Dog Boy (2 page)

He dropped his hands to his sides. Hunger and cold had pushed and pulled him down the stairs, but, for the moment, they had all but disappeared. It was a nice late autumn day—a high white sky, dry but very cold. The fleeting snows of two nights before had melted straightaway, but it was cold enough to snow heavily now. His spirits lifted. It couldn’t be all that hard to find food and warmth. Grown-ups managed all the time, with or without money.

From the outside, the building looked unnaturally still. It was an old building, with many broken or ice-cracked panes in its outer windows. None had curtains and there was no movement in the darkened rooms beyond. There was no sign of anybody, except the signs that they had left quickly—trails of debris led from the door; drag marks and the imprint of handcart wheels through clumps of dust, dropped tissues and indeterminate things crushed to pieces under many feet.

Romochka stood in the doorway, watching people passing by on the pavement. They were almost all familiar but he didn’t know any of their names. They belonged in the neighbourhood. They came and left and came back. But no one who belonged to his building appeared. Maybe he should catch an eye, tell someone that he was all alone. They would take it seriously—you weren’t supposed to be outside all alone at his age. He watched for someone familiar who didn’t frighten him. Maybe the shaven-headed guitar man from the blue building three street doors from his. Maybe the fat lady from the corner tenement. She had three big nasty kids, but they weren’t with her today. Maybe the old lady in the pretty cream lace scarf, carrying her two bulging avoski. He could see a loaf of bread sticking out the top of one, but it wasn’t enough to make him talk to her. In the end he didn’t try to catch any eyes. He was overcome with secretiveness and mistrust. His mother’s voice rang in his ears:
Don’t talk to strangers
.

He stood on the step curling and uncurling his cold toes inside his boots, not looking at anyone. He rocked back and forth a couple of times. His bucket knocked against his thighs. He put it down for a moment on the step and clapped his mittens together, stopping half way, palm to palm. In an adult the pose would have suggested prayer. In a four-year-old it suggested indecision so profound that his body had shut down in order to let him think.

The lane was almost deserted. Frozen puddles here and there gave a dull gleam, wrinkled like the eyes of dead fish. A car roared past, taking advantage of the sudden freedom of no traffic. It disappeared and for a moment nothing moved. It really was bitterly cold, and he knew he had better get moving soon. Still he waited. He was old enough to know that the street belonged to cars and the footpath to grown-ups and big kids. Little kids (and right now he felt particularly little) had no space in the world outside.

The next rush of cars cleared and a large yellow dog passed by on the other side, heading down the lane. Dogs, he said to himself, are warm. He had cuddled Mrs Schiller’s hairy dog Heine many times, and he had a sudden vivid memory of Heine’s warm belly skin and stinky breath. He picked the bucket up again and stepped out through a gap in the fence and onto the footpath. He clattered and rattled down the lane in the same direction as the dog. His mother had told him never to go out the door, never to wander off, never to go down the lane by himself even if Uncle sent him. She also told him:
Never go near street dogs. They have diseases that can kill you.

There was no one there to chase him and tell him off, which gave his transgressions a certain hollowness. He was so cold and hungry. Had his uncle staggered around the corner and cuffed him a few times, then dragged him off to some new place to live, he would have sobbed and snivelled but he would have felt much better.

The lane cleared and he crossed in order to be on the same side as the dog. Now he shivered with excitement—he was definitely where he shouldn’t be, where any little kid shouldn’t be, doing what a little kid shouldn’t do. She stopped just ahead, sniffing the corner of a building. He peered at the dog’s belly where a double row of breasts swung as she walked. She turned and looked at him for a moment, then trotted on faster than before, moving in an easy confident way. Her pale yellow hair was thick around her neck. Everything else around him was grey and murky; so, he told himself, she was the only dish on the table. His mother had said that about their apartment, about Uncle, about the flickering television; and about him on those nights when she didn’t work.

Romochka couldn’t keep up. The pavement was slippery with black ice, his layers of clothes bulky and he had to walk flat-footed to stop himself from sliding. An alley led off to the left from the lane up ahead. The dog turned in and, when he reached the corner, she was gone. He sat down on the cold concrete, the bucket beside him. He couldn’t feel his fingers inside his mittens. He curled up against a drainpipe that ran up the wall next to him. A faint warmth seeped through his clothes from the pavement: there were people up in this dark tenement somewhere.

His mother had said many times:
Don’t go near people. Don’t talk to strangers
.

He’d already done an awful lot of things his mother wouldn’t like.

He didn’t get up. The warmth from the heating pipes under the ground made him listless. He was around the corner from home but his legs were too heavy to do their job. Even his emptiness was too heavy, pressed into the ground by his sleepy bones. His head was too heavy.

A freezing drizzle fell. The black ice on the pavement began to shine. The gutter filled with black sludge and the white lines on the asphalt disappeared in a reflective sheen. His blue mittens glittered with tiny droplets. He shut his eyes.

He heard a faint noise that was more than the whisper of rain, and much closer than the cars on the lane around the corner. He opened his eyes. Two dogs were taking up all the space in front of him, present just as suddenly as if he had been on one page of a picture book and had now turned to the next. They paced in front of him without taking their eyes off him, crossing each other’s paths again and again. One was pale gold all over with a tail that curled back on itself, the other huge and black with cream paws and mask. Both were bigger and clearly nastier than the one he had followed.

They moved around, urgent with some purpose. They stared at him, eyes big and yellow. The rain spangled their fur. He liked dogs, but even he could tell these dogs wanted to hurt him. The dogs snarled at each other just as if he were a dish laid out in front of them and there wasn’t enough for two. He wondered whether it was really possible for a dog to eat a boy. He frowned at them fiercely.

Struggling with his clothes, he used the drainpipe to pull himself up. The dogs jumped back. Then the dog he had followed appeared out of the shadows on the other side. She looked at him as if waiting: head high, tail low. He let the pipe go and crossed the alley towards her. She didn’t move. The two dogs closed in behind with a rub of hair jostling for space and the snicker-snap of bickering. His dog had her ears up.

‘Doggie,’ he said, and she tipped her head very slightly to one side. One of the dogs behind him growled low. His dog lifted her lip over long teeth and growled back, a growl that travelled around him and was aimed at them. He felt the agitation behind him settle and, glancing back, saw that the gold dog was sitting now, watching. He reached his dog, put out his hands. She flinched, hesitated for a moment, then sniffed his face, his chest, his mittens. She was standing still.

Then she waved her tail from side to side, slightly, thoughtfully. The other dogs came up to her then, their heads weaving low, and they licked her face. She licked them each in turn, licked his face too, placing a sticky kiss on the corner of his mouth, then she turned and loped at an easy pace up another alley leading from the first, one he had never entered. People were filling the streets again, trudging, skittering and sliding along the pavements, but he paid them no attention. He focused on his dog and followed closely, the kiss freezing on his cheek. The other two dogs fell in behind neatly, without jostling.

He wondered what these dogs ate for dinner and his stomach sizzled painfully. He suddenly remembered his bucket, back by the drainpipe.
Leave something behind, and you can kiss it goodbye.
He faltered. Then he trotted on.

They had gone around a corner or two and were weaving in and out of parked cars when he realised he was nearly lost. He thought of stopping. He remembered that the apartment was cold and dark, empty even of his uncle’s smell, and then, before he could think anymore, he
was
lost. He concentrated on what dogs ate for dinner. He pictured bowls of diced meat and cabbage, all in a row, with one extra for him. But perhaps dogs couldn’t afford diced meat. Perhaps a soup, made with big bones, potatoes and onions. Or chicken soup with noodles. Maybe just potatoes. Hot and steamy. Mashed and buttery. Then he remembered: dogs don’t have money! They steal everything, or get given it! It could be anything. Cutlets! Kolbasa! Dumplings with meat! Chuk-chuk! Donuts! Saliva filled his mouth.

 

They passed throngs of people who were making their way home or to shops after work but no one stopped the boy or asked his name. He was a boy; his companions dogs. There was nothing to show that he was following, not leading. They looked like three obedient dogs, and he like a boy master—neglected, young to be out alone, but everyone knows without thinking that a person with dogs is not lost.

Three dogs and a boy passed through the populated thoroughfares of the precinct to more deserted lanes. Gates and mesh fences sagged, street walls crumbled. In the distance, apartment blocks were stacked like dishes in a rack, their windows glittering. Close up, weeds filled all gaps. They passed by low buildings with no balconies: offices and warehouses and factory sheds. They passed rows of identical five-storey tenements with cracked tiled façades and a few unkempt birches in the raked yards. They breathed in the smell of cooking onions and cabbage. Inside, people were preparing their evening meals, sitting or moving around in warm rooms, arguing, tired, sipping hot tea or soup.

They slowed only to cross roads or skirt cars or people, then picked up pace again.

A lane opened to a vista with no more streets. Ahead was a meadow filled with oddments of rubbish, ringed with buildings, all unlit: factories or warehouses without people. Then the three dogs did stop and eddy, sniffing in the corner of the street wall and the field fenceposts, moving around the boy, ignoring him. The three dogs peed quickly, here and there. Then they trotted on as purposefully as before. He followed, staggering now. They slipped one after another through a hole in a fence and crossed the meadow through blackened weeds. They made a ragged trail through the icy grass, one track wide and one dainty. At the far side of the field, he stumbled and stopped, swaying on his feet. The lead dog dropped back and waited, looking at him, so he nodded, turned and trudged on.

They squeezed through a gap between a brick wall and a fence post, and then they were among abandoned construction sites. A car passed up the potholed lane and a few scruffy people walked by. A man was lying in a heap against the street wall, asleep. He had been rained on and smelled of wet wool and old urine. The dogs stepped wide around him but otherwise paid no attention.

The boy’s strength was almost gone when the mother dog disappeared through a broken gate. They all in turn slipped through into an ancient courtyard. Here there was a tangled mess of dried grass and a dead orchard of five apple trees, their trunks bearded with lichen. Above, a brick façade ended in a broken cupola silhouetted against the sky. It was a church, a blackened and roofless ruin.

The dogs’ lair was in the basement. They entered through a hole in the floor and clambered down a pile of rubble along a narrow, much-used path. Inside was dark. Somewhere puppies yelped and yabbered.

And so it was, trotting with three dogs through ordinary lanes, past ordinary tenements, past ordinary lives, a lone boy crossed a border that is, usually, impassable—not even imaginable.

At first he didn’t notice.

 

Romochka could see nothing at all. He was assailed by a stench, pungent even in his cold nostrils. Then he made out a wide cellar with holes here and there in the roof. The two younger dogs had flopped down on the floor to one side and were scratching and licking themselves. They didn’t seem to have any food. He could see some distance now. His dog had trotted to a far corner and was being greeted with delight by four small puppies. He crept close and squatted on his haunches as she was licked and squealed at. He watched as she lay down and the puppies tumbled over themselves to suckle. He could just make out her dark, shining eyes watching him as the puppies pushed and grizzled. He noted her thick hair, her tidy feet, with pale tufts sticking out between her shadowy toes. She was motherly to the puppies: firm and distant and bossy. He wondered what dog milk tasted like, and edged closer. His stomach gurgled. She watched him steadily. The warmth of the nest, warmth of the squirming bodies, rose to heat his face. He dropped to his hands and knees, to his belly and wriggled towards her. She growled, steady and low, and he stopped. Then he inched closer, again, eyes averted. She was growling softly when he reached her flank and the full heat of the puppies. He curled himself slowly into that warm bed and pulled off his freezing mittens.

He could smell the puppies now, warm and spicy-milky, sucking, sucking. He could smell her too, stinky and comforting. He didn’t move except for an involuntary shivering. She growled on but didn’t move either. This growl was for him. But it was a mind your manners growl, not a get out of my sight growl and he waited, minding his manners. Then she stopped and began licking her puppies. She reached over and cleaned his face too. Her tongue was warm and wet, sweet and sour. He licked his lips and tasted her spit and the faint taste of milk. He wormed his cold hand towards her belly and grabbed a puppy. It writhed, grunting in displeasure as he pulled. It took two hands, but in the end he managed to yank it off the teat. The puppy squealed and snuggled, nudged deep and found another. Romochka wriggled himself close, buried his cold nose in the mother dog’s hair and sticky skin, and then the hot milk was his. It slid, rich and delicious, down his throat and into his aching belly.