Lost Dog

by Kate Spicer

  This dependency created some logistical problems. If we couldn’t take him with us when we went away, where did we leave him?

  The invitation is attached by a magnet to the fridge. It has loomed, silver and white, over the entire year, this wedding. We’ve talked about it regularly. Our social diaries operate largely independently and, if it was the wedding of a colleague of mine he had never met before, Charlie would not come; but I am going to this one. It’s a big deal, for him, involving some senior staff from his company. He takes it seriously while I think it’s like the set-up for an episode of a seventies sitcom. I enjoy moaning about these much-anticipated nuptials and winding him up about all the wrong things I am going to say and do. He said, ‘You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.’ I said, ‘No, I’ll definitely come, I’m just enjoying this excuse for a grumble.’

  The wedding’s not for another two months but we’re already having regular fretful debates. ‘What are we going to do with Woofy? I think we should take him to my mother’s,’ he says.

  ‘For one night? Don’t be crazy. You’ll drive two hours up there and back in a day and be tired and grumpy. And who’ll have to suck that up? Me. No, that’s sledgehammer and nut business. Why don’t we put him in doggy daycare overnight?’

  ‘No, that’s cruel.’

  ‘There’s this guy round here who moves in to your place to dog-sit, everyone raves about him.’

  ‘I’m not having a stranger in my house.’

  ‘I know, Tarik!’

  ‘Are you kidding? No!’

  ‘Why can’t my brother have him? He’s good with dogs, he always says he was raised by Labradors.’

  ‘Yes, you’ve told me that before, a lot.’

  ‘It’s so sweet.’ I go off into reveries about preschool Will, cut off from his two other siblings, tumbling around an empty house with our mum’s Lab, Chloe, and riding his Raleigh Budgie around followed by her litters of yipping and nipping black silky pups.

  ‘Kate! Are you listening?’ He repeats his concerns as if to a halfwit and points to the calendar on the fridge ‘Aren’t you looking after Castor then? Look. Isn’t it a bit much to foist two dogs on them, they’ve got three small kids. Have you thought about this at all practically?’

  ‘The kids spend a lot of time with both Castor and Wolfy when they’re here. They’re all great friends.’

  ‘The dog doesn’t need a friend, he just needs to be safe. I’m not happy about it.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, it’s one day. I look after the kids all the time. We don’t even know if we’re going to stay the night after this performance. It’ll be fine. And I want him to go there. I want him to be with the family, all the familiar smells and stuff, he’ll be happy there.’

  He snorts his disagreement and turns to aggressively rearrange the shelf in the grill.

  ‘It’ll be fine.’ I say this again in an infantilising soothing way that I know will wind him up.

  The problem with living in a small space is that moods simmer, merge, mutate and inevitably grow. Over the course of this discussion an atmosphere has built and I want to escape it. Three options: I shut myself in the shit pit/Wolfy’s Office and put headphones on, we stay in our common parts and cultivate the atmosphere with sharp comments and asides, or one of us gets the hell out for a while. For once, I make a wise decision.

  Walking down from the top of Portobello on a sunny day on the cusp of summer and autumn is a disorientating pleasure. It’s London but inflected with so much else. The dog and I weave slowly through the crowds, between the competing beats coming from houses and stalls, everything merging into one uniquely west London vibe, soul, dub, reggae, ska, the drone of the Westway A40 flyover, even the distant whistle of a goods train going up the Harlesden line by Latimer Road, the smell of doughnuts, old fruit and diesel, snatched gusts of weed or stale beer. The street sweats with a sensory funk of living. Everything is slowed down by sun; and the pulse of the place has a steady easy flow.

  Not sure where we are going. Do we need a destination? The dog stops to gobble bread and sausages left discarded on the street. I go to Lucinda’s vintage stall under the Westway by Portobello Green and buy an eighties Ungaro dress with a strong print, deep pockets and a pie-crust neck. It’ll do for that wedding. Wolfy mooches round the stall while I try the dress on over my jeans. Lucinda’s tiny black jackapoo, Bean, strains on its hind legs to get up and have a decent sniff of Wolf’s bum.

  Wolfy collapses down on his side for a nap while Lucinda and I gossip about the fashion label people who have been lurking round the stall, buying old clothes to copy, I mean be ‘inspired by’.

  There’s a soothing subtle hum to Portobello life. I love it. Living here is a privilege. I’m lucky.

  When Charlie and I bought our flat on Grenfell Road, the one without a front door, my friend Elaine lost her temper with me. ‘No! You don’t belong there. You need to move here. West London isn’t interesting any more. Too much money. Come north.’

  This is weird because Elaine’s good at making money, and she only likes nice things. I’m surprised by this. ‘What made you interesting back in the day was how you looked, how you behaved, how you dressed, what you did creatively, whether you were funny, or clever, or knew how to throw a great party or even just if you had drugs to give away. Now money seems to trump all these things, and what is money? Money is nothing, it’s inert, it’s not cool, it’s not interesting, it doesn’t have any good one-liners. This obsession with money is why everything’s shit now.’

  She’s right about that but she’s wrong about west London.

  Next to and above Portobello Green, the metal bridge carries the Hammersmith and City Line over Portobello Road. Alongside it the Westway steadily rushes on and on. There’s a manicurists called Coco under here. I know the owner, a woman called Fatima who I’ve known since she was a teenager. There’s another way to kill time. Wolfy lies on the floor and I get into one of those lumpy electric massage chairs that pummel your back like an annoying child a row behind on an aeroplane. I put on a headset for a sneaky watch of the whiny plastic child-people of the Kardashian family.

  Fati tells me her aunt is coming in and she can read coffee grounds. I always start hankering after the solutions and dubious gifts of psychics and self-appointed mystics when things are a sketchy at home.

  Aunty arrives. She’s got a serious-looking blow-dry and a perfectly applied coral red lip. She sets up beside me in a back-thumping chair. I drink a Turkish coffee, with its silted grounds thick at the bottom of the tiny cup, and as soon as it’s finished she turns it sharp over into a saucer and then picks it up to examine the residue left on the side.

  She asks me to ask a question.

  ‘I’d like to know about my dog.’

  ‘What do you mean, your dog?’

  ‘My dog. Is he OK?’

  ‘Of course he is OK,’ she says, flabbergasted, looking down at him snoozing on my Woof Bed jacket. ‘I see him there, asleep by your side. What other questions could you have about a dog?’

  ‘Loads,’ I say, unperturbed by her undisguised disdain for the question. ‘Why do I love him so much? Do I love him too much?’

  ‘He’s just your dog, what’s wrong with you. I have a dog, I love my dog, but he’s just a dog. I have some advice for you. Don’t think about the dog so much. What about your husband?’

  ‘My boyfriend?’

  ‘Or your work?’

  ‘I don’t want to ask about those things.’

  ‘I want to tell you about your boyfriend. How are things at home?’

  What a waste of a tenner.

  Having Castor as well as Wolfy was a proper commitment to the cause. Much harder to stroll round town, free and easy, with two dogs than with one. So I’d often head out of London and visit my mum, who lives on the edge of Dartmoor.

  Up there every solitary footstep took me further away from who I ought to be and back to who I was. Round this time of year, in the early autumn, Da
rtmoor’s often wrapped up in a damp, grey mist. Unless you can use map and compass you’re buggered navigating. But this little patch of Dartmoor between Buckland Common and Rippon Tor, I know it so well I recognise rocks and paths and tiny landmarks. I won’t get lost – hopefully.

  Down by a narrow strip of woodland running alongside the stream, the air was clear of mist. The world looked flat, the edge of visibility only a few feet away. I sucked on through black boggy ground. All sound was muffled by thick air, apart from a late cuckoo’s fluted two-note song coming from somewhere out there in the blank beyond. I stopped to listen. I’d be very unlikely to hear a cuckoo again until next Spring.

  Wolfy meandered while Castor careened around like a lunatic, nose in the undergrowth. There was a commotion in a patch of heather 20 feet away. Castor had caught something and was shaking it. I ran to look. A squirrel. I called him off but the damage was done; the poor chap was punching out with its nut-munching upper claws, while its haunches where the dog had shaken it were utterly motionless.

  The squirrel’s eyes were all fear and it fought with the limbs that still had life. Castor went back to sniff his catch and got a scratch on the nose. He retreated. The squirrel was paralysed, it wasn’t going to get better. I needed to euthanise it.

  I called Wolfy over. ‘Kill it! Wolfy. Kill it!’ Wolfy gave it a sniff and a worried refusal, backing off rear end first. Castor wandered off as if nothing had happened. Neither of them had any interest in finishing the job, and neither did I. Should I stove in its head with a rock? Break its neck? Could I pick it up, punching and squeaking as it was, and drown it in the stream? No, I could not.

  Any ideas I had of myself as a countrywoman took an immediate pasting. Who in the country picks their way through the bog in white jeans, for a start. I pulled the neck of my jumper over my nose, a defence mechanism that I’d had since school. Mum does it too. Poof, I smelled. Not washing your face for three days or using deodorant doesn’t mean a return to the earth, I reflected, it just means you’re a slob.

  Ending the squirrel’s life was impossible. I just couldn’t kill it. I couldn’t kill a suffering squirrel. Perhaps a fox would come and do the job, or a hungry buzzard. My heart was thumping, my head cascading thoughts and worries and paranoia like a screen full of code streaming on the backs of my retinas. I was having something like a mild anxiety attack.

  The squirrel was like a Post-it note stuck to a lump of lichen-encrusted Dartmoor granite: ‘Oy! Mate! Don’t forget about death.’

  I always thought about death on Dartmoor. It’s big, it’s full of 300-million-year-old rocks, give or take the odd 50 million years. This is where I want my ashes scattered, I would think as I gazed in endorphin-induced euphoria out from whichever tor I’d just hammered up.

  But old Mr Squirrel here brought death a bit nearer than melodramatic statements about ashes while enjoying a pleasant vista. Instead of wind and dust and an eternity of stars and a return to universal oneness, I saw my dead self being chomped and chewed and pecked and slimed by a series of natural predators: fat flies rubbing their shitty feet together, the common buzzard, a black slug, Mr Fox, bacteria and labradoodles out for a walk. I saw my surviving relatives getting on with their lives, no children crying or grandchildren asking if Granny is with the angels now.

  This was getting silly. The questions crowded in. Mum dying, I’m not nice enough to her. I love my mummy, I want my mummy. Don’t die Mum. Dad dying, oh Daddy, my darling Dad, I hear his voice and see his gentle face. I don’t see him enough. Oh God, I love my parents so much it almost seems like I don’t love them because they are so thickly stitched into every part of me. What if Will died before me, or Tom? Family; step-parents, faults, division, half-siblings, dogs, step-sibling, games of all-pile-on, grumpy Christmases, family in all it’s fucked-up glory is everything.

  I wanted to call Charlie now, tell him I loved him and that I took huge comfort in our habitual coldness, that we were perfect in our imperfection. But I had no signal. At best I’d get a ‘love you too Fox’, at worst he’d think I was off my head and dismiss me with the eternal words, ‘can’t talk, I’m in a meeting’. Real love never looks like what we are taught it is. My brain burned with the thought of all the love I had never thanked my family for, never even recognised.

  It hit me: I had never suffered loss, not really. I’d been lugging around those childhood years of missing my mum like a bag of rocks my whole life, but it was over now. It had been over for nearly 35 years. Drop it. The squirrel still lay there, motionless from its hips down and punching out with its tiny arms.

  What was I going to do about the squirrel?

  I tried to interest Wolfy in it again: ‘Come on Woofs, sort the existential elephant in the room, it’s only a squirrel-sized one, and get an early supper into the bargain. Mmmn, num nums. Foooood.’

  ‘No way mate. Not interested.’ He slunk backwards and busied himself sniffing something. ‘Keep me out of this mess, that’s a you problem right there, not a me one.’

  Castor hovered, also nervous. ‘Dude, you did this. Finish it. Please?’ He turned and pottered up the narrow path to find some important patch of gorse to urinate on, then from a distance he stood and watched. I squatted down. A swift karate chop to its neck like I’d seen Charlie do with rabbits? Nope. Not that, I’d be certain to balls it up. Kill the squirrel, the voice in my head was screaming now and I wanted to run away from it with my hands over my head, except I was the voice.

  If it had been on the road I’d have run it over in the car. The lump of death metal no human was afraid of wielding. If I’d had a machine gun, I’d have peppered it with sweet release. Easy.

  Maybe once my back was turned a little team of bushy-tailed rodents nurses would come out from a hidden hole down by the stream, and Squirrel’s friends Water Rat, Rabbit, Toad and Vole would help him home on a cart fashioned from acorn cups and interleaved ferns. Wise old Dr Brock the badger would fix him up. Or perhaps it was a her. Damn, I felt even worse now.

  What could I do to make the universe slightly less terrible? Kill the squirrel, don’t kill the squirrel, take the squirrel to an animal sanctuary. I turned to the dogs one last time. They both looked away: ‘You’re the boss. You deal with it, big man.’

  ‘Look, squirrel’, I said, toying as a last-ditch attempt at salving my guilt with the idea of divine retribution, ‘you guys have done a lot of damage to the native red population’.

  Nah. It didn’t work. I walked away from the squirrel, praying uselessly to a not-there God, let alone a benevolent one, and to a more certain agent, Mother Nature, to send a hungry hawk as soon as possible.

  Death. It’s a right big one.

  Wolfy would die before me, barring tragedy. I imagined him fading away and hobbling more and needing to be carried upstairs and more poo accident episodes and then his sad face looking at me one day, as his heart beat more faintly, and he would give me his ‘it’s time’ face that bereaved dog owners put on Facebook after they’ve had to make that last trip to the vet.

  ‘Pixie has left us. She was totally deaf, with failing eyesight, and had dementia. This meant constant pacing, random weeing and pooing. But she still enjoyed her food and her walks. And she loved the cuddles. One day something very painful arose. We took her to the vet … she left us peacefully, eating sausages.’

  ‘Eating sausages.’ What a way to go.

  In France one time, interviewing a scion of a big champagne family, I had a brief but poignant conversation with a grand elderly gentleman, late seventies and, in all, pretty odious. He kept staring at my tits and telling me how unattractive women became in old age and that older men needed to have affairs with younger women. ‘But it is important to still make love to your wife so she feels beautiful even if she no longer looks it.’

  You met these guys sometimes. I listened wearing an insincere and emotionless rictus smile, fascinated by how much worse it could get. ‘Do go on.’

  Somehow, as he went on, the conv
ersation turned to dogs, as it so often did.

  He had kept dogs all his life, he told me, but no more. ‘It is just too painful when they die. I cannot take it again.’

  What would happen when Wolfy was gone? Had unconditional love and the routine and discipline I’d learned from an animal, from Wolfy, had it fixed something permanently in me? Or was he like a drug? Would the effects wear off?

  My eyes stung with tears that didn’t come. I crunched on to the Buckland Beacon and stood over the lichen-muddled biblical words on the two tablets of stone. I had never noticed that there was an eleventh commandment there below the usual ten. In all the decades I’d come up here, willingly or dragging behind a forceful parent, I’d never read this: ‘A new commandment I give unto you, Love one another.’

  On the way back to the car the dogs ambled behind me, seemingly subdued by the squirrel episode. Perhaps they were ‘picking up on my energy’, as people constantly liked to say; or – it had been a long walk – perhaps they were just tired.

  PART TWO

  LOST DOG

  CHAPTER SIX

  Wolfy is curled up at the end of the bed and before I take him over to Will’s I really want a cuddle. Late October sunshine drenches the room in light and warmth. The other male animal is already up and changing the world one chore at a time. Sisyphus and the sybarite, and their dog. I’ll just have a moment of hedonic bliss with the dog and then I’ll get up. I pat the bed exuberantly. ‘Wolfy, Wolfy, come on Woofs.’

  ‘If he’s not coming he doesn’t want to be cuddled, Kate,’ Charlie shouts up the stairs in between his furious bathroom ablutions. ‘Wolfy, Wolfy.’ Pat pat pat. Pat pat. ‘Oh come on.’ I quit the doggy intonation and just plead in a mockney accent, ‘Gizza a little cuddle, mate.’

  He half raises his body, then launches himself up the bed, close enough for me to roll him onto his back, soft underbelly exposed, where I stroke him, muttering inane nonsense, just making noises. In dogs like Wolfy with relatively small eyes, with a narrow, long, sighthound’s dolichocephalic head shape, the nictitating membrane that protects the eyeball is prominent. Slowly the shining black irises roll away under the pink corpuscles of his third eyelid so he looks like a zombie. The happy teeth come out as his muzzle relaxes and drops half a centimetre to bare the tiny baby teeth at the front of his lower jaw. I close my eyes and scratch his chest, and a blissed-out and peaceful smile lights up my whole body. I’m not thinking about anything. It’s taken a while to get him up here, but now he’s here. It’s heaven.