by Kate Spicer
The whole place is on funny levels. Our main food-prep surface is next to those three little stairs in the kitchen. This means the big wooden chopping block where we prep all our food is at lurcher nose height. We called it Wolfy’s Smorgasbord. If we had ever had any concerns about food hygiene, we lost them to the sight of a glistening black nose twitching over the area and a stealthy pink tongue snaffling what he could before we started the farce of trying to scold a dog while laughing.
He is on a permanent See Food diet that dog. No one’s hungry like the Wolf. At first we would scold him, and use the word No, sharply, if he went near the chopping board. Had we kept up this discipline, I am sure that only when we left the house would he have explored the area with nose, tongue and jaw before carrying it off to Wolfy’s rug, like all his other treasures.
But our discipline was patchy. We’d catch him nicking food and be tickled by these attempts at Hooded Claw-style stealth. He used the slinking approach, sidling past us, making himself flat and small and as close to invisible as he could while he snuck, nibbling up the well-done ends of the beef by shooting out a long sticky tongue with his head turned sideways and resting ear-down on the chopping board. Charlie and I would be too busy chuckling to tell him off effectively.
Yes, we loved some bad habits into him. It wasn’t his fault if we condoned all sorts of naughty doggy behaviour by standing back and laughing affectionately. We created a very loveable monster by spoiling him. Otherwise, his manners remained impeccable. He peed as far away from the flat as possible, never in the alleyway behind. He pooed discreetly in the long grass and away from sight and smell-lines. He did this so efficiently that I sometimes missed where he’d dropped his crap and would be gingerly stepping through the grass, trying to avoid other people’s uncollected dog faeces while scouring the ground looking for his like I was hunting for truffles not crap.
Out walking with my nieces and nephews one day, Wolfy did one of his tidy invisible jobs. ‘I’d better go find that,’ I said. ‘It’s very important to pick up dog poo.’
‘Ah-ha! Now then!’ said Arty, with all the certainty of a small person. ‘Aunty Kate, would you like to know how you can find that poo that Wolfy just did?’
‘Why yes Arts, educate me.’
‘Well, what you do is you must look for the flies because the flies are really good at finding the poo.’
His theory worked. In winter you looked for steam rising. In summer, follow your nose, or, as Professor Arty proposed, the flies.
Wolfy started to make his own life, as much as a domesticated dog is able. In the alley round the back of the flat he was allowed to visit some of the neighbours. It wasn’t quite like the good old days, when people would turf their dogs out on the street when they left the house and the streets were full of free-range dogs roaming around doing white poo everywhere.
The first ‘friend’ he made back there in the alley was Janice, who lived in one of these little two-up two-downs that had originally housed two families. One up, one down. Ours was the only little hutch that remained divided in two. Janice had lived in this house since birth and she had no central heating or washing machine, no television or, indeed, much light to speak of. It looked awful dingy in there. The top floor still had the original back door, a cheap swimming pool blue with dimpled glass panes, but was minus the outdoor stairs that led up to it as in our flat.
When I first caught him slithering in the crack in Janice’s back door, I went running and calling and apologising. ‘Wolfy, come, come, COME! HERE!’
‘It’s all right, he’s just coming in for his biscuits,’ she squawked with irritation. ‘Leave him be. Woo’ likes his biscuits.’
I hovered at the back door waiting for the dog to return from elevenses with Janice.
Wolfy got a very warm welcome there. He would eat any cat food left out, or run up to her bedroom to beg for the old-fashioned, cheap biccies she kept by her bed. Rich Tea, Nice, Malted Milk, Lincolns … Sometimes if she was heading out she’d break them up and leave them outside her back door for Woo’ to eat at his leisure.
Janice is what people like to describe as a mad cat lady. This isn’t a fair representation of her. She is an eccentric and isolated figure, not happy, not sad, always busy and frequently fretting about things in her tiny universe of the alley.
She enjoyed a visit from Wolfy on a daily basis. In the end I started buying dog biscuits and leaving them in an old plastic tub outside her back door. What amounted to eight hundred human biscuits a day wasn’t ideal. She never acknowledged this, or thanked me. Which was fine. I’d given her an M&S Christmas cake last year and she’d said, ‘Now, you don’t have to do that.’ That was as close as she would get to a thank-you.
His other daily call lived just over from Janice. Rita was in her seventies and her husband John was a retired market trader who loved Eric Clapton. John called Wolfy ‘The Guv’nor’.
‘Rita! Guv’nor’s in,’ he’d shout if Wolfy came calling at the back door when Rita was upstairs. Rita would give him two Bonio, and both wet and dry cat food. ‘Ahhh. He does enjoy his cat food, doesn’t he?’ she’d say, looking down fondly at him as he feverishly licked the pattern off the clattering dishes.
Yes he did, though what Whiskas did to his breath was less enjoyable for his human housemates.
Rita and I would marvel at how Janice loved all animals, lived for them – when they died she went to the church and lit candles for their souls – but never touched them. Despite Janice’s devotion to the animals, Wolfy prioritised Rita over Janice; the edible haul was greater, plus she gave him a lot of strokes and cuddles: big biscuits, cat food two ways and an oxytocin buzz. Nice!
I was glad about this because his visits to Janice were a bit of a problem. The sheer quantity of cats in and out of the place, and the fact that she didn’t own a vacuum cleaner nor had new carpets since the end of the last world war, meant that above a certain temperature her place became an orgy of fleas.
Manchester Nancy, our next-door neighbour, was nearer to 90 than 80 but still loved a bracing three-fingers G&T and occasionally went out in miniskirts and with her long dyed-blond hair in bunches. Nancy didn’t much like dogs. But I liked gin, so we’d pop round there occasionally and Wolfy would lie on the AstroTurf on her patio, watching while I selflessly shared a stiff gin with my elderly neighbour.
Nancy told me she’d always had her suspicions that Janice was mildly autistic: ‘She doesn’t drink you know; mind, neither does Rita. People are funny, aren’t they.’
Janice would patrol the alleyway in men’s shoes without laces, a dingy dressing gown the same colour as those cheap biscuits Wolfy enjoyed so much and a dirty baby-blue nightie. At all hours of the day and night she could be heard talking to the cats she’d adopted: Zappy, Dappy, Buster, Noggy, Felicity … All of them had originally belonged to other households off the alley, but they all ended up with Janice. ‘They dint care for ’em right,’ she’d say.
‘Not true,’ the original owners insisted. Everyone got on well enough though and that was Wolfy’s world.
‘Why have you put tomatoes in the fridge?’ I say, whipping out three desperately underripe orange rocks. ‘Never put tomatoes in the fridge.’
Charlie mutters ‘For fuck’s sake,’ under his breath and stabs the chopping board with the knife he’s using to slice himself a piece of salami.
In our tomayto/tomahtoe relationship we can agree on the pronouncing of the word; whether they should be kept in the fridge or not, less so.
My honeymoon with Wolfy was looking like it would never end, unlike the brief respite from antagonism between Charlie and me. We two had enjoyed gazing at Wolfy together for a few months after he arrived. Now that was over. We had hit a really miserable rocky patch that had me wondering if we were really meant to be.
Sometimes the only thing that kept me from walking out was the fact that we shared a mortgage, the ultimate ball and chain. If the Instagram evidence of other people’s relationships
was to be believed, then Charlie and I had the worst relationship on earth. In fact, I was beginning to suspect that relationships were what is technically known as a ‘fucking grind’. No wonder all my others had ended after two years.
‘Anything else I’ve got wrong here?’ he says through clenched teeth.
‘Well, they never ripen otherwise, and’ I mutter this last, ‘it’s common to keep tomatoes in the fridge.’
You get the boyfriend you deserve, I think, mournful, resigned, self-pitying. A victim. And, it’s true, the punishment cuts both ways – he has me too, a woman who judges people who keep tomatoes in the fridge.
There’s more cross words about the tomato issue, but what savagely destroys happiness in this home isn’t shouting, it’s the silence. He opens his laptop. Lips in a miserable set line. We do not speak to each other for the rest of the night. It is happening too often, and it’s depressing. It’s not drama queen depressing, where you huff and blow and complain that it’s sooo depressing because you can’t get tickets to see Beyoncé at the O2. It’s actually depressing. I feel permanently low.
I want to say something positive but I can’t think of anything. When I do try to speak the intonation is inflected with coldness and disappointment, a slow drip of martyred poison. The female response to male anger is weary passive aggression.
My comeback will not emerge for another 24 hours probably, drip drip, it can last for days, little digs, sharp inhalations, overlong exhalations. For now, I say nothing but I pine for my shabby old rented flat, the real deal, the ‘room of my own’ where no one ever sighed because the bed wasn’t made, or if I dinged the wing mirror. I had my own shit car and I could read with all the lights on until 4 a.m. if I wanted to. What have I done? Given up my every independence to be unhappy in a relationship.
The silence is cold and hateful. I attach the dog to his lead and leave the house, slamming the door so hard that a pot of pens falls off the windowsill onto the floor. As my feet ring down the metal steps there’s a hollow metallic thud as, I assume, some white good takes the force of Charlie’s fist or foot.
‘Oh, ’ello Woo’,’ Janice gurgles, blocking my way out of the alley, out for a late-night cat-herd in her greige robe. ‘Now. Have you seen Zappy?’ she asks me, with hands planted business-like on her hips.
‘Not now Janice.’
I can’t get out of there fast enough. I walk round to the green outside the leisure centre and I sit on the concrete bench down the far end by the tower block and put my head between my knees. Wolfy wanders off to pee on a favourite object, the old foundation stone dug out when they built the new school here a few years ago.
I want revenge. Revenge for what, I don’t know. I want my power back. I could always get up and walk out. And go where? A women’s refuge? With a dog? And the reasons for leaving? My boyfriend keeps tomatoes in the fridge? Could I afford a small flat. Could I move in with my mum? God no. I’m not far off 50. Jesus.
The dog had finished sniffing every tree trunk and street lamp outside the sports centre.
Normally this is the point at which we return to the flat.
I don’t want to go back this night, though, so I carry on sitting on the concrete bench opposite a lurid pink and pointless squiggle of a municipal sculpture. I take a few deep breaths. I try to anchor myself to something strong, solid, abiding that will keep my spirits up. Wolfy comes over and crumples his gangly legs under his belly and lies on the grass in front of me, and exhales with a purposeful force that suggests he is content to park here.
Lewis Hamilton II, a beagle I’d watched over the last few months grow from a puppy into a fat overfed dog, appears to schnuffle round my dog’s rear end. Lewis’s owner comes over. I don’t know his name, ‘Lewis’s owner’ suffices. ‘Evening Wolfy,’ he says and my dog bumbles over to lean against his leg. ‘I love it when they do that,’ he beams at me. ‘Dear old Wolfy.’
He’s such an unusually cheerful guy, which tonight just makes the rot back home feel more remote. From across the way comes the transgender lady with her cloud of French bulldogs and pugs. She has a new one: ‘I can’t help myself. I’m addicted to them babe.’ The story of the new puppy is relayed in explicit detail along with the complexities of her housing situation. Small piggy dogs aren’t the only thing she’s addicted to, I think, listening to the babble and looking at her heavy, sleepy eyes.
Would I like to be high now, I wonder.
Yes. No. No. Yes. I think of the repercussions. It’s a terrible idea. The shortest-term and worst solution. Wolfy has come back to sit beside me and I lean down to sniff his head and kiss his ears.
The painfully posh local councillor has arrived with his dog. ‘It’s Wiggles the cockerpoo!’ I exclaim, as the little glove puppet rushes towards Wolfy to sniff a greeting. Wolfy recognises little Wiggles and his tail starts wagging high and fast in enthusiastic welcome.
Posh chap nods at me – he is never very free with the chat – and over at Lewis’s owner too. His eyes flicker at the transgender gal and back again quickly. She looks too healthy for it to be crack or white cider, too lively for smack or weed. I’m dying to know. Is it rude to ask? Perhaps I could hang out with her for a bit. She sees me staring. I wave and smile too enthusiastically. ‘Babe.’ She waves back in acknowledgement, coolly, lazily.
‘She’s a malty poo.’ I notice that posh is talking to me. ‘… A malty poo.’
‘Oh dear. Too much Horlicks.’
‘Wiggles. She’s not a cockerpoo, she’s a big maltipoo.’
‘A Maltipoo.’ What a word.
Posh is as bonkers about his dog as I am mine. He’s got the doggy oxytocin gene. He’s got it bad. I see the way he looks at her, adoring eyes betraying a melting heart. ‘Ooh, better be off!’ He chases off after the wiggly Wiggles with a poo bag over his mitt and his iPhone torch on to better find brown treasure laid deep in the bushes by Treadgold House. That’s him, civic-minded to the extreme.
Mentally, I shuffle through the alternatives to going home. What I’ll do is I’ll go out all night and not come back and then he’ll think I’m dead and that will teach him and then we can be great lovers again. I’ll switch my phone off and disappear. Yeah that’ll make him sorry. Where to go? My friend Elaine’s. To my brother’s. Too far. Timbo is only a ten-minute cab ride away. There the door is always open, once he’s fought his way through the deadlocks and latches of the paranoid drug abuser. I envisage the Peterbilt wing mirror and the mountain of butts in the heavy glass ashtray, the talkative goons around the-marble-and-glass coffee table.
Posh is back, waving his hand, still covered in a poo bag. ‘False alarm!’ shrugging and rolling my eyes, I semaphore an amused exasperation, which neither of us feel. Our dogs can do no wrong.
No. Just, no. In the past I’ve walked out on men and bunked in Tim’s spare bedroom, or what he calls the tantrum suite. The thought of doing that now is like inviting someone to kick me in the head.
I linger a bit longer, scrolling through Chica’s Instagram. There’s all her socialite chums, thin as pipe cleaners and all at the same party. I start clicking, on and on, through to the feeds tagged in her posts. More lithe-limbed girls, all gleaming and glowing and hugging on speedboats and skis. Here’s me, sat outside a municipal leisure centre with a bunch of ordinary freaks like me and their dogs. Oh, why did I do that? Now, what modicum of mellow spirits I’d have scrabbled back from the company of my random doggy acquaintances has been harshed by the whipping out of the old ruler of success. Bugger.
Come on, go home, go to bed. Grind on, see what tomorrow brings. That’s all I can do. My relationship might not be Insta-perfect, but we’ve been together for six years now, and for me that’s a major achievement. Grit your teeth. Head down.
I want to go home, to my home. I’m not going to run away tonight.
‘Come on boy, it’s too late for Rita.’ I steer him away from her gate as we return down the alley with the moonlight bouncing off the silver clouds and my beast f
riend’s swaying rear end. I breathe in cool still night air. Life’s not great but there’s always this.
The flat still hums with the dislike we both feel for each other and I sit on the kitchen step, reluctant to join my so-called lover in bed.
Without any meaningful money of my own, I’m impotent.
Virginia Woolf famously said that a woman needs ‘a room of her own’. Less famously, what she exactly said was ‘a woman must have money’ and then the room business. My mum, too, raising us three on her own, constantly seemed tortured by a financial want that she could not answer herself. Money is a brute. When we were kids Will and I used to fantasise about looking after Mum. When we grew up we would buy her a house and send her on great holidays and she’d never have to be hurt by a man again. If we did that, she’d be happy and free.
This was my formative experience of economic power being in the hands of men. Work, work would make women free, and I did work, I didn’t follow a domestic path, still the real economic power always remained just out of my reach. My feckless spending had nothing to do with it. It was all someone else’s fault.
With Wolfy beside me on the floor, I sit on the kitchen step and stew. If I had money, I could just walk out of here. I don’t want to leave. I just want to know I am able to leave. I want to want my boyfriend, not need him. The risk, with need, is too high. Love is like any drug – take it, but don’t be dependent.
Wolfy sits upright, looking away. The poignancy of his gentle loyal presence compared to the detached cold man upstairs brings tears stinging to my eyes. I let them go, the tears, and they fall with a slow patter on the seagrass. I hang my head, staring down at the accumulation of crud between the weave in my miserable domestic universe. I’ve not cried much in my adult life. I taught myself to hold it in as a kid, like real ladies do with farts. Dad said holding in farts was unhealthy. Never said anything about tears. Sniff. Sniff. Snotty nose-blow. Sniff. Sniff. Drip. Drip. It goes on and on. It feels horrible and it feels good. The dog turns and swiftly licks my cheek a couple of times before settling down on the floor beneath me.
