Lost Dog

by Kate Spicer

  ‘Have you been to the police?’

  How many dogs go missing every year? Thousands.

  Every retweet of my original tweet generates more people telling me the dog is in kebabs, that I am a terrible dog owner, that they hope I find my dog, that they are sorry, that they are out putting up posters and looking for Wolfy and, more specifically, that a dog like him has been seen in Clissold Park, over a mile away in Stoke Newington. Charlie heads over there. I will carry on combing these streets.

  I stop to drink a cup of tea in a cafe on Tollington Park. All around me couples and friends eat eggs Benedict and turn the pages of Sunday supplements. They are living the brunching dream.

  It’s too much, so I move outside to a table in the cold sun. An older woman, slim, bleached-blond hair with a heavy fringe and wearing ‘the fashions’, keeps looking over at me; she has a strong handsome face ravaged, I can tell, by countless nights on drugs in discos. I know those faces, wrinkles brined in fags and booze and cured by sunshine. Living a plain old hard life ravages a face in a different way to the high life and hedonism writ across hers.

  She’s not like the friendly dog walkers who have approached me throughout the morning. Maybe she heard me telling Charlie to head for Clissold Park. Maybe she clocked the stack of posters beside me. She draws on a vape and squints at me. ‘Lost yer dog, babe?’ Her voice belongs in a bookie’s or a rough boozer, its feminine essence lost.

  If I could have pretended I didn’t care, and that the dog was just a dog, it would have been to this cool Medusa in smudged black eyeliner. I trot out the story. Brother’s house, the high-speed dash from Tufnell to Finsbury, been 24 hours, rescue dog, heartbroken, hope he’s alive.

  ‘He’ll come home,’ she says.

  I repeat that the dog’s too far away from home to find his way back, that there is no scent for him to follow back. ‘Where d’you live then?’

  ‘Notting Hill, well, Dale, the not-rich bit, you know it? Down by Latimer tube. You probably don’t.’

  ‘Yeah, I know exactly where you mean.’ She peers at me under the bleached fringe, jabbing at me with her vape and a glossy black nail-bar talon. ‘And I know you, babe. I’ve seen you round Tim’s.’ Her gurgling, phlegmy laugh is grimly knowing. ‘You still see him?’

  ‘Not so much. Not since the dog—’ Blunt needles jab at the back of my eyes. ‘I’ve cleaned up a lot. I am a lot happier. Was a lot happier.’

  ‘Me too. Tried AA, settled on NA – amazing who you meet in there. It’s better than the Groucho. Don’t go there any more, either. Even given up fags.’ She waves the vape.

  I ask for the bill, and she insists on paying. ‘I’ll be honest, I never really liked you. Not to be trusted, journalists. I always thought you were a bit of a twat. But you’re a good woman. I can see that now I’ve discovered my inner nice person. It’s taken a while.’

  My dog-hunting pals return and hover like delicate creatures on the edges of her hard-boiled 1,000-year-old supermodel aura. They have to leave now. I say an enthusiastic round of thanks to them and stand up to leave. She stands up too and folds me in her creaking leather arms. She smells of men’s Vetiver aftershave, Elnett hairspray and fruity vape fumes. ‘Good luck finding your dog, babe.’

  Charlie calls. He is walking round the perimeter of Clissold Park calling the dog’s name. He says that dog walkers, out on a Sunday, come and said, ‘Oh I’ve heard about your dog, don’t worry, we’ll keep an eye out, it’s a great community round here.’ People do care.

  The people I am stopping are varying shades of middle-class, the sort who would have been tucked up guzzling tea, Malbec, Chardonnay and Kettle Chips in front of The X Factor while Wolfy was roaming the streets last night. I need to push on out of my comfort zone. Widen out the demographic.

  The other side of Tollington Park is the Andover Estate, with flats stuffed into five-storey red-brick blocks. I walk for a few streets stopping no one, shy and awkward and weakened by one of the regular waves of hopelessness. Park that feeling, I tell myself, you have to push on.

  From cheerful counter staff in crammed corner shops, to merry drinkers outside pubs, people are consistently warm and interested. I stop a police van full of hatchet-faced coppers. ‘I’ve lost my dog, can I show you a picture of him? I’m going out of my mind.’

  ‘How long’s it been now?’

  ‘Over a day.’

  ‘Give us a poster, we’ll put it up in the station’. As the light fades, I end up on a low-rise street with the sort of tall but narrow hutches the state rents to large families. I approach three men shouting at each other in a concreted front yard. ‘Excuse me …’

  This is not London in my own image.

  One guy steps to the side and leans over his creaking gate to look at my lost dog flyer. It’s not easy to understand what he is saying but he is determined and so am I. I listen, intent, to his thick accent. It reminds me of the times when I can’t understand my brother Tom’s speech. He tries again and again, and again. At first he asks me simple questions: ‘Where you lose?’ Tufnell Park. ‘How old he?’ About five.

  Then in this fractured English he starts to tell me his story. It is impossible to track and he knows it, so he repeats it over and over while I try to tune in. I nod along, clueless, my earnest sympathetic nodding the epitome of middle-class politesse. ‘I have dog. Stolen, stolen. Very bad man, he lie. He take dog.’ I nod, thank him. Dark brown skin, Caucasian features, straight thick black hair, short, agile. Despite the month, he wears Nike pool slides with a suit jacket and tracksuit bottoms. Where is he from? Albania? No, this isn’t a European language. Iraq, Iran, Algeria … is he a Kurd? I don’t know. ‘I loved my dog like my children.’ In his thick broken English, this I understand.

  ‘You understand,’ he says.

  ‘I understand,’ I say.

  ‘Very stressful time for you.’

  ‘Yes, it’s stressful.’

  He walks me to the end of his street, talking to me still. I shake his hand and punch my number into his phone. On Hornsey Road we say goodbye.

  I’d read something recently about all the dogs euthanised on the orders of the British government at the start of the Blitz in 1939, nearly a million of them, some completely pointlessly. In his memoir Sleeping with Dogs, the art critic Brian Sewell writes about his father taking his first childhood dog down to the beach and shooting it in the head as the Second World War began.

  I’ve never known real suffering.

  What I feel is what I feel. It’s not going to change because I’ve rationalised it and deemed it insignificant in the grander scheme of human suffering.

  This guy, what has he left behind? Why is he here?

  I try to breathe hope into my body, which is fizzing with sadness. I ring Charlie to tell him I am coming home. I’ll walk back through Finsbury, Holloway, up Tufnell Park Road, tracking back near the main arteries that brought Wolfy here. I set out and pass a dumped fake-leather sofa by a row of industrial wheelie bins in a scrappy dead end behind a row of shops. I imagine Wolfy asleep on it.

  I perch there, crying with frustration, tiredness and just the utter insignificance of all these human lives piled on top of each other, whether it’s behind £5,000 curtains or greying broken glass. Stupid fleas in our ugly concrete universe. I cry until I remember my bladder, which has been distended and aching for hours now. I piss rivers behind one of the bins, hidden away from the orange street lights, and wonder if Wolfy can smell it.

  Reversing back along the route that I know Wolfy ran, I run my hand along the walls hoping to leave a scent and willing the traffic in his favour should he follow it. A cold wind blows down Seven Sisters Road, and I can hear fireworks popping randomly. Guy Fawkes and Diwali are a few days away. The fireworks will get worse.

  I mistakenly drift back towards Stroud Green. The streets are empty, their unfamiliarity disorientates me and the architecture flattens under the street lights; all I can see is light and dark, lots and lots of malevolent da
rkness, like the whole experience rendered into a negative. After a light rain shower, the wet leaves glisten on the pavement like broken glass. More of the people I stop now are rambling and unwell.

  I stand on the steps of a large Victorian house converted to flats and a woman with her hair piled up under a head scarf is initially curious and concerned, but quickly her conversation moves to complaint and the problems she’s having with the ‘drug addicts’ who live upstairs. She needs to get it off her chest. I sympathise and put my number in her phone. She is still talking as I back away saying, ‘If you see the dog, please call me. I’m desperate.’

  On the corner of Hanley Road and Hornsey Lane, I stop a man. ‘Excuse me, have you seen this dog?’ I raise my phone, holding up the picture of Wolfy in Cornwall.

  ‘It’s me. Remember? Marwan? You spoke me already.’ It’s the man who had explained with such persistence how he had lost his own dog. ‘You still looking?’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It’s 6 a.m. and Charlie’s alarm is thrashing our waking synapses. They start to spit and crackle and that second of blissful ignorance is overwhelmed once more by the reality Wolfy: gone. It comes rushing in with an electric jolt of worry and grief. Newsflash. Everything’s shit today! Kapow. I am wide awake.

  Castor does not come upstairs to hoot his usual morning greeting. Downstairs and he is curled up tight in the yellow armchair. He opens an eye and looks up at me. Am I projecting sadness and caution on him or is he feeling the immense downer here?

  ‘Come on little chap.’ I drive him straight to the Scrubs and as on every other day he rolls in the pitch-black, sticky pointy-ended caca of fox – smellmageddon. Once again I am in the shower reliving the moment when Wolfy first came home, when I realised the intimacy of dog ownership was about way more than Bonio and throwing sticks. Owning a dog was profound, a physical and emotional investment. With love, always, comes the promise of pain.

  Where are you Wolfy?

  I’ve been sitting at my desk for a couple of hours, writing a bit, combing Twitter a bit more. I respond to every tweet, eager to cultivate the attention of strangers. Charlie works from home, sitting on the sofa, making booming phone calls of fake confidence to his clients. Oblivious to the situation.

  My phone rings.

  ‘Is Marwan. I talk you yesterday. My daughter, she thinks she saw your dog in the bus station.’

  ‘Hello.’ His daughter comes on the line, north London accent through and through, innit. ‘Yeah, I think I seen your dog in the bus station. It was just kind of wandering about. Looked a bit lost but calm.’

  Is this for real? When? ‘About nine, a bit later maybe, on Saturday night. Near the stop for the number 19.’

  A dog wandering around a busy bus station doesn’t sound quite right but the location makes sense. I decide to talk about the reward. If they sound greedy or eager then my caution will rise.

  ‘We would never, never take money.’

  Charlie is looking at me, mouthing, ‘What?’

  I come off the phone. ‘Someone says they saw the dog at the bus station in Finsbury Park on Saturday night. Would he go to such a busy place? Could he have got on a bus? He can’t have got on a bus.’

  I visualise him getting on a bus.

  The lady in the information office stares at me, blank and bored. She takes on the information of a bus-riding dog that looks like a skinny yak with the same indifference as a query about the next bus to Oxford Street. Hence, I am surprised and touched that when I ask her to put a poster on the glass in her booth she says in a West African accent, ‘Of course, I hope you find him.’

  As she places it I motion for her to put it somewhere more prominent, which she does. Every time someone does something unexpectedly nice for me, a worm of hope wriggles through my core.

  Finsbury Park was very Irish back in the day. Now it is, like a lot of London, very everything, but the pubs retain an Oirish flavour. It’s not even lunchtime, yet a few wiry stalwarts are supping pints of lager and Guinness in a high-ceilinged, ugly, proper drinkers’ pub called the Twelve Pins, calmly committed to the alcohol, stolid, quiet, elbow up, elbow down. No eggs Benedict here.

  Finsbury Park is an armpit. I haven’t been to a pub here since I was a student, when I used to go to gigs at the George Robey, a live music pub on what was known in gigging parlance as the ‘toilet circuit’.

  I stand at the bar by the door delaying the moment when I will lurch into the personal space of complete strangers and deliver the lost dog spiel.

  ‘Excuse me …’ The guy barely registers my presence. I leave a flyer and move on. ‘Excuse me …’ My next approach is to a tiny man in a flat cap, no more than five foot or so. I show him one of the flyers.

  ‘Ah, that’s a fine-looking lurcher there, what is he, a fen, looks like one of Mik Douglas’s, under twenty-three is he, got a bit of weight on him’ – He starts wheezing out a little chuckle and his shoulders shake – ‘that’ll soon go if he’s gone walkies on his own.’ More wheezy chuckles.

  His speech is as rapid as his accent is thick and I have to keep stopping him to repeat what he’s saying. ‘Used to know a dog like this back in Ireland, Lord Conan Finnegan he was called, champion he was, oh I won a few on that dog on the track at Powerstown, mind his legs are a bit short, you know the old story, “I think my dog is a Norfolk lurcher, every time I slip him on a hare he has got norfolking chance of catching it”.’

  This last elicits choking and delighted wheezes. ‘You want to visit the Traveller folk, there’s nothing those fellas don’t know about the running dogs, he may have found his way there, always a home for a lurcher with a Traveller if he can run.’

  He returns to face his pint, smiling. ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ I ask.

  ‘Why not just a half, I won’t say no, you can for sure. Ah, what a dog, ten euro I put on ’im, went home that night with three hundred in me pocket, I hope you find your boy, they’re a strong fecker, the lurcher, he’ll be doing OK out there with the foxes, don’t you worry.’

  I buy the guy a pint and move on to the next man, who grunts and ignores me.

  On the way home I drop in at Will’s. He is working from home and on the table in front of him is a jam jar full of cat munchies that he has been cycling around with, shaking them and calling Wolfy. The dog has always liked eating his cat Norfolk’s Munchies – could the sound of them rattling in a jar bring him home? We debrief on the Wolfy hunt.

  ‘Did you see Ronnie Wood tweeted your poster?’ says Will. ‘And Clarkson.’

  ‘He started it,’ I say. ‘It’s why we have all these retweets.’

  ‘Nuts,’ says Will.

  ‘The power of celebrity.’

  One of the pressing reasons I have for going back to my desk is to set up this week’s story about a new Asian restaurant in Mayfair, London’s most mind-bogglingly expensive neighbourhood: three-bed flat, six million quid. It’s called Sexy Fish and is huge, flashy and owned, like so many things are now, by an intensively coiffed and tanned billionaire. This one is called Richard Caring.

  Come Thursday, I’ll be sat in Sexy Fish watching the social mob in a feeding frenzy. Half of them, no, most of them, won’t be paying for their dinner, but the people who follow them in will, and through the nose at that. Be it a lost dog or a fancy restaurant, a celebrity endorsement is worth its weight in normal punters.

  Kay Burley, Ricky Gervais, Amanda Holden, Jane Fallon … the celebrity retweets are piling up but Jeremy’s fans are the easiest to spot. A certain type of male tweeter ensures they copy him in on their supportive tweets or their tweets about seeing Wolfy being put in a kebab. Some of them make jokes about Argentinans. They’re so desperate to impress their hero. He’s lording it up in Barbados on a mate’s yacht and Grant from Swindon’s desperately jumping up and down hoping he spots his stupid pub humour on Twitter.

  I pull up the screen and read, ‘@jeremyclarkson @spicerlife Think I’ve found that dog, just been to that new Korean restaurant. I es
pecially enjoyed the meatballs, they’re the dog’s bollocks.’

  I tweet back to the guy, ‘Thanks so much for your support. My dog’s neutered so it can’t have been him.’

  ‘Why do you answer?’ Will is disappointed in me. The basic rule of social media is don’t feed the trolls. ‘It’s a waste of energy.’

  ‘I try to answer all the tweets.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ says Will.

  ‘I can’t help myself. This guy. “You can bet his new owners keep him on a lead, why didn’t you?” I told him the dog was inside and he goes, “Lost your sense of humour as well as your dog, you silly woman.” “The two are intrinsically linked you sad, fat, bald, bad sunglasses-wearing c**t.”’

  ‘Did you say that?’

  ‘Yes. It gives me a thrill.’

  ‘I sent a tweet to Jeremy Corbyn,’ says Will. ‘He’s the MP round here.’

  ‘Me too, and David Cameron. I wonder if they will help the Twitter hunt to #findwolfy? I feel like one of those starfucker parents that pretends their child has a terminal illness just so they can meet their favourite member of Girls Aloud.’

  ‘Yes, that Little Britain sketch had crossed my mind,’ says Will.

  I tell him about my visit to the Twelve Pins. He says, ‘I went in all those Irish pubs on Sunday saying “have you seen a lurcher” and of course, ask a silly question. They all had.’

  ‘Will, I think that’s racist.’

  ‘No it’s not, it’s a matter of fact. Irish people love a lurcher.’

  ‘I had an interesting chat with one of the guys I approached this morning, he said to talk to the Travellers.’

  This entire exchange is full of subjects that would usually prompt a round of piss-taking and silly voices – Jeremy Clarkson, Little Britain, Irish pubs, sending tweets to politicians, it’s all ridiculous really – but the whole thing passes without a single laugh. I say sorry to Will again and he says, ‘Don’t say that. It’s OK, I understand, we have to find him. Wolfy is family.’