Lost Dog

by Kate Spicer

  ‘Did you say “the dog”? The dog? You eat with your bloody dog?!’ He hooted with malicious laughter.

  It was meant to be provocative. But it didn’t touch the sides. ‘Yeah, sometimes,’ I said, with an amused ‘secret smile’.

  ‘Well, I’d better meet this fascinating canid then.’

  The call ended.

  I crouched down on my haunches so the dog and I were eye to eye. ‘Thanks mate,’ I said. He too sat back on his furry hips and I shuffled forward like a crippled frog so I could put my hands gently either side of his skull and look into his eyes.

  What was he thinking as he looked back? ‘Does she have any biscuits?’ Or, ‘She smells of toast.’ Or, ‘What does she want. Christ she’s needy.’ Or, is he in love, just like I am?

  Back at home, peternity leave might have been over but the honeymoon continued. Life with Wolfy never palled. Charlie and I were experiencing a honeymoon period, buoyed on the tide of feel-good hormones the dog had brought to the flat along with the dirt he also brought in from lying by us in pubs and cafes on far-too-tiny Woof Beds. Where once we talked about work we now talked about everything in Wolfyworld.

  In March I took him to dinner at Castor’s house. If it hadn’t been for Castor, and that conversation with Keith, his owner, in Coffee Plant that momentous hungover day I decided to get a dog, I might never have met Wolfy. My life might have remained the hollow canine-free place it was before.

  Keith and I had never really been friends, more professional acquaintances, but once Wolfy became my ward, Keith and I became closer. We both loved our dogs, and discussed them like a couple of fixated new mums.

  ‘He’s been coming home from daycare a bit of a bully, I think he gets into a pack mentality there.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I can see how that happens. Next time he’s overnighting there shall I take him instead for a bit of mellow Wolfy time?’

  ‘Would you, that’d be great. He’s a great influence on Castor, he seems to calm him down.’

  ‘It’s nothing, Wolfy needs Castor too, all that nipping at his arse gets him in shape. Honestly, he’s so lazy, Keith, he’s like a fourteen-year-old boy, not a lurcher.’

  ‘What are you feeding him?’

  ‘I’m doing the barf diet, you know, meat, bone, organs.’

  ‘My vet’s very anti, I’ve put Castor on the kibble but it’s very expensive stuff.’

  ‘Anyway, enough dog chat. What do you think about the new collection at Dior?’

  ‘Well, I shouldn’t be telling you this, but strictly entre nous …’

  Dogs were like the golf course, for me. They had gained me access. Interviewing showbiz sorts was a breeze now; the stars all have packs of rescue dogs, which they dote on and call ‘my puppies’ even when they are incontinent and 150 in human years. Dogs were a way in. Most people with a dog, whether they admit it or not, don’t really trust non-doggy people.

  Keith invited me for dinner and told me, ‘Bring your boys,’ Charlie and the dog. ‘Let’s have another one of those dog parties. I’ve invited Stacey and her terrier, Bo. Do you know her?’

  Urgh. Her. I’d never liked that Stacey much. She was a viperous fashion person. My first encounter with her outside work functions had been at a party not long after New Year’s Eve sometime in the mid early noughties. I had been wearing Uggs on my feet. I know this is nothing to be proud of, but it was well over ten years ago, when people did things like that. She’d looked at me and placed a solitary thoughtful finger on her cheek – ‘Uggs. Interesting’ – before mumbling to a friend, ‘I thought she wrote for Style magazine, clue’s in the name darling.’

  Then she’d twirled around, showing me her skirt. ‘Balenciaga. Like it?’

  ‘Lovely,’ I’d coldly smiled back, and, as I’d walked away, muttering sidewards, adding, ’You’d never know. I’d have said Primark.’ Nothing particularly unusual there. My first encounter with one of the world’s most famous stylists, 20 years ago, had been like that too and I have never been able to forget it. She clocked my outfit (what both she and I were wearing is fixed in my memory like physical assault). She managed to reproduce the effect of projectile vomiting in disgust, on both me and my clothes, merely by looking at me a little bit longer than necessary. People tell me she is a nice person. Even though I’ve heard she has a dog now, I struggle to believe it.

  The sensible part of me had always known very well that all these women I marked on the ruler of success were not monsters. But these women, for some reason, seemed set up to be somehow special, different, ‘better’, in my mind.

  The dog helped me on this front. Turning up at Keith’s that night with Wolfy at my side changed everything. Stacey monster was there, and as the four canines sniffed butt, us six humans talked about dogs over a negroni. What a leveller. Not surprisingly given the host worked in fashion, there wasn’t a huge amount of food and we were soon drunk. We lit a fire, the dogs settled onto the sofa, a sure sign that a dog party was under way, and we humans sat on the floor, chatting. I say the dogs settled on the sofa; Wolfy and Castor did. Fiona and Stacey both had terriers, so they ran round the walls barking.

  The only person without a dog sat quietly back at Keith’s dining table, watching, confused and a little or a lot bored, probably. I clocked this and thought about all those times I’d been the only woman without kids, listening mute and slightly irritated to parents – understandably sometimes, tiresomely at others – yap on about their kids. I knew how she felt not to be part of a gang and yet I didn’t care. This sense of belonging and immediate camaraderie with three relative strangers was fun.

  When we ran out of cigarettes, I suggested we might take the dogs out for a wee and do a little run to the corner shop. Stacey and I went together with two dogs each, two terriers pulling her arm off, two lurchers rolling along like supermodels at my side. They all took their turns to pee and crap. We should’ve taken them out much earlier.

  Charged up with Marlboro Lights and a sneaky bag of Skips, Stacey and I sat on a wall and had a drunken chat. ‘I’m so mad about my dog,’ I said. ‘Look, he’s made us friends. Before, I thought you were a fucking monster.’

  ‘Me?’ she said. ‘You’re so vile, Spicer!’

  Her BoBo, she said, was her best friend and had saved her from utter suicidal despair and loneliness when she broke up with a fiancé a few years back. Wolfy, I said, had delivered me from Timness. We gave each other a hug and I told her that the Preen dress she was wearing was ‘beyond, beyond’. We went back to Keith’s, where we had a disco while the lurchers placidly watched and the terriers crawled up the walls.

  At the end of the night I asked Charlie if he’d enjoyed himself. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Dog people are good people, aren’t they.’ I thought about Stacey and smiled. ‘Yes. They are.’

  The dog brought Charlie’s and my schedules into a closer alignment. I had a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Sometimes we were so early to Coffee Plant we had to sit patiently waiting til it opened at seven.

  It was on a morning like this I’d gone round to Rococo, the newsagent on Elgin Crescent with the enormous selection of rare magazines. I was hovering round the front pages deciding which paper would be the least depressing to read. ‘Jihadis burn 19 Yazidi girls to death.’ Or ‘Ex on the Beach star strips off to reveal tattooed bod …’

  An Irish guy stood by the fridge opposite the till and spoke while nodding in the direction of my dog. ‘Norfolk Lurcher that,’ he said, matter-of-fact, quiet. ‘Good for getting rabbits to a net.’ He talked about how many deer there were to be caught ‘out at Slough’ and how the country was so overrun with deer, ‘they’d be on the Scrubs soon’.

  Did he have lurchers, I asked.

  ‘Longdogs,’ he says, which is a mix of two different types of sighthound. ‘Got two saluki greys. Go all day they don’t get tired.’

  I tried to match the disengaged way he was speaking at the dog and not to me and not sound all excited and in-your-face, which is how I
felt. What’s he made of, I wondered?

  ‘Greyhound, Bedlington, deerhound …’ He paused. ‘Lookin’ at the ears now, there’s probably a bit a collie in there too. For the brains.’

  The conversation ended without any kind of goodbye. He picked up his Mayfairs and was gone.

  I had a deadline that day, a piece about a therapist couple who had written a book about ‘mindful sex’ and how having said ‘mindful sex’ would save the world. It seems absurd and I was struggling to give a shit about it given the ‘Jihadis burn 19 Yazidi girls to death’ headline, which was making me feel grossly inadequate as a journalist and as a species. The fact that my work required turning out mildly entertaining guff week after week depressed me more than the certain knowledge that I lived on a savage and arbitrarily cruel planet.

  To cheer myself up I sat in the car and ate a croissant from the expensive Grocer on Elgin, or, I Saw You Coming Deli as Charlie and I called it. Flaky golden exterior for me, the white gooey, doughy centre for Wolfy. He sat next to me while I ate my bit, drooling onto the crud and dust gathered round my gearstick, with his eyes focused on what he knew he was due. Eating my part took ten minutes, he dispatched his in two seconds.

  At home at my desk, the suggestion that my labralukipoo is actually an ancient and authentic proper proper lurcher, as identified by what I strongly suspected to be an actual gypsy (or should I say Traveller?) seemed far more important to me than saving the world through mindful sex.

  I Googled Norfolk lurchers for two hours.

  There were very few references but I found some deep in the forums of sites like Hunting Life where the avatars had names like ‘Swirlymurphy’, ‘Mr Poach’ and ‘rabbit tourmentor’ (sic).

  ‘Norfolks is those big, fawn, rough-coated dogs, mate.’ ‘Yeah mate, original lurcher was always long coated as that disguised the athletick body that was capable of use when poaching.’ ‘They was the real poachers dogs combining the speed of a sighthound with the intelligence of a working dog.’

  All the images for Norfolk lurcher were blond, shaggy and thicker-set than your average scrawny hound, a bit less regal and speedy. They looked a lot like my Wolfy. One of my dog-walking companions, a sylphlike older beauty called Sarah, was constantly accusing me of overfeeding. Her lurcher, Lettice, was tall, skeletal and – I agreed – the perfect size but Wolfy was naturally thicker-set, I’d say, like a mother excusing her tubby child with the words ‘big-boned’. A lot of these gorgeous west Londoners, reformed party girls who all knew each other from NA and AA, were concerned by their dogs’ size. Anna, Wally’s owner, called them ‘the ladies who lurch’.

  I’d look forward to sharing this information with the lurcher set on the Scrubs. My Wolfy isn’t overfed, he doesn’t have any labradoodle in him either. He’s a Norfolk Lurcher. My chest puffed with pride just thinking about him.

  ‘Any sign of that sex copy?’ came the email from the editor.

  ‘Just doing a final edit,’ I shot back.

  By the time I’d finished my lurcher-digging it was lunchtime. As I ate, I put all my research in an excited email to Charlie. Now how to kill the rest of the afternoon without doing any work? ‘Walkies!’

  I considered cancelling Tim for dinner in favour of writing the piece that night. But I didn’t want to be rude – and, more importantly, I didn’t want to write the piece yet.

  He is in nostalgic mode when we meet. ‘I’ve missed you Katiepoo.’ Before the huge bread basket has even appeared he wants to remind me of all the good times we’ve had: ‘Remember that time you turned up wearing those patent boots with a broken heel and a red PVC mackintosh.’ He’s acting out a state of blissed reverie and the happiest of times remembered. ‘By the time I came to the door you were on your hands and knees because you’d taken your bedtime Rohypnol before you realised you were locked out.’

  Ha ha ha. It’s an awful memory, I mean truly appalling, and not funny at all. He loves to tell it, proudly. Ha ha ha. I laugh along, mentally writing a list of friends I need to drop, with Tim at the top.

  My good humour increases, though, as the wine in the bottle reduces.

  ‘Let’s go to the Groucho,’ he says.

  Oh Christ no, not the Groucho. He might as well have rolled up a fifty-pound note and said toot toot through it.

  He rolls up a fifty-pound note and says toot toot through it.

  ‘I need to go home. I’ve got a deadline. Already two days late …’

  He pays the bill, I feebly protest that we should go halves, then say thank you three times and we’re in a cab heading off for the lie that is ‘a quick nightcap’. Wolfy settles his jaw on the floor and looks up at me. ‘He’s very good, isn’t he,’ says Tim. ‘I could almost be persuaded to like dogs if they were all more like this one.’

  I look at Woofs. It makes me really sad to see toot toot Timbo and Wolfy in the same taxi. ‘But you’re not bringing him with us are you?’ Tim goes on.

  ‘Yes, I am. The dog comes with or I go home. Bernie’s promised me he can sneak him in.’

  Bernie is the Groucho’s host, and had assured me I could bring my new dog if I wanted to. I have studiously avoided the place lately, given its associations for me, but now my resistance levels are one bottle of Sangiovese down.

  At reception the pretty girl says, ‘No dogs, sorry.’

  ‘Can you fetch Bernie?’ I say, confident, with a wobbly-headed touch of the ‘I’m specials’ about me.

  Bernie will sort it. I nod in the direction of the bar. ‘You go in, find us a quiet corner, I’ll come and find you.’

  Bernie sweeps down the back stairs from the bar and crashes open the double doors. Long leopard-print jacket and a tiger-stripe T-shirt. Quietly dressed, as usual. ‘Arright daaarlin.’ He comes in for a kiss but stops short and yowls, ‘What the fuck is that. You’re not bringin’ that in here, it’s massive. I thought you meant a little one. That’s more like a horse. No babe! No. No dogs. Come back when you’ve done something with him.’

  Tim is already stalking the room looking for friends. I don’t bother going in after him. He’ll find someone, he’s a big boy. I’ll send a text. Turning away, I briefly feel a bit of a berk but the dog bounces along lively as hell beside me as if to say, ‘Well that’s a lucky escape, I wasn’t looking forward to navigating all the feet attached to greedy nostrils.’

  By the time I reach the end of Dean Street I’m delighted to be going home from Soho at midnight instead of God-knows-what o’clock. I’m euphoric, in fact. I swagger down Oxford Street on nothing more than a bottle of red. I might even escape a hangover.

  We reach the end of the West End’s colon in that toilet bowl of an underpass: at Marble Arch. We come up for air at Speakers’ Corner to take a bracing and illegal walk through the cold black grass of Hyde Park. Wolfy, let off the lead, shoots off excitedly into the deeper dark with a couple of 360-degree turns of joy. His way of saying, ‘I’m happy as hell! Thanks mate.’

  No, mate. Thank you.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Any memories Wolfy might have had of his past seemed to fade and his secure place in our home sank slowly deeper into his canine comprehension. The light came back to his eyes. The hunch in his back straightened out. He got his doggy mojo back.

  Charlie rang me as I was heading home after a work trip.

  ‘Erm, I’ve got a bit of bad news.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It would appear that Wolfy has eaten your fur coat.’

  I love to eat pork scratchings, as does the dog. We all love a hairy snack, don’t we? It was only made of rabbit pelts, a little bomber jacket; it must have smelt tasty. He was a carnivore magician – he could make a whole rabbit disappear in ten minutes, leaving barely a trace but a bit of fur or a tooth in his shit a day later – so why not a fur coat? When I got home I scooped up the mauled uneaten remains and threw them into the growing nest of tattered and cosy fabrics under the desk.

  Wolfy was a special dog but I laboured under no illusion that h
e was ‘my fur baby’ or me his ‘mummy’. His constant quiet presence made him companionable beyond anything I could have imagined and I often called him ‘mate’, but I knew he was a dog and he did doggy things and had doggy urges. Chief among them the scavenger’s urgent need for food.

  If he was left at home for anything beyond five minutes, he’d do a lap of the flat looking for food to steal. In the early months we’d come back to find packages of food spilled, decimated or plain gone. A plastic tub containing smoked pig fat, lardo, was chewed into, the contents vanished into his stomach. Butter, cheese and bread were all popular snacks. An entire box of crispbread was torn into, half eaten and the rest trodden deep into the fabric of our furniture and rugs. Sometimes he’d steal things and shred them apart just for larks, like, say, a bag of chickpea flour. The law of Sod dictated that his preferred spot to deal with stolen food was the Turkish tulu rug by the fire, the plushest, tuftiest, shaggiest, most expensive and hardest to clean spot in the whole 700 square feet we three animals crammed into and called home.

  Sometimes we might not notice what was gone for days, until, puzzling over some missing cheese, I’d shout through to Charlie in the sitting room, ‘Can you check the rug for any signs of Cheddar.’

  Under forensic examination, sure enough: ‘Yup, traces of yellow cheese-like substance on the fireside edges.’

  We learned to put food away.

  Even when we were home, though, he still chanced it.

  The way our flat is laid out is weird. It’s part of the urban living compromise – like having no front door, or the bathroom being next to the kitchen as far as possible from the bed. It’s a tiny labyrinth, a multi-storey burrow, and sometimes it feels like it’s 90 per cent stairs. You go up 13 ringing steps to get to our back door and once inside, from the kitchen you can go down a step to the bathroom on the left or walk up three steps to the sitting room. There are more stairs there, another 13 that go up to our loft bedroom. All the stairs are steep and narrow – a death trap for skinny-legged dogs. Remember?