by Kate Spicer
We go to bed. He sleeps. He always sleeps.
There are things you have to do when you lose a dog. Partly for your own sanity, partly because it’s genuinely helpful. The first is to make an attention-grabbing poster.
I sit up in bed and work quickly on a Word document: a few colours, the words LOST DOG writ large and, aside from those essential details, both our phone numbers and a strong picture.
From among the hundreds of photos I have of the dog, which should I use?
It is a month earlier and I am in Cornwall with the dog, staying in a 1930s house my dad has taken near Constantine Bay on the north coast for a big family gathering with my stepmother and his six kids. On our first morning the dog and I rise before six, before the sun, and set out. There are snuffles from the kids’ dorm, where five grandchildren are bunked up together in a room with cracked Lino, ping-pong table and two broken televisions; at the opposite end of the house there are bellowing snores from the oldies in the most comfortable rooms. My stepmother has put Post-it notes with our names on the doors. All the couples have got double rooms. The ones with kids have got the best ones.
These big family holidays infantilised me, I knew, as more and more of my siblings, all younger, married and reproduced. Charlie never came – too far, too many people, too busy, no thanks – so my learning-disabled brother Tom and I always got the bum bedrooms because us two were the least changed from our child status. Fair enough. I didn’t mind being pushed further and further down the bedroom ranking, sliding ever closer to the nursery wing the older I got. There’s a metaphor for old age.
This is my first time there with Wolfy and I’ve discovered he loves the beach – when I took him there the evening we arrived, the shambling, frankly perplexingly slow pace he assumes in the city’s parks was swapped for top-speed sighthound looning. He’d hit the sand and gone at it full tilt in the scissoring double-suspension gallop of a racing greyhound. He ran around me in wide circles or chased me through the sea into the surf in an undulating motion like a needle through silk. Even in deep water he would touch the bottom and then spring up and down through the waves like a dolphin crossed with a kangaroo. It was a marvel. As his wet fur dried by the fire in the evening he smelt the very essence of sea spray.
Wolfy isn’t allowed upstairs at the house at Constantine, and coming down in the morning I can hear his anticipatory whimpers as he registers the creak of my step on the back stairs. I open the kitchen door and he is right there, wagging his ecstatic welcome.
‘Morning Woofs.’ His cold nose touches my cheek and he gives the corner of my mouth a single brief dab with his tongue, which I think is a curious ‘What does she smell like today?’ and an affectionate greeting. ‘Mmmmn, Wolfy.’ I put my forehead on the top of his head and smell and kiss him back. ‘Let’s go walkies. Walkies?’ Excited little squeaks and a furiously wagging tail affirm that this is a great idea and we set out through a door in the concrete wet room, which reeks of damp sour old neoprene. This house has lavish quantities of doors; we are spoilt.
Beyond the low garden wall, and it is high tide. The Atlantic Ocean shifts without breaking. Its dark breath sends a bracing tang of the sea, which mingles with the smell of cut grass and gravel.
We are happy. Acutely so. It is a moment of exquisite and simple joy. What a life. As dawn breaks the air is saturated with rose gold and that’s when I take a photograph of him. He is alert, looking forward and bathed in the richest sunlight of a new day.
Breathing deep, in and out, I battle the urge to cry again and choose this picture. I attach the file and post it to Twitter. ‘I’ve lost my beautiful dog. Last seen belting towards Finsbury Park. Please Twitter, and God if you’re there, help me find him.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
At four the next morning the phone rings and wakes me with an electric start from an unexpectedly thick, heavy sleep. For a moment the dog is asleep in his bed and all is well, like those brief moments of oblivious sweetness before an evil hangover kicks in. Reality weighs back into the room and brings the grey ash of sickening misery with it. I see the mobile on the floor. Its old-fashioned telephone ringtone is savage. Next to it, nothing, a gaping hole; the dog’s empty bed is at Will’s house still.
‘Hello.’ My voice has that startled confusion of someone woken at 3 a.m. by a call from a strange number.
‘Oh. Yeah. Er. Hiya. I were wonderin’. Have you lost a dog?’
‘Yes. Yes! Yes I have.’ Hope surges through my body and I feel daft for making such a huge fuss. He has been gone only 12 hours and now someone’s got him. What a relief …
‘I seen a dog just like yours just now, see, by the M602 …’ My mind grinds the information like a rusty mangle. The M602? Salford? I used to go to school there. I briefly picture Wolfy on the hard shoulder. How did the dog get to Manch—‘yer, it looked dead scared,’ the guy continues confidently, ‘until it were hit by a …’ As he says those last words I know it’s a joke; the Greek chorus behind the caller let contained laughter through their lips with a round of raspberries and stoned hilarity.
‘By a lorry.’ The caller laughs too.
I can see them, rolling around, cruel nobody shitheads. And I can picture the scene they have set for me: my dog, dead, destroyed beyond all recognition to all but me, who sees the few remaining loose tufts of familiar fur not stuck and ground into his entrails. All anyone else would see is just a dog, or just roadkill, gone for ever, just hair and bone in someone’s bumper.
Charlie is sitting up in bed beside me. ‘What? What?’
I tell him in a neutral flat voice.
As I am slipping back to sleep, the phone rings again. I answer more cautiously this time.
‘I’ve found your dog.’
‘Where?’
‘In a kebab.’
I roll over and hug my arms tight around myself and lie in bed for a few minutes, staring at the top of the rowan tree on Treadgold, visible above the slate of Janice’s roof, its leaves are yellow now but a few withered berries still cling to its branches. Beyond the rooftops and chimney stacks are the maple, plane and chestnuts edging Avondale Park. That park was a huge slurry pit back when our house was built, when the area was still known for its pottery, piggeries and slums. Now it is Wolfy’s favourite place for a pee and a poo before bed. It is? Or was? If he doesn’t come home I will never go there again. The house still feels like it is covered in ash and the molecules in the air are as grey as I feel. Soon I’ll be forced up by the bossy alarm call that is a bladder, but perhaps if I go foetal I can buy another ten minutes. I curl up and look at the middle of the bed, where the dog would leap to join us once he sensed we were waking up. He’d pad across the duvet before dramatically crashing down with his entire body stretched out, flush against Charlie’s body. After a groan of happiness as he exhaled he’d cock his head sideways and back, swivel it 180 degrees like an owl and stare at me with those shiny black eyes. He’d make a small sound, the tiniest sound, like a trumpet tuning: half scratchy air, half off squeaky note.
‘Hi Woofs.’
Where is he? Is he alive, is he cold, is he hungry? Has he found water? If he is alive, will he stay alive? Does someone have him or is he alone, injured and dying? Where is my dog?
I go down to make mugs of businesslike working-class tea, thick, terracotta-coloured, milky. This is not a situation that calls for weak Darjeeling with a slice of lemon in a porcelain cup. We need a proper brew. Tea and cigarettes come into their own, don’t they, in grief, they acquire a whole new substance, texture and satisfaction. It must be an interaction with whatever speedy hormones the body’s chemist is pumping out.
Castor moves noiselessly from where he has slept on the egg-yolk yellow woolly armchair and stands beside me in the kitchen. I try to muster feelings for him. I stroke him and give him a bowl of Woof Nuts.
I go back to bed and Charlie and I discuss our plan of action for the day while I go to check Twitter to see if anything has happened there. Castor stands
beside the bed, hooting his desire to join us. He floats up almost silent, a slithery whippety lurcher with a long thin nose. He is nothing like Wolfy. ‘Hey boy,’ I whisper.
He stares hopefully at me, boss-eyed and looking for love. A black cylinder of pain spins in my chest. I stroke him and scroll the replies and the tweets with #findwolfy.
The one I sent last night has been retweeted by Jeremy Clarkson. It’s not yet 9 a.m. and it has already been retweeted a thousand times.
‘So I suppose that was some of his followers there on the phone.’
In another reality, I would have found a retweet by Jeremy Clarkson funny and amazing in a ludicrous way, but in this context, it’s just a thing; a good thing because it has fuelled an insane amount of engagement, but no big thing. The spectrum of feelings I can experience has shrunk. All are subsumed by loss, panic and longing.
Wolfy’s loss has been shared by DogLost.com. This charity calls on local volunteers to help ramp up local interest in finding dogs and cats. You don’t realise these resources exist until you need them. When a dog disappears all you have is volunteers. It’s not a police matter. There’s no state resource, aside from the dog wardens, and they only get involved when a dog is found, dead or alive. They don’t do the finding.
Lose a dog, and you’re relying entirely on the kindness of strangers.
A lot of strangers are being kind to us on Twitter. They are full of suggestions. Some are offering credible, incredible, help. A woman called @JustEmmaPratt who appears to be an amateur lost dog hunter and a community policeman called @moonieman stand out. I know the police don’t get involved with lost pets, and so the fact we have this guy on board feels like a coup.
He tweets me, ‘What does he look like?’
‘Small, blond, shaggy like a deerhound.’
‘We’re all on the lookout,’ he says. A plural. We?
There are hundreds of replies, supportive mostly; and several suggestions that I try the nearest Korean restaurant. The trolling doesn’t move me.
Charlie chooses to walk the streets near Will’s, pinning up posters. He goes to the copy shop while I head off to the Scrubs to walk Castor. The colours are plain and flat, no more nuanced than a cheap box of children’s pencils. The trees are green, the path is brown, the tarmac is grey, the air is mild. Nothing more. I limp around, then, cutting the walk short, I turn back and call Castor, only to spot him rolling gleefully. When Wolfy rolls it’s to scratch his back, to express joy. When Castor rolls, all of the above, plus fox caca. Eau de Reynard. He shoots over. A broad strip of black reeking shit is dashed from his ear to the tip of his tail.
‘Gargh!’ I try not to sound angry. There is no point, the deed is done. ‘Oh Castor.’ My voice is defeated.
‘Fox poo?’ a cheery voice calls to me and I look across to see a woman with a pencil-thin, charcoal shaggy-haired lurcher trotting beside her.
I nod.
‘Where’s your other dog? What’s it called?’
‘Wolfy.’ The lump in my throat makes my voice sound oddly strangled. ‘He’s lost.’
‘Oh, he’ll make his way home soon enough. I knew this person …’ She rattles off a story about someone else’s dog running off but knowing their route home after all that leg-cocking round the streets of W11 and W10. ‘Hell, of course, absolute hell and then he pops up after a night on the tiles, like nothing happened.’
She bends to one side and pats her hound, standing quietly at her side, just like Wolfy would be if he was here. I’m jealous of her, standing there with her dog. Wolfy. Wolfy. The constant internal keening ramps up. I shake my head. ‘He ran away in north London, we’ve never walked it, he bolted, he won’t have marked the route back to my brother’s. He’s lost. That’s if he’s alive.’
‘Now you mustn’t worry. They’re hardy beasts, these lurchers, I’m sure he will return.’
‘Do you think so?’ I’m grasping at the hope in her breezy, almost patronising cheer.
‘Of course I think so. Unless the Travellers have him.’
What?
‘Terrors, they’re terrors.’ She has a new story now, about a lurcher stolen and thrown into the back of a van outside the post office on North Pole Road and retrieved a matter of hours later from a camp in Manchester.
I wade back through the heavy air and drive Castor home to wash off the cloying fetid musk of Mr Fox. Bent over him, scrubbing at something that I know, however long I stand in the shower, will haunt my nostrils all day. Being here, doing this with the wrong dog, takes me back to that first day Wolfy arrived. My tears are washed down the plughole with the shitty soapy water.
Will, my youngest brother, is a handsome bugger. Out of all of us, he’s got the best looks and proportions. People say he looks like Hugh Grant, but that’s doing Will a disservice. He’s six years younger than me and, aside from a few months with my dad and stepmother after he was born, he always lived with my mum. She came back for him and took him with her one day, and left Tom and me behind. My mum was suffering from postnatal depression and the man who went on to be her second husband convinced her we would be better off with my dad. All I knew was I came home one day and my dad said, ‘Your mother has gone, again.’
So it wasn’t just my mummy I missed, I also missed little Will. I remember seeing his chubby two-year-old form growing bigger through the bobbly glass in the front door of the house Dad rented near the hospital. Will would run up the path ahead of mum to collect me for an access visit, and open up the letter box: ‘Katie!’
Within two years of them splitting up my dad moved up north. The weekend visits with Mum stopped and I saw even less of her and my baby brother, but I never missed them any less. As a grown-up, with all these decades between now and then, I still think of Will as something precious and golden, something rare, because back then he was in limited supply. No commodity is as valuable as a human you love and – now I understand – a dog you love too.
I bang on his front door like I have so many times before. I hear the skiffling erratic footsteps of a small person coming to the door. I do my usual thing and look through the letter box. ‘Aunty Kate!’
Arty comes thumping to the door and arranges a well-rehearsed sequence of boxes and books so he can reach the lock to let me in. I sweep him up for a cuddle that turns into a dangle upside down and a walk up my legs and a kissy-monstering for ultimate giggles. The welcome ritual done, we walk into the house. Sam and Bay are playing in the sitting room and they look up at me but say nothing. ‘Bay.’ I put out my arms and she reluctantly lets me hold her. Any other time she would have run to the door and been there in the queue for hugs, kisses, silly voices and being picked up and turned upside down too. ‘I am not cross about Wolfy. Aunty Katie loves you and it’s not your fault.’ She nods and mumbles and backs away with her eyes down.
I caused this, I think.
Through in the kitchen, Steph too seems subdued. ‘Oh hello, Kate,’ she says, a slight trace of weariness, which I am hyperalert to now.
Will is cheerful but the dynamic is unfamiliar and strained. Has he had to defend me? Is he torn? No one wants to lose their dog. But in losing mine, I’m reliving the feelings of absolute powerlessness of when I had little access to half my family. I’m in the room with them but the closeness is compromised.
I have to find Wolfy. If I don’t find Wolfy how will anything ever be normal again between us?
Will hands me a big stack of posters he’s printed and walks me to the front door. ‘It’s not your fault, Will, I should never have left him with you. I made a mistake.’
He says nothing. I suspect that he is torn between things, between me and my dog and Steph, who was being so remote. I wonder if she’s angry. Angry women scare me.
I am calling his name again, walking up and down Regina Road where he was last seen. It is the first day of November and the sun is low and bright, the sky a startling cobalt. My instinct is to be uplifted by this even if my spirit is not willing. Wherever Wolfy is, if he
is alive, at least he is not cold or wet. I fish about in my hot scrambled mind for hope as I walk the streets stopping people, putting posters through letter boxes and ringing doorbells. ‘Have you seen my dog? He was last seen yesterday, near here.’
People are kind. ‘No, sorry. Good luck. I hope you find him.’
My gut tells me to take a narrow turning over pitted broken tarmac leading to a row of garages and lock-ups. He’s there, I am sure of it. He is curled up and hidden somewhere in that cul de sac, away from people. I walk slowly, calling his name. ‘Woooolfy. Woooolfy.’
There’s an excitement. It’s the same confused adrenaline of starting a new school, of heading into the unknown with fear and curiosity. I’ve got this hunch. I am going to find him here in these open cinderblock garages with leaves blown into sprawling pyramids in the corners.
Behind the garages I can hear a full congregation praising the Lord in the enthusiastic Pentecostal style, loud singing and clapping that goes on for fifteen minutes or so. To this chorus of faith and hope, I creep and gently call until my voice tails off: ‘Woooolfy.’ Where is my God-spelt dog now? I have forensically, pointlessly explored one-billionth of London. Of course he’s not there. It was just a surge of the hopeless hope.
Two dog owners called Em and Al have joined me with their cockerpoo puppy, Bua. I know their mother and she suggested they come all the way from Fulham to Finsbury Park and help me. They are hungover and as young and bouncy as the puppy they bring with them. Their little Bua wiggles and yips along beside them like an animated mop head.
I don’t understand why they are helping me. ‘We only just got our dog and we love her so much, we couldn’t bear to lose her, we just want to help you.’ I am so grateful not to be alone.
Walking the muddled grid of Stroud Green’s boxy Edwardian terraces, I regularly comb Twitter. The editor of the Independent on Sunday tells me she lost her dog, Olive, once.