The Last Dog on Earth

by Adrian J. Walker

  But really, honestly, I do think he’s lost the plot this time. We have been inside this fucking flat for TWO DAYS STRAIGHT, and if I don’t get a walk soon I’m going to go properly mental.

  I have to piss in a saucepan. IN A SAUCEPAN. And don’t get me started on shit. You might think it’s all right to take a dump on a piece of newspaper, but me? No. Just no. No, no, no, no, NO.

  Going to the lav is a rather important and sensitive issue for me, as it is with most dogs. It is not OK to just go anywhere you like; it matters where it goes. That’s just common fucking decency in my book. I have to go where I’ve gone before, or rather, where not many others have gone before.

  Think of it this way: if you’re busting for an Eartha and you walk into the toilet to see someone else’s floating there, what would you do? You wouldn’t just sit down and coil one out on top of it, would you? You’d flush first, probably giving one of your little tuts as you do it. People are so disgusting, you’d probably say to yourself, eyes lifted to the angels as you wait for the offending item to spiral away before laying down your own eye-shuddering cable as you flick through Heat or Twat or Men’s Washboards or whatever stupid fucking rag you’ve … I’m sorry. I’m a little worked up. Love the flat. Love Reg. No concerns there, just, you know … properly mental.

  Anyway, as I was saying: you flush. But we dogs don’t have flushes, do we? No, we have noses; noses that tell us exactly where some other animal has done its business. And not just in the last day, either, nor in the last week, month or year. Our noses tell us exactly who has done what where SINCE TIME IMMEMORIAL.

  I’m exaggerating perhaps. But you get the idea. It’s important to choose the right place, and I can’t do it where he wants me to do it, I just can’t, though fuck knows I’ve tried. I’ve already disgraced myself twice in the kitchen, once next to the television and three times up against the bedroom door. This has only made Reg even madder (and he’s pretty fruit-loops right now, let me tell you) and me more confused. But I can’t help it. Some things just don’t go the way you want them to.

  Kitchen, telly, bedroom door – these are all places I’ve done it before, back when I was a pup and knew no better. But right now, with every passing second I spend locked up in here, I feel more and more like that frightened little runt taking those first wobbling, piss-pawed steps into his new home.

  I’d been in Battersea since birth. All the others had gone, my old mum too, so it was just me in the cage, the bare floor and the endless parade of faces. Christ, I can still remember the racket. Those wankers had no hope – no hope – of getting picked with all their slavering and howling and mad eyes rolling about.

  Me, pick me, please pick me I love you I love you I do I do I won’t bite you I’m nice I’m sorry about that thing on the floor I won’t bite you honest PICK ME, YOU WON’T REGRET … HEY! COME BACK HERE! COME BACK HERE AND STOP CRYING! STOP CRYING, YOU LITTLE PIG-TAILED CUNT!

  Who wants to look after something like that?

  I didn’t know the gig at the time, of course. I thought this was the world, like anything that’s born in captivity. I didn’t even know there was an outside.

  Strange then, isn’t it, that I felt sad? Strange that I somehow believed things could get better, that these paws and this snout and these springy muscles were telling me that they were born for something more.

  Ever get that?

  That’s The Howl, that is. The Howl tells everything where it’s supposed to be and what it’s supposed to be doing. The Howl tells everything when something’s just not as it should be. So rather than curl up in a ball and cry, I stood up, held my snout to the air and learned to be patient.

  Face after face passed my cage and I watched each one drift by. The screams of the others became the noise that filled my days and their whimpers and whines became the nights. And in those nights I’d dream of wide places I’d never been that swarmed with huge animals, and my feet would be buried in mud. Battersea was a desperate place, full of fear and anger.

  I tried to keep my thoughts on the only memory that made any sense, which was my mum, all milky and warm and soft. Every day she seemed further away, a part of her disappearing like a jigsaw breaking into pieces. And the others – I couldn’t remember who or how many there were. I kept telling myself I could remember the shape their bodies made against mine as we flumped about at Mum’s tits, or the sound of their voices trying to speak, but I couldn’t, not really. The only feeling I had was the hardness of the floor, and the only sound was the yelling of those pricks around me.

  Then Reg came along, and it was like a window opening. The Howl spoke to me: This one, it said. This one’s yours, and you’re his. That’s how things are supposed to be. It was a good bit so my tail wagged. And the rest, as they say … An entire history of good bits.

  Not a good bit now, though, not at all. You’re not supposed to lock yourself away. You’re not supposed to hide from the world. You’re not supposed to be alone. Even the wolves know that.

  That’s the other thing you had, as well as that magnificent ape mind of yours. You had you. Lots and lots of you. You looked after each other, cared for each other, watched each other’s backs. You did this right from the start and you did it without question because the feeling was something so raw and deep that you didn’t know how else to be. You did it because The Howl told you to. And the way The Howl told you to was by giving you that wonderful thing called love.

  Real love. I’m not talking about roses or cherries or fluttering looks. I’m not talking about beating hearts, swollen cocks or throbbing cunts either. I’m talking about the thing that binds you – that messy glue that hardens on contact, that shatters when it breaks and even then leaves bits of it behind.

  I’m talking about the thing that you feel when you’re screaming through a car window or arguing over a phone or throwing plates or shaking fists or about to throw one – the feeling that tells you no matter how much you hate this person, if you saw them in some foreign place where the signs made no sense, or shipwrecked on a far shore, or fleeing for your life on some alien planet, you would seek them out. Because deep down you’re the same, and your only hope of survival depends on sticking together.

  Even with that mind of yours the odds were still stacked against you. Forget your lone hunter standing proud on a hill, nothing lasts long on its own. Wolves know it, foxes know it, squirrels know it, birds know it, cats …

  (Cats are a different matter. Cats, and I’m positive on this, do not know the meaning of the word ‘love’. This is because they are from a place where love does not exist and that place is called hell, where the Dark Lord himself, who is a cat, will roast the soul of every moggy that has ever scratched or hissed or purred or sprayed in a monstrous pile of flaming kitty litter for ALL TIME.)

  Apologies. Not myself.

  I’ll admit it, there are a few animals out there who like to go it alone. Spiders, for example. Not great at parties, spiders. Bears like to keep to themselves too, mostly because they’re too fucking stupid to find their way out of the woods and when they do they go berserk and start killing everything. Jaguars, leopards, tigers, cheetahs (all cats … I rest my case), pandas (just not fucking) and koalas, who probably would be all right at parties if they weren’t so off their faces most of the time.

  And even then, these animals are not the most cheerful lot, are they? Not happy campers, by and large. The only time you see a bear smiling is when it’s fucking another bear.

  We’re not supposed to be alone. You’re not supposed to be alone. But try telling Reg that.

  I have. I’ve tried whining and pawing and even – I’m ashamed to admit this, but I’m desperate – even making noises close to human words. But he just shouts or pushes me away. He paces around and spends most of the time in his room or looking out of the window through those binoculars of his.

  I know it’s because of her. I can hear every move she makes out there and I smell her constantly. I’m latched onto her, everyt
hing she does. It’s weird. I know she uses the stairwell as a toilet and I know she hasn’t eaten for four days because her stomach acid is making it smell like her insides are turning in on themselves. I know the smell she makes when she’s about to come to our door again. I swear I can smell her thinking. She’s found water from somewhere with a metal tang that makes me think it’s from one of the dripping pipes downstairs, but it’s not enough. Her mouth is dry and swollen and it hurts. I can smell her pain and her woe and the little shreds of hope, like flesh on barbed wire, that keep making her return to our door. And when she does she knocks, and Reg covers his ears and shuts his eyes and takes huge, wet breaths through his nose until she stops.

  She wants our help and I don’t know why he won’t give it to her. She’s just a pup, alone, on a cold, hard floor.

  Target

  REGINALD HARDY’S JOURNAL

  9TH DECEMBER 2021

  She stopped crying some time early this morning. It had not really been crying by then – just a series of croaks and whimpers that had kept me from sleep for a third night.

  Her surrender brought a wretched mixture of relief and guilt, a poison that numbed me towards some hateful version of sleep. But before it took me, something yanked me back to consciousness. A voice inside of me; an actual voice, and I knew at once who it was. The warmth, the swift upward inflection, the crack as she said my name.

  It said: This is not how things are supposed to be. Get up now, Reginald, and take a look. So, weary and ragged, that is what I did.

  I stood at the door and looked out through the spy glass. She lay engulfed in her coat with curled limbs and clawed fingers, perfectly still. Again came that rotten wave of dull comfort accompanied by sinking failure. Thoughts came quickly to help me out: What kind of world was this for a child, Reginald? She would have died anyway, and what would you have done with her if she had lived? Could you have made her happy? It is over now, she is at peace …

  But the way the bones showed in her fingers and the way her head was pressed into the corner, trying to seek some bubble of warmth – she looked anything but at peace.

  Lineker growled at the door. Then suddenly he spun round and ran for the window instead.

  ‘What is it?’ I said, but he just stood there with his paws up, back stretched and tail down, staring out at the silent morning.

  Her voice again.

  This is not how things are supposed to be, Reginald. You know this.

  I opened the door.

  I got the light smell of her doings on the wind whistling through the hall, and a rat scuttled past my feet.

  ‘Lineker,’ I called, but he was still there at the window, ignoring me in favour of the view. I watched the rat weave between the skirting boards and dart beneath the stairwell door. Then it was just me and her.

  I walked to the corner and stood over her. Her face was as bony and drawn as it had been before, ghoulish in the flashlight on that first night. Now her eyes were closed, their long lashes interlocked, and her mouth was parted showing two oversized front teeth and a gold one beside them. Her features were fine and taut as if still in whatever fretful dream had accompanied her into death. I bent down and pulled back her hood. Her hair was dark and curled in tight ringlets, like oil against the moon of her face.

  Around her neck was a piece of string and, attached to it, a brown tag. I pulled it from a crease in her coat. It read:

  NAME: Aisha Gray

  AGE: Unknown, roughly 7 years old

  ORIGIN: Streatham

  DESTINATION: HM Military Stronghold Kestrel 24-C, Wembley, N. London

  PARENTS/GUARDIAN: Deceased

  SIBLINGS: Deceased

  RELATIVES: Unknown

  ENDANGERMENT STATUS: Target

  I let the tag drop and fell on my backside, holding my head and staring at her face. My right leg began to wobble as if it belonged to someone else. I heard somebody breathe hard and realised it was me. My lungs were sucking and squeezing like giant, flapping bellows – huge gulps of air I neither wanted nor needed. My vision swam, dizzy in the tide of oxygen surging in my blood. I was somewhere else, in another time, another place.

  This was not what I had wanted.

  What was it you wanted then? You left her out here. You could have saved her. You could have looked after her. You were supposed to look after her.

  Somewhere else. Another time, another place.

  She needed help. You failed her.

  I jumped to my feet and tried to pace off the panic, this swarm of shrieking ghosts that had descended out of nowhere.

  Then two things happened.

  The first was that Lineker started barking from the window. It was proper barking too – rapid, loud and aggressive – and beneath it, from the street below, was the sound of engines approaching.

  And the second thing that happened, as I stood there drenched in my own doom, was that the girl’s cheek twitched.

  I staggered back, then forward again, as if on the lurching deck of a ship. I looked behind at Lineker springing and snapping madly at the window, and then back at the girl. With my legs still wobbling, I took a few hesitant steps towards her, rubbing my fingers like an old man at a horse race as I tried to decide whether what I had just seen I had actually just seen. I watched, waited and chewed my lip as the engines outside throttled. Brakes squealed. Doors slammed. The girl’s pale face remained still. My shoulders slumped – this time in despair, with no shred of relief.

  The sun broke through a cloud and struck her with its ray. As the cloud swiftened away, the light travelled up her face, and when it hit her right eye her cheek twitched again. This time her entire body followed with a gigantic spasm that made me fall to the floor. She took one mighty, rasping breath and coughed. I scrabbled backwards, watching her stockinged legs wheel against the air.

  She sat up, still coughing, looking about as if the place and time in which she had found consciousness was not the same as the one in which she had lost it. Her eyes darted between the walls as she fought for breath and pulled her coat around her tiny frame. Then her breathing suddenly steadied. In the jolt, a black ringlet fell from behind her ear and hung there, trembling. Her face flickered with a memory, and very slowly, she turned it towards me.

  We watched each other from our respective corners. I heard a voice from outside and Lineker barked. It was a different sound to the one he usually made; wary and low, not quite sure of itself. I went to see.

  Down on the ground there were two trucks, both BU. Their drivers were outside arguing about something, nose to nose, fists clenched, gloved fingers pointing.

  I did not know what to make of this. Whether I had accidentally drawn them here or whether they had resumed sweeps in this area, I had no idea, but either way it did not bode well at all. Then there was the army truck from earlier, and now this child. Too much company. Far too much.

  The argument below was blustering to a climax when all of a sudden a terrific roar tore through the air and ended in a distant thump. The drivers stopped bickering, grabbed their guns and looked up. A tight fist of black smoke spiralled from the north. The men snapped a few more words and returned to their cabs, spinning off in the direction they had come.

  I watched the smoke plume dissipate and waited until I could no longer hear the trucks. Then I turned to the door. She was standing there, watching me.

  I seated her at the table and gave her a blanket, a bottle of water, two tins from my store (one peas, one ravioli) a tin opener and a spoon. Lineker positioned himself on the floor beside her, snout up and tail wagging. She drained the water and thrust the bottle back at me. As I fetched another from the kitchen she picked up the tin opener and looked it over, trying a few combinations against the side of the can of ravioli before dropping it and attacking it with her teeth. When this didn’t work she banged it against the table instead. I took it from her, opened both tins and let her go to work on them, scooping the contents out with her fingers and mashing it into her mouth. Lin
eker watched with excitement, and I left them both to fix Bertha.

  It didn’t take long to fit the new bearings and, after a bit of tinkering, the old girl came back to life with a furious roar.

  When I returned to the flat I found the girl sitting at the table, staring at the empty cans. I got things going – heater, three-bar fire, lights, water filter, pump – and ran a bath. It was tepid but the water was clean and I put a towel in the bathroom for her. She understood, closed the door, and returned fifteen minutes later looking and smelling a little less like the grave. I gave her more food and water, and watched while she inhaled it.

  It was almost midday but there was still a hard frost outside, stiffening the vines and creepers that covered our balcony, the street – everything made of brick or concrete – into glistening white cables. The fog was relatively light, so you could see how far the creepers stretched and how high they’d risen. A dense web of sap and sinew spread out as far as the eye could see, attaching itself to anything its tendrils touched and clawing it imperceptibly back into the Earth. How long would it be? I wondered. How long before those empty shells crumbled? How long before Seton Bayley, my home, fell?

  The girl placed her last empty can on the table and let a little burp escape from her lips.

  ‘Your name,’ I said. ‘It’s Aisha, isn’t it?’

  She stared into the fire, her face orange in the electric glow.

  ‘I read it on your tag,’ I went on.

  She blinked and said nothing.