Lost Dog

by Kate Spicer

  I spend the afternoon flicking between Twitter and wardens and neighbourhood groups and carry on setting up that week’s dumb story (which was my idea) about the new restaurant with a silly name.

  Charlie asks me what Will’s been doing. ‘What’d he have to say then?’ His lip-curling and sarcastic tone shocks me. ‘Did he bother to even look for the dog yesterday?’

  There have been dark clouds around Will’s name for the last two days, but now Charlie’s anger is no longer just a threat; the clouds have opened and his fury is out in the open.

  ‘Yes, he’s been out but he has three kids, work, of course he has to do other things.’

  ‘They’ve made no effort at all.’

  ‘That’s absolutely not the truth and anyway it’s my fault the dog ran away. It’s straight up my stupid fault.’

  He falls silent, loudly reserving his opinion on the matter. I shut myself in the shit pit and wonder what will happen to us if Wolfy isn’t found, or if he turns up dead. What will happen to my relationship with Will, and Steph, and the kids?

  I put the phone down on mum this evening. She rang to console me but with little in the way of dog lost conversation starters I’d lost my patience when she had offered the conciliatory and sage advice that, ‘You’d better get a female dog next time …’

  ‘Next time?’ I’d growled in response, furious that a next time was even being mooted at this stage. Surely we were still hunting for Wolfy? ‘Mum, your phobia of male dogs, of all males in fact, is not what I need right now. I’m planning on finding my dog.’

  I have hurt her now. Damn, why do I always do that? She’s just trying to maternally soothe me from a long distance. And whatever do you say to someone who has lost their dog? Why am I such a punishing brute to my mum, why do I make her suffer? Why do we torture the people who love us the most and dance around kissing the arses of the mean ones? Why? I hate myself now; I’m miserable and I hate myself. I have a good idea, in fact. I’m beginning to accrue a long list of what people say. By now I have stopped enough people, received enough phone calls and read enough Tweets to know.

  Someone’s got him, taken him in out of kindness, an old person probably … Have you thought of having a barbecue in the middle of the park, that’ll bring him out … The gypsies will have him. No, the Travellers have … Check all the animal rescues. They put them to sleep after seven days … Battersea Dogs Home have him and haven’t bothered to call you, go down there before he’s adopted … What are you doing working – you should be out there looking for your dog … Have you tried all the vets in London? … Your dog has been eaten by Africans … He’ll come back … Is he chipped? … The immigrants have eaten him … He’s in a kebab: a bit stringy, but generally quite delicious … Korean restaurants. Korean restaurants. Korean restaurants…. Don’t worry, he’ll follow his scent home … Your dog is dead, get over it …

  That last advice is sent, so thoughtfully, with a local newspaper story about a dog hanged from an M5 flyover.

  When I wake up on Tuesday morning the theory I am most attached to is that someone has him. How could there have been so many sightings, and then none? If he was dead he would be starting to smell now. A corpse would have been found and its chip read. That means someone has him.

  The alarm on Charlie’s side of the bed is beeping more and more furiously. I sit on the edge of the bed and send a tweet, ‘Got a neighbour with a new dog? Is it like Wolfy? To have not seen him for three days suggests the worst. Or, does someone have him?’

  My relationship with Twitter, like most people’s, is ambivalent. Social media is the ultimate ruler of success: followers, retweets, likes, they’re all solid data by which to measure yourself.

  I could waste whole mornings on social media but I justify this by thinking of it as ‘work’ – I am surfing the zeitgeist, or some other self-deluding bollocks. Occasionally I’d actually use it for work; with leading questions I could coax out case studies for stories. In that respect, I used it to my advantage; in other respects, social media was messing with my mind, rewiring my brain to go back constantly, for stimulation and self-validation.

  Like me, need me, am I good enough, where do I sit on the scale of popularity, let me look at my phone again and again and again.

  Looking for my dog has the same push and pull. My need was feeding other people’s desire to be entertained and participate in a collective activity. The dog has been endorsed by famous people, I am drip-feeding social media with information about Wolfy, about me, about the hunt for him. People have engaged. I have an audience the size of which, in the past, only a national newspaper, telly or radio could have brought me.

  This @JustEmmaPratt lady, we’ve started sending each other direct messages. She’s constantly encouraging when I surrender to bleakness and wailing. She reassures me, ‘I am so sure Wolfy is alive. I am sure.’

  The community support officer, ‘Moonieman’. He is unbelievably good news. I imagine him walking the streets in his heavy copper’s boots and hi-vis tabard, flicking through Twitter, keeping his eyes peeled. We are all so rude about the police but when we need them, damn it’s reassuring to know they are there.

  His most recent tweet: ‘I will be calling on all 200 community wardens tomorrow in the hunt for Wolfy, from Manor House up to Holloway. Wish us luck.’

  ‘You are like an angel,’ I say. ‘I can’t believe how lucky I am to have you there in the north while I am over here useless and west.’

  This @moonieman, he doesn’t feel like ‘an angel’ if I’m honest; this is just the kind of desperate, mealy-mouthed, eager-to-please language I have been using while sat at my desk, feet resting in an empty Wolfy nest and impotent. My pleading and excessive gratitude has the same one pathetic dimension as a beggar who only needs to impress upon one part of you, and that’s the compassionate bit. It’s like I have chopped a limb off, like Eddie Murphy on his trolley pretending he has no legs at the start of Trading Places.

  I have gone from a life lived in three fleshy west London dimensions in Notting Hill to one lived in my head, through avatars on Twitter and in the alien landscape of north London.

  Moonieman feels how all of these disembodied helpers feel to me. Like a character from Trumpton, a children’s stop-motion animation from my early childhood. Moonieman is the friendly local bobby, PC McGarry. ‘Have faith,’ goes his next tweet. ‘Boys in blue were in Newington Green today. It’s only a matter of time.’

  My day is punctuated by strangers who claim to have seen the dog, or who want to advise us. Charlie and I have put our phone numbers on all the posters. Anyone can call. We have no choice but to trust the majority are decent and want to help; patently cruel people crop up sometimes, but far less than I’d expected.

  Twitter gives me hope. Twitter is my lifeline. What Twitter gives me is company and validation. And empathy.

  Charlie and I don’t speak to each other about how we feel. We both know the other is suffering. To discuss it is pointless. I watch him vacillate between three moods. There’s a controlled numb pragmatism: ‘It’s not worth looking, he’s either dead or he’s alive. All this running around won’t get him back.’ There’s despair, which manifests itself as him sat staring at the wall like a blind man. And then there is anger, which he directs mostly at the wall and other inanimate objects, but sometimes at Will and Steph, via me.

  For my article, I am on the phone to the designer who did the interior of Sexy Fish, which with every unfolding detail seems more and more like a Silly Fish. He is talking to me in intricate detail about the Iranian onyx and the backlit marble he used in the lavatories.

  While he talks I post a picture to Instagram of the dog sleeping on a train, typing, ‘Where are you Woofy, I miss you.’

  The designer has moved on; to the importance of commissioning Damian Hirst to create a mural for the wall and statues of mermaids for the bar. There is work by the great architect Frank Gehry too, a friend of Richard’s apparently. I dully ask what all the art
is worth and am fobbed off: ‘no comment’.

  ‘My cat ran away last year but he came back.’

  ‘How long was he gone?’

  ‘Three weeks. I know what you are going through. Stay strong.’

  I call the auctioneer Simon de Pury – perhaps he knows how much the art at Sexy Stupid Fish cost – and ask gauche questions. He is not unkind, but I can hear an appalled note of hauteur creeping into his voice as my ignorance about the art market becomes apparent. ‘I suspect at auction these pieces may make five or six million perhaps. It’s rare for restaurants or hotels to have great art,’ he says, which makes Sexy Fish ‘formidable … timeless … cherished’. After he finishes speaking, there’s a pause as he waits for my sycophantic response, but I am distracted answering a dog tweet.

  ‘I live in Finsbury Park. Out shaking the Bonio box for you.’

  ‘That’s so good to hear. Thank you.’

  Heart emojis, puppy emojis, praying hands. My eyes are locked on the screen, fingers responding as I offer a paltry ‘Mmmn’, ‘very interesting’ and ‘I see’ to de Pury’s sage art-world commentary.

  My breath is so shallow, sometimes it stops altogether as I push on through threads of #findwolfy tweets and on into other people’s feeds.

  I have the maître d’s of Sexy Fish on conference call now, telling me who is in, who is out. Apparently the dining room will be open to all, as long as they look the part: ‘If a lady has a great hat or hair, who cares who she is, she dresses the room,’ says one.

  Will the reality TV types be welcome, I wonder.

  The other chips in, ‘Of course we’ll let some of the reality stars in, who doesn’t love a bit of tragic TV?’

  I respond to a tweet from a lady called Anna Marie: ‘My dog is my most significant relationship! I can’t bear the thought of him being lost and scared. I’d be frantic. I’m in Highgate hunting for you.’

  That’s what I should be doing but I have more questions, can you believe it. ‘And … will the suits and out-of-towners up to take in a West End show or the Christmas lights, those sorts, will they be allowed in?’

  I’ve lived in London for nearly 30 years now. I’d put my last penny (Lord knows I’m often down to it) on Sexy Fish being a suits and a bridge ‘n’ tunneller’s paradise by the end of the year. But I can’t say that, explicitly, because all this hype, it’s a game. Famous people, rich and beautiful people, will come down, they’ll be invited, they’ll want to look at each other. It’s opened just as the winter party season is hotting up and this place too, for a brief season, will be hot. Then not. So they let a grubby but tame journalist sort like me in to gawp at high society, mock them a bit perhaps, but not too much, and open the door to the plain folk, the wannabes and the rubberneckers. Though everyone’s a rubbernecker in my experience; no one can resist ‘seeing who’s in’, as Jeffrey Bernard used to say.

  I make approving noises as a maître d’ says, ‘I love going out of my way to make people from out of town feel like superstars.’ It’s said with the largesse of a man who has just moved a few families of Syrian refugees into his spare bedroom. ‘But,’ he adds gravely, ‘you can’t have a restaurant full of them, maybe just one or two tables.’

  ‘Oh no, can’t have too many of them. Ghastly!’ I agree with hammy vociferousness.

  The aquarium specialist who designed the huge tropical fish tanks in Sexy Fish’s basement private dining room is deflecting my questions about how much they cost. I keep on and, by a process of elimination and reduction, we settle on it probably being somewhere between £100,000 and a quarter of a million quid.

  Some bastard tweets that he found my dog in Manchester. I ask him if he was the tosser that rang me at 3 a.m. to say the dog was on the motorway and I have to grovel respectfully when he tweets back, ‘No. I saw this.’

  Turns out he’s not a bastard. He’s just trying to help. It’s the Facebook page for North Yorkshire Police, with pictures of about 19 dogs that have been recovered from a smallholding in Selby. That’s some distance from Manchester but nonetheless, one of the dogs does look like Wolfy. It’s a shagbag of bones and fur. A Norfolk lurcher just like mine.

  It’s not Wolfy. And I know it. But I want it to be him. I think back to the woman who had her lurcher stolen from outside the post office by the Scrubs. The words ‘Traveller types … Found in Manchester two hours later’ echo round my head.

  I call to Charlie, who comes in from the sitting room and stands over my shoulder looking at the picture. ‘It could be him, is it him?’

  He too is willing the dog in Selby to be our dog. The magical thinking is taking over even his logical mind.

  Someone else sends a dog they saw on the street in Alexandra Palace. ‘Too skinny and gingery, but thanks.’

  The phone rings. It’s a man, English-speaking, excited. ‘I saw your dog.’

  Oh God. ‘Oh God.’ I’m breathless, where, where? ‘Where!?’

  ‘I just saw your poster. He ran into Upper Holloway station around six o’clock on Saturday night.’

  Oh. Saturday. The disappointment is brief. It is overtaken by anxiety. A train station.

  I immediately share the information with Twitter and ring Network Rail and British Transport Police to see if any animal corpses have been found on the line. I find train drivers on Twitter, ask them to share the poster, keep an eye out.

  I can work no longer. I have to head back to Finsbury Park.

  After I’ve crossed Holloway Road at the bottom of Will’s street, I walk up the steps to the station. I backtrack and traverse residential streets until I am lost. I’m on a busy road but I don’t know which one it is. I don’t bother to try reorienting myself. This is how the dog experienced his escape. He has no Google Maps. He can’t stop and ask someone the way.

  Drifting, I tap posters to telegraph poles and lamp-posts. They’re covered in plastic pockets; I turn them upside down and push the pins down tight so the poster won’t fall out, and the damp and the wind can’t get in. How long will they last? Is there even any point doing this? How many posters like this have I walked past in my life? If I even notice them, it’s with barely a glance if it’s a cat, barely a second glance if it’s a dog.

  I walk round residential streets that all look the same in the dark. ‘Woolfy. Wooooolfeeee.’ My voice is thin. My heart’s not in it any more. On I plod. I’m back on a main road now. Which one it is, I don’t know.

  There’s traffic, buses rumble by, but the pavement is oddly quiet even though most of the shops are still open. Turkish supermarket, a banqueting centre on a first floor with bright white tiles and unforgiving neon strip lights in its raised basement, a barber; there are slivers of cheap real estate, little wider than a car, which house minicab offices and phone shops. Somali food, Afghan Grill; outside the Blue Nile cafe a few people smoke hookahs, there’s a supermarket that is also a ‘business centre’. Despite the familiar grey and brown chill of a London autumn, the smell of the traffic, this stretch of road feels exotic. There’s a patch of Uxbridge Road near home that is full of Syrian shops. I like going there to buy buckets of yoghurt, value packs of za’atar and gigantic watermelons.

  Here, away from familiar turf, grindingly miserable, wrung out on adrenaline as I am, the difference, this exoticism, more familiar from travelling than from any London I inhabit, makes me feel insecure.

  A sign advertises a ‘Mall’. I live near Westfield, the 50-acre mega-mall of consumer dreams, where teenagers and shopping fiends roam around like zombies with their mouths half open; gone to ‘look at the shops’.

  This ‘mall’ is a normal-sized shop, a large newsagent’s or a corner shop sort of size, divided into tiny units selling dates, tea, brass teapots, North African shampoos with packaging that looks like the seventies, there’s tins of baby formula and malty Milo powder, knick knacks in cheap gilt. Inside the door on the right is a stall selling a few religious books and pieces of modest Islamic dress. Two women stand there talking to each other, one in brown
, the other in a dreary sludgy blue. Their clean faces are tightly framed into a diamond shape by their hijab. These are not the heavily made-up Gulf Arab women in twinkling abayas you see on Edgware Road.

  There are men at the back of the shop. My instinct is to speak to them first. I notice this, stop myself, turn to the women and say, ‘I’ve lost my dog and I wondered if I could put a poster in the window?’

  What are they. 20, 30? I have no idea. They stare. I don’t even know if they understood me. Then, ‘Ask him,’ says one, pointing to a man sitting working on a calculator.

  Looking at how little people here have, the cheapness of the materials, the sad cost of things, I feel wretched.

  A few doors down from the mall in a cab office a fleshy, jowly guy in a brown cardigan sitting behind the window says ‘No, I cannot put a poster in the window, it is not possible.’ He does not look up or make eye contact.

  I have to go out onto the street and stand with my eyes closed and take several deep slow breaths.

  Smile at people. Move on.

  Next I step into the white stairwell up to the eye-scorchingly bright banqueting suite and speak to a man in a simple shalwar kameez. ‘Hello, good evening, I’m so sorry to disturb you, I’ve lost my dog round here, he’s been gone a few days. I’m so worried about him. Could I put a poster in your window?’

  ‘Yes, yes, we are about to close, do you have something to stick it, put it here, everyone will see it here. And next door, go to the cab office.’ I tell him they said no. ‘I will tell him yes, he is my friend.’ We fix up the poster and walk next door. A couple of drivers are outside now. They ask me about the dog. I tell them I can’t stop crying, that the dog is my friend, that I love him. One of the drivers is sitting out on the street on a tatty, once-grand conference centre-type chair, gold bent metal and wine-coloured plush. His English is simple but he wants to make it clear to me that ‘I know British people love their dogs, that they are like family.’ He nods in the direction of the office. ‘We put a poster here’ – he points to the window – ‘and I take one for my car too.’ He walks me to the booth where the guy had told me no. The guy takes a poster silently and grudgingly tapes it up to his window.