The Girl, the Dog, and the Writer in Rome

by Katrina Nannestad

  Still looking at the path ahead of them, she reached up and took Tobias by the hand. Not even the hand, really. Just two fingers. And only for a few seconds.

  Tobias, bless his heart, pretended nothing had happened and they walked on, side by side, in companionable silence.

  They came to a clearing in the forest that was carpeted with grass and dotted with clumps of bracken. ‘Here!’ cried Tobias. ‘This is where I do cloud-dreaming.’

  They flopped down on the ground. Finnegan stretched out between them, glad for a break in which he could chew on sticks and leaves and Tobias’ bootlaces.

  ‘If you stare at the clouds for long enough,’ explained Tobias, ‘they turn into animals . . . and if you linger amidst the bracken for a further half-hour, a story about the animals will weave itself in your mind.’

  So they did. They lay in silence — the girl, the dog and the writer. The sky came alive with tigers . . . elephants . . . aardvarks . . . a scattering of mice. A herd of reindeer meandered along, just for a moment, trying to draw Freja back to memories of Norway and Clementine. But then an arrogant fat warthog barrelled into their midst, scaring them away. Freja watched and smiled and allowed the warthog to weave a tale about himself — a tale filled with spectacular and improbable acts of heroism and romance, which lasted until the sun sank low and the clouds turned from white to pink.

  ‘Time to walk home,’ said Tobias. ‘Unless you’d like to learn a little something about frostbite first hand . . .’

  Freja shook her head and stood up.

  ‘Home it is then!’ Tobias glanced at her dirt-smeared face and the clothes she had worn both day and night since leaving London. ‘And perhaps you could take a nice hot bath while I prepare our supper.’

  But Freja didn’t answer. The word ‘home’ had joined in her mind to another word that had been drifting about all afternoon: ‘Clementine.’ Suddenly, unexpectedly, the ugly homesickness, that deep longing for her mother, cut through her heart. Freja clenched her jaws and breathed deeply through her nose. She breathed in . . . then out . . . then in . . . then burst into tears.

  Finnegan bounded to her side. ‘Woof!’ he said and tried to lick the tears as they fell from her eyes and ran down her cheeks.

  ‘Oh dear,’ sighed Tobias, patting her awkwardly on the head. ‘Whatever is the matter? Are you cold? Tired? Hungry? All three at once? Is it the bath? Are you scared of cleanliness?’

  Freja sobbed and snuffled. She wiped her nose on the back of her mitten. How could she possibly tell the truth? It would be saying that Tobias’ kindness was not enough. And it wasn’t. But she felt that it should be. And again, she was overwhelmed by how completely ill equipped she was for life in the big, wide world — life away from Clementine and the Arctic.

  Freja sobbed and shook, grasping for any excuse other than the real one. ‘I . . . I . . . I want a bubble ba-a-a-ath!’ she bellowed.

  Relief flooded over Tobias’ face. ‘Well, well, well. Let me see. I don’t have any bubble bath . . . but I do think . . . no . . . I am certain that a good dash of dishwashing liquid will work just as well.’ He took her by the hand and led her home through the darkening afternoon, babbling on and on about bubbles and how simply marvellous they were for raising one’s spirits and cleaning the grime from one’s face.

  Back at Myrtle Cottage, Tobias left Freja by the fire, sobbing into Finnegan’s neck, while he dashed to the kitchen to find a bottle of lemon dishwashing detergent. By the time a hot and frothy soap-sudsy bath was run, the worst of Freja’s sad and soggy mood had passed. She was able to force a smile onto her face, convincing Tobias that her woes really were of the small and easily mended kind.

  And once she found herself sitting up to her neck in warm water and fluffy bubbles, staring at the giant Irish wolfhound who had decided that baths were meant for sharing, she really did feel rather happy.

  CHAPTER 10

  Tobias mingles in his own special way

  Tobias drove like a maniac, his vintage motorcycle flying like a rocket one minute, chugging so slowly that they almost came to a standstill the next, then roaring off again for no apparent reason. Fast or slow, Tobias swerved from one side of the country lane to the other, splashing through puddles, side-swiping hedgerows, whooshing beneath low-hanging branches. Freja, seated in the sidecar, screamed, yelped and giggled. Finnegan, crammed onto her lap, revelled in the speed and the bumps, his tongue and ears flapping joyously in the wind. Every few minutes, he turned around to share his delight, licking Freja’s face and lunging at the big, round cherry-red pompom on her beanie. It was the most thrilling fun Freja had had since she and Clementine rode on a sled pulled by huskies at the North Pole.

  ‘Village day!’ Tobias had announced that morning. ‘You’ve been here a whole week and the bickie supplies are running dangerously low. Off to Little Coddling we’ll go! Shopping. Errands. Ice-cream spiders and trifle at the tea room. Meeting, mingling, chatting.’

  Freja, of course, did not like meeting, mingling or chatting with other people. But ice-cream spiders and trifle sounded ever so delicious . . . and bickies were important . . . Besides, Finnegan would be there. It was comforting to know there’d be a large Irish wolfhound behind which she could hide should the need arise.

  The motorcycle roared over the last hill and they zoomed into Little Coddling at breakneck speed. The road curved to the left, but Tobias seemed drawn to the right. They clipped a street sign, ripped through a patch of winter crocuses, plunged down an embankment and came to a boggy standstill in the middle of a field. A flock of curious sheep surrounded them.

  ‘Ever so sorry!’ cried Tobias.

  The sheep jostled and bleated.

  ‘I’ll be out of your way in a jiffy,’ Tobias promised.

  Freja giggled. ‘They can’t understand you, you know.’

  Tobias climbed off the motorcycle. ‘Of course they can! Why, just listen to them bleating and blabbering. “Ba-a-a-ad luck!”’

  ‘Ba-a-a-ad driving!’ bleated Freja.

  Tobias chuckled as he heaved the motorcycle out of the bog, back onto the road.

  They parked by the village common, where Tobias looked Finnegan in the eye and said in a clear and commanding voice, ‘Stay!’

  ‘Woof!’ replied Finnegan. He blinked, licked his nose and leapt out of the sidecar. Without a backward glance, he trotted off to sniff at lampposts, car tyres, drainpipes and unsuspecting bottoms.

  Tobias and Freja headed towards the grocer’s. Freja was nervous and tried to conceal herself by walking close to Tobias, hiding in the floppy folds of his cardigan. She needn’t have worried, however, for once they came into contact with the villagers, Tobias drew all the attention to himself.

  ‘Hello, Tobias.’

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Pargenter.’ Tobias smiled and nodded. Then, turning to Freja, he remarked in a too-loud whisper, ‘That woman’s overbite is a marvel! How she manages not to swallow her own chin is beyond my understanding. And the amount of custard she has in her shopping trolley is sensational. Look! Perhaps eating solid food is a problem when one’s upper and lower teeth refuse to meet at the middle.’ He closed his eyes and muttered.

  ‘What are you doing?’ whispered Freja, tugging at his sleeve.

  ‘Committing the details of lips, teeth, chin and custard to memory,’ he explained. ‘I might want to use Mrs Pargenter in a novel one day.’

  Freja nodded. It was much the same as she and Clementine did when observing animals in the wild, except they committed the details to memory for the sake of research and a deeper understanding of nature . . . and the animals never seemed offended.

  Mrs Pargenter, on the other hand, was completely unnerved by Tobias’ intense gaze and madman mutterings.

  ‘Rude fellow!’ she gasped and dashed away.

  Tobias wandered around the grocer’s, gathering apples and beans, milk and biscuits, cheese and crumpets, jam and oatmeal. All the time, he remarked loudly, enthusiastically, on people’s distinguishing
features — Jenny Sergeant’s uneven gait . . . the Vicar’s slight lisp . . . the fact that Charles Whitmore’s left ear was a little bigger than his right. Freja didn’t know whether to laugh, cry or be impressed by Tobias’ acute powers of observation. In the end, she did a little of all three.

  Halfway along the produce aisle, Tobias stopped and threw his arms wide. ‘Helloooo, Mrs Indira!’ he exclaimed. But by the time he had taken one step towards the woman, she had ducked behind a crate of oranges with her two small boys.

  ‘Leave us alone, please, Mr Appleby,’ the poor woman hissed. ‘Sanjay is still having nightmares since our last meeting in the pet food aisle.’

  Tobias ran his hand through his mop of hair, grimaced at Freja and tried to explain. ‘But dogs truly can be trained to bite off —’

  ‘Hush!’ snapped Mrs Indira, and she hurled an orange at him.

  In aisle three, Tobias sat down to better admire the unique qualities of Mrs Hawking’s nasal hair and squashed a carton of eggs. At the deli, he stood for a full ten minutes, wondering aloud whether it would be best to hide a stolen ruby inside a bratwurst sausage or a wheel of camembert. And at the checkout, he was busy explaining to a teenage lad how a stick of celery could be used to break into a safe and failed to notice that he’d paid for his groceries with a chocolate wrapper and two old parking tickets. Mr Barnes, the store keeper, was so eager to see the back of Tobias that he accepted the payment without question and bid him a hearty goodbye.

  Out in the street and the wintry air, Freja took a deep breath and looked up into Tobias’ face. She thought she might see despair or at least embarrassment. Instead, she saw nothing but a dreamy smile and a twinkle in his eyes.

  ‘I do love a good outing!’ he cried, striding towards the motorcycle, arms laden with groceries. ‘So many intriguing people. Always something new to observe. All fuel for one’s writing. Chocolate topping and whipped cream for one’s imagination.’

  At the library, Tobias borrowed every book he could find on mountain climbing, including a fascinating little volume called Gashes, Bruises, Slashes — An Illustrated Anthology of Life-Threatening Injuries. While she waited, concealed by a bookshelf, Freja overheard a strange and disturbing conversation.

  ‘It’s true!’ exclaimed a woman with a deep, husky voice. ‘He really does have a child staying with him.’

  A second woman with a high, squeaky voice asked, ‘Who in their right mind would send a child to live with that mad writer?’

  Freja gasped. They were talking about her and Tobias!

  ‘Perhaps the mother is not in her right mind,’ said Husky.

  ‘Probably not,’ agreed Squeaky. ‘The child seems a little odd herself. Have you seen her? Wide, staring eyes. Feathers sticky-taped to the top of her gumboots. And a hat and scarf that look like they were stolen from a garden gnome.’

  ‘Eccentric!’ added Husky.

  Freja ducked beneath the computer desk, lest the women should see her and scream with horror. She patted her cherry-red scarf and beanie, birthday gifts knitted by Clementine.

  ‘Clementine,’ whispered Freja, rubbing her stinging eyes. She took the little felt hare from her pocket and clutched it to her chest.

  ‘Yes! Eccentric!’ cried Squeaky. ‘Just like Tobias Appleby.’

  There was a long silence that felt like it was full of something nasty.

  ‘And that hair,’ whispered Husky loudly. ‘Feral and curly! Just like . . . well, you know . . .’

  Freja peeped out from her hidey-hole and saw the women stroll past the Romance section, their eyebrows raised knowingly at each other.

  ‘Come along, old chap, wherever you are!’ called Tobias. ‘I’ve just spotted Finnegan through the library door, with the front half of his body wedged down into a rubbish bin. There’ll be trouble — and bad smells — if we don’t rein him in.’

  Freja gathered three feathers that had fallen from the top of her gumboots and crawled out from beneath the desk. She blushed as the two gossips stared at her. Springing to her feet, she ran from the library, relieved to be away from their confusing words and sizzling silences.

  They extracted Finnegan from the bin. Tobias wiped gravy off the dog’s face. Freja plucked squashed chips from his hairy grey shoulder.

  ‘Come along, dog and child,’ sang Tobias. ‘Polly Wimple’s Tea Room is waiting!’

  Two lime spiders and a bowl of cherry trifle later, Freja felt full, warm and fuzzy. Tobias was sitting on the opposite side of the booth, pushing a blob of red jelly around the table with his finger. He muttered excitedly about squashed eyeballs and oozing goo. Finnegan had eaten three bowls of trifle and was moving his mouth, slowly, furtively, towards the pompom on Freja’s beanie.

  ‘Uh-uh!’ Freja pulled away, wiggling her finger at the dog’s nose.

  Finnegan licked the finger in apology.

  Freja poked her straw at the green froth in the bottom of her glass. ‘Drinking a lime spider is like slurping up a magic cloud of happiness.’ She sighed. ‘It’s fluffy, sweet, colourful and creamy, and the merry tingle lingers long after the last slurp is gone.’

  At that very moment, however, the two women from the library strolled into Polly Wimple’s. A gush of cold, nasty air accompanied them and blew the magic cloud of happiness away. Freja shivered and shrank down behind Finnegan’s hairy body until they had passed.

  Pulling one of her curly locks down before her eyes, Freja stared at it, then let it go. It sprang up and down, tickling the side of her nose.

  ‘Tobias,’ she whispered. ‘Is my hair feral?’

  Tobias froze, his finger submerged in jelly. He stared at her for a moment, then boomed, ‘Absolutely!’

  Freja gasped.

  ‘In fact,’ continued Tobias, his eyes wide and sparkling, ‘yours is the most feral hair I have ever seen! It reminds me of wild storms at sea . . . an octopus caught in a whirlpool . . . a bowl of noodles tossed into the air . . . an explosion in a factory full of corkscrews! It is the most sensational, marvellous hair I have ever seen. A real crowd-stopper. You should be mightily proud of it and make sure to always keep it just as it is right now.’

  How like Tobias, to take something troubling and turn it into something good.

  ‘And by the way,’ he added, ‘have I told you how simply splendid that scarf and hat are? Like something one might have stolen from a garden gnome. Jolly exciting.’ He grabbed the sides of his tattered brown cardigan and grinned down at his frazzled green vest. ‘I haven’t a tenth of your style, old chap!’

  Freja beamed at him and, to show her appreciation, said, ‘Please, before we leave, would you tell me all about squashed eyeballs?’

  CHAPTER 11

  The too-big lie

  Two days later, a letter arrived from Switzerland. It was brief but meaningful, bearing Clementine’s deepest love and three small treasures — a pressed edelweiss, a chocolate wrapper with German writing and a small, colourful drawing of a cow with a bell around her neck. They were snippets of Clementine’s new world, something Freja could hang her thoughts on. Visions of a clinic with endless corridors and sterile white rooms faded from Freja’s mind. Instead, she was able to picture Clementine eating chocolate and breathing fresh air while strolling through meadows full of flowers and fat cows.

  ‘Delightful and delicious!’ she sighed.

  In the evening, Freja sat on the floor in the living room, pasting the new treasures in her scrapbook. The scrapbook was tattered from use, its pages bulging with objects she had gathered during her travels over the years — ferry tickets and food wrappers in different languages, feathers, pressed plants, her own drawings, Clementine’s precise sketches, tufts of fur, shards of eggshells, photographs, seeds and a small but completely intact fish skeleton.

  Freja had not taken the scrapbook from her satchel since arriving nine days ago. There had been no need, her time having been filled with crime novels, treks through the forest, cups of sweet, milky tea and Finnegan.

  But here
, now, her whole life with Clementine was laid out before her on the floor. Slowly, she turned the pages, staring at this picture she had drawn of a squirrel . . . that tuft of fox fur she had found snagged on the bark of a tree . . . those photos of their blissful summer in Greenland.

  A hard lump formed in Freja’s throat.

  She tried to focus on the rhythmic clackety-clack of Tobias’ typewriter, but it was no use. The lump in her throat grew until her neck ached and, soon, her eyes were stinging too.

  Closing the scrapbook, Freja reached for Rome’s Reward, Tobias’ newly released crime novel and the only one she had not yet read. Leaning against Finnegan’s hairy grey body, she folded back the cover. But before the end of the first page, her eyes filled with tears and the words washed away. She began to cry, ever so softly at first, but soon snuffling, gasping and — there was no other word for it — blubbering!

  The typewriter stopped clacking. Tobias held his hands in the air for a moment and tilted his head to one side. He leapt up from his chair, strode over to the fireside and stared. His green eyes grew soft and sad. ‘Why, Freja! You’re sobbing again. What a shame!’

  He dropped to the floor beside the girl and the dog and folded his long, gangly legs in a knot. Leaning forward, he squeezed Freja’s shoulder awkwardly. ‘There, there.’

  Freja dived into his lap, wrapped her little arms around his body and buried her tear-drenched face in his vest. The vest was soft and woolly and smelt like comfort, love and old books. It was also being worn inside out and back to front, which helped her to feel a little bit happy amidst the gloom. Her sobs settled to gentle weeping.

  Tobias seemed surprised by the close contact, but soon relaxed. He rocked Freja back and forth, whispering, ‘There, there. Everything will be all right, old chap. Tobby is here and will keep you safe.’

  Slowly, Freja’s weeping faded to sniffs.

  Tobias twiddled the golden curls at the back of her head and made up a jolly poem.

  Mousey, mousey, needs a housey