by Kate Spicer
‘What happened? Where did you find him?’
‘I got in early and I was just getting changed when I heard this howling. It was so faint I couldn’t work out where it was coming from. I ignored it for a bit, but it sounded so sad and low, it was pathetic, you know. So I came back here, looking up and down, and then I saw his face right back there.’ He points deep into the thicket of brambles beyond the high steel railings with their ‘Property of Network Rail’ sign. These are keep-out railings in no uncertain terms, six foot high, spaced barely an inch apart and with razor-sharp points at the top.
‘I thought it was a fox at first but I could see his face was white. He looked shocked and scared. I told him I’d get him out, and went off to get a drill. When I came back he was at the railings, trying to scratch his way through, digging and biting. The railings are close together, dug deep into the ground, but there is one steel post hanging loose from its screws and pulled to one side. He squeezed through by himself. As soon as he was through he came and leaned on me, it really felt like he was saying thank you. Yeah, it really did. He was so happy to see me, you know, and then seeing him with you …’
He’s a quiet guy, soft-spoken.
Another of the mechanics, stacked and muscular with a shaven head: ‘It’s nice to see a happy ending. We lost our dog last week, he was old, he’d been ill but nothing prepares you for that feeling. So I know how you must have been feeling. How long’s he been gone? Nine days did you say?’
Someone appears beside me holding a box of cheap dog biscuits. ‘One of the boys went and got them from the shop. We knew he must be hungry and thirsty. Take them.’
We say our thank-yous, practically bowing as we back away. We walk out the way we came, the poignant difference of the fizzing lightness in every step we retrace. Wolfy trots along beside us.
There’s a deep grumble as the next overland train passes above. Next stop, Upper Holloway, the station he was seen running into last Saturday. Where has he been? I will never know. For all I know he has been living in the dense thicket of brambles between two railway lines for a week.
The dog is not strong enough to leap into the car, so Charlie puts his arms under his hindquarters and lifts him up. Wolfy sits on the back seat and I climb in with him and he collapses down, using my thigh for a pillow.
I pull the biscuit from my pocket and hold it out to him between my thumb and finger. His mouth nuzzles it from my hand like he’s done a thousand times before with a thousand biscuits, the stodgy uncooked centre of a croissant, an offending crust of a sandwich, a sinewy scrap of beef. Normal service is resumed – almost – this time the crunching is cautious. His mouth is red and sore from trying to chew through the steel fence.
As we drive back to west London, I call everyone, Will, Steph, the parents, Emma. I send the midnight jogger a text – ‘Throw my dirty laundry away. He’s back.’
While we wait in Notting Hill Vets I take a photo and share it to every corner of the social media we turned to for help. ‘Wolfy is found.’
The reams and reams of responses are ecstatic and relieved. Steph tweets, simply, ‘Wolfy is found. Good things do happen.’
His tail is broken and bloody, and his gums infected, but other than that he is fine. The vet prescribes him antibiotics. The Aussie veterinary nurse crouches down as we weigh him. He has lost three kilos. ‘Ah Wolfy, you been eating like a student, mate?’
Charlie lifts him into the car again and points us homeward in the direction of Notting Dale. One more stop. We buy beef mince from the butcher.
Wolfy expels the contents of his intestines at great force in the yard; a week’s worth of anguish in the form of chocolate bum milkshake. Inside he goes to his favourite spot and watches us as we wonder what the hell to do next with our adrenaline-addled human selves.
A shower, obviously. I strip naked and wash the dirt of his adventures off him. He stands hunched and patient while Charlie holds his broken tail out of the way. There’s a bottle of Krug in the fridge, and no more fitting time to drink it. I pop and pour while Charlie lights the fire.
The three of us settle fireside on the shaggy Turkish rug. Wolfy sprawls, his head turned and one ear resting contented on a paw. Gradually his fur returns to golden as it dries. Us two humans sit either side of him, sipping this ambrosial champagne and feeling a calming of the alarming mix of neurotransmitters that only people who have lost a pet will comprehend. Our bodies’ internal pharmacies have been working overtime. The story ends where it began, really: me, on a comedown.
What’s different now is how happy and grateful I am for this life I have. I’m grateful for the awkward bastards club, Charlie and me, and the more or less happy family we have found with the addition of a third-hand lurcher called Wolfy.
‘Can you hear something outside?’
‘Yeah, what is that?’ I get up and go to the window. ‘There’s a bloody great Sky News truck out there. What the f—?!’
‘Oh no, I’m not getting involved.’ Charlie disappears upstairs to hide while I watch the journalist go to my downstairs neighbour Annabel’s front door.
‘You need to go round the back,’ I shout through the window. ‘We don’t have a front door.’
Wolfy and I make the six o’ clock show in the upbeat ‘And finally’ slot. The anchorwoman Kay Burley, an early recruit to the Find Wolfy cause, interviews me live. We even get the rolling banner at the bottom of the screen. ‘Lost dog Wolfy found after viral social media campaign.’ Wow! We are like real news.
I look horrific. My hair is stuck to my head like an Elastoplast and as I talk I dementedly stroke the dog sleeping in my lap.
Not long after we come off air dear old Timbo calls. ‘Marvellous news about the dog. Though I must say, seven minutes on Sky News, bit excessive isn’t it? After all, it is just a dog.’
EPILOGUE
Not long after Wolfy came back my father’s dog, Moby, died. He was an old dog but of course Dad was heartbroken. I’d taken these tearful calls from both Mum and Dad over the years when their dogs died. Now, I could see they had both been carrying on love affairs with their dogs all their lives. I’m glad they’ve both had that love through their own struggles, which define our passage through life.
That Christmas when I went to stay every walk we took together felt poignant and precious. My dad looked lonely without Moby at his side. I felt so lucky to have Wolfy back. The body of my friend Lisa’s dog, Olive, who had gone missing around the same time as Wolfy, had recently been found on the railway line near where Wolfy was found.
In another very possible world, I could have lost him not for nine days, but forever.
He’s a scientist by nature, my dad, not one for the magical thinking. He’s always telling the more airy-fairy of his six kids off for believing in ‘mumbo-jumbo’.
One evening we sit together by the fire after everyone else has gone to bed. There’s a space at his feet where the old liver-spotted springer would normally have lain. Now my stepmother has gone upstairs, Wolfy has snuck up on the sofa.
‘I can’t make sense of it Dad. Where does all this love for Wolfy come from? Is it a sort of madness in me? Is it just oxytocin?’
I might be nearly 50 but I still think my daddy has all the answers.
Dad pinches the bridge of his nose behind his round gold-rimmed specs. He’s welling up. ‘I’m sure there are scientific attempts to explain it. But I don’t know, darling, I don’t think anyone has ever adequately explained the bond between mankind and the dog. It’s one of the great mysteries.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Will, ‘Steph’, Sam, Bay, Arty, my beloved family and all those friends and frenemies whose lives I plundered in order to write this book, thank you. Think of yourselves not as defiled and used but as ‘patrons of the arts’. Mum, Martin, Ginge, Mark, Yogesh at the newsagents and Devlin’s Portobello fruit and veg stall for all your interest free credit over the years. Patrons of the arts, the lot of you.
Mum, Dad. I ho
pe you skipped the book and went direct to here. Thanks for everything and especially liking each other long enough for me, Tom and Will to be born. Don’t be offended, just be relieved I got a f***ing book out.
Robert Caskie, to many more years of, ‘I am taking my agent out for lunch’. Thanks for believing in me and my ideas. Robyn Drury, my publisher at Ebury, who can reference Adrian Mole and Samuel Pepys in the same sentence without turning into Melanie Oxbridge. Sarah Bennie, Steph Naulls, Lucy Brown, Rae Shrivington. You went above and beyond.
I stole the expression ‘hopeless hope’ from the artist Jake Chapman. If two words sum up the experience of searching for a lost dog then it is those.
The dog hunters at DogLost.com, when a dog goes missing they make it easier to cling to the hope in hopeless hope.
The countless friends, strangers and traders who lent their energy, support and shop windows to the #findwolfy cause. My belief in humanity and Twitter is born again.
Hugh. I’m sorry you aren’t here to disapprove of my book. شكر
Most of all I’d like to thank Charlie, crisps, wine, and Wolfy.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The owner of Lewis Hamilton II is Nicholas Burton, one of the last people to be pulled alive from Grenfell Tower on 14 June 2017. His ‘boy’ was killed that night, along with 71 of his neighbours. The following January, his wife Maria Del Pilar Burton, Pily, died in hospital as a consequence of the tragedy. Nick’s ability to bring light into a room despite his great personal loss is astounding. He is a wonderful, warm man.
THE BEGINNING
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Copyright © Kate Spicer 2019
Cover Design by Two Associates
Kate Spicer has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Ebury Press in 2019
penguin.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781473559660
This book is a work of non-fiction based on the experiences and recollections of the author. In some cases names and details have been changed to protect the privacy of others.