by Kate Spicer
His footsteps ring on the metal steps up to the only door we have, windows fogged by cooking. Inside, the reassuring smell of garlic softening in butter.
I go to speak, and he holds up his hand. He is indeed on a call. I clatter about finding things to fiddle with, killing time until I can say what I so urgently need to.
‘Right. Yes, sorry.’
‘I saw Keith today and you know he has a dog, it’s a lurcher, called Castor, anyway we took it for a walk to Wormwood Scrubs, it’s huge there, I mean huge, and it’s only five minutes away from here and it’s great for walking dogs and I think we should get one. I think we should get a dog.’
‘Good idea, Fox,’ he says. Fox, the name he gave me when we were still wallowing in the oxytocin joy of first love. ‘You sort it out. What’s for supper?’
PART ONE
LOST WOMAN
CHAPTER ONE
A dog by Christmas, that was the plan. But the process of adopting a lurcher is far from straightforward. For two months middle-aged women in rubber-soled shoes and noisy anoraks visit us and rustle round the flat, ticking boxes and asking questions. They are like cops.
We are turned down for one-eyed Zac and for Honey. Always they mention two things. First, our lack of experience. Jesus, how hard could dog ownership be? People have kids without Maureen from Lurcher SOS approving it. I try to gain their trust, to start conversations. It is a closed shop. Forget the Carlton Club, try gaining the trust of the Lurcher SOS Forum members; it’d be easier to buy weapons-grade plutonium on the dark web.
Secondly the stairs, which they point at and gravely discuss how dangerous they would be to a lurcher with its long spindly legs. Too many stairs, sorry. No. ‘But the dog will never go up the stairs to our bedroom because dogs don’t sleep in bedrooms,’ I plead. ‘Dogs aren’t allowed upstairs.’
That the stairs even exist is enough for them. I had not expected this. I give up with the lurcher specialists and go to a more homespun operation. It isn’t a registered charity and it rescues all kinds of animals, from guinea pigs to donkeys. There we find ‘Merlin, four-year-old lurcher’, a scribble of roughly dog-shaped, messy biscuit-coloured fur. There is only one photograph of him on the website, and it is a black-and-white one taken of him in the boot of a car. He is sat like the Sphinx after a nasty fright. He doesn’t look quite lurchery enough for me but I am desperate at this stage. I want a dog.
Again we are inspected by a woman in an anorak. This time Charlie is home too. She has issues with the deadly stairs but seems less disapproving than the previous visitors from the lurcher rescues. ‘They’re too steep and the fact that they have no back could be very dangerous.’
‘The dog will never go upstairs. I don’t let dogs upstairs,’ I say, doing my best impression of a stern old battleaxe.
‘And I will make backs for the stairs with glass. I will do it immediately,’ adds Charlie.
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘That could work.’
Four days later, Tuesday evening, a woman called Sara from the rescue rings and tells me ‘Merlin’ is mine if I want him. The glass has already been ordered, I tell her. ‘Good because I’ll need to see pictures as proof you’ve done it, I heard they were very steep.’
When Sara rings I am sitting at my heavy cherrywood desk, midway through finishing a health piece due in Monday morning just gone. It’s 1,200 words about a phenomenon called ‘drunkorexia’. Drunkorexia means you save all your calories up for wine. It hasn’t been hard finding case studies.
My drunkorexia notes fill up with my scribbles and doggy doodles as we talk.
‘He came to us because his last adopted home didn’t work out. He was being bullied by the resident bitch so they put him up for adoption again.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘Oh, he’s a lovely boy. He’s been with me three months now. I can’t think why no one’s had him. He loves his walks and he’s a dream on the lead. He’s best one on one. Like a lot of these dogs he’d like to be with a single woman.’
‘My boyfriend’s a lovely man, very gentle,’ I say.
‘Yes, that’s fine, just concentrate on not shouting, he’ll only find a corner to hide in or run away and wee himself. He’s a strong boy but timid.’
I’m hearing estate agents’ parlance, where every phrase has a hidden meaning. I add up ‘no one wants him … best one on one … wees himself … strong boy … timid’ and picture an ugly, incontinent dog that bites people and then runs away. I’m picturing a dog no one wants. ‘So what are we? His third owners?’
‘As far as I know, yes.’
Sara is displaying classic animal-lover conversation skills. There’s a reticence to share detail that comes not from truculence or secrecy but from a simple preference not to have to speak too much to humans. My effusive gratitude receives not a mote of recognition. My curiosity feels like an inconvenience. I want to know more.
‘He was originally found as a stray wandering the streets somewhere in Manchester. He wasn’t chipped, he had no collar, so who knows.’
‘Any idea what mix there is in there?’
‘Well, he’s a bit chunky, I reckon he could be a labradoodle saluki cross but I really don’t know.’
Labradoodle/saluki? This wasn’t the regal lurcher blend I had in mind. I liked the look of the shaggy lurchers; they were robust, like mutts, yet with a leggy, lean, royally handsome silhouette that felt all pedigree. I’d look dead cool beside one of those, I thought. This Merlin looked shaggy enough, but could a lurcher even be a lurcher if it’s crossed with a labradoodle? Surely it’d just be a labrapooki or a salabrapoo. Whatever it was, it didn’t sound like the skulking and skinny noble old gypsy hound I fancied.
A number of unappealing thoughts cross my mind. Not least, my consumer approach to buying a living thing. Also, now I’ve been accepted to adopt this Merlin I’m wondering what’s wrong with the Essex rescue, and the dog. It’s like when a man makes it clear he likes you, you go off him – he must be a weirdo.
‘I think he’d have a lovely life with you. I can’t understand why you’ve been turned down so much.’
This whole glass fiasco is going to take a few weeks. I’ll have time to process whether I actually want the dog. So I’m taken aback when she says, ‘You can pick him up Saturday.’
Too soon. I don’t know if I want Merlin. Don’t we get to visit him first and see how the chemistry is? Shouldn’t there be more rigorous anorak and clipboard checks from these self-appointed canine social workers? I don’t want a dog with Lab or poo in his genes. I want a lurcher.
‘This Saturday?’
I need to tell this Sara about my misgivings.
‘Yeah. I’ll meet you at midday at Thurrock services in the car park. It’s £160, the adoption fee, you need to bring cash and a lead.’
‘See you there. Fantastic. Thanks. Great. Thanks again. Thank you so much.’
Looks like another of life’s big decisions has been left to fate, like getting pregnant, a career path and how to survive in old age. Charlie isn’t big on fate. He has five-year plans and a pension. He gets up at 5 a.m. to go to the gym.
I ring my mother. ‘Mum, we’ve found our dog. He’s—’
‘Oh no, a male dog? Don’t get a male dog. They go wandering. They wee everywhere, they—’
‘Got to go. Sorry.’
I’d forgotten about my mother’s prejudice against boy dogs, a latent canine misandry that I’ve never worked out the source of. Like most women, she loves to huff out the word ‘Men!’ Not all women of her generation were Gloria Steinem or New Labour MPs; the battle of the sexes for the less visible of my mother’s generation was a passive-aggressive one fought not in important feminist tomes but in small victories won on the domestic front.
Rejecting the patriarchy, for her, comes in the form of never owning a male dog and moaning, constantly, about husbands. I had not cared what genitals my dog came with but now I’m delighted that it’s a dog not a bitch. 46½ and I’m still
childishly celebrating all the ways I’m not like mum.
We were both looking forward to the dog’s arrival and not a day passed without us talking about what our new boy would be like. We went to walk in the places where we might take him, to reassure ourselves that we could give this beast a great life. I showed Charlie the spot under my desk where the dog could have his own ‘office’, a space away from humans, where it is dark and quiet and, just like me in my office, he could sit quietly undisturbed and do nothing. I liked the idea of him sleeping on my toes. Perhaps I would write more with a dog as a colleague.
In the space between deciding to get a dog and getting a dog, there was a general lift in the mood of the house. We had something to think about other than work.
In the nights before we drove to Essex to fetch him I sat upright in bed devouring Jackie Drakeford’s The House Lurcher like an airport novel. I tried to stir Charlie into awakeness with excited readings about things like prey drive, intestinal worms and the perfect dog poo.
‘Lurchers are perfectly capable of withdrawing if they do not consider you worthy of them … Lurchers may not bark a lot, but they have a huge vocabulary of noises known as “lurcher talk” … Lurchers do things with you, not for you, and are the most loyal companions, as long as you deserve them.’
‘Mmmn, very interesting,’ he mumbled under the duvet.
‘… Raw meaty bones complete the natural diet for dogs and should be fed three or four times a week … Are you listening?’
An incoherent mumble followed by a brutal fart from under the covers suggested he was not. ‘Lurchers are …’ Snore. Fair enough. I’d read on for hours more while he slept beside me.
I’ll be honest, we were struggling to reconcile our different lives. Charlie lived at a furious double-macchiato-and-ambition-driven pace. His downtime was sleep time. Then there was me with my siestas, missed deadlines and mess. The desire and search for the dog created a peaceful focal point that we had been struggling to find since we’d moved in together a year before.
On the Saturday when we went to collect ‘Merlin’ my left temple buzzed with a light tequila headache from a Libertines gig the night before. I’d ended up behind a rope somewhere, not because I was meant to be there, I just ambled in and saw a few people I knew. As usual, the gilded party set were chatting loudly as the artists performed. Far from delighted to have been invited, they behaved like it was their birthright. Free stuff, all the time, from everyone. These guys are invited to everything and pay for very little. Just having them there is an honour.
Natter, natter, natter. Patti Smith’s supporting, you know. Oh, fantastic! Love Patti. Natter, gossip, natter, gossip. Gossip. Darling. People, places, things. Darling. Darling. People, places, things. Some of them were very successful, others were there by dint of marriage, birth, beauty, money, or all four, or simply knowing someone, probably, and being reliably good company. It was all very flamboyant, with scarves and sweeping gowns. A shoal of models floated by.
I hadn’t intended to drink but I did. Patrón were sponsoring. And I love a Margarita or four. Hangovers often eat their humdrum way into momentous days like weddings, funerals, important interviews, shooting high-brow late-night culture shows you will never be invited back on to, so why not collecting your first dog too?
I’d told a couple of people at the gig I was getting this dog the following day. One said, ‘So?’ And the other said, ‘Amazing!’ Basically, no one cared. Though, given the self-interest and indifference among party people, I could have been getting an albino tiger and still roused no more than a yawn.
Charlie hadn’t come with me. He rarely does – ‘I’m not interested in being your plus one.’
A few moments after the alarm goes at seven he says, ‘Right,’ in a ‘time to get organised’ sort of way.
He is on crisp and efficient form. He lies in bed for a few minutes more, says, ‘Right,’ again and gets up. He is showered, caffeinated, shipshape, fragrant long before I’ve pulled my head off the pillow. He has also been and done some shopping and studied for his latest finance exam.
It’s not a matter of physical suffering with this morning’s light yet still very much present hangover; it’s more of a mental issue. It feels like a small creature is carefully tiptoeing back and forth over my frontal lobe and this is inhibiting my executive functions, the parts of the brain that get you up and at ’em.
Added to my self-inflicted limitations is Charlie’s overactive executive function. The more he does downstairs, the less I can get up. The sound of him making his smoothie assaults me from the kitchen. It’s not just the noise. It’s the fact that it’s green and designed for him by a famous, ravishingly beautiful nutritionist. I’m thinking perhaps we can buy a bag of the M&S Salt and Black Pepper Combo Mix en route to getting the dog.
‘Right. Are you getting up?’ he asks up the stairs. I know what he really wants to say is, ‘Get the fuck out of bed, you lazy cow.’
Yes, yes. I throw on last night’s clothes and flop downstairs and try to scrabble back some good odour. I say brightly, ‘Cup of tea?’
Irritated by my wanton pursuit of sybaritic elixirs like a strong Assam with whole milk, he snaps at me. ‘No, Kate.’ Clearly he is way beyond the tea-drinking part of the day. ‘We have to go.’ I feel scalded. The hangover has made me sensitive. I feel chastised just for being me.
Charlie knew what he was getting into. He claims he fell for me when he saw me eating an apple while driving in the neighbourhood with a bin bag strapped to the broken sunroof of a beaten-up Honda CR-X that cost me £400. I called it my Porsche Banana.
‘Why don’t you just use my car,’ he’d said, when it failed its MOT. ‘I hardly ever use it.’
This was the overture to a long-term relationship.
I’d looked at the £1,500 estimate for getting the Banana roadworthy, balanced it up with the rapidly shrinking freelance journalism market, and said yes, thank you, if you’re sure you don’t mind.
‘I’d love it. I like smelling your perfume when I get in after you’ve used it,’ he said.
What a sweet and romantic moment that was. ‘I like smelling …’ Yeah, that wasn’t all that happened there. It was a tipping point, small at the time but significant. I surrendered some of my independence. Charlie was starting to support me. In the brand of equality I dreamed about, I had lots of my own money. Foolishly, I had created the impression of this with the miasma of endless credit for 20 years. All those it’s-not-your-money chickens were coming home to roost now – not just in my life, in the world generally – and now I lived permanently in a crowded relationship with a Visa bill, HMRC and my financially astute boyfriend.
I saw a get-out clause in the brand of equality my mother’s generation taught me about. A man who supports you.
Not that Charlie is rich, not at all. We live in a sweet little flat, I pay a bit less of the mortgage than he does, he put down a lot more deposit. Given this fiscal imbalance, I feel I ought to pick his socks up and wash them. He pays for dinner more than me. Picked up my tax bill this year. You think this stuff is going to be nice but you feel like a traitor to your ideals. Ain’t nothing in this life for free, baby.
Women sometimes choose relationships that are pure transaction, where each has something the other wants: his money, her sex. That isn’t what I wanted.
The balance of power, it’s askew when I am broke. When we argue, and it’s about money, he always wins. My mum always told me, ‘When money problems come in the door, love flies out the window.’ Which is the definition of ironic given it was her lot that flogged us that let-the-man-support-you paradigm. I didn’t want to be like that. But it felt like we were headed that way.
‘Right,’ he says, again, ‘I’m going to get the car.’
God, I wish he’d stop saying ‘Right’. I make myself a cup of tea for the car and head outside to wait for him by our back door on Treadgold Street. I say ‘back’ door; it’s a gate. We don’t have a front door. We hav
e this gate into a ramshackle alleyway dotted with mangy geraniums along the rear entrance to our neighbours’ houses on Grenfell and Treadgold Streets. Our front door is actually a back door on the first floor up these noisy metal steps. If you want to live in London’s fashionable Notting Hill, you have to forgo luxuries like front doors, unless you are rich, in which case, it’s front-doors-a-go-go. And if you’re mega rich, then it’s all basement-swimming-pools-r-us.
Just as we are heading out of central London I admit I have forgotten to take the cash out of the bank to pay for the dog and that we are going to have to stop at a machine. Charlie’s disappointment at this predictable lack of preparation vibrates from him, though no words are spoken.
After a tense five-minute silence, he says, ‘How are your finances at the moment, Kate?’
Ah-ha, one of his special punishment questions. A provocative question that he knows will give him a really good excuse to be openly pissed off with me. He only ever asks it when we are in a state of barely contained animosity. My heart sinks. Now is a terrible time for a money conversation. If I admit to him that I have just enough cash in the bank to pay for the third-hand dog, the situation will descend into a conversation about credit ratings and how I am punishing our chance of a good mortgage rate with my feckless approach to money.
I have no choice. I must lie.
‘They’re good,’ I say brightly. ‘Couple of grand in the bank, another few grand owing.’
As this has not proved a fruitful outlet for his irritation with me, all his frustration is verbally channelled into traffic and other drivers; he’s like a street drunk with Tourette’s raging at paper bags swept up by the wind. I cringe in the passenger seat, undermined by tequila and a steadily accumulating pile of unaired grievances.
