Everybody Died, So I Got a Dog

by Emily Dean

  It was only fellow members of my parents’ tribe – a collection of actors, writers, directors and intellectual bon viveurs armed with anecdotes – that I could tolerate crossing our threshold without mortal panic.

  ‘Answer the door, darlings, will you?’ my mother would cry from the kitchen on their arrival, as she gulped down white wine and stirred a bubbling casserole, cigarette ash occasionally garnishing her creation. Rach and I would welcome the guests. Theatre actors who justified their decision to accept a part in Doctor Who by roaring, ‘Well, it’s a “Who” not a Hamlet, but pays the BLOODY bills!’ Celebrated writers, war correspondents, TV historians and broadsheet-newspaper columnists. My father would dazzle them with his observations about literature and culture and I would watch them nod approvingly at his eloquent monologues as he commanded the room with the perfect word and the precise insight.

  Sometimes my parents would encourage Rach and me to put on a ‘performance’. So we would traipse up to our room to hastily devise, write and produce a small comic play. My sister was the self-appointed director of these productions, and they were the only occasions when a note of tyranny crept into her otherwise benign disposition. ‘Emmy! You’re not taking it seriously!’ she would chide. She approached our shows with a professionalism I found perplexing. Her attitude was that of the inmate who resolves to capitalise on their stretch by developing abs of steel. I was the one shouting obscenities at the guards after several ill-fated escapes. The ‘look-at-me’ gene I had inherited from my parents, and which had bypassed Rach completely, didn’t extend to these impromptu performances. I lived in fear of being judged.

  Occasionally, family friends would drop by with a symbol of a slightly less peripatetic lifestyle – my utterly longed-for dog. A showbiz lawyer came with a red setter named Jake; there was a photographer whose Dalmatian had been given the rather less child-friendly name of Lover. The house would be thrown into an explosion of tail-wagging, as the dog explored each room. Once, a dog returned with a pair of my father’s Muhammad Ali pants (emblazoned with the promise ‘I float like a butterfly, I sting like a bee’) dangling from a slobbering jaw, to much adult hilarity.

  Rach and I would race out to the garden with our temporary companion, drunk on power when they sprinted to us on command, giggling as they collapsed on us with devoted licks.

  I would be inconsolable when our dog trysts came to an end, burying my head into their necks, whispering intense goodbyes like a mistress increasingly resistant to her role of weekend diversion. I was certain that these extraordinary creatures were the key to everything that was lacking in our life. The grown-ups would exchange amused glances at my histrionic farewells, promising future meetings, but these felt like hollow consolation prizes. I knew that our travelling troubadour environment was no place for a dog.

  But these brief, illicit liaisons provided me with a fix that soon turned into a longing. ‘PLEEEASE, please can we get a dog?’ I would ask daily. My father laughed in a tone that said, ‘Yeah, good luck with that.’ He seemed as captivated as we were by our furry visitors at the time, temporarily jubilant and unconstrained. But his fear of being tethered to routine always outweighed any desire for joy if it came shackled with permanence.

  My mother’s reluctance to get a dog had more to do with their depressingly outdoorsy vibe. She refused to accept that anything of value ever happened outside OR before 10.00am. ‘A dog is such a big responsibility, darling. And who is going to walk it?’ she said, as if it were obvious that she had automatically been ruled out as a candidate.

  One day my parents had some ‘exciting news’ for us. Rach and I had learned to be wary of statements beginning like this. At worst they led to long plane rides and introducing ourselves to new people on a different continent. At best they meant sitting in fringe theatres for three hours watching someone playing Coriolanus dressed in a leather jacket and camouflage trousers. So I was unprepared for the announcement that followed, as Rach and I gathered in the living room in our Muppet Show pyjamas.

  ‘How would you like to have a doggy come to stay with us?’

  ‘For how long?’ I asked, with glass-half-empty distrust.

  ‘A whole week.’

  We could work with this.

  The dog was beautiful, kind, copper-haired and called Rusty, Dad told us. Not realising he had us at ‘dog’.

  Rusty’s ‘parents’ were our family friends, Joan Bakewell and her husband, Jack. The plan was that they would drop Rusty off with his basket and some belongings (he had actual belongings – how adorable!) and return the following Sunday to collect him.

  In the days before Rusty’s arrival I went into manic dogzilla preparation-mode, selecting towels from the airing cupboard that he might like (‘Darling, that’s Italian and it’s from Harrods, put it back,’) planning outfits that gave the impression of confident dog-family child and suggesting a trip to our butchers for treats. (‘We still owe them money for those sirloins, so no, Emmy.’)

  Rach and I fought angrily over whose side of the room he would sleep on, before we were told that Rusty, heartbreakingly, wasn’t going to be resident in either dominion. It was an unexpected show of bedroom propriety, given that Rach had recently found an abandoned bra in her bed. My mother had explained that it belonged to a friend of hers who was conducting an affair with her French lover beneath Rach’s Peter Rabbit duvet. Rusty was to be allowed no such privileges. He would be installed in his basket in the living room. I imagined she was afraid he might belong to the tribe we loathed most – ‘those dreadful “morning people”.’

  The momentous day arrived. Strung out and over-emotional from a cocktail of sleep deprivation and excitement, Rach and I kept watch with the agitation of Southern Belles awaiting returning soldiers. How could my father be engrossed in the newspaper? How could my mother be laughing throatily on the phone to an actress friend about a dreadful production of As You Like It, when Rusty was about to make his entrance into our lives?

  ‘He’s here!’ cried Rach.

  I smarted from not being the one to break the news. And then I saw him too, padding vigorously down the gravel path, glancing up at Jack with besotted reverence.

  The doorbell echoed throughout the house and my parents’ affable exchanges (‘Hello there you bugger! You found us!’) receded into background hum as I stood, staring with wonder at our new companion. Rusty assessed me with interest and then leapt into the hallway, allowing me to smother him in waves of psychotically intense love.

  And so began Rusty’s brief week with us: a transformative ‘never-the-same-after-that-summer’ episode in my life.

  Rach and I loved rising early for the daily ritual of filling up his bowl with food. We giggled as he chased us up the stairs, and revelled in the novelty of being authority figures in his eyes. ‘Rusty, that’s VERY naughty!’ we would say, giddy with power.

  Sometimes I would lie in his basket just to listen to him sighing as he rearranged his limbs and half opened an eye before going back to sleep. I was overwhelmed with happiness. How could anyone not want permanent access to this source of joy? There was a glow of miraculous completeness in our household. Rusty was an anchor. My father was gleeful in his presence, and even my mother managed a walk to the shops with him, selecting a slightly lower pair of heels for the occasion.

  Rach embraced the interruption of our normal life that Rusty represented but seemed less emotionally invested in it than me. She was apparently untroubled by the gloom that I knew would accompany its end. She stored good experiences like this away in a file marked ‘Happy memories’. They were things that had been enjoyed rather than painful reminders of something that had passed. I harboured a sense of faint dread whenever anything too joyous came into my life: a boisterous party, a sunny day, a funny TV show. The looming ending of the moment of bliss always outweighed the present enjoyment.

  All too soon, Black Sunday arrived. My mother consoled us with assurances that Joan would let us visit Rusty any time we liked, as
Rach and I lay next to him stroking his soft ears. He jumped up ecstatically when Jack arrived to take him to his real home, and after the slight sting of betrayal, I resigned myself to some hard facts. We simply didn’t have the requisite qualities to keep loyal, solid types like Rusty. We couldn’t give them what they needed, we would only end up hurting them. It wasn’t them, it was us. But our summer fling had opened up a world that I didn’t want to leave. I couldn’t help hoping my parents would suddenly see Rusty through my eyes, as the one that got away who forces you to swear that next time, you’ll finally put a ring on it.

  As autumn arrived and ushered in the excitement of our second Christmas in Holly Village, I sensed conspiratorial anticipation in the air. My parents were exchanging knowing looks, there were hushed phone calls and the gleeful mention of a ‘big surprise!’ I didn’t have to wonder what it was. I just knew.

  Even they couldn’t screw this up.

  Chapter Two

  The ‘who could be at the door?’ conceit was often rolled out by dog families for childhood surprises. But it had a slightly less benign sense of anticipation for Rach and me than for most ten- and eight-year-olds. We were pretty much on permanent door duty, especially if A. it was any time before 10.00am, B. there was a man carrying a briefcase and waving brown envelopes, or C. it was someone who had appeared a bit on TV in the Sixties but now stank of wine.

  So when I saw our fuchsia-lipsticked maternal grandmother in diamanté-trimmed Christian Dior sunglasses and jaunty trilby standing there on Christmas Eve, my heart soared. She was holding a pet basket trimmed with a satin bow.

  ‘SURPRISE!’ she cried, with the studied enunciation of someone who probably should have left it at the third gin and tonic.

  She had been tasked, a bit weirdly in retrospect, with the role of temporary guardian to our Christmas present, which I could hear scratching at the basket. Curled up inside were two creatures that would have been the stand-out choice to grace the cover of a pet magazine. But it wasn’t Puppy World we had been presented with – it was Cute Kittens Monthly.

  It was an unexpected twist that made a curious kind of sense. My parents had flirted with cat ownership before. Various Siamese and Burmese had all nobly shrugged off our customary ‘you deserve better’ speech, before we resumed our travels. Perhaps this experience had reassured my father that cats, with their beguiling but ultimately self-sufficient natures, posed no grave threat to our lifestyle.

  I felt that brief stab of disappointment that comes when people offer pudding and return with a bowl of slightly tired fruit. But the sense of being swindled disappeared the moment the kittens opened their tiny mouths to meow, and thrust their little noses at the bars. They were two heavenly brown Burmese kittens – and they were all ours.

  There were cries of joy as I seized the darker, more hyperactive kitten and Rach claimed the smaller, more compliant one. She examined its sleepy green eyes and soft pecan-coloured coat before pausing to ask, ‘Do we get to keep them?’ A pretty reasonable question considering our track record with long-term commitments.

  I was enchanted by their pink scratchy tongues, neat miniature fangs and flailing paws. To me they were like a tantalising gateway drug on the way to the real stuff: a dog. ‘We’ve got two cats,’ the conversational opener could go, ‘what difference will one little puppy make to our lives?’

  ‘Can they stay in our beds tonight?’ I asked. ‘We promise we’ll go to sleep.’

  It was a pledge we had no hope of honouring without the help of prescription drugs. We stayed up most of the night, marvelling at our new playthings while the Christmas traditions played out downstairs. My grandmother was singing along to Liza Minnelli as she emptied the drinks cabinet, my mother was shrieking about ‘wrapping the FUCKING Christmas presents’ and my father was escaping into some light reading with The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

  So it was with the joyful exhaustion of sleep-deprived new parents that Rach and I crept down the stairs on Christmas Day 1978 with our velvety new charges, to begin life as pet owners.

  My father encouraged us to choose names from TS Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, in a bid to give this domestic intimacy a literary foothold. Significantly, perhaps, we were drawn to Mungojerry and Rumpleteaser, the ones described by Eliot as two glamorous, show-stopping drifters of no fixed address, who spent their lives roaming.

  Tell me about it, TS.

  Rach, with her gentle agreeability, stuck with the paternally approved Rumpleteaser for her kitten but I rebranded mine, deciding to trade Mungojerry for the less ornate Treacle.

  After only a few seasons, Rumpleteaser suffered the fate of an actor written out of his storyline: missing, presumed ‘run over’. My father, honest to the point of indecency over certain things (‘Is Jim’ll Fix It nice, Dad?’ ‘No, I’m afraid he’s widely considered to be a paedophile’), was strangely coy over this disappearance. Rumple had gone on an adventure and he would turn up again, he reassured us. As time passed, though, Rumple’s mini-break was turning into a full-on Lord Lucan-style mystery.

  I wasn’t really prepared for the fact that pet ownership could turn out to be temporary. How could something that nuzzled up in your bed and shared your life just not be there from one day to the next? And how could everyone continue with their lives regardless?

  Rach dealt with it stoically, though I did find a nod to her unprocessed grief in our battered Liberty-print address book.

  ‘The book’ was the gateway to my parents’ social life. Its spine had been resealed countless times with now-yellowing Sellotape and was groaning with names scratched in by my mother in her self-taught calligraphic script. Flipping through one day past the M’s – Jonathan Miller, Norman Mailer, Spike Milligan – I eventually got to the R’s. And there, between the phone number for RADA and a Royal Shakespeare Company voice coach, my sister had written poignantly in blunt pencil: ‘NAME: Rumple. ADDRESS: He’s lost?’

  My parents decided to audition a new hopeful. Kipper was already on shaky ground due to his slightly route-one birth name, and sure enough we were soon informed that he was ‘just not the right fit for us, girls.’ He had neither the ‘look-at-me-gene’ nor the devotion of a good audience, so he was sent to live with our dry cleaner, a man who paid us weekly visits and tolerated invoices being settled with coins from Rach’s piggy bank. Kipper learned the hard way that cowering in the corner, recoiling at a booming actor’s voice and wincing at cigarette smoke weren’t going to get you far in this family.

  And then another hopeful set foot on our stage. Danny. This Burmese was the ideal male by which you judge all others – exquisite-looking, sensitive, the first to leap up to lick your tears, playful without being a nuisance, nurturing without being needy. He threatened to eclipse Treacle, but, like Rach and me, the two of them defied the odds to form a united bond. ‘To be honest I’m quite relieved to have you on board, mate,’ Treacle’s opening gambit probably went, over dinner party leftovers. ‘Don’t get me wrong, they’re a good laugh here. But the hours they keep take the absolute piss.’

  A year after Danny’s arrival, my parents called us into the living room for a chat. Rach and I had just returned from a sleepover with some dog-family school friends. There was an eerie tranquillity at home.

  My father was chosen as the spokesperson for the ‘very BIG’ news. ‘So, girls, the news …’ he said, picking at non-existent fluff on his sleeve, ‘the news is,’ he repeated, like a presenter building audience tension with playful misdirection, ‘that Danny … Danny is a DEAD pussy!’

  ‘Danny … died?’ Rach’s voice collapsed.

  ‘Yeeees, that’s right, girls. He’s a deaaad pussy!’ said Dad, wrapping the whole ‘death thing’ in a blanket of cuteness by adopting that high-pitched tone people use when talking to a baby or suggesting a walk to a dog.

  ‘Danny had to be put down, because … he had terminal CANCER!’

  He gave the word ‘cancer’ the
oddly sing-song tone of a TV prize reveal. ‘You’ve won a holiday in MALTA!’

  Danny’s death was our President Kennedy moment – incontrovertible proof that life was senseless and cruel and, in Danny’s case, horribly short. We sat there, snot dribbling, tears plopping on to our T-shirts. Danny had shone so dazzlingly. It seemed impossible for him to have disappeared overnight.

  ‘I’m going to bed!’ I cried in furious protest, and Rach dutifully followed me, throwing her vote over to my rebel alliance, instead of sticking with my parents’ Galactic Empire.

  We lay curled up together on her duvet and Treacle licked up our cocktail of tears as he purred with slightly disrespectful bliss. This was Rach’s moment as central mourner, but as always, our experience blended together to form a united one. Her losses were my losses; her bewilderment was mine. Underscoring it all was the inconvenient truth that cat ownership and Rach didn’t seem to be a match made in heaven. To lose one cat may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose three? That needs a whole new word for carelessness.

  ‘We can share Treacle if you like,’ I offered as a consolation prize, aware that it was probably time to knock the endless auditions on the head. Danny’s were Freddie Mercury-shoes: simply too flamboyant too fill.

  But Danny’s new status as ‘a dead pussy’ allowed Treacle to really find his light. His unique selling point for my parents lay in his good looks and fabulously laid-back approach to life. He was what my mother called ‘a trooper’. Even a car accident requiring a wired jaw didn’t put him out of action for long. Like us, Treacle just got on with the show. He also had a sixth sense for knowing who to cultivate, helpfully curling up in the lap of our creepy old bank manager, whom my mother would greet with tinkling laughter, hair fresh from rollers, treating us to weary side eyes as she re-filled his glass. Treacle had instinctively grasped what Rach and I had spent several years trying and failing to adjust to – the sense that we were less a family, more a touring cast of characters. Family, according to my father, was ‘blind loyalty to people whose genes you happen to share’: a twee, parochial concept.