Talk in New York always turns back to one subject

By ROGER FRANKLIN

Under normal circumstances owning a dog in Manhattan can be marvellously therapeutic. There is the obligation to take your best friend for a walk, the security of having a gruff sentinel to guard the apartment and, above all, the entre that a dog provides to one of Manhattan's stranger little subcultures.

Dog people gather nightly in the city's parks, the animals sniffing each other while their escorting humans honour odd rituals of their own.

Strangely, conversation tends to be initiated only through our animals. This leads to some ridiculous exchanges: "Hello, Bingo, how are you? Did Mommy get that new job?"

"Bingo's very happy because we got the promotion he wanted."

At which point, owners feel free to address each other directly and normal human interaction can begin. In a teeming city, a place where it is all too easy to see yourself as one isolated island in an archipelago of indifferent humanity, a dog can be a bridge to a wider world.

We owners hail the good looks of each other's pets and bask in their reflected glory. But since the Twin Towers came down, the canine magic hasn't been working quite so well, at least not at the dog run on East 42nd St, a urine-scented sanctuary in the shadow of the United Nations building.

Owners still gather of an evening, but the mood since September 11 has changed.

Efforts are made to talk of other things, but always, inevitably, the horror of 5000-odd bodies beneath the rubble refuses to be ignored.

A woman known to all as Murphy, a fashion-plate airhead with an English bulldog called Max, started it.

Over the weekend, she announced, she had driven to an upstate town with more lenient gun laws and bought herself a rifle. If a terrorist legion materialised on Midtown's streets, she would be armed and ready to fight back.

"Do you think, Max, that someone might be overreacting?" said a young guy who is dragged nightly to the park by Angus, a crotch-sniffing English mastiff.

Images of Murphy blasting away from the terrace of her apartment made for a moment of grim humour. Would she trade her Spandex workout duds for designer camouflage?

"If you were a terrorist, you wouldn't attack like that, would you, Zorro," Nib's owner said to a long-haired German shepherd. "You'd put bombs in trash cans, like the IRA in London. That would be the smart way to kill lots of people."

"Stop it. Please stop it," said the woman who owns Jesse, a black lab. "It's horrible. Can't we get away from death for a bit."

It was no use. The subject had been broached and the fears came tumbling out.

"Anthrax or smallpox, that will be next," said a gay guy with a shitzu and a close-cropped coxcomb of bleached hair.

By now, the conversation's morbid turn could not be curbed.

Nibs' owner observed, apropos of a yellow streak that hurtled down the street toward the FDR Drive, that few of New York's infamous cabs had been flying the Stars and Stripes, the banner of grief and unity now framed in every store window.

There was another silence, the pregnant pause of an assembly in which each member would prefer someone else to state the obvious: Many Big Apple cabbies, perhaps the majority, are Muslims, most from Pakistan.

A month ago, they were ingots in the American melting pot; today, though none would say as much, objects of suspicion.

"Well," began a sharp, trim ex-Marine in his 60s, "I don't think we've got anything to worry about just yet. The reprisals will start when our guys flatten Kabul, or Baghdad, or whatever. That's when we have to be alert."

The speaker is normally a fellow best avoided, unless you are in the mood for interminable tales of his dog's prowess at retrieving ducks. But on this night the old soldier has everyone's attention.

"When the bombing starts," he continued, "that's when to avoid crowds."

Jesse's owner, now visibly upset, tried to change the subject. "How's Sara doing?" she asked of an ailing boxer whose arthritis and cancer has been noted with sympathy and concern by the group, adding that she hadn't seen Eleanor, the dog's owner, at the park for a while.

There was another silence, one finally broken by the man with the shitzu. "Well, you know about Eleanor, don't you?" he said at last. "She worked in the Twin Towers?"

Summer is still lingering in Manhattan, the dry weather and mild nights making it that much easier for recovery teams to dig through downtown's debris. But just then, as Jesse's owner snapped on the leash to head home, the breeze coming across the river from the East carried the chill of a long, dark night.

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