Dog Boy (29 page)

He sat back, self-consciously stroking the dog. Naming Malchik, he thought, would not have been so easy. How could you ever know their real names? Boy, Girl, Mother, Father, Pup—that was the only honest common ground. He was overcome with weakness: he was not only exhausted but also famished. He sighed. Natalya was not particularly interested in food. She cooked rarely, with unpredictable results and an air of proving a point.
I
do
cook for you, see?
He had never mentioned her cooking or not cooking, and, bewildered, had made no comment when she raised it. Natalya always got home before him, but these days he found it stressful to walk in and find her wreathed in cooking smells, smiling triumphantly, preemptively winning an argument.

She might have shopped, though. Perhaps it was the influence of the dogs, but he really felt like otbivnaya. A dog’s dream dinner: a slab of meat, bloody, seared. With onions. He would cook, and they’d eat together.

Dmitry got up. ‘Come on, Malchik,’ he said, and they headed home. Dmitry had never walked alongside a dog. Malchik padded beside him with a lion-like gait, his brow twitching incessantly. One eyebrow lifted in triangular wrinkles now and then as he cast an eye up at Dmitry’s face. Dmitry was intensely aware of the dog’s friendliness. This huge beast, this sagacious brute who could not speak his language, was radiant, somehow, with a foolish goodwill.

Dmitry pressed the buzzer on his neighbour’s apartment. Yuri Andrejevich opened the door and Malchik romped inside, splattering spittle. Dmitry gestured towards the dog with a wordless smile. Yuri stared at him.

‘He’s a nice dog,’ Dmitry said hurriedly, and waved goodbye.

 

Natalya had bare feet up on the yellow arm of the 8 Marta. Her hair was down and her wild curls gleamed in the light of the table lamp. She hadn’t cooked, but the fridge was full and the kitchen clean. Her face glowed softly, blue-lit by the television. She looked up at him with her uncomplicated smile; and, as always, the unfailing health and warmth of her face drew him in. He felt the miseries of the day as small inert packages, defused, well-prepared for handover.

They are not really dogboys, just from a family that understood dogs well, and then had to fend for themselves with only the dogs for company. The older child
in loco parentis
, as is common in neglect scenarios. Disappointing for the purists—and the mythologists. They can’t really be categorised as feral children, but they have survived an incredible ordeal for at least a couple of years. Not much here for poor DPP to write up, though. Romochka’s still looking after the dogs, it seems, and has them living with him. He said, or rather agreed, that they live in a nice place, with everything they need. He mentioned other people who help them with clothes and food, so maybe some kind neighbour lets them live in the cellar or attic. Dmitry is right, really—a lot of Romochka’s behaviours can be explained by some mental defect and the emotional attachment to the dogs, the only enduring element of their family life.

Natalya had Puppy moved to intensive care. The blood tests were in: it was pneumonia. With cystic fibrosis, this was critical.

The oxypulsimeter graph showed the racing heartbeat and the falling oxygen. The little boy flicked his limbs and she knew he was in pain. He didn’t appear to recognise her but fixed his gaze on Dmitry. As she watched the bony chest labour under her stethoscope, she felt Dmitry staring across the barouche. There wasn’t much to say, so she didn’t say anything. She wrote up her notes without looking up. Nothing they had done had made the child sick, so Dmitry’s accusing stare could burn itself out. Of course, he had more at stake here. He had still wanted to study the two boys together, and stubbornly held onto the idea that they were at least partly feral. She could do without his disapproval just the same.

She gave instructions to the nurse for the increased dosage of intravenous gentomycin and morphine and left the room. Dmitry would call her if anything changed. She was conscious of retreating. She had been fond of Marko, but she could not turn this around. Her affection had no place now, and she needed to retract it. She was the one who would be doing an autopsy on a child she’d known, not Dmitry.

Puppy’s body made a tiny mountain in a vast snow plain on the barouche. He objected to nothing. Dmitry sat long hours with him and Puppy, soaring somewhere on morphine and fever, smiled each time he looked into Dmitry’s eyes. There was nothing canine, or boy-like either, in this glance. Certainly there was nothing of the boy Dmitry had known. Dmitry sat, waiting for the glance, and wondering what Marko saw to make him smile so sweetly. He had the uncomfortable feeling that the boy was seeing someone else.

Puppy died almost effortlessly the following evening.

It is a long autumn twilight. The hour between dog and wolf. Light and dark are mixed, fear mingled with possibility. Between dog and wolf, everything seems to hesitate, everything is neither, until the point when night, like a drawn-out exhalation, spreads over the city.

 

Romochka trailed along the side of the mountain, striking cans and other rubbish with his club. A bitter cold wind was blowing from the north, tossing small flocks of plastic bags up the sides of the mountain for take-off over the city. The heat was gone from the world and the smell of autumn was in the wind. Sweet dry grass heads, tea, and the smoke of fires. Out at the forest the birch trees stood out, golden and orange; the larch were a high haze of dull gold, and the pine and spruce seemed taller in their dark coats. The rowan fruit hung heavy and red, as yet too tart to eat. Romochka’s thick mane of hair blew across his face as he turned this way and that in aimless misery. Puppy was dead. He knew what that meant. Blood out, not in: a kill smell. Cold bones. Cold rot. He knew he would never see Puppy again. Every creature he had ever seen die had been afraid, and he couldn’t bear to think of Puppy like that.

He stared up at the bloodshot eye of the sky. What if someone, somewhere, were watching all this? Someone like Natalya, someone who knew nothing and lived outside everything, unable to smell, to touch, to rub; just watching, delighted, without comprehension? It was good, that day, standing beside Natalya and looking down at Puppy playing in the room. He had always known they were watching, and the satisfaction of finding out how blended with happiness that she had shared her secrets. She showed him the TV screens, and he looked at all the other children. He suddenly found them interesting, when they had been completely uninteresting before. It was a form of hunting. Everything the children did seemed changed, worth seeing and thinking about. He had been about to tell her his own secret, but then Dmitry found them and was angry.

A rat shot out of a faded bucket at his feet and he swung savagely. He missed, and a sudden rage flared behind his eyes. He battered the bucket with all the strength of his arms, but a rising fury swept over him as he did it. The bucket split, crackled and splayed out in shards. There was nothing satisfying about smashing a fucked-up bucket. Puppy was dead but not broken like this. Curled up. Warm…then cold. With Natalya and Dmitry watching.

His blows slowly stilled until his arms hung by his sides.

He hadn’t said anything. He had wondered for a moment whether anyone had eaten any of Puppy, whether some hungry dogs had got to him when he was defenceless. Strangers. Then he had realised that Dmitry was trying to touch him. He had wanted then to smash Dmitry’s face with his club.

He sat down on the spreadeagled bucket with his club across his knees and stared out. He was on the slope nearest the cemetery, overlooking the wooded graveyard and the much thicker treetops of the forest. The trees in the cemetery seemed more wintry than those of the forest beyond. The wind could shake them more easily.

Autumn was nearly over. The tall oak tree nearest him was already almost bare; the black branches with their tattered remnants reached a hand of many fingers against the darkening sky. He could see the fur of lichen making a frayed upper edge to the silhouette. Where the forest met the cemetery, he could make out the occasional flicker of movement: squirrels bustling, hunting in the leaf fall, urgent with purpose. He should be hunting too, if only for the sake of Mamochka, who was heavy and soon to pup. Winter was coming. Winter without Puppy: neither warm and comforted with Romochka’s arms around that homely little body, nor soap-stinky in the centre under blankets.

He should have hit Dmitry. Puppy was Dmitry’s responsibility, and he must have done something very very wrong. But he felt all twisted and knotted in his belly at that. He tried to throw up to clear his belly, but nothing came and the knot stayed. Suddenly he couldn’t breathe; he began coughing to dislodge the heavy block of wood that seemed to have become stuck in his chest. He shut his eyes.

His neck-hair rose. Some dumb stray was stalking him, upwind. He could smell fear and hope and inexperience on this dog. He opened his lashes enough to see through the grey curtain they made. It was a big, thin dog, just a shape in the evening gloom. There was something wrong with it. It was rasping, making too much noise as it crept towards him, sending its weird sick smell straight at him.

He sighed twice, as though still in his own world, but gripped his club tight. When it finally lunged, he rose more swiftly than the rat from the bucket and swung with all his strength and speed. There was a satisfying, sinking crunch as the club caught the dog below the ear. Romochka’s fighting snarl dropped to a growl, and he watched with something like clean happiness as the yelping dog staggered briefly, its smashed head held low, its one good eye leading. It stopped, stood with its head swaying. Then it collapsed and lay still.

Romochka walked over to the dog. His happiness cooled and vanished as quickly as it had risen. The dog was twitching slightly, but leaving. He could see that distant, fearless look in its eye. He felt his own blood draining away, leaving him weak, wrecked. He had never killed one of his own kind. The knot inside him tightened.

He walked away from the dead dog, down the mountain towards home. He wasn’t hungry but thought he had better fill himself up tight, then sleep. White Sister and Grey Brother were waiting for him at the mountain meeting place, to his relief. He couldn’t have borne being alone for one step longer. White Sister licked his face. Grey Brother kissed his neck as he sat down with them. They smelled him over, looking for Puppy. For them Puppy had been, for a long time, the smell on him when he returned from the centre. His rage and misery returned as he licked them both. They would never smell Puppy again. Romochka’s throat and stomach clenched painfully.