Dog Boy (3 page)

His anxiety floated away and wellbeing seeped through him. After a while his hands warmed up and he reached for her damp belly and stroked her with his fingers as he drank, feeling out her scabs and scars and playing his fingers along her smooth ribs. She sighed and laid down her head.

 

Romochka woke up in the solid darkness of the night. He had never experienced true darkness. No streetlight filtered in through blinds; no orange clouds glowed through gauze. He held his hand in front of his face and could see no dim fingers. He filled his invisible body and although nothing about him had changed, in this darkness he felt enlarged. Warm bodies clambered over him, burrowed around him. He grabbed hold of one and tucked it to his chest. The puppy whined and wriggled, but he held on harder and it stopped struggling. Its rapid heartbeat settled and he smelled its milk-and-leather breath.

He smiled in the darkness. If his mother walked in now, she’d find him well-dressed, warm, full. He hoped she would, just to see that he could manage without her, without Uncle. The mother dog’s mouth loomed near his face. Her whiskers tickled his lips and he breathed in the heated stink of her mouth. She licked him and he smelled her saliva as it dried and stiffened on his face. The other two adult dogs settled their heavier bodies inside the nest against his back. He drifted away.

The cold woke him. Light filtered into the cellar through the broken floor above, enough to see that the big dogs were gone and the puppies had deserted him to roam. They moved clumsily near the nest, tails up as they tracked scents. They pounced on each other, play-fighting, tumbling and snarling. He sat up and tucked his knees to his chest as best he could in his bulky clothes. He was cold, hungry and grumpy. There were no blankets. The bed was made up of some damp solidified rags, a lot of hair, gritty stuff and old feathers. He couldn’t find his mittens. He looked balefully around and didn’t bother to get up. The cellar showed no sign of provisions.

The puppies, seeing him sitting up, scampered closer in, bumping against him and tugging at his sleeves and leggings. He grabbed one as he had in the night, wrestled it into his coat top and held it in. When the puppy stopped complaining, he opened the top and looked down at it. The puppy’s eye gleamed in that dark hollow. It reached up and began licking his face with exaggerated movements, licks that were almost nips. He stroked its white head. Then he noticed that the other three puppies had stopped playing and were sitting on the nest, pressed against his sides. They were watching the entrance to the cellar, tails wagging expectantly.

The mother dog entered and the puppies went wild, wriggling, whimpering, leaping on the spot. Then they raced around her, springing to lick her mouth as she stalked to the nest. The white one inside his coat struggled so violently that he couldn’t hold it.

Even Romochka knew that breakfast had arrived and he reached out his hands in delight to his Mamochka.

 

On that first morning Romochka gave the puppies names. He surveyed them proudly. Brown, black, white, grey. All his! Then another day he gave them other names. Then he forgot their names and forgot that he had ever looked at them as a boy looks at puppies. Their breath filled the air around him, their bodies warmed him, and they fought with him for their place at the milk. Their weight pressed against him and their tongues left a milky trail on his skin. His hands reached for warm mouths and bellies, scruffs—throwing, wrestling, tongues meeting.

There were just the three adult dogs in the family. Their heavy bonier forms dominated the lair when they entered. His Mamochka, milky, clean-mouthed, strong, was the leader. The other two were her grown children. He could sense it in their familiarity and subtle deference.

The two big dogs were heavy enough to shove him, and were not tender with him. He learned quickly that their tolerance was enough for his siblings, and it was also enough for him.

His suckle siblings were all milk-spiced, but the three older dogs had strong saliva and rank muzzles, each different, unequal in experience. They carried their own body odour on their tongues, their own signature in faint urine, paw, skin and anus—and their authority in their teeth, clean and sharp. They carried their health and their abilities in their kiss. He tumbled over the puppies too, kissing each dog on their return to the lair, then smelling their necks and shoulders to see what they might have done, might have found today. He, like the puppies, found the smell on their mouths and bodies tantalising; but he couldn’t read the stories.

Mamochka knew more than the other two. Her teeth ruled the lair. Mamochka raised her head and shoulders from her puppies and that was enough to end fights or quell food rows. She silenced bickering between Black Dog and Golden Bitch by looking their way.

Mamochka knew how to choose between risk and danger, and her wisdom and experience were evident in the crisp stories of her muzzle and shoulders. She didn’t try every fascination for possibilities, follow every cold trail just to see what had happened for someone else. She didn’t roll in everything wonderful that she found, but wore just one strange stink as a cloak or a disguise. Mamochka went where she thought she would get food and felt fairly confident that she wouldn’t risk too much getting it. Mamochka also knew humans and bore the scars left by both affection and brutality.

The two younger dogs were all health and foolishness, all action. They were at the mercy of scent and whim. They were exciting to smell over, exciting to be with. The puppies would savour their adventures until the older dogs threw them off. Golden Bitch had signs of Mamochka’s courage and cunning. She was a darker grey-yellow than her mother, with a cream face mask fringed gold and grey. Black Dog, her brother, was the biggest. He had a broad, heavy-muscled body, thick haired like his mother. He was visible in the gloom of the lair as a floating face mask over a chest triangle and light belly and legs. Black Dog vacillated between courage and cowardice, foolhardy until fear overwhelmed him. Then he became vicious or timorous, or an odd mixture of both.

For a little while Romochka was much like a fifth puppy, a dependant to be fed and guarded. He was shoved, tumbled, bitten and licked. He was told off and shamed. For his part, he tried hard to please and became downcast when he was snarled into submission. For a while he emulated the puppies in everything. They grew rapidly and soon outclassed him in every way he could see. He practised their agile moves. He tried to listen to what they heard and to smell Mamochka before she appeared, the way they did.

Yet he could do many things they couldn’t: for one thing he stroked Mamochka while he drank.

For weeks, Romochka was contented. He lived as in a dream. The good beasts rubbed against him in the dark until he became beast too. Day and night flickered in the background of a more urgent cycle: cold and warmth, hunger and a full belly. The old world above disappeared from his mind, except that it took the warm dogs from him when they left to forage and sent them back with cold, wet fur or manes of ice and snow. That old world was reduced to smells on dogs, and the many different foods they brought back with them. Rats, mice, ducks or moles, even once a roasted chicken. Once they all came in with loaves of bread, another time with cold cooked potatoes in their mouths. Romochka adapted quickly to eating anything he was given and to sucking and chewing at small bones and knuckles for hours. Mamochka treated him with disarming solicitude. She made sure he got his pieces, along with the four puppies. She licked him clean, pinning him down with a paw. He let her do anything—even though he had the size and perhaps the strength to stop her—so delighted was he to be included. When Mamochka was gone, he slept in a pile of warm bodies or played with the puppies, imitating their growls and yips.

Golden Bitch and Black Dog accepted without demur that they too had to care for Romochka. He could remember when their faces were the faces of strangers and their scent unremarked: he could remember their eyes when they had wanted to eat him. He savoured the change. He measured himself in their eyes. Mostly they treated him as another puppy. A cursory greeting when they entered, then to be shrugged off; snapped at for overdoing play, snarled at for nearing them when they were eating. But Romochka had what no puppy could aspire to. He could stand up and lift his eyes and face high above them. In their own way they loved him and provided for him just as they would for any puppy. Yet, subtly present, was an altogether alien pleasure they too discovered in pleasing him. Golden Bitch began to stand apart from him, watching and listening. Black Dog smelled him over not just to greet him, but with a recurrent air of curiosity.

The puppies gave warmth and simple physical pleasures. They were also fun, a gang of four playfellows. He didn’t think of them at first as different from each other, but because he could see the white one most clearly in the gloom, he grabbed her and dragged her to him more often than the others—his closeness to White Sister had its beginnings before he even really knew her. Pressed into his body, night after night, White Sister moulded herself to fit Romochka, to fit not just his body but his moods and thoughts.

 

The temperature dropped steadily and the days became shorter. For a while Romochka wore only a few of his clothes inside the den, so charged and heated were the bodies of the puppies, but piece by piece he put them all on again. The puppies played night and day and slept deeply only after feeding. Slowly his own sleeping patterns changed.

While the grown-ups were out hunting he explored, following the puppies as they trailed smells from one end of the cellar to the other. He ran back to the nest with them when they startled rats or heard scary street noises. The cellar was divided by wooden pillars that held the frame for the floor above. The far corners were filled with junk—mouldy clothes, piles of wood, empty bottles. A statue lay on its back at one end, face serene above its pointed stone beard, chipped fingers peeping out from under wide stone cuffs. It was too heavy to move and Romochka soon lost interest in it. There was enough rubble and wood to build pens, then interlocking corrals with secret escape routes that the puppies had to hunt for and squeeze through. Romochka built mazes. Once the puppies understood the game, they played with increasing skill and enthusiasm. He led them through jumps and tunnels, turning on them savagely if they made a mistake. The puppies learned quickly to watch him and follow him closely, to do what he did, to delight in doing what he suggested. Then they would all lie down together, biting, wrestling, pouncing. Then they would lick each other. Then they would sleep. The older dogs would return every time to a fully rearranged lair, something that startled them at first.

In daylight, he became the leader of the puppies. Before long, under his shrieking and pushy direction, he and his litter siblings were team-hunting the rats, unsuccessfully but with increasingly elaborate plans. But he was crippled at night, and the days were getting shorter.

He remembered the chilled apartment and the smell of his uncle as if they were a bad but tantalising dream. He remembered his mother, too: dreamily, but without pain or discomfort. Her phrases, her perfume-and-sweat smell, were fixed memories rarely touched, as distant as the stars. He had dreamed that faintly coloured, faintly odorous world—then woken up to live here in the rich smelly darkness and in the rub of hair, claws and teeth.

Romochka was trying to make the puppies listen to a story. He had become bored with puppy play, with the repetition of stalk, chase, wrestle, growl, maul and sleep. He rolled onto the nest, opening up his belly, and they all piled on. Then he found he didn’t want to do anything more. He grabbed White Sister and forced her to sit still. She stayed where he put her, waiting bright-eyed for his idea to take shape, yipping at him in encouragement. Then he grabbed Black Sister and tried to force her, growling and squirming, to do the same. She pulled back her tiny top lip from her teeth and did her best to look really mean. He held her down. Then, when he got the chance, he wedged as much of Grey Brother as he could between his knees and grabbed Brown Brother by the scruff. Black Sister was nipping him in earnest now, and he had to let her go. She snarled and snapped at his hand, then sat down anyway, curious. He grabbed a rag and tried to tuck them in but only White Sister would let him. He held onto a corner of the rag as Black Sister grabbed the other corner and began tugging. Grey Brother wriggled out from between his knees and grabbed another part of it.