What Mum said made my heart sink. We all relied on Julie for her common sense, her ability to look right into the heart of a situation. I was scared silly. Julie was far too level headed to believe in anything as impossible as me! She sees things very clearly, Julie, but she just hates it if you disagree with her, and I couldn’t see her agreeing with this one.
First thing though – I had to have some food inside me. I slid down off my chair and, using the sides of the table to help me stay upright, I walked on my hind legs to the fridge and tried to pull the door open with my paw. It was hard – my balance wasn’t good enough. I looked over my shoulder. They were all staring at me with their mouths wide open. I thought, What are they all staring at? Haven’t they ever seen anyone go to the fridge for food before? What did they think a fridge was for?
‘I’m hungry!’ I explained. Dad turned pale and Adam turned red. Mum’s hand went back up to her mouth. It was making me feel cross, this permanent staring as if I was some sort of freak.
‘I think she wants something to eat,’ said Adam.
‘What shall I give her?’ asked Mum, and Adam said,
‘We haven’t got any – have we?’
‘What?’
‘Well, dog food.’
How dare he! But he just went on, ‘I could ring Julie and ask her to get some on the way round.’
Mum had gone to the cupboard. ‘I’ve got some tinned stew, do you think she’d like that?’
‘If it’s supposed to be Sandra …’ began my dad.
‘She,’ snapped Mum. ‘If she’s supposed to be Sandra.’
‘Sorry. If she’s supposed to be Sandra, maybe she’d like what Sandra likes. Why not make her a fried egg sandwich?’
‘Good idea,’ said Mum, although I wasn’t sure there wasn’t a trace of sarcasm in Dad’s voice. I certainly saw him and Adam exchange glances. But Mum did as he suggested. At last the sandwich was ready, but then, after being so good, Mum let me down badly by putting it on the floor. I wasn’t having that. I jumped up on to a chair, and said, ‘Up here, please!’ although you wouldn’t have guessed that’s what I was saying by the noise I made.
Mum hesitated, then quietly cut the food up into small pieces before putting it down in front of me. I didn’t make a fuss about that – she only did it so I wouldn’t have to slobber and chomp over the big pieces of bread.
‘Perhaps she’d like a knife and fork,’ said Adam.
‘Adam!’ snapped Mum.
‘Oh, sorry, right, you don’t need a knife and fork for sandwiches, do you?’
‘Adam, that’s enough!’
‘Well. If she’s so human why can’t she make her own sandwich?’
‘Don’t be stupid, she’s doing her best. She can’t – help herself very much at the moment. It’s like I said – like she’s disabled or something.’ I caught a glance of Adam rolling his eyes at Dad. I thought, Well – I’ll show them! Then I wolfed down my sandwich. It wasn’t bad. I admit I’d have preferred meat but I’d rather have died than admit that to them. Then Mum made tea. She put mine in a wide pint mug, bless her, so I could lap out of it, and we all sat in an uncomfortable silence, and waited for Julie to arrive.
Ten minutes later there was the sound of a key in the front door.
‘I hope she hasn’t brought Angelo with her,’ said Dad.
‘Keep the family shame a secret,’ said Adam. Then the kitchen door opened and in came Julie.
‘What’s that?’ she asked as she came in, catching sight of me. ‘You haven’t gone and got a dog, have you?’ she asked Mum. She reached down to pat me and I started licking her hand, but then I thought, No, that’s not me – licking the hand of anyone who wants to pat me, so I stopped.
Mum stood up, ran her fingers through her hair and said, ‘Watch.’
She made me do all the tricks all over again. First of all the dog ones, sit up, roll over, play dead, beg. Julie was laughing and clapping me on to start with. Then we got on to the slightly dodgy ones, a bit too clever for a dog – shake your right paw, shake your left paw, tap the ground five times, tap the ground thirteen-take-away-seven times. Julie’s eyes started to pop out of her head. I was enjoying myself. Then Mum got on to the family ones – how old is Julie, how old is Adam? When she got to tap out your birthday, I turned to face Julie as I did it. She didn’t know who I was yet, she only knew that I was impossible. She was always saying that sort of thing to me. ‘You’re impossible, Sandra. Grow up!’ You know. Now she was going to learn just how impossible I really was.
As I tapped out fourteen for the day, her face turned a chalky white. As I tapped out ten for the month, she backed off and leaned against the worksurface, her hand groping at her mouth as if she’d forgotten what it was for.
‘Tap out the year, then,’ said Adam.
‘Shut up, Adam,’ said Mum. ‘Just do the digits separately,’ she told me. I did the one, pause; the nine, pause; the eight, pause, then three.
Julie let out a little moan. You could feel the temperature in the room drop.
Dad put his arm around her and led her a little further up the counter away from me. As far as he was concerned, I was something out of the Special Effects department.
‘What’s this all about?’ demanded Julie. She pushed Dad’s arms off her and looked around the room, at Mum, at Dad, at Adam – but not at me. No one said a word. ‘What are you trying to tell me?’ she asked, but no one had the courage to answer her. Dad and Adam looked down at their shoes. Mum chewed on a nail.
‘You tell me,’ she said.
‘Are you trying to tell me …?’ Julie paused and shook her head, because she didn’t want to have to be the one who said it. But no one else was going to say it for her.
‘How do you explain it?’ demanded Mum. ‘How can a dog do all those things? Just tell me that!’
‘Are you trying to tell me that this … dog … this … dog … is … our Sandra? Is that it? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?’ Julie leaned forward.
Mum closed her eyes and nodded. She looked as if she’d just swallowed a fish whole.
‘Mum.’ Julie got off the worktop and walked up to her. ‘Mum!’ She turned round at Dad. ‘Have you been going along with this?’
‘No one’s going along with anything. How do you explain it then? Go on, explain it to me because there’s only one answer I can see,’ insisted Mum. I ran to her and leaned my back against her legs, but Julie had just got going.
‘Look at it. It has four legs, teeth at one end, hair in the middle and an arsehole at the back. It’s a dog. It craps on the pavement. People are different. You might have noticed. Two legs for instance. Flat faces, fingers, that sort of thing. Conversation. Remember?’
‘I know what people look like, Julie.’
‘It doesn’t look anything like Sandra! Sandra hasn’t got a big nose, Sandra hasn’t got a two-foot tongue – it doesn’t even have the same hair colour as Sandra, for God’s sake!’
Adam had started giggling. I growled at him to shut up, and he shut up.
Mum was furious. ‘Then how, how, how, how do you explain it?’ she shouted.
‘How should I know? How can I explain it? It’s some sort of freak. It doesn’t behave like a dog, but it is a dog, any idiot can see that. Give it to a vet, maybe they’ll be able to find out what’s wrong with it. Give it to the University, I don’t know. It’s probably a circus dog. They can train them to do anything. They can do anything with smells, dogs …’
‘Smells won’t help it count, Julie!’
‘It can’t count! It just reacts to certain words with a certain number of taps. I’ve seen horses do it. Dad?’ Julie looked appealingly at him. Dad rubbed his face.
‘How does it know all those things about the family?’ he asked.
‘She’s been kidnapped, the kidnappers have trained it. Sandra gave them all that information and they trained it …’
‘What, in four weeks?’ asked Dad.
‘Maybe they’ve
been training it up for ages. Maybe four weeks is enough. How do I know how long it takes to train a dog?’
‘But what for? Don’t you think we’ve been through all this?’ Dad demanded. ‘Don’t you think we’ve tried all the other explanations? The trouble is,’ he said, ‘the trouble is, no matter which way you look at it, it’s impossible, that’s what the trouble is. It just doesn’t make sense.’
‘People don’t turn into animals!’ insisted Julie.
‘Dogs don’t know the things people do,’ said Dad.
‘Werewolves,’ said Adam suddenly. I might have known his contribution would be something barmy like that. ‘Maybe she’s a werewolf, or a weredog or something.’
Julie waved her hand at him. ‘You’ve been watching too many crap films.’
‘Well, you tell me what it is then, because you haven’t so far. It’s all very well looking for a rational explanation, but this isn’t rational, is it? It’s supernatural. She must be a werewolf.’
I was listening to this conversation with my heart banging like a bullet inside me. Which way was it going to go? But suddenly I felt that I had to join in. I stood up. Everyone in the room looked at me and went quiet. It was difficult balancing. I was getting better at it but I still sort of tottered round in a circle. Then I managed to straighten myself up and looked Julie in the eye. I cleared my throat with a gruff little cough and said,
‘Julie. Julie. It’s me. I am Sandra.’
Julie went as white as a sheet. ‘Why’s it growling at me? Look out! It knows I haven’t been taken in … I think it’s turning savage!’ As she spoke she backed off towards the fridge. I took a couple of steps after her and she screamed, ‘Get it away from me!’
‘She’s trying to talk,’ said Mum. ‘She talks! Do you understand? She talks!’
‘Talks? Have you all gone stark staring bonkers? It’s a bloody dog, for God’s sake, it doesn’t talk, it growls! Get a grip, will you? I know, we’re all under a strain, but, Jesus, I could do without this, I really could! Christ! D, O, G, dog! Dog! Dog!’
There was another pause. Mum had gone very pale. I looked pleadingly up at her, but I could see that Julie had shaken her conviction that I was her daughter.
‘You heard it talk, didn’t you, Adam?’ she asked. ‘It said Adam, didn’t it?’
Adam licked his lips. ‘It sounded a bit like Adam but that doesn’t mean anything. There was that dog on telly that used to say sausages, remember that? No one said that was a person, did they?’
Julie edged around me and put her arm around Mum’s shoulders. ‘Mum, I know how much you miss her. I miss her too. But this isn’t going to bring her back! You’re just stretching out the agony. Really! That dog is not your daughter. You can see that, can’t you?’
Mum looked at me with wild eyes, then suddenly burst into tears and buried her face in Julie’s shoulder. I just stared in horror. Things had been going so well, but now they were all turning against me. Julie patted Mum’s shoulder and went on, ‘What we need to do is call the police so they can find out who’s done this. One thing is true – this dog is evidence that Sandra’s still alive. If someone’s gone to all this trouble to train a dog to know things only she knows, it probably means she’s … well, that she’s still alive. You see? OK, Mum?’
Mum had a tissue up to her face, but she nodded.
‘You’ll call the police, Mum?’
Mum paused and shook her head. ‘I’ll think about what you’ve said. Just – give me a little time to get used to the idea. I don’t want to – that is, I can’t hand her over yet.’
She looked down at me as she spoke, and she looked just devastated. I was looking from Mum to Adam to Dad to Julie, but none of them could meet my eye. I’d come so far and now they were going to give me up, send me to the police and God knows what sort of fate. With a howl of disappointment I turned and fled the room, ran up to my bedroom and flung myself on the bed to cry my heart out. A minute later, I heard someone creep up outside and start fiddling at the door – jamming the handle somehow. I was trapped, but I didn’t care. Tears were streaming down my face. Julie didn’t want me, Adam didn’t want me, Dad didn’t want me. All that I could have put up with, but now even Mum was turning her back on me. All I wanted to do was die, as soon as possible, and put an end to my miserable, useless life. But even as I thought that, as I lay there at the bottom of despair, I knew I wasn’t going to die. I’d never give up, I’m not that sort. Girl or dog, I was going to carry on being myself right up until my last breath, no matter how bitter it was to do it.
And when I thought that, instead of feeling sorry for myself, I was taken over by a terrible rage. I mean, who did they think they were? What right did they have to decide who I bloody was? It was the same story all over again – all people ever want to do is to judge you. If you don’t look right, you’re wrong, if you don’t behave right, you’re wrong, no one wants to know you. It doesn’t make any difference how much you need them or how much you love them, or how much they love you. If you don’t fit – out! You’re a slut, you’re no good, you’re worth nothing! Out! Out!
When I’d been working hard at school and had friends like Annie and a nice boyfriend like Simon, then I was the lovely daughter. But because I’d dropped Annie and started seeing other people, people who had a bit of life in them, because I started seeing other boys, suddenly I was no good, no one liked me, everyone thought I was just some little piece of shit stuck to their heel. Now I was a dog and it was just exactly the same. So what was so bad about being a dog anyway? Human beings think they’re it, they really do – but they’re not it, I can tell you! I’ve tasted life from both sides and I can tell you – worry worry worry, stress stress stress. Don’t do this, do that, think this, how dare you – it’s just a long stupid game with more and more stupid rules to take up your precious time.
I ran around my bedroom, champing my jaws and snarling and growling. Can you blame me? So I was a dog! So what? It was still me inside, if only they took the trouble to know me. But oh, no – they knew better! They knew exactly what I was!
At least as a dog you knew where you were. At least you could trust your friends. At least people didn’t let you down! The more I thought about it, the more my life as a dog seemed better than my life as a person. Fella loved me. Mitch did, too – they’d both have died for me if they had to and they’d never judged me once in all the time I’d known them. See Mum and Dad or Adam or Julie doing that! Or Simon, or Annie, or Michelle or Wayne or Dobby, or Mosley, the guy I took home from Swingler’s that night, or Dave or Jason, or any of those other lads I’d been with over the past year. In fact, life as a dog was pretty bloody good. Not with Terry – sod him – but running with the pack, hunting, using my nose and my wits to stay alive! What could be better than that? A dog’s life burns bright when she’s not sold out to some master or mistress. Short, but oh, so sweet. And here I was about to throw all that away!
I began to remember how pissed off I’d been with seeing Simon every weekend, doing my homework so neatly every night, helping around the house, all that shit. Now I could just do what I wanted and where was I? Out with the pack? No, I was stuck here at home weeping and wailing because my bloody family couldn’t accept me as I was. So what’s new? What had changed? Nothing – not even myself, when it came down to it.
I was so furious I hardly knew what I was doing. I raged around the bedroom, leaping up and tearing the cushions and sheets with my teeth, I was so upset. I chewed my school books – no more bloody work for me! I pulled the duvet off the bed, I peed on the carpet, I shook my clothes until the stitches popped. I thought my rage would go on forever, but then, as I was nosing about looking for something else to attack, I found Mr Brown, my old teddy I’ve had since I was three. He was lying half buried under a pile of shredded clothes. I didn’t have the heart to tear him to pieces. Instead, I picked him up tenderly in my jaws and carried him to my bed. I held him in my legs, licked his face, and gradually began to calm
down and think properly.
I was never much good at being a person, me. It’s so hard! It’s hard, it’s hard, being a person. I lay there on that bed and I thought, God, this is going to go on for another seventy years! Seventy years of people pushing you into being something you’re not. Seventy years of rage and anxiety, worrying about things you don’t care about, like GCSEs and if you’re dressed nicely and if your face is clean and if you’re making your mum or your husband or your kids unhappy and whose feelings you’re going to hurt next. Seventy years of getting up in the morning when you don’t want to and going somewhere you don’t like. Tests and rules and skills and assessments, and then another set of tests and rules and skills and assessments. On and on and on and on and on it goes. What’s the point? Why bother? I wasn’t ambitious, I wasn’t going to change the world. All I wanted was to have a good time. I mean!
There were things I missed. My parents, my friends. Oh, I know I moan about them but that doesn’t mean I don’t love them. And the dances and the music, the whole thing. Packets of crisps, clothes, money in your pocket. People! I love people. There’s a hundred great things about being a human being. I thought about how I used to look, my slim legs and my smooth tummy, my round breasts with their pink nipples and my smiley face, and how much I missed looking like me … but then there was Fella sniffing under my tail and growling to himself, ‘Hmmm, that’s good!’ That made me lick my lips. I looked up and caught sight of myself in the mirror and waggled my eyebrows up and down, and the sight of a dog waggling her eyebrows was so funny I laughed, Huf huf huf!
I felt better then. I curled up and tucked my nose under my tail so I could breathe in my sweet scents, and fell asleep lying there on the bed, breathing in the rich centre of my dogginess.
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