The Labrador Pact

by Matt Haig

  Adam clinked the gate open, wearily pushing it forward. His eyes were empty and the smell of sex was still on his hand.

  As he turned the key I sniffed under the door. Instinctively, I started to bark. As the door swung forward, I ran upstairs to Charlotte’s room. No one was there.

  The window was open, its curtain billowing in the breeze. I sniffed around for Charlotte and followed my nose to the bathroom.

  I pushed the side of my head against the door but it was closed. I tried to let her know I was there by clawing my paws against the door. Not a sound.

  Adam was still downstairs, unconscious of my concern. I started to bark. Continuous, something-is-wrong barking. And to make sure he heard, I squeezed my head through the wooden rails overlooking the downstairs hallway.

  ‘What is it boy?’ he asked, plodding out of the living room.

  I carried on. Bark bark bark.

  Halfway upstairs he had a sense that something was wrong and quickened his pace.

  ‘Charlotte!’

  No answer.

  ‘Charlotte!’

  He tried the bathroom door.

  ‘Charlotte!’

  Locked.

  ‘Charlotte!’

  He threw his weight against it.

  ‘Charlotte! Open the door!’

  He tried again, harder. This time it flew open.

  ‘Oh my God! Charlotte!’

  Time stopped.

  She was on the floor, motionless. Pills everywhere. Her face, squashed into the carpet, leaked spit and vomit.

  Time re-started.

  Adam crashed his knees to the floor, felt her neck, pulled back her eyes, slapped her face with his hand. The hand he had wiped against the tree. There was no response. She was alive, but the life-smells were fading fast.

  He got up and shot past me, banging my head with his knee. Things went blurry. He phoned for an ambulance on the upstairs phone.

  I did what I could. Licked her face clean. I made her a promise.

  I will always look after you, Charlotte. I promise, you will never want to do this again.

  She couldn’t hear me. Of course she couldn’t. But that didn’t make it any less of a promise.

  Adam was back on the bathroom floor, placing the top half of his daughter’s limp body over his knee.

  ‘Oh please, Lottie, please. Come on, baby, come on.’ He shook her gently, causing her mouth to sag open.

  I didn’t know what to do so I kept on talking to her, quiet dog words. I told her how much she means to everyone, although they don’t always show it. I told her that one day she would be a happy, confident woman. I told her that I had let her down, but would never do so again.

  When I had finished, the ambulance woman was there, dressed in green and smelling of death, asking unanswerable questions.

  ‘How many did she have?’

  ‘When did she take them?’

  ‘Has she swallowed any vomit?’

  They put things on her face.

  Adam wept, and went with her, in the ambulance. On his way out he told Grandma Margaret to wait there and tell Hal and Kate what had happened. Grandma Margaret wept too.

  When the ambulance had gone I went into Charlotte’s room, climbed onto her bed as she had always allowed, and I breathed in her scent, trying to keep her there with me, trying to stop the outdoor air coming in through the open window to take her away.

  From then on, I swore to myself, everything would be different.

  From then on, bad things wouldn’t happen.

  radiator

  Lapsang had been asleep through everything. She had only woken up when they had taken Charlotte away, in the ambulance.

  ‘Where’s Charlotte?’ she asked, drowsily, as she strolled into the room.

  ‘She’s not here.’

  Lapsang froze as she read my expression. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘She’s at the hospital. She tried to kill herself.’

  Her tail jolted in shock. ‘Will she . . . will she be OK?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Lapsang didn’t say anything after that. She just looked at the bed, as if for the first time in our mutual history she was about to jump up and join me.

  She didn’t. Instead, she turned and walked slowly over towards the piece of carpet situated under the cold metal of the radiator. It would be cooler there.

  superdog

  Charlotte was OK.

  Not OK OK but OK. She was alive, and that was the main thing.

  Adam felt terrible.

  Of course, only I knew why he really felt so bad. Everyone else thought it was just about the way he had treated Charlotte. Not about why he had been delayed, in the park, with Emily.

  He knew to be careful, to keep a careful distance, and indeed, so did I, even though the temptation to sniff for information was strong. I realised I had to rely on my other senses.

  To be honest, she looked pretty bad. Her face was pale, as pale as with her make-up, although this time Adam didn’t say she looked like Death. And her voice had altered. It had a crack in it, as if her old voice had been irreparably damaged by what had happened.

  ‘I don’t know why I did it.’

  Adam smelt relieved after she said that, as if he had thought it had been all down to him. Which of course, it wasn’t. It wasn’t down to any of them. Not really. It was down to me. This type of thing just wasn’t meant to happen. Not to Families with Labradors looking after them.

  That is what I couldn’t understand.

  I had been doing my best. Making sure I stayed within the boundaries as dictated by the Pact. Well OK, most of them. And remember, I had only befriended Falstaff to find out information. I had devoted every single moment of every single day to keeping this Family safe from harm. Using my secret Labrador tricks and special powers. I hadn’t even got side-tracked when we had found Joyce’s body. I had always remembered that our human masters come first. And yet I must have lapsed somewhere. I had definitely got something wrong.

  But then, as things panned out, I started to reassess. Maybe I was being hard on myself. After all, the Family was still together. Charlotte was still here. In fact, looking at it one way, I had saved her life.

  That was certainly the way everyone else was looking at it.

  ‘It was Prince, you know, who realised first,’ Adam told Hal when Charlotte and Kate were out of the room.

  Hal said nothing. He just stroked my head. Slow, careful strokes - not like usual, when he would sink his fingers into my fur and shake my head about a bit.

  ‘We’re living with Superdog,’ Adam added, raising his eyebrows in an attempt to get Hal to speak. But still, he said nothing.

  He was probably working out what this all meant. How he was meant to act. Or, maybe, he was starting to come round to my way of thinking. That speaking isn’t always very helpful. That sometimes you need the silence if things are ever going to mend. Or be retrieved. For the couple of days after Charlotte came home alive, everything was still rather shaky and Adam and Kate were clearly at odds over how to deal with the situation. Adam thought that they should keep a closer eye on Charlotte, but Kate thought that was exactly what went wrong last time.

  ‘Adam, can’t you see: she feels suffocated,’ Kate said, straightening the picture frame of the Family portrait. ‘She’s thirteen, she’s starting to need her freedom.’

  ‘Well, we can’t just let her run wild, can we?’

  ‘I’m not saying she should run wild. I just think we need to be careful. Not so heavy-handed.’

  ‘So you’re saying it was my fault.’

  ‘I’m not saying that at all.’

  Come on, I wagged. This isn’t doing anyone any good. They weren’t listening to me, they just carried on, snapping at each other, giving a voice to all of the forces of tension in the air. But of course, these were forces which extended beyond their bedroom walls into the world outside. A world without Labradors. And I knew where they were centred, these forces. They wer
e centred in the park, and the big, modern house which cast the long shadow.

  carpet

  That night Charlotte woke up, crying. She went into her parents’ bedroom.

  ‘Charlotte, what is it?’

  ‘I had a nightmare,’ she said, through tears. ‘You and dad had split up because of me and I couldn’t see either of you again because every time I tried to step out of my bedroom there was nothing else there.’

  ‘Oh, darling, come here.’ Charlotte nestled into her mother’s pyjamas. ‘It was only a dream. Everything’s all right now.’

  ‘But I’m worried that you and dad will get a divorce and that it’s all my fault.’

  ‘A divorce?’ said Kate, with convincing horror. ‘That would never happen, we’re a close family. A strong family. And we’re going to stay together.’

  Adam blinked awake and said in a sleepy haze: ‘What’s the matter, sweetheart?’

  ‘I just got frightened,’ explained Charlotte. ‘I thought the family was going to fall apart and I thought it would all be because of me.’

  ‘I told her that that was a silly thought and that it’s never going to happen,’ said Kate.

  ‘Your mother’s right,’ said Adam, into his pillow. ‘We’d be the last family in England to fall apart.’ And even more drowsily: ‘The last -’ He slipped back into sleep as Kate held on to her daughter.

  I stood by the door, unnoticed, wagging as hard as I could. Wagging, lifting the air, blocking out thought, and doubt. Blocking out the possibility which was starting to creep into my mind. Not even considering it, not for a second. Because it was nonsense.

  The Pact was going to be enough. Of course it was. It had to be, because what else was there? What else?

  A brief contemplation of that final thought caused me to vomit, leaving a sticky white mess on the carpet.

  ‘Oh, Prince,’ Kate said, as soon as she had realised.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Adam, still heavy with sleep.

  ‘It’s Prince. He’s been sick on the carpet.’

  ‘Oh well,’ he sighed. ‘It can wait till morning.’

  ‘No,’ Kate said, unlocking herself from Charlotte and pulling back the covers. ‘I’ll have to do it now.’

  mad

  Hal had not said much at all the first few days after Charlotte tried to kill herself. The only words he did say were requests to go out with his friend, Jamie.

  Permission was usually granted, although Kate had observed that Jamie was ‘a bad influence’ and preferred Hal to revise. This had been confirmed to me on the first Saturday following his sister’s suicide bid.

  The house had been sleeping for some time when he arrived home, via the back door.

  He looked at me with wide eyes, frisbee-wide, and shut the door. As he moved forward into the kitchen I could see that he was confused, as though he had arrived back at the wrong address.

  He giggled nervously, through his nose, then looked around to see where the noise had come from.

  ‘I am completely out of my tree,’ he whispered, crouching down. ‘Chimpanzee. Out of my tree.’ After more giggles, he sat down on the cold tiled floor and smoothed his back against the refrigerator. As his face was now at dog level I got a closer look.

  Everything was more extreme. His skin was paler, while his spots were redder and angrier than ever. He looked like he had been plucked.

  ‘Fridge music,’ he said, as he nodded his head to the low hum of the refrigerator.

  This was not good. Not good at all. I could hear bed movements upstairs.

  I went over and licked his face.

  This tactic had an undesired effect. Floppy hands and more giggles.

  Oh, Hal, come on!

  His head sprang up and he stared into my eyes. To our mutual shock, my words had broken through. For the first time in his life he actually seemed to understand what I was saying.

  Hal?

  His eyes were now so wide they were protruding out from his face. He was terrified.

  ‘No, no, no. This cannot be happening. This cannot be happening. Dogs don’t talk. Dogs don’t talk.’

  I talk. I always talk.

  The scent of fear was almost intoxicating as Hal attempted to lift himself off the floor. ‘Shit. Talking dog. How much did I have? I’m losing it big style. Orange juice.’

  He pulled a carton of orange juice out of the refrigerator door and started to pour it down his throat. As he glugged it down his frisbee eyes stayed fixed on mine.

  I talk to everyone all the time. It’s just that no one ever listens. You mustn’t be scared. You are not going mad.

  ‘But if, but if, but if -’ I tilted my head expectantly, waiting for him to finish his sentence. ‘But if it is true you would not be speaking like this. You would be speaking like a dog.’ It appeared that he was no longer surprised about the fact that I was talking, but rather with the way I did it.

  What do you think dogs talk like?

  He paused, silently debating whether or not he should answer this question. A question put to him by a household pet. It was a big decision. I watched as the answer started to play with the corners of his mouth.

  ‘If you could really talk,’ he said, ‘you would talk like this: Woof! I want a biscuit. Give me a biscuit! Biscuit! Biscuit! You wouldn’t be able to, you know, say proper things. You wouldn’t be able to hold a meaningfuh - a meaningful - conversation.’

  We pick up everything. And we are talking to humans all the time. Well, those of us that still care.

  ‘Care?’

  While he tried to stop himself shaking, as he quietly sat down at the kitchen table, I started to tell him about the fate of the Hunters. I told him that things might fall apart around him. Then I taught him the things only dogs can teach.

  Life. Love. Loyalty.

  You are the oldest child, Hal, you need to be strong. What you are going through now, it is just a test for the future. It may seem like everything, but it really is nothing. None of the fears and anxieties you now feel will matter. You must focus on what is important. But most of all you must realise one thing. You will be all right, Hal. You will be all right. Do you understand?

  ‘I do,’ he said. ‘I understand.’

  We heard sleepy footsteps, on the landing. ‘Hal?’

  It was Kate, ready to interrupt our private conference.

  ‘Mum. I’m just getting a, um, a glass, glass, glass of water.’

  ‘Who were you talking to?’

  ‘Um, no one.’ Somehow his voice managed to convince her and she headed back to the bedroom. For a short time we sat in silence, saying nothing. We had made progress, I was sure. He was still shaky, yes, but it had been quite a shock.

  Eventually he left the table and whispered in my ear: ‘Can you hear that?’ I told him I couldn’t hear anything. ‘The kettle,’ he continued. ‘The kettle is saying things.’ He moved across to the kitchen unit and placed his ear next to the kettle.

  My heart plummeted.

  A talking kettle, I ask you.

  nice

  After a few days, things settled.

  In some ways, things were starting to become better than they had ever been. Charlotte may not have succeeded in killing herself, but she had certainly put something to rest. She had emerged from her near-death experience a completely new person. She was now starting to act as though she was a member of the household through choice, rather than sheer obligation. Because perhaps she was. Perhaps, in her unconscious state, she had faced death and then turned the other way. To come back. To face up to responsibility.

  Her new behaviour did not go unnoticed.

  Adam, despite the argument with Kate, was definitely less heavy-handed. Each time he made a suggestion as to what the Family should do he would ask Charlotte: ‘How do you feel about that?’

  And Hal didn’t begrudge his sister this special treatment. In fact, he welcomed it, perhaps having heeded what I had told him. He was certainly looking at me differently. But when I trie
d to talk to him, he no longer seemed able to listen. He didn’t decide to resume our conversation, and certainly didn’t return home in the same state again. Anyway, he didn’t seem to mind his parents’ focus on Charlotte. It meant that he could hide away in his room for hours on end, revising, or doing whatever it was that caused such tempestuous movements of the duvet, with no one even noticing his absence.

  There were other changes too.

  Adam was less angry with Grandma Margaret, whose Controversial Opinions were now largely ignored. He was also starting to wait longer before taking me for my evening walk. We went last thing. I don’t think he wanted to see Emily any more. Not after what happened to Charlotte.

  With no outside danger to distract us, the park was ours again. Stick-throwing resumed, if not quite as enthusiastically as before, and we tried to make sure we stayed out of view of the big modern house.

  The only problem now was Kate. The scent of anxiety was intensifying and I couldn’t believe it was only about Charlotte. Because, of course, it wasn’t only about Charlotte. Or rather, it was, but not in the way I could have sensed.

  So while the Emily-threat may have evaporated, the Simon-threat remained. Which probably explains why she was so enthusiastic when Adam re-suggested a weekend away.

  ‘We could go to Devon, there are some lovely b-and-b’s in the book,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Adam. And then, remarkably: ‘We could all go. You’d enjoy a weekend away, wouldn’t you, Margaret?’

  Grandma Margaret smiled and nodded her head.

  ‘I’ve got my revision,’ said Hal, raising his sandwich in objection.

  ‘Well, you can stay,’ said Kate. ‘We’re not going to force you. Not any more.’

  ‘So, Charlotte,’ said Adam. ‘Weekend away. How do you feel about it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, smiling softly. ‘It would be nice.’

  fur

  The next morning I was more impatient than ever on my way to the park.