by Kate Spicer
When I scrolled through the lost dog stories, it was plain that dogs often turned up dead on train tracks or in canals. If he’s followed these routes, has he survived? The questions are infinite. I let them in one ear and out the other as the next unknown shuttles up the queue.
Back at Will’s my nephew’s birthday party is in full swing. There are kids aeroplaning around the house and a woman called Snakey Sue draping eight-year-olds in fat boa constrictors. I had forgotten this, and have no card or present for him. Normally when I come here all I want is a drink and a good gossip. What I really want this time is decent paper map of London.
Will makes a good show of looking before I let him off the hook. ‘You get on and enjoy the party. I’m going to the pub to meet this guy.’
‘Not sure “enjoy” is the correct word. Old Snakey Sue here seems a little too relaxed with her snakey pals.’
If I can’t bring a bit of joy to proceedings then I am extraneous. Quietly I bugger off to meet the midnight jogger at the Palmerston up the road, on my way out dropping a freshly smelly T-shirt from my stash, and hiding a pair of pants among it for luck, in the pile of Wolfy-luring smells outside Will’s front door.
Christ I’m tired.
Charlie mum’s words, ‘You can get another dog,’ are gnawing at the back of my mind. I don’t want another dog. It’s way too early for such talk. It’s made me quite angry, in fact. I stride on up the road looking ahead, fists plunged into my pocket, in no way ready to give up the fight.
If I have to – and it looks like I will – I will seek on secretly.
As soon as I get to the Palmerston I fall on my phone’s cracked screen and try to put together a theory about where Wolfy is. I draw mental lines along train lines and towpaths. Try to see patterns in what sightings we have had. I know there is some logic somewhere but my brain can’t see it. It’s just my gut, really, my gut and the sightings that keep my faith alive.
I’m itching for a drink. I hope this jogger character fancies one too.
‘Are you Kate?’ a tall, grey-haired but vital-looking man calls from the next table. It’s the midnight jogger. He has been there all the time. In all the returning to his Twitter page over recent days, wondering if he is mad or, since Moonieman’s outing, even real, I have only ever seen him dressed for ultra-endurance pursuits. I didn’t recognise him without his wetsuit and swimming hat.
‘Would you like a drink?’ I ask. He orders a green tea. I urge him too keenly to have a proper drink and he says he is teetotal. When someone is about to go out of their way to find your lost dog it’s probably best to appear sober and serious, I think, standing waiting at the bar I repeat to myself, ‘order tea, order tea,’ while longing for the soothing mallet to the skull of a dose of thick jammy pub red. ‘Merlot. Just a small one.’ The bartender says the smallest glass they do is a medium, 175ml. I nod, too tired and distracted to quibble for a 125ml. I won’t have my favourite pedant’s argument about the logical impossibility of a medium glass of wine being the smallest. How can I ever moderate my drinking if the first glass is big enough to get me on the way to pissed? As I expected, I guzzle the wine too fast and the combination of wretchedness, no food and alcohol hits me like a sledgehammer. I fast feel blessedly squiffy already.
‘My wife isn’t happy,’ he admits. ‘She says I shouldn’t be getting involved in other people’s lives.’
I wonder what Charlie would do if I started hunting for stranger’s dogs? In gratitude that the jogger’s absurd levels of altruism exist, I spill my guts to him about how people are giving up on the hunt and my family are telling me to stop looking. ‘Why are you going to so much effort to help me?’
‘Because I lost my dog once in the park. It wasn’t for long but I didn’t know that at the time. And what I remember of it is feeling so desperate and asking people to help me and no one did. No one cared. I will never forget that feeling of helplessness.’
My phone is ringing. It’s Charlie. ‘Where are you?’
His voice is tense with stress and barely disguised desperation. With an artificial brightness I answer, hoping to deflect any expectation that I come home. ‘With that nice man Brett. He’s got a great plan. I’ll be back soon, I promise.’ I put the phone down. I’ll deal with smoothing things over later.
So what is his plan? We have yet to discuss it.
It’s complex and tests my stressed brain with its logistics. He takes all these fetid clothes and sets up a nocturnal nest of smells and enticing carnivorous foods within Parkland Walk, where, he is convinced, ‘He will go because it’s by far the safest and quietest place a dog could live, plus you have the sighting there last week.’ Wolfy will follow the scent. There I will set up a number of CCTV cameras that will allow us to spot the dog.
I don’t get it, which I am not about to tell him. Instead I give him the edited highlights of Anna Twinney’s reading – the dark skins, the high footfall at Arsenal: ‘Wasn’t there a match yesterday?’
The antipathy, or disgust, that he feels about the psychic information shows on his face. ‘I’m not interested in that.’
‘Even if he is there, won’t the foxes get the food before Wolfy does?’
‘All scavenger and carnivore animals will be attracted there, but the scent will be so strong that eventually Wolfy will make his way there. I’ll just keep buying meat if I have to.’
‘Oh. I’ll pay,’ I say, wondering how.
I’m not sure about it as a plan. But to reject support of such a significant level seems counterintuitive.
Charlie rings again. There’s a desperation in his voice that I have never heard before. ‘Come back now. Please. I don’t feel good about you meeting this stranger.’
‘I’m with him now, he’s nice, don’t worry.’
‘Come back now. Come back, Kate.’ The desperation in his voice ramps up.
‘I will. Soon.’ I put the phone down.
He rings again. I switch the phone to silent.
‘So why do you figure he’s on Parkland Walk and not somewhere else?’
‘It’s the sightings, there’s a pattern …’ He pulls out a plastic document wallet containing a printout from Google Maps and we both settle over it as he shows me his theories.
‘You see, I’ve been thinking about the routes he could be taking that we as humans can’t see.’
My phone vibrates. Charlie’s mum. I ignore it. As soon as it has gone to voicemail, she rings again. And again. I put my phone in my bag.
When the midnight jogger gets up to leave I hand him the bag of dirty laundry. It’s like we are doing a shady deal. He does not smirk or make a single joke about anything.
Charlie’s mother has rung ten times in the hour I was at the Palmerston. As I walk out I brace myself for the call. ‘What are you doing?’ Her voice is shrill with fury. ‘Stop these mad schemes and go home now to your boyfriend. He is sick with worry. If you go on like this you will end up in the loony bin. You are losing your mind. Wolfy was lovely but he was an animal, Kate. Go home to your boyfriend, now. You’re going to lose him. You’re making yourself ill.’
‘I am, I am.’ I smile as I say it, laughing with nerves, or am I laughing like a mad woman in a Victorian novel? ‘I am going home now.’
I walk in the door and Charlie has roast potatoes and a big rib of beef cooked and a bottle of claret already open. I don’t think I have ever seen him so vulnerable. My angry man is utterly exposed, truthful; for once his pain is not hidden behind pragmatism or anger. He is pleased to see me. He holds out a slotted spoon. ‘Will you make the gravy?’
He loved the dog too. We have both lost something that was precious only to us.
‘Oh God.’ I move towards him and hold him tightly. ‘I’m so lucky to have you. I love you.’
‘You too Fox, it’s all right.’ We stand in the kitchen, me leaning against his chest, him stroking my hair. Two scratchy, odd, hurt humans in a rare moment of straightforward love. I kiss him and we say nothing, not a word,
about the dog.
He has lit the fire. We eat and talk. I am ravenous. The beef is delicious. My enthusiasm for everything is abnormally bright. I try to tame it. ‘This is great, thank you. The wine is so good.’
‘I dropped a bit extra.’
‘I can tell. It’s brilliant. Something a bit …’ I take another sip and pretentiously wash it a round my mouth like a pompous twit at a wine-tasting. ‘Mmmn, what is it?’
‘Erm, is it grapes?’ Charlie says it in a dullard’s voice. It’s an old standard we two use a lot when I’m being a wine ponce.
‘It’s sort of salty and smoky.’
Ostensibly, this is normality.
I put the plate on the floor. No dog comes over to try to lick it. My mobile phone rings in the kitchen and I go to answer it.
‘Hello.’ A child’s voice, gruff, faint, early teens maybe. ‘Are you the person that’s lost their dog coz I seen it.’
‘Where?’
‘It was lookin’ out under a bin, I saw its eyes.’
‘Where? Where? Which street?’
‘Near Brecknock Road, I don’t know.’
‘Which street?!’
‘I can’t remember. I seen your poster on the estate.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘Colley House on the estate.’
‘Was the dog near your place?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Is this a wind-up?’ I say it gently so as not to scare him away.
‘No, I seen it.’ There are no manic giggles. ‘He looked frightened.’
I believe him.
I come off the phone.
‘Who was that?’
Brecknock Road is behind Will’s house. ‘No one, one of the dog-walker lot, wanting to know news.’
I don’t say anything, I don’t send a tweet. I act like nothing has happened. Inside hope springs round my body like a rubber ball. The heavy sludge of longing is in every cell of my body, weighing me down, but there’s something else. There’s more hope than I’ve ever felt in my life, and there’s tomorrow.
I tell Charlie I love him again. ‘Love you too, Fox. What are you doing this week?’ I can feel his relief at the safety of having the routine conversations of six years together.
‘I’ve got a lot of writing to do, I’m going to work at the London Library. You?’
All the experiences of the last nine days concertina into one powerful surge of energy. When we go to bed I lie there sending messages to Wolfy. Stay safe, stay warm. I’m coming. I see him curled up, peeping out under his shaggy brows from his spot under the wheelie bin somewhere near my brother’s house. Stay there, stay safe, stay warm, don’t die Woofles. Tomorrow.
In the morning I pack to ‘go to the library’, meaning I put my first pee of the day into an old Evian bottle and tie a few pairs of my and Charlie’s smelly socks to a long cane that usually holds up the honeysuckle in the scrappy yard at the bottom of the steep metal steps. I take the tube to Tufnell Park and I walk the streets behind Will’s house.
I go into every deep dark corner, I step down into every basement entrance to a flat. At the top of Corinne Road there is a deserted house and I walk around every corner of it, and take care to squat and pee, just to ram the point home.
Why didn’t I do this before, just fill the streets around Will’s with scent that could draw him back to me in his blind and confusing world of smells.
As I travel around these maybe six streets and the estate where the boy said he lived, I squirt my scent on the wall at dog nose height, dragging the cane behind me and looping back to the gate of Will’s place. Wolfy has been here enough times, he knows the smells. He’s near here. I know it.
Walking down Corinne Road, I bump into Will on his bike on the street. ‘What are you doing? I thought you were at work,’ I say.
‘Bah, I don’t need to be there til ten-ish. I’ve just been out shaking some of the cat’s food,’ he says, holding up a jar of brown beans. He looks down at the near-empty Evian bottle. ‘Is that pee?’
I wave the sock at him. ‘Scent trails!’
Will cycles on and I carry on round the streets alone with my wretched faith.
At 10.30, thereabouts, Charlie calls. Someone has called him to say they have the dog.
‘It’s probably a con but I’m on my way there now. Do you want to come and check it out? Can you get here, from the library?’
He gives me the address, a garage no more than a mile from where I am now. I flap briefly. Should I walk, or wait to spot a black cab, try an Uber. I try Uber, the wheel turns on the screen as the app promises to find my driver. I can’t wait. I can’t rely on a black cab passing. My heart is beating so weirdly I feel nauseous. I drop the stick, socks and Evian bottle in the first bin I see and start to run to the minicab office in the parade of shops by the Irish pub on Dartmouth Park Hill. The Lost Dog posters are still there in the newsagent, the barber and on the glass that I am talking through. ‘Do you have any cars, do you know the M&A Coachworks on Highgate Road?’
‘You can walk it in ten minutes.’ The woman’s phlegmy response echoes the strong smell of stale cigarette smoke drifting through the hatch.
‘I’m in a hurry.’
‘Alright love. Outside. White Toyota.’
A driver is waiting on the kerb and I jump into the grey synthetic pod of body smells and Magic Tree fragrance with a suggestion of illicit Silk Cut. The same type of chariot that had shuttled me round London at dawn in my partying days was taking me to my saviour. Maybe.
Minutes later I meet Charlie as he jumps out of the car. He is confused: ‘How did you get here so quickly from the West End?’
‘I’ll explain later.’
The garage is in a series of railway arches and it’s not clear where we should go. There’s a security guy at the entrance. ‘We’re here about a dog?’ I say hopefully.
‘No dog is here. Do you have an appointment with someone?’
There’s Porsches everywhere, packed in the small spaces like cattle in a truck. We keep walking on with the security guy cautiously escorting us, to the back of the first arch and a reception desk with two suited ladies sitting by telephones. I stand there with my hands in my pockets. I’m wearing a different coat, one I haven’t worn since the dog ran away. There is a small bone-shaped biscuit in one pocket. I turn it over and over with my fingers. ‘You have our dog here. A man rang us about a dog.’
‘You’re here to see a man about a dog,’ says the older of the two, harsh-looking with her solid helmet hair, cynical. ‘No dogs here Madam. You’ve got the wrong place.’ It’s a wind-up. I can’t take it. I should have known after all the hoaxes and false alarms. ‘Do you want to try the pub next door, maybe?’
I remember – the Southampton Arms; I’d stuck a poster there the other day. Drunken hoaxers. How dare I get hopeful.
Then a man emerges from a doorway leading to the next arch. ‘Yeah, come with me. I think it’s this way.’ Charlie and I follow, through these immaculate white shining arches crammed with a jigsaw of Porsches, pink, neon green, black, old ones, new ones, half a Porsche, a Porsche jacked up two metres above the ground, punctuated by the odd Bentley. We emerge from the arches into a small rhombus of tarmac with a drop 20 metres on one side to the train tracks. The overland train rumbles above our heads. Over and over, I turn the biscuit.
Sound warps and bends in my ears. When I’d sat speaking to Anna Twinney the world shrank around my shoulders and it feels like this now. The hope is gone, the yearning is gone. Time stops. I am pure energy. Pure love. Outside I can hear the twittering sound of my own voice, pointless and polite. Inside it is like meditation in a state of high arousal. And the biscuit turns through my fingers. ‘Where should we go?’ asks Charlie. A polite tic because, short of launching ourselves onto the train tracks, there is only forward.
We weave through the expensive cars, trashed and broken, a red Carrera with its back completely stoved in, the rear end of a vivid blue 911. In places we ha
ve to turn sideways, they are so close together. Blokes in liveried overalls turn as we walk by. A couple of them fall in and follow us. The tarmac dips into a huge brick garage, free-standing, open, tiled and bright white. To the right of us a thick bank of brambles. The biscuit dances on my fingertips. A cluster of men, white overalls rolled down to their hips, are waiting in a semicircle, arms folded, serious.
‘Where is he?’
We walk into the garage and turn left. There, sitting in the corner with electric flex tied round his scuffed brown collar, is a grubby, wide-eyed, polite shaggy lurcher.
‘Here you go. Here he is.’
It is Wolfy.
The dog limps over squeaking and feebly letting his tail wap his whole today. Charlie and I both fall to our knees. Wolfy burrows deep into my body, making tiny bleeping squeaks. I fold around him, my forehead on the top of his skull. He smells deeply richly terrible. ‘Oh my God. Wolfy. Wolfy. My boy. Wolfy. Oh my God.’
What is time now. I can’t feel it moving, I can only feel relief and love. I rest back on my heels and Wolfy goes to Charlie, his whole emaciated body moving in a ripple of physical delight.
And after a few minutes Wolfy walks over to one of the guys in overalls and leans very firmly against his leg.
‘Did you find him?’
‘Yeah, yeah I did,’ he says, stroking the sides of the dog’s ears.
‘He’s saying thank you to you.’ I want to bark, howl and cry with happiness.
Another of the mechanics says, ‘Don’t think we need to check whether they’re the owners. I’ve never seen a dog so happy.’
Wolfy comes back to me. I look at him. He is thin – the arc from his ribs up to his tummy and down around his haunches is exaggerated – but he doesn’t look awful. We’ve probably overfed him a tad but in the circumstances that doesn’t seem such a bad thing; it meant he survived. We walk out of the garage back to the tarmac. As soon as we are clear of the building Wolfy lets out a long thick stream of dark brown pee. He doesn’t cock his leg, he simply stands and lets it go. ‘Hey, don’t worry,’ says one of the mechanics, anticipating my apology.