by Nikki Attree
Harry slams the van door shut and Jack carries Angus into the yard.
“Right then Jack, dump that mutt in the shed and let’s go and get a pint.”
Jack hesitates: “but mate ... it'll be freezing in there tonight."
“Come off it Jack, he tried to take yer ‘and off back there.”
“I know, but he was just frightened."
“Ah, I see. So now you’re some kind of expert on dog behaviour eh? Leave ‘im in the feckin shed, he'll be fine.”
Reluctantly, Jack puts Angus in the shed with a bowl of water and a towel to sleep on, and the two of them head down to the ‘Bucket of Blood’. But The Lad can’t stop worrying about the pooch. He drinks up, plonks his glass down, and telling Harry that he wants an early night he leaves his partner to get pissed and try his luck with Rosie, the exuberantly endowed barmaid.
When he gets home he goes straight to the shed to check on the dog. Angus gazes up at him with big staring eyes, shaking with cold.
"Hey mutt, don't give me that look. You'll be alright in here.”
He stoops down and gives the pooch a bit of a cuddle, but Angus can’t stop shivering.
“OK, don’t worry - I'll get you a blanket."
Jack fetches a blanket and wraps the dog in it. Angus wriggles free of the blanket and stares up at Jack again, still shivering.
"You'll warm up. I'm going to bed now."
He covers the dog with the blanket again, pats him on the head and shuts the door of the shed. As he walks away he can hear Angus whimpering. He goes to bed but he can’t sleep, and after twenty minutes he gets up to see if the pooch is still whimpering.
As he opens the shed door Angus is still shivering, but starts to wag his tail when he sees Jack.
"OK mutt, I suppose you can stay in my room. Just for tonight, and no barking or jumping on the bed, alright? Deal?”
Angus wags his tail and licks Jack’s face enthusiastically as he picks him up and carries him to his room.
The next morning The Lad wakes to find the dog curled up next to him, snoring happily. He eases out of bed trying not to disturb Angus, but there’s an angry shout from the yard.
"The bleedin dog's gone! Some fecker’s stolen the dog, thieving scumbags!"
"Calm down ‘Arry, he’s in my room.”
"No way. You can't keep it in the ‘ouse. That’s disgusting. The little bugger threw up all over my van yesterday."
“Well, I’m sorry mate, it’s just too bloody cold to keep Angus in the shed. He’d be an ex-pooch by now, and then where would we be with the reward money?”
“OK, ok mate. You win. Just as long as you keep the stinking little bleeder out of my way. And it better not shit or puke in my way neither. And ... ‘ang on ... what’s with this calling it by it's name then? You goin soft on me Jack lad?”
“No, no of course not ‘Arry. That’s just the dog's name, mate. Look, we don’t have to keep him here for long ... the owners should have put up a missing poster by now. Let’s go and have a look."
The dognappers make their way back to Hampstead Heath leaving Angus in Jack's bedroom. They go in Jack's car, in case someone recognises the van, and to avoid the sickly sweet smell of dog vomit. Jack doesn’t have a suit on this time. He’s in his wannabe-working-class-hero-gangster-mode rather than playing the posh conman role. They’re both dressed in hoodies and leather jackets, trying to blend in as they ‘casually’ examine the trees and lamp posts for reward posters.
Jack soon spots what they’re looking for: “have a look at this ‘Arry. That's a photo of Angus, and there’s a two thousand pound reward! I told you this would be easy money!”
Harry is impressed. He doesn’t want to boost Jack’s ego any more than he has to, but he’s beginning to think that he might have made a smart move teaming up with The Lad ... even if he does have to put up with a poncey dog-lover who sounds like he’s swallowed a dictionary ‘alf the time.
"Ow long are you gonna stand there looking at it and feelin clever, mate? Grab the fekin poster off the tree, and let’s get going before someone sees us."
They get back in the car, and that’s where we’ll leave them for now: celebrating the crime of the century and musing over the next part of Jack’s cunning plan.
2 ELIZABETH’S GRAND DESIGNS
Doodle, the somewhat obviously named Labradoodle, gazes forlornly out of the window and waits patiently for her mistress to return home. It’s winter, and the house has been shrouded in darkness since late afternoon. She yawns and stretches out over the back of the enormous leather sofa, where she’s been since Cheryl, the dog walker, took her out at midday - eight hours ago.
Although the house is dark, Doodle is not alone. Her owner’s teenage daughter, Miranda, is upstairs in her bedroom, chatting on Facebook. She has paid no attention to the pooch since returning from school, except for a quick pat on the head. Not even letting her out in the garden for a quick sniff and a pee. The teenager has been immersed in her laptop all evening, and Doodle knows that she’s not allowed upstairs in the bedrooms. She might as well be alone!
Finally the dog hears a car in the drive, footsteps, keys in the door ... yipee it’s her mistress. Wooftastic! She rushes to the door to greet Elizabeth, and sits there with her favorite toy in her mouth, wagging her tail in anticipation of a tug-of-war session.
Elizabeth is happy enough to see Doodle, but she’s had a tough day at work, and bonding with the dog isn’t exactly top of her agenda.
"Doodle darling, I’m exhausted. Hasn’t Miranda been playing with you?"
Elizabeth shouts upstairs to her daughter: “did you play with Doodle today? She seems really frantic.”
Long pause and then a grunt of “no-oo” from Miranda’s bedroom.
The pooch is scratching at the door now and barking.
“Did you let her out in the garden at least?”
More grunts of “no-oo” and “wadever” from upstairs.
"Miranda for goodness sake, you’re fourteen now. You could show a bit more responsibility. Who was it that begged me to get a dog in the first place?"
Elizabeth sighs, pours herself a large glass of Chablis, and opens the back door. Doodle rushes out into the large, leafy garden and immediately relieves herself on the nearest tree. It’s been eight hours since her last wee and she’d been getting increasingly desperate.
“How would they like it if they had to cross their legs for eight hours at a stretch? It's just taking the piss!“ she thinks to herself. Anyway, feeling relieved now, she has a good sniff around and comes back into the house in search of a bit of attention.
Elizabeth is upstairs, arguing with Miranda about her school report and lack of interest in the dog’s welfare. The argument is loud and interminable, and Doodle would love to join in, but she knows that it’ll be her that gets yelled at if she shows her face upstairs.
Eventually Elizabeth comes back downstairs, but without so much as a glance at the pooch she switches off the lights, and goes to bed. Doodle is plunged into darkness again for another eight hour stretch.
She’s not impressed. “That’s just great” she thinks. “Don't bother about me. Just treat me like I’m part of the furniture. Actually that’s not true - the furniture gets more love than I do!”
And she’s right. Elizabeth does care deeply about her furniture. After all, it cost a lot more than the dog.
After a restless night dreaming of chasing squirrels, Doodle wakes to find Elizabeth making a cappuccino and opening a large brown envelope. She sits down to read and sighs. The document, with it’s legal jargon and small print, is her Decree Absolute. Her marriage is officially over.
“OK, thank God for that, now we can move on” she thinks, but her relief is tinged with some sadness and regret. “Maybe we’d still be together if it wasn’t for my career.”
But normal service is quickly resumed: “hey what am I thinking? I love my job and I’ve worked damn hard to get where I am. OK it’s taken some sacrifices, but
how many women get to be senior producers for a top film studio? It's not my fault that Andrew ran off with my secretary. Anyway, I was more pissed off with her than him. She was a lot more difficult to replace!”.
Doodle senses her mistress’ conflicting emotions and gently rests her head on Elizabeth’s lap. She glances towards the dog and Doodle wags her tail anticipating a bit of attention at last, but as ever Elizabeth has other things on her mind. She puts the document on the coffee table and stares into space.
Doodle considers giving it a good chew as a sign of her frustration, but she notices a more tasty-looking object on the shelf under the table and grabs it gleefully.
Elizabeth is jolted out of her reverie: “Doodle what’ve you got there? Put that down ... “
She grabs the book before any further damage is done, and her mood changes. "Aha, good girl! We’ve found that dog book at last. I wondered where it had got too."
“Aha, so we’ve found it, have we?” thinks Doodle.
The book is actually what had motivated Elizabeth to get a dog for Miranda in the first place. Her daughter had been wearing her down with endless demands for a puppy, but Elizabeth had been resisting, arguing that it wouldn’t fit with their lifestyle. Goodness knows it was difficult enough holding down a demanding job as a single super-mum and coping with a divorce, without bringing any more complications into their lives. She’d never had a dog in her life, and she’d dismissed Miranda’s pleadings as teenage peer-pressure-induced angst. But ‘Nobody’s Poodle’ changed all that.
She’d picked it up from an airport bookstore on her way to Los Angeles. Normally her reading material would have been organized by her secretary on her iPad and laptop, but she’d been forced to let the girl go after discovering her In flagrante delicto with Andrew in their bed. That was just before the business trip to LA, and needless to say it didn’t exactly help her preparations for this crucial pitch to the Hollywood big fish. She considered canceling the trip, but it was such an important meeting, and hey why should she allow that rat of a husband to screw up her job! Anyway, it would do her good to get away from the sordid mess for a few days.
So she found herself at Heathrow facing a ten hour flight, feeling like death warmed up, and with nothing to read to distract her from the dark thoughts. She had just enough time to dive into the bookshop and grab something that might take her mind off her husband’s shenanigans.
'Nobody's Poodle' was not the kind of book that Elizabeth would normally have chosen, but her eyes had been drawn to the striking sky-blue cover, and the cute fluffy white dog with reading glasses typing on a laptop. Turning to the back cover, she allowed herself a little chuckle as she read the blurb:
‘Nobody’s Poodle is a wooftastic ‘tail’ about a loveable ex-pat pooch uprooted from his home in cold, damp, muddy old England to start a new life in Tenerife. It’s much more than an ex-pat diary though. It’s a gripping story, with a plot that is the mutt’s nuts. Our intrepid hero: Gizmo may be more street Doodle than swanky Poodle, but he’s very much his own dog. He’s all about standing up for the underdog, and it gets him into a fair few scrapes on the mean streets of Costa del Scorchio. He’s also something of a canine philosopher, and along the way you’ll be learning a lot about their universe … Quite simply it’s the dog’s danglies of a book.’
“Yep, that’ll do” she thought, grabbing the slim paperback as she heard the last call for her flight.
The journey had not been quite the ordeal that she’d anticipated. She spent it working on the pitch, with the light relief provided by 'Nobody's Poodle' prompting frequent giggles, and she’d had no need of the woefully inadequate in-flight entertainment.
The message of the book was that not only was a dog without a home like a fish out of water, but that a home without a dog was similarly flawed, and this had got her thinking: could their home possibly be flawed? I mean, they had pretty much everything that money could buy, but Miranda had still been surprisingly upset by the break up of her parents’ marriage. Perhaps a puppy might indeed be just the thing to make up for her father’s absence (not that he‘d been around much for her anyway).
Elizabeth certainly wasn’t foolish enough to believe that money could always buy them happiness, but she liked the idea that with a bit of research and a trip to the right breeder she could replace her husband with a life-form that could pretty much guarantee unselfish love.
Of course ‘Nobody’s Poodle’ had strongly advocated adopting a rescue dog, but goodness knows what kind of problems some random stray mutt might have. How on earth could you know what kind of people it had been mixing with? Not to mention whether it would look right in her house, with her furniture, at one of her dinner parties ... No, if they were going to get a dog it would have to be special, and in Elizabeth’s experience you usually got what you paid for.
The book had been just the right length for the flight, and it had certainly got her thinking, rather than just brooding. She reached the last page as they were starting their descent into Los Angeles, and had just enough time to take in the poem that is the bookend:
I am Nobody's Poodle
But I'm Somebody's Doodle,
And I Woof ... therefore I Am!
That did it. Miranda would get her dog, and it would be a Doodle like Gizmo. When she researched the Labradoodle breed and discovered that they were often described as a ‘designer dog’, it just confirmed her feelings that this was the dog for them. The photos of Gizmo on his Facebook page were so appealing. Conveniently ignoring the fact that he himself was just a “random stray mutt”, she thought he looked like a film star, and she could just picture a snow-white Doodle against the graphite leather sofa and their black / grey / chrome interior.
Talking of canine film stars ... although Elizabeth had never taken much interest in them herself, she knew that dog movies were big business. Look at 'Marley and Me' and 'Lassie Come Home', they grossed millions ... and what about ‘The Artist’ - Uggie the dog stole the show, no? Maybe ‘Nobody’s Poodle’ could be the next doggie blockbuster and Gizmo could be the next Marley, Lassie or Uggie.
After all, it had all the elements of a traditional feel-good movie: a moral tale with plenty of twists and turns, a few tears, a happy ending, and of course a cute, good looking star. Elizabeth decided that she would look into a possible movie option as soon as she got back home to her office.
The book had turned her mood around and given her a new lease of life. In the course of a transatlantic flight she’d gone from morose middle-aged mum, with a daughter blighted by teenage angst, and a husband who’d run off with a girl not much older, to her usual confident in-control self.
By the time she’d settled into her hotel suite she was hopeful that she’d resolved the family issues, as well as discovering a potentially lucrative new project. Her pitch to the Hollywood moneymen went well, her boss was impressed, and she returned to London in triumph.
Miranda got the puppy she wanted, but in all the excitement ‘Nobody's Poodle’ was left under the coffee table and forgotten, until Doodle found it there this fine morning a year later.
* * *
Elizabeth puts the book into her shiny aluminum briefcase and sets off for work, planning to talk to her boss that very morning about the dog film project. She shouts upstairs to her daughter: “for goodness sake Miranda, I’m going to be late. If you don’t come down right now you’ll have to walk to school. Do you hear me?”
The threat of having to use her own two feet does the trick. Miranda slouches down the glass-sided staircase with all the hunch-shouldered loathing that a teenager can manage. She follows her mother out of the marble tiled hallway and through the shiny black front door. Doodle hears the door shut with that refined click that only very expensive doors make.
"Well, thanks guys” she thinks. “Thanks for giving me a hug and saying goodbye ... NOT!”
She settles into her familiar daily routine. “So, guess what? Here I am again, same as it ever was. Stuck in th
is house. All alone, until Cheryl gets here. That’s if she bothers to turn up today.”
Cheryl, the dog walker, is paid to take Doodle for her daily forty minute walkies. It usually lasts ten minutes, but sometimes she ‘forgets’ altogether. “Ha, that’s a joke. Call that a walk? Most days there’s barely time for me to lift my leg on a lamppost.”
Anyway, she hopes that Cheryl will show up today, even if it is only a brief break in the daily tedium. “So what’s next in my busy schedule? Ah yes, I remember ...”
Doodle starts her daily sniff around the house, or at least those parts of it that she’s allowed to sniff.
* * *
Elizabeth had bought the imposing five bedroom Victorian townhouse with Andrew, and together they had completely gutted and modernised it. It was described by the estate agent as in “an exclusive, sought-after location” - a private cul-de-sac backing on to Hampstead Heath. At the time they had needed a massive mortgage to buy it and do the work, but they were both high-flyers with successful careers and now it was worth several million.
Andrew was in fact an architect, and while Elizabeth’s ‘day job’ was film producer, her real passion was interior design. Between them they had the skills, drive, and money for a Grand Design and theirs was sufficiently innovative to feature on the TV show of the same name. The heady excitement of the building project, and the TV exposure, had papered over the cracks in their relationship that were already starting to appear.
From the front, the house looked like other similarly elegant period townhouses in the street (the planning committee had insisted on this), but behind the Victorian facade was a “spectacularly contemporary space” (as Kevin, the ‘Grand Designs’ presenter called it).