Lost Dog

by Kate Spicer

  I’ve been out for three hours now. I feel like I should stay out longer but my spirits are super-low.

  I head home via Will’s.

  The easy patter I always had with the older children is stuck still. The big kids’ greetings are muted and remote. Arty stays the same and runs me through a jumble of childish interests, ‘Katie. Norfolk the cat’s friend is naughty and he stole Norfy’s food Katie.’

  ‘No! What a naughty cat. He should go to cat prison.’

  ‘Cats don’t go to prison, don’t be silly Katie.’

  ‘Yes I am silly.’ I go in for a hug and he hangs on to me like a little monkey for a while. I take the affection greedily, like a vampire.

  I sling him round on my hip and carry him through the house towards the kitchen. He looks serious and says, ‘Woofy he go “Aoooo, aoooo, aoooo.”’

  I stop. Say that again Arty?

  The small person imitates a howling dog. It’s a quiet howl, a little thin one. His baby lips pucker as he goes aaaaahooooh.

  I know it, exactly, that howl. He’s got it spot on. The smallest member of the household has just added a detail the others had failed to. ‘Thanks Arty, clever boy.’ I kiss his soft cheeks, mmnwahmmnwahmmmwha. ‘It’s helpful for Aunty Kate to know that. Thank you. You’re a clever boy.’

  ‘IsssOKKatie.’ He wraps his little arms around me very briefly and for a second rests his head on my shoulder, before wriggling away and stomping off to find Lego Batman.

  That howl is an enquiry. Where are you? I miss you. I’m here. Where are you? Can you hear me? Where are you? It’s pining and plaintive.

  Have I created this howling needy monster by treating Wolfy like a companion animal and taking him everywhere?

  When I was a kid I had a comfort blanket called Cluggy. My stepmother took it and threw it away when I was seven because it was time for me to grow up and not be a baby. Depending on your parenting style, you will either think that throwing Cluggy in the bin was unnecessarily cruel or that it was a necessary lesson in life.

  The question 40 years later was, had I turned Wolfy into a giant living breathing Cluggy? Had I, in my own dependency, created a dependency in Wolfy that made him run away?

  Wolfy and I were tightly bonded. We’d opened the sluice gates in each other’s bodies and, like a Tetley teabag, let t’oxytocin flood out. We were joined at the hip, fairly literally given his ear fitted very neatly under the top of my femur. I knew people were saying things about my attachment to him. I liked life so much more that I didn’t give a toss if there were snide comments here and there and Charlie didn’t mind. All was well with him.

  Both parents on both sides were muttering about my attachment to Wolfy, I knew that. When Mum spoke to her friends about me and the dog she called him, patronisingly, Dear Wolfy. My stepmother had acquiesced after one too many visits where the dog howled and cried in the kitchen and now tolerated the intolerable: dogs upstairs. She liked to remind me that other people may be less understanding. I once overheard my stepfather talking to some fellow baby boomer who was choking in horror as Wolfy hopped up on Mum’s sofa. First came the explanatory and, again, patronising, ‘Ah, meet Wolfy. Very precious.’ Then loudly to the dog, patting him: ‘We’re a special case, aren’t we Wolfy.’ Then, sotto voce, with a nod and a wink in my direction, he said, ‘First child, you see.’

  I shouted from the next room, ‘I can hear you, by the way.’ I did not give birth to a dog.

  One of my favourites, that. I used to do it when I was a teenager. Dad was living in South Africa and Tom and I were back living with my mum, who, freshly out of a crap second marriage, had moved in with my grandmother.

  We lived miles from any of my school friends, up on a hill on the edge of Dartmoor. We lived there together, one house, three women, three generations, one Dalmatian, one Labrador, two hamsters.

  If I caught Mum and Granny talking about me, I’d listen, breath suspended, still, and wait until the perfect moment to announce they had an audience.

  ‘I don’t like that hippy boy she seems very impressed by. He came the other day and didn’t even say hello. And the reek of patchouli is unbearable.’

  ‘Oh that’s what it is. Is she smoking, or is that the boy? I don’t think she smokes, no, but I see she’s had another little go at dying her hair.’

  ‘I can hear you, you know.’

  I’d leg it then, laughing – I loved the way they stopped and went deadly silent, as if by being silent I’d unhear their gossiping.

  There were some fights in that house. I remember going into Granny’s sitting room after a particularly furious scrap with Mum – it had ended with her chasing me shrieking, ‘You little madam.’ This led to more hilarity on my part but eventually it turned to tears. Tears are the real full stop to any conflict.

  Granny was doing the Times crossword, and I leapt on the sofa beside her, hoping to get the key third party on my side and hence win a majority. Granny listened. ‘We are three women. Three difficult women. It’s not going to be easy living together. You need to be grown up about it.’

  My response was shock. I had never considered I would grow up to be a woman. I wasn’t sure I fancied that. Couldn’t I just stay a girl?

  ‘I don’t want to be a woman.’

  Steph passes me, coming home from work, as I go out on my way back to Notting Hill. ‘Oh, hi Kate,’ she says, in a strange distracted way that I can’t read but which makes me feel uncomfortable. She goes on, wearily, ‘Any news?’

  Anxiety strikes! Is she angry with me? It could be anything; she has a serious job, she deals with office politics and board-level braggarts and egos, she’s successful in a way I am not. Probably she’s had a hard day, is worried about one of her kids … there might be many reasons for her voice to come out that way, but my instinct, always, is to assume some sort of blame and isolate myself mentally. It’s just you. Rely on no one. Hide your feelings. That’s how I felt when my mum wasn’t around, and that’s how I feel now.

  I lock away my anxiety about what Steph is thinking, I lock away what I feel for dear little Bay, who looks at me with new frightened and remote eyes; and for Sam, whose eyes flicker nervously away when I come into the house. I lock away what I feel for Wolfy, who is gone.

  I say brightly, ‘So sorry about all this, it must really be a pain but we’ll find him, he’ll come back. We will be laughing about this by Christmas.’

  She responds, kindly, but still that tone of weariness. What is it?

  I shrink further.

  As I shut the front door in Tufnell Park I look at the bowl of water left out for the dog on Will’s front doorstep in the hopeless hope that he might return there. It has bits of black crud in it, and a small brown leaf, floating. I’ve put a dirty T-shirt of mine there too, in the equally hopeless hope that I am the Bisto and Wolfy is the kid. In his Buddhist realm of smells perhaps his nose will find his way back here.

  I get the bus back to Notting Hill from my brother’s because I don’t want to be anywhere. Something about the glacial speed at which London buses travel through the city mirrors the treacle pace of every minute that Wolfy is gone. These last four days have felt like weeks.

  A dog can survive nine days without food, three without water. There have been no real confirmed sightings since Saturday evening and we’ve had barely any rain for weeks. Where is Wolfy finding water? Even after a shortish walk, forty minutes, even in the winter, he’d head in the direction of the nearest brown puddle for a long delicious noisy lap. Once, dying for a poo, I’d broken into the Linford Christie Stadium at 7 a.m. and wildly run this way and that trying to find a loo. Finally sat, in mighty relief, I’d called out to Woof to ensure he’d not lost me. The answer came in a series of echoey enthusiastic schlurps as he made free with the facilities too; for him this was not just a posh Portaloo, it was a large, deliciously smelly porcelain dog bowl. That had made me laugh out loud. I feel a squeeze of remembered joy in my heart.

  Staring out the bus win
dow as it rumbles past Camden Market I consider how life will be if Wolfy doesn’t return. There will be a period of real grief that no one will really understand or care about because he is just a dog. The joy will drain out of life. And work. How will I work? My bank account is nearly empty. I look at my phone, aimlessly checking my emails for the first time in hours. A press release from some new app which is giving away 888 limited-edition pink custard buns to celebrate their launch. Am I really reading this shit?

  I want my dog back.

  At home I relay the howling business that Arty did for me to Charlie. Before I’ve finished speaking I can see where his mood is headed. He starts to rail against my brother again. I beg, ‘Stop it, that’s my brother you’re talking about. Stop. Stop! I can’t listen.’ The silence vibrates with anger.

  ‘Well one thing’s for certain,’ he says, ‘If the dog doesn’t come back I won’t be going there for Christmas, I can tell you.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  Wednesday, and I trudge round the Scrubs with Castor, swiping between every form of social media as I go. Of course he rolls in fox shit.

  When I walked Wolfy I’d often chuck my phone under some empty crisp packets in the car and let our time together be unadulterated by external distractions. I don’t do that now. What if someone calls?

  Last night I created a dedicated Find Wolfy Facebook page and paid to boost its first post, which means it will pop up on the side of several hundred thousand Londoners’ Facebook pages. It costs me about £30 for a day.

  ‘This is Wolfy. He is six years old. If you see him, dead or alive, or know someone who has him, please contact me here. There is a substantial reward for his return. No questions asked. I just want my canine brother back.’

  I’ve posted it on Dragon Driving too, a sort of eBay for gypsy and Traveller communities: horses, traps, gigs, tack, caravans, dogs, donkeys – and lurchers. One of my new allies on Twitter suggested it. The woman who took down my ad could not have been more helpful and understanding, suggesting the wording that would cause the least offence and invite the most interest. ‘Good luck love,’ she says. ‘I know how much the dogs mean to us all. I hope you find him.’

  Talk of gypsies, Travellers and ‘pikeys’ wasn’t going away. The tone of these varied. From a respectable consideration: ‘Might have found his way to a Traveller site, they love their lurchers’ to something far darker: ‘He’ll be with the gypsies now if he’s any cop, swinging from a bridge if he’s not.’

  I responded to a guy ranting on about pikeys killing dogs and was told I was a ‘virtue-signalling PC wet’ and ‘a fucking bunny hugger’ who needed to ‘open your eyes’. In his bio, a quote from Enoch Powell.

  One of my #findwolfy ladies on Facebook calls me this morning. It’s been five days now. She tells me what she has been doing: ‘We’ve postered all around Queen’s Wood and Highgate now. Have you been up there?’ I say I haven’t. ‘Now Parkland Walk, that’s going to be very attractive to a dog, have you been up there?’ No, I say, but Charlie has it on his places to visit. ‘We’ve got to make him too hot to handle.’ She’s urgent, like a policewoman in a TV show. I want to say, ‘Yes Sarge.’

  I mention that people keep talking about gypsies and Travellers and I don’t know how seriously to take all this talk. ‘Well,’ she says, conspiratorial, knowing, ‘you’ve got to consider that. The way they treat their animals, it’s shocking. And they do steal dogs. They’re terrible.’

  ‘But Wolfy’s not a hunter or a killer. He doesn’t have his balls. What’s he useful for?’

  I’ve got the woman on headphones and am walking round the flat, picking things up, pairing socks, Wolfy’s bed is back by our bed, minus its blanket, which is among the items piled outside Will’s for their smell. Castor slept on it last night. I think of the sound Wolf makes as he’s shifting in his bed, the contented puffs and exhalations of breath as he settles in for the night.

  ‘Oh they don’t care,’ the emphasis of immense difference on ‘they’. ‘They find a use for them, or they use them as bait.’

  I am lugging the Hoover back into the crawl space under the eaves where it lives. ‘Bait?’

  ‘With the dogfighting. Oh it’s terrible, ahh they’re terrors, terrible people, they don’t care about their animals, keep them in terrible conditions. Terrible.’

  My victim side is willing a suitably terrible image of my savaged dog’s corpse into my mind’s eye. Another side of me is battling that urge, and feels thrillingly certain of something. I’ve never spoken to this woman before in my life and she seems very kind and pleasant but what she’s saying is waking me up.

  I back out of the crawl space. It’s impossible to pull yourself metaphorically up to full height when you aren’t able to physically stand up. Unusually, carefully calm, hyperaware that she is an ally in the #findwolfy hunt, I contradict her. ‘I don’t think that they are inherently evil. These are marginalised people who operate outside mainstream society, of course it’s a more grey economy.’ I’m quite impressed by my use of words like ‘marginalised’ and ‘grey economy’. Where has this come from? ‘I really don’t agree with what you are saying.’

  This isn’t a forced form of righteousness. If I thought it’d get my dog back I’d say or do pretty much anything short of murder (and even that would be up for discussion). What’s happening here? Am I a virtue-signalling wet? A gullible bunny hugger? A Blairite liberal multicultural capitalist with a bad dose of underdogism? Or am I just right?

  She’s immediately rowing back, going, ‘I’m sure you’re right, yes, they aren’t all bad. Perhaps it’s a few bad apples.’

  A few bad apples. Jesus. She ought to meet some of the bad apples in the aristocracy or the abattoir business, or politics or the priesthood. I don’t want to listen to this crap. Next thing you know she’ll be telling me all gay people have AIDs and never to touch one.

  There seemed to be a whole community among the #findwolfy tribe determined that the dog had fallen into gypsy hands, Traveller hands, ‘pikey’ hands and was being used as bait for dogfights. Facebook provided me with a photograph of a dog that looked remarkably like my boy, stitched back together with the vet’s needle into a patchwork approximation of the lurcher it had once been. Bait. He’ll be used as bait in dogfights.

  Like someone just diagnosed with cancer, I turned to the internet with these ideas and was sucked into forums explicitly detailing horrors I didn’t need to imagine. I was unable to tear my eyes away from the savage imagery.

  Gypos, Travellers, pikeys, the words came up again and again. ‘My friend’s very friendly lurcher ran over to play with their dog and was bundled into the van and gone. She got him back about two weeks later, he was on a Traveller site.’

  ‘Same happened to me. We never seen her again. More than anything I just hope she hasn’t met a bad ending, she is such a wonderful trusting dog and I love her to bits. I can’t tell you the worst of my fears. I’m completely heartbroken.’

  ‘Just last week a 16yo terrier got out of its garden in Newport, he nipped under a chain-link fence into some industrial units where the usual suspects collect scrap there. He was later found dead in a ditch with all his feet taped together.’

  ‘Bait animals are used to test a dog’s fighting instinct and are mauled or killed in the process. A dog used as bait will have his snout taped shut.’

  I needed to get offline.

  I have a friend called Rob whose dad was ‘born in a caravan’ to a mother from an old Romany family and a father who was a ‘showman’ and described himself as a Traveller. I ring him. ‘Rob, I’ve lost my lurcher. Can I talk to your dad?’

  ‘Yeah, hard not to notice that, your ad pops up on my Facebook. How’s my dad gonna help?’

  ‘A lot of people are saying the gypsies have got him, or the Travellers or the pikeys. I don’t know what to do. Where to turn. I just want a dose of reality.’

  ‘Yeah, I can see why you’d not want to walk straight into a camp asking that. It
’s not going to look good. You can ask him anything but don’t use the word pikey, it’s as bad as the N-word.’

  Rob’s dad is happy to talk: ‘In my mum’s day they’d put canvas round the bottom of the old high wagons and in the summer all the kids would sleep down there with the dogs. Gypsies love their dogs, they’re well fed, well looked after. My grandfather used to trade in horses and lurchers, greyhound/collie they were.’

  I say I’m thinking of going to visit some Travellers’ sites and he doesn’t think going to a camp will do any harm. ‘If a gypsy purloined your dog they’d want it for hunting. I think the Travellers treat their dogs well too, though I don’t like the coursing they do, ripping the hare to pieces. I used to go walking across the fields for hours with my grandfather and his dog, they train the dogs to make a clean kill, hunt for the pot.’

  ‘What about all this talk of animals becoming bait?’ I ask.

  ‘What do you mean, “bait”?’ he says.

  ‘That they’re using him as bait to test a fighting dog’s aggression.’

  ‘There’s no reason to use a dog for bait. They just tease and tease the fighting dogs until they’re bad-tempered. I’ve spent a lot of my life not telling people I’m from travelling people. Before I say anything I always weigh it up and see how prejudiced people are first. There’s a percentage of bad in any community. Is that a reason to judge them all? Are you a reporter? Rob tells me that you are.’

  I think of the Sexy Fish story. ‘Kind of.’

  ‘To brand a whole section of the community by the actions of its worst, it’s just wrong. Like what some of your kind did at Hillsborough.’

  With no recent sightings of Wolfy, and in this information vacuum, the magical thinking is strong. I am convinced the dog is with the Travellers.