Waiting for Doggo (6 page)

I took Clara to Ely, out in the Cambridgeshire fens (or what used to be the fens before they drained the wetlands for pasture), and to Studland Bay on the Dorset coast, and to see
Twelfth Night
in Stratford-upon-Avon. She introduced me to the Neolithic standing stones of Avebury Ring and the thermal waters of Bath, and to paragliding (in a shallow bowl scooped out of the Surrey Downs). Less successfully, I also took her to watch Portsmouth play Southampton in the fifth round of the FA Cup.

Are these meaningless memories? Am I completely deluded? J isn’t the only friend of mine to share an opinion on Clara since she jetted off to God knows where (although I’m not sure even He knows). Many of the others have let slip in various ways that they found her a bit of a handful, that we weren’t good for each other. I wonder how long I can keep telling myself they’re wrong, that the best of what we were was known only to us.

Polly texted me yesterday, even though we vowed not to communicate for a couple of weeks:
Why aren’t I feeling more guilty? X

Because you have no moral rudder, you hussy x

LOL. God I miss you. Sorry, I shouldn’t say that x

Might be flattered if you weren’t in, er, Wales x

It’s not so bad x

Liar x

I can remember every delicious detail of that night. Damn, there I go again. Don’t worry, have to dash. Middle-class brats screaming for burgers and yours truly on BBQ duty xx

Rereading the exchange later, it strikes me that Clara and I would never have been able to produce it, that anything we wrote would have been bogged down in an earnestness of her or my making. The alchemy with Polly is a law unto itself, a wild beast prowling through the undergrowth. I’m seriously tempted to pick the conversation up where we left off. In the end, though, I take Doggo out for his final dump of the day.

I love where I live. My flat is on Chesterton Road, which is a continuation of Golbourne Road, which lies at the top end of the Portobello Road. It’s not quite Notting Hill, but in my opinion it’s all the better for it. The area has an edgy, front-line feel to it, although long-term residents probably think it has been gentrified out of all existence by yuppie ad men like me moving in. Either way, it’s still a rich mix of North Africa and Portugal, designer boutiques and junk shops, hardware stores and specialist bike shops for people who could buy a motorcycle for the same money. The whole thing is overlooked by that soaring testament to 1960s brutalist architecture, Trellick Tower, which stands sentinel at the northern end of Golbourne Road.

This is my stomping ground. I’ve been here for three years now and I can’t imagine living anywhere else. I love it more than ever, even on Saturdays, when the whole world descends on the street market and the hordes of visitors spill from the pavements into the streets. Doggo, I sense, is coming to love it too, if only because the Moroccan chefs sneaking cigarettes out the back of their restaurants toss him scraps of food when we make our evening pilgrimage to Athlone Gardens. Athlone Gardens is Doggo’s latrine, the place where he dutifully craps and I dutifully bag it up.

In American romantic comedies, owning a dog is a sure-fire way of bumping into cute girls before bedding them. You meet them in Central Park (maybe their dog tries to mount your dog – a bit of canine gender reversal to take the edge off the obvious parallel); you part on awkward terms, resolving to keep your distance from each other in the future so as to avoid a repeat of the ugly spectacle, et cetera, et cetera, right through to the final scene in the church when, just as you’re exchanging your marriage vows, her dog attempts to mount your dog once again (tee-hee).

In Kensington Gardens on a Sunday morning, most of the dog-owning women make my grandmother look like a spring chicken, and the few fit ones are, well, fit. You’d have to be an accomplished athlete to stand any chance of exchanging even a few words with them, that’s how fast they run, their lanky pedigree hounds bounding along beside them.

You could never describe Doggo as a lanky hound. He’s a stumpy, honest-to-God, salt-of-the-earth, deep-dyed, through-and-through mutt. Remarkably, he seems to have no sense of this whatsoever. It’s something I’ve noted at the office over the past week or so. He holds himself like royalty, as though all eyes are on him and he can’t afford to slip up for fear of disappointing the adoring crowds. Kensington Gardens, with its better breed of person and dog, is definitely his kind of place. He’s at home here, in his element, so much so that I wonder if he doesn’t know it already. On reflection, I’m not sure he does. For all his haughty self-assurance, he seems uncertain of his environment.

I’ve brought him here to stretch his legs, to let him run properly free for the first time since Clara left. He’s not interested. Yes, he wanders off to bury his snout in the base of a tree every so often, but he always keeps one eye on me. I’m touched by the little glances; they suggest a reliance on me that I haven’t felt before now (although it’s quite possible he imagines he’s the one in charge, and he’s simply checking to see that I’m not getting up to any mischief).

It’s a glorious, sunny, windblown May day, and I decide to treat us to a spin round the Serpentine in a rowing boat. Doggo hops fearlessly aboard and plants himself in the prow, paws on the gunwales, surveying the water like a captain from his poop deck. He seems as surprised as I am by the shiver in his hind haunches and the little whimpers he emits every time we near some ducks. I’m not sure he likes to think of himself as subject to the baser instincts that make other dogs tick.

Last night I came close to blowing out Sunday lunch with my sister. The moment she opens the door of her terraced house, I wish I had.

‘Oh God,’ she groans. ‘A dog.’

I love Emma. Of course I do. She’s the one who held it together when Mum and Dad split, the one who filled in for them when it came to me. It’s just that I haven’t seen her for five years, not the real her, not the person who would once have smothered me in a hug and made a joke about the rubbish bottle of red wine I’ve brought with me. For some reason, everything now has to be ‘just so’ in her life. Her brother turning up with a dog is an unexpected irritation, a detail she’s struggling to factor in to the preordained vision of how the following few hours will unfold.

‘Don’t worry, he’s almost house-trained.’

‘Dan—’

‘Joke, Ems.’

Emma and Duncan have two kids. Milo is a permanently disgruntled blob of a two-year-old, upstairs, sleeping, probably drugged with Calpol. Alice is six, downstairs and playing the piano in the kitchen cum dining room. She’s the real reason I didn’t blow out lunch.

‘Who’s making that God-awful racket? Oh, it’s you.’

She spots me coming down the stairs. ‘Uncle Dan!’ She drops off the piano stool, scampers over and throws her arms around my waist. ‘What have you brung me?’

‘Brought,’ corrects Emma at my shoulder.

‘What makes you think I’ve brung you anything?’

‘’Cos you always do. You’re my godfather.’ Her eyes widen at the sight of Doggo on the landing above. ‘You brung me a dog!?’

‘Brought,’ says Emma. ‘And it’s Uncle Dan’s dog.’

‘He’s called Doggo, unless you can come up with a better name.’

Alice thinks on it with a serious little face before deciding, ‘It’s a good name.’

I wince suddenly. ‘Oof!’ I pat the back pocket of my jeans and pull out the wrapped package with a puzzled look. ‘What’s this doing here?’

‘It’s for me, it’s for me!’

It’s a silver necklace.

‘That’s the symbol of peace,’ I explain.

‘Peace?’

‘Because there’s too much war and killing in the world.’

‘Maybe you can show her some photos of mass slaughter on the Web,’ calls Emma from the cooker.

‘I love it,’ beams Alice. ‘Put it on me.’

Duncan is in the garden, flapping a bit of cardboard at the barbecue. ‘Bloody charcoal’s damp. It’s been in the shed all winter. Good to see you.’ He breaks off from his flapping to pump my hand.

He’s a good man, Duncan, the sort of chap you’d want beside you in the trenches, the sort of chap to whom you could say, ‘Duncan, old man, the Captain asked if I’d make a quick recce of no-man’s-land but I’ve got the most dreadful headache.’ Duncan would happily go in your place, return unscathed and probably earn himself a medal in the process. He’s utterly unlike all of Emma’s previous partners, the string of feckless boyfriends who taught me to swear and smoke and listen to Bob Dylan when I was younger.

‘Sorry to hear about you and Clara,’ he says awkwardly. ‘I’d have offered five to one on you’d go the distance.’

Duncan has always been a betting man. He sees life in probabilities. He doesn’t gamble any more; Emma doesn’t allow him to, except at work, where he trades bonds for an Italian bank.

‘Maybe you still will,’ he adds.

‘Unlikely.’

I mean it. I’ve spent a couple of weeks feeling sorry for myself – confused, wounded, even vengeful – but I refuse to become one of those sorry fools who carries a guttering torch for someone who wants rid of them.

‘Just took off, huh?’ asks Duncan, a wistful look in his eyes. ‘Still don’t know where?’

‘No.’

He goes back to his flapping. ‘I rather liked her.’

‘Really?’

‘Absolutely. Well, mostly.’

‘I’m sure she’d be touched to know you rather liked her mostly.’

As long as I’ve known Duncan, he has laughed like a bad actor performing to order. ‘Ha ha ha,’ he chortles stiffly. ‘I could tell she wasn’t always easy.’ It’s his polite way of saying she was several sandwiches short of a picnic.

I’m the first to arrive, but I’m not the only guest. There’s a couple I’ve met a few times before, Hugo and Lucinda, as well as my date, Fran, who works as a research analyst at Duncan’s bank. I’m assuming she’s my date because she’s my age (or close enough) and single. She’s also sullen, chippy and caustic. She’s rude about Doggo, dismissive of Islington (where we are all gathered), and she drops a snide comment about parents who drone on endlessly about their children. It’s quite a feat, to alienate every person present within twenty minutes or so of arriving.

While Duncan fights to keep the butterflied leg of lamb from becoming a burnt offering, I find myself looking at Fran across the teak table in the garden and wondering what makes an intelligent person like her tick so out of time with everyone else. It’s as if she’s consciously committing social suicide. This makes her extremely intriguing, of course, but only because she’s also extremely attractive. Without her looks, she’d be sitting alone at home right now.

When she takes a swipe at the middle-class obsession with organic food, it pops out of my mouth unbidden: ‘Without your looks, you’d be sitting alone at home right now.’

‘Dan!’ chides Emma.

‘Don’t I know it,’ says Fran, fixing me with an amused look. ‘And thank you. That’s the first honest thing I’ve heard since I got here.’

‘There’s more to life than honesty,’ blusters Hugo.

Fran ignores him, her eyes still fastened on me. ‘Say something else.’

‘Quid pro quo.’

Fran drops another slice of salami into Doggo’s mouth. ‘Why did your girlfriend run away?’

‘That’s cheating.’

‘You never said it couldn’t be a question.’

‘Okay,’ I reply. ‘Because I don’t believe in angels.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because there’s no evidence for them.’

‘Ah, an empiricist. Maybe you’re blind to the evidence. Maybe you’re looking for halos and wings when you should be looking for other things.’ She pauses briefly before adding, ‘Maybe I’m an angel.’

I can’t resist it. ‘Great disguise.’

Fran laughs loudest of all.

Duncan keeps a fine cellar, and as the claret flows, Emma finally begins to relax. So does Fran. She has set out her stall – Hi, I’m Fran, your resident misanthrope – but she’s smart enough to know that labouring the point would only be boorish. She even tells a sweet anecdote about a hedgehog and a garden broom that has us all in stitches.

I clear the plates away and find myself alone in the kitchen with Emma, who’s dusting her home-made chocolate torte with icing sugar. ‘Sorry about Fran. God only knows what Duncan was thinking.’

‘I like her.’

‘Then you must be worse off than I thought,’ snorts Emma. I snaffle a raspberry from a bowl. ‘Don’t!’ she snaps.

‘Ems, it’s a raspberry.’

‘I knew I should have bought another punnet at the farmers’ market.’

Not a line I ever thought I’d hear my sister utter.

‘Two Our Fathers and two Hail Marys should cover it,’ I say. We’re lapsed Catholics, so it’s okay to joke about such things. When Emma asks about the new job, I tell her the truth: that it’s great to be working again, functioning, earning.

‘So who have they got filling Fat Trev’s shoes … sorry, open-toed sandals?’

‘Her name’s Edie, short for Edith.’

She throws me one of her knowing looks. ‘Intriguing. Age?’

‘Twenty-five.’

‘Attractive?’

‘Kind of.’

‘Elaborate.’

I begin to describe Edie, then remember I have a photo of her on my phone, the one taken just after we’d finished rearranging our office. She’s posing in the middle of the room, smiling broadly, arms spread wide in a ‘ta-dah’ fashion.

‘Kind of?’ says Emma. ‘She’s bloody gorgeous. Bitch.’

Ah, there you are
, I think.
Finally
.

I explain that she has a boyfriend, Douglas, and that they’ve been together for ever – well, since they met at Cambridge University.

‘Cambridge? Did you tell her you tried to get in and failed?’

‘Yes, Ems,’ I reply wearily.

‘Did you tell her I tried to get in and did?’

‘Weirdly, you haven’t come up in conversation yet.’

‘It won’t last. University relationships never do.’

I tell her it’s never going to happen, Douglas or no Douglas. The thought of living and working with the same person fills me with a kind of cold terror. All day together, then nights too? Talk about cabin fever.