by Kate Spicer
‘I can’t talk or think right now, I’ve lost my dog and I’m in a state.’
‘You think losing your dog is worse than Dan dying?’ She is appalled.
‘No, but I can’t connect to Dan’s loss. I hadn’t seen him in twenty years. I spent every moment with my dog. It’s proving very hard to handle. I’m cracking up.’
The phone call ends badly. She tells me I’m ‘pretty sad’. I tell her to fuck off. I don’t care. I don’t care at all. I sit on the wall in the murky dark under the trees, away from the street lights. Wherever the hell I am, I will limp my bike down the hill and walk into the nearest pub and get drunk.
Thank God, the next pub I see isn’t a bad one. I reviewed St John for the Evening Standard back in the early noughties. It’s a bit more corporate now but the wine list isn’t too dull. If it had been a proper crap boozer with swirly carpet and the sort of red wine that gives you a blocked nose and a headache, that might have felt more fitting for my desperate mood, more authentic, but I’m relieved the first pub I come to doesn’t require me to drink shit wine.
‘Do you have a cold-climate Pinot noir, a phone charger and any pork scratchings?’
The bartender charges my phone and brings me a goldfish bowl of posh pub red and long strips of home-made crackling in a glass. The crackling is gone in 60 seconds. I sling the glass back at him. ‘keeps ’em coming.’
As soon as I have 10 per cent battery I call Charlie and tell him I’ve fallen off my bike, my heart is breaking and I’m getting smashed in St John’s Tavern on Junction Road. ‘I’m coming,’ he says.
Charlie and I talk, we laugh. ‘Hey, I haven’t told you the news. This French woman rang to tell me she definitely saw Wolfy on Camden Road on Wednesday morning. Sounds like he was quite near the back of Will’s. There, that’s good. Another sighting. Cheer up, Foxy.’
We stand up off our stools and hold each other for a really long time, and then he digs in too, and starts drinking. ‘It’s OK,’ I say. ‘I’m back here tomorrow on the hunt. I’ll pick up the car.’
We’ve been drinking an hour or so when a call comes in. ‘I’ve seen your dog in East India Quay.’
What? That’s Docklands. Miles away.
We run to Will’s in Tufnell Park, where he and Steph are sitting over dinner and a bottle of wine with their friend. I post the sighting to Twitter and two people say they are heading there immediately. It’s ludicrous. ‘That’s ten miles away from where he was last seen. Should we even go?’
‘Yes, go, go,’ says Steph. ‘I’ll stay here with the children.’
Will says he will drive us and we all pile in his car. He has on a pirate radio station and the combination of the alcohol and the music makes me think, Yes, now we are going to hashtag find Wolfy.
As soon as we get there I go to meet the woman who called me. I can’t escape the sneaking suspicion that she is on something. She seems totally sober, looks, dare I say it, a bit boring, but she describes the dog having red eyes, like it was really tired, like it was a devil, and wearing a bandana. A tired devil dog wearing a neckerchief.
But the hope is there in me, also like a drug. I search on through the estate by the Thames.
We are hunting for the dog in a bland development of brand-new, triple-glazed, yellow brick condos. They are starter homes for the young professional who isn’t too fussed about ideas of community and just wants ‘amenities’ and ‘facilities’ and to be not too far from work. This isn’t a place with the breadth of all human life on its doorstep. I expect they are advertised as executive Thames-side residences. It’s soulless, more so than the Harvist Estate, and aside from pools of rusty lamplight, it’s dark and it’s deserted. The Thames is on one side, the busy eight-lane Aspen Way rushes by on the other. As we split up in our usual Scooby style, I am overwhelmed by an aimlessness, of having no clear purpose in the way I hunt. Yet, still, images of his head popping round the corner of the human hutches taunt me to move on, still calling.
‘Wolfy. Woooolfy.’
Two hours later: ‘Ever get the feeling you’re on a wild goose chase,’ Will asks tentatively as we drive back north to his place.
‘Yes,’ says Charlie, ‘a lot. That was a joke. That woman was having a fucking laugh at our expense. Red devil eyes. Please. I’m reaching the end of my patience with this.’
The sensation of being laughed at had occurred to me too as I called around the blocks in the development. ‘I thought it was hopeful,’ I said.
‘And how does that place gel with Highgate. Or Harvist?’ Charlie isn’t being cruel, or brutal, just utterly practical.
‘It’s the circling theory, you know, that he’s moving around Will’s, trying to track himself back.’
‘Sorry, still don’t understand – how does that explain Docklands?’ Will motions to the blur of traffic outside the car. ‘There is no way a dog could get across some of these roads.’
Will’s not usually gentle. Normally a sardonic inflection touches his every utterance. But there’s none of it now. We are rational and debating whether to keep pushing out into the city looking for the dog, or not.
A text from Emma Pratt: ‘You say Wolfy seen by canal Camden Wednesday. Canal comes out at Limehouse Basin, not far from where he was seen tonight. What do you think?’
‘It’s the canal. The canal! The Regent’s Canal comes out just below yours and comes out the whole way to Docklands at Limehouse. I’m coming back tomorrow, I’m going to walk from here to Docklands along the canal.’
‘Really,’ says Will. ‘That sounds a bit mad.’
I hear Charlie mumble in the front.
‘What’s that? I didn’t catch it.’
‘I said that’s it. I’m done. You can keep looking, I still believe he will either be found, or not.’ He’s raised his voice, like a patronising care worker talking to a deaf old bat.
‘Will? Will? What do you think?’
‘I agree, Kate. Steph and I were talking about this last night. It’s hard to say, but I don’t think we can change the outcome of this.’
‘But Steph doesn’t give a shit, she’s just thinking of this whole Wolfy thing as an inconvenience to the family, of course she thinks that.’
‘Kate. Steph is beside herself. She hasn’t got a clue what to say to you and she’s like me. She’s devastated the dog ran off on our watch. She doesn’t think it’s an inconvenience, she knows it’s a total nightmare for you. All we can compare it to is if you lost one of our kids. It’s the same, we know that. I’m sorry if you feel we don’t. The fact remains, though, that I think we’ve done everything we can. It’s out there, people know what he looks like. We can keep putting up posters. But all this running around? I dunno, it’s wearing everyone out, it’s fucking stressful, and it’s actually kind of dangerous. We could have got badly messed up at Harvist the other night. Kate, Charlie is right. You’ve got to leave it. It’s in the lap of the gods now.’
What gods?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The midnight jogger has asked me to bring him a load of my smelliest clothes – knickers are probably best, he says, and sweaty things, socks, sports gear. He wants to explain his plan for luring Wolfy out. The carting of a carrier bag full of dirty laundry across London does not feel problematic. It feels logical, given that dogs live in the Buddhist realm of smells. What feels perverse is handing it to a complete stranger, and a man at that. But he has a plan and, eight days in, I’m too desperate to be coy. Charlie knows half the truth, the half with socks and a smelly T-shirt. The other half with the dirty knickers I keep from him.
I leave the flat early on Sunday morning. I want to hunt for as long as possible, stick posters up all along the canal, stop and talk to people. If a person can feel committed to something on a cellular level then that’s me and today’s Wolfy hunt. Back to Docklands to where we were last night, then a good six miles up the canal and on to meet the midnight jogger with my smelly laundry basket stash.
Charlie tells me again th
at he isn’t going out looking today. For him, from here on in, it’s fate that takes care of our dog. He’s been saying this for several days now. This morning, though, there’s real steel in his resolve.
‘Go, do what you planned, but come home this evening, please. I’ve got a rib of beef from the butchers. Let’s get a decent bottle. I’ll cook. Come home, we can eat together, watch a film.’
It feels like punctuation marking the end of the hunt for Wolfy. The feast at which we hand ourselves over to fate. I promise him I will be home by six.
It takes me a while to get to Docklands, and make no mistake, no matter how perky and smiley I may appear to the people I stop, I am in a state of perpetual low-level distress. Meaning? I make mistakes. I lose the car keys. I drop money. On the Docklands Light Railway this morning, I had got off at the wrong station. Crossing over the platforms, I got myself into a tourist-like confusion, and popped up several times in the wrong place. Eventually I had to stop and try to pull my feverish self together.
Charlie texts: ‘Dog seen on Hampstead Heath again’. Here he inserts an emoji rolling its eyeballs. By the time I call him he is already jogging across the Heath and talking to me with that mix of excitement and cynicism that only someone hunting for a dog will understand.
I sit and wait for him to call with my eyes closed. Canary Wharf DLR station is new and sterile, in contrast to a lot of the battered old Underground stations. But with its weekend calm and grand steel and glass elliptical roof it feels like being in church. It’s calming. When the phone rings I allow myself the brief luxury of thinking that he has found the dog.
He has not. Having met the walker who saw ‘Wolfy’, the two made off after this golden shaggy lurcher, only to catch up and find that it was following behind its owner, who was on a run. ‘No, it’s still not Wolfy,’ the guy said. It obviously wasn’t the first time this had happened.
I travel on. Heavy-hearted and in need of perpetual motion. In the 20 minutes it takes me to get back to East India DLR, Charlie has obviously been on the phone to his mother. She calls me. She’s been very kind and reassuring before, but now her tone is sharp and impatient. ‘Who is this chap you are going to meet? Have you met him before? Are you meeting in a public place? How do you know he’s a good person?’
I placate her with lies. The truth is I only trust the midnight jogger because he’s an endurance athlete and he invented an energy bar.
‘OK, well, if you are sure. But promise me this is your last day. Do what you have planned today and then go home to your boyfriend. You can get another dog. You won’t get another Charlie.’
‘You can get another dog.’ These words sweep through my body, prickling and panicking. I can’t cope with the idea.
That’s it, more tears. ‘I don’t want another dog, I want Woofs back.’
‘I know, I know, and he may well still come back but you need to get some normality back in your life. You are making yourself ill.’
This conversation clearly won’t end until I make her a promise.
I constantly make and then break promises to editors about getting things in on time. If it’s a promise she wants, I can give it to her. I’m good at pretending. I pretended to be OK when I lived with my dad and stepmum because appearing upset just made everyone pissed off. I’ve got this. As I take the steps from the DLR down to the street, I say, ‘OK Christina, I will just walk the canal from Docklands to Camden and then I will go home to Charlie and stop looking. You’re absolutely right. Promise.’
As soon as I put the phone down I start blubbing again, right in front of a homeless guy. It’s getting embarrassing, all this crying.
‘Hey, hey, hey. What’s wrong? What you crying for. Look at me, I’ve nae teef.’ He shows me a gummy smile. ‘At least you’re not a useless old junkie like me.’
What a dreadful big baby princess cunt I must look in my old fur coat and Parisian Stephane Kélian trainers. I crouch down on my haunches opposite him. ‘I’m a dog addict. I’ve lost my dog. I loved him, love him, so much, maybe too much …’ I offer him a cigarette.
‘You’re all right, I’ve given up.’
‘So had I,’ I say, taking a puff. ‘Sorry I haven’t got any money, for real, I have no money.’
‘Aye, looks like it. I don’t want anything off you, now fuck off.’
He laughs.
I laugh.
‘Thanks for cheering me up.’ I smile and I mean it.
The rendezvous I was going to make with Emma is nixed by my grief-addled bumbling transport errors. As I arrive she is leaving. She too has been to East India Quay this morning, with her son.
We coordinate by text but I still want to ring for our soothing daily ‘Do you think he’s alive?’ chat, in which she reassures me to hunt on is not the act of a soft-headed fantasist.
‘Yes,’ she says, as she always does, but for the first time since I started talking to her, I doubt she’s being honest.
‘You sound unsure, Emma, why can I hear doubt in your voice? I trust you. Tell me.’
‘Sorry Kate. I know how distraught you are. I sit up at night waiting until you’ve sent your last tweet to the #findwolfy followers because I never want you to feel alone in this. I’ve barely slept this last week. I want you to know I’ve fallen in love with Wolfy. It’s like I am feeling your pain.’
‘It’s called empathy, I think, or is it sympathy, either way I am really sorry to foist my suffering on you. It’s so wrong.’
‘No, no, I’m sorry.’
‘No, you aren’t allowed to be sorry. I forbid it. I owe you such a huge drink, you’ve kept me sane this week, or as sane I could be.’
I feel like she is leaving me, I feel like I’m being dumped. She must have sensed my fear. ‘I’m having a hard time at home with my daughter. She’s revising for her GCSEs and she thinks I should be at home with her, not out hunting for a dog I’ve never met.’
I throw a load more sorrys at her. ‘Sorry, God, I’m so sorry. You absolutely must go home to your daughter, please put her first.’
‘I wanna keep looking, Mum,’ I hear a boy’s voice in the background. ‘We are going to Find Wolfy.’ He says it like it’s a quiz show slogan.
‘Sorry, I’ve got to go,’ says Emma. ‘My husband’s just pulled up in the car.’
I say sorry back once more.
So ends a very apologetic and British conversation about dogs.
Emma’s wavering confidence is a blow. Despite the careening about chasing leads, there has not been a strong and plausible sighting of the dog since he was seen twice on Thursday. The surge of interest and supporters of the first week he was missing is starting to wane; of course it is. A missing dog. That’s not a long player. Is it? Every day I’d have a moment when I’d wonder if it was possible to feel less distraught, approach this whole situation from a more easy come, easy go perspective. Like Pat had said, ‘They do run sometimes.’ And Anna, ‘Some dogs, once they are on the move, they like it.’
I try that attitude on for size but it doesn’t fit. Keep looking.
In my desperation, I ring the Daily Mail and wonder if they’d like a story about a sad childless middle-aged woman who has lost her dog. I paint the sort of picture they want in order to gain access to their millions of readers. I don’t care.
When he woke up, he’d sometimes walk up the top of the bed and sit above me looking right into my eyes. He’d sit there for a bit and then he’d collapse with a big whumpf into a comfy position to lie close to me, still looking directly into my eyes. His neck would stretch forward and he’d say good morning by giving me two tiny licks on my nose with his tongue. It was a moment of such sweet focus and nothing would break it – unless he heard Charlie cooking sausages downstairs or rustling a packet of biscuits, obviously, in which case he’d launch himself down the lethal-to-lurchers stairs and wait.
You cannot rationalise love. It’s not just a load of oxytocin; at some point there’s some magic, a spirit that weaves its way through the
chemistry and that no one can explain. Love isn’t just neurotransmitters, is it? It’s not just dependency. It is our route to something beautiful, mysterious and transcendent. Without it, life is a hollow set of functions and, frankly, pointless.
From this part of south-east London where we were hunting last night, it takes me not far off an hour to walk to the canal’s entrance at Limehouse Basin. It’s then another six or so miles from there through prime hipster country on the canal to just before the Kentish Town lock, where I will exit onto Camden Road, near Will’s and near where the dog was seen by the French woman earlier in the week. The plan has a modicum of logic.
We have already skimmed the borders of east London in early searches around Clissold Park in Stoke Newington. People have told me they put up posters in Victoria Park too, which is proper east, an area we haven’t even considered. It’s a blinder of a day as I start the second week of his absence. I am grateful for an azure sky and I am relieved the canal walk offers a straight line to follow. I walk the 200-year-old artery of the Industrial Revolution; the information superhighway of its time, with its brickwork and bridges black with the patina of industry and time.
I stop passers-by. Like a charity chugger or a politician I am recruiting people, ever more, to the cause. People are kind, there’s a steady generosity of spirit. Londoners in all their shapes and sizes are good people. They care. When I stop for a cup of tea somewhere near Dalston the waiter refuses to take my money when he sees the stack of Lost Dog posters at my side. I bump into two photographers I have worked with in the past and they both give me warm hugs.
I keep a smile stretched across my normally hangdog face, which is unusual for someone used to strangers’ jeers of ‘Why the long face?’, ‘Cheer up, love, it might never happen’ and ‘Give us a smile.’ This is a face that says, ‘Like me. Listen to me.’
After four poster-pinning hours I arrive at Camden Road. My legs feel like lead. But to move is better than to stay still. There are several points where the dog would have had to leave the towpath. Would he have carried on following the canal, or been redirected into the streets at these points? If indeed he has been here at all. I imagine him trotting along the path, perhaps moving at night so no one sees him.
