Waiting For Doggo

by Mark Mills

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

No-one ever called Dan a pushover. But then no-one ever called him fast-track either. He likes driving slowly, playing Sudoku on his iPhone, swapping one scruffy jumper for another. He's been with Clara for four years and he's been perfectly happy; but now she's left him, leaving nothing but a long letter filled with incriminations and a small, white, almost hairless dog, named Doggo. So now Dan is single, a man without any kind of partner whether working or in love. He's just one reluctant dog owner. Find a new home for him, that's the plan. Come on...everyone knows the old adage about the best laid plans and besides, Doggo is one special kind of a four legged friend...and an inspiration.

(P)2014 Headline Digital

Release date: November 20, 2014

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 208

Sample

DEAR DANIEL,

God, that sounds so formal. I don’t mean it like that, or maybe I do. As with a lot of things, I’m not sure any more/anymore (which one is it? I know you’d know). Shit, I’d start this letter again, but I’ve done that three times already and I’m late for my flight.

I’m going away, a long way away. I can’t tell you where. Part of me wants to but there’s no point because I don’t know how long I’ll be there. Anyway, it’s better like this. That’s crap, of course. What I mean is it’s better for me like this, not for you, although I know you’ll cope because you’re strong and sensible and slightly cold-hearted.

We’ll talk properly soon, when I’m feeling up to it, which I’m not right now, obviously, or I wouldn’t be running away to Austral— Oops! (Joke. You see, I haven’t lost my sense of humour like you told me the other night.) Okay, not funny under the circumstances. I can see you standing at the table reading this. I’m sorry, my dear darling Daniel. I’m a coward. At least I’ve learned that about myself. And I’m sorry about Doggo. That’s totally my fault. God knows what I was thinking. What was I thinking? That he would make a difference, even heal us. You’ll hate that word, like you hate it when I talk about journeys and energies and, yes, angels.

The thing is, I DO believe in them. And you don’t. Is that what this is really about? Maybe. I used to love your polite tolerance, the sceptical smile in your eyes, but now it pisses me off. It looks cynical and superior to me now, like you think you have all the answers. Well, you don’t. Who does? Maybe that’s what you have to learn about yourself, like I’ve learned that I’m a coward. Maybe I can only be with a man who believes in angels. Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean I’ve run away with Brendon. Brendon’s a prick. I’d take you over him any day (and if that’s not a compliment, what is, right!?). No, I’m on my own, travelling light, following my nose. There’s no one else, just me and you-know-who – the ‘One Who Must Not Be Named’, as you jokingly call him. I know you think he’s a figment of my warped imagination, but I believe he’s here with me right now, watching over me, and you can’t deny that that feeling is real (even if you are right about angels, which you aren’t!).

Take Doggo back. Something tells me you’re going to get this job and you can’t leave him shut up in the flat all day. It wouldn’t be fair on him, and it’s not like the two of you have hit it off. Is he there right now, peering up at you with those weird eyes of his? I swear he looked at me with a kind of contempt when I was packing my suitcase before, like he knew what I was doing. Of course he didn’t, he’s just a dog, a small, ugly dog. No, not exactly ugly, but you know what I mean – not overloaded with good looks, poor thing. I think I must have felt sorry for him when I first saw him. I feel bad about messing with his life, but at least he’s had a change of scene, a short holiday. I would have taken him back myself but there wasn’t time. You see, I haven’t been planning this thing, it just came to me very suddenly. I saw what I had to do and I’m doing it.

Am I making the biggest mistake of my life? I don’t think so. I think we got to a place where we were about to make a decision that would have been wrong for us, definitely wrong for me, and probably for you too. Don’t hate me, Daniel. You’ll feel humiliated, of course, but it could be worse. It’s not like I’m leaving you standing at that altar, plus everyone will damn me as a bitch, which will make it easier for you. Please don’t try and find me, and there’s no point in calling me now because I’ll be in the air by the time you read this.

Love and light

Clara XXXXXXXXX

PS I’ve just read this through and I realise I haven’t made myself clear. It’s over between us, at least for now, which I suspect means for ever, but who knows? Never say never, right? I need to feel open to other opportunities (yes, okay, other men). I can’t stop you doing what you want to do, but if you sleep with Polly I’ll kill you. She’s young, vulnerable and in awe of you, but she’s also my baby sister, so ‘non toccare’, as they say in Italy (reminds me of that gift shop in Lucca where you bought me a horrid china figurine of the Virgin Mary because you thought it looked like my father in drag). X

I lay the letter carefully on the table with a trembling hand. Cold-hearted? Really? Cynical and superior?

I never felt superior. It was our little game. We worked out the rules together. Astrology, past lives, guardian angels, whatever it was, Clara fell hard and I applied the brakes. We agreed to differ and we laughed along together because what we had was bigger than any of it. What we had was love. We agreed on that. She can’t just change the rules and get on a plane and disappear after four years. It’s my life too.

I want to be angry but it won’t come. Stung by the accusations levelled against me, I’m also numbed by a cold, creeping sensation that I may in fact be guilty as charged.

I glance down at my feet. Doggo was there before; he’s now on the sofa. He knows he’s not allowed on the sofa, but he doesn’t seem too worried about my reaction. In fact he’s not even looking at me. His chin is on his paws and he’s staring intently out of the window, as though the passing clouds hold the key to some metaphysical conundrum he’s wrestling with.

‘Doggo.’

He doesn’t turn, but then again it’s not a name he has ever answered to, possibly because he knows it’s not really a name, just something we’re calling him until we’ve decided what we’re really going to call him.

We’ve tried everything – we’ve even trawled through websites of baby names, but somehow none of them fitted. For a while we thought ‘Eustace’ might be the answer. It didn’t even last a day. According to Wikipedia, St Eustace was a Roman general who converted to Christianity only to suffer a grim catalogue of torments and misfortunes which included being roasted alive, along with his sons, inside a bronze statue of a bull. You had to hand it to the Emperor Hadrian: he not only knew how to build a wall, he had a dark imagination when it came to disposing of his enemies. St Eustace, I now know, is the patron saint of firefighters (the ones who failed to put out the flames that cooked him) and, more generally, anyone facing adversity.

‘Eustace,’ I say. ‘I’m facing adversity.’

Doggo cocks his ear, just the one, the left one, but it’s little more than a momentary twitch. His eyes remain fixed on the scudding clouds.

I pull my mobile from my pocket. I know her number is stored in it because we communicated about the surprise birthday party for Clara back in April. She works as a coordinator for a children’s activities company and seems to spend most of her time white-water rafting in Wales. What with it being the school holidays, I’m expecting to leave a message.

She answers on the fourth ring. ‘Daniel … …’

Just one word, but it carries in it an enticing mix of pleasure, surprise and anticipation.

‘Hey, Polly.’ Another twitch of Doggo’s ear, the right one this time. ‘How’s it going?’

Clara only has herself to blame, I tell myself, almost believing it. The thought would never have occurred to me if she hadn’t brought it up.

‘Great,’ chirps Polly. ‘Working like a dog.’

I look at Doggo welded to the sofa, almost at one with it, and I wonder where on earth that phrase came from.

IT ONLY OCCURS to me as we’re boarding the bus.

‘Am I allowed to travel with a dog?’

‘Driver’s discretion, mate.’

They’re caged off nowadays, bus drivers, for their own protection, and he has to press his nose to the Perspex screen to get a better view of Doggo down below.

‘Jesus,’ he mutters, unimpressed. ‘You’ll have to have him on your lap.’

‘I can’t. He’ll bite me if I try and pick him up.’

‘What, violent, is he? A public hazard?’

‘No, no, it’s just that …’ I trail off pathetically. What can I say? It’s true: he will bite me if I try and lift him on to my lap.

‘Sorry, mate, rules is rules.’ Please don’t say it, I think, but he does. ‘It’s more than my job’s worth.’

Normally I would plead my case, even create a scene, but I’m not feeling up to it today. I was barely able to boil an egg for my breakfast earlier. ‘Fair enough. Sorry to bother you. Have a nice day.’

I’m stepping off the bus when the driver says, ‘Now if he was a guide dog, say, or a seizure alert dog, or a mental health companion dog …’

‘He isn’t.’

The driver rolls his eyes and spells it out slowly for the dim-witted: ‘’Cos all them dogs trump driver’s discretion.’

‘Oh yes, he’s a seizure alert dog.’ I pat my chest to make the point.

‘Heart trouble at your age?’ he snorts. ‘You’re havin’ a laugh.’

But he’s the one having a laugh at my expense. He winks, nods for me to take a seat. I touch my Oyster card to the reader and thank him.

‘Tuck him out of sight. Don’t want him scaring the other passengers, do we?’

This time he isn’t joking.

The Battersea Dogs & Cats Home is jammed in between an old gasworks and the desolate wasteland that rings the long-defunct Battersea Power Station. It’s hard to imagine a more miserable spot for the housing of unwanted pets. The tight triangular site is bordered by railway lines on two sides and a busy road on the other. The place has received a makeover since I last passed by it some years ago. (I rarely come south of the river; north-west London has always been my stomping ground, for no other reason than it’s where I first landed in the capital.) A building with a curved glass facade now presents its gleaming face to the road. The flashy architecture seems a little excessive, a cruel taunt to all the expectant relatives who found themselves without a bean when the lawyer read out the terms of Great-Aunt Mabel’s last will and testament. Unlike France or Italy, where there are rules and rightful percentages for descendants, you’re free to shaft your family from beyond the grave in England, and animal welfare is often the winner in the legacy battle.

Doggo doesn’t appear to recognise the place. He trips merrily inside, apparently oblivious to the dim but distinct yapping of dogs above the rattle of a passing train.

I explain my predicament to a woman at the front desk. She’s as bright and cheery as the reception area where she spends her day, even when she tells me I really should have phoned ahead and made an appointment. It’s probably just me, but I sense something brittle in the kindly smile that Laura (it’s on her badge) flashes me. It brings to mind the carers at the grim nursing home near Brighton where my grandfather is seeing out his days. Is it really possible for someone to be so relentlessly good-natured? Or do they revert to true type once the front door has swung shut behind you, swearing like troopers and brutalising the unfortunates in their charge? So much for my resolution to rein in the cynicism Clara accused me of.

Ten minutes later, Doggo and I find ourselves in a cheerless office with another breezy young woman wearing a standard-issue polo shirt. This one is called Beth. She’s a ‘re-homer’, and she’s clearly not pleased about having to re-home a dog that was homed only three weeks ago. It’s a relief to know she’s human. Beth is my sort of age, I guess, late twenties, and she leans forward, elbows on her desk, as she listens attentively to my story.

I play it for sympathy: how it was my girlfriend who wanted a dog, how she didn’t even consult me but just turned up with it one day, how she then upped and left me with no warning. I am not, I explain contritely, in a position to look after a dog on my own. Beth nods, but I can see her eyes searching my face for clues to the failings that drove poor Clara to flee me. I can see her wondering if I’m a violent man, or just boring. I don’t care what she thinks, so long as she takes Doggo back and allows me to move on with my life.

I produce the buff envelope that Clara left out for me, the one containing the official paperwork. Beth doesn’t require it; she has her own file. She didn’t know Doggo but she’s happy to process his ‘re-admission to the facility’. It’s beginning to sound a little too George Orwell for my tastes, but I grin and thank her.

It turns out that Doggo was known to them as Mikey. Clara never mentioned it to me, but I can forgive her this omission. Mikey!? It would be like Winston Churchill’s parents changing their minds at the last moment and deciding to call their bouncing baby boy Brian. I mean, would Roosevelt and Stalin even have sat down with him at Yalta if he’d been called Brian?

Beth frowns as she reads on. ‘Strange, he was only with us a week before your girlfriend picked him out.’

‘So?’

‘I’d have had him down as a lifer.’

‘A lifer?’

‘Like in prison … here for the long haul.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Well, I mean, look at him.’

I look at Doggo, but there’s not much to see. He has folded back on himself and is licking his balls.

‘That’s not right,’ says Beth.

‘Doggo, stop it.’

‘No, I mean we have a neutering policy here.’ Beth flips through the file, finds what she’s looking for. ‘Ah, okay. He wasn’t here for long enough. Your girlfriend undertook to have it done.’

This time I correct her. ‘My ex-girlfriend.’

‘Whatever. She signed here to say she’d have him seen to.’

‘Seen to?’

‘Snip snip.’

I flinch. Maybe you have to be male to understand that castration can’t be reduced to finger-scissors and some onomatopoeia.

‘She never said.’

Beth lays her palm on the sacred file. ‘It’s here in black and white.’

But it isn’t black and white. No, it’s grey, very grey. We’re talking about Doggo’s balls.

‘I need to think about this.’

‘It has to be done.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s policy.’

If she knew me better, she wouldn’t have said it.

‘It was Nazi policy to exterminate Jews, gypsies and homosexuals. Did that make it okay?’

Beth looks deeply affronted; she even gives a little gasp. ‘I really don’t think that’s fair.’ Her eyes have a sudden watery sheen to them and I look away out of awkwardness. Doggo is still lapping away. I can’t remember ever having seen him so happy, and I find myself rising to my feet and extending my hand across the desk.

‘Beth, it’s been a pleasure, but Doggo and I are leaving now.’

It’s pathetic on my part. He’s just a dog, a dog I never wanted in the first place, but I’m expecting gratitude, or something. A glanc. . .