by Livi Michael
The thing had turned away from her dish and was glaring around suspiciously with its luminous eyes. Flo barely had the presence of mind to cower behind the dining-room door as it stalked past, radiating pure evil, its yellow eyes scouring the hallway as though still hungry for another chance of attack.
‘It’s just a cat, Flo,’ Gentleman Jim had told her one morning when Aunty Dot was walking them both and Flo had been particularly distressed.
‘It’s not a cat!’ Flo insisted. ‘It’s a horrible stripy – thing – and it’s got fangs and – and ’
‘It’s a cat,’ repeated Gentleman Jim.
‘Oh, no, it can’t be,’ Flo quavered. ‘You haven’t seen its eyes. Its eyes are – horrible – monstrous. They – they glow in the dark – like – like ’
‘Like cat’s eyes?’ queried Gentleman Jim, but there was no convincing Flo that the ferocious being that had taken over her household was, in reality, no more than a cat.
Gentleman Jim tried a different approach. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘You are actually bigger than it is, you know.’
But Flo’s terror had apparently affected her eyesight.
‘Oh, no – I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘You haven’t seen it – it’s huge! Much bigger than me.’
In vain did Gentleman Jim point out that for a cat to be much bigger than a standard poodle, it would have to be a tiger, and though Flo’s owner, Myrtle Sowerbutts, was a renowned eccentric who dyed her pet poodle pink to match her own clothes, and had her clipped into unusual geometric shapes like a kind of abstract topiary, even she might draw the line at taking a tiger in.
‘Besides,’ he said, ‘if a tiger had jumped on you from the top of the kitchen cupboard, you’d hardly be here to tell the tale.’
Eventually Flo was forced to concede the point. ‘Well – it might not be quite as big as me,’ she admitted. ‘But it’s much, much meaner.’
Life had been fine, a little scary but manageable, before her owner, for no good reason that Flo could think of, had taken in this foul predator and assassin.
‘She calls it Henry,’ she said, as though this was like calling the Prince of Darkness Fred. ‘She says her sister left it to her. In her will!’
It was true that the Sowerbutts were notoriously eccentric. Myrtle’s sister, Holly, had left her house to the cats’ home and her cat to Myrtle, and though everyone, including Myrtle, thought that this should probably have been the other way round, there were no real grounds for contesting the will. And since it was the only thing she had been left, Myrtle seemed determined to keep it.
‘But it’s ruining my life!’ Flo said, almost in tears as they approached her home again. ‘I don’t know how much longer I can go on like this!’
And it was true that under the fantastically clipped pink and purple mane, Flo was actually getting quite thin. Whereas the cat was getting fatter and fatter, because it always ate Flo’s food.
While Jenny was being taken for her first walk, Flo was clinging to the skirting boards, feeling the reassuring texture of wallpaper on her back. If she could just make it to her bed and lie down for a little while, she might feel better. She was quite exhausted after the morning’s trauma. She nosed the door to the front room open carefully and sniffed.
‘Feel the fear and do it anyway,’ she reminded herself – this was another of Myrtle’s favourite sayings. The coast seemed to be clear.
‘Lightning doesn’t strike twice,’ she remembered, as she tiptoed behind the back of the settee, towards her bed.
Nothing. The clock ticked; the shadows did not move. Vastly reassured, Flo reached her bed and was about to sink down gratefully, when the bed itself rose before her into a huge and monstrous cloud of ginger fur with staring eyes, making a noise like the snakes around a Gorgon’s head would make if they all hissed at once.
At first Flo wondered whether she was having a heart attack, but then she realized it wasn’t her heart but the beast that was attacking. It flung itself at her face and she careered round the house backwards, totally unable to see, hear or think. The smell of it was enough to render her unconscious. And in fact she did seem to pass out for a moment, and when she came to she was somehow locked in the cellar, alone.
Poor Flo stayed in the cellar a long time, because Myrtle was out with a friend, and when she came back she was rather tipsy and had completely forgotten that she had a dog. She opened a tin of dog food for the cat and fell asleep with him on her lap. Eventually she woke out of a dream in which the cat was barking at her and looked at him in surprise.
‘Henry?’ she said.
At the same time there was a knock on the front door.
‘It’s only me,’ called Aunty Dot. ‘I’ve come to take Flo for a walk.’
‘Flo!’ said Myrtle, remembering all at once that she had a dog.
‘Just thought Fd take her out for an evening constitutional,’ said Aunty Dot, letting herself in.
It was part of Myrtle’s eccentricity that, though she had a dog, she wouldn’t walk. She didn’t like the outdoors at all – there was too much of it, she always said. She had an elderly chauffeur called Ryan who drove her everywhere, even next door, and she had hired Aunty Dot to walk Flo twice a day.
‘Well, where is she, then?’ said Aunty Dot, and finally Flo was extracted from the cellar.
‘How did she get down there?’ said Myrtle.
And ‘How did she lock the door?’ said Aunty Dot, and she looked towards Henry, who squatted with eyes like yellow slits, twitching his evil tail.
‘Well, never mind,’ said Aunty Dot, when Henry failed to speak. ‘Come along now, Flo dear, there’s someone I want you to meet.’
Poor Flo hung back, cringing and trembling. ‘Will it hurt?’ she asked, but Aunty Dot coaxed her to the door with dog biscuits, and then to the end of the garden, where she could make out her friends, Gentleman Jim and Pico, and a boy with reddish hair, who might have been alarming, but he was standing on the other side of the gate.
‘I’ve had the most terrible time,’ she started to say. ‘I’ve –oh!’
Because the boy had opened the gate and there was Jenny.
Instantly Flo cringed, her whole body clinging to the earth, as though fearing it might rock dangerously and fling her off. There are not many dogs who close their eyes when meeting a potential threat, but Flo had an optical condition that made frightening objects appear five times larger than their actual size and so had discovered that it was best. She shut her eyes tightly and clung to the lawn.
‘Don’t be silly, dear,’ said Aunty Dot, and Sam and the dogs tried to tell her that it was all right. But Jenny trotted right up to Flo and touched her nose.
Instantly Flo’s nostrils were filled with the scent of meadows and summer streams and, well, kindliness. It is not often that one female dog takes instantly to another, but the scent in Flo’s nostrils said ‘friend’. Very cautiously, she opened her eyes and realized that Jenny was not, in fact, the size of a pony.
‘Dear friend,’ said Jenny, in the voice that was at once strange and instantly recognizable, as though Flo had been listening to it for years, ‘you will be an invaluable companion through the peril that is to come.’
‘P-peril?’ stuttered Flo, getting ready to close her eyes again. ‘I’m not very good at peril. I-I’m a bit of a coward actually.’
‘Cowardice is just one of the forms of wisdom,’ said Jenny. ‘And it is your wisdom and perception that we need.’
‘Oh,’ said Flo. It was not often that she received a compliment and she was so taken by surprise that she forgot to ask, ‘For what?’ Instead she was remembering that poodles are in fact among the most intelligent of dogs, and that her great-grandfather had been a leading performer in a circus, and that Flo herself learned new tricks very rapidly. She felt suddenly aware of the vast possibilities of her brain, and she raised herself up properly, feeling brave enough to look all around.
‘There you are,’ said Aunty Dot triumphantly. ‘Jenny’s
even made friends with Flo!’
‘I told you she was special,’ said Sam, and Aunty Dot said she didn’t need telling that.
Between them they led all the dogs on to the croft and watched as they sniffed and explored, and Checkers ran round and round in circles, but sooner or later they all returned to Jenny.
‘It’s like they’re making a pack,’ said Sam, and in fact, this was exactly what they were doing.
‘My friends,’ Jenny said, ‘I can see that all of you are sad, for one reason or another. That is because you are not leading the lives you were born to lead. None of you can live out your full potential. But all that is about to change. You are all members of my pack.’
‘Hooray!’ cried Checkers, belting all the way round the croft again. ‘I’ve always wanted to be in a pack. Can I be the leader?’
‘No,’ said Jenny.
‘But every pack should have a leader,’ said Flo, who had watched a documentary. ‘And an underdog.’
‘That’ll be Pico,’ said Checkers, tearing round again.
‘WOOF!’ said Pico from underneath a twig.
Jenny paused for a moment, wrapped in thought. There was a reason she was here, in this new world, and a reason they had all come together. Only she didn’t know what it was. A ripple of sadness passed through her, and she had a sense of something else dark and flickering in the corners of her mind.
‘This pack has neither leader nor underdog,’ she said eventually. ‘Each of you is needed for the danger that lies ahead.’
Boris looked at Checkers, and Flo looked at Gentleman Jim. Pico stood underneath Jenny and looked up, but couldn’t see a thing. They were all thinking the same thing, though only Gentleman Jim put it into words.
‘Danger?’ he said. ‘What danger?’
‘I do not know yet,’ Jenny said.
Flo closed her eyes, but Checkers ran round the croft again, barking madly. ‘Danger!’ he shouted. ‘Hooray!’
Now the colours of the sky were deepening and the first pale stars appeared. Jenny looked up at them and sighed, and wondered briefly if she would ever see her own, very different stars again.
‘When will you know?’ asked Gentleman Jim, but Jenny only said that she would know when the time came.
‘Come along, you lot,’ called Aunty Dot. ‘Checkers, Boris, Flo – time to go home.’
And slowly, reluctantly, the dogs returned. Their mood had changed, and they were all serious and quiet, wondering what their new friend might possibly mean.
7
The Doggie Post
Over the next few days, Jenny adjusted to life in her new home. There was a lot to adjust to. Electric lights that went on and off unpredictably, so that the rooms did not go dark when night came, and music blaring out from a small box. There was a bigger box, full of moving pictures, that Sam and Jenny watched, entranced, every evening, until Sam’s mum told him off for not doing his homework, or sent him upstairs to bed, at which point she sat in front of it, entranced. Then there was the washing machine. Jenny got in trouble for attempting to rescue the clothes as Sam’s mum loaded them in, then she guarded them fiercely, her head going round and round, until the machine reached the spin cycle, when she ran off backwards, with her tail between her legs.
‘It’s almost as if she’s not used to electricity,’ Sam’s mum said, as Jenny stared out of the window, fascinated by the street lights. ‘I wonder where she lived before.’
Then, at the end of that week, Sam’s mum got the vacuum cleaner out. Jenny cowered to the ground, appalled, as she plugged it in and switched it on. She watched in horror as Sam’s mum kept pushing it away from her, and it came back, roaring horribly. Jenny was terrified, but her duty was clear. She flattened herself to the floor, emitting a volley of barks, then advanced on it in a growling rush, gripping the base of it with her teeth and hanging on for grim death while it pulled her back and forth across the carpet. But Sam’s mum did not appear to be grateful for Jenny’s heroic struggle.
‘Sam!’ she thundered. ‘Take the dog away!’
And Sam had to haul Jenny into the kitchen on her lead. Even there she wouldn’t give up the battle. She kept on barking and sounding the alarm until Sam’s mum had finally won the fight and tied the beast up with its own tail.
There was so much that was strange and new that Jenny was often exhausted at the end of the day. She had come to a very noisy world. The bin men arrived with their huge truck that made a grinding noise as they lifted the bins. Police sirens sounded regularly, and once a fire engine thundered past, almost deafening Jenny with its alarm. Many enemies attacked the house in that first week. There was a strange man in uniform who came every morning and a boy with a big bag of papers. Both of them seemed to be trying to get in through a slot in the front door, but each time they tried, Jenny barked furiously until she had seen them off When a man with a ladder came, she nearly had a fit. He attacked all the windows with a soapy solution so that he thought he was hidden, but Jenny wasn’t fooled, and she barked so loudly and for so long that everyone on the street came out to see what was going on.
Gradually, Jenny adjusted to the clamour of her new world, though she was still very nervous and didn’t much like being taken out on a lead. No one turned up to claim her, much to the bemusement of Sam’s mum and Aunty Dot. But Sam kept his word about taking her out every day, before and after school. She wagged her tail furiously at him when he got up in the morning and looked very sad when he left for school, then overjoyed to see him again in the afternoon. He was the first person she had trusted in this strange new world and she followed him whenever she could.
If Aunty Dot came to take Sam and Jenny out, Jenny would meet all her new friends. When Sam took her out on her own, she learned to communicate with them by using the doggie post.
When dogs leave their mark on lampposts or fences or tufts of grass, it usually contains a message for other dogs. In this way Jenny learned when Gentleman Jim’s rheumatism was bad or Boris’s food had disagreed with him again; when Flo was feeling especially nervous or Pico especially cross. Checkers was always very excited about something, often too excited to leave a proper message.
‘Come on, Jenny,’ Sam would say, because he was impatient to play with his new friends. ‘What’s so good about that one blade of grass?’
But Jenny would move the blade around carefully, sniffing over and under it and nudging it at the root, before moving on to the next blade. There were the scents she was familiar with, of earthworm and mole and hedgehog, the silvery trails of snails. Then there were the little piles of poo scattered all over the croft. Boris’s poo was especially interesting, and she couldn’t understand what made it glow with a mysterious purple light, until she worked out his message: Mrs Finnegan had bought a new cookbook and he was suffering from the results. The chemicals in Flo’s poo suggested that she had become sensitive to the new hair dye her human was using on her. She could tell that Checkers had been eating the wallpaper and that Pico was having trouble with his teeth.
‘Hurry up, Jenny!’ Sam complained. ‘It’s getting dark!’
But Jenny had her own messages to leave, of comfort and hope to her friends who were leading such unnaturally stressful lives, and about her daily battles with the postman, the washing machine and the vacuum cleaner.
Apart from these misadventures, however, Jenny felt that her humans were shaping up nicely, and that she was getting to grips with the new world and settling in. Aunty Dot thought so too.
‘She’s a little miracle, that dog,’ she said, spoiling Jenny with one of the special treats she always brought. ‘I wonder how she came to be a stray.’
Jenny could have told her, of course, but she preferred to lie in her basket in front of the fire, keeping one eye on them all even when she fell asleep. Then, as the weeks passed, she found that she was forgetting her former life, and she preferred not to think about it. Her life now was full. She had her food, such as it was, she had her family and she had her fri
ends. She was learning to speak to them in a voice that was more like theirs. And, of course, she still had the mistletoe dart. She kept it under her cushion and took it out with her when she went for a walk. Sam was still the only person she allowed to touch it, and it was getting rather mangled now, from the games they played. She refused to give it up, however, since it was her last reminder of her former life. Sometimes, when she tucked it into her mouth, she had an old, sweet feeling of former times, the image of a golden boy, to whom she was absolutely devoted, and then she would get the pressing sensation that there was something she should be doing, but, try as she might, she could no longer remember what it was. She worried about this at first, but as time went on and she became more and more content, she allowed the fragments of her former life to settle like dust into the hollows of her mind.
8
In Which Something Very Unusual Happens
Aunty Dot and Aunty Joan and Aunty Lilith sat in their front room, knitting. At least Aunty Dot was actually knitting, Aunty Lilith was holding the ball of wool and sucking her tea from her false teeth, while from time to time Aunty Joan leaned forward with an enormous pair of scissors and cut the wool. This didn’t seem to bother Aunty Dot much; she just carried on knitting with another ball of wool that Aunty Lilith picked up in a different colour. Pico was asleep in his tea cosy in another room. This room was very quiet, except for the ticking of the clock, which was very loud. It was an old-fashioned clock which had a sun and moon travelling round the face on separate dials, and if you looked at it closely enough you would see that instead of numbers, it had the words PAST, PRESENT and FUTURE inscribed on it where the numbers 9, 6 and 3 would normally be. And at the top, instead of the number 12, there was the word ETERNITY in bold letters. It was quite hard to tell the time from this particular clock, especially since there seemed to be an almost infinite number of hands of different sizes, from the microscopically small to the huge. The biggest hand, however, seemed to be pointing at one minute to eternity.