Dog days, p.5
Dog Days, page 5
‘Oh,’ he had said, backing away as his heart and resolve melted, like candle wax. ‘Ah.’
The dog had slipped from Luke’s grasp and wobbled over to Dan, who found his arms were already outstretched, waiting, like the windmill, to welcome his boy home.
‘All done, fella? Good to go?’ Dan asks now. Fitz answers with a head-back howl. They complete their final lap, then head home, nodding to the evening regulars carrying the ubiquitous little black bags that swing in the evening wind. Since Atticus, though, nothing feels regular any more.
* * *
At home Dan cooks spaghetti for twelve minutes, slices tomato and prepares a smoothie for the morning. Fitz paces up and down with Dan’s running sock until he’s ordered to put it back in the washing, which he carefully does.
Dan calls his mother, who tells him what she had for dinner and describes the neighbours’ various ailments. ‘He’s got that disabled badge, Dan, but I’ve seen him jogging from the car to the loo.’
‘Have you?’ Dan says indulgently.
‘I have, Dan. It’s all that funny food she cooks. The smells that come out of her kitchen window. I worry about my washing.’
Dan hums and tuts and asks about his sister. ‘Do you think Dave is going to pop the question while they’re away in Tenerife?’
‘I hope so, Dan, I really do. They’ve been together four years now. Your dad would’ve liked that … What a shame he won’t be here to see her get married …’
Dan changes the subject before the tears start.
Lizzie
(Fancy seeing you here)
‘LENNY, SCHOOL IS GOING to be fun. You’ll make lots of new friends.’ Lizzie is trying to convince herself as much as him. She doesn’t want Lenny to go. She wants to keep him by her side, tuck him under her arm, cling to his hand. Fill her lungs with his sunshine. She wants to be his only friend, like he is hers.
Instead she adjusts the collar of his second-hand polo shirt and sweeps his too-long hair out of his eyes. He refuses to let her cut it. ‘Don’t want to go.’
This is a lie. Lizzie knows Lenny is bored, and desperate to get out of the shelter, and his loyalty makes her heart ache so much she has to cover it briefly with her hand. ‘You’ve been out of school too long. It’s been over a month now. You need to get back in the classroom. I wish I got to go to school! Just think of the football in the playground and I’ll be there afterwards with a Mars bar and I’ll ask Tess if we can make cupcakes later.’ Lizzie watches Lenny pretending to waver. There are no boys his age in the shelter and she is rubbish in goal. She’s always too afraid to dive.
Lenny lets her waffle on about all the fun he’s going to have as she walks him across the blustery Beacon. Maud trots along beside them, peering left and right. Lizzie wonders what or who for.
Taking Maud with her on her walks has become second nature now. Tess is always grateful. ‘Thank you, Lizzie, always so much to do. I’d love to have time to wander over hills and dales with the old girl, but duties prevail.’ Tess is certainly married to her job, but her adoration of Maud is obvious. The Jack Russell has baskets and blankets all over the place, and a chicken breast of her own cooked on Sundays. ‘Saved my life, that dog,’ Tess says. ‘All she has to do is wag her tail.’
Maud seems to understand her elevated status in the house, and occasionally climbs, Siamese-cat-like, atop a pile of clean washing. ‘Hey, Lady Muck, get off,’ Tess says, with mock sternness, then to Lizzie, ‘Only a bit of dog hair, no harm done.’
Lenny forgets himself in the breeze, as only children and kites can. He takes his arms out of the sleeves of his coat, does up the top button and lets his cape fly him across the hill. ‘Look, Mum! I’m Superman!’
Lizzie chases him until they are red-cheeked, still catching their breath as they walk up the lane to school, which, Lizzie is relieved to see, is hidden away up a dirt track. Giant conifers shield the playgrounds, and wooden doors, too high to see over, are locked shut. ‘That’ll do, Pig,’ she says to Lenny, who snorts on cue.
She presses the buzzer and waits until a tinny voice says, ‘St Jude’s. How can I help?’
Lizzie gives her name and Lenny’s and they stand back as the doors creak open. A gravel path leads down to a glass-fronted dining room next to the main entrance, where pot plants break up the red-brick walls. Lizzie, not sure on their dog policy, or what dogs think about being held, asks, ‘Can I pick you up, Maud?’ The dog sits down, which Lizzie takes as a yes. ‘Thank you. It’s only for a second.’
‘See? Isn’t this nice?’ Lizzie says to Lenny in a chirpy voice as she signs them in. ‘Lunch smells good, too.’
It doesn’t. It smells of every school dinner in the world. Chips and spilled milk. Lizzie moves on into the foyer, following her nose. Shoe polish and nit shampoo. Sun cream and Dettol. Moth-eaten beanbags. Sweaty plimsolls. Herself. Lizzie can smell her old self in here. Wishes she was behind one of those closed doors, with a class of children in front of her and a whiteboard behind. Armed with her marker pen, her projector and the curriculum.
Children appear from corridors like ants, dressed in hats and scarves although spring is here. Lizzie remembers the damp smell of wool on radiators, the warmth she drew from being with children. She was never awkward with them. She didn’t need to be their friend, she needed to be their teacher, but she became both. Her notice-board was always full of cards from her class. ‘To the best teacher in the whole (infinite) universe’ and ‘You are even cleverer than The Guinness Book of Records.’
Lenny says nothing, but cranes his head, taking it all in. He’s small for his age, the borrowed clothes too big. Lizzie wants to scoop him up in her long cardigan and take him home. She wants his nose in her neck. A shelter is no place for a kid, Lizzie. She knows that. He needs to be at school. Making friends. Learning. He wants to eat the whole world and she can only offer him the tiniest sliver, a waning crescent. She feeds him encyclopaedias. Sets the timer on his T-Rex watch, five facts in ten seconds. She fills his brain with statistics and trivia. Did you know pigs can’t look up? Monkeys go bald in old age? Kangaroos can’t walk backwards? She tells him that you can make dynamite with peanuts. The word ‘muscle’ means ‘little mouse’ in Latin, because that is what ancient Romans thought biceps looked like. Bodies give off a light too weak for the eye to see.
The details fall through him, like water in a sieve. Hey, Lenny, your heart is the same size as your fist. Lenny’s fist is tiny, but his heart is huge, and there is a tear in the muscle, a mouse hole, that only his dad can fill.
‘Ah, Lenny,’ says an overly made-up receptionist wearing a badge that says Linda, ‘I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. I hear you like football.’ She gives him a conspiratorial wink and adds, ‘I know some boys who badly need a good left-footer.’
‘I’m left-footed!’ Lenny blurts out. Linda smiles over his head at Lizzie, who mouths, ‘Thank you,’ and breathes slightly easier.
‘How about that, then?’ Linda says. ‘Come on, kiddo, it’s almost time for break. Mum will be back to pick you up at three fifteen, okay?’
A quick kiss and a hard sniff of his minty shampoo. It will have to last Lizzie the day. As she walks out of the door, she hears the sound of paper ripping and realizes it’s her heart being torn in two, so part of it can stay with her boy. Maud licks her cheek and she squeezes the dog briefly, before she realizes what she’s done, remembers dogs’ tongues can carry Capnocytophaga, a bacteria that can cause all sorts of disease and infection. She sets Maud on the floor and the dog whimpers in the direction of the gate. ‘I know,’ Lizzie says, ‘but it’s for the best.’
* * *
She’s first in the queue at pick-up time. Maud had trotted out and stood by the door as Lizzie was preparing to leave, but Lizzie said no. This was her special time with Lenny. She sees him before he sees her: messy hair, grin splitting his face in two. Then she tracks the arm around his shoulders up to its owner. And there, smiling broadly, is Luke-from-the-Beacon. Their eyes meet briefly before Lizzie looks down and rushes over. Lenny ducks under Luke’s arm with a ‘Bye, Mr Williams. See you tomorrow,’ and races towards his mum.
‘Mum! Mum! I’m on a football team already! They’re reading Goodnight Mister Tom in class, but I’ve read it already, so I’m reading another book of hers called Back Home and—’ The rest of his sentence is lost inside Lizzie’s cardigan as she wraps him in her arms, then fits her palm around his bony shoulder and steers him out of the playground.
Lenny waffles on about his day and how much fun he’s had as they walk home. He’s all ‘Mr Williams this’ and ‘Mr Williams that’ and each time he says the name Lizzie flinches slightly and doesn’t know why.
She picks up Lenny’s star-shaped hand. ‘It sounds great, your teacher too.’ The thought of Lenny being happy without her hurts, like a stitch. She plasters over the wince of pain with a smile. She can’t be his only happiness. She knows this, but it still stings.
Back at the shelter Lenny undresses and folds his uniform ready for the next day. There is already a scuff in the knee of his too-long trousers and a button missing from his coat. ‘Sorry, Mum, I scored a goal, though!’
Lizzie grins. ‘Don’t worry about it. Nothing a needle and thread can’t fix. Did you know there’s a story that buttons on shirts were invented by Napoleon? He was sick of seeing his soldiers wipe their noses on their sleeves.’
‘A button won’t stop me,’ Lenny says, with pride, and Lizzie laughs.
‘Come on, Tess is calling us.’
Stella has cooked the dinner, though Deb’s name was down. No one sticks to the rota except Lizzie. The person cooking is supposed to make a list of what they’ve used and what needs replacing, which also rarely happens. The person who cooks doesn’t do the washing-up. Stella never makes dessert. When Sandra cooks, she makes sure all the items are separated by an inch: the peas don’t touch the carrots and the potato shrinks back from the chicken, the way she used to for her husband. Tess always makes a big deal about mashing her meal together.
Lenny wolfs down his dinner, even though tonight it’s veggie curry. Full of vegetables, mostly peas, and the odd chunk of pineapple. It’s overcooked and sloppy, but he doesn’t seem to mind. The second he’s through, he shouts, ‘FINISHED!’, which he has done ever since he could talk, and she used to do too, once, a long time ago.
Lenny wipes his orange-stained mouth and pulls back his chair from the table with a screech that scares Maud, who had been lurking around for scraps but would never admit she ate things from the floor. ‘Delicious. What were the yellow bits? Please can I go and kick the ball outside, Mum?’
Worry about his day has exhausted Lizzie. All she wants to do is wash him clean, tuck him into bed, read to him until he falls asleep, then lose herself in her word searches. ‘Oh, Len, haven’t you played enough today? You’ll be back at school tomorrow. You can have a kickabout then.’
‘Mum, that’s not fair!’ He brushes his fringe out of his eyes angrily, swiping away a fat tear.
He’s tired, Lizzie thinks, but he’ll never admit it. No one denies exhaustion like a boy needing his bed. Lizzie feels tears of her own prickle in a Pavlovian response to his, and starts to backtrack, but Tess puts a hand on her shoulder and says, ‘Stay there and finish your supper, Lizzie. I’ll take Lenny out with the ball for half an hour. I’m no Daniel Beckham but I’ll give it a go.’
Lenny is too excited to remember that he doesn’t like Tess because she smells funny. ‘David Beckham,’ he corrects, then says, ‘He’s, like, ancient. It’s all about Dele Alli now.’
‘After you’re done, go on up and have a nice bath, Lizzie. You’ve been cleaning all day! There are some posh bubbles on the side. Frankie went shopping earlier. Add a dollop of them – and take up a cup of tea. I’ll play with this rascal outside for a bit and he can jump in after you.’
Lizzie knows when she’s beaten. She thanks Tess quietly, lowers her head and forces down a lump of indistinguishable vegetable. Lenny is too happy to protest the bit about the bath. He’s already waiting at the back door, doing keepie-uppies with the ball.
Once Lenny and Tess have gone, Lizzie scrapes her plate and makes her way upstairs. She’d love to bathe with Lenny, like she used to, but her body is a map of scars that he cannot see. She counts them as she soaks herself in water not quite warm enough to be relaxing and jumps out when she hears him bound up the stairs, quickly wrapping herself in her dressing-gown. It’s cheap, the itchy nylon sticking to her damp flesh. She had a towelling one at home. Penance.
‘Come on, Lenny, hop in,’ she says, topping up the bath with the last of the hot water.
‘Tess is all right in goal,’ Lenny says, as he pulls his jumper over his head. ‘She even saved a couple.’ He pulls down his trousers and pants at the same time and would have got into the bath with his socks on if Lizzie hadn’t stopped him.
She kneels by the bath and makes him a long beard with the bubbles. ‘They are always round because of surface tension. Their shell is made from a layer of water between two layers of soap. Bubbles can be frozen, just like water. Snapping shrimp kill their prey with bubbles.’
‘Never.’
‘True fact.’
‘Cool.’ Lenny pretends to kill her with his pincers and, after some persuasion, lets her wash his hair.
He falls asleep halfway through ‘Jabberwocky’. She doesn’t sleep, though. Instead she opens the curtains slightly, so the light from the brillig moon shines on her son and her slithy toves, as she watches him breathe in, and out, and in again.
George
(George lays it out on the table)
‘MORNING, POPPY! HOW ARE you today?’
‘She’s hardly going to answer you, is she, daft mare?’
‘Dogs have their own way of communicating. You just have to be able to understand them,’ Betty says, bending down to kiss the fur between Poppy’s eyes.
‘I don’t want to own a dog, let alone understand the poxy thing. What next? Tea leaves and Tarot cards?’
‘I thought I’d run the vacuum round first.’ Betty stands up painfully slowly and says, ‘Takes a while for my psychic abilities to kick in. And don’t say those things about Poppy. She understands more than you think.’
‘She’s as bad at taking a hint as you are,’ George says, briefly wondering if Betty has a walking stick, then deciding he doesn’t care. He made Ellen a fine pikestaff with a smart brass cap that tapped like a hobnail boot. Far too good for Betty: she’d only bend it.
‘Hang on, I’m sensing something.’ Betty waggles her head. ‘I’m picturing a bacon sandwich. Does that mean anything to you?’
‘Humph,’ George says, and snatches the newspaper from the side table. ‘Four slices, as crispy as your hair.’
She’s brought her own dog along today, an ugly old rescue greyhound called Lucky. Betty covers his ears as she walks him through the house to the back garden. ‘I can take your potty mouth, but my poor boy’s been through enough and he doesn’t need to hear it.’
George laughs. ‘Ha! I bet he doesn’t think he’s lucky!’ Then: ‘And what the fuck is he wearing?’
‘It’s a coat I knitted for him. Don’t listen to him, Lucky. You look hotsy-totsy.’
‘He looks like one of those piss bottles men get given in hospital.’
‘Nonsense. He looks lovely and smart, don’t you, Pipperoo? He needs it, anyway. He gets cold, don’t you, Lucky?’ Betty says, rubbing the dog’s ears as Lucky cowers in the itchy polyester.
‘He’s not cold, he’s embarrassed,’ George says, and Lucky’s tail moves to the left by a couple of inches, then back again. ‘Look, his tail’s moving. He agrees with me.’
‘I thought dogs couldn’t communicate?’ Betty asks innocently.
George raises his finger in response and Betty chortles with delight.
‘A point to me,’ she says to Poppy, holding up her hand for a high-five, which Poppy loyally ignores.
‘Would take more than a coat to smarten up your mongrel anyway. He’s got teeth like a bag of burned chips.’
‘Rude. I did knit a little one for Poppy …’ Betty says, pulling out something pink with bobbles on it.
‘No. Absolutely not. She’s not wearing a coat. She looks ridiculous enough as it is.’ George wonders, again, why Ellen chose to punish him with a dog. What was she thinking? Bloody Poppy. What does the dog want from him? He has nothing to give her. He’s never once tossed her a scrap of his toast, let alone a bone, yet there she is, every mealtime, looking at him as if he’s hung the moon, or invented Pedigree Chum. He doesn’t even feed her. Betty does that, and she takes her for walks with Lucky.
No matter how hard George tries, he can’t shake them off. Poppy and Betty seem to be here to stay. The other day Betty found the spare key when she was cleaning the kitchen (nosing about in the tins), and now she simply appears every morning.
He’s sworn at her, ignored her, pretended to be asleep. Once he even tried being dead, but she just stepped over him, said, ‘Great Scott,’ and put the kettle on, then let the dog out and sang a song about waggy bones.
Never once has George asked her for anything nicely or thanked her for her help. It would take too much from him, and his dignity is all he has left. Realizing that the doctor had undressed him that first morning, not Betty, had gone some way to reassuring him he had not completely lost control, but for a while it was close.
Now Betty is his alarm clock. He gets up when he hears the key turn. He ignores her greeting, but shuffles into the kitchen for the tea he knows she’ll bring to his bedside if he doesn’t rise. ‘Stay out of my bedroom.’ If he’s told her once, he’s told her a million times, but she keeps walking in anyway, a feather duster in one hand and Shake n’ Vac in the other. He used to say, ‘Stay out of my house.’ Now George just demands she stay out of specific rooms, namely his bedroom and the spare room. So far, she seems to have sensed there is no leeway on the latter, mostly because George guards it when she’s on the prowl for things to clean. After the funeral, Barbara put away all Ellen’s things in the spare room. Knowing Betty, she’d march in and come out wearing Ellen’s wedding dress, then expect George to take her for a turn round the rug.
