Lost Dog

by Kate Spicer

  Sometimes I’d watch Charlie walk off with Wolfy beside him on the lead, and the dog’s elegant prance, his springing step and thoroughbred horse’s legs looked just about the coolest thing on this planet. People in my neighbourhood, be they rich or not so rich, or not rich in the slightest, were unusually concerned with a specific sort of strong but unforced style. West London style requires insouciance. It must not look like an effort has been made. Street swagger trumped fashion to the point where actual fashionability, as in wearing the latest season-to-season fashions, was actually looked down on. Being pretty wealthy, yet wearing a lot of second-hand clothes or well-made old clothes – that was considered something of merit among the more confident rich, while being ‘the sort of person who buys entire looks off the internet’ is an actual insult to hurl around. I would have liked to be able to buy entire looks off the internet if I am honest. But I could not, unless I went to Top Shop, which I didn’t. We choose old clothes over cheap clothes in west London, where the market had treasure beyond most people’s charity shop dreams. Here on Ladbroke Grove and Portobello Road, where street swagger required owning your personal style, the dog was definitely ‘a look’.

  Not that my dog-walking sass was a look that travelled terribly well.

  ‘Darling, so great to see you’ve updated your look at last,’ said Steph when I walked in one Sunday lunchtime wearing something other than baggy jeans and Blundstone boots. Was I becoming one of those women on the makeover shows, requiring an intervention in which my family talk about how frumpy I had become?

  ‘Aunty Kate always wears men’s clothes and her hair is like a bird’s nest,’ my nephew would say to camera and everyone would think it was sweet and hilarious. Some naff TV personality would come and bullyingly turn me into a desperate Boden clone. ‘We need to chuck out the shapeless jeans and the green jumpers and get you into something slim-fitting, you’ve got quite good arms’ – dot dot dot, there’s a parenthesis: ‘for a woman your age.’

  The dog isn’t with me when the handsome bloke looks at me repeatedly across the bar of the Cow. I look around, dramatically, left and right behind me. He can’t possibly be looking at me. I’ve become so used to men going for younger women that I can’t quite believe these ardent stares are meant for me. He’s practically winking.

  ‘That’s guy’s looking at you,’ says Charlie. ‘He’s very good-looking. Do you know him?’

  I saunter over there and strike up some dazzlingly imaginative chat. ‘I know you from somewhere.’

  ‘Yes, it’s Mark.’ Nope, still no idea but he’s got a beautiful straight nose and curled full lips like a Greek statue so we amble towards a chat general enough not to require the slightest knowledge of who the other is.

  ‘I’ve never seen you in here before—’ There’s a crashing sound as something drops into place in my brain. It’s Otto’s owner, the grey whippet we walk with on Baby Scrubs, a smaller public park over the road from what was now popularly known as Big Scrubs. Now I am feeling cocky. I could rinse some kudos out of this. I turn to the guy, make good eye contact. We talk what must look like intently from across the bar. I’m leaning here, smiling and gesticulating, talking about dogs. Living the lie that this man might find me sexually interesting. Not that Charlie knows that.

  Otto’s owner, this Mark, is telling me, ‘Lurchers, they’re starter dogs really. They’re easy compared to a breed like a beagle. They train easily and sleep all the time.’ He starts telling me about his friend with a Hungarian vizsla. ‘Starter dog?’ I am crestfallen. I pretend to sparkle for a few minutes more and then go back to my boyfriend.

  I love Charlie for many reasons at the moment. One of them is he never gets jealous. ‘So, who was he? You seemed to be getting on very well.’

  With a cocky wobble of the head, I close my eyes. ‘Yeah, we were talking about …’ I pause for a moment, let the belief that we were having a riveting chat abide a few seconds longer, and then admit, ‘… dogs actually.’

  It is an inescapable fact that large tracts of my life and conversation are entirely dog led now. Notting Hill has morphed into a landscape of dogs and dog owners, of people who like dogs, and would like to talk about it. In among these folk there are some other folk but they have nothing to do with dogs so they are about as relevant as lamp posts – less so, in fact, as Wolfy won’t relieve himself on a human. This canine filter is not as excluding as it seems. I guesstimate west London’s dog-loving population is a majority.

  En route to the Scrubs one day I spotted Tarik walking down Latimer Road with Tyson, Satan and the other little dog, Sugar.

  ‘Wanna lift?’ I stopped and shouted through the window.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, holding up the three leads in mock despair. The three panting beasts crammed in the back with Wolfy, who moved out of the way and looked determinedly out of the window, like he could will them out of his dog bed on wheels by pretending they weren’t there. Somehow the giant Satan settled in without crushing the other two.

  I’d see Tarik sometimes being dragged to the coffee shop; he might as well have been waterskiing on the pavement, the monster dog dragging him along, Tarik’s strong arms fully extended. When we approached him coming the other way Wolfy would swiftly steer me away from the dog, not out of fear, but out of the pure inconvenience of being ‘greeted’ by Satan. Any detour from the monster dog suited me so I’d follow Wolfy’s lead and go for either a cheery wave or a head-down ‘I haven’t seen you’ approach.

  Tarik was getting thinner as his dog was getting bigger. One day he’d told me how much Satan ate and I immediately handed over a bag of dog food I’d just bought.

  Still, it was nice to see him and we set off walking together.

  ‘Thing with dogs, yeah, right, is you’ve gotta be the boss.’

  The enormous Satan rampaged around Wolfy, tumbling like an elephant over my gamine bag of bones. Wolfy stayed aloof, alert and, for now, calm but there was a tension in his step that said, ‘This dog is seriously doing my head in.’

  I considered the dense-packed muscle around Satan’s jaw. We walked with lots of Staffies, playful, roughhousing, but this dog, was something else. ‘He’s just massive,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Tarik agreed, nonchalant, proud. ‘If he wanted to kill Wolfy he could do it in a second. But that would never happen because he knows I am the boss, and he’s a good boy. He’s like a harmless little pup. Ahhh, look at him. He just wants to play.’

  ‘Wolfy’s not big on playing.’

  ‘Yeah I can see that.’ His drooling monster went cantering into Wolfy’s ribs like a battering ram. ‘You’ve got to not worry, mate,’ he said. ‘See, you’re creating tension.’

  Satan was now ‘playfully’ riding Wolfy’s haunches like a prize stallion.

  I tried in vain to control my anxiety. I wished I’d never gone for this walk.

  Tarik clearly knew a lot about dogs but I was losing faith. This was a radical chic experiment gone horribly wrong.

  Rowrarowrowrowgrrrrrrraaaaaaargh. Yelp. Scream. Yelp. Scream.

  Wolfy had kicked off with the gigantic fighting dog the size of a hippo and now before my eyes they were a joined-up, indistinguishable mass of fur, foamed spit, growls, whines and barks. A dogfight.

  That was it, Wolfy was dead meat. I screamed, ‘Get that dog off! GET IT OFF!’ A calm, constant person in me was standing back and going, ‘How is screaming going to help, you berk.’

  The majority of my being was engaged in uncontrolled, hysterical panic: ‘Get the fucking thing off.’

  Tarik strolled over and stopped the fight with a word.

  ‘You see, you reacted wrongly there. I was always in control and the pup never hurt Wolfy. Wolfy was just teaching him a lesson and, see?’ He pointed at my dog, swaggering off towards the bushes for a celebratory post-fight micturation. ‘He’s fine.’

  I had overreacted. No doubt about it. But his dog was just so inconveniently massive. Its ability to kill was so evident that whether it w
ould or not seemed like an irrelevance. All the times I’d sniggered at adults who threw their hands up and whimpered if a dog went near them came back to haunt me. In some ways, people were right to be scared of dogs. Like people with guns, they’re able to kill.

  Now I had to finish the rest of the walk with Tarik patronising me and pointing out the countless ways I had reacted badly to his ‘playful boy’.

  ‘Well, you need to not own such a ridiculous ferocious-looking dog that could “kill my dog in one second.” What’s the point of having this beast?’

  ‘It’s the challenge,’ he said. ‘Though I think I am gonna change his name to Billy. Satan gives off some bad gangsta vibes.’

  I decided not to walk with Tarik ever again and returned to the ladies who lurch with their slinky biddable hounds.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Living in Notting Hill with the dog feels a bit like a holiday every day. We walk those ordered streets of mustard London brick and pastel stucco to find good coffee, good wine, to test peaches for ripeness or buy exotic mushrooms from the Mushroom Guy in the market. It’s the same, more or less, as I did before the furry string bean slouched everywhere beside me. Everything’s changed though. The immersion is so much deeper. I notice more. For every house lavishly draped in silks with a grand piano in the window, there’s another that cost a million to make it bleak and spare and another that is bleak through want, with ripped grey nets and a junkyard front garden.

  Welcome to Notting Hill, where grandeur and grot live literally right next door to each other. There’s Tarik’s place and next door there’s that nice chap who was at Eton with David Cameron.

  Pootling about the place in the daytime, it still surprises me how much people salute the dog. On ‘our’ stretch of Portobello Road, between Elgin and Blenheim Crescents, there’s cries of ‘All right Wolfy,’ left, right and centre some days.

  As I’m caffeinating myself, there’s a shrill cry of ‘Wolfy,’ followed by an even shriller one: ‘Wolfy!’ The two little girls, Betty and Audrey, arrive in Crocs and matching sundresses. ‘Oh, this dog is my favourite. Can I stroke his tummy?’

  ‘Arright Wolfy?’ It’s the drugs counsellor with the voice that sounds like he has a stinking cold. ‘Come on then.’ He coaxes him away from the children, with their mere stroking and pats, with the crunchy promises he jiggles in his biscuit-laden pockets.

  ‘Is that a lurcher? My wife has just got one of those. Majestic-looking, isn’t he,’ pronounces a haughty chap in green quilted jacket. He rears up behind the children and their nanny, and the drug counsellor, all now worshipping Wolfy. The nanny is cooing at him, ‘Eres un chico guapo. Mwah mwah mwah.’

  I feel like the wives of pop stars must do: superfluous, in the way, but proud.

  I get up and leave slowly and wait outside the door until he notices me there and scrabbles at the smooth floor trying to quickly get to his feet. Once up he strolls out to join me. I clip the lead on, put on a pair of cheap sunglasses and swagger off.

  We’ve not walked 20 paces before the dog gives a little tug on the lead, tug enough to pull my arm straight, as we pass Mike’s Cafe, the greasy spoon on Blenheim Crescent opposite that infuriating travel bookshop where the tourists from all around the world stand in the middle of the road and take pictures while playing clips from Notting Hill the movie.

  Danny, the son of the eponymous Mike, bellows, ‘Orroit babe?’ at me as we pass him leaning against his convertible Merc. He’s got his roof down and the car stereo pumping out some classic late nineties UK house and garage – pronounced, of course, garridge.

  On and off throughout my 25 years of working at home I have gone in there when the four walls at home are good only for crawling up. I’m a regular at Mike’s like Joan Collins is at the Wolseley and Lucian Freud was at Clarke’s. For a while I worked here almost every day – despite belonging to an expensive private members’ club just round the corner – because, as the sticker on the door of Mike’s says, in capital letters, ‘We Welcome Dogs.’

  Daily was too much. The problem was that I was eating too much fried food. It being a Notting Hill greasy spoon, you can get a full English, but also eggs royale or a Greek salad. But when fried bread and baked beans are available, who really orders a fruit plate?

  Wolfy didn’t get a sausage every time we went to Mike’s. Sometimes he got two. And on the days he didn’t get sausage, he got a chicken breast. He’s a big fan of the place. The sausage reward system has made him strongly motivated to visit Mike’s. Entirely like the feelings I had when I passed Tim’s place. Our habits burned into our neural pathways created the actual physical routes we trod in life.

  Danny is his usual deep chestnut brown permatanned self. He’s smoking, leaning against his black C-Class and wearing a Burberry baseball cap. Danny runs the place now and Mike shuffles in quietly for breakfast every now and again, still with traces of the Greek Cypriot accent, smart in a suit, always. The caff has been there since 1963. Charlie loves an imagined dialogue between him and Danny, where he calls him Moik constantly. ‘Orroight Moik? You’re a proper old local incha Moik? Cor Moik. Stroike a loit. Cor blimey. It’s a real pea-souper innit mate.’

  The clueless and patronising new middle-class arrival to town, talking in his Dick Van Dyke East End shockney to a west London local whose name he has muddled with the name of the caff. This was a weekly stalwart in the range of skits we performed for each other at home.

  I’d told Danny about the ‘Orroight Moik’ business and he’s having a chuckle about that. Truth is you could live here a lifetime and people wouldn’t think of you as a local. These errors of cross-cultural intimacy were real for the posho middle-class people who loved the multiculturalism, thrived within it, but didn’t get to make jokes about white dog hairs on a black niqab. Even if you lived to 150 you couldn’t please the, as they loudly called themselves, ‘real locals wiv foive gen’rations on Grove, know wot am sayin’?’

  Wolfy tugs towards the door and I point at him. ‘Real regular inne Moik?’ Danny laughs and carries on posing on his Mercedes.

  As I drag Wolfy on past the caff, he squirts a jet of possessive urine on one of the plant pots outside. ‘Oops, sorry,’ I say.

  ‘Nah that’s all right, he’s just saying, “That’s mine. That’s my caff, that is.” I haven’t got a problem with that babe.’

  Wolfy is constantly steering me, manipulating me with what tools he has to do the things he is driven to do. Such is the engagement with a domesticated dog. In steering me away from my own habits, and towards his own, he has changed my life. I ain’t complainin’ Moik. I just had to start eating salad for breakfast because a bacon sandwich every day was out of the question.

  When we near Coffee Plant, where the maximum haul on a really good day might be anything up to eight dry dog biscuits, he starts steering too, although not with the sausage-strength force that he uses round the corner by Mike’s. Timing matters too: if we walk past in the morning he’ll automatically veer in, such is the regularity of my caffeine habit, but in the afternoon he just bowls on past. Whenever I look after Castor he does the same whenever we pass Portobello Juice, which explains why his owner Keith is so much healthier-looking than me. Just a light pull from Castor’s lead is enough to make me think about popping in for a green juice.

  The biscuit-tracking instinct is strong in Wolfy. So you can imagine the problems I have keeping him out of Janice’s in order to keep the fleas at bay. Were I to open the gate a crack, say if I had stinky bags of rubbish in my hands, he would somehow compress himself down to fit through the crack, and slither out down the alley and snackwards.

  Early September, it’s warm and it’s still flea season. Wolfy has been doing his usual rounds in the back alley, yet he hasn’t come back with any hoppy squatters for a few weeks.

  One morning I’m walking past Janice’s back gate with him unattached to his lead. I wait for his inevitable swift exit. He looks left at Janice’s door, pauses and moves swiftly on as if
to say, ‘Yeah, you know what. You’re all right mate, didn’t fancy a biscuit anyway.’

  He’s scared. Specifically, he’s scared of Felicity, a mangy-looking tabby cat that recently set up camp in her yard, looking to me tiny and terrified but to Wolfy, clearly, terrifying. Why? He could go mano a mano (perro en perro?) with Satan/Billy, and walk out tail up and cocksure, yet this small sad smelly cat, trembly as a squirrel, has him aquiver. At last, an effective flea treatment.

  Even at the specific invitation of Janice, who is often there, kneeling on a bit of rubber in her concreted yard busy potting stalky geraniums or painting gnomes, he is not interested. ‘Hello Woo’, coming in for your biskit?’ Nope. Wolfy trots on to Rita’s.

  This from a type of hound who is a thief and a murderer by nature, a stealthy poacher’s best friend. Lurchers don’t carefully retrieve prey the master has shot and softly drop it at your feet. Lurchers chase it and kill it. That’s their job. Have the oxytocin benders he gets with me as his owner crushed his killer instinct? Or is his gentle nature the reason he was turfed out of his previous home and found wandering the streets of Manchester without a collar or a chip?

  He cries sometimes when I leave the study and go and work in bed. I try to ignore his imploring ‘where are you?’ bleating, which is what the dog behaviourists instruct you do, but I always relent: ‘I’m up here, you goon.’ Click clack, he’s up the killer stairs and springs onto the bed, where we both give ourselves a quick oxytocin fix as I stroke him and stick my nose in his fur. ‘What do you smell of today? Mmmn, sun-toasted seaweed and hot sand.’

  There’s a knack to snuggling a lurcher. Get the wrong angle and it can feel like embracing a collapsible picnic table. Awkward as hell. You will find a scratchy paw, at the end of a long thin extended leg, stuck in your eye. Snuggling isn’t what they’re designed for.

  Experience teaches a lurcher owner how to make a teddy bear of your high-speed stealth kite. Once the big cuddles start, then you get seriously addicted.