by Kate Spicer
The only good things about north London were all the friends who lived there, and of course Will, Steph and the kids. Otherwise, the air feels thin up there. You can have your great views from Parliament Hill, it’s not for me. Too high, too highbrow. All those books and chin-stroking clever people, psychoanalysts, newspaper editors, and not nearly enough idiots being shallow tripping around in high heels or bragging about their trainers. I don’t trust north London, it’s weird.
Partly you have to choose your hood for practical reasons because London’s so big it needs to be carved up into manageable chunks. Then you grow into your natural habitat.
I’m in north London tonight at a dinner for 40 people. It’s Steph’s birthday, and a noisy room above a well-known gastropub is choc-a-block with her Oxbridge chums and sundry people whose names are predicated with the unspeakably tiresome words ‘multi-award-winning’. They are the sort of people who roll their eyeballs and groan, ‘Sorry I’m late, darling. Had to go to another of those bloody drinks parties Number 10 are so keen on.’ In fact, this is exactly what a senior staffer at the paper called Rachel says to Steph while planting dramatic double mwahs on her cheeks. This woman, Rachel, has recently dropped me from a regular column on the paper. I’m so used to this merry-go-round I don’t even hold it against her. Of course I’m not good enough. Goes without saying.
‘Haw haw.’ Rachel, stands back and spots me. ‘It’s the dog correspondent.’ This one is clever, with clever parents, clever grandparents, clever kids, and clever clogs. Well connected, well educated and (need I bother to add) of course Oxbridge: a whale of a Melanie. The best thing about her is that she makes the other Melanie, the one I hate, look a bit thick. As I often do when confronted by women like this, I laugh nastily at myself, ha ha ha, yes, aren’t I stupid, gone into retirement, going to start writing for People’s Friend. Oh, it’s closed. Well, I shall open a pet-grooming parlour, yes it’s all over for me. Yes, I’m reporting live from dog poo park.
‘So! Rachel! How are you?’ I ask with all the whooping sincerity I can muster while pecking the air five inches away from either side of her incredibly confident cheeks.
‘Very good,’ she says in that urgently breezy cheerful way of people who do terribly well at everything.
She has recently been promoted and not to be friendly and interested would be a mistake. I need to appear confident and cleverish. I force an attitude of cool relaxation, although women like this make me feel like my socks are wired up to the National Grid. Women like this, more or less, run the bits of the media I regularly find myself working in.
‘So good to see darling Steph.’
‘Yes, so good.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, must do the rounds and see the gang, got to be off soonish,’ she says. ‘Babysitter!’ How could I forget, you’ve got five children as well as an amazing career and awards in your downstairs lav. ‘Are you going to Melanie Oxbridge’s book launch on Monday?’
‘No, sadly not. I’ve got a deadline tomorrow – reviewing some dog food,’ ha ha ha ha ha ha. ‘I must get hold of Melanie’s book though, I bet it’s a cracking read.’
The birthday girl, Stephanie, my dear darling brilliant sexy sunny uber-capable sister-in-law, is another high-flying journalist and while I love her, I don’t always like her. She’s got a killer streak that a woman needs to succeed. I admire this in her. I envy it in her. But sometimes I wish she’d park it so that we can all be off duty, like when we’re side by side sharing potato-peeling duties on Christmas Day or over a wheel of Stilton and port on New Year’s Eve. She is sitting at the end of the table surrounded by a cabal of confident horrors she went to Oxford with. I make a joke of the awkward interaction with Rachel. ‘Darling’ – it’s a ‘darling’ that actually translates as, ‘I have little patience with this self-pitying crap’ – ‘Instead of constantly googling stuff about the dog why don’t you look up Freud’s narcissism of small differences. You may take some comfort in it. Have you considered that just maybe she was pleased to see you?’
Gaaargh! Hadn’t thought of that. More wine, more wine. Is that my glass? Ah well, never mind. Glug. Ha ha. Isn’t life wonderful. Aren’t people so terrifying. Isn’t it all such fun. Ha. Hello. Love that dress. How are you?
I spot a normal person, well not a normal person, a famous critic, but someone who might not make me feel inadequate just by, you know, breathing.
I flop down in the chair next to her with much melodramatic puffing and huffing. ‘Looks like I’ve got myself a reputation.’ I flail around trying to make her laugh, but she takes it all embarrassingly seriously.
‘What for, Katie Coo? Have you been sleeping with horrid little men again?’
‘No, no, no, still with Charlie. Dogs,’ I say. ‘I’ve just become so crazy about my dog everyone just thinks of me and thinks of dogs now.’
‘Oh, how sad,’ she says. ‘That’s not good at all. Why is everyone so obsessed by animals at the moment? There’s always some cafe with owls or cats or dachshunds opening. It’s infantile.’
‘Because they have nowhere left to turn. Modern life, maybe just life, is too unforgiving. Dogs are loving and kind and funny, they restore your faith in love.’
‘Why don’t people have sex, or read books, or go out for dinner’ – she sounds aghast – ‘or have better friends?’
If Charlie and I managed to synchronise our schedules sufficiently to be in bed with minutes to spare and awake at the same time, then we did, occasionally, have sex. The dog barely raised a furry eyebrow. If it disturbed his rest, he’d jump down into number two bed, the Woof Bed, but most of the time he was asleep on the bed when we were at it. Like medieval people, we lived with our animals. That was us. The dog didn’t care. And we certainly didn’t.
‘Animals make people happy.’
‘What is this obsession with happiness. Where did it come from? We didn’t grow up expecting to be happy. We didn’t look to other people for solutions to all our problems. All one can expect from other people is common decency.’
‘Dogs connect us to nature, something we have all lost, especially here in London.’ She is older than me, twenty years or so. ‘It’s odd having to defend love so often. Why shouldn’t I love my dog? You have three children, grandchildren … Perhaps all it comes down to is humans need somewhere to channel the unconditional love usually reserved for children?’
I say this but I am thinking about Cecil’s owner Sasha and the conversation in Kensington Gardens when we were watching the Life Guards’ bottoms bouncing up and down in their saddles, when she’d said about her beloved ‘Cessy’, ‘I think I love him more than the children.’
‘I’ve heard that pugs were bred to satisfy the broody concubines in the imperial Chinese harems – you know, those big gooey eyes and cute faces were easy to pet and love. T.H. White described his dog as a “reservoir for my love” back in the fifties when children weren’t fetishised, or even seen, let alone heard, so this adoring of pets isn’t just about us snowflakes today.’
She looks at me with a cynical cast. ‘I understand they are loyal and trusting but …’ She stops and looks frustrated. ‘But they’re animals, Kate. It’s so wet,’ she says, ‘just dogs everywhere.’ Her voice is warm and familiar but I know her well enough to feel the texture of disdain.
I kind of agree with her, but equally it’s as though I am in a boat that is drifting away from her clever and cerebral human shore across a quiet lake to another place where people walk with dogs at their side, and the only sounds are twigs cracking underfoot, and the sniff and rustle of leaves being explored by curious wet noses. I like this place. I don’t care if it’s irrational.
The truth is that she is not a dog person and she isn’t ever going to get it. It reminds me of the time I was in Tehran interviewing an architecture apparatchik at the Iranian Ministry of Roads and Urban Development. Foolishly I allowed the conversation to stray into religious debate and within minutes, no seconds, our fundamental a
nd profound differences were apparent. Anything that had connected us in conversation was completely gone. It was black or white. And so it is with doggy people. You have the believers and the unbelievers.
I quietly pay my share of the bill and take a minicab back to west London. I was on the way to being sloshed anyway. As it is, the wine hand has just landed on cocaine o’ clock.
As the cab hits the A40 at the bottom of Regent’s Park I pull up Tim’s number on my phone. I sit staring at it all the way down Marylebone Road. I want to get blitzed, really a lot. I want to switch off the boring persistence of sketchy old me and switch on some intensely nice feelings and not a lot of thinking. Nothing, really, has gone wrong tonight. I am just at that perfect pitch of indignant, insecure, bored and slightly pissed which often leads me to Timbo’s front door.
The cab cruises over the Westway up above Edgware Road, blazing with midnight life and smoky with sweet-scented hookahs. I put my phone away. I don’t want to get high. I think of Wolfy’s golden haunches swaying and shining in the moonlight as I lead him down the alley for his bedtime wee. I think about the morning walk. It makes pushing on for the rest of the journey home that little bit more urgent and several hours (OK, ten minutes) later I’m back home in the arms of west London.
His claws descend the steep wooden lethal-to-dogs stairs with the musical, delicate skittling as I’m ascending the noisy metal ones with my oafish human steps. We meet in the middle, at the door. His tail wags wildly side to side and he breathes hotly on me from a huge wide-jawed smile. He makes little involuntary squeaks and I know how he is feeling because it is thrilling to see him too.
‘Hey Woof.’ I lavish scruffles and strokes around his ears until he’s distracted by an urgent need to scratch an itch on the left side of his ribcage.
I pour a glass of wine. I take the box of cigarettes out of the medicine drawer directly under the kettle, where I keep all drugs, prescribed or otherwise.
We set off for the leisure centre, for a little late-night party for me plus one. The air sits around me with a reassuring familiarity helped by the sweet decay of early autumn. On a concrete bench, I set up camp and lie with my head and feet resting on the arms either end. I puff my cigarette and stare up at the tower, crooking my neck down hard to get prone sips of the wine, a slightly stale red Rully – brambly, dry, a bit of something smoky like hot compost in there. Lying under the tower, I wonder why people are still up at after midnight. Telly? Booze? A new baby? Is it Ramadan? I have no idea. Cocaine? Computer games? A deadline? Or just profligate with the electricity and didn’t switch the lights off before bed? A good book, perhaps?
The cigarette makes my head spin. The blood rushes in my ears like the breaking surf. I close my eyes and smile. This is as high as I’m gonna get.
‘You having a party, Wolfy’s mum?’ It’s the fat beagle Lewis Hamilton II’s owner, out too for their evening pee-poo-potter. Wolfy and Lewis do some chilled-out neighbourly bum-sniffing.
‘I’m just celebrating being home,’ I say. ‘I had to go to a party in north London tonight.’ I give a mock shudder.
He breathes in sharply as if taking an evening constitutional along the pier at Great Yarmouth. ‘Nothing beats the Ladbroke Grove air.’
I’m wondering out loud as politely as I can, given the drink and the subject matter, how Lewis got so tubby when a Muslim family walk past, dad, mum, two kids clustered round a pushchair with a cool-box in it. So late, why are they still up, I tut like an old biddy to Lewis’s owner, who says, brightly, ‘Eid, innit?’ and goes bounding over and claps the guy on his arm: ‘Mate!’ And raises his arm in greeting to his heavily veiled wife: ‘Rania!’ The wife says back loudly in a broad west London accent full of laughter, ‘Orroight, Nick mate. How you doing?’
‘I’m alright darlin’,’ he says, with ebullience. ‘Oy, Lewis get away from her. My dog can’t touch you can he, with you all in black.’
Aah, I think to myself, observing the culturally sensitive comment, my invisible cloak of Guardian-reading sensitivity rippling in smug approval.
‘You’re all right Nick. I’m fine with the dog. Hiya Lewis.’
‘Darlin’, we don’t want you getting all covered in his white dog hairs, they’re a nightmare to get out of black.’
They have an in-joke.
Another round of mates and darlin’s and little waves from the small girls and they head off down the path towards the Lancaster West Estate. My invisible cloak of Guardian-reading wokeness crumbles to dust on the paving stones.
I wasn’t expecting that. I feel a bit stupid.
There is a magic moment between physical waking and full consciousness when the day could bring anything. In this moment I used to enjoy a precious instant thinking I was not hungover before the remembrance of drinks past kicked in along with the accompanying full-body headache. In this moment sometimes I don’t know who I am, where I am, why I am. It is fleeting freedom before reality kicks in.
Lately, the situation is reversed. I wake and assume a hangover is imminent and cringe, only to wake fully clean and serene. I have energy. I am alive. And there is Wolfy, my saviour, all 22 kilos of him now – he’s put on a couple of pounds – hogging the bottom of the bed like a large furry friendly crocodile.
This morning I am woken up by Charlie singing a song: ‘It’s just a Wolfy furry bottom snake flying about, flying about, flying about. It’s just a Wolfy furry bottom snake, so don’t be afraid [hits high note, badly], it doesn’t want to bite you, it just wants to play …’
He is standing at the foot of the bed and the singing is making Wolfy’s tail rear up in happiness, while the rest of his body stays slumberous and still. Charlie waves his hands from side to side. ‘Come on Katie, sing along!’ He continues the song, with lyrics and melody declining to a point of tuneless nonsense.
I sit up smiling and feel the laughter dancing in my chest. I add my descant to Charlie’s appalling melody. ‘If you’re down and feeling blue, the Wolfy furry bottom snake will whistle a smelly tune for you-hoo.’ I rush out the words in an attempt to make them scan.
However shit Wolfy! The Musical might be, it is a tonic for our relationship.
And do you have any shared hobbies, Charlie and Kate?
Well dear, we enjoy our sulking, don’t we?
Yes dear, that, and singing songs about our dog Wolfy.
Charlie thinks Wolfy speaks like Ray Winstone in Sexy Beast and he gives voice to the dog’s thoughts: ‘I’m not playing this game you twat, it’s my tail, you loser, it’s not a fucking “hairy bum snake” or whatever you call it, poof. It sounds like a disturbing sex game. Go on, fuck off. Go and get me some biscuits. Go away. Leave me with her. She’s better than you.’
Our dog just lies there, the bottom snake coiled under his furry bottom. Charlie says in a melodramatic, fey, kids’-TV-presenter voice, ‘Oh no, look, children, the Wolfy furry bottom snake has died.’
Then in a normal voice, ‘Hello Woofs. You ready for a walk?’
The tail rises up off the duvet eight inches and lands back down again with a whumpf of approval. ‘The furry bottom snake, it lives. It lives.’ I’m laughing out loud now. Charlie goes skipping round the bedroom. ‘All hail the furry bottom snake.’
So starts Sunday morning; no hangover and a song in my heart, albeit a rubbish one.
A natural drift towards doggy folk had happened almost immediately I got the dog, but by the autumn it was entrenched behaviour.
I’d started looking after Castor when Keith went away on business; instead of spending his week boarding at doggy daycare, he came to live with Charlie, Wolfy and me. Once the international fashion weeks started in mid-September, silky whippety Castor the lurcher became our long-term house guest.
When Castor wanted some emotional or comforting response from a human he also talked, like Wolfy, except Castor mostly just hooted like a timid and polite owl. He slept downstairs on the armchair, but come morning he’d clatter up the death-to-lurchers st
aircase and stand waiting for some love with his long thin nose resting on the mattress beside mine, hooting softly and staring at me with one blue eye while the other roamed to the left.
In the past I’d often be away working in Paris, Milan or New York myself but life had changed; now I cared for the dog fashion week was left behind. It was interesting testing my two-dog mettle, and Keith paid me in bottles of Pauillac, the greatest of Bordeaux, which helped. Wine aside, I felt a strong and worrying sense of my old life slipping away, of my relevance waning, and sometimes when Keith came to collect his dog if he was home for a few short days, I felt self-conscious about my dog-walking clothes and frizzy, wind-ravaged hair.
At first the habit of wearing flat worker boots was confined to walking the dog, then I started wearing them all the time. I was working them into my look for meetings, or consultancy sessions. Sometimes I went out in them. Eventually I just wore them all the time. I’d open the wardrobe and look at the rows of shoes, the thick-soled white ones bought straight off the catwalk, the flash trainers, retro sneakers, the flat Greek sandals, the cowboy boots, the Argentinean polo boots, the countless black ankle boots of every height, the over-the-knee Gareth Pugh ones that never did fit, the loafers, brogues, platforms, the three pairs of Terry de Havilland wedges, the platform wedges, the strappy sandal, the ‘shoe boot’ – and not to forget the clutter of daft hurting stiletto heels. All were covered in dust. Every day I looked at them for a moment – shall I? Nah – and turned back to the stout brown leather Blundstone farmhand’s boots. ‘They look all right, don’t they?’ I’d shrug to Charlie on my way out the door.
‘Yeah, fine,’ he shrugged back.
That’d do.
To paraphrase Quentin Crisp, ‘Style is knowing who you are and being it like mad,’ Well, those boots pretty much confirmed who I thought I was. (And I was certainly being it like mad.)