Mutts and Mistletoe

by Natalie Cox

  Needs must.

  Fifteen minutes later Peggy, Malcolm, and I survey my handiwork. The leads have been strung together in a long garland, which I have wound several times around the branches and clipped almost to the top. I’ve stuffed tennis balls into the poo bags and tied the handles into a sort of bow to decorate the ends of the branches, and the rawhide chews and squeaky plastic toys have been dotted about the denser parts of the tree. Peggy sniffs with interest at one of the lower-hanging poo bags, and Malcolm turns to me with an enquiring look, as if to say: Are we done here?

  For a moment the three of us regard the tree.

  “It’s missing something,” I say finally. I return to the cupboard to root around, and emerge triumphantly a moment later clutching a neon orange Frisbee with a hole in the center, which I balance at the very top of the tree. Malcolm responds by prostrating himself directly at its base, as if the tree is now somehow worthy of worship, and even Peggy signals her approval with a long, satisfying scratch beneath its boughs.

  Bah, humbug, I think with satisfaction.

  * * *

  I pass a pleasant enough evening with my canine companions, but in the morning when I come downstairs I find the Great Dane in exactly the same position as I left him: crouched low, facing the tree, ears rigid, and a decidedly worried look in his eye. I stare down at him.

  “Malcolm, have you been here all night?” I ask.

  He’s deaf. Not to mention a dog. So it’s a purely rhetorical question. Still, he seems to intuit that I’m addressing him and swings his oversized muzzle toward me like the barrel of a cannon, his eyes alighting on me for the briefest of instants, before swiveling back to gaze steadily at the tree. I glance over at Peggy, who is faking slumber on the sofa. She opens one eye, gives a dismissive snort, then closes it again, indicating that Malcolm is unworthy of her attention. I bend down and lightly run a hand down his back: he flinches; his spine as taut as a violin bow, but apart from that he takes no notice of me, his eyes are stapled to the tree. It’s like he’s cornered it and doesn’t know what to do with it—as if the tree is somehow prey. I get up with a sigh and make coffee, trying to remember what it is they say about mad dogs and Englishmen. I’m beginning to realize that double the fees may not be enough to compensate for Malcolm’s eccentricities.

  Armed with sixteen ounces of freshly brewed dark roast, I cross to the office, where Jez houses her professional library in an enormous wooden dresser. It’s the old-fashioned sort with shelves above and drawers below, the kind that people used to display crockery on in the old days, but this one holds an impressive collection of books on a wide variety of canine topics including breeding, training, evolution, dog psychology, and health.

  The titles range from the obvious (Perfect Puppy) to the ridiculous (Train Your Dog the SAS Way) to the hilarious (Know Your Bitch!) to the frankly baffling (Canine Cognitive Dysfunction) and to the sublime (Follow Your Dog into a World of Smell). Who knew that dogs were even capable of cognition? They eat, sleep, shag, and fart—but do they really obsess about doing so, the way we do? None of this is getting me any closer toward understanding what is wrong with Malcolm and I briefly consider phoning Hugo, but decide that a little due diligence is in order first. So I select a title to peruse over breakfast: a slim volume, promisingly titled Dog Sense, whose cover features a cock-eared boxer with a sardonic look in his eye. Peggy raises her head and frowns at me as I sit down next to her with the book, like I’m some sort of pretender, but I fix her with my most authoritarian glare and she turns away.

  I’m a strong, independent woman, I think huffily.

  Why shouldn’t I become a dog expert in the space of ten days?

  * * *

  The book is about canine personality profiling, a concept that immediately strikes me as oxymoronic (or at the very least moronic). According to the author, every dog has genetically determined behaviors that can be grouped into three drives: prey drive, pack drive, and defense drive. The first is associated with hunting and eating: dogs that stalk, chase, bite, or dig are all exhibiting prey drive. I glance up at Malcolm. He may have cornered the Christmas tree, but something tells me his behavior isn’t about food. His body is rigid with apprehension, as if the tree might combust at any moment. I skip forward to chapter two. Pack drive is all about loyalty, order, and cooperation—dogs that sniff, groom, mount, or play with one another all exhibit pack drive. I look up at Malcolm and Peggy. The idea of them grooming each other is laughable: they couldn’t be less of a pack. So far, we’re definitely barking up the wrong tree.

  But chapter three is more promising. The defense drive is about survival and self-preservation, but confusingly it can result in either fight or flight behaviors, making the dog aggressive or fearful, depending on how they’re inclined. Fighting dogs will growl and stand tall with their hackles raised. Flighty dogs will prostrate themselves, retreat, or even hide. Bingo, I think. Malcolm is in flight mode. He’s an enormous canine coward.

  I turn to Peggy, who somehow seems to defy all three categories. She’s calm, cool, and self-contained, and fight-or-flight seems definitely beneath her. Peggy doesn’t really strike me as a dog at all. Peggy is like Jeanetta, my überorganized but condescending upstairs neighbor in Nunhead, who sighs with dismay when I ask to borrow a teeny-weeny drop of milk for my morning tea, but gives it to me anyway because, at the end of the day she may be obsessively efficient, but she’s not a jerk.

  I decide that dog psychology is mostly common sense, and canines aren’t much different from humans. In fact, as soon as I saw the list of traits associated with prey drive, an image of Lionel popped into my head. Lionel was the classic alpha male—confident, charismatic, competitive, and a little bit arrogant. In truth, it was these qualities that attracted me to him in the first place, because who among us isn’t secretly drawn to the pack leader?

  I first met Lionel at a barbecue in Hyde Park on a sunny night in June. It was one of those golden summer evenings in London—which are so rare they instantly take on an almost mythic quality—when the air is clean and sharp, the grass luridly green, the temperature fuzzily warm, and the city seems to almost shimmer with energy. It was a night made for exuberant living and I went along, like most others that evening, determined to have a whale of a time.

  Even if one of my closest friends had just lost his job.

  Lionel was working at one of the top legal firms in London and the barbecue was a leaving do for a colleague of his who had been a roommate of mine at university. Joss had recently been made redundant, sidelined in the vicious up-or-out world of London law, and although the event hadn’t been billed as a leaving do per se, we all knew why we were there: to cheer him up because his contract hadn’t been renewed. Someone from their office had gone to masses of trouble to compensate: there were tables laden with platters of salads and cold dishes shipped in from a trendy Chelsea deli, each with a handwritten label in perfect calligraphy. Everything seemed to be either charred or fancily dried: air-dried beef, sun-dried tomatoes, wind-dried salmon, and some sort of Asian daikon salad that had probably been blow-dried. The drink flowed, too, with massive jugs of lethally strong Pimm’s that were replenished by smiling staff as soon as we emptied them. There must have been forty or so people in all, including a half dozen of my old university mates, and within a few hours we were all pretty tanked. Then someone started the games: tug-of-war, three-legged race, four-in-a-sack—the latter causing much mirth, more than a few contusions, and at least one person vomiting behind the bushes.

  The final event of the night was the egg-and-spoon race, and for this we were all organized into heats. Lionel was put next to me, and as he stepped forward I noticed that he didn’t so much walk as swagger into the starting position. He was tall and lean with a long, narrow nose, a prominent chin, and dirty blond hair cut short so that it stood up like a brush. His clothes were casual but chosen with care: Nike trainers, Diesel jeans, and a dark
blue T-shirt that read TRUST ME in white letters across his chest. Typical metrosexual garb, I thought.

  After he’d taken his place at the starting line he turned and looked at me dead on. Though I’d clocked him earlier as one of the better-looking guys there, we hadn’t yet been introduced, and there was something unnervingly direct about the way he met my gaze: like he could tell exactly what I was thinking. Which at that precise moment was that if we ended up in bed that night, I wouldn’t be sorry.

  “May the force be with you,” he said with mock solemnity.

  “And with you,” I replied evenly. He nodded, as if accepting my challenge, then turned toward the finish line, thrusting his egg out in front of him.

  Needless, to say, the force wasn’t with me. I lost, rather spectacularly. It had all been going swimmingly well, with me lurching forward at breakneck speed, the egg hovering in front of me like a tiny flying saucer, and Lionel matching my pace with seeming ease—when suddenly I stumbled, the momentum launching me like a rocket. I landed facedown in the grass and lay there, gasping with laughter while Lionel went on to win the heat amidst raucous cheers and shouts. When I stood up I discovered that the egg had smashed beneath me and was now fetchingly smeared across my chest. Lionel walked over to where I stood, still holding his perfectly balanced egg on the spoon. When he reached me, his eyes flicked down to my yolk-stained T-shirt, lingering for an instant on my bright orange breasts. “I usually like poached,” he said. “But scrambled will do.” Then he reached in the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out an actual cloth handkerchief (Who carries cloth hankies these days? I thought) and started to dab gingerly at my breasts, which caused us both to crinkle with laughter. He handed me the hankie. “Think this might be one of those too-many-cooks situations,” he said with a grin, then turned away.

  He went on to win the next two heats, until it was only he and Joss left to battle it out in the final. We all watched as they took their starting positions, and the fact that it was Lionel against Joss made me feel suddenly uneasy. I’d learned during the interim heats that Lionel and Joss had both been put forward for the same job, and it was Lionel who’d been given the promotion. I watched as Joss gave his egg a quick kiss for luck, then placed it firmly on his spoon, his face unnaturally pink from drink, heat, and exertion. He had a worryingly manic look in his eye, as if there was too much at stake, and I saw a shadow pass briefly across Lionel’s face. They set off and both men strode confidently across the grass, though with his long legs Lionel cut a more impressive figure and seemed certain to win. They were neck and neck right up until the last twenty paces, when I saw Lionel start to pull ahead, and Joss fall back a little, his hand beginning to tremble slightly, as if he was losing focus. When Lionel was only a few paces from the finish line, he glanced back over his shoulder at Joss, and as he did he tripped on a small dip in the grass and went down, sprawling flat, while Joss practically leaped over him to cross the finish line, his egg miraculously balanced on the spoon. Joss roared with victory and flung his egg high into the air. Lionel stood up, smiling, and I saw that his egg had broken all down his T-shirt, just as mine had done. He clapped Joss heartily on the back, offering his congratulations, then turned, his eyes searching the crowd.

  They landed on me. He smiled and walked over to where I stood. I handed him the handkerchief and nodded to his egg-smattered shirt.

  “Bad luck,” I said.

  “Or not,” he replied. He looked at me with his piercing gaze and I felt my knees buckle. Then he smiled. “I thought you might not want to eat alone,” he said.

  He did end up in my bed that night, and the next, and the one after that. And in less than six weeks, we’d moved in together. At the time it seemed like the most natural thing in the world, even though my mother expressed alarm over what she termed our “undue haste.” Lionel’s lease was up and we spent most of our evenings together anyway, I argued, so it made sense to pool our resources and save on rent. The fact that it took him several months to set up the standing order for his share of the bills only slightly worried me, but not enough to spoil our idyll. That first year passed in a miasma of lust. At home we were in bed more often than not, and most of that time Lionel was funny and attentive and spontaneous. He brought me freshly brewed coffee in the mornings, introduced me to his friends, and showed me his favorite London haunts. He was a keen climber and even tried to persuade me to join his gym so we could climb together, something I resisted instinctively, without really knowing why.

  But one day about eighteen months into our relationship, when he’d already begun to grow distant, his best friend, Tony, made a casual remark that thrummed somewhere deep inside me. “Lionel’s a serial hobbyist,” he declared lightly one evening over beers. We were in a pub outside of the gym waiting for Lionel to finish. By this time Lionel’s obsession with climbing had morphed into one with kickboxing, and he spent every waking hour outside of work training. “He has the attention span of a gnat,” said Tony. I frowned. Did that extend to his relationships, I wondered.

  I think I knew the answer even then. But it took two more years and one more hobby (rowing) before Lionel finally left me. Over that time, the alpha-male traits that had initially enthralled me had slowly begun to grate: by then his confidence struck me as overblown, his charisma insincere, his competitiveness annoying, and his arrogance boorish.

  The truth is, I should have left Lionel long before he left me.

  chapter

  12

  Hugo rings me later that morning to check on Malcolm, and I confess that things aren’t going well. With a great deal of coaxing I’d managed to get the Great Dane out to the paddock after breakfast, but only because he’d reluctantly followed Peggy and the others. Once he’d done his toilet business, he’d stood next to the gate staring longingly in the direction Hugo had departed.

  “He seems a little unsettled,” I say.

  “He doesn’t adapt well to new environments,” Hugo admits.

  Now you tell me. “Perhaps you should visit?” I suggest hopefully.

  And take him away?

  “We’re just off for a ride now,” he says breezily. “And then there’s a bit of a lunch thing later, but I promise to come by later this afternoon.” The weather outside is blustery and freezing: why anyone would want to ride out in it is beyond me. They are forecasting a blizzard for later in the week. But no doubt Hugo and his fiancée will be kitted out in the most expensive riding gear money can buy. And Hugo is clearly a pack animal: he will do as he’s bid.

  Instead, it’s Valko who arrives in the middle of the afternoon, stamping his feet and blowing on his hands. “Outside very cold,” he says, shaking his head. He motions to the kennels. “Dogs will be freeze.”

  “The kennels are heated,” I say breezily. Surely they must be?

  He raises an eyebrow. “Not so much, I think.”

  “Enough for animals, I think.”

  Jez would never let the dogs freeze. I think.

  Valko takes the twins for a long walk and afterward, over tea, he tells me the story of his Moldovan bride. It seems he met her on a website catering especially for men seeking Moldovan women for marriage. Sometimes I think I’m better suited to the Victorian Age, I tell him, as I’d no idea such websites even existed. Valko googles Eastern European Bride on his phone and shows me the results. There are dozens of sites. We click on one and I see with relief that it is not just men seeking women, but women seeking men. But when I click through to the detail, I realize that the men are all from the UK, the US, and Australia, while the women are only from Eastern Europe. Further research reveals that the women are all under forty and, without exception, stunningly attractive—while the men are uniformly dumpy, fat, balding, wrinkled, or a combination of all four. I look up at Valko and, sadly, with his gaunt features and leaden eyes, he fits the profile.

  For twenty-five dollars a month he was given access to dozens
of Moldovan women’s details: he could search by age, ethnicity, education level, or simply by photo. The woman he chose to correspond with was called Laska. She was thirty-one, divorced, peroxide-blonde, and unlucky: she’d been raised in dire poverty by a father who was more often drunk than sober and a depressed mother who, when Laska was twelve, took to her bed and never got up again; an older sister had run off at sixteen with a Russian man twice her age; and her younger sister had married a local man who impregnated her with twins, then promptly disappeared. Laska herself had been married to a man she had believed loved her: he drove a truck across Europe delivering goods for IKEA and was absent three weeks out of four. One day he went out drinking with mates and left his mobile phone behind; it rang, and when she answered it the caller demanded to know why a strange woman was answering her husband’s phone. It turns out he had not one, but two other wives, and was engaged to a fourth. Laska waited until he left town, then made an enormous bonfire of his possessions in front of their flat and texted a photo of it to him, together with the news that she was filing for divorce.

  When Valko relates this sorry tale in halting English, I shake my head with wonder. How did we ever manage to survive before modern technology enabled us to meet, marry, cheat, and divorce with such aplomb, I wonder aloud. But Valko doesn’t seem to understand. I ask him what happened between him and Laska. He takes a deep breath and lets it out abjectly. “For her, it was not love math,” he says with a tortured shrug of his shoulder. I frown.