Lost Dog

by Kate Spicer

  The following morning, both my hair and the dog’s fur sticking this way and that from sleep, we head out in my old Mini. He sits next to me on the worn leather passenger seat, alert and upright. Furry face alternately staring dead ahead and looking to the left, out the window, and right, to me; Wolfy is my wingman, like Chewbacca on the Millennium Falcon.

  Newsagent, coffee, walk, in that order. I park the car in the staid white English old-money streets of Kensington, near the palace. We do a full lap of Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park.

  Going back to the car afterwards I see the Kensington Wine Rooms. 50 wines by the glass. I’ll just have the one with a plate of charcuterie and a green salad.

  I tentatively put my nose round the door. ‘You OK with dogs?’

  ‘We love dogs,’ says an Irish waiter polishing glasses beside the bar.

  It’s a rule, isn’t it, not to drink alone? Drinking alone at lunchtime, that’s alkie turf. Unless you have something to celebrate, that is, which I do. I have a dog. And I’m on this peternity leave.

  Peternity leave was a stupid idea really. When you’re a freelancer no one pays you any money if you don’t work. In nearly thirty years of working as an adult, I’ve enjoyed no more than 60 days of paid leave. But this self-imposed holiday does feel pretty marvellous.

  ‘Do you have a light red, a nice lunchtime wine, you know; a child’s wine?’

  ‘A Beaujolais perhaps,’ says the Irish waiter, ‘or,’ his intonation shifts to flatter me with a suggestion that I am a distinguished middle aged lady who knows her wine, ‘an Austrian Blaufränkisch?’

  Efficiently flattered, of course I say, ‘Blaufränkisch, but a small one, a 125?’ Aren’t I marvellous, asking for a small measure. I feel quite smug so reassured am I that 125ml of good red is the sort of optimum and homeopathic quantity that is nourishing and healthy.

  Wolfy lies beside me, chin flush to the floorboards, his senses calmly taking in the room. He barely moves as he discreetly accepts the odd slice of saucisson or a ribbon of Bayonne ham I dangle beside me.

  I read the papers. After a while the dog rises to sniff round the wine racks to my left. The waiting staff take turns to come and make a fuss of him.

  It is the perfect arrangement; a table for one means I can eat and drink without having to talk and with Wolfy’s grateful jaws beside me, no food will end up in the bin; I can drink at lunchtime because I’m not alone; and … well, I can’t see a downside, other than if I have another glass then I’ll have to leave the car and fetch it later.

  ‘How was the Blaufränkisch?’ says the Irish waiter, who, chatting to in my lightly lunched state, I have discovered is studying for a PhD at Imperial College.

  ‘Loved it!’

  ‘One more?’

  ‘Why not!’

  Most of our flat was governed by Charlie’s need for tidiness. Mess upset him, whereas tidiness did not upset me, so my natural piggery and sluttishness was reined in. This was no bad thing, but I needed a room of my own and not just to write in.

  My office was known as many things: writing room, study, the spare room, the west wing, the shit pit, or usually ‘there’ as in ‘just chuck it in there’.

  I filed paper all over the floor and hung pictures crooked on the wall. There were shelves of books stacked up and crammed in any old way. Any gaps were filled with postcards, a broken Tiffany keyring, hundreds of old notepads … there were sticky notes everywhere listing a mixture of story ideas, fitness goals and, always, the money I owed everyone from HMRC to my mum.

  If there was washing to dry and I wasn’t at home, Charlie would plonk the laundry rack square in the middle of my little writing room. If I left clothes or shoes about the flat and he went on a cleaning spree, they got thrown in there too. Sometimes I returned from a weekend away to find the door to this room of my own wedged shut by a pair of sodden men’s socks that’d been dropped on the way to the rack.

  In this pit of clutter and sometimes despair was my cherrywood desk, which looked out over the alleyway behind the flat. Part of my preparation for Wolfy’s arrival was creating his nest under the desk. It would be a spot the dog could know was his and his alone, a place where humans would never bother him.

  If I patted it and called to him he’d come and dutifully get in the bed, though he rarely used it by choice. Thing is, I liked him under there so much that to tempt him in there I’d buy these small bags of lamb knuckles from the halal butcher on Portobello Road for £1 and toss one in so that he’d associate sleeping on my feet with snack heaven. When I ate at my desk, which was more usual than slipping out for bijou little lunches, I’d put the plate down for him to demolish any leftovers. Anything to keep him down there. I loved it.

  Usually he’d take the swag, gnaw it and amble out to sleep somewhere with more human smells, like a pile of dirty washing on the bathroom floor or the sofa, somewhere he could straighten his long legs to their full extension, while watching from a good vantage point.

  The dog bed wasn’t big enough for Wolfy’s rangy body. Should’ve trusted my gut on that one, instead of my untamed urge to spend, spend, spend. It wasn’t the first time I’d bought something too small despite the certain knowledge it would not fit. Buying the dog bed was as feckless as those size 38 Gareth Pugh boots I bought online, which tortured my 39 feet, or that tight white roll neck, which had room for two bee sting tits and an upper body unencumbered by bingo wings and back fat. Good for Chica. Not for me. Same with the bed. We live in hope.

  I took the bed out and instead piled Wolfy’s nest with old blankets, a tired floppy pillow and a ripped Indian scarf. Over time I’d drop all sorts in there, like the odd holey sock or anything else I was too sentimental to throw away. He started to use it more and I would sit writing with my toes under his warm silky underbelly, as I’d always dreamed of doing. The nest was now Wolfy’s Office, and he visited it on rotation with his other favourite spots in the house as he went about the important business of sleeping 22 hours a day. I no longer worked alone. I had a colleague. With Wolfy on staff my work life improved.

  I moved the too-small bed bought in haste to the sitting room and patted it, inviting Wolfy to try it there. He dutifully got in and curled himself up so he fitted snugly in. Five minutes later he hopped onto the sofa. I gave the bed away.

  The dog was not expensive to keep. I bought him blocks of frozen dog meat – tripe, beef, lamb, turkey, that kind of thing. I called them woof patties, and he had them once a day, added to a selection of leftovers from the humans. We gave him bones too. I didn’t buy him anything else and he occasionally chased a ball I bought him but, for the most part, needed nothing.

  I take the dog up to my friend Anabel’s house in Queen’s Park for a dinner party. It will be three couples and me, alone, as Charlie sees evening as time to prepare for work the next day. Wolfy will be my date. Briefly, I wonder if it is weird to turn up to a dinner party with a dog. I decide it probably is, a bit, but that since my brother Will and his wife will be there, and Anabel is a good friend, perhaps they’ll all be excited to meet my new boy. It’s more convenient too; instead of taking him home round the back streets of North Kensington after our Wormwood Scrubs walk, I can set straight off up Scrubs Lane on the mile or so’s journey north over Harrow Road to Anabel’s.

  Wolfy hops up on the passenger seat next to me and sits bolt upright and alert, looking dead ahead; Chewbacca to my Han Solo again.

  I sit there and just look at him for a while. He knows I’m looking at him but he stares dead ahead like a sentry outside Buckingham Palace. Once, he snaps his head quickly to the right and looks back before resuming his rigid, formal posture.

  As I drive I keep looking left at him and smiling. This smile isn’t just a smile, it’s the sort that bursts open inside my chest. Seeing him sitting there, wow, that tickles me. I lower his window and he cautiously leans towards the wind so his fur is flat and flying away from his nose. The enjoyment this gives him is enchanting. If only I had an eye in my
ear. I could watch him for hours.

  It’s not a long journey from the Scrubs to Anabel but the traffic’s patchy. I punch on the radio. It’s tuned in to Radio 4 because Radio 4 is very interesting and all that – but it is also a bit like work. Listening to Radio 4 I am productive, staying abreast of the news and improving myself. It’s an arts programme. The mellifluous, confident tones of Melanie Oxbridge fill my hot, jealous ears.

  Melanie Oxbridge isn’t her real name. She’s a journalist who is my age but far more successful and, especially since she wrote her first book of brilliant and incredibly funny feminist essays, she’s always on the radio or telly commenting on something or other.

  I don’t like Melanie Oxbridge. We have previous. For all that she’s outspoken about feminism, sisterliness, justice and, you know, righteous stuff, in doing this she always manages to ever so slightly trample on all those beloved ‘sistas’ who aren’t exactly like her. There are a few Melanie Oxbridges in the media. She’s actually one of the nicer ones, which, granted – I speak from experience – isn’t saying much.

  In the early years of this century dear Melanie and I had gone on a press trip together to the South of France and were lying next to each other poolside in a just-finished hotel on the wrong side of St Tropez bay. It was never very clear what the trip was about, but we were taken to beautiful restaurants and while we were ‘working’ together, i.e. lying by a pool on the wrong side of the bay drinking rosé, I thought we were also bonding. Women, bikinis, poolside … I let my guard down and as we talked about our plans for life I let slip that I’d like to be married.

  ‘Married! Why do you want to be married?’

  I knew, immediately, I had said something desperately outré and tried to coolly scrabble my way back to terra feminista. ‘I would wear a white suit, yer know, like Bianca Jagger, not a stupid meringue, and I’d make a speech too. I’m not buying the fairy tale, I just …’ I actually just wanted to be married because I liked the idea of it, because my mum told me I’d get married some day, because I wanted the party, because I wanted some sort of punctuation to all the sleeping around and romantic turbulence and, clearly, now I saw, because I was stupid. I was unfeminist. ‘I … I’. I stopped talking.

  She ladled out the feminist critique of matrimony in a tone of withering instruction. ‘Who wrote all the fairy tales? Men.’ I squeaked that I knew that but she wasn’t listening: ‘Marriage is a patriarchal institution designed to control women. It is a fairytale curse loaded with so much bad history it’s just contemptible. It’s utter bullshit.’

  I agreed with her; marriage had done nothing for my clever mum, trained to put the domestic ahead of her intellect. Christ, I felt humiliated. I tried to claw back some credibility.

  ‘I just, I just … I just want a party.’

  My brittle 30-year-old’s self-worth promptly collapsed like a newborn foal. I had just bought my first expensive bikini and felt so good in it and had been vamping it up and wiggling around the pool feeling like Ursula Andress. Now, that breeze pool-side was not the mistral but the air pfrrrrrting out of my bikini ego. The rest of the trip I was an anxious mess (it didn’t help that, in addition to me old pal Mel, there was an ex-boyfriend there with his new girlfriend, plus a couple of vile cows in positions of significant editorial power at two glossy magazines). The whole thing sits technicolor in my memory, a horror story, one set in a just-finished hotel on the wrong side of St Tropez bay.

  Of course it was for tax reasons or some worthy excuse to do with children, but the hypocritical bitch went on to get married not once but twice, while I remained a noble spinster of the parish (if that is possible, as I believe spinsters have to be virgins).

  I am shouting at the radio. ‘Who is the feminist now Melanie?!’ I bracket the words ‘twice married’ in two ironic fingers while steering the car with my knee. ‘Oxbridge? Eh? Eh? Tell me that.’

  Clearly the answer is, still her. God it’s galling listening to her now on Radio 4, wittering on, brilliantly, making the clever female presenter laugh. Still winning at feminism.

  Sista? My arse!

  She is just a disembodied voice on the radio but her commenting on something means I am not commenting on something. She sounds very confident and I hate her, then I hate myself for hating her, then I hate her again because she’s making me hate myself.

  Click. I change stations. Radio 3. I stop there. The music is big and symphonic, possibly Mahler.

  For a moment I imagine myself as the sort of woman who lives in a book-lined house in north London, perhaps with a light-hearted political column that everyone loves to read for fun but which masks an actual deep understanding of the political and cultural landscape. I’d be interviewed in front of my book-stacked desk and people like me would scrutinise the shelves, thinking, Christ she’s read some big books. Ah yes, I am a woman who enjoys Radio 3. No I’m not. It’s aggravating and boring.

  The ruler of success is well and truly out tonight. Everything, lands up there: work, body, mind, whiteness of the whites of the eyes, choice of books by the bog. Always measuring everything on there, I am.

  The negative self-talk is now spiralling round my gut like an acrobatic tapeworm. It’s a No to Mahler.

  I switch the radio over to Radio 2. Mmmn, soothing, Radio 2. A show tune. Mmmn. Safety sounds. Urgh. Radio 2. MOR adult-oriented pop leads fairly swiftly to total irrelevance and then death. Am I so intimidated by the world I must surround myself with the aural equivalent of a Mr Kipling Bakewell Slice of unthreatening easy listening? The tapeworm cartwheels some more.

  Radio 5? Gimme a break.

  6 Music. Ah yes, that’s me. Middle-aged, still cool, had some vinyl once. Lay in her teenage bedroom listening to the Fall, John Peel and Annie Nightingale. Only, I haven’t got 6 Music in my car.

  Jesus. My life is a disaster. It’s all too much. I turn the volume down until click, the radio’s off.

  Next to me the dog is now sunk down and coiled like a golden furry penny on the front seat; his black button eyes peep up through his long shaggy brows. He looks at me looking down on him. Ah, there’s the dog. The tapeworm dies and my heart fills up with love. He starts to lick his bum; it’s heaven.

  With no external noise and a third-hand dog grooming his privates at my side, I cheer right up. I stop at Borough Wines and pick up a cold bottle of Bourgogne Aligoté from the fridge. There will be wine soon, too. Plenty to be cheerful about. I’ve almost forgotten about Melanie. I stroke Wolfy for a couple of minutes outside the offy. Melanie’s hold on me is not strong tonight. Pouf! Melanie’s gone.

  ‘Meet Wolfy.’ Anabel opens the door and I come bouncing in, stamping my feet, while she glides around me looking serene and ravishing. ‘You look gorgeous,’ I say. ‘Love that dress’. She is very ‘this old thing’ about it as I kiss her cheek and tell her she looks beautiful. I am wearing a pair of Turkish army trousers I found in Portobello Market that have been enthusiastically if amateurishly altered at the Afghan launderette at the top of Ladbroke Grove. My T-shirt is half tucked in, which as I left the flat thought looked ‘very snazzy’, as my mum would say.

  Often the combination of Steph, my brother’s wife, and Anabel can knock me a bit. They can’t help it. They’re impressive women. Straight outta Oxbridge! Most of my girlfriends are there on the ruler of success, markers of female achievement. Sometimes they look like rock stars in my eyes.

  Steph and Anabel both always look splendid and over the years have had so much and such big news to impart. ‘We are moving to Ibiza.’ ‘I’ve taken a job in New York.’ ‘I’m editor.’ ‘I’m building a modernist house in my spare time.’ ‘Have you heard the gossip about David Cameron?’ ‘So! I had dinner with Sheryl Sandberg last night.’

  I felt so cool when I left the house tonight and despite these two impressive girls, for once I still feel that swagger now, largely because the dog is strolling politely in and he looks so damn cool. I (we) receive a round of verbal applause. Steph: ‘Darling, he’s
gorgeous!’ Anabel: ‘Oh my God, I love him!’ Steve: ‘Look at this fella.’ Will: ‘Yay. He looks just like What-a-Mess. Remember that book?’

  ‘He’s beautiful, Kate,’ says Steph. ‘And so big. The kids can ride him.’

  ‘No! They’d break his spine.’

  Wolfy prowls round the edges of the rooms. Casing the joint. Anabel and Steve have the sort of aesthetic vision middle-class people often delude themselves they have, but don’t. They bought a huge lumpy suburban semi in the mock-Tudor style and remodelled it. You could fit ten or more of our share of a late-Victorian terraced artisan’s cottage into their whopper pad. They’ve not just taken out walls, they’ve taken out ceilings too. Unlike the half-timbered Tudorbethan neighbours’ houses, they’ve painted the whole thing black. We call it the Death Star.

  There is a cartoon-perfect crunching sound. Wolfy has followed Steve into the larder and found the cat food down on the floor. That sound is him helping himself to contraband Munchies.

  Steve is not amused. ‘’Ere, the dog’s eating Audrey’s food. Go on, bugger off.’ He gives Wolfy a prod with his foot. Wolfy carries on munching the Munchies. ‘Kate, get your dog under control,’ he shouts at me, good-natured, appalled.

  Charred artichoke hearts drizzled in good olive oil are out, and petit lucques olives. Every plate, glass and dish tells a story of their effortless sophistication, a jumble of good old porcelain and quirky pieces found in a Paris flea market or on an artisan’s stall in Bamako when they just happened to be in Mali a few years ago. I have to swallow the endless need to ask, ‘Where did you get this?’ When I grow up, I’d like to have a life like this, I think. No Kettle Chips appear with the wine.

  I am absurdly proud of the dog but I know I have to contain my pride. I have not given birth, I’ve acquired a skulking, slightly miserable-looking, third-hand hound. The conversation moves on. What is there to say about dogs? They are a minor event. But I want to talk about the dog some more. I bite my tongue. Steph is dissecting a documentary she watched recently about big game hunting that ‘presented the nuances and facets of an argument that is usually presented in simple and far too emotional binary terms’. She was so impressed by it she sat down to watch it with the elder of her children so that they could learn to think about ideas in all these different dimensions.