by Kate Spicer
‘It’s only six days,’ I whimper in a flash of fear as I realise the eternity of sadness that could lie ahead.
She talks straight over me. Businesslike. ‘I told this lady that he was living with people in Scotland, that the garden looked over a big field where he went every day to run and to play. I told her she had to let up looking for him and accept he was happy in his new home. Let him go.’
I want to tell Charlie about Anna Twinney. Anna isn’t like a psychic sister; she’s an ex-copper and gives huge conferences on what she does. OK, so what she does may well, ostensibly, be the same, but the package is way less woo-woo.
My ace card is Maya. Anna comes recommended not by Kim Kardashian but by my shy and extraordinary cousin. She was Monty Roberts’s right-hand woman for years, the guy who invented a system of animal communication known as horse whispering. This in turn was bastardised into bestselling romantic schmaltz in a novel called The Horse Whisperer and then a Hollywood movie with Robert Redford.
She is a brilliant rider and a woman so tethered to reality I can feel hyper and silly in her presence. I know Charlie respects her. Maya is the real deal countrywoman. She has worked with horses all her life; she loves them but she has also shot them, lots of them over the years, because that, generally, is how old, sick and insane horses meet their end, not lying on a giant bed eating sugar lumps and carrots. (I know a farmer, too, who kills his own dogs. Quietly and with no fuss. Bang. They’re gone. It’s over.)
Maya told me once that if horses are in pain and suffering you don’t wait for the vet to come. She lives on a ranch with thousands of cattle and hundreds of horses that all roam free over hundreds of thousands of acres. She is 15 miles from the nearest tarmac road. When they lose horses she calls Anna to try to work out where they are. When she couldn’t work with a horse as a horse whisperer, she would use Anna to go next level in the human–equine communiqué.
Charlie has a furious dislike of psychics and thinks that even if the magic is real, they can cause untold damage. He has his reasons for this; they are sad and personal and not for me to share. I totally understand his phobia.
But Maya is not a brainless bunny hugger, and now it is hell night – Guy Fawkes Night. Fun for all the family, except the dog. The fireworks will start this evening and carry on right through to the big formal displays at the weekend. They are an immense added worry in an immensely worrying situation. Right now, I will do anything to get him back, including psychics.
Around lunchtime, Anna gets back to me. ‘Hi Kate, send pictures of the dog. I will try to find time to talk to you tonight or tomorrow.’
She is six hours behind. Her tonight could mean three in the morning here. I have to go to Sexy Fish tonight to get lots of juicy colour for my piece, which needs to be in by tomorrow. I pray that it is soon; as every informationless minute slips by I’m banking on Anna more and more.
I rush down to the shit pit and sit naked at my desk rifling through my files of photos. It hurts more acutely to look at him than just to think of him. I send them to Anna.
I fumble around the kitchen trying to think about feeding myself. Charlie appears. ‘It’s impossible in the office, listening to people’s petty moaning is driving me insane when I just want to find Woofs. I’m going to work from home this afternoon.’ He has an odd new energy. ‘I’m going to get coffee,’ he says. ‘Want one?’
‘No, no coffee.’ I hold up my hand. I haven’t had a coffee since Saturday morning, when I picked one up with Wolfy and Castor on my way over to Will’s. Now, when I drive up Blenheim Crescent it’s with only the left eye open, so the stretch of Portobello where our six legs spent so much time together caffeinating, begging for biccies and vegetable shopping isn’t visible. If I don’t see the visual triggers, the memories won’t flood back so painful and fresh. Sludgy, all-pervading, stale misery is the best I can hope for in this dog-lost world. It’s possible I will never go into Coffee Plant ever again. It’s not only that it is ‘our’ place, it’s the practicalities. The staff will ask me, ‘Where’s Wolfy?’ and I will have to tell them he’s gone.
It’s been the same with Rita and Janice. I’ve ducked, avoided and ignored them as I speed down the alley. Can’t face it. Can’t face the explanations.
‘I’m fine with tea.’ I pour hot water over a bag of Assam and let it stand until it is black. When I add the milk, it’s a tooth-staining shade of brick.
Charlie’s standing scrolling through his phone and reads out a message from one of the DogLost ladies: ‘If he is happy at home, he should have come back by now.’ Another one of those theories complete strangers have. ‘Grrrrrr. “If he is happy at home” – what the fuck! She’s implying he might have legged it because we don’t care for him properly.
‘Don’t take it on board. Take the good, ditch the bad. If we listened to everyone we’d spend our lives hunting for him in kebab shops.’ Instead we talk about our plans. I say: ‘Back to Finsbury I suppose, back to Will’s.’
I relay the opinions and movements on Twitter, he deals with more tangible authorities and rescue centres. In between, we both work. Sometimes I cry. He doesn’t.
‘I’m going to Battersea Dogs and I’m going to do that Parkland Walk. It’s the old railway line between Ally Pally and Finsbury Park that’s been turned into a nature reserve. Lots of people have suggested it,’ he says, ‘as a place a dog might go.’
Fiddling about on the laptop, I see that Parkland Walk starts on Florence Road. ‘He was seen there. He was seen on Florence Road.’ Briefly I am animated, a new possible world appears. ‘And, and …’ I scroll backwards through my tweets – ‘And someone saw a dog a bit like Wolfy in Alexandra Palace, remember, the gingery one that wasn’t him. Well, perhaps it was him, let me dig it out. He could have gone into Parkland Walk and come out the other end.’
‘It wasn’t him, Kate. Don’t bother. We know what our dog looks like.’
With no sightings of him later than Sunday, we’ve been drifting further into the realms of the hypothetical. Or in my case, the metaphysical.
Jayne. This is information of sorts. I need to share it. I don’t want to keep secrets.
He rolls his eyeballs in an amused sort of way. ‘Go on.’
‘I spoke to a psychic this morning. She says he’s with a man with a bad leg.’
He starts laughing. It’s Charlie’s special hollow, mocking laughter. No one’s gripping their sides with mirth here. ‘Man with a bad leg. God help us. Didn’t a Dutch clairvoyant predict that the Yorkshire Ripper was a 27-year-old washing-machine mechanic living in Aberdeen, a profile that did not fit Peter Sutcliffe in any way? Madeleine McCann is alive and well, apparently, and studying in Minnesota. I hope you didn’t pay for that.’
Definitely do not mention Anna to Charlie now, I think to myself. ‘No, I didn’t, I blagged it. I’m low on cash actually. Can you lend me some money?’
‘It’s ridiculous. This is costing us a lot of money. I notice you’ve got another parking ticket. It all adds up.’
‘Can we put a price on the dog’s life?’
‘Look, Kate. I feel as bad as you but I can’t help thinking it’s pointless to look any more. To hunt on constantly is a kind of madness. We aren’t going to turn a corner one day holding a cooked chicken or shaking a jar of Woof nuts or during a seance with Doris Stokes and see him there waiting for us with a waggy tail. He’s gone. He may well turn up; he may not.’
His tone is not uncaring, it is defeated, it is pragmatic and it is as close to tears as it gets with Charlie. The thing is, I don’t disagree with him. In solid, grounded moments, I know that hunting all over London is irrational. Just an area of one street squared would hold countless spots a dog could slink off to and hide, never mind a whole postcode, or borough.
‘But to do nothing is an impossible ask; and there’s people on there …’ I say, dipping my head towards the laptop. I have it open on Twitter, typing my latest post about Charlie’s plans to check Parkland Walk, ‘… wh
o don’t think we are doing enough.’
‘Fuck them. This isn’t about them. We don’t even know who they are. It’s about you, me and Wolfy. And we’re exhausting ourselves running across London like this. I love Wolfy as much as you do, but he’s either going to turn up …’ he pauses, ‘or he isn’t. He’s an animal, Kate, not a child; they live and die by different laws. We have to accept he may well be gone for good. He may be alive, he may be dead, we may well never know.’
His sadness is turning to anger. If Wolfy was here he’d back out the back door and sit in the garden until it was all over. I don’t push it. I know what is happening. Charlie is living with his own sadness and the way he feels sadness is anger.
A sane, dependable part of me stands back watching how obsessively the magical-thinking me is checking emails, anxious to make contact with Anna. Thoughts of finding him mooching about with gypsies and Travellers have gone from my mind. It’s all about the psychics now.
Mum lends me the money to pay Anna; she is relieved, I think, to be able to do something to help. I make a mental note not to punish her for my pain, like a big baby. She does not deserve it. I promise to pay it back.
I am on the phone to her when a weird mobile number interrupts the call. Another hoax, another dog that looks like Wolfy seen by the army of dog walkers co-opted into our cause.
‘Gotta go, Mum.’ I switch the calls immediately and offer an urgent ‘Hello’ to whoever is there. ‘I’ve just seen your dog in Waterlow Park,’ they say. ‘Call the park ranger now, he’s there. He was looking at me from the entrance, the gate down the bottom by Swain’s Lane. Do you know it?’
Charlie has taken the car to do Parkland. I get up and run into the street, looning about left and right, looking for a taxi, too impatient to wait for an Uber. One of my neighbours comes out to ask what’s wrong. ‘My dog. Dog. Must find. Hampstead. Now.’
The neighbour does nothing, is thinking, I suspect, Avoid, Avoid.
I calm myself. Stop, breathe, order an Uber. Now, how do I contact the warden, which borough is it … I ring the town hall, they don’t want to give me a number, I call again, same story. Third time, they do.
I ring the number they give me and the voice at the end of the line tells me I need to ring another number if I want to talk to the warden. My heart rate is cranking up and up again. I want to scream when the warden doesn’t pick up. Then the warden does pick up. The warden isn’t on site. The warden gives me a mobile number of someone who might be able to help. Tick tock. I speak to someone on site. ‘OK, we will alert everyone to look out for your dog’. By now I’m well on my way.
The approach to Waterlow Park on its Swain’s Lane side tracks the eastern wall of Highgate Cemetery. Overgrown, broken down, it is a great place for a dog to hide: sheltered, leafy, hard for man to get in but plenty of holes in the old masonry for a dog to press himself flat and wriggle through.
Wolfy was seen at the entrance to the park.
I had never heard of Waterlow Park before. Its ornate gates look gloomy and Gothic in the Great British mizzle that envelops me as it floats down slow and moist from the thick grey sky above. The remnants of the stately garden it once was are evident and the smell of box and yew is painfully reminiscent of happy childhood days at my grandmother’s house. The gates are only half open. I walk through the park, wondering what should I do. On Twitter, someone said sit down with a roast chicken and wait for him to come to you.
I don’t have a roast chicken. All I have to lure him is my voice. ‘Wolfy!’ I whistle, call, ‘Woooooolfy.’ As people pass, I give them a flyer and I ask, ‘Have you seen a dog?’
Inside the park two gardeners in blue overalls are digging over a large raised bed pegged off behind some hi-vis netting. I assume they have been briefed about the missing dog and launch straight in with my questions and logistical issues.
Of course, they have not been briefed about any lost dog. They look at me, blank. ‘You what?’ one says. The other carries on digging, uninterested. ‘Lost your dog; have you? Sorry about that.’
‘Did you see him?’
‘No.’ He’s not interested either.
‘If you see him …’
‘Yes,’ he says. It’s not a promise, it’s just a fob-off.
I call the person who originally rang me. What did he look like, describe him. ‘Medium-sized, pale brown, nervy but not running …’
Is it him?
After I have walked around for an hour or so, the enormity and foolishness involved in the task of looking for him overwhelms the hope that I might find him. I head back to where ‘he’ was last seen. The gardeners have gone now.
My phone dies. I crunch through thick piles of brown leaves, while peering through the black railings into the cemetery, calling until I arrive back near the exit where the railings are obscured by a yew hedge. I’m engulfed by a wave of nausea-like sadness. I need to escape public view. I’m like Wolfy when he wants a shit and scurries into the bushes to void his bowels hidden and safe from harm. Only, it’s my tear ducts I want to void. I wedge myself between the hedge and the railings and stand, poker-straight; like Lot’s wife I’m turned to salt and salty water.
The tears go on. How many locations have I done this in now? It’s embarrassing. An angel, draped in stone cloth, is bent in eternal supplication over the grave of a person long dead. I start to sing in a thin, pathetic, faltering voice to the Scooby Doo theme tune, ‘Woofy Woofy Woo, where are you?’
I sing it over and over until the tears have dried up and I’ve wiped all the snot on my sleeve.
Walking out of the park, I see two women and offer them a flyer. They have knapsacks and sensible walking shoes on, and a handful of homemade Lost Dog posters.
‘We’re here for the hunt. Are you the owner? We read your tweet.’
‘Wow. Thank you.’
‘There’s a lot of us out here you know. Everyone’s looking.’
This is humbling. It spurs me on.
I walk around from the cemetery further down Swain’s Lane, where there’s a gated community of large suburban-looking mock-Tudor semis and ye olde blocks of half-timbered flats called the Holly Lodge Estate. I wander in here, for want of anywhere else to look, and walk up and down its private, quiet roads taping posters up on residents’ noticeboards. Leaving via the Parliament Hill exit at the top of Highgate Road, where Will and Steph walked Castor and Wolfy on Saturday, I approach a middle-aged woman.
Holding one of my remaining crumpled flyers, she tells me I have her sympathies. Her dog died last year. ‘I couldn’t get out of bed for a week, it was worse than when my mother died.’
We talk for a while longer, marvelling at the hold these animals have on human hearts. I thank her, and move on.
There’s an old spit, sawdust and sausage rolls real-ale pub not far from here called the Southampton Arms. I feel lonely; it’s a thin, cold feeling, not plump with the satisfaction and poignancy of the aloneness I have relished with the dog. For a moment, I consider going there to sit in a dark corner and get hammered. I want to escape. I want medicine.
Who can I call? Friend? Family? Charlie? I text Emma Pratt. ‘Could I ask you a question?’
‘Of course.’ The phone is answered by a pleasant-sounding lady, no discernible accent to distinguish her class, her ethnicity, her colour, her haircut or her taste in shoes. She is just disembodied female human kindness.
She asks how I am. ‘My heart is breaking. I miss him. I was crying the other night and my boyfriend told me to pull myself together. I don’t even know if my sister-in-law is talking to me, I feel like I’ve fucked up their lives. I feel like this whole thing is just a massive inconvenience for other people.’
‘Don’t think that. I’m sure it’s a difficult time for everyone. Maybe your sister-in-law feels bad that the dog ran away from their house.’
‘Maybe, maybe.’ The old stew of mistrust and cynicism is churning. Through all my whining and crying, a voice in the back of my head has bee
n constantly going, Would you do all this for a complete stranger?
‘Why are you helping me, Emma?’
‘Something about that picture of him looking so nice in such a beautiful place and then the desperation in your original post, I think. I just couldn’t not help. I had given up going on these hunts because it’s so devastating when they have an unhappy ending but—’ She stops herself, realising what she’s just said.
I clock this. Not going to let a worst-case scenario slide like that. ‘What do you mean, unhappy?’
Emma doesn’t react. ‘Another reason was, I was sure he’s alive. He’s out there. We just have to keep looking. Don’t give up on him.’
We talk a bit more. She tells me she has been in touch with Brett, the tweeter I call the midnight jogger. We’ve exchanged some direct messages on Twitter. Brett has esoteric exercise habits and this is why, he explains, he is my most ace ally in the hunt. His bio says he is an ultra-endurance athlete and inventor. ‘I exercise at night, the roads are clear for cycling and running, the pollution is low. It’s like I own the streets. The wildlife I see. If he’s out there, you’ll find him at night.’
The other night he stopped a man on the street in Archway and asked if he could take a picture of his Wolfy-esque lurcher, just in case it was stolen. The man was very reasonable; turned to him and said, ‘It is a new dog. My wife just died, you see. The dog is keeping me alive at the moment but sure, go ahead …’
Charlie has spoken with Brett on the phone. ‘Odd chap. Seems pretty bright, though.’ I’m too wretched to think about Brett’s eccentricities much; I accept them gratefully for the help they can give us. Not even Emma would set out to look for the dog at 3 a.m.
Brett recently sent me an encouraging article from a Yorkshire newspaper about a lurcher surviving in the wild with foxes for over a year. Based on a theory about Wolfy keeping the same hours as urban foxes, his plan is a crazy one: riding his bike round prime find-Wolfy turf at night with raw meat strapped to his mudguard.
