Dog Boy (5 page)

Romochka enjoyed Golden Bitch watching him. He knew that she liked him. He didn’t guess her bewilderment, so he aimed to get what the growing puppies now occasionally got—an affectionate licking. Not a cleaning such as Mamochka would give, but a definite, approving kiss, and an occasional invitation to learn something when she brought a live rat or mole into the lair. He imagined a day when her satisfaction at his learning enveloped him too. But whenever he leapt in to show his skill, she would sit back on her haunches and watch him: interested, but without participation or encouragement, just as she watched from the entrance hole.

In late winter, with the young dogs’ larger bodies hemming Romochka in, testing his strength now with their vigorous play, a discord crept in among the five siblings. One week Romochka felt them all as equally playful, if different from each other. The next week one of them was no longer playing. Black Sister slipped from being funny as the snappiest, sharpest-toothed and sharpest-witted to being savage and genuinely angry. She ruined the fun they had been having and Romochka was annoyed. As the balmier air seeped in through the snow, the lair became a place of unexpected explosions, incomprehensible fights.

When the big dogs were away, there was no one there to check their fighting or bring peace. They ganged up on Black Sister playfully but she bit Romochka hard and often and reduced White Sister to submission, snarling and snapping until she had the lighter dog on the ground baring throat and belly. She ignored or rebuked her brothers and spent time alone on the nest. At the same time Grey Brother provoked the anger of the adults more and more. He tried repeatedly to sneak outside after them or to slip away unnoticed while the others were playing. If Romochka set up a maze for him, he deliberately wrecked it, or climbed over. Sometimes he climbed the statue, and barked, inviting Romochka and the others to catch him, and then refused to do anything except be prey. Romochka started games with Grey Brother only for them to fall apart as Grey Brother decided to look at him as the hunter and to tease just out of reach. Romochka couldn’t catch him and was too annoyed to team-hunt him.

They were denbound. The air was deliciously warmer every day but the atmosphere became close and wet. Everything was damp. Romochka’s clothes chafed horribly on his skin but cooled to freezing if he took them off. Sores on his ribs and thighs got bigger and more painful every day. Puddles formed on the cellar floor and soon the nest was the only part of the lair that was not covered in slabs of ice and sodden snow. At night all Romochka could hear was the split splat of drips and the sliding splosh of falling chunks. Then, one day, spring sunlight broke in and sucked everyone outside.

Romochka crawled through the hole, wriggling towards the sun. He looked up and saw blue. A car slid past in the slushy lane, engine whining loudly, and his ears prickled at the raw sound. The sky was a patchwork of rain clouds. The puppies followed him out into the ruin. They were such big lanky dogs! The five of them raced through the snowdrifts, all tensions forgotten. Outside the grey snow still covered everything, but it had slumped, sapped from underneath.

Then it rained, making a white curtain in the sunshine. Romochka stood up on his hind legs and danced, his mouth open. This whispering water, falling on the snow, seemed to him something he remembered from dreams.

 

Over the next month the mountainous snow crumbled, shrank and vanished, leaving the black ice-sludge and mud of springtime. The heavy grey and deep smoke blue of winter were gone. The earth was black and grizzled with dead weeds. The snow-burnt grass was lifeless, but, above it, the tree branches were dusted to their tips with a haze of green. Even the trees in the courtyard had sticky reddish buds on a few branches. Broad puddles reflected the green, bringing it to ground early. The view up the street towards the allotment was a swathe of these green and blue winking eyes in the cracked asphalt. Romochka stood in the empty lane in front of their lair and held his hands up to the white spring sky, pointing his fingers the way first leaves sprout from the buds. Just as he had danced in the rain on the grey snow, he danced now in the mud. The four young dogs made wide muddy tracks sprinting around him, tongues out, heads up, ears back. Then a car came sliding up the lane, wheels spinning in the mud, and they all dashed for the ruin, playing fear.

The young dogs had a lot to learn, and Romochka with them. They were allowed to play in the upper floor of their ruined church, and then, little by little, in the grass under the orchard trees. To go outside the courtyard to the allotment up the street they had to have adults with them. They went every day and sometimes at night, avoiding morning and evening when people and cars filled the lane. They learned quickly to track each other back and forth across the wide muddy space of the allotment. But there was no following Mamochka, Black Dog or Golden Bitch past the empty field or down the trail over the waste lands and long grass. If Romochka tried, they growled. If he tried again, they warned him, and if he persisted, Mamochka nipped him so harshly that he yelped. She was now the only one who reprimanded him with teeth.

Black Dog marked out about half the allotment as a territory for them to play in. Every wake-up, the four tumbled out of the building, pretended to test the air the way the grown-ups did, then tracked their elders out to the allotment. They would trot around Black Dog’s markers, considering them thoughtfully, then abandon themselves to play within the boundary of that invisible fence. Romochka trotted around with them but could not smell what they could. He had to watch their reactions to messages and read the news from this. He found he knew immediately if they were smelling a stranger’s or one from their own family.

Golden Bitch or Mamochka would be lying down somewhere in the rubbish around them. Romochka would only see them raise themselves up and walk towards the puppies if he or one of the others stepped outside the boundary, or if a strange dog approached the allotment. When Black Dog minded them he played too, more often than not. He taught them all to hunt insects, something he hadn’t grown out of: the happy victory of downing a grasshopper and the respect to be shown to bees.

They played in daylight, twilight, moonlight, starlight, cloudlight. Rain and mist. Light time and dark time and the time of shadows when dogs looked larger and stronger, and their eyes shone in silhouetted faces.

Romochka’s raw skin got infected and he had to take all the tormenting clothes off for Mamochka to lick away the pus and scabs near his armpits and on his inner thighs. In time his body grew accustomed to being damp. His chafed patches thickened and he slept near-naked with the dogs to dry himself and to get new sores licked. He began to separate his many garments and hang them up on lengths of wood the way his long-ago mother had hung damp clothes on heating pipes. Then he started dressing White Sister and Grey Brother in his clothes for sleeps, giggling at them and how much like him they looked. His thinner clothes dried out nicely on big warm dogs. Soon he was dressing all his siblings every night. He began to wear as little as possible.

 

His new daytime world above the lair was not the one he had left behind in the autumn. He noted, first with surprise, that cars, houses, shops, people and cooked food, even when these were seen, smelled, dodged, evaded, were now somehow fixed in place, even unimportant. They were ignored as eyes, ears and noses sought movement; real, interesting little shifts in the grass or waste lands that meant danger or food. There was so much in the new world to be learned that he quickly forgot anything that didn’t touch him. This new world had immutable laws. It was divided into realms of danger and safety; it had clear enemies and its own demons.

He learned to notice dogs above all and learned that strange dogs were bad, without exception. They were to be treated with care and hostility. Any breach of territory was deliberate and unfriendly, to be met with controlled aggression or retreat. He learned that the most dangerous were lone dogs who had no clan. Onetime people’s dogs, as Mamochka had once been, but these now lawless and unpredictable. He learned that the allotment was his family’s and its pathways were closed to strangers, but beyond it there were the comings and goings of many other clans—open trails. He learned that the lair was secret, and that there was a prescribed pattern on entering and leaving. He learned about the hunt. He noticed that anything a young dog caught was his or her own, but anything a grown dog caught was everyone’s.

If it hadn’t been for Golden Bitch, Romochka would have felt an easy confidence about his growing knowledge. He wanted, above all, Golden Bitch’s acceptance. He wanted her to stop watching him so eagerly. He waited for her to boss him and teach him to hunt mice. But he never got a puppy’s easy, loving licking from Golden Bitch, or a young dog’s lesson. There was an awful day in midspring when he was so happy that he scampered up to her, leapt and threw his arms about her muscular body as she guarded the territory in which they were playing. He felt her stiffen, then quietly sink into a controlled body of deference. Her ears were back and her eyes soft, and she licked her own nose again and again. Then she dropped very slowly and deliberately out of his arms and onto the ground. She rolled and presented her throat.

Romochka was horrified and bitterly hurt. She had said something that could not be unsaid and that threw everything awry.

Golden Bitch soon came to weave with pleasure at the sight of him, and to lick his hands and mouth in greeting. She always watched him with that same yearning interest. Romochka in turn could never forget that he was not a dog to her. He was also not a dog to Black Dog, but everything between Black Dog and him seemed accepted, easy. He was conscious that Golden Bitch was waiting for something from him that he didn’t comprehend.

 

One day Mamochka, Black Dog, and Golden Bitch led them all together outside the playpen and to the other side of the vacant lot. Sunlight filled the world, and the allotment glittered with yellow dandelions. The young dogs were quivering with excitement. At the far end, they all squeezed through the fence and then clustered to one side. There they stopped, sniffing everything. Romochka could remember this place, but it seemed utterly changed. He savoured the memory, curious. He had been a boy then, with a missing mother and uncle, following a strange dog. He remembered how cold and hungry he was. How unknown the trail ahead. Now the allotment was the threshold of home, redolent with familiar smells, a place of impending safety, even boredom. He was a dog now. His mother was a dog. His brothers and sisters were dogs. He watched keenly as the young dogs smelled everything in long deep breaths, tails stiff and thoughtful. What could they smell? He tried, but it just smelled like pee.

This was the first meeting place. Only later did he realise that here they could know when and where everyone had headed out hunting, who had returned and what, if anything, they had caught. Here they could smell whether the approach to the lair was safe, and here also strangers left messages, a little way off if they were neutral; in the meeting place itself if aggressive.

The rubbish mountain rose dark and squat above a forest of birch, larch, spruce, pine oak and alder that stretched from the far side of the mountain to the horizon. The old cemetery hugged the base of the mountain at one side, almost invisible under its tree cover. The concrete block wall that stood between the cemetery and the invasive slide from the mountain could just be seen as a thin white line from the construction sites. Beyond the cemetery was a highway, flanked on the far side by more distant apartment blocks. The cemetery came within a hundred metres of the dogs’ ruined church. All between was long grasses and marsh.

At the edge of the mountain, the waste land ended in a bank overlooking a shallow basin of rubbish. Whether water actually flowed out and away to some cleaner watercourse was unclear. It was a natural declivity that wound its way along one side of the ancient yet ever-growing mountain. In spring it was a sodden, treacherous pool, hard to cross and quite deep in places. In summer, the river of rubbish seemed to move in this bed in an imperceptible slide. A bucket seen from the eastern slopes of the mountain might two weeks later be seen in the centre of the southern curve. There was no clear trail across this shifting bed of debris.