Lost Dog

by Kate Spicer

  Yes, Emma and the midnight jogger are offering a whole other realm of support.

  At first I was confused by the more committed dog hunters on social media. Moonieman, I understood – he’s an earnest, helpful, local amateur copper. BeautifulMumsie is clearly in profound emotional pain and through Twitter she tries to ease the pain of others who are suffering. This is the social media version of the wounded healer. For the dog walkers of north London, it’s their turf, their specialist subject; they’re out and about anyway, and the viral drama online gives it a community aspect that is probably quite jolly to participate in.

  I say jolly, but people were genuinely sharing my pain. A cab driver in Mayfair messaged me saying he was having problems sleeping what with the worrying about Wolfy and all that and, as I hadn’t sent a tweet for a while, could I let him know if there was any news?

  A friend of Steph’s texted to say she was thinking of me and that ‘The kids are beside themselves, desperate to help #findwolfy. I’ve only been allowed to walk the dog on the Heath all week.’

  Sasha, Cecil’s owner, said the same: ‘We’ve only been walking Cessy on the Heath all week, and putting posters everywhere. Thinking of you.’

  Sammy, the wife of a guy I went to school with rang me. ‘I just want you to know we are all thinking of you.’

  My glamorous friend, Jack, tells me he and his husband Dan are taking their two kids up to Queen’s Wood in Highgate straight after school to put up posters. I imagine Jack picking his way through the mulchy leaves in one of his pairs of lambskin Gucci loafers. ‘I told them, “Now darlings, we must help find Katie’s dog, he’s like her little boy.” Well, they knew all about it already, I don’t know how. Darling, I know you’re feeling utterly beastly but you’re a cause célèbre!’

  Even Timbo, canine hater-in-chief, gives me a quick call.

  Why? Why were people helping? Yes, people truly are altruistic. Yes, there is compassion and kindness out there. I feel ashamed because there is so much suffering out there. Child poverty and malnutrition exist, not in Sudan or Somalia, Syria or Yemen, but in our own country. There are the desperate faces staring out of the papers at us, migrants stuck in the Jungle in Calais; the corpse of a small Syrian boy was recently washed up on a beach in Turkey.

  What were we all doing looking for a bloody dog, my bloody dog? Give or take the odd Brett or Moonieman, this great bank of kindness has in its majority been delivered by women. A class of human that, with very few exceptions, whether friend, family, frenemy or foe, I’ve had a fractious relationship with since childhood. I toughed out all 900 pages of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which changed my understanding of what it was to be female; even if I didn’t understand it all, that book changed my life. Same goes for Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth; my paperback copy is frilled with use and reference. Yet, still, I felt the passive threats of my own sex far more than I did those of men. I accepted men for what they were, women less so. They scared me and disappointed me. Men, they’re just easy.

  I couldn’t be arsed blaming this on my childhood any more. I remember confronting my dad once, and it was only once, about those unhappy years, cut off from Mum, with my stepmother, who must have found looking after my mother’s children a royal pain in the arse. We didn’t see Dad much. He worked very hard. The NHS and poorly children owned my Daddy. And he quoted the first few lines of Philip Larkin’s ‘This Be The Verse’ back at me:

  They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

  They may not mean to, but they do.

  They fill you with the faults they had

  And add some extra, just for you.

  But they were fucked up in their turn

  By fools in old-style hats and coats,

  Who half the time were soppy-stern

  And half at one another’s throats.

  Man hands on misery to man.

  It deepens like a coastal shelf.

  Get out as early as you can,

  And don’t have any kids yourself.

  I’d become obsessed by the poem. Though I remained a bit of an Eeyore at times, and was fairly certain I’d learnt this in childhood. Forgiving my parents, seeing them as humans, not meddling imperfect Gods, was empowering. We focus so much on where our parents went wrong, we forget to celebrate all they got right. Those famous first lines are only part of the story. The next two stanzas made the bleating and tears in therapy over the years feel silly. Between them, Larkin and the French Lacunian lady psychotherapist in Highgate sorted my head right.

  Larkin taught me one thing, and the dog finished the job. Wolfy had helped me uncover how much love I had to give. The dog had taught me what an unequalled joy it was to love and be loved with no conditions, even by a dumb animal. He’d saved me. The dog saved me from myself.

  I have to get the dog back. We have to find him.

  Charlie is home when I get back, sat at his laptop on the sofa working. The dog would be lying next to him if he was here, squeaking occasionally if he fancied a tummy rub. His absence makes his presence felt everywhere. It is truly the epitome of ghostly.

  At my desk in the shit pit, I sit down to ‘work’ some more. Meaning I prowl Twitter and Facebook for love and information. I catch sight of myself in the mirror. My hair is glued to my head in an extreme side parting, skin matt and grey with lack of care. I haven’t washed properly since the dog went. I circle cleanser into my face. The thought of dressing for this Sexy Fish thing tonight makes me feel like my feet are nailed to the floor. The restaurant’s going to let me sit quietly and anonymously at one of the counter seats so I can watch the hot folk congratulate themselves on being in a new hot place on the hottest night of the week.

  I’ve got £20 in my pocket and there’s probably about eight quid in cash in the change pot on top of the fusebox. It’s all the cash I have in the world. Credit cards will sustain me til I next get paid. It’s madness to spend my last pennies on a blow-dry but I’ll go to the cheap Brazilian hairdressers by Avondale Park. If I meet other people’s expectations of who I am, hiding how I am feeling inside will be easy. Dress the part of the groomed, together, sleek Londoner even if you aren’t one.

  My phone is ringing. I dive on it, desperate. It’s one of the Sexy Fish maître d’s checking I am still coming in. Not long after, it rings again, I answer in a foggy drab monotone, like I’m about to blow a hole in my head. ‘Hello.’

  ‘I spoke to you earlier today on the Holly Lodge Estate. Look, I’ve just been talking to my husband about your dog. There’s something you need to know. I’d forgotten all about it but we could both hear this dog howling and running back and forth below the window in all the leaves down there.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Last night, probably around midnight, one maybe. I went back to sleep, but my husband said he lay there listening to it. At first he thought it must have been one of the neighbours’ dogs locked out in the garden but the leaves, the rustling … The dog was running up and down, it must have been outside. Maybe it’s not helpful, but I thought …’

  I reassure her that it’s very helpful and that this is just the sort of information we want to hear, before rounding off the call with the usual round of insane levels of gratitude.

  Clocking this, Charlie comes rushing in. ‘What! What?’

  I repeat back the call as I rub moisturiser into my face.

  ‘He’s there, he’s living there. We’ve been looking in the wrong places. I know it. I’m going back. Give me the address.’

  Charlie drives back to Swain’s Lane in Highgate, back to where I just came from, all talk of leaving it to fate forgotten.

  Anna messages me to say she can fit me in for an animal communication session in a short break in her teaching schedule. The time slot doesn’t fit with my work but Maya has made me promise not to go to anyone else. She says that while a lot of people claim to be able to do this telepathic Doctor Dolittle thing, very few people can.

  ‘Anna’s the best.’

  Anna�
�s only available time slot today is after her morning classes at 12.30 p.m. I count this off on my fingers. 12.30 p.m. Mountain Time is 5.30 p.m. here. She makes it clear she is doing this as a favour. I cannot say no. But I’m meant to be at Sexy Fish then.

  There have been a few Tweets questioning why I wasn’t pounding the pavements of Finsbury Park 24/7, and I have wondered that myself. Is it laziness? It’s not for want of his return; the madness of worry and longing is barely contained and in private moments leaks out constantly from my eyes. Six days in, like a granny, I’m learning never to forget my hanky.

  My professional and financial situation is hardly 24-carat gold; it’s barely tin plate. Toss in that the writing economy is much shrunk generally. Before Johannes Gutenberg brought the printed word to the people in about 1440, a book cost as much as a house. Printed words were incredibly valuable, a real luxury. In the information age they’re stacked up in Poundland, by the out-of-date gingerbread. We’ve got words spewing from every electronic orifice.

  In a crowded market I have to tap-dance and wave my pen-calloused jazz hands to get enough to eat (and to buy those nice scented candles I like). If I stop, the work stops. Start throwing in the towel and I am what’s technically known as proper fucked.

  Sexy Fish has to make this week’s issue. Tomorrow’s chip wrappers to you. A cheque in the post for me. The show must go on.

  I tell Anna, ‘Twelve thirty Mountain Time is great. Speak then!’.

  How do we identify ourselves, and how do we satisfy other people’s expectations of our identity? In my job, hovering on the edges of the high life, trying not to scare anyone while poking about in their business means I, a fairly scruffy bugger, as my stepmother accurately put it, had to fit in. I often borrowed clothes I’d never be able to afford and wrote notes up my leg with biro in the ladies’ for want of a bag that looked expensive enough to put a notepad in. Sometimes I thought I belonged there, among the money and the yachts, motor racing, diamonds, art, ski towns for the super-rich and beach clubs for the idiots who wanted to copy them.

  I really need a blow-dry.

  ‘Where is dog?’ The Brazilians in the salon by the flat are used to me coming in with Wolfy, who sprawls across the white tiles or shambles about greeting everyone as they come in. The owner is my age, probably, with a hard, not unkind, but unreadable face surrounded by ludicrously youthful, bouncy honey-coloured hair. She always has a little Portuguese love-in with him. ‘Mmmn mmmmn’ – they are nose-to-nose – ‘Meu docinho de coco … mais fofo.’

  I’d like to sit in silence, but the others, who speak no English, are all busy so there’s no escaping her. ‘The dog is gone? Seis days? You don’ know where is he?’

  I hear the rustling of the leaves as Wolfy runs up and down, howling. I think of the imaginary man with the limp who is becoming more and more real in my mind. I see the corpse of a dog curled up under a bush. I see Wolfy peering through the gates of Waterlow Park.

  ‘He cannot hear you or see you but his …’ she struggles to find the English word, ‘âmago, you know? Open your heart. Let your heart find him. His âmago will find your âmago. The dog is a survivor. Now, you want tongs or brush?’ Eh? ‘The hair,’ she says, pointing a comb at me. ‘You want loose waves or big curls?’

  Walking home, I hear the crack of the evening’s first fireworks and sing again the Scooby song from Waterlow: ‘Woofy Woofy Woo, where are you?’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Here on the sofa to call Anna Twinney. I think this was Wolfy’s favourite spot. I’ll be sitting on skin cells and microorganisms that lived on Wolfy’s body, a tiny ecosystem that lives on despite his being gone. Here it is easy to connect with him, like when I climbed in his nest, but less mental.

  I slept in my grandmother’s empty bed the night after she died. I hated the smell of death and old age but I wanted to be close to her residue, to breathe it all in and not waste a molecule, so I slept on the deflated air mattress on her death bed, the sort with bars and sides and electronic positioning, which had been moved into her room when she came home to die.

  My aunt walked in the following morning to find me curled up like a child in a cot and had screamed in alarm. ‘Oh my God, it’s you. You gave me such a fright, I thought you were Mary.’

  ‘No, Mary’s gone, Granny’s gone.’ We had watched the matriarch slowly die and by the time she was gone it was like we’d been weaned off her presence. I was not relieved, I was just ready for it. I made jokes about stealing her morphine with the funeral director’s assistant while his boss and the vicar talked to my mother and uncle about immediate arrangements for her corpse and soul respectively. I sang like an ebullient chorister at the funeral. I beamed as I read the grim Victorian death poem that Will and I shared at the funeral, while my cousin broke down and couldn’t finish his. No Robbie Williams’s ‘Angels’ for Granny. She got Matthew Arnold’s ‘Requiescat’. RIP. It was time to go; her meat body had failed her. Near to the end, the only writing she did was binary. Filling the crosswords she had once done so quickly with only two characters, 1 and 0. Turning the pages of the newspaper without reading. She stopped talking altogether. Her eyes closed. I never grieved, or cried; even at her graveside, as my mother sobbed I did not.

  That’s why the dog going has hit me like a madness. He’s still vital and alive in my mind. I don’t have the inevitable misfortune, yet, of comparing this loss to a greater one.

  The sitting room is usually lit with lamps. I don’t like the miserable one-dimensional light of the overhead, but lately I don’t care. I snap the ceiling light on and sit down. I call Anna Twinney at the precise time she requested and sitting in Wolfy’s spot, looking towards the fire and the bookcases either side. ‘Are you sitting down, are you comfortable?’

  The way she speaks is plain, practical and she has a slightly hard intonation, stern, perhaps, confident to the point of egotistical. She fills me in on the thousands of readings she has done, the successes and the experience she has. Not just horses and dogs, elephants, sloths and anteaters too. It is all to preface this point: ‘You need to know, if I make contact with him he may or may not be alive. If he has only recently died I cannot be sure, as the spirit lives on for a few days after the body has died. He may be in transition, you see.’

  I don’t really see; it feels like a Get Out of Jail Free card for psychics. I feel foolish for paying money for this. ‘There’s more – lost animals are often frightened and disorientated, the further they’ve run the more confused they are. It can be hard to get any clarity from them.’

  ‘How do you communicate with him?’ I ask.

  ‘He will communicate to me in images, visions, body feelings, tell me if he is hungry, thirsty, in pain, and it’s up to me to interpret them for you. I’m just a translator.’

  OK, understood.

  ‘Now, Kate, Wolfy is obviously very precious to you. Not all dogs, like not all horses, are the same. Some dogs are very shallow, all they need is to be walked, peed, fed; others help us evolve as people and see life differently.’

  ‘I feel that Wolfy saved me,’ I say. ‘I don’t know if anyone really understands how much. Maybe my boyfriend does. He’s been a great dog, he has brought love and peace and back to our lives.’

  ‘Understood, absolutely. I do a lot of work with Gulf War veterans and it’s the same with horses. Some have the ability to cure veterans of PTSD, some are just normal, even annoying, like some people are.

  ‘But there’s just this one other thing you need to be ready for. Some dogs run because they want to leave, and some might bolt in shock or something, but once they are on the move, they like it. They don’t want to come home. Be ready for that.’

  ‘I’m ready.’

  ‘Just try to connect with Wolfy yourself. Think about him. I need to ask you not to speak unless I ask you a specific question or you could break my connection with him. I am going to go quiet for a minute. I am shutting off all my senses to I can open myself to him.’

&
nbsp; The distinct sounds of the city outside slow, blur and muffle together into one solid form that cloaks the windows like lagging. The room is changing. I can see the light, dull and granular, sitting around my physical body while my spirit scratches at the door trying to get out to find my soulmate.

  She begins. The line goes quiet.

  It stays quiet for maybe five minutes. I breathe, I wait.

  With a sharp sucking intake of air she says, ‘I’ve got him and … he’s alive. He’s definitely alive. Oh isn’t that great. I’m asking him to describe his home, I want to make sure this is right. I’m seeing a lot of stairs. Stairs up to the house, stairs inside, a lot of steep stairs. You can speak – is this right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m asking if he likes it here.’ More quiet, then: ‘He’s telling me he likes lying somewhere looking along a corridor with stairs at the end.’

  I think of his spot in the bathroom where he likes to lie on the cool floor, away from the action but with a good view of it and, ideally, with a pile of smelly washing for him to rest his head on. There at the furthest end of the flat, he has a prime view up the steps in the kitchen, and the steep wooden stairs to bed.

  ‘He’s allowed to sleep on your bed. That is his favourite place. It’s a very big bed. That’s where he wants to be now.’

  I think of how still and empty the bed is at night as we both turn over to sleep. The conversation when we bought it went, ‘Let’s get the biggest bed they’ve got.’

  ‘Goes without saying,’ Charlie said.

  ‘He’s not with anyone. He is alone. He is in a very busy, urban place, hundreds of legs passing him by. There is a strip of shops and a lot of brown and black faces around. He’s staying hidden away, peeping out. He is staying away from people. He is not with anyone. He’s hiding. He wants you to know that he is OK but he doesn’t understand why you haven’t come for him yet. He’s frightened.’