plain colours, dark so that the subject stands out like in an oil painting She doesn’t get a say in Marie’s background: he gives