by Kate Spicer
If he is curled up and confused in a yard somewhere, having been found and kept – the ambiguous theft by finding – then I will simply go and ask for him back.
Immediately, fired up by certainty, I get up and walk down to the Travellers’ site under the Westway about half a mile away. It’s where the underbelly of several roads intersect and enclose the land like a vaulted concrete cathedral.
I like the certainty of knowing where I am going, and why. I’ve been there before, to parties, to get my car fixed and to stand and stare at the dissonant sight of a heavily graffitied riding school right under the A40. But I have never been deep inside, to the land the Travellers rent from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
The camp is down a rutted, age-bleached road. I walk past the scrappy shipping container workshops where men black with oil and dirt tinker with mechanical parts.
There’s a man not far from the first of the caravans on a site with about ten. I approach him. ‘I’ve lost my dog, I need some advice.’
‘Pat, you need to talk to Pat, come back later, after seven. He will be back then.’
Charlie comes home from work early and stares at me with weary eyes. There’s no point asking if there’s any news because we both know there isn’t any. He scours DogLost and calls the wardens every day. I scavenge on social media.
‘I’ve had an idea,’ I say. ‘I’m not going to put posters up tonight, I’m going to go down to the Travellers’ site under the Westway and ask their advice. Everyone says, where there’s gypsies or Travellers there’s lurchers. Dogs often turn up on Traveller sites.’
‘Kate, is that a good idea? Is that safe? I don’t want you to go at night.’
‘I have to go then.’
‘Well I can’t stop you, though I think you’re mad.’
I turn back to the crutch, back to social media. Some of the #findwolfy people from the internet, the majority of them female dog walkers from the north London parks, text me directly. I like this. It makes me feel less alone, like there is a plan in place and vast numbers are acting on it. The most prominent disembodied help comes from @JustEmmaPratt. But she is by no means the only one.
@BeautifulMumsie has taken my original tweet and poster and retweeted it to loads of famous people. I can see that she sends these tweets morning, noon and night to newsreaders, comedians, novelists, TV presenters, actors, politicians. Where could this energy and compassion come from but her own suffering. Her bio says, ‘Beautiful daughter Laura 31 died of colorectal cancer’ and the month, year and day of her death. Because of BeautifulMumsie the picture of Wolfy at Constantine must have been seen by thousands more people now. My eyes flick back to her bio again and again. I think of my pain and times it by a thousand. It’s not possible for me to imagine it but from that unimaginable pain comes kindness.
The Find Wolfy Facebook page soon has hundreds of followers. Dawn, Natalie, Rebecca, Siobhan, Emma, Tan Tan, Vicky, Alexandra, Carrie, Charlotte, Ruthie, Felicity, Lulu, Sue, Deborah, Debra, Debs, Debbie, Rhea, Tina, Sammy, Tash, Verity, Jody, Jenni, Jane, Jani, Joanna, Nicky, Hilary, Anne-Marie, Sarah, Katie …
At any point in the day when I am not trudging the pavements of Finsbury Park, my neck is hooked over the screen, my chest is hunched over my hips. Every so often I hear the squeaky floorboard at the door to the study. That’s Wolfy coming in, I wonder if he will get on the sofa or head for his nest. I hope he comes to his nest. I ready my toes for the wriggle under his smooth pink belly … Breathing deep and pulling the tears back inside me, I let the ghost of my dog leave the room.
A babysitter from my childhood, now a professor of nursing, gets in touch: ‘Dear Kate. You are doing all you can. My cat went missing, I was distraught. He just sauntered back.’
It isn’t lost on me that they are all women.
It’s November, and dark by half four. Tomorrow, on Thursday, it will be Bonfire Night, the annual excuse for pyromaniacs to come out of their hidey holes and start throwing explosives around in the name of a foiled seventeenth-century Catholic fundamentalist terrorist plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Tonight, it’s random whizz-pops and bangs, but tomorrow and through to Sunday, it will crank up.
I imagine being my dog. I am cowering beside a big blue wheelie bin while fireworks skid across the street and explode nearby. I don’t know where I am. There are no familiar smells. The smoke confuses me even more. I am trembling, petrified, confused and hyper-anxious. Where is the big pink animal that gives me oxytocin and biscuits?
A singer in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin says, ‘I see him coming back to you soon, healthy and safe.’
Half of me reads that and thinks, ‘How the hell would you know, goon?’, and the other half writes, ‘Why. Please tell me why?’
‘I’m psychic,’ she says.
I make my way back down to the Travellers’ site by a strange route, avoiding the way Wolfy and I would always go when we walked to the Scrubs. I edge the narrow sandy rat-run down the side of the riding school and into the camp. There’s a kid wheeling about on his bike and I ask him if Pat is here. The kid throws down his bike and runs to two nearby vans separated by a courtyard decorated with painted plaster horses’ heads and a few bright flower boxes. I follow him. Two tiny lapdogs, a grubby white poodle and a toffee-coloured Pomeranian, shrilly announce just how big and scary they are as I hover by the gate.
A woman comes out. ‘Can I help you?’ She has an Irish accent, but it’s not strong. She’s dressed smart, with a gigantic baby under her arm, which she puts down. The child, who can’t be more than one, looks up at me, waving a cloth doll.
‘I wondered if I could see Pat. I wanted to ask him something, about my dog.’
She looks at me for a long moment. ‘A dog?’
‘Yes, I’ve lost my lurcher. I wanted to … to ask his advice.’
She calls inside the larger of the two vans, while barely taking her eyes off me, before turning into the doorway to have a muttered conversation.
‘He’s eating his dinner but you can go in.’
I go through the gate. The child squawks in amiable greeting and the scruffy designer dogs yap on without menace. Inside, Pat is sitting at a small table between the living area and the kitchen, watching a telly on the wall. He’s about 50, with the ruddy cheeks of someone who works outside.
He’s got a plate of chicken nuggets, beans and chips in front of him. I’ve interrupted his tea. What am I doing here? Hunting down the exotic and the out-of-bounds? Proving I’m not scared? Or am I undoing the magical thinking and the fantasies that have grown up around the lost dog? Whatever, it’s suddenly apparent to me that what I’m doing is pretty rude, really. I’m coming down to accuse ‘his kind’ of having, nay, nicking, my dog, lost on the other side of a city of eight million people. After a quick muddled think about some plausible white lies to make what I am about to say look better, I settle on telling the truth.
‘I’ve lost my lurcher, he’s been gone five days. I heard that these kinds of dogs often turn up with your people and I wondered if you had any advice.’
The patience in his response is excruciating.
‘Where did you lose him?’
‘North London. Finsbury Park.’
‘I can’t help you. Not my patch.’
‘Do you have any advice? Do you know anyone in Finsbury Park? Do you think I should go and visit them? Where would you go if you had lost a lurcher?’
‘Was he chipped, tagged? Have you been on that DogLost website?’ His advice is no different from that of the nice ladies up on the Heath. ‘If what you’re saying is have I got your dog, no I haven’t. I’ve got twenty-two dogs down there in the kennel. I can show you them now if you want to check if I’ve got your dog.’
Yup, he thinks I’m accusing him of stealing my dog. ‘Of course you don’t have my dog. I suppose I wanted advice.’
‘I lost one not long ago. Started running on the Scrubs and never stopped. Never did find out what happened to him. They d
o go, you know?’
I walk home in the dark, the adrenalised hope of the visit long gone and the brief spike of hopeless hope exhausted. Wolfy being co-opted into a large Traveller kennel of hunting dogs was pretty unlikely; he is a soft bumbling middle-aged dog, so pampered by love that he’d once let a couple of aggro magpies peck his bum with barely a glance backwards. If he was wanted for hunting, he’d very soon be unwanted and a stray again … or bait. Oh, for fuck’s sake stop thinking this drivel. I sit on a low wall opposite a bank of graffiti on a wooden hoarding around the Travellers’ camp. I smack my temples with my fists.
Sat here underneath the Westway, I look at my phone. The keener #findwolfy ladies on Twitter have been very active. The Sky News presenter Kay Burley has tweeted ‘Let’s get this lad home.’ The whole thing is surreal.
Emma Pratt has sent me a text telling me to keep my spirits up, that her and her son have been combing and flyering Hampstead Heath that afternoon after school. Attached is a picture of a dog on Gumtree. It’s an online classified ad for an adult lurcher for sale. ‘This couldn’t be him, could it?’
No amount of willing it to be so can make it my hound.
Emma’s dedicated search for the dog is more total than mine even – she has her kids out hunting with her after school. I don’t even know what this woman looks like.
I ask her if I can call her.
I walk down Bramley Road, past the red-brick thirties houses and the old Victorian arches under Latimer Road station. Here, normally, I turn to the left, past the western edge of the Lancaster West Estate, down a paved pedestrian access to the grassy area between the tower and the leisure centre. This is the little locals rat-run where, night after night after night, Wolfy and I have dawdled until he’s voided bowel and bladder and is ready for bed.
I walk on and take the main roads back to the flat. I can’t even look at the places where we used to be together.
Charlie is on his way back from flyering and putting up more posters around N4 and N7.
His voice is weary when he calls me on the way back. ‘Is there anything to eat?’
I cook some sausages, which we eat with Presbyterian simple joyless accompaniments, boiled potatoes and peas, the sort of food people cook when they no longer have a lust for life.
In bed, his warm body is reassuring and for once I curve around his back instead of rolling into my side of the hump in the mattress. ‘I can’t stop thinking about him, it’s so painful,’ I say in a whisper.
‘I know. It’s uncomfortable. We can’t crack up though. No point in that, is there? How were they down on the Travellers’ site? Any help?’
‘Singularly unsatisfying. This guy Pat tolerated it, politely, but I got nothing out of it other than I still had no idea where the dog was. I’m still going to try some of the north London sites though. I suppose the one good thing I got out of it was it proved they aren’t anything to be frightened of.’
‘Were they ever?’
‘The stuff I’ve been reading on social media, on the internet, on some of these dog forums, it’s insane, Charlie.’
‘Well I don’t need to tell you what the answer is to that.’
‘Yeah, farkin’ get off t’ ’internet.’
‘Precisely. Where’s it getting us? Our numbers are everywhere. If people have information they’ll get us the old-school way. Right, I have to sleep.’
He’s gone in 60 seconds. Man could outsleep a hibernating Grizzly.
I lie on my back listening to the Wolfy-less silence. Castor breathes softly in Wolfy’s bed beside us.
Rolling onto my side, I curl up in a foetal ball. Don’t cry. Don’t cry.
Two hours later I sit bolt upright, already crying and choking on my breath as if I am suffocating. Now I am fully awake the tears turn to out-of-control bawling. ‘Charlie, Charlie. Help.’
‘Get a grip, Kate. Get your shit together, for fuck’s sake.’
I hadn’t expected him to be so cold and angry. It surprises me to silence but the tears keep coming, in torrents and convulsions from my gut. I get up and mechanically put on my grandmother’s old ragged Chinese dressing gown. Snot still running down my face, I tiptoe downstairs to the dog’s nest under my desk and climb inside, covering myself in his blankets, holey old socks, chewed fur and ratty sheepskins. There, I howl until I am exhausted.
Wrung out, finished, I pull down my laptop, check Twitter, check Instagram where dear flawless Chica has posted a picture of Wolfy’s poster. ‘Help gorgeous @Spicerlife find her dog’. That’s sweet; it sits, ugly, between a lovely shot of her feet in a pair of Nicholas Kirkwood shoes and a cute tongue-out shot of her standing legs akimbo in a jumpsuit beside a vending machine in Tokyo. She is utterly gorgeous and doing well. For once I feel no shiver of envy.
Check Facebook. Check my new Find Wolfy page. Check check check, soothe soothe soothe, numb numb numb. Go back and do it all again. Numb it all down to nothing but a blank sadness.
A box pops up, a Facebook message from my cousin, Maya, in California.
‘Kate, are you there? Any news on Wolfy?’
I type a colon and an opening bracket. A sad-face pops up in the box.
‘Kate, I have a friend who might be able to help you. She has done some awesome stuff for me in the past – maybe it’s a bit way-out for you but she is what’s known as an animal communicator and she’s seriously good. I have sent her a message saying I am passing on her info to you and that your dog is currently lost. She’s booked up months in advance but she’s a friend of mine. She will help you. If you think it is all airy-fairy that’s fine, ignore me. But I know from experience she is good and may be able to help you in some way.’
Ping! A warm light springs into my chest. Hope! ‘I will try anything, Maya, I am desperate. I will definitely call her. Could I call now? Where is she?’
‘Her name is Anna Twinney. Look at her website, reachouttohorses.com. She is based in Colorado but is English and totally genuine in what she does.’ She sends me her phone number. ‘I said you might call her.’
‘I’d never have you down as someone who goes to psychics, Maya, you’re the most grounded person in the entire family.’
‘I know it may seem way-out but it has worked for me before. I have used her with horses and dogs – been amazing. Make it happen, Kate.’
The warmth and light spreads a little. ‘Thanks Maya. I will. He ran off from Will’s house so doesn’t know how to get home. As far as we know he is heading further away from Will’s in the wrong direction.’
‘Hugs to you big cousin. Be brave. I know how horrific it is when they run off. I know how you are feeling.’
I text Anna straight away. ‘It’s Maya’s cousin. When can we talk?’
CHAPTER TEN
Jayne Wallace runs a string of female psychics out of Selfridges’ basement in London and Culver City in LA. She also has offices in Epping but you hear less about this now, since she’s read for Kim Kardashian. I interviewed her earlier in the year for a story about energy vampires for Red magazine – you know, those people who make you feel like the life’s been sucked from you after anything more than a few minutes in their company. I’d thought it would be fun to add a bit of cosmic witchy-woo to a story, fundamentally, about depressed and needy people.
She’s a blue-chip psychic, Jayne. A half-hour reading with her costs £125, less than a top barrister but still, more than a decent haircut. Right now, I’ve got no moolah for this. As I wait for Anna Twinney to get back to me, I am hungry for magic. If I can’t have the miracle of Wolfy coming home, psychics will have to do.
That’s how I wake up on 5 November, with a need for answers and instant gratification.
There’s no way I’m asking Charlie for money for a psychic. Having to use his money robs me of my power, and having to use his money for psychics? I can forget my dignity too. There’s no surer way of being consigned to the second-sex dustbin than by succumbing to paranormal commerce.
Castor comes paddin
g up the stairs looking for love and for once I pat the bed and invite him up. I’ve booked him in to doggy daycare for the rest of the week. The walks, the rolling, the showers are a daily torment of remembering and regret and I feel bad for how neutered all my doggy affection is now.
The slender, gentle dog lays his head on my thigh while I focus on how to get access to Jayne. I need to make up a bogus reason to interview her. If I can find one I could probably get to her right now.
One of the pieces I have to write this week is about hangover cures. I’ve got a professor of genetic epidemiology commenting, and a nutritionist to showbiz caners and mental workaholics like Charlie. I’ve quoted P. G. Wodehouse. Why not Jayne; why not a psychic cure for a clang? She’ll add a bit of spirit and sparkle, I tell myself.
She’s game, and has a slot at 11.30. I am standing in the study when we talk. It takes her no more than five minutes to relay a cure, a pink angel crystal and psychic energy clearance. I’ll remember that one, I think; after, that is, I’ve done 400mg of ibuprofen, 1000mg of paracetamol, a double espresso, a litre of Berocca and a bowl of porridge.
As we wind up the interview with thanks and quick pleasantries, I jump in. She’s busy, Jayne, she’s got soothsaying shit to do.
‘Hey, Jayne, before you go. Can I just ask you something seeing as I have you here? It’s just my dog has gone missing and I wondered if you could tell me anything?’
You don’t need to be a clairvoyant to spot immediately that the premise for the interview was a weak cover for the real reason I am on the phone to her. Barely a beat and she says, ‘He’s all right. He’s inside with an older man with a bad leg, he’s being well looked after, he’s safe.’
I’m not so hungry for magic that I want to hear something I don’t want to hear.
‘Oh.’ I’m ashamed already of piggybacking my lost dog trauma on the back of this interview, so I don’t ask any more questions. ‘Thank you. Thanks so much. How can you tell, though?’
She’s a kind person, Jayne, but she’s got that Essex bluntness. ‘Can I give you a piece of advice, Kate?’ she says, her accent making her sound fierce to my pussy middle-class ears. ‘I’ve done a lot of readings for people who’ve lost their dogs. I did one woman who had an Alsatian lost for six years and she never let up looking for him. It was her whole life.’