Everybody Died, So I Got a Dog

by Emily Dean

  We exchanged wary looks as we witnessed this petite glossy-haired stranger embracing him. I wondered how he could shift his allegiance so openly to someone else. How he could call her ‘darling’, the word he still used, out of habit, to address my mother. He looked wrong in this exotically glamorous woman’s space, with her peaceful Zen garden and pristine white kitchen units. Like a battered typewriter in a new modern office space.

  A glossy foreign correspondent should have been the dream companion for someone uncomfortable with commitment – but with two kings sharing a space, the court tends to get a little crowded.

  Their relationship foundered after less than a year and descended into a war of hostilities. ‘Oh God, the Russian’s thrown your father’s passport into the Thames,’ my mother laughed of the latest drama. She was now just a baffled spectator in his emotional life, much like us.

  Some months later, a typed letter found its way onto the Holly Village doormat, addressed to ‘Christine, Rachael and Emily’. The words were typed but for a flourish of fountain pen at the bottom that read, ‘Anonymous’. It looked like the piece of evidence that would finally nail the sloppy perpetrator in a film noir.

  And sure enough, ‘Anonymous’ had blown their cover with a postmark stamped ‘Chelsea’.

  ‘Michael has just become a father for the third time,’ Rach read out, sat cross-legged on the sofa. ‘The child, Misha, will live with a family retainer in France. THIS child was planned and wanted. Unlike the two YOU blackmailed him with.’

  ‘So Rach and I are the “two YOU blackmailed him with?”’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’ My mother laughed. ‘Charm-ING!’

  According to my mother, the Russian had faked a pregnancy, wandering around with a cushion shoved up her dress. ‘There is no bloody Misha.’

  Misha never materialised but I’ll always be grateful to him in spirit. ‘The two YOU blackmailed him with’ became our sign-off in every card Rach and I ever sent our mother.

  The brief domestic constancy in Holly Village (for ‘the two SHE blackmailed him with’) was about to end. My mother was having strained conversations with ‘the bloody Walkers’ about rent so we took up a friend’s offer to move into their Islington terraced house while they were abroad.

  Holly Village had represented a shot at a consistent history. I felt wistful looking at our now empty rooms, stripped of life, as my mother’s friends came round with wine and bin bags to transport us to our new temporary home.

  Treacle wasn’t sold on our new place. He’d traded a magical garden for a tiny patch of urban concrete. He slunk up and down the house’s metal spiral staircase, weaving in and out of our three bedrooms, weighing up the safest bet for a long-term bed companion.

  One Sunday my father was helping us clear the dishes away after his regular lunch date with us. He began flicking through a catalogue from an art exhibition Rach had saved up to buy.

  ‘Can I borrow this Chagall catalogue, Rach?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘Yeah, sure. Are you all right, Dad?’ she asked.

  He looked as if he had tears in his eyes. But then my dad often had tears in his eyes when he was immersed in a cultural moment. It wouldn’t take much. A TS Eliot poem. A Shakespeare sonnet. An Orson Welles film.

  ‘I’m okay. Love you very much. Both of you. Night, girls.’

  And he shut the door behind him.

  There were three white envelopes lying on the doormat when I let myself in from school the next day. One said ‘Emmy’, underlined, in my father’s unmistakable handwriting. I began to read it.

  Dear Emmy,

  By the time you read this I will be on a plane on my way to start a new life in New Zealand alone. I am sorry not to have told you in person …

  It was beautifully written. Of course it was. It was moving. It was almost reasonable. He talked of ‘needing to do this for himself’, of new job opportunities that would change his fortunes and finally he said, ‘I hope you can forgive your old dad one day.’

  My mother burst through the door with Rach, juggling bags of steaming fish and chips. ‘The queues were round the block! But I couldn’t be bothered to cook …’ She trailed off as she saw my expression.

  I handed them the letters. ‘Read these. Dad’s gone.’

  The rest of the night passed in a fog of melancholy punctuated by pockets of hysteria. Aunty Lyn turned up, immaculate and solution-driven, with her chequebook and lawyers’ numbers. ‘Thank you, Michael,’ my mother said at one point. ‘I have SEVEN pounds in my FUCKING purse.’

  My grandmother arrived in a cab from Brixton, smelling of gin and shouting about her ‘connections’ at Interpol. ‘I don’t think that even exists anymore,’ Rach whispered to me.

  My mother’s mature civility towards him, born mainly out of a desire to keep him in our lives, collapsed briefly. She mentioned a ‘Maori princess’ he was now ‘screwing!’ (She was in fact a prominent intellectual and activist but it played better to dismiss her as some entitled prima donna.) ‘It won’t last,’ she continued, lighting endless cigarettes. ‘They never do.’

  Rach and I escaped upstairs to the spare room. It was the place we had begun to retreat to together, a sort of junior common room. We would talk about boys in there, experiment with smoking avocado leaves and listen to Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Rach had recently pulled out my mother’s old Beatles albums but I decided we needed the bubble gum comfort of Wham! tonight. We curled up together on the mattress, eating cold chips. Treacle, always dependable in a crisis, nestled between us.

  ‘He took my Chagall catalogue,’ Rach said simply.

  Apart from the odd postcard and phone call, our father disappeared from our lives for the next five years.

  Dog families weren’t immune to domestic problems but I felt sure they didn’t handle them in this way, like actors slipping out of the stage door while someone else cleared the set. I felt ashamed when my father left. As if somehow Rach and I hadn’t been enough to keep him with us. If we had just been smarter, kinder, more loveable, perhaps he would have stayed. People didn’t leave you if you were loveable.

  ‘Looks like I backed the wrong horse,’ I said to Rach that night. We tended not to voice our respective silent allegiances to each parent, but she laughed grimly in acknowledgement.

  I decided not to share the true extent of my pain. Instead I poured out my feelings every night in a diary, scoring my black fury over the pale pink pages. ‘Why did you GO? Why did you leave ME?!’ I scrawled, retreating into the simple worldview of a toddler. One who didn’t know about screwing a Maori princess and divorce and people not wanting children. The sadness and anger eventually settled and began to mutate into something else. A brittleness that attached itself to me, spreading like creeping ivy that cleverly hid my fear and hurt.

  But what I hid most of all was how much I missed him.

  ‘Oh bloody GREAT timing!’ my mother said.

  The owners of our temporary home had announced they were returning. So, we packed up our theatre programmes and moved into a dilapidated two-up two-down in Wood Green. ‘But that’s an AWFULLY rough area!’ one of my friends at our posh school helpfully announced. My mother coped with the ‘awfully rough area’, known for its high crime rate, by giving Wood Green a camp French moniker, calling it Forêt Vert. Treacle attempted to find pals among the world-weary local strays, but the velvet collar gifted to him by James Coburn marked him out like some effete Etonian, unable to blend into his new manor.

  The odd loyal bon viveur from our old life paid us visits, helping to put up shelves and donating furniture, but the party had come to a screeching halt. We were now just a collection of travelling souls rather than the beating heart of a thriving salon. Jane and her mum Mandy visited, a reassuring reminder of our old lives, bringing laughter and female solidarity. My friendship with Lucy Simpson had tapered off into a family-based connection, but we’d catch up during our mothers’ intense chats over wine at their house. Ralph was reliably thrilled to see me, his
smell taking me back to a time that I now missed.

  The red bills mounted up and we became dependent on loans, Oxfam shops and generous friends. But somehow, through sheer force of will and endless borrowing, my mother managed to keep us at our expensive school. ‘I don’t want you to end up in my bloody position!’ she said.

  I began to lie a lot. Mainly to my school friends. I told a girl who lived in a mansion that we had seventeen rooms in our house. I invented a family ski trip we’d once taken. I learned to be vague about where exactly we lived, and forgetful if someone asked where my shoes came from, deciding this was a tough room for ‘the Cancer Research charity shop’. I lied about my father, turning him into a doting fantasy figure unavoidably detained on foreign TV shoots. I committed fully to my role as visitor in other people’s homes, gracious, courteous and undemanding, hiding the secret of our collapsed family, my absent parent and our empty bank accounts. I felt like north London’s answer to the Talented Mr Ripley, waiting to be exposed at every turn. But my new brittle armour came in handy, encasing me in smart-arse cynicism.

  I began to imitate Lynsey and those women from Dynasty. Formidable, icy, free from messy emotions. Madonna became my new idol. I copied her language, using phrases like ‘Don’t give me attitude!’ and ‘Screw you!’ My friends daydreamed about romantic weddings with their pop star crushes. My fantasies were revenge dramas involving George Michael cheating on me. ‘Congratulations, YOU just lost the best thing you ever had,’ was my cool parting shot to him, as he sobbed in his hotel bed, tears dripping from under his aviators.

  I envied the way Rach dealt with our new circumstances. She didn’t lie about our house having seventeen rooms. She didn’t fantasise about George Michael cheating on her. She didn’t hide who she was; in fact she was happy to invite over the floppy-haired public schoolboys who were starting to take an interest in her. As if she was miraculously able to separate her worth from parental circumstances. She rejected the affluent world to which I craved membership privileges, going on CND marches, cultivating people outside of our school and dismissing the materialistic scorn of snobbier peers. She blossomed physically into someone the popular girls now viewed as ‘actually really pretty!’ She was morphing from quiet observer into aesthetically-pleasing Apollonian.

  I felt a surge of pride at her newfound acceptance, but Rach seemed uninterested in the people that now held her in high esteem. Unlike me, she had never really deserted our tribe of misfits, holding their maverick code close to her heart.

  A year after my dad’s departure, when I was fourteen and Rach sixteen, my mother told us that we were all going to be separated for a brief period. She had got a small acting job in Australia, in a touring Samuel Beckett play alongside the actress Billie Whitelaw. She reassured us that it would only be for a few months, which would ‘fly by!’ Rach and I were going to live with two different families. Rach was to be placed with a director and actor and their two small children; I was to return to dog-family life with the Simpsons.

  My mother decided to deal with these circumstances with the optimism of a 1940s musical heroine who adapts to challenges by announcing, ‘Let’s put the show on in the BARN to raise money for the orphanage!’ But whichever way you tried to spin it, our gossamer-thin ties were finally snapping under the weight of our chaos. The dream she had wanted: the kitchen table surrounded by family, the plates of home-cooked lasagne, the sense of belonging, was staying a dream. We were now just four individuals, living in different homes. The show had been cancelled due to ongoing cast absences.

  I was finally getting the life I had always wanted – one with a bona fide dog family. But no one had told me the deal meant giving up Rach.

  ‘I don’t want us to be split up, Ray,’ I cried, as we packed up our clothes.

  ‘It’ll be okay, Em. I’ll come and see you lots!’ she said.

  My emotion seemed excessive next to her resigned acceptance. We carried on emptying our things into suitcases, A-ha playing in the background, as I prepared to cloak myself in my gracious, charming guest persona for the next few months, shape-shifting my way into the dog families.

  Treacle, the last reminder of our Holly Village stab at domestic consistency, was to be rehomed with my mum’s on/off boyfriend. John was an actor who had starred in a 1960s hospital drama. I had seen old publicity shots of him posing with a stethoscope and a lit cigarette. He was a kind but reserved Yorkshireman, someone who popped up when my mother needed him and retreated when she didn’t. John was everything my father wasn’t, relying on quiet actions over charm, someone who drilled walls and changed tyres. He often retreated into the dialogue of war dramas in which he’d appeared. ‘At least all’s quiet on the western front!’ But I sensed that he was as thrown by my mother’s imminent absence as we were.

  We waved goodbye to my mother at the departure gate. ‘Bye, darlings! I love you so much. It will go so quickly!’ she cried, waving frenziedly, before her figure slowly disappeared.

  Some nights during those months I spent living in the Simpsons’ spare room, with its anglepoise desk lamp and alarm clock courteously provided, I struggled with sleep. The Simpsons were welcoming and supplied a structure I’d never known before. But I missed my mum’s theatrical laugh and amber scent. I was nostalgic for my father’s amusing insights. Mostly I wanted my sister back by my side, where she belonged.

  There were nights when I would creep down the stairs to the Simpsons’ pine kitchen, open the freezer and stick a spoon into one of the neatly stacked tubs of ice cream, smoothing the surface afterwards to hide my midnight raid. Then I would quietly head for the utility room and lie down in Ralph’s hair-covered bed, stroking his soft fur as he licked my face. He welcomed me each time like an adored long-lost relative. My occasional nocturnal visits were our secret, never to be shared.

  Mum called and wrote letters about her adventures in Australia. ‘It’s NO fun, I can’t smile without you – like that Barry Manilow song!’ Dad’s postcards from the same continent landed on the pristine doormat, saying ‘Rotorua is like a tired old drag queen – lots of glitter and paint but faintly suburban underneath.’ Rach and I talked every day from our respective temporary homes but kept our chats brief and formal, wary of taking up too much space in the homes of our benefactors.

  My mother eventually returned, arriving outside the school gates one day. She wrapped me in hugs, laden down with Koala T-shirts and Australian sweets. ‘I have MISSED you like mad!’ she said, as we bundled my suitcase into the car to collect our two remaining band members, Treacle and Rach.

  Our little house smelt faintly of damp and neglect. The gate had fallen off its hinges, the central heating had broken down and Treacle expressed his joy at being reunited by taking a dump in the living room. But who cared. I was back with Rach.

  ‘Your father’s coming back for a visit!’ my mother announced two years later. It had been nearly five years since we opened the letters telling us he was leaving the country. I wasn’t sure he would recognise the people we had become. Perhaps he’d skipped too many seasons to ever fully catch up.

  The concept of parental boundaries had always been sketchy but since my father left, that fragile wall had crashed down entirely. Now that I was nearly seventeen and Rach was nineteen, the three of us had abandoned any pretence at being a family. We were more a bunch of women taking part in a ‘Three Girls Go Wild!’ reality show. Our relationship with our mother felt volatile, almost adolescent. There were rows about borrowed clothes and stolen cigarettes. Rows with the passionate intensity usually reserved for partners. Nighttime Mum had triumphed over Daytime Mum. Our friendship groups began to blend together: her new collection of gay theatre friends with our teenage pals who came round to smoke dope and drink wine. There was a girls’ holiday where Rach and Mum both got off with Spanish waiters. ‘Hers was GROSS, Em,’ Rach whispered to me.

  So when I heard that my father was returning to London for a brief work trip, I was thrust back into an old world, one th
at belonged to someone else. I was in a resolutely female gang now and the parts for ‘occasional male visitor’ had already been allocated.

  My mother’s on/off boyfriend John was back in our lives and Rach had a new romantic interest, called Zygi. I stuck to the safer, sustained intrigue of ‘will they won’t they’ crushes. I lived through Rach’s relationship, attaching myself to the two of them like a pestering sidekick, adopting Zygi’s circle of affable teenage friends as my own. I clung to my new identity as ‘Rachael’s sister’, in a reversal of our childhood order. It was a relief to sit back and enjoy the ride on her journey.

  The reunion with our father didn’t exactly turn out to be the ‘lion gets reunited with previous owner’ YouTube tearjerker I’d expected.

  Publicly I viewed my father with eye-rolling laughter. It worked with my new persona, of junior Madonna in training. But secretly I had written him long letters, looking up words in the dictionary to impress him. ‘I brush my hair laboriously.’ ‘The weather is hopelessly mercurial!’

  When the meeting finally took place, he wasn’t begging forgiveness as we magnanimously offered our absolution. It was more like a wary catch-up with an old ex. We talked about jet lag and movies and the cat. The ‘Maori Princess’ had been swapped for a new girlfriend, a confident flame-haired woman who arrived clutching his hand. Before long she delved into her bag to retrieve a photo album of her two children.

  I felt hurt rising up as my dad talked about the hilarious things these mysterious quasi-offspring said, their birthday parties, the trips they’d all taken together.

  My mother yelled down the phone at him after the photo album incident. ‘What do you mean MY daughters, they’re OUR daughters!’ She banged the receiver down and the three of us sat together like flatmates shit-talking a badly behaved boyfriend, slagging off his new world.

  A few days later she suggested Rach and I attempt to salvage things without FHW (as we rechristened the flame-haired woman) before he headed back to New Zealand.