Sky Wolves (3 page)

Afterwards they went on playing. Sam threw the dart and Jenny caught it, no matter where he threw it, how high or how far.

‘Jenny – you’re amazing!’ he said, and just then the doorbell rang, and Jenny shot backwards, barking, under a chair.

It was Aunty Dot, who had pedalled all the way across the city on her bike to see them.

‘I thought we’d take her out, first thing, before it’s too busy,’ she said, and she propped the bike up in the hallway and followed Sam into the front room.

‘Watch this, Aunty Dot!’ he said, and he threw the mistletoe dart high into the air.

‘Look out!’ said Aunty Dot, but before it could strike anything, Jenny leapt. She flew straight over the back of the settee, caught the dart in her jaws and descended again gracefully to the carpet.

‘Goodness!’ said Aunty Dot, and then ‘My word!’ as she did it again. ‘Well, there can’t be much wrong with her hip,’ she added, as Jenny bounded over the high-backed chair.

‘It doesn’t matter where I throw it,’ Sam said, ‘she always catches it!’

‘Impressive,’ said Aunty Dot, and she patted Jenny’s head vigorously.

Jenny put up with this politely, but then Sam said, ‘You have a go,’ and as soon as he handed the dart to Aunty Dot, Jenny put back her ears and growled.

It was an astonishing growl. It rattled all the ornaments on the mantelpiece, and the books and videos on the shelves. The shelves themselves started shaking, the coffee table rattled and the high-backed chair juddered towards the centre of the room.

Aunty Dot clutched her hat, which she could feel was about to fly off. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘Oh, my word,’ for she had a sudden, fleeting vision of volcanoes erupting and continents shifting deep within their oceanic beds.

But Sam was beaming up at her proudly.

‘She does that an’ all,’ he said.

‘Well!’ said Aunty Dot, once she had got her breath back. ‘I don’t think she wants me to have it.’ She gave the dart back to Sam, and instantly the thunderous growling stopped and Jenny wagged her tail.

‘Well,’ said Aunty Dot again, ‘I think we’d better take
her out for a walk,’ and from her shoulder bag she produced a collar and lead.

‘Cool!’ said Sam. ‘Can I hold them?’

‘You’d better get dressed first,’ said Aunty Dot. ‘And tell your mum where you’re going.’

Sam ran upstairs, where his mother was still in bed. Aunty Dot eyed the little dog intently and Jenny eyed her back.

‘You’re not quite what you seem, are you?’ Aunty Dot murmured, bending forward and removing her spectacles. ‘I wonder what your real name is and where you’ve come from. And what that dart is for.’

Jenny stared at Aunty Dot as though she had never seen her before. Without her glasses she was transformed. White light streamed from her face, which suddenly seemed not elderly and kindly, but magnificent and ageless. Her eyes radiated darkness, while pale fire streamed from her lips. It was obvious to Jenny that Aunty Dot too was not what she seemed.

Sam came thundering down the stairs again.

‘Can I put the collar on her?’ he said.

‘Yes, I think you’d better,’ Aunty Dot replied, replacing her glasses.

There followed a short interlude during which both Sam and Aunty Dot tried to get the collar on Jenny, and Jenny responded by running round in circles, twisting out of reach, rolling over and finally backing into a corner under the chair.

It was as if she didn’t know what a collar was.

‘Right,’ said Aunty Dot, out of both patience and breath. ‘I think I know what’s going on. She’s nervous of traffic,
since I clipped her last night. It’s quite understandable, poor thing. But she’ll have to get used to it. See if she’ll let you pick her up.’

As before, Jenny seemed quite happy to be picked up by Sam. He tucked her under his arm and followed Aunty Dot to the hallway, standing to one side of the bike as she opened the front door.

‘Now, you’ll have to be really careful,’ Aunty Dot warned. ‘We don’t want her jumping down and running into the road.’

In fact, Jenny did seem to be extraordinarily nervous. She flinched at all the brightness and quivered at the noise. Sam held on to her tightly, then he saw Aunty Dot’s bicycle basket.

‘I know! She can have a ride in your basket,’ he said, and before Aunty Dot could say,
No, don’t!
he lifted the lid and lowered Jenny inside.

‘WOOOFF!!’ said the bicycle basket, and there followed what sounded like a small tornado. Aunty Dot hastily scooped Jenny out again.

‘Pico!’ she said.

It has already been mentioned that Pico was very small, even for a Chihuahua. He was so small that he could fit in the palm of Aunty Dot’s hand. He was also very loud. In fact the one attribute had evolved out of the other, since Pico lived with Aunty Lilith, who was short-sighted and very deaf. And she weighed a lot. It wasn’t easy to coax her on to scales, or to find any that would take the full brunt of her weight, but Aunty Dot had bought an industrial-sized set especially for the purpose and had bullied Aunty Lilith on to it one day.

‘Good heavens, Lilith!’ she had said. ‘You weigh 340 pounds!’

‘Too much money for a set of scales,’ Aunty Lilith said.

‘No, dear – you’ll have to go on a diet!’

‘Dye it? There’s nothing wrong with it!’

‘Nothing wrong with what?’ said Aunty Dot, getting confused.

‘That’s what I said!’ said Aunty Lilith triumphantly.

Most conversations with Aunty Lilith went like this, and in the end most people gave up and left her to sit in her specially designed armchair, which could be manoeuvred into different positions at the touch of a button, and to eat her favourite treacle toffee, which exercised her jaw at least. Other than this, Aunty Lilith was quite happy in her chair and rarely saw the need to move out of it, but when she did Pico had to be very careful, because her size-nine feet might descend in any direction. And so this was how he had come to develop his tremendous bark.

‘WOOF!’

Because Pico was too small to go for walks in the usual way, Aunty Dot carried him around in the basket of her bicycle. When anyone approached it, Pico produced a bark like a Great Dane.

‘WOOF!!’

‘No one’ll ever steal this bike,’ Aunty Dot said, with satisfaction, and Sam, out of politeness, refrained from saying that no one would ever want to. It was a vast, unwieldy thing that clanked and groaned, and looked as if it had been cobbled together from the remains of other bikes. Aunty Dot had ridden it around the city for many
years. She rode on the pavements, since the roads were so busy, and whenever pedestrians got in the way, she just jiggled the basket so that Pico barked again – ‘WOOF!!’ – and they scattered to left and right, sometimes diving into the road for safety.

‘Better than a car horn,’ Aunty Dot always said.

Now she handed Jenny back to Sam and lifted Pico from the basket.

‘Jenny dear, it’s all right – everything’s fine,’ she said, holding the Chihuahua out towards her. Jenny this is Pico.’

For a moment the two dogs tensed and bristled at one another, then Jenny moved her nose, quivering and whiffly, towards Pico, and after a moment he lifted his tiny nose to her. And, moved by an impulse she didn’t fully understand, she said,
‘Little friend, I see that your body is small, but your heart is great. You have within you distant horizons and marvellous deeds. You will leave the place where you are now and travel to faraway lands. The stars shall be your compass and your journey shall know no boundaries.’

Now, in the main, Pico was contented with his life. He had known nothing else, having been bought by Aunty Lilith when he was a puppy and hardly bigger than a mouse. But sometimes he did wonder if there was more to the world than Aunty Lilith’s sleeve and Aunty Dot’s bicycle basket. When he rode in the bicycle basket he had a sense of immensity and noise, but Aunty Dot and Aunty Lilith were agreed that the pavements were too dangerous for him. Once, when he had been taken out, he had barked at a large, mean-looking dog called Rex, and Rex had
looked down in surprise to find where all the noise was coming from, then opened his great jaws and scooped him up in a single bite. Pico had to be pulled out of his mouth by the tail. Since then he had been carried about from one confined space to another, which was all he knew of the world. But he did dream about huge mountain ranges and deserts and forests and plains so vast that, run though you might, there was no end to them. He didn’t know where these dreams came from, but each time he had them he felt restless and a little more discontented with his lot. He would bark at Aunty Lilith until she put him on the window ledge, where he would peer out as well as he could at the bush that obscured his view, and get terribly excited if anyone came, such as the postman or the window cleaner. He would trot all the way from one end of the ledge to the other and wish he was bigger and that he could see more.

‘Where have you come from?’ he would bark at them, or ‘Where are you going?’, and in his mind he had the sense of far horizons and of horses galloping into the sun.

But all that came out of him was the same sound – ‘WOOF!’ – and the postman and the window cleaner would laugh, and say that he was a great little guard dog, and leave him alone again on the ledge.

One day, Pico,
he would tell himself,
one day you will see the world!
And each time he told himself this, he had the sense that the day was coming nearer. Now for the first time he could see those dreams realized in Jenny’s eyes. When he spoke finally it was in a voice that was hushed and awed.

‘You are right,’ he told her. ‘But no one has ever seen
that before.’ And right there and then, Pico gave Jenny his heart.

Aunty Dot could sense that something had shifted between the two dogs.

‘Perhaps we could try her in the basket after all,’ she murmured, thinking aloud.

So, very carefully, Sam lowered Jenny into the basket and, even more carefully, Aunty Dot lowered Pico in after her.

It worked! The two dogs nestled in without protest, and as Aunty Dot wheeled her ancient bicycle along the street, Pico rode between Jenny’s forepaws and both of them looked out.

The most obvious thing about the city where Sam and his mother had come to live was that there was hardly anywhere to walk a dog. There were overpasses and bypasses and subways, and concrete buildings and apartment buildings so tall you could hardly see the sky, but there was very little grass or trees. And wherever there was grass, there were notices up saying:
DOGS NOT ALLOWED
. More notices on lampposts read:
DOG OWNERS BEWARE
! £1,000
FINE IF YOUR DOG FOULS THE PAVEMENTS
.

They didn’t say what the fine would be if the owners fouled the pavements, Aunty Dot pointed out, as she showed Sam the notices. ‘And humans are a lot dirtier than dogs,’ she said.

It was true that the city was dirty. A kind of smog hung over it at all times, so that only on the brightest, hottest days could you actually see the sun, like a flat disc without
rays, through the smoke. Petrol fumes clogged up the air and roadworks clogged up the roads. So many different companies were drilling and digging, you could see right into the underbelly of the roads, as though they were being gutted. Wheelie bins overflowed from alleys, wastepaper bins spilled their contents into the streets, people scattered their litter behind them as they went.

And there were so many people! Fat and thin, tall and short, drab and colourful, decorated with paint or metal studs. Jenny had never imagined there could be so many people. They didn’t look anything like the people in her own world. For one thing, hardly any of them wore small, horned helmets. Or carried axes and shields. Some of them carried bags, and they bumped and jostled one another along the pavements, yet even then they didn’t look at each other, but down and away, and they didn’t look happy either, but frustrated and sad, bad-tempered, or just as though they were millions of miles away in their thoughts.

Jenny saw all this and wondered. It seemed to her, as Aunty Dot wheeled her bike slowly along the pavements, that she could hear the distant murmur of grass still struggling to grow far beneath the concrete, or the soft protest of roots forced to turn inwards and grow back down into the earth. The only spare bit of land that had not been developed yet was towards the outskirts of the city, near where Aunty Dot lived, which was where she was taking Jenny now.

It was a desolate wasteland, known as the croft, with patches of black earth and stubble, and tufts of grass that contained the scents of every dog in the city. Here at last Aunty Dot let Pico and Jenny out of the basket. Pico
disappeared instantly behind a tuft of grass, while Jenny was assaulted by a stunning range of scents she had never encountered before. Dogs, of course, and litter – old beer cans and bags of chips or takeaway curries. There was a can of oil, an old sock and a carrier bag. But beyond this there were all the ancient scents, telling the story of that particular patch of earth since it began, nearly five billion years ago. There was the scent of marching feet drumming in her nostrils, scorched earth and fire, and before that, long before, the scent of swamp, then ocean. She took her time investigating the earth, sniffing along the length of each blade of grass she came to, parting the tufts with her nose and examining them from the roots to the tip. Even here she could smell the petrol, and the residues of people, and the scent of a greater variety of dogs than she had ever known.

‘This is where I bring my other dogs,’ Aunty Dot told Sam, clipping the lead on while Jenny was too distracted to notice. ‘She’ll soon get used to it.’

Once they were ready to return, Aunty Dot put Pico back in the basket, while Jenny practised walking through the streets of the city, dodging and weaving through what felt like millions of pairs of feet. When they finally got back to Sam’s house, his mother had copied out a notice on several cards:

FOUND
One Jack Russell terrier, white with brown markings.
Please contact –

And she had put their phone number on the bottom. She gave them to Sam, along with some money for dog food. He was to go to the post office, the newsagent’s, the corner shop and the Co-op, the vet’s and anywhere else he could think of that might put the cards in their window. Sam looked at Aunty Dot for support, but she only smiled at him ruefully, shook her head slightly and said she would have to be going.