Authors: Mark Mills
I glance down at my feet. Doggo was there before; he’s now on the sofa. He knows he’s not allowed on the sofa, but he doesn’t seem too worried about my reaction. In fact he’s not even looking at me. His chin is on his paws and he’s staring intently out of the window, as though the passing clouds hold the key to some metaphysical conundrum he’s wrestling with.
‘Doggo.’
He doesn’t turn, but then again it’s not a name he has ever answered to, possibly because he knows it’s not really a name, just something we’re calling him until we’ve decided what we’re really going to call him.
We’ve tried everything – we’ve even trawled through websites of baby names, but somehow none of them fitted. For a while we thought ‘Eustace’ might be the answer. It didn’t even last a day. According to Wikipedia, St Eustace was a Roman general who converted to Christianity only to suffer a grim catalogue of torments and misfortunes which included being roasted alive, along with his sons, inside a bronze statue of a bull. You had to hand it to the Emperor Hadrian: he not only knew how to build a wall, he had a dark imagination when it came to disposing of his enemies. St Eustace, I now know, is the patron saint of firefighters (the ones who failed to put out the flames that cooked him) and, more generally, anyone facing adversity.
‘Eustace,’ I say. ‘I’m facing adversity.’
Doggo cocks his ear, just the one, the left one, but it’s little more than a momentary twitch. His eyes remain fixed on the scudding clouds.
I pull my mobile from my pocket. I know her number is stored in it because we communicated about the surprise birthday party for Clara back in April. She works as a coordinator for a children’s activities company and seems to spend most of her time white-water rafting in Wales. What with it being the school holidays, I’m expecting to leave a message.
She answers on the fourth ring. ‘Daniel … …’
Just one word, but it carries in it an enticing mix of pleasure, surprise and anticipation.
‘Hey, Polly.’ Another twitch of Doggo’s ear, the right one this time. ‘How’s it going?’
Clara only has herself to blame, I tell myself, almost believing it. The thought would never have occurred to me if she hadn’t brought it up.
‘Great,’ chirps Polly. ‘Working like a dog.’
I look at Doggo welded to the sofa, almost at one with it, and I wonder where on earth that phrase came from.
I
T ONLY OCCURS
to me as we’re boarding the bus.
‘Am I allowed to travel with a dog?’
‘Driver’s discretion, mate.’
They’re caged off nowadays, bus drivers, for their own protection, and he has to press his nose to the Perspex screen to get a better view of Doggo down below.
‘Jesus,’ he mutters, unimpressed. ‘You’ll have to have him on your lap.’
‘I can’t. He’ll bite me if I try and pick him up.’
‘What, violent, is he? A public hazard?’
‘No, no, it’s just that …’ I trail off pathetically. What can I say? It’s true: he will bite me if I try and lift him on to my lap.
‘Sorry, mate, rules is rules.’ Please don’t say it, I think, but he does. ‘It’s more than my job’s worth.’
Normally I would plead my case, even create a scene, but I’m not feeling up to it today. I was barely able to boil an egg for my breakfast earlier. ‘Fair enough. Sorry to bother you. Have a nice day.’
I’m stepping off the bus when the driver says, ‘Now if he was a guide dog, say, or a seizure alert dog, or a mental health companion dog …’
‘He isn’t.’
The driver rolls his eyes and spells it out slowly for the dim-witted: ‘’Cos all them dogs trump driver’s discretion.’
‘Oh yes, he’s a seizure alert dog.’ I pat my chest to make the point.
‘Heart trouble at your age?’ he snorts. ‘You’re havin’ a laugh.’
But he’s the one having a laugh at my expense. He winks, nods for me to take a seat. I touch my Oyster card to the reader and thank him.
‘Tuck him out of sight. Don’t want him scaring the other passengers, do we?’
This time he isn’t joking.
The Battersea Dogs & Cats Home is jammed in between an old gasworks and the desolate wasteland that rings the long-defunct Battersea Power Station. It’s hard to imagine a more miserable spot for the housing of unwanted pets. The tight triangular site is bordered by railway lines on two sides and a busy road on the other. The place has received a makeover since I last passed by it some years ago. (I rarely come south of the river; north-west London has always been my stomping ground, for no other reason than it’s where I first landed in the capital.) A building with a curved glass facade now presents its gleaming face to the road. The flashy architecture seems a little excessive, a cruel taunt to all the expectant relatives who found themselves without a bean when the lawyer read out the terms of Great-Aunt Mabel’s last will and testament. Unlike France or Italy, where there are rules and rightful percentages for descendants, you’re free to shaft your family from beyond the grave in England, and animal welfare is often the winner in the legacy battle.
Doggo doesn’t appear to recognise the place. He trips merrily inside, apparently oblivious to the dim but distinct yapping of dogs above the rattle of a passing train.
I explain my predicament to a woman at the front desk. She’s as bright and cheery as the reception area where she spends her day, even when she tells me I really should have phoned ahead and made an appointment. It’s probably just me, but I sense something brittle in the kindly smile that Laura (it’s on her badge) flashes me. It brings to mind the carers at the grim nursing home near Brighton where my grandfather is seeing out his days. Is it really possible for someone to be so relentlessly good-natured? Or do they revert to true type once the front door has swung shut behind you, swearing like troopers and brutalising the unfortunates in their charge? So much for my resolution to rein in the cynicism Clara accused me of.
Ten minutes later, Doggo and I find ourselves in a cheerless office with another breezy young woman wearing a standard-issue polo shirt. This one is called Beth. She’s a ‘re-homer’, and she’s clearly not pleased about having to re-home a dog that was homed only three weeks ago. It’s a relief to know she’s human. Beth is my sort of age, I guess, late twenties, and she leans forward, elbows on her desk, as she listens attentively to my story.
I play it for sympathy: how it was my girlfriend who wanted a dog, how she didn’t even consult me but just turned up with it one day, how she then upped and left me with no warning. I am not, I explain contritely, in a position to look after a dog on my own. Beth nods, but I can see her eyes searching my face for clues to the failings that drove poor Clara to flee me. I can see her wondering if I’m a violent man, or just boring. I don’t care what she thinks, so long as she takes Doggo back and allows me to move on with my life.
I produce the buff envelope that Clara left out for me, the one containing the official paperwork. Beth doesn’t require it; she has her own file. She didn’t know Doggo but she’s happy to process his ‘re-admission to the facility’. It’s beginning to sound a little too George Orwell for my tastes, but I grin and thank her.
It turns out that Doggo was known to them as Mikey. Clara never mentioned it to me, but I can forgive her this omission. Mikey!? It would be like Winston Churchill’s parents changing their minds at the last moment and deciding to call their bouncing baby boy Brian. I mean, would Roosevelt and Stalin even have sat down with him at Yalta if he’d been called Brian?
Beth frowns as she reads on. ‘Strange, he was only with us a week before your girlfriend picked him out.’
‘So?’
‘I’d have had him down as a lifer.’
‘A lifer?’
‘Like in prison … here for the long haul.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Well, I mean, look at him.’
I look at Doggo, but there’s not much to see. He has folded back on himself and is licking his balls.
‘That’s not right,’ says Beth.
‘Doggo, stop it.’
‘No, I mean we have a neutering policy here.’ Beth flips through the file, finds what she’s looking for. ‘Ah, okay. He wasn’t here for long enough. Your girlfriend undertook to have it done.’
This time I correct her. ‘My ex-girlfriend.’
‘Whatever. She signed here to say she’d have him seen to.’
‘Seen to?’
‘Snip snip.’
I flinch. Maybe you have to be male to understand that castration can’t be reduced to finger-scissors and some onomatopoeia.
‘She never said.’
Beth lays her palm on the sacred file. ‘It’s here in black and white.’
But it isn’t black and white. No, it’s grey, very grey. We’re talking about Doggo’s balls.
‘I need to think about this.’
‘It has to be done.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s policy.’
If she knew me better, she wouldn’t have said it.
‘It was Nazi policy to exterminate Jews, gypsies and homosexuals. Did that make it okay?’
Beth looks deeply affronted; she even gives a little gasp. ‘I really don’t think that’s fair.’ Her eyes have a sudden watery sheen to them and I look away out of awkwardness. Doggo is still lapping away. I can’t remember ever having seen him so happy, and I find myself rising to my feet and extending my hand across the desk.
‘Beth, it’s been a pleasure, but Doggo and I are leaving now.’
It’s pathetic on my part. He’s just a dog, a dog I never wanted in the first place, but I’m expecting gratitude, or something. A glance to acknowledge the two-legged animal at the other end of the lead would do, but I don’t even get that as we make off down the road towards Battersea Park.
‘Hey, pal, they were going to chop your bollocks off.’
Doggo stops to sniff the base of a litter bin.
‘That’s right. Snip snip.
Adios testiculos.
Your bloody bollocks – gone.’
My timing couldn’t be worse. I’m so focused on Doggo, wondering if he’s about cock his leg and piss against the bin, that I don’t notice the children in dinky blue uniforms disgorging from the school, not until one of their well-heeled mothers exclaims, ‘Excuse
me
! Language!’
I know the type: blonde and painfully thin and sure of her place in her privileged world. Just like my sister. I’m tempted to retaliate when I see her young son cringing with embarrassment at his mother’s intervention.
‘My apologies, young man.’
‘What’s his name?’ the boy asks unexpectedly.
‘Doggo.’
There’s an enormous 4X4 illegally parked nearby, two wheels on the kerb, its hazard lights flashing. The woman zaps it with her key fob. ‘Hector, come along now.’
Hector’s a beautiful boy, like the young Christian Bale in
Empire of the Sun
– all floppy hair and large green eyes. ‘Hey, Doggo,’ he coos warmly, dropping to his haunches.
Doggo doesn’t just tilt his head at Hector, he allows the boy to stroke him, to rub his ears and scratch beneath his chin.
‘Aren’t you the best dog? Yes you are, Doggo. You’re the best dog ever.’
‘Hector!’ comes his mother’s indignant cry.
The boy glances up at me and rolls his eyes. ‘Got to go.’
‘It gets better – life, I mean.’
‘Let’s hope so,’ he says. ‘See you around, Doggo.’
The two of us stand and stare as Hector clambers into the back of the big Mercedes. He gives a wave as the car pulls away.
Let’s hope so? And delivered with the weary forbearance of a biblical sage. He can’t have been more than twelve years old. Where did this child come from? Not from his mother, that much is certain.
I follow Hector’s lead and drop to my haunches. ‘Hey, Doggo, you just made a friend.’
As I reach out a hand, I wonder at first if it’s the sound of the passing traffic I can hear, but it’s the low rumble of a warning growl telling me to keep my distance.
‘C
AN
I
SAY
it?’
‘I don’t know, J, can you?’
‘I’m going to anyway.’
I spread my hands. ‘Sock it to me.’
We’re in a bar on the Portobello Road, and J throws back a slug of his third (or is it his fourth?) mojito before coming out with it. ‘You’re well rid of her, mate.’
‘Clara?’
‘Who else? I never liked her.’
I’m shocked. ‘I’ve been with her almost four years. You don’t think you could have told me before now?’
‘Grow the fuck up, Dan. I’m seriously going to tell you the love of your life is loopy as a box of frogs? Jesus, I’m not that stupid. What, have that one come back and bite me in the arse when you tie the knot with the loon?’
‘She’s not a loon.’
‘She’s certifiable, mate, always was. Hey, don’t get me wrong. It was fine when we were younger, but this is life now, the real deal. We’re looking at the long game. I mean, take Jethro, for example.’
‘What about him?’
‘His time is over.’
‘Jethro?’
Jethro is the coolest guy we know. Tall and artfully dishevelled, he divides his time between dossing on other people’s floors, smoking huge quantities of weed and playing his guitar (rather well). He’s like some latter-day troubadour, always on the move, forever searching out a new patron to house and feed him.
‘I’m telling you, that guy’s currency is in serious freefall. All women like a bad boy when they’re younger, but let’s face it, Jethro isn’t the bloke you want bouncing your firstborn on his knee. He’d probably drop the bloody thing on its head.’
‘I like Jethro.’ I really do. He’s got a great sense of humour and he can tell stories like no one else I know.
‘Hey, me too,’ soothes J. ‘But he’s had his day. Women our age don’t want a layabout, however charming, not when the old biological clock starts ticking.’
He’s right. It’s the reason Jethro’s girlfriends are getting younger. Poor Jethro.
‘Clara’s nothing like Jethro.’
‘All I’m saying is I can see why you went for her. She’s hot, hot as hell, and a bit crazy, which is okay when you’re young, but we’re not any more … sorry to break it to you. You really want a wife who’s into crystals and auras and fuck knows what else?’