What if he did it to the whole human race? What a paradise the world would be then! No one to open the tin or drive the car or put one brick on top of another. No one to open the window, or lock the door. No one to count the money, or spend it. The pack would come back to the fields and woods and run along the crumbling streets. In my imagination I could see the shops of Copson Street growing dirty and caving in, the pavements sinking, the road breaking up, the grass and trees coming back. Rabbits grazing the car parks! Calves and lambs up for the hunting!
I thought of the city farm down at Wythenshaw Park and reminded myself to pay it a visit.
Then I shook my head and the world of man came back to my eye – stinking cars and food in jars, and the world wrapped up like a toy for big pale monkeys. Sod them!
And there was Terry.
‘Master,’ I thought. When I was a girl I would have spat on that word, but now that I was a bitch I felt a bubble of love in my heart. What that word meant! Food, companionship, love. I was sure I could love him. Could he love me?
I came forward slowly, with my head hunched down, my eyes steady on his face, my tail slowly wagging. The old man next to him spotted me first.
‘Is that dog yours?’ he asked.
Terry’s eyes turned and fell on me, and he started. ‘God no, nothing to do with me,’ he croaked.
The older man glanced at him and raised his eyebrows curiously. ‘It seems to know you, that’s all. Here, boy …’ He put out a hand encouragingly towards me. ‘Come on, boy. What’s your name, then? Good dog!’
People always assume a dog’s a boy, but I didn’t care. I let him ruffle the fur on my head and pat my back, but I kept my eyes on Terry. I could smell the fear creeping over him, springing out of his pores. He was inching himself away from me along the bench, his can held hidden under his coat, his legs wrapped round each other tightly. He watched nervously as the other man stroked me, but he didn’t offer me his hand.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked me.
I nodded. The older man laughed and said, ‘What a way to speak to a dog!’
Terry grinned weakly. ‘Good … girl?’ he said, in a questioning tone of voice. He bobbed his head to look underneath me and check, and despite myself, I felt myself blush. He put his hand out carefully, ready to snatch it away if I went for him, but I bowed my head and let him pat me and fondle my ears. Then I licked his hand to show submission. Terry began to smile. I whined and put my paw on the bench beside him.
‘She seems very fond for a dog that’s nothing to do with you,’ said the older man, sounding slightly hurt that I had gone for Terry and not him.
‘Oh, I have a way with them, don’t I, girl?’ smiled Terry. Now that he knew I was friendly his mood had completely changed. He was smiling and squeezing his hands together as if he’d just found a pile of money. He stood up suddenly. ‘Here, I’ve got things to do,’ he said.
‘Things to do, have you? Oh, well, fancy that,’ said the man. ‘Something on the Stock Exchange, is it?’
Terry nodded absently and took a few steps away. I followed at his heel. We walked up the road and round the corner and as soon as we were out of sight, he took hold of the loose skin behind my head and shook my head gently.
‘I didn’t mean to do it, you know. Oh, but you make a lovely dog, you know that? You make a better dog than you did a girl, and that’s saying something. I used to notice you all the time, walking up and down the street with your friends. Oh, you were gorgeous, weren’t you? And you’re gorgeous now. Yes, you are!’ He paused and stared at me as if he wasn’t sure. Then he got down on his haunches in front of me and held my face in his hands.
‘Is it you? Is it really you? Give me your left paw if you understand me.’
I put my left paw up to him.
‘Now your right.’
I gave him my right paw.
‘I knew it was you! Can you talk at all?’
I tried to say, ‘I’m practising,’ but it came out sounding nothing like it. Terry laughed.
‘Are you hungry?’
‘Yeah!’
‘What? I can’t make out a word. Use your head.’
I nodded. Tears sprang into Terry’s eyes and he began patting me and stroking me.
‘Oh, you’re gorgeous. You are, aren’t you? Yes you are. Yes you are! Aren’t you lovely, aren’t you gorgeous? Oh, I love you, I love you, I love you, you good dog, you good girl, you good good good girl!’
After a time he sighed, stood up and led me up the road to buy me meat. I’ll say this for Terry, he took care of me. If I went hungry, he went hungry first. Only the drinking came before I did, but the drinking came before everything, even himself. Oh, I was jealous of the drink.
On that first day we were both so happy just to be together. We walked back into Withington for the butcher and he bought me some dog meat and begged a marrow bone for me – delicious! Then he got some bread rolls from Somerfield’s and I wolfed those down too, while he stood and watched, rubbing his can between his hands and laughing at me. It made people look fondly at him – the poor man feeding his dog good food while he stuck to his beer. One woman stopped and gave him a pound.
‘See you spend it on yourself this time,’ she told him.
‘Thank you, ma’am,’ said Terry politely. ‘That means I can have another drink,’ he told me when she’d gone. I pushed a roll towards him with my nose, but he waved his can in the air. ‘This’ll do me for now, I can’t take breakfast so early,’ he told me. He leaned forward to stroke me. ‘It’s the least I can do, you poor girl. God, but I’d change places with you if I could!’
After he bought himself another drink, Terry went round to the café to beg some water. The owner gave him an old plastic bowl for me to drink from, and poor Terry was so delighted and made such a fuss of saying thank you, that he made the man blush with pleasure.
‘If that’s all it took to make the rest of us happy, the world would be an easy place,’ he said.
‘Yes, but not for long,’ said a woman standing in the dark kitchen behind him. I stood there sniffing – bacon, grease, fried eggs, baked beans, armpits, the perfume from the woman, frying oil – my God! There were times in that first week when the smells of this world threatened to overcome me, like an invasion of my nose.
After I’d drunk my water we settled ourselves down on the pavement. Terry had an old blanket which we shared half each, just as we shared everything. He folded my half over my head and tucked it up under my chin – I must have looked like someone’s granny – and gave me a big kiss on the nose, which tickled me and made me huff and lick his face.
‘We’ll get you a blanket of your own, soon. Maybe the charity shop will help us out,’ he said. He put the drinking bowl in front of us and then took a creased, dirty piece of paper out of his pocket. It read, ‘Please help,’ in blue biro. He found a pen in his coat and added, ‘Dog and self to feed,’ underneath. Then he settled himself back.
‘A dog is a responsibility,’ he told me. ‘You need feeding and watering. We should get some jabs for you. There’s all these diseases around that dogs get, you know. There’s charities for that. There’s as many charities for dogs as there are for people.’ He ruffled my ears. ‘A dog – it’s a lot of work. But what can I do? You used to be such a pretty girl, and now you’re a pretty dog. Well, girl – you look after me and I’ll look after you, eh? That’s the way, eh? And I’ll call you Lady. OK?’
I said, ‘That’s the only way I’d ever get to be a lady, then,’ and he laughed, although I don’t think he understood. He made me so happy, talking to me like that, but already I was losing track of what he said, it was just grunts and mumbles to me. Soon, I slipped away into a lovely, warm doggy doze.
We did all right, me and Terry that day, as far as the money went. All day it was chinkitty-chinking down into my dog bowl. Terry got more beers and got happy, and that made me happy. He promised to love me and I promised to love him. He wept tears and me, poor bitch, I h
ad no tears any more, so I licked his off his face and I whined and held up my paw and rolled over so he could tickle my tummy.
‘You forgive me,’ he whispered, and I was so grateful that he wanted me to forgive him that I did – forgave him in a second for stealing my whole life off me. The people going past were so touched at the sight of us cooing over each other, the money came down faster than ever – too fast, really. Poor Terry wasn’t used to so much money and drank too much beer. By the time the afternoon was half way through he was too drunk to speak, and just about managed to stagger away and find a place out of sight to pass out in, behind a cheap hotel on the Palatine Road. He slept there for a couple of hours – me on guard, and I was proud as a soldier. I was quite prepared to savage anyone who came too near.
Looking back, it’s something I can’t understand, why I was so grateful to Terry of all people for the smallest little kindnesses he gave me. But I wasn’t the first to fall head over heels in love with someone who has destroyed their whole life. The thing is, he was all I had in the world, my last living link to being human. Every little thing I did for him, it felt like he was doing me a favour.
As the dark came, he woke up.
‘Jesus,’ he said, staring at me in the half light. I perked my ears as prettily as I could and wagged my tail. ‘Still want to celebrate, do you,’ he said thickly. But it was only more of the same – bread rolls and a slice of belly pork and water for me and a four pack of Special Brew for him. I wanted to walk and play and hunt – I don’t know what I wanted! To fetch sticks, anything! – but Terry had finished his day already. He just wanted to get out of it as fast as he could. He took me and the beer back to his shelter – a piece of corrugated plastic behind the hotel – drank the beers one after the other, bang bang bang bang, with hardly a word spoken. Then he staggered off to empty his bladder nearby, rolled himself up in the blanket, pulled a corner of it out for me to lie on, and went straight back to sleep for the night.
I thought, Is that it? A day in the life of a drunk? But I’d made a start. Maybe if he cared for me enough, he could turn me back into myself. What else was there to hope for? I prowled up and down the garden, but I wouldn’t go far away from him. I had to protect him. If anything happened to my Terry I’d be stuck like this forever. At last, boredom turned into exhaustion, and I curled up with my back to him and tried to sleep.
But my head was buzzing. It was going to be a long night. I’d been busy all day, but now that I had some time on my hands, thoughts and memories of everything I’d lost came flooding back to me. My family – how was my disappearance affecting them? Did they think I’d been murdered or raped? Most likely they’d think I’d run away from home. That would be just typical of me – to let them run around looking after me and loving me for years and years and then dump them as soon as things got a bit difficult. I’d thought about running away from home so often in the past year – and I’d told them I wanted to do it, too. Only a week or so ago, I’d had a row with Mum and told her that the only reason I carried on living with her was because there was nowhere else to go. She’d shouted and wept, but I didn’t care.
My poor mum! Now that the shock of her not recognising me had worn off, I began to see things a little more from her point of view. How could she have known who I was? I barely recognised myself. I was a dog – I was impossible! I was always asking the impossible of people. And now I might never get to tell her how much I loved her and appreciated her.
And it wasn’t just my mum either. My dad – had he been told that I’d disappeared? And poor Julie and Adam – what did it feel like for them to have a sister like me, who just used people all the time? I hadn’t realised that my life was so full of people who cared for me before that night. My friends at school. Annie, who I’d turned my back on, because she wasn’t enough fun. Simon, my old boyfriend, who I dumped because he was too steady and faithful …
‘Are you sure it’s not because you think you’re not good enough for him?’ That’s what Annie said, and I’d laughed at her at the time, but now look – I was a dog, not good enough for anyone any more. All those people gone forever out of my life, and I was doomed to walk the same streets as them and see the same sights, and yet they’d never know me. They’d see me but they’d never know me. If only I could be given back my human voice just for an hour, so that I could tell them who I was!
And it was all my fault. All I’d been bothered about was having a good time. I didn’t want any responsibilities or commitments, not even to my own friends. I made everyone unhappy, and I didn’t even care.
The funny thing is, it’s almost like I decided to go off the rails in my life. I can pretty nearly remember the first time it occurred to me that there had to be more to life than what I was getting. It was in my bedroom with Annie. We often used to do our homework together, we’d go round to each other’s houses and just work. I was never as clever as her – she was always top of everything – but I never had any trouble with schoolwork, so long as I could be bothered to do it.
It was fun doing homework with Annie because she was a good laugh as well as hardworking. We were doing nets that day, and she was cracking me up by going on about doing a net of her boyfriend’s willy and seeing if our teacher could work it out and put it back together again.
‘I bet she’d take it home and make it up out of cardboard or something,’ she said.
And I said, ‘Then she’d bring it in the next day and it would be ruined!’ And we’d both fall around laughing like a pair of drains.
But all the time we were sitting there laughing, I was thinking, It’s all right making jokes and things, but actually, really – I’d rather be doing something else. I’d been thinking like that about a lot of things. About people. My dad, and how he was always on at me to come and visit him in the USA – I mean, why couldn’t he come and visit me? And my mum, who I wasn’t getting on with, and what a pain Adam was, and how I was bored with school, bored with Annie, bored with Simon. Everyone wanted something off me, you know? Annie wanted me to spend more time doing homework, because our mock GCSEs were coming up. Simon wanted more time with me. Mum said I was going out too much. See? The exact same people who were supposed to be my friends, and all they wanted was me to be someone else. It was just too much.
Annie started on about not going to Planet K that Friday. She thought we ought to stay in and work instead, because of the exams coming up.
‘We can’t just work all the time,’ I said. ‘You know how much I like Planet’s.’
‘Well, I’m staying in. You could go with Simon,’ she said, but she knew very well that Simon wasn’t going to come. He was working on Friday nights. He was worse than her, he didn’t even like me going to a club without him because he was scared I’d get off with other boys. I had to stay in because he was too busy for me! It was stupid. I just wanted to go out and have a good time.
I don’t know why, but that just started me off.
‘Do you know what?’ I said to Annie. ‘I don’t care. I’m just realising it now.’
‘What do you mean? What don’t you care about?’
‘Anything. This. Work. Getting good results.’
‘You need good results, though.’
‘One day maybe. But why now?’
Annie just shrugged. ‘That’s what you do at our age,’ she said.
‘I can do them later. Or not. But I don’t care. I don’t care about any of it, really. I just do it, but I don’t care really. It doesn’t mean anything to me, really.’
She looked at me and laughed. ‘You’re crazy, Sand,’ she told me.
‘Yeah, but I don’t care. Do you see what I mean? Actually, I don’t care about anything. Not even Simon, you know?’
‘I thought you loved him.’
‘I do, but I don’t care!’ It made me laugh. I didn’t even know what I was talking about, but I knew it was true. ‘I could stop seeing him and it’d break me up but I wouldn’t care. I mean, so what? He’s always on a
t me about things too. I’d miss him, but it wouldn’t make me unhappy. I think I might even be more happy. Isn’t that weird?’
‘And what about me – don’t you care about me, either?’ she asked, and I said at once,
‘Oh, no, I care about you, of course, you’re my best friend.’ And I went over to give her a hug but, really, she was right. I didn’t care about her either even though she was my best friend. Does any of that make sense? All the time I was reassuring her I was thinking, actually, sitting here doing homework with her wasn’t my idea of a good time either.
That Friday I went to Planet K on my own, despite Annie and despite Simon and you know what? I thought going on my own was going to be boring and lousy, but it wasn’t. It was brilliant. It was just brilliant. I remember coming home about two in the morning, and I knew Mum was going to kill me for being late and not ringing, and I just couldn’t care less. I’d met up with this gang, they were great. I was pissed out of my head and I’d had some puff, and I’d walked half the way home with this lad. We didn’t do anything, not much anyway, just felt each other up – and it was just brilliant.
‘That was just so brilliant. That was just so brilliant!’ I shouted. I was walking home on my own shouting my face off. ‘What am I doing with my life? Why aren’t I just doing this all the time?’ I yelled.
And after that I couldn’t stop myself. I just decided to get off on anything I could find to get off on. I stopped seeing Simon, even though I loved him; I stopped seeing Annie, even though she was my best friend. I stopped working hard at school, even though I wanted a good job. And it was just great. I was so much happier. You might not believe it. But I was.
Lady Page 6
