Dog Boy (21 page)

Night fell. The boys slowly lost interest in him as a toy, a doll with a range of human emotions. They had become fascinated with his endurance and were now experimenting to find out just how much he could take. They pierced his ears. They burned his arms with cigarettes. When they cut the lines into his chest with the point of a knife he howled until his voice was gone. He knew they would kill him in the end, probably almost by accident. He had killed the orange cat almost by accident. He felt himself receding from his outer body, gathering all of himself deep inside, coiled, ready and waiting.
Mamochka, Mamochka.

 

 

What have
you
got for me, Mamochka, Mamochka?

 

He felt fast and sure on the inside but his outer body had slowed. He took a while to notice that White Sister was taut, her free ear swivelling. It broke in on him slowly: Mamochka and the others must be outside.

He dragged himself back to the surface, to the laughing, the hard grip and the pain. A boy was burning his long ropey locks, one by one, holding his nose and exclaiming over the rich crackle as they frizzled. The others were bored, he could tell, and the boy was looking for a more exciting reaction. He tried to moan, to draw attention away from the door, and although his voice found only a whispering thread of soundless breath, they were looking at him when the room filled with dogs.

The knotted end of Romochka’s greasy hair ignited. His elflocks parted and he fell to the ground. He seemed to sleep for long seconds, although he could see the marvellous swirling violence sweeping the room, could feel the glorious strength of dogs as if it were coursing through him. His body did not obey him. The bored girl was stamping out the flames in his hair, swearing through her cigarette, shaking her head at him as she did it, then she was gone into the melée.

He had waited so long, made himself so ready on the inside but his body would not come to life. Then he realised he was already crawling across the floor, legs and arms heavy, unbelievably slow. He was flooded with a fierce joy: he felt the loving wall of hair, tooth and muscle close around him, heard their snarls and the house boys’ screams. He scrambled across the floor to White Sister. He licked her bloodied face once and scrabbled on his belly over to the knife. He didn’t think. He took the knife in both hands, sat hard on her head and, sliced off her swollen ear. The knife was brilliantly sharp.

The next thing he knew he was out on the street, dizzy, naked, his arms around the trembling bloodied body of White Sister, pulling her away, as the ruckus continued behind them. He had no idea where they were but White Sister did. She shook herself weakly, and with halting, feeble steps, nosed out the thread of the others’ trail. They stumbled through unfamiliar streets in darkness. Now, in the midst of his relief, ballooning terror shook his jaw, clattering his teeth. He wished he had not dropped the knife. White Sister was picking up his scattered parts with her bloodied muzzle.

Then they were in the awful alley, lit now by homely bomzh fires. White Sister turned away. She didn’t want to enter it—she knew this part too. But he begged her, and they crept to the blank wall, to their forgetfulness. He scrabbled around in the rubbish until his fingers found his club.

They headed into known trails and were soon joined by the others, all battle scarred but jaunty. They hemmed around his shaking naked body, each in turn slipping in to lick his hands and face, to lick the cuts on his chest, the sides of his mouth and White Sister’s blood-soaked head. The breeze on his naked skin froze him and his wounds stung. He shook all over, clammy and sick. He wanted to close his eyes and sleep on the road, but the thought of recapture drove him on. He looked around, big-eyed, fuzzy-headed. Maybe he was dying, after all. He could barely hold onto his club.

They entered the lane leading to the last meeting post as a tight, jostling mass. Then Romochka saw Pievitza. He knew her straightaway. She still had a floating, sinuous walk, completely unlike anybody else’s, although now she was walking carefully. She came slowly up the lane towards them, staring at the ground, her face in shadow. Her skinny daughter wasn’t with her and Romochka thought she wasn’t waiting back home either. Pievitza gave off the unmistakeable scent of grief.

He melted with the dogs into the shadows and watched her pass. She was thinner across the shoulders. Once she was close he could hear the occasional hiss of her breathing through her strange mouth, and he could smell her. He breathed in deep on that: ash and chemical, sweat and semen. The smell of harm and hurt. The dogs lifted their muzzles. Pievitza, he suddenly knew, was pregnant. Her long hair was uncovered, pale under the orange velvet sky. He saw the flicker of that long-ago fire in her shining hair. He couldn’t see her face or her mouth but he burned now as if he were filled with fire. His teeth stopped tap tapping. His shaking stilled. He stepped out silently into the path behind her and stood up tall, naked under the stars with the dogs quiet around him.

He touched his fingers to the congealing blood on his chest and raised his bloodied hand to her receding form, just as Laurentia did to him. Then the wall of hair and muscle and teeth hugged him close and he drew the cleanness of the night air deep into his stinging chest.

 

The following morning he woke up shivering, sweating, hot and cold all over. He couldn’t bear the dogs to touch him but needed them to stay nearby, warming him as best they could. He couldn’t get up without falling over. Puppy was alternately overly compassionate and overly boisterous, but it was Puppy who held him while he shivered, and Puppy who curled in his arms, carefully distant from his wounds, when each storm had passed. Romochka lay in the nest, dizzy and miserable. His wounds were too inflamed to be licked. He couldn’t eat the freshly killed offerings everyone brought for him. He kept thinking over and over that his mother and uncle were going to miss his birthday.

For three days Mamochka licked the sick sweat from his face and ears and slowly worked her way down to the oozing scabs on his chest. He shut his eyes tight and put up with the pain for as long as he could. He remembered the sores that healed in springtime after she cleaned them. On the fourth day, he ate some baby mice White Sister brought for him and played with Puppy.

He recovered his strength in a week. He imagined again and again heading out to find the singer but he didn’t leave the lair. His hair was still long but didn’t quite cover his face and he felt exposed. White Sister had recovered quickly and hunted specifically, lovingly, for him. Each time she returned, her lopsided silhouette at the entrance hole jolted him, and he fingered his own slowly healing scars. White Sister brought him rats, mice, birds, a fox cub and miscellaneous edible refuse: he could tell that she was hunting the mountain and the forest, not the city.

Romochka spent his time playing with Puppy, making the most of all the toys obtained on past hunts, building elaborate cityscapes. Romochka made streets and housing estates out of all the blocks and broken toys or rocks they could collect, while Puppy barked in anticipation. This city had to have the vacant lot, the meeting place, the open paths, and then the exact streets Romochka knew. Puppy’s eyes shone at the magic of it all.

Once Romochka was happy with the city, he made people out of small sticks and pebbles. People milling about in groups too large to stalk, people shopping, people in buildings; and always one lone pebble far from the others. He walked his fingers through the alleys, imitating with his eyes and manner the moves of a hunt, getting Puppy to crouch down, hold his noise. Then his fingers would leap out, Puppy leaping too in imitation, and the two boys barked and snarled as Romochka’s fingers backed the hapless pebble up against the wall of a teetering building.

Sometimes he would abandon the lone pebble and stalk the crowds, leaping his fingers at them, scattering the shocked pebbles, making them run this way and that. Puppy dashed and lunged at them by his side, eyes flaming, white teeth bared, shaking all over with excitement. Then, after scattering all the pebbles, Romochka would trash the very city with the power of his hunt and Puppy would go wild with delight, standing up and running around on his hind legs like Romochka and uttering strange war cries.

Romochka stuck his nose out of the lair, struck by the thought of just going out the way he used to. He was bored playing with Puppy, bored with the lair, bad tempered with the dogs and dissatisfied with the tidbits they brought home for him. He pulled himself out and shuffled into the ruin and then the courtyard. Late spring sang and shimmered. The dandelions were high and bees buzzed over the high grass. He could see that he had missed a lot of things hiding from the house boys. He squatted in the green, eating the bitter-delicious leaves, snatching at them and gobbling like a dog with a tummy ache.

He looked around. The birch would be dancing with many greens in these light breezes; babies would be out in the leaves with their mothers watching over them. There would be nests and mottled eggs in the forest. He loved eggs. He wished he had some now. The dogs were useless, wasteful egg eaters. Smash and lick, that’s all they could do, swallowing sticks, shell, plastic and road grease as they did it. Stupid dogs.
He
would bore a little hole at either end with a sharp stick, and then suck, feeling the white and then the yolk swell through that little hole and fill his mouth. He sighed. How could he tell them to go and get him some eggs? If they weren’t dogs, they’d know the word
egg
. Stupid dogs.

He sniffed the air. Only cooking fires burned out beyond the mountain. The reek was mingled with pollens, the air laden with the best things in life. Birds whistled and warbled, marking their territories with sound. So many crisscrossed invisible boundaries, trails, nests and lairs. So many fights to be had for dog, cat, man and bird. So many eggs for the brave.

He grabbed large handfuls of dandelion and climbed back down into the lair.

Puppy was sleeping with Little Gold and Little Patch, and Romochka tiptoed around them. Little Gold opened an eye and yawned but didn’t move. Romochka settled himself in his bower with his treasures. He stroked the soft tatty fur of the cat’s tail. That was a brave cat and as orange as autumn, as orange as fire. He smiled. He stuck the tail between his bare buttocks but it wouldn’t stay, so he curled up and sucked thoughtfully on the bony tip of it.
I don’t eat dog, I don’t eat human, I don’t eat cat.

He was, all of a sudden, very pleased with himself
.

The next day, with the warm spring wind stronger and humming across the entrance hole, sucking from the lair a booming music, Romochka couldn’t stay a second longer. He wanted to hunt, to explore, to rediscover the shining world. He hugged himself in glee at the thought of visiting the Roma, a thought filled with expectation of delicious food and, perhaps even more delicious, Laurentia’s tears.

 

When Romochka started hunting again, he was lean and fast on the streets and in the rain-spangled forest. He snarled savagely at children when he saw them, terrorising them and their mothers; making his own family insecure and close-hackled around him. But he wouldn’t chase cats. When he saw them, he stood and nodded thoughtfully to them, exactly as his singer had once nodded to him. Cats stopped arching and spitting at the sight of him and just slunk away, turning at a safe distance to blink their shining eyes.