by Kate Spicer
‘Come on, today’s a good day. I’m excited, aren’t you? Aren’t you? We’re getting our dog.’
‘Mmmn, yuh,’ he says, and I wait in hope for the air to settle in the car and for warmth to return to our interactions.
‘CUNT!’ A Prius driver.
This is how the next 30 minutes on the M25 go by.
‘Fucking CUNT!’ He slams his fist on the horn as a white van man carves him up at a junction exit.
Concentrate on the dog, I think. Concentrate on the positive. Concentrate on the animal you’ve never met before who is about to come and live in your home.
‘Sara said that we mustn’t shout in front of him, you know? She said he will pee himself if you shout,’ I say in my special measured and calm voice. ‘Will you be able to chill before we get the dog?’
It is entirely impossible now for me to say anything without it sounding passive-aggressive.
‘Yes, I am aware of that,’ he says, in his own special extra-calm voice that he only uses when I put on my special extra-calm voice. He stares at the road with a face like a hammer. There’s peace for a moment until the next Prius driver moves into the wrong lane.
I sigh loudly.
‘Why are you sighing?’
‘Because I don’t know how else to release the tension in this car. Can’t today be a good day?’
‘Happiness is overrated,’ he mumbles, but at least he isn’t shouting ‘cunt’. It’s a truce, of sorts.
‘I wonder how many poos I will pick up in the next year?’
Charlie ignores me. It wouldn’t be a hard sum to do. I don’t know how many times a dog defecates in a day but I am guessing it’s about two, maybe a few more after greedy days like Christmas. I think about riffing on this for laughs but there’s no point if the audience is only here to windmill his fists at Prius drivers.
What can I do with my excitement about the dog? Nothing. I start looking at Instagram. Pulling up Chica’s page. I’ve become quietly obsessed by her glossy lip close-ups and dynamic leaping-off-steps-in-tiny-shorts shots. Usually she manages to leverage her gorgeous legs into everything but today she has posted an inspirational quote on a plain background: ‘Every woman is your sister; treat her accordingly.’
‘Word sista!’ ‘Truth!’ ‘Yes to this.’ ‘Love.’ There must be thirty comments underneath, all accompanied by hearts and high-five emojis. It’s ridiculous. It’s not as if she’s Emmeline Pankhurst crying, ‘Freedom or death!’
I type: ‘What? Every woman wants to steal your clothes and have a fist-fight about who gets the top bunk?’
My impotent silent rage at my relationship abates a bit and in its place rises a light sprinkling of Instagram-fuelled jealousy and superiority. How can this work, this Chica mixture of hot pants, lip gloss, beauty products and lame hashtag feminism? She’s a spindle-legged, vapid child. How has she got nearly 50,000 followers since that night at Timbo’s? Now I wanted to shout ‘Cunt’ at a Prius driver too.
‘Am I mean or snarky?’ I ask Charlie.
‘You can be a bit of a bitch, yes,’ he says, in a reasonable neutral tone. The traces of kindness in his voice puts an entirely different cast on the day. I cheer up. ‘But I just know that however mean you are on the outside you must be feeling far worse on the inside and I try to ignore you.’
I finish my comment on Chica’s post with a crying laughter emoji and an x. Hopefully that will deflate any mean or snark. Those sarky people who leave clever dick comments on people’s Instagram, they’re prats really, but because I roll on the floor laughing and give you a kiss afterwards that carves me out as nicer than the average prat.
Chica is never vile on her feed, she is never sarcastic; she sometimes makes jokes about loving doughnuts, and when she is with her friends they all stick their tongues out, but— I interrupt that thought because I am starting to feel funny. The sort of funny you only feel after looking at too much Instagram. I lock the phone in the glovebox.
We cunt, I mean count, off junctions with a minimum of bickering until we find Thurrock Services. We are there well before twelve because we left in such annoyingly good time. Sara texts to say she will be late. We have an undetermined period of time to kill in this miserable humourless zombie concourse full of concrete and Vauxhall Zafiras. We buy nasty overpriced coffees, do pees and make sarcastic comments about all the people buying trays of Krispy Kreme doughnuts and Burger King. There are of course many other things you can do at service stations in an attempt to kill time – sit in the big massage chair, play fruit machines in the two amusement arcades or buy a travel pillow – but Charlie and I are middle-class, and these are verboten activities for urban middle-class people. I won’t be having a Greggs sausage roll.
Usually, I have to buy something to eat in a service station; I get a huge thrill buying food in service stations because it was forbidden as a child. We only ever once ate in a service station in my entire childhood; neither my mum or my dad, nor my various stepfathers or my stepmother, did eating in service stations, because back then middle-class parents didn’t stop at service stations for anything except the loo and even then you had to jump up and down in your seat (which was easy because kids didn’t have to wear seat belts back then), crying, ‘I’m desperate’ for an hour.
Frazzles. I’d get some Frazzles.
My middle-class parents had found an acceptable use for service stations throughout the mid- and late seventies and that was as a place to throw suitcases and children at each other at the end of access visits.
I hesitate to argue with Tolstoy, but I think a lot of unhappy families are pretty similar. They had a textbook messy seventies divorce, Mum and Dad. You know the score: fighting over the kids, slagging each other off, hurting and hating the ex a top priority, lots of money on lawyers, resentment, screaming and meltdowns at handover, court cases, massive terminal resentments about money. All this stuff is very public; the only thing that happens in secret is the crying, which I did a lot of.
Showing the pain of missing my mum while living at my dad’s was not acceptable. No one held me when I cried myself to sleep at night, my letters to her were read before they were posted, ways in which I was like my mum were ridiculed and reviled. I lived in a household that punished me for being my mother’s daughter. I love my dad and my stepmum and I’m sure some of the things they said about Mum were true. I’m just not sure I wanted to hear them at seven, or nine, or 12. I don’t even like hearing them now, aged 46½. She’s my mum, and only me and my two brothers and my two uncles are allowed to say horrible things about her, and our granny when she was alive. Anyone else, I want to kick their heads in. I didn’t attempt that though, as my stepmother was scary back then.
I don’t hold any of it against anyone any more but it had left me with complex issues, the least of which is an aversion to service stations. There really is nothing good about them, except the crisps.
‘I hate service stations because they remind me—’
Charlie interrupts, agreeing. ‘Yeurgh. Look at that man with the giant box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Do you really think he’s off to share it with his eleven colleagues,’ he snorts. ‘Who are these people?’
Thinking about those handovers I am starting to relive the panic and utter powerlessness of the whole situation. Even when I was with Mum on access visits, I was never able to stop counting the days, hours and minutes and then, as the final hours progressed, the seconds, until I’d have to say goodbye to her for another two months or so. I feel depressed just thinking about it.
I swallow it. That’s a generation or more ago. It looks like I am trying to leverage sympathy off past misfortune. I dial it all back with a silly voice. ‘This space is very triggering for me, I need to call my therapist,’ I say in a whiny LA vocal fry, while dangling my fingers around like punctuating deeley-boppers.
‘Don’t. You sound like my ex-wife,’ says Charlie, flatly.
No sympathy gained. Not even a snort of amusement. I turn back to the ba
g of Frazzles.
The sound of the M25 rushes and sucks at the air behind us and weak January sunlight appears between the scudding clouds. It’s OK, you aren’t in a car park waiting to be dragged from your mother’s arms, or to drive a Prius or eat a Greggs sausage roll. We’re here to get a dog.
We’re getting a dog.
It’s been nearly an hour now of this twitchy hovering. Sara texts again. ‘In green people carrier. Parked behind lamp-post at back.’
That’s helpful. The whole place is a sea of people carriers and lamp-posts. ‘The back’ of what exactly? I describe where we are in even more detail.
More peering between cars, more craning to look above them.
There’s a corkscrew of anticipation, sad childhood longing gone and last night’s hangover entirely forgotten. Where is he?
‘I can see him,’ I say and point at something odd slinking and rolling across the tarmac towards us. The cone of a nose sticks out of a fuzzy halo of hair the colour of an old sports sock. His back is arched, shoulders hunched like a giant grubby prawn while his head is hung low. He’s kinda ugly. Half cur, half anorexic Muppet. I wave at Sara and she acknowledges us with a far less enthusiastic nod and a bare smile.
He is a stranger who in a minute or two will be joining our family. For a brief moment as I stare at him I panic and wonder if I could love him. But what a graceful bounce to that slinking step. He has a noble carriage with well-sprung suspension; it’s like his joints are made of rubber. The dog manages to be simultaneously a scruffy bugger and completely regal.
He is here. Sara is sullenly making apologies that she doesn’t need to make. ‘There you go.’ She holds out the lead. ‘Sorry, he smells. The other one was sick on him.’
It’s an acute, tender sensation holding either side of the dog’s head gently to say hello, and feeling the small hard skull underneath thin warm skin and soft scrubbly fur. He looks at me with cautious eyes the colour of old conkers and rimmed by kohl-dark lids. Under his eyes the skin is slightly sunken and dark; it looks like he’s had a few late nights. He smells like the juice at the bottom of a wheelie bin.
My heart is hurting. Some kind of valve has opened inside me. ‘Hello boy. Hello. You’re coming to live with us.’
Charlie takes him round the car park for a wee before we turn round and go back to west London. The dog delivers the first of the thousands of his shits we will pick up over the years. He must have been desperate.
I stay back with Sara to pay. She does not look at me as I hand over the £160 but I can feel her disapproval and disappointment. I like to think of myself as a woman of the people, but standing there in a coyote-fur gilet next to this woman who rescues squirrels and hamsters and is wearing a matted acrylic parka and worn pink wellies, I realise I am not.
Clearly, she had expected a thicker pile of notes. ‘Sorry, I haven’t got more to give.’
There is something unsaid, to do with her dedication to animal causes and my (second-hand) fur coat and Charlie’s company car. ‘Yeah, well the collar. I had to pay for the collar,’ she says.
I feel like I am lying to a beggar outside a tube station. ‘So sorry, I haven’t got any more money.’
Truth is, I really didn’t have any more money. I’d withdrawn every penny I had to pay for the dog and his things – a bed, a collar, a lead, food, all that stuff – would all have to go on the credit card.
We say our goodbyes and she softens a bit: ‘I hope you enjoy him, Merlin’s a lovely dog.’
‘I’m going to change his name actually.’
‘What!’ she says, openly insulted. ‘I gave him the name Merlin.’
I don’t know why she called this stray pipe-cleaner dog after a mythical medieval wizard and I’m certainly not going to make myself look any worse in front of her by asking her. He’s not wizard-y. He’s wolf-y. He’s Wolfy.
The journey home is an entirely happy one, both of us gazing with curiosity and delight at this rancid-smelling, peculiar-looking beast sitting between my knees in the passenger footwell.
All the Prius drivers have magically evaporated. There is not one cunt to shout at on the way home. Perhaps Wolfy does have wizard-y powers after all.
Halfway home we stop again and the dog gets out with me and hops back into the car and onto the back seat, where he sits looking out of the window with his jaws in what looks like a wide-open smile. I cannot stop turning round and taking photos, which I text to my family with unconfined excitement.
We stop at a pet shop in Kilburn, not far from home, to buy the dog a bed and some shampoo to wash the sick off him. I pull all the beds down from the shelf and he dutifully climbs into each one, trying them out like Goldilocks. He rests in the biggest one, coiled up like a snake. It reminds me of the china ornament sleeping puppy I had as a kid that fitted exactly inside a tiny wicker basket. Deep down, I know the bed isn’t big enough, that dogs don’t always sleep with their noses tucked into their behinds, but I buy it anyway. I want to buy the dog everything.
The pet shop assistant tells me that Wolfy has done a wee in the dry food aisle and I say that I am sure he hasn’t. He’s perfectly nice about it. ‘It’s OK, it happens all the time,’ he says, as he mops it up. ‘Don’t worry.’
I’m not just sure my dog isn’t the sort of incontinent ninny that does a wee in a pet shop, I know it. What is the point in being defensive about the fact that my dog definitely hasn’t done a wee? I haven’t had the dog for more than an hour. Why am I so sure? He is self-composed, sniffing round the shelves at the end of his lead, and he is eager to please, neatly arranging himself in the too small bed for my delectation. He is not secretly doing little widdles behind my back. ‘Must have been another dog,’ I say, with confident finality.
Back at home I strip off and shower the sick off him in our tiny bathroom off the kitchen. We don’t have a bath, another compromise necessary if you want to live in Notting Hill, so this is how it must be done. I straddle his back and hold on to his collar to stop him from escaping. He hangs his head in misery as I rinse and rub with my hands. It takes a while. I hadn’t considered that dog ownership would entail this. I had not considered much, in fact, other than whether there were good places to walk him.
Wet, his body looks skeletal and his eyeballs bulge from his skull like fat black marbles. I rub him down with white towels and he shakes himself off a few times before heading for the thick blue and black Turkish rug by the tiny wood-burner. He lies down and as he dries he grows bigger and more shaggy until he’s plumped up, like a miniature yak. That dirty matted old-sock-coloured fur has turned a Rich Tea biscuit colour with golden highlights. It sprouts this way and that so that he has a slightly chaotic, always different look, like a fractal.
The telly is on but I just stare at him, devouring the detail. On his chest the fur is white, fine. His stomach scoops up tightly towards his hips, and there is barely any fur there covering his skin of pale piglet pink with the odd brown splotch of pigment. His long legs bend and wrap around each other like furry spaghetti.
Charlie and I sit close by each other on the sofa looking at the third member of the household. Both of us are grinning.
‘Look at our dog. We’ve got a dog.’
He rises up off the rug, knocks out an impressive stretch that a yoga bod would recognise as an upward dog and a downward dog, pauses by my knee, where his black nose twitches and wriggles as it sniffs whatever it is the air has to tell him. He looks up at me for a heartbeat or two and hops lightly up between us on the sofa where he rests his chin flat on Charlie’s thigh.
CHAPTER TWO
Wormwood Scrubs, that’s where we went that first Saturday afternoon. And on the Sunday too. After a couple of walks with him on a special long lead I bent down to unclip it.
We were walking along the eastern edge of the Scrubs, by the strip of scruffy woodland next to Scrubs Lane.
When I first unleashed him he didn’t register that he had freedom of movement and continued walking along b
eside us, but then he tentatively started to move away. Inch by inch, foot by foot, he ambled his own way, looking back constantly to check we were OK with it.
‘Go on. Good boy.’
He trotted a little further on, sniffing the ground around him. Once he was several feet away he picked up his speed, really tasting freedom now, and did a little lap of glory at a zippy canter. When he came to a stop he celebrated with a couple of buckaroo kicks before trotting off to sniff a patch of scrub.
‘I don’t think he’s been off the lead in some time,’ I said. ‘I wonder if Sara ever let him off.’
‘Maybe those other owners never did either,’ Charlie said.
I called him back. ‘Come.’ And he trotted over our way. ‘What a good boy.’ He sat politely while I fed him dog treats and stroked his back. ‘What a good dog.’
Charlie goes to work as usual on Monday. Me? As soon as Wolfy arrived I’d started announcing, ‘I’m on “peternity” leave,’ to anyone who would listen. I need a few days off to bond with my hound. Wolfy and I would explore the neighbourhood on six legs.
I set off briskly for the familiar seven-minute walk to caffeine from our back gate on Treadgold Street, heading north skirting the Kensington Sports Centre, past the doctors’ surgery and over Walmer Road into the rat-run that separates the 1930s red-brick social housing blocks from the 1960s ones. The rat-run is dark and narrow but Wolfy loves it. The sniffing intensifies and he pees on everything in this 30-metre stretch. I’d read that I should yank his lead up and force him onwards, but this little strip of pedestrian, dogshit-strewn tarmac gives him so much pleasure I don’t have the heart to go all Barbara Woodhouse. Let him have his fun.
Tomorrow we’ll drive, I decide, because with all the sniffing, the peeing, the squatting for an early-morning poo or two, by the time we reach Coffee Plant I’m starting to think not of coffee but of lunch.
