Lost Dog

by Kate Spicer

  KATE SPICER

  * * *

  LOST DOG

  A Love Story

  CONTENTS

  BEFORE

  PART ONE: LOST WOMAN CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  PART TWO: LOST DOG CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Kate Spicer is a lifestyle journalist who has written for the Sunday Times, The Times, the Daily Mail, the Evening Standard, Vogue, Red and Noble Rot magazines and The Pool, and has appeared on television in everything from Masterchef to Newsnight. She has made three acclaimed documentaries in the last ten years all of which still air internationally, including most recently Mission to Lars, described as ‘beautiful’ by the New York Times.

  To anyone who knows what it is to love and be loved by a dog.

  BEFORE

  The clock barks twelve times and the day I decide to get a dog begins. I look up at my drug dealer’s clock. The numbers are replaced by TV family favourites. It’s Lassie’s job to announce midnight.

  What the hell is that doing here?

  The heart of Tim’s place is not the hearth or the kitchen or even the TV, it’s a large marble-and-glass coffee table that must have been quite the natty thing in the eighties when Tim was a young man about town. Now the town comes to him, and hunched over his period monstrosity holding rolled-up notes, they sniff cocaine up into their respiratory system, where it is absorbed through the blood vessels in the mucous membranes, into the bloodstream where it shoots around the body and arrives at the brain. Boom, there’s a big rush of dopamine. Delicious dopamine is the happy drug made in your own body. If only you can get enough of it, it makes life feel grand, even when you feel grim.

  In this state time flew by. Every hour an echo from my innocence calls out more time past. More of my life, wasted. It seems Lassie has only just barked her warning that everyone should be in bed when Bagpuss starts his soporific yawning. It’s 1 a.m. Sleepytime for kids. Not for Tim’s visitors though, they felt talkative, perverse, horny, animated, they shouted, they confessed their truest darkest thoughts, they argued and pointed fingers at each other, one did a rigid hipped sexless sexy dance, they bonded for life and became fast friends – until, that is, the drug wore off and all that merriment is replaced by the urgent grubby desperate need for more cocaine. No one’s your friend then, aside from Tim. Dear old Timbo.

  Tim wasn’t a dealer, not exactly; at first, he was very generous with his Tupperware full of finely milled snowy-white toot. This was no tawdry £30 pub dust. A gram of Tim’s very moreish gak was £130. Hence he attracted a ‘nicer’ fiend, if there is such a thing. Eventually though, he just said no, and then you started paying him.

  Sitting under the clock, now with the little hand on Mr. T, are two delinquent bankers. One is considered a genius of his speciality, the other is a more humdrum financial talent but far more handsome, if you go for that sharp-suit-and-slicked-back-hair kind of guy. They are bellowing at each other about LIBOR and complex financial transactions. Let’s call them the Libores.

  There’s another woman here, a young one with coltish legs in a pair of knickerbocker-style leather shorts and a dainty singlet that shows the sides of her cute bee-sting tits. She’s the brainy banker’s girlfriend, not that he’s paid any attention to her all night. Let’s call her Chica. Tim is alternating his attention between the birds and the bankers. He is riveted by Chica’s chat about her ambitions as an influencer. Which is a good thing, because she ain’t letting anyone else get a word in edgeways. For now it feels like we are all getting on like a house on fire, though I’m experienced enough to know it’s the drugs talking, and listening; I’m old enough to be her mother and, don’t be fooled by the inky-black hair, Tim her grandfather. In the morning we will have nothing in common.

  I sit with my head inclined to indicate that I’m all ears, though I’m not at all. I am just enjoying the anaesthetic escapism from a non-specific discomfort that throughout my whole adult life I have never quite been able to escape unless I am high, on what has changed over the years: drugs, sport, booze, love, work, they’re all great numbing agents. Eventually though, I always land up back here.

  The ashtray fills to overflowing and once an hour another snappy catchphrase from childhood falls through the gloom. It is dark everywhere in the flat except the coffee table, lit by an overhead lamp and our eager attention.

  By four my mood is starting to seriously flag and I descend into a hunch-shouldered silence. What chat I’ve managed to edge in to Chica’s self-absorbed monologue is grinding to a halt. The gas is running out.

  I need more. Drugs.

  There’s a susurrant squeak of dead animal hide against Chica’s delicious skin as her legs move on Tim’s old white leather international playboy sofa. It sounds like guys making moves in old cars. This flat really is the land that time forgot. Specifically daytime. I cannot remember ever seeing the curtains open. I look up. This fucking clock really doesn’t belong here. It belongs in a playroom, or a happy family kitchen, one bathed in sunlight and smears of biscuit.

  Phil Collins is on Tim’s mega-stereo with the big dials. Tim’s got the drugs, and where there’s drugs there’s usually someone happy to have sex, but he’s always struggled with the rock ’n’ roll part of the equation. He is sitting, intent on Chica, now discussing monetising her Instagram account and advertisers and brands that will pay her for content. ‘I’m sure you could attract a male audience too …’

  My cynicism is creeping back. Once, I had found it sad and offensive to my feminist principles, the sight of these younger women being slowly corrupted by the Tims of the world, older men with expensive drugs. Now I shrugged. The ordinary undoing of fortunate people didn’t move me anymore. The French writer Huysmans said a ‘heart is hardened and smoked dry by dissipation’ and that sums it up better than I ever could. Nice girls move to London, nice girls get corrupted, and pretty willingly, from what I could remember of my own swift descent. I know it’s meant to be a tragedy of gender inequality, but to me, it’s cliché.

  Chica, zipping through the lines like a pro and filling us in on her plans for a brilliant life, doesn’t realise all this yet. She theatrically holds the phone above us. ‘Selfie!’

  No, no, no. No way. I can see the hollowed-out ocular sockets. Lack of focus in the eyes, the lifeless 5 a.m. skin, grey roots and the fuzzy jawline. I put my hands in front of my face.

  ‘Come on! I can’t believe you’re the same age as my mum,’ she says, excitedly.

  ‘No!’ I speak like I would to a dog about to steal a steak.

  She still looks flawless. The satiny fabric of her smooth skin and her loose and easy slender body, her hair still a glorious reflection of her natural golden hope. Her beautiful eyes with only a mere hint of blue shadow underneath them stare intent and briefly hurt from her luminous dew-kissed face. ‘Oh no, why?’

  ‘Because even if by some miracle I look OK, I really don’t like selfies. They’re narcissistic, needy and embarrassing.’

  ‘But there’s this amazing filter I have,’ she says, beetling away on her phone, scrolling. She tells me all about how many selfies she needs to post a day as a social media influencer.

  ‘I don’t think this is anything that should be documented in any way. You go right ahead, but me, uh-uh.’

  Tim’s offering to take the picture of her and she’s reclining on his stupid white sofa, no
w doing something cute with her legs. She does a queer little pout and he shoots away. A real David Bailey. Yuck. He’s arranging her hair. There’s an #everydaysexism story right there. My great friend Timbo, the priapic sex pest with the massive bag of chang. What was it that first attracted you to pervy middle-aged Tim with a bit of a belly, weirdly too-black hair and a sandwich bag full of the most expensive drugs in London?

  The smarter, less handsome LIBOR guy is still in his work clothes, but he’s taken off his tie, undone his two top buttons. His oiled hair is flopping either side of his ashen face. He’s barking at Tim across the powdered altar about how, despite appearances, ‘You know, I’m an anarchist really. We need nothing short of a social revolution …’

  It takes some time to make him stop talking so I can ask a reasonable question. ‘Can I just speak for a moment,’ I say, urgently. He holds up his hand. What he has to say is as never-ending as it is imperative. ‘NO, but can I just say …’ Eventually I rush out, ‘So if you’re an anarchist and a socialist then why are you a banker?’ Disappointingly, my throat is like paper and the last words are a feeble cracked bark.

  ‘You’re not defined by your profession, rather by the impact of your actions,’ he says and, turning back more generally to the coffee table symposia: ‘I mean yes, it’s arguably contradictory but a puritanical approach to these matters is generally an even greater impediment to progress.’

  Brutal, bright, entitled and … a right old adenoidal mess; his suit’s falling off him and he has little Vs of dried foam at each corner of his mouth to match the margherita crust around his favourite, sore-looking nostril. I’d say banking ain’t working out that well for him.

  I need wine, I think, and make a move towards Tim’s fridge full of cold Waitrose Chablis. Mmmn, wine. Just the thought of it brightens the existential gloom.

  Tim and Chica’s little impromptu photo shoot is over and they have turned their attention on me. I’m a bit over the talking stage. I’d like some supermarket finest plonk and to be mute. I can’t think of anything interesting to say.

  Chica has already told me she’s a vegan, doesn’t drink or do drugs and I’ve looked at her with the appropriate astonishment. ‘Oh this. This is a special occasion. You’ve got to cut loose sometimes.’

  ‘But you do drink and you do do drugs and your shorts are real leather?’

  ‘Yes but I present as sober.’

  ‘But you aren’t sober.’ I look at her jaw grinding away. ‘You’re fucked, in fact.’

  This is a new one on me. Back in the day we wore our habits on our sleeves. It’s two decades, more, since I proudly worked my Hysteric Glamour ‘Junkie’s Baddy Powder’ T-shirt, which ripped off the famous baby powder packaging and was a staple in a certain type of young woman’s wardrobe in the nineties. I also had a Betty Ford Clinic ‘Clean & Serene’ T-shirt, which Brits saw as a joke, while Americans rushed over waving their ten-years-sober AA keyrings. Most of my sisters in this kind of behaviour had gone on to have at least one child, aka a partyectomy. Kids gave women something the rest of us needed to pay upwards of £30,000 for. A reason to be sober. Motherhood or rehab? I’d done neither.

  Tim follows me into the kitchen, telling this doe-eyed angel what old old friends we are and how much he loves me, about how I used to flat-sit this mansion block pad of his on Mayfair’s Mount Street when I was her age. He’s well-meaning, and he’s been a real brick throughout my adult life – if feeding a low-level coke habit for two decades is what great pals do for one another. But he’s also a raving addict, and that makes him tricky as a pal.

  Chica’s spotted I’ve gone a tad bleak and has gone into supportive – God help us – therapy mode. ‘You’re sooo cool and fun, like, I just don’t understand. Were you, like, just maaassively into your career? Cuz, I, like, totally get that. I really do. Like, I don’t even know if I want kids.’

  The kids thing. She’s latched on to the kids thing.

  ‘It’s too late,’ I say with a flatness that would zip the mouth of most sensitive human beings. But Chica is off her nut. Her empathy feels real to her at the moment but what that empathy really is is just a need to talk and talk. And talk. The only thing she has in common with Sigmund Freud right now is she loves cocaine. If her Instagram career doesn’t shape up she may get a job at Freud’s, that PR company.

  ‘It’s totally not too late. I had a friend …’

  We’ve been best friends all night but now, as I go into the early stages of a comedown, she’s starting to do my head in. The last remnants of fun are trickling out of the evening. There is only one option if I want it to continue. Do lots more drugs. I cannot do lots more drugs. I have to leave and I have to leave fast.

  Despite me standing up and walking away, Chica is still babbling about her friend who is 200 years old or something and has just given birth to quins. I’m starting to resent her lovely legs and her eager helpful face twitching and twisting in front of me.

  There’s only bleak internal noise now. Non-specific dark feelings as well as more irritatingly clear ones: my legs compared to hers, will I ever wear shorts like that again, do I have enough money to remove the valley of grey in my parting. Then it starts to get big-picture and existential. Glimpses of parents, siblings, of my boyfriend, Charlie, what’s the point of anything. I hate my life. And work, work, work, work … like a bird pecking at my head. I go back again and again to the moral mathematics of getting messy on a school night.

  I start telling myself familiar lies: ‘I can be home by six, I’ll be up before midday and I can write until eight in the evening and do exactly the same work as a normal person with a job. I only have to write a thousand words for the paper tomorrow, it can be done, I can do it, I don’t need to feel bad about tonight.’ I’m gulping wine now like it’s lemonade, from one of Tim’s stemless Riedels, which, experience has taught him, are harder for wasted people to knock over.

  The thought returns again and again until the existential noise is a painful screech.

  Work. Work. Work. Fuck, WORK! My spirit claws at each rib as it sinks into the pit of my stomach. Oh God, help me; help me get out of here, help me say NO.

  Somewhere in the ramped-up coke anxiety a sensible version of self is trying to get through, is soothing me. You’ve been here before. You can cope. Go home. Go home to your sensible boyfriend asleep in your big comfortable bed. Tomorrow is just another day.

  No, tomorrow is today already. Work. Work. Work.

  ‘OK in here darling?’ Tim stands far too close to me where I am leaning against the kitchen counter with my shoulders scrunched up to my ears and chin on my chest. He holds his arms out like he’s about to hug me and I allow myself to be embraced by him like a teenage boy rigid under the swamping arms of a moustachioed maiden aunt. ‘Come here, come to Timbo, darling.’

  He guides me back into the coffee-table coke-sniffing suite and gives me his beloved silver Hoover-shaped straw, a gift, like the clock, from one of his unfunny fun-loving coke buddies. ‘No thanks.’ I look down at the expertly razor-chopped lines arranged across the discarded wing mirror of a Peterbilt truck. No grubby credit cards and rolled-up fivers for old Timbo. There’s a few freshly snipped paper straws there. Plastic ones are too harsh on the nose.

  ‘Darling. It’s so good to see you. Such a treat to have you here.’

  I try to think of something to say but can’t find anything.

  ‘Fit of the miseries, Katiepooz? Just remember darling, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”.’

  That old chestnut. Did the great mystic William Blake have crumby vapid London nights like this? I don’t think so.

  ‘You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough,’ I say. ‘And this is enough.’

  Hello, I must be going.

  ‘I’m going home.’

  There are noises of persuasion. Offers of taxis. A suggestion that I wait and share an Uber back to Notting Hill with the lower-IQ hot Libore. My heart bounces a
round in my chest like a squash ball and my mind keeps dropping tomorrow’s deadline in front of me like a manic terrier with a stick.

  I should have gone home six hours ago at midnight. Midnight 20 years ago, in fact, when all the nice people stopped doing this stuff. I have to get out of here before the clock strikes Paddington Bear, though, despite my state, I am curious what sound Paddington will make. ‘Gotta go.’

  I leg it down the stairs. I don’t wait for the cage lift in his grand old mansion block. If I run perhaps I’ll run off the dread, liven up a bit. I run down Mount Street fuelled by cocaine and Chablis and desperation, willing the fresh air to perk me up. Balenciaga. Scotts. Marc Jacobs. I pass all the status shops and restaurants and flag down a black cab with an orange light on Audley Street. I crash into the seat and throw my head forward into my hands, silently screaming, ‘Never again. I never want to do drugs ever again. Please God. Please help me. I have to stop doing this.’

  I sit up, breathe, breathe, breathe. What goes up, must come down. I lean back and catch the driver looking at his passenger now splashed across his back seat.

  ‘Youorroight love? Up early? Or aincha been bed yet?’

  His amiable forgiving banter is briefly cheering. I roll my too-wide and staring eyes rimmed in day-old mascara and smudgy crusted eyeliner and stutter, ‘Something like that.

  I lean back and watch Park Lane roll by on the left. What goes up must come down. My jaw is locked, my back teeth clenched. Shoulders are sore and tight. I can smell my armpits. I try not to think of other people getting up in the morning, minty fresh and showered, listening to manic morning radio, hurrying kids off to school, queuing for the mild, socially acceptable, worker-bee buzz of coffee, all the healthy activities of the useful human. They’re tired perhaps. Some might even be carrying a hangover on a Wednesday. How many idiots like me are hunched over their knees in the back of a taxi? I think about my brother Will a couple of miles north in Tufnell Park, groggily greeting his youngest child waking him up with a toy or an absurd toddler question. And of my brother Tom, learning-disabled and living in a care home by the seaside in Devon, content with a couple of beers or a nice cup of instant coffee. It hurts. It all hurts.