Lost Dog

by Kate Spicer

  ‘Near a busy place, with a lot of dark-skinned people. He is hidden away, he is avoiding people even though there are so many around. She says he peeps out from his hiding places. He won’t make himself known. He’s afraid. He isn’t with someone. It’s Harvist, it’s the estate from last night. I’m going back.’

  ‘Why have you called up these cranks and spirit-dealing goons? It’s like drugs, Kate, just escapism from reality, a way of twisting the world to the shape you want it to be.’

  Repeating back to Charlie the experience with Anna has been immediately polarising. ‘This shit is unhelpful. And I am not going back to that fucking estate, we don’t belong there. It’s dangerous. Knocking on that man’s door last night could have got us hurt. We were lucky it didn’t turn into a fight. He was angry. And big. I was a bit scared. He wouldn’t have thumped you, it’d have been me or Will that got it.’

  He looks at me, then stands up and walks to the kitchen. It’s not far, a couple of cat swings, but it’s designed to make a point. As he’s walking away from me, he says, ‘You are starting to scare me.’

  Sadness ripples across the surface of his frustration with me. I can feel it. Gently, I say, ‘Sorry, sorry I opened this Pandora’s box, but I’m desperate, I want him back. Every minute he isn’t home I want to be out there, looking.’

  ‘I believe it more than ever now. He’ll either turn up somewhere, or someone’s got him, or he’s dead.’

  I have no rational reason to disagree with him, but a few irrational ones. ‘It’s just what Anna said: “he doesn’t understand why you haven’t come for him yet”.’

  He clutches his head as he crouches down by the wine rack, rummaging for a bottle that isn’t port or crème de menthe. ‘He’s a dog, he can’t fucking talk.’

  ‘But Ray Winstone …’ I try to lighten the mood.

  ‘I’m having a big drink and I am driving nowhere. I’m knackered. If you want to drive off on a fruitless hunt for a needle in a haystack, you knock yourself out trudging around miserable estates all night. I’ve had enough of this madness.’

  Picking up the car keys and my bag, I suck any dark emotion deep inside and paper the cracks with humour: ‘I’m going then. Byeeee!’

  ‘Bye,’ he says flatly as he cracks the cap on some screw-top Shiraz I bought for chucking in a stew.

  I filed the Sexy Fish piece at four and now I can breathe into the Wolfy hunt fully. There are no more pressing deadlines now for a few days. Emma and I talk on the phone while I drive from Notting Hill to the Emirates Stadium. She has been at the Harvist Estate tonight putting up posters with her kids. Her son is excited to be hunting for a dog, while her husband is there because he doesn’t want her wandering alone with their son. ‘Emma,’ I ask her, like I do every day now, ‘do you think Wolfy is alive?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  I tell her about Anna. ‘Oh I see. That’s interesting.’ The inflection in her voice says she has no comprehension of this witchy business.

  Harvist is deserted, lights on at the windows but no one in the streets. The corner-shop guy was true to his word. There is a lost dog poster in the chemist. In Domino’s Pizza, they still say no. Had to ask, didn’t I. I wander over the road to another estate by a big lumpy building called the Sobell Leisure Centre. This estate is low-rise and dark, with corners of the blackest black. I walk around calling and calling. I imagine him trotting round the corner, him just being there. I imagine him sitting in the dark, not emerging.

  My sense of longing is so desperate that I press my body flush up against a wall, feeling the cold rough brick pressing into my skin. Has the dog really been here in the arsehole of Finsbury Park, or is he curled up and safe in the leaves on the graves at Highgate? Where are you? Where are you?

  Being alone feels unbearable. I call my friend Kim, who comes to meet me. Together we walk and call the dog’s name in the shadow of Arsenal.

  After watching me talk for ten minutes to a stinking street drunk, the weathered, dirt-brown kind who looks like they’ve been out here for years, she steers me away and into a pub.

  We sit opposite each other with big glasses of thick and fruity pub red and she says, ‘Are you all right, Katie?’

  ‘No, Kimmy, I can’t bear it, I miss him so much.’

  ‘That’s understandable, babes. You’ve been having a love affair with Wolfy.’

  I recoil at this. ‘Don’t say that. It sounds too close to bestiality.’

  ‘Of course I’m not saying you’re shagging your dog, but I think we’ve both had enough love affairs to know what one feels like.’

  ‘Yes.’ I puff out a little laugh. Discussing the frustrating and unsatisfying dynamics of pairing with the male human is a constant for us. It’s how we met each other. Fifteen years ago, after circling each other like a couple of wary cats, we eventually bonded over our love/hate of the same toxic bachelor. We are both battle-scarred veterans who stopped counting a long time ago and we are good friends. And the man in question? Long forgotten.

  It’s the calmest I have felt since the dog went missing. ‘Wolfy made me happy, he showed me a very simple sort of happiness. You know what I was like before, Kim, I was all over the shop.’

  ‘You weren’t that bad.’

  ‘I can’t bear to think of him suffering.’

  ‘What about Charlie? How’s he doing?’

  ‘I don’t know. Isn’t that terrible. I don’t know. We’ll cope, we always do. It’s not like it’s a child, it’s just a dog.’ I look down and we sit in silence.

  ‘I saw that dog.’ A loud bloke appears. He’s waving a pint of Stella Artois over the stack of Wolfy posters and flyers in the middle of the table. ‘I’ll never forget it, ever, in my life, it was running so fast, faster than the traffic. Last Saturday, it was.’ The guy’s hammered, but obviously telling the truth. This is immensely reassuring, we are in the right place. He’s been here. He may well still be here, tucked away and scared, but, as Anna promised, alive and alone. The guy continues. ‘Fucking mental. It’s been on my mind all week. I hope you find him mate, coz you got yourself a wonderdog there.’

  Around one in the morning we walk back to the car that Charlie calls the glorified dog bed on wheels.

  ‘Have you eaten anything today?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Let’s go to Maroush on Edgware Road on the way home for a posh kebab.’

  ‘And Lebanese wine.’

  As we sit there peeling back the flatbread inhaling the garlicky chicken. ‘Thanks for being kind, Kimbers. You’re a brick.’

  ‘That’s all right, it’s what friends are for.’

  ‘Mad, isn’t it, that I’m so uncomfortable with it. Friends and help and all that.’

  ‘Tiz a bit, yes.’

  At home, I fall into bed and Charlie mutters, ‘How was it?’

  Moving closer to him, I speak into the warm skin on his back. ‘Usual.’

  ‘You?’ I ask.

  Apparently a dog that looks like Wolfy has been picked up in a remote London borough and taken to Battersea Dogs Home. Charlie was alerted on the DogLost website and it’s already spread across Twitter. A woman in the #findwolfy crew went down there tonight to bang on the door and claim him. The staff sent her away, saying if she wasn’t the owner she couldn’t check him out.

  Charlie says, ‘I’d better drive down there and check it’s not him in the morning.’ Resigned and tired as he is, he’s still got skin in the game, if that’s not a ludicrous way to describe participation in wacky races around London after a third-hand lurcher. These hurtling drives and dashes to anywhere the internet or callers point us feel absurd, but to do anything else with our time feels somehow obscene.

  ‘Coffee?’ he asks, when he rings on his way back from Battersea the next morning. He’s already confirmed what I already knew – that the dog wasn’t Wolfy. No. Still no to coffee. It’s impossible not to dwell on this-time-last-week type thoughts. Seven days have passed.

  Saturday is my fi
rst full day of hunting since last Sunday. I have to confront the zero-liquidity issue. Every pocket is turned inside out; every bag, upside down. Twenty quid is all that turns up. The money, my money, has run out.

  Charlie brings a stack of plastic folders to put posters in so they aren’t destroyed by wind and rain. He has drawing pins to tack them to trees, Blu-tack for windows, Sellotape. The tools of the dog-hunting trade. He’s despairing of the cost of losing the dog, again so I don’t dare mention I have only £20 in my bank account. I’ll have to wing it.

  I set off for the Saturday hunt on my yellow pushbike. It’s heavy and old-fashioned and there are more hills in north London than I am prepared for. As the day proceeds I get tired and that particular type of stressed that comes from winging it with hardly anything in my bank account. I print out more posters in a strange copy shop with a sad rack of dusty greetings cards and a few food items like ginger nut biscuits and Angel Delight. It’s like they’ve been there since the seventies. There are four men in there; one obese guy with a ponytail is sweating over an old grubby computer terminal and the other three are clustered in the back of the shop eating Pot Noodles and drinking instant coffee from mugs. It is one of the seediest internet cafes I’ve ever found, but it has a big printer and I print off 50 posters and 100 flyers, which I will guillotine down to size.

  A tall skinny mean-faced guy in a leather blazer comes out to serve me. His breath stinks of instant coffee. I order a cup of tea to drink while I do the posters, which he serves in the worst possible way, sour-faced weak and milky. Any attempts at friendliness on my part are assertively rebuffed. The other two guys stare at me from the back room. It’s like I’ve walked through a shabby portal into a malevolent all-male world. I think of Coffee Plant, with its regular parade of all Notting Hill’s human life from the film directors to the regular lunatics; there’s the odd junkie pops in to use the toilet there after an NA meeting, and the artist mum who brings her two girls in to run feral round the place and give Wolfy tummy rubs. From the tough black guys saying ‘innit’ and smoking rollies outside to the laconic playwright chain-drinking espressos and chatting up the compact French ex-ballet dancer, it’s a distillate of the place I call home.

  I want my dog back because I love him, but I also want to take my life back.

  As I do the printing I talk to the obese guy. His body is straining against his clothes. I tell him all about my dog, and he tells me that he hasn’t seen his daughter for ten years, that her mother won’t let him near her. He is peculiarly vulnerable in his friendliness but there’s something not right about the place.

  When I come to pay I have badly miscalculated the cost of the posters and am £14 short. The skinny guy stands and looks at me with contempt. ‘What are you going to do about it? The cost is £34.’

  I start to flap about and try to call Will, who is the only person I feel comfortable asking for money at this point. My phone dies. It’s a mess. I need to get out and hunt for the dog. The stress is making me feel sick.

  The obese guy says, ‘I’ll pay for it.’

  The skinny guy says to him, ‘Don’t do that, John. You don’t even know her.’

  ‘The girl lost her dog, Colin, have a heart. I’ll pay.’ He slips £20 out of a wallet tucked up somewhere near his armpit in his brown polyester jacket. ‘Don’t worry about the change.’

  I’ve grown enormously suspicious of all these guys while I have been hiding out here. There’s an atmosphere of secrecy that makes me imagine some dark scenarios. But this weird, childlike, obese guy has saved my bacon. I accept the kindness of strange strangers without shame. I take the money, keep the change and get the fuck out of there.

  The midnight jogger calls me as I attack Archway Road, the long steep hill that goes from my brother’s place up to Queen’s Wood, an ancient patch of old oak woodland. He has a new plan and wants to meet me. He can’t do tonight though. Tomorrow is fine, I say. He speaks fast and with great enthusiasm like a kids’ TV presenter, but without the modulation of emotion that indicates a shift in the conversation. So we have moved from our meeting tomorrow at the Palmerston pub just up the road from Will’s house to the real identity of my beloved tweeting police officer: ‘That Moonieman. I tracked as far back as I could in his Twitter and there’s some dodgy stuff. I am not sure that’s what a community policeman would put up. Is he what he says he is?’

  This, I admit, is a blow. A blow because thinking confidently that you have a copper, even a volunteer one, on your side always reassures any human, we all want the police on our team. Be they an armed robber or a frail little old lady. On the other hand, the #findwolfy story has moved on. I don’t need to keep using him as an emotional prop. The wheel of hope, or hopeless hope, keeps cranking away with the help of psychics and many kind-hearted people. I can do without Moonieman, the Porno PC.

  It’s not like I’ve lost Emma, and Brett’s still there, midnight jogging for Wolfs. Onwards. As I climb the hill, I grind my way down through the gears until it’s low enough to cope with the unfamiliar North London terrain. Onwards.

  In the afternoon I hunt for the dog with a woman I know, but not very well, a minor celebrity who lives in the area. She’s kind and I’m grateful, but I’m getting kind of paranoid. Whatever my body is overdosing on in this stress state – is it adrenaline? – is starting to have the same effect as a mixture of speed and cheap student hash. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch her looking at me as I repeatedly leap across a muddy cricket pitch in Queen’s Wood, thrusting flyers at everyone I see: ‘Have you seen my dog, have you seen my dog.’

  In the moments when there is no one to assail with the Lost Dog story, we walk and talk. ‘How’s your lovely man Charlie?’ She’s always applauded me for making a sensible choice in a man. ‘You did well there. Wish I could.’

  I sympathise. ‘Took me til forty to realise the things that drive you wild about a man will pretty quickly be what makes you hate him, or him hate you. I reject my type and look at us, We’re doing OK. Ish.’ Why can’t I just say something like ‘I love him’ or ‘I’m lucky’? ‘It’s always very ish, isn’t it.’

  I wonder where Charlie is. He went to Hampstead today, chasing a sighting, pinning up posters. He’s probably long home by now. If it were me, I’d have dropped in at Will’s, but Charlie won’t do that.

  I tell the minor celebrity I don’t know where he is, that I have had no charge in my phone since it died in the Pederasts’ caff, which is how I described the creepy print shop to her. ‘You cannot say that!’ She’s outraged.

  ‘Is paedo cafe better? It’s only for me, I’m not putting it on Trip Advisor. It’s not for a guidebook. It’s for a list called “things that only happen when you lose your dog”. That place was dark.’

  Before, I would never have spent time with her anywhere other than some party, clutching a free glass of champagne and batting back and forth short spiky gossipy sentences. In my edgy state, there’s a nervous frankness – I don’t have the emotional wherewithal to censor myself. We share information with each other about our lives. She’s a good egg, despite the fact that she vamps around on red carpets in lovely borrowed dresses; she doesn’t do Hello!, so I’m probably being unfair calling her a minor celebrity, with all the naffness that suggests.

  We are walking down a wide north London street lined with mature trees. This is now way out of my comfort zone; I don’t know where we’re going. She cuts off down a pathway that tracks a long line of allotments on our left. It’s getting dark. Why am I even looking here? It’s two miles from Will’s and so far no sighting has been further than about a mile away.

  Shouldn’t I have gone back to Harvist or Highgate Cemetery?

  We walk past a tennis club where a fireworks party is just getting going and I curse the bloody things. ‘Ahhh, not another one.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, deliberately misunderstanding, ‘I hate tennis clubs too. Horrible institutions full of dog whistles of the patriarchy.’

  ‘A dif
ferent kind of horror to the Groucho though.’ We share an eyeball-roll about Tim. Everyone knows Tim; the world’s worst best friend if you’re trying to kick drugs. ‘I can’t tell you how many times I have deleted his number from my phone,’ I say.

  ‘Sympathies, babe.’ She’s been clean for years, and has the sort of superhuman strength that only damage followed by recovery brings to a woman.

  ‘I’ve always found you utterly terrifying, you know,’ I say.

  ‘Pot. Kettle,’ she says.

  ‘I’m so crap with women. They either scare me in their strength or disgust me in their weakness.’

  ‘That’s horrible. I see women as my allies in a world full of old crap systems designed by men to bully and subdue my power.’

  ‘Yeah and that too,’ I say, wishing I hadn’t said anything.

  I hold out a pack of Marlboro Lights. ‘I’m smoking, sober. Something else to add to the things you do when you lose your dog.’

  ‘Go on then.’ We stop and cup our fags to the lighter.

  ‘But in a way,’ I go on, ‘the fact that men don’t really bother me means that I have handed all the power to women already. If I hadn’t handed them all this power they wouldn’t be able to hurt me as much as they do.’

  I leave her at her house, pick up my bike and ride towards my brother’s. It’s all downhill, which sounds better than it is. I don’t have any lights and the pavements are covered in wet brown leaves that make me skid if I use the brakes. I come off, and go sprawling across the pavement, grazing my knees as I tear through my wool trousers.

  Throwing the bike onto a patch of grass and trees, I sit on a low wall around a concreted seating area by the side of the road. It’s shaken me up even more; my pretence at calm with the minor celebrity is gone. I’m a big panting, flapping, teary mess. In this state, I read a text from an old university friend telling me a mutual friend has died suddenly. I respond. She follows up with a call, she wants to discuss it.