A Girl Called Dog

by Nicola Davies

  She stopped to catch her breath, then looked back and saw they had left the rats behind! There they were, far below, a dark tide against the pale paintwork of the deck and the silvery stacks of tins. But as Dog watched, the rats swirled around the ladder and began to climb it, spreading upwards like a stain. Esme had seen them too. She gave a little grunt and tried to climb faster, but she was already tired and soon the rats were gaining. Glancing down between her feet, Dog could see the shape of their sharp snouts and the dark glitter of their unblinking eyes, just a few rungs behind!

  Carlos had settled on the top of the ladder, clinging upside down and calling to them. “Quick. Quick!”

  Dog pushed Esme higher and higher until they were both crushed side by side at the top of the ladder, with the strange little door just above them, and Carlos half clinging, half hovering on the last rung.

  “Open! Open! Door open!” he squawked, but it wasn’t so simple. The metal wheel at the centre that must be turned to open the door was stuck. Dog used all her strength, and still it wouldn’t budge.

  Now the rats had reached Dog’s feet; she had to hold on with her hands to free her feet for kicking. Carlos squawked and Esme chittered with fear. Another few moments and the wave of rats would be too dense to simply kick away. Dog and Esme would be covered in them, with the choice of being eaten alive or falling to die on the floor below. Dog’s head was filled with hotness and confusion; she tried again to turn the door wheel with one hand but it was no good.

  And then Esme did something totally extraordinary. She stopped chittering and clinging on with her eyes closed. She turned round, and went head first down the ladder towards the advancing rats. Holding on with her back legs and her curling stripy tail, she began to snarl and scratch. With her fur on end, and her lips drawn back from her teeth, she looked like a different animal, like her fearsome coati ancestors who had scared away jaguars and anacondas from the treetops.

  The rats climbing upwards were faced with sharp slashing teeth that snapped limbs and severed heads. There were fast flailing claws too, ripping their paws from the rungs and uprights of the ladder and sending them spinning into thin air. That wasn’t all!

  Now the parrot had joined in, swooping at them and knocking them off with its wings and grabbing feet. For a few moments the rats held back, weighing the chances of a fresh meal against the odds of a sudden death. It was all the time Dog needed. With both hands free, she wrenched the wheel again; this time it moved, just a little at first, then faster and faster.

  Dog pushed, and with one big shove the round metal door clanged up and back. Dog was through it in a moment, pulling Esme up after her. Below them Carlos dive-bombed a few more rats, then swooped up, folding his wings to shoot through the hatch like a missile. Dog slammed the door shut, trapping the rats down below, then sat down breathless on the floor.

  “Phew!” said Carlos. “Very very phew!”

  Chapter 19

  DOG HAD NEVER seen a sky full of stars. The pet-shop window was too grimy and the streetlight outside too glaring to see more than a faint dot of light from the very brightest ones. But the open sky above her now was shimmering with an endless sea of them. She gazed up, mesmerized. She didn’t know what stars were, but she was lost in their beauty all the same. Esme pointed her nose straight up and blinked her eyes in wonder.

  But Carlos wasn’t interested in stars. “Danger, danger!” he hissed. “Must hide! Coming person! Now.”

  The sound of footsteps ringing on the metal deck finally got Dog and Esme’s attention. Just in time, they scrambled up to one of the lifeboats slung above the deck and wriggled, rather noisily, under its cover.

  They lay still in the bottom of the lifeboat, listening as the footsteps got closer and closer, then stopped, right beside them.

  A voice spoke very sternly. “I know you’re in there; I heard you banging about.”

  The three friends crouched lower.

  The corner of the cover was lifted and a bright torch beam began to search the boat.

  “Just come out and show yourself,” said the voice, though now it didn’t seem quite so stern. “You can’t get away, you know!”

  The beam caught them like a spotlight. They huddled together, waiting to be seized. Instead, the voice gave a long, low giggle, and someone jumped in with them, propping the torch up like a lantern to light the whole space under the cover.

  “Well, am I glad to see you! After all that clanking of hatches I thought I was going to find some villain with a gun.”

  The owner of the giggle was a lanky boy dressed in a pair of ancient shorts, a T-shirt with a picture of a beer bottle on the front and a grimy yellow oilskin jacket. Dog looked at him from under the cover of her fringe.

  “No need to look so scared!” He grinned. “I don’t think you’re a danger to the safety of the ship, so I won’t give you away, don’t worry! Just don’t let anyone else see you, or we’re all in big trouble.”

  They were safe! Dog had never hugged a human but she wondered if she should start now. Esme caught her relief and her tail went straight up like a flag.

  Carlos, who had been sitting dejectedly on the floor, now clambered onto Dog’s shoulder. “Boy fine, very,” he announced.

  The boy was delighted. He smiled as if all his features wanted to join in the fun, even his ears – which, Dog noticed, were large and rather nicely mouse-like.

  “Well, that’s a compliment if ever I heard one!” he said. “Quite right too. I am a very fine boy, though I’m not sure there’s anyone else on board that would say so! Anthony Steven Kevin Edwards, at your service. Asky for short, apprentice seafarer extraordinaire!”

  He sat down on a coil of rope, grinning, and looked keenly at Dog. “So what’s your name then?”

  Dog shook her head.

  “What?” said Asky. “Not going to tell me your name?”

  She shook her head again and looked down at her feet, still inside their small red wellies.

  Carlos coughed. “This,” he said, tapping his curved beak gently on Dog’s head, “Dog, this.” Stretching a wing towards the coati, Carlos went on, “Esme … Me, Carlos.”

  Asky looked dumbfounded. “Wow! Not just a talking bird, a thinking one too! You know we’re bound for South America, don’t you?” he said to Carlos.

  Carlos squawked approval and said, “Sí, sí, sí!”

  “Oh, you already speak the lingo then!” said Asky. “Going to see your family in the jungle, Carlos?”

  The parrot stretched his wings around his two friends. “All see family in the jungle,” he said in Asky’s voice.

  Asky laughed at Carlos’s mimicry but Dog wondered if he was being silly or saying something true. She thought about Marmalade’s words:

  I haven’t seen a coati or a child like this since I left Theamazun.

  If Theamazun was where they were going, maybe she and Esme were going home too?

  Chapter 20

  ASKY VISITED MOST nights, when it was easy to slip about the decks unseen. He told them the Marilyn was owned by his Great-uncle Enoch, who always took the smallest, cheapest crew he could.

  “They eat chips when they’re off duty and watch satellite TV in the mess. Only person who comes down to this deck is me. If you stay quiet, you ought to be all right down here.”

  He brought them food – fruit and nuts and crackers, hidden under his T-shirt – and blankets to sleep on. Water was the only problem. Big bottles were hard to hide under a shirt, and Asky could never bring enough, so when it rained they collected the water that ran off the cover of the lifeboat.

  Sometimes they rolled back the corner of the lifeboat cover, on the seaward side, and breathed the clean sea air. Esme would stand on tiptoe, poking her nose as high as she could, as if searching for the scent of something. If it was still enough, Carlos would fly alongside them in the starlight, then sit and preen every feather, grumbling to himself about “Salt! Salt!”

  Dog and Asky would watch the waves rolling al
ong the side of the boat or look up at the stars. Asky had lots to say about stars. “They’re like the sun, only a long way away. The sun is a star, just really close.”

  All the patterns the stars made in the sky had names. “There’s Orion. He’s always easy to find, that old boy. There’s his belt. See? No?”

  Dog shook her head. Asky took her hand and pointed with it. “There, those three big ’uns. And the big orange one, that’s his shoulder, yeah?”

  Dog nodded. She could see Orion now, standing tall, with one arm raised above his head.

  “They show the way, stars do,” Asky said. “That’s how the old seafarin’ boys used to navigate. None of your satellite navigation in those days, they just followed the stars!”

  Dog didn’t know what satellite navigation was, but now she knew what stars were. She watched how they moved across the sky in the night and disappeared below the horizon, in the very direction the Marilyn was headed.

  When it was too cold, or too wet, which it often was, they sat in the torchlight under the lifeboat cover. Asky thought of questions that Dog could answer with a nod, a shake or a shrug. Even though she couldn’t speak, Dog felt that she was talking to a human for the first time in her life.

  “So, your mum and dad dead then?”

  Dog shrugged and thought of Marmalade’s picture – of Gikita and Dawa; had people like that been her parents?

  “Were you born in the old port?”

  Asky meant the city where the pet shop was. She realized that she now knew she hadn’t been born there, that there had been something before Uncle and the pet shop. She shook her head.

  “I bet you were born somewhere exciting. Like Carlos’s jungle, eh?” Asky said.

  Dog smiled: perhaps that was true. She nodded her head again.

  “Maybe you hatched from an egg? What do you think?”

  Carlos coughed and stopped preening. He looked at Dog and Asky with one eye then the other. “Hatched from an egg!” he exclaimed, in Asky’s voice, adding, “No! No! No!” in his own.

  He looked so horrified that Asky and Dog burst out laughing.

  “Rude,” said Carlos, and turned his back on them. “Very, very.”

  Chapter 21

  THE WEATHER GOT warmer and sunnier with every day at sea. It was too risky to lift the cover when it was light, so daytimes in the lifeboat got hot and stuffy. There was nothing to do but try and keep quiet. Esme was happy to sleep and sleep, but Dog and Carlos needed to find ways to kill their boredom.

  Carlos invented bird exercises. He hung from the underside of the cover by his feet and flapped his wings. It kept him occupied and made a nice cooling fan system for the boat. Dog lay propped on lifejackets with her eye next to a chink in the cover that allowed her to look down at the sea. She watched the waves and wondered why a colour that could be so many different things was just called blue. Sometimes she saw sea creatures – and she’d point at them to get Carlos to tell her what they were, or mime their shape and movement to Asky, who seemed to know everything.

  In this way Dog knew she had seen flying fish.

  “Their fins are like wings,” Asky told her, “and you only get them in tropical waters. We’re nearly there now, you know!”

  Dog saw what Asky said were “dolphins” too. Carlos had got quite excited about those and had inspected them carefully with each eye in turn pressed to the gap in the cover. “Not fish,” he’d said. “Air breathe. Clever.”

  Dog wasn’t sure if they were clever for breathing air, or for doing amazing acrobatic leaps out of the water. Clever or not, they seemed to be having a lot of fun.

  Days and days passed. Dog couldn’t tell how many. She’d thought she was getting to know the sea when, one morning, staring out of her usual chink, it looked different. The blues and greens faded, water and sky changed to grey. Wind whistled, and waves like jagged white teeth covered the sea. The whole ship began to roll and tip so it was hard not to slide about the lifeboat.

  The skin around Carlos’s beak turned from white to green. “Sick,” he said. “Very.”

  Then Asky risked a visit in daylight and Dog knew that something was very wrong.

  “Can’t come in, too many crew about,” he whispered from beside the lifeboat. “Listen, there’s going to be a storm. A really, really bad storm. The Marilyn’ll come through, no worries. But it’ll be tough.”

  All the feathers on Carlos’s head stood on end. “Storm,” he repeated quietly, and shivered.

  Dog shuddered too; there was fear under Asky’s words.

  “Pull the cover on as tight as you can,” he told them, “then tie everything down, and rope yourselves to the benches. Got that?”

  Asky pushed his hand into the lifeboat. Carlos gently squeezed a finger in his beak and Esme rubbed his palm with her cold nose. Dog put her small hand inside Asky’s, and felt her throat ache with silence.

  “Take care of yourself, Dog,” Asky said, and closed his fingers around hers for a moment. Then he was gone.

  Dog, Esme and Carlos worked together to do what Asky had told them. Dog and Esme pulled ropes tight, and Carlos, who was good at knots, tied them off. Then Dog roped herself to one of the benches, and strapped Carlos and Esme safely inside her lifejacket, so they wouldn’t all be thrown around like beans in a box. Then they held tight and waited.

  First the wind smashed into the ship like a blow from a giant’s club. Then the waves grew, until the ship was tossed from peak to trough like a tiny toy. The Marilyn screeched and groaned as the sea tried to rip her to pieces, but she held on. The lifeboat rocked and juddered as the wind tried to work it loose. All around, in the weird twilight of the storm, the waves bellowed and the wind shrieked, while the three friends huddled together silently in their little refuge.

  The storm went on. It grew dark but there were no stars, only fearsome flashes of terrible brightness, and crashes in the sky. Dog wondered if the sky was breaking and if the stars would fall into the sea.

  When the night was at its blackest, and without warning, a terrible howl cut through the screaming wind, and a huge blade ripped the lifeboat cover in two. Wind and lashing rain burst in on the three terrified friends and a great flash of lightning showed the knifeman towering over them! He was still on the ship, and he had found them!

  He was much thinner than when they’d last seen him and his white skin was covered in rat bites, but his great alabaster body still weighted him down in a gale that would have blown Dog away in a second. He rode the bucking, tipping deck as if it were a ballroom floor. His face streamed with rain and his eyes glowed with a feverish excitement. He seemed to be another part of the hurricane.

  “You!” he roared. “You! My three first meals you’ll be, just as soon as I launch this boat. I’ve been tormented by police, chewed by rats – I’m not going to drown in this metal coffin.”

  Then he leaped into the bow of the lifeboat and began hacking at the ropes that kept her lashed to the ship! One rope broke, then another, and then a third.

  “No!” squawked Carlos. “Noooooooo!” He wriggled free of Dog’s lifejacket and took to the air. The wind blew him straight into the knifeman’s face, where he held on, clawing and pecking, stopping him from slicing any more ropes.

  But it was too late. As a giant swell struck the Marilyn, it parted the old lifeboat from her mother-ship as easily as a speck of dust brushed from a shelf. For a split second they were all held in the brightness of a lightning flash – the man falling backwards to be swallowed by the waves, the bird helplessly fighting the wind, the girl and coati holding onto the spinning boat. Then all was darkness and bellowing sea, as the lifeboat fell down, down, down into the black trough of a wave.

  Chapter 22

  DOG OPENED HER eyes and saw calm blue sky. The lifeboat was still at last, and it rocked her gently as she lay, comforted by the warmth of the sun. For a moment she was just grateful to be alive, and then she remembered Esme and Carlos, and that terrible fall from the Marilyn. Where were h
er friends? She sat up and looked around with her heart racing.

  The storm had carried the lifeboat to land! They floated in a calm, sandy bay, with dense green trees beyond the beach. The air was warm and full of the scent of flowers and plants. Dog thought of the map above Uncle’s till, and wondered where they were on it now.

  The lifeboat was still in one piece, although almost everything that had been inside it had been stripped away by the wild sea. The ripped cover was knotted around the bow in a complicated tangle. There was a deep puddle in the bottom of the boat, and lying in that, like a bit of wet rag, was Esme. Dog tried to get up but found she was still tied to the bench and the knot took minutes to undo. In all that time she didn’t see Esme breathe once.

  Free at last, she staggered to Esme’s side and gently lifted her out of the water. She hung limply in Dog’s arms. Her nose was bloody, her tail was broken and she seemed quite cold. Dog laid her in the driest part of the boat, and gently began to check her friend’s little body for signs of life. She cleared the blood from Esme’s nose, and put her lips close to the coati’s nostrils to feel for breath. Yes! There was the tiniest movement of air and, when she put her hand on Esme’s chest, a faint flutter of a heartbeat. She stroked the coati’s fur, feeling for any broken bones, and gently massaged her paws to get her circulation moving again. Slowly Esme’s breathing deepened, and her heart began to beat more strongly, but still she didn’t open her eyes.