by Kate Spicer
Anna asks if I want to say anything to him. I hadn’t expected this. ‘Be a good boy. Find a human, Wolfy. Find a friendly human. Come home. Good boy. I Love You.’
I feel stupid.
The call is coming to a close. She checks I have transferred the money to the right account. And ends with the words, ‘Get out there and find your boy.’
I notice I have written down everything she said in my awful shorthand, yet I have no memory of moving a muscle.
Dazed, I sit for a while staring at the wall and then I get up, mechanically dress, put on some make-up and leave for the bloody Fish place.
‘I saw your dog on Tuesday, please call me.’
I hurtle off the tube before it goes underground at Paddington and call the number. ‘Hello. Hello! It’s me. Yes, it’s Wolfy’s owner.’
‘It was on Hampstead Lane by Kenwood House. He was running all over the road, zigzagging and weaving through the traffic so fast no one could stop him.’ A lurcher is good at turning, I think, in a flash of pride. ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t contact you sooner but I’ve only seen your poster now.’ Which way was he going? ‘I don’t know for sure. Down,’ she says. ‘Maybe down towards Parliament Hill. The bottom end of the Heath on the Highgate side.’
‘Swain’s Lane, do you mean? Could he have been headed down towards Swain’s Lane, round the cemetery, because someone thought they saw him there on Wednesday.’
‘Oh yes, definitely, that’s the direction he was headed, there or Highgate Road. Is that helpful?’ she says. I pant words to the affirmative: ‘God yes.’
‘I hope so, and good luck finding him. It’s so good to be able to tell you this.’
I can’t stop saying thank you. ‘Thank you, thank you.’ I say it until I am out of breath.
It’s no distance. Wolfy can rack up a mile in ten minutes at a relaxed trot.
Late now, I rush past the windows of shops for the rich. Mayfair: past expensive art, the finest porcelain at Thomas Goode, Rolls-Royce, Harry’s Bar, Sautter for fat-cat cigars, Mark’s Club, Tim’s flat, jewellery, Celine and Goyard, the French trunk-maker where a couple of dog bowls in a leather carry case cost £5,000. There is nothing in these windows that I would trade for my dog. Not even the £10 million Cy Twombly painting sitting in the window at Phillips. No amount of money in the world could make me stop wanting him back.
My spirit is on an astral plane floating through Kenwood. It can smell the autumn, hear the crunch of dry leaves and gravel; it’s moving across the Holly Lodge Estate, the rustle of the leaves towards the sanctuary of Highgate Cemetery, via a small hole in the wall on the corner of Swain’s Lane. It moves like a wraith among the graves under the dark of the trees and emerges to peep through the gates of Waterlow Park. I am briefly with him. Emma Pratt is right: my dog is alive. ‘Hide yourself away tight Woofs. Don’t be afraid of the fireworks. I am coming …’
Full of longing and pain, mingled with adrenaline and the metaphysical ecstasy that he might be safe and alive, I arrive at Sexy Fish. Like we’re in a decompression chamber, two handsome doormen in peaked caps and frock coats open two heavy gold doors one after the other and I burst from the bubble of magical thinking into something else entirely. The roar of a packed and popular restaurant.
There’s a lot of faces in. Minor royals, major-league restaurant critics – two aren’t even reviewing – Clauds, with a wild-looking and (whispered) very collectible female artist and two imperious, snobby gallerists, Hollywood actor at four o’ clock, retired supermodel at two. Billionaire family get-together at midnight and, ooh, what’s this, in the far corner at about eleven on the clock there’s a major famous-guy alert on table one, the hottest, darkest, most discreet table in the house, where he is sitting glued to a famous heiress. Other women sit at the table but it’s her he is close to. An affair. Without a doubt. She’s half his age but when did that ever stop a guy. So the whispers are true. His marriage must be over. All these are educated hunches. What is absolutely certain, though, is that they’re sniffing coke at the table. It’s pathetic how obvious as they bend down under the table and spoon the white powder into their noses. Do they think we can’t see? What a car crash of entitlement and stupidity.
This perch I have at a countertop by the open kitchen is an absolute winner.
As the general manager, Paul, passes, I mouth, ‘Thanks, great spot’ and we chat for a minute before he has to glide off in his Saint Laurent tuxedo and Givenchy patent leather gentleman’s opera pumps to hover and swoop over his 150 diners. A PR powerhouse walks past me. ‘Do I know him’, asks Paul the GM. ‘I don’t; he’s too important for the likes of me’, I say, in a thick Bristol accent for comic effect. Charm radiating out of every cell and through his sparkling white teeth, Paul says, ‘No one is more important than you, Kate.’ We both laugh. We know it isn’t true but somehow it still works and makes everyone he says it to feel incredibly special. ‘You know what, he lost his dog once, perhaps you should talk to him.’
I’d never have imagined this guy had a pet; he’s cold-blooded, I assumed. He won’t talk to me for longer than 20 seconds. I have had interactions with him before and I think the word ‘deign’ describes his attitude to conversation with anyone less than an authentic somebody. I ask him quickly, before he rushes off to give continental kisses to all the editors, critics and movie stars, ‘How was losing a dog for you?’
‘Like losing a child minus the helicopters and press conferences,’ he says, and walks off.
I go to join Clauds at her table. She’s in a good spot, in between the billionaire family outing and the retired supermodel. Her friends all shuffle round and I squeeze in between her and the bonkers artist, who is wearing an enormous pair of Gucci sunglasses. ‘Can you see me through those?’ I ask.
She goes straight in with a hug. You have to love the Yanks for the emotional displays. ‘I hear you lost your puppy, you poor baby girl, you must be mad suffering right now honey.’ I nod. She tells me how much she loves her own dog and I nod some more. I don’t want to talk about it. Instead I whisper to her and Clauds about the very famous guy and the heiress, nose down on table one.
‘Not any more, doll,’ she says, and we watch as Paul sedately walks very famous guy to the door, leaving his coterie of women to sit wondering whether they really want to give up the hottest table in London tonight.
They wave over a waiter and order more drinks. Clearly they aren’t that bothered that their elderly coke-sniffing pal has exceedingly discreetly been kicked out.
We’re all enjoying this delicious moment of restaurant theatre when my phone rings. It’s a woman and I’m struggling to hear her. I get my head right under the tabletop and what she’s saying starts to become clear. ‘My friend saw your dog this morning. Someone was trying to catch him but he ran off.’ I ask her to repeat what she knows several times, then write the address she gives me in my notepad and sit back up.
‘The dog. Someone saw him.’
‘Go. Just go. Take my driver. I’ll get a taxi home,’ says Clauds. ‘He’s round the corner, run, I’ll tell him you’re coming.’
We can redistribute the wealth tomorrow. Tonight I need a chauffeur to help me find Wolfy.
As I get in the car Ernie starts to make sympathetic noises. ‘Sorry to hear about dog, Kate.’ His English is good – better certainly than my Tagalog – but the problem is he talks quietly, in a muffled murmur, and as I paw and scroll around maps on my phone trying to locate this Harvist Estate and put it in context with all the other Wolfy sightings, Ernie’s voice is just a soft steady sound coming from the driver’s seat.
It appears to be in the shadow of Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium, next to a train line. It’s highly likely that this sighting is real. The Harvist Estate is just off Hornsey Road, which is the last confirmed place he was seen on Saturday and miles, I reflect mournfully, from the Hampstead Lane sighting on Tuesday or the Waterlow Park one this morning.
Ernie drives, and mutters to me, while I rock b
ack and forth between the maps on a small screen in the dashboard and the ones on my shattered old phone. How close is this place to where he was last seen? I call Charlie and he says he is coming; I call my brother, who says he’s had a drink. ‘Don’t worry, Will, I’ll collect you.’
Anna said a lot of people, a busy place; she said there were hundreds of legs passing by him. She said there was a row of shops and lots of dark-skinned people around. Swain’s Lane and Holly Lodge are enclaves of white wealth and privilege. You don’t see so many dark faces on the street round there.
As we drive onto Camden Road, the main road round the back of Will’s, I settle down enough to hear what Ernie is trying to tell me in between my directions to Will’s front door. ‘Idolatry, Kate.’ He keeps repeating my name. ‘Dogs are not meant to have the human love. Kate, you should not love your dog so much. I hope you find him but turn to the Lord, a dog’ … mutter mutter … ‘You know Kate you need to find real happiness in your life.’
Religious orthodoxy and its dislike of dogs is something I’d only ever ascribed to Muslims and stuffed away, my ‘virtue-signalling wet’ afraid of the implied Islamophobic overtones. Ernie is redressing the balance and reminding me that Christianity is pretty babyish too.
Will jumps in the car, bringing the brash energy of the street into this hermetically sealed pod of comfort and wealth, and Jesus. His enquiring look says, What the hell you doing in a limo; he actually says, ‘Sweet ride. Pay rise?’
Ernie stops talking about dogs and God and drives in silence for the remaining five minutes, which takes us in a fairly straight line from Will’s to the Harvist Estate.
I shower Ernie with the usual effusive insincere thanks for the ride and the interesting sermon. Will has already left the car when Ernie starts to tell me it is too dangerous for me to be here. I ignore him and dive out after my brother.
Will looks up and around at the four lumpen, grubby and cheap-looking tower blocks. I am already scoping for corners and dark places where a dog could hide. He asks me, ‘Where do we start?’
I don’t know. I’m grateful he is here. We give each other a brief hug and set off on our own ways, walking and calling around the concrete paths that snake around the 23-storey buildings. I wander and call, looking under bushes and back to giant wheelie bins. Anyone I see, I stop. I don’t care.
Will and I, and Charlie, just arrived from west London, briefly convene around a short strip of shops inside the estate’s boundaries. The young man working in the corner shop is just leaving as I approach him, but he unlocks the shop and puts a poster up without questioning it, and says he’ll give one to the chemist tomorrow. The kid working in Domino’s Pizza says no.
‘Why?’
‘It’s the rules, head office.’
Pointlessly, I rail against a corporate authority that doesn’t allow a local shop to put a missing-dog poster. I look around us at these bare containers for housing people who can’t afford to live in this city. ‘And some corporate turd in Buttfuck American Midwest is going to make your decisions about what is right, and what is wrong for this community here in your corner of London?’
‘I don’t know mate but it’s the rule, I could lose my job.’
I kick the blue chair.
‘Sorry, mate, she’s a bit upset,’ says Charlie, patting my arm and steering me out of the shop.
‘Kate, that was ridiculous. You’re like the vigilante who only beats up OAPs and kids.’
I go back into the shop and apologise. ‘Yeah, no problem. Yeah. Hope you find your dog, yeah.’
We look around together for a while, poking our noses in the gardens of the low-rise houses that surround the estate on the Hornsey Road side before heading back to these blocks that look like something Khrushchev knocked up with prefabricated Soviet Lego. The paths between the blocks are empty save a few small clusters of young men leaning on walls and lamp-posts. One group wearing rock band T-shirts are disappointingly white – perhaps he isn’t here – and stoned off their gourds, nattering at us in gibberish while swigging on giant cans of cheap caffeinated fizzy pop called ROCKST★R. The next guys are a mix of black and Asian-looking, possibly stoned too, or just very relaxed. They’re polite. I can feel Will and Charlie thinking how pointless this is. We move away from the basketball court. I look at a cluster of wet leaves in one corner and wonder, Has my dog pissed here, have his paws come this way?
A neat woman with a tote bag, businesslike, returning from work, stops to listen to my lost-dog query. She is black; Anna’s rubric has formed in me a heightened awareness of people’s skin colour.
Nodding and listening, polite and interested, she interrupts me when I show her the flyer. ‘There’s a man in there got a dog like that,’ she says. ‘He’s not had it long, I saw him with it the other day. He usually only has one dog, but he had two, and this other, new one, well, he was struggling to control it.’
She readily agrees to take us to the man’s front door and we follow her into Citizen House.
As we climb the stairs behind her the atmosphere in the search party becomes more adrenalised; we walk up two flights of an open stairwell up to the second floor, where we press through two glass doors, and she points to the flat directly in front. ‘There. Good luck.’
We stand in a wide corridor with old shiny red lino on the floor and wooden doors spaced 20 feet apart along the wall. My first thought is what an immense waste of space this hallway is, given how poky the flats inside must be. No light shows under the door. Charlie and Will are mumbling to each other, joking nervously about getting the crap beaten out of them. There’s an energy now that only comes from the feeling of being in danger.
The hunt for our dog has brought me to a stranger’s door in a north London tower block at eleven on a Thursday night. I rap on the door. Gentle at first. Then sharper and harder. After five minutes a tall man, big as in strong, not fat, pulls the door open with an irritable ‘Yes!’
His salt-and-pepper hair is awry and the skin under his two-day beard crumpled with sleep. I go into a genteel and effusive round of apologies and explanations, during which he looks remarkably like he’d like to smash us all on the tops of our heads like boiled eggs.
During this exchange I can see his dog asleep in a basket behind him. It’s a skinnier version of Wolfy, definitely a lurcher. His wife comes to the door of what must be the bedroom to ask what’s going on. ‘I heard you had two dogs,’ I say. ‘Could we see your other dog?’
‘I don’t have two dogs.’
I press on, ‘One of your neighbours …’
This denial passes back and forth, with me dropping an obsequious apology here and there to avoid him coming out and punching our lights out. I implore him, as a fellow dog owner, to understand that I just need to know for peace of mind that my dog is definitely not with him.
‘Tell her about the other dog,’ the woman calls from back inside the bedroom.
‘I had another dog like that one but I got rid of it last week. It was no good … I gave it back.’
‘Can you tell us where the dog is now?’
‘I want you to go. You wake me up, get me from my bed, disturb my wife.’ The conversation, on his part anyway, is drawing impatiently to a close.
The woman calls from the bedroom, ‘Good luck finding your dog.’
The door closes.
‘Fuck! Did anyone notice if he had a limp?’ I say.
Our detective skills having been found lacking, we turn back to the wider estate. Charlie and Will make noises about going but I can’t bear to leave. I know the dog is here. His fur brushes against the skin of my imagination. Anna’s words, ‘he doesn’t understand why you haven’t come for him yet’ ring in my head.
Roaming beyond the estate into a London-brick development of modern townhouses, I wander aimlessly, calling and calling between choking on tears. A young black guy, maybe 16, comes towards me on a mountain bike and I stop him. Has he seen this dog? I wave a flyer under his startled face. He�
�s perfectly polite – ‘I ain’t seen it, sorry’ – and he goes to pedal forward and away from me. I clock the crumpled mound of tenners spilling from his inside pocket. ‘Take this, please.’ I thrust a flyer in his hand.
The boys are right. We have to go home. I walk back towards the exit of Citizen Road where Wolfy was, allegedly, last seen down by the railway at the junction with Hornsey Road.
When we drop Will home I get out and give him a huge hug. ‘You OK?’ he says.
‘Mmmn.’ I give a non-specific response to his shoulder. ‘Send my love to the kids.’
Back in the car driving west, I keep tapping Google Maps, postulating theories. Someone wise on Twitter told me that in order to find his way back to where he first ran from, he’d circle around and around until his nose took him back. My eyes are itching with weariness and I’m finding it hard to match logic with the variety of theories, metaphysical and solidly practical alike. ‘If we add up all the places he’s been seen they are all within about a mile radius of Will’s house. Perhaps he’s moving back and forth between the west and east sides of their place.’
‘I can’t believe he’d want to stay there.’ Charlie says this with a shiver.
‘But maybe that guy really did have him. There’s meant to be loads of rabbits around Kenwood. Maybe he was hunting with him up there and Wolfy escaped this morning.’
‘The only thing I know for sure is I’m not going back to that place again.’
Maybe I will wait to tell him about Anna.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Charlie sits on the sofa and I jump up and down in front of him to adequately act out the drama of the Twinney conversation. I don’t necessarily believe her telepathy or clairvoyance with the dog is a fact, but I have added her reading to the phone calls and the sightings and I feel surer than ever that he is alive.