Dog Boy (15 page)

He had been home for half a day when he wanted to go back.

They all sat up, wakened suddenly from an afternoon snooze. Mamochka, Golden Bitch and Black Dog growled low, making a swelling, threatening chorus. Everyone’s hackles rose and Romochka’s neck and spine prickled. Someone was stumbling around in the ruin above them; rummaging, clumping, then dragging a beam from one end across the earth and weeds to another. They heard voices: there were two men in the ruin above.

Romochka scuttled to the wood pile and climbed up. The dogs paced, alert and scared. He could see legs wearing boots made of a yellow pelt of some kind. Romochka hummed a low, silencing warning, and the dogs dropped their voices and hovered in a group below him. They watched his face with such open trust that his chest swelled. He hummed his lowest, quietest note then stopped, listening. The second man’s voice rang out over the other end of the cellar and Mamochka, staring at Romochka’s rigid form, kept the others silent. The man in the fur boots grumbled just above them: ‘It’s a good place. What’s that idiot on about?’

The other man murmured something indistinct.

‘I don’t fucking care—look around. We can build a house with all this stuff, and if everyone’s scared of the place, all the better. Leave us alone, no problem.’

Romochka clambered down. The dogs paced miserably and Romochka listened with rising anger as the two men pulled things back and forth above them. The dogs looked at him, repeatedly, asking something of him. Mamochka licked him every time she passed, a deferential kiss that made him ache inside. Mamochka had never licked him like that; yet now, again and again, he felt her tongue on the corner of his mouth, and he felt her waiting.
Waiting for him to tell them what to do
.

Evening fell, but it was not a comforting darkness. The men lit a crackling fire up above in the ruin, murmuring and exclaiming all the while about some beef they had obtained. The flickering light through the cracked floor made the den seem permeable, flimsy. The smell of cooking meat and onions filled their space.

Romochka climbed back up onto the wood pile and stared down at the family as they waited in a semicircle before him. They all knew now that the men were moving in, taking over their closed paths.

Mamochka gazed calmly up at him. Golden Bitch, sitting motionless at her post by the entrance suddenly got up and walked over to Mamochka. She raised her head and looked at him intently with ears pricked. There was nothing bewildered in her glance. She wagged her tail slightly. She looked like Black Dog—impulsive and eager. Ready.

He was dizzy with sudden resolve: he would drive the men out.

He leapt down, his body tingling. He hummed them all in close and bounded on all fours up the rubble pile and into the moonlight and firelight above. He felt their huge courage rise like a wind behind him. Golden Bitch was at one hand, White Sister at the other, and the rest following close. Romochka didn’t stop to think. He bounded up the familiar blocks of stone and leapt to the nearest parapet. The dogs spread out in the shadows beneath him as he raised his shaggy head to the midsummer moon. He felt his fingers curl to the stones, and a howl bigger than his whole body welled and roared through his throat. The dogs howled in response below, hidden in the shadows. Then there was silence.

Both men leapt to their feet and turned away from the fire, peering this way and that.

‘Alyosha,
what was that
?’

‘Dogs? Calm down, Yuri—they won’t come near the fire.’

Romochka stared down from his parapet. He felt, then, immensely powerful. He was not afraid of their fire! He cackled out loud and both men started. Mamochka was leading the dogs around the outside of the ruin and he waited, humming quietly, weaving them into a dance—a singing hum now, not a growl.

‘Alyosha,
what is that
?’ Yuri was pointing straight at Romochka.

Alyosha peered at the silhouetted form.

‘A statue, a little lion?’

Yuri laughed nervously. ‘It moved, I swear it did!’

‘Hah! You’re off your face, you moron. Stone don’t move.’

Yuri shuddered.

Then Romochka stood up on the parapet, and both Alyosha and Yuri screamed. He howled again and all the dogs answered from around the outside of the ruin. He stood for a second, then leapt down, singing the dogs in closer. Alyosha and Yuri were both panting now. Wherever they looked they saw the glinting eyes of the six dogs. Romochka bounded on all fours just outside the clear light of the fire, then raised his voice, pulling the hum of the dogs with him into a crescendo. The two men screamed again and ran for the street door, the terrible slavering noise of the pack filling the air around them.

Romochka spent his first night as leader basking with the pack by the embers of the fire and eating hot, half-cooked beef stew.

Each metro station had its own character. Romochka had roamed in a daze through gracious stone forests, palisades, mosaics, statue arcades and painted scenes, his mind strung taut with a strange, pleasurable pain. He had found children in the pictures, all pretty and fair-haired, pet dogs, and bigger creatures. He’d searched these crowds of many-coloured heroes, the crowds that never went home or hunted, and felt his heart pound in sickening delight. In these pictures, somewhere, he would find his singer, Pievitza—in all her sternness and glory, and she would be flat too, and identical every day, yet new; silent yet singing.

But today was different. He didn’t gawp at the ceiling, or stare at his favourite painted panels. He walked down to near the end of the crowd and stood, sweating, at the edge of the platform, not looking at anybody, setting his face with the same studied and strategic indifference he had observed many times. This he understood well, and it pleased him. Mature dogs too, he told himself, would act as though the other were not there, not a threat, and so make themselves unthreatening too.

People looking round for the awful stench didn’t have time to identify Romochka as the source. The train pulled in with a diminishing scream over the roar of its engine. The doors hissed open, and he was suddenly pressed from all sides by the crush of people pushing against each other at the edges to get on and the flood of people pouring off. He found himself swept onto the train, but once on he couldn’t feel White Sister beside him. People pressed against his body, and he started to panic. He would have begun fighting to get away if the crush hadn’t suddenly separated again into discrete bodies, some seated, some holding on above their heads, all avoiding each other’s faces or staring with unseeing expressions. The space around him began to grow as people scented him and tried desperately to get away.

In that widening space, Romochka dithered, craning his head frantically. He lost his balance and fell flat as the train lurched and took off, accelerating to its impossible speed, shuddering, clunking under him, grinding against the tracks. He was on all fours, clinging to the bucking floor with open palms, crying through clenched teeth. A wave of horror rolled over him and then, through all that grinding, gnashing, screaming, roaring, rattling and clanking, his ears twitched. He had picked up a quiet, terrified whimper. Somewhere up the carriage and down low. White Sister was flat to the floor up ahead somewhere.

He began to wriggle forward on all fours through the legs but then the train decelerated sharply and he had to stop moving to keep his balance. People were shouting at him but as a thicket of legs stampeded off the train and another forest marched on, all the words were broken up and lost. White Sister was still whimpering quietly somewhere ahead of him. She hadn’t moved. The train took off, the people began to part around him, and he moved through that open space towards her. Another stop, another exodus, and an even more crushing surge onto the train. He was pressed against the legs of those seated along the benches, people jiggling and bouncing in unison as the train bounded, swayed and rocked over bumps in the tracks.

The carriage was so full now that people couldn’t get away from him. He wriggled doggedly between knees and was cursed and kicked, and then the train decelerated, stopped, and seemed to fill even more. He was crying with the effort, and thinking about starting to bite when he felt White Sister’s tongue on his face. She was pressed tight under the seat behind the row of legs near his hands. He reached under to her happy face and cradled it. Someone high above him laughed kindly, and he felt a little better. He decided not to bite anyone.

He closed his eyes, squeezing the tears out, and rocked and swayed and bounced with White Sister until the people who smelled him began to desert that carriage and he could ease the dog out and cuddle her in his arms.

He wiped his nose and eyes on his sleeve and pulled himself together. He adjusted to the flying speed of the train and stood. He nearly fell again when the train suddenly decelerated and slid into the lights of yet another station, but he was too low and hemmed in to see more than a glimpse of the roof. He clung to a silver pole with one arm and to White Sister’s body with the other, so that they would not be swept out of the door again with the sudden dissolving of people into that strange human river that had swept him on. People settled into their places, and then he clenched his teeth, eyes shut as the train launched into speed again.

When he opened his eyes, he saw immediately that the carriage was half-filled with kids, big and little. He could tell that these were not house kids. These were bomzh kids, street kids and gang kids, and he was suddenly very alert. He edged himself into the first free space that had a metal pole to hold onto, and he made quick hostile eye contact. The first kid to approach he snarled at savagely and made White Sister do the same. The kids laughed and talked about him, but they left him alone.

Then a terrible thought burst in on him. How many stops and starts? How many stations? He was probably further from home than he had ever been. This train had not really changed direction all that much apart from what felt like a long turn away from the sunrise. It was hard to know in the darkness.

He started to wonder whether it was really the same train that appeared in his metro station, or whether it was a completely different train each time. He tried to remember what had happened when he was a very little boy, and he vaguely recalled getting off trains. The phrase
catch the metro home
.

A horrible fear flooded his body then and he nearly blacked out. This train was carrying him further and further and he had better get off before it was so far that he would never find his way back. How far he must have travelled already! As the train pulled into the next station, he stood up and, with White Sister, stumbled out onto a strange platform.

This station was filled with trains and platforms and people flowing between them in steadily tramping hordes. His heart twisted in despair and he wished he could curl up somewhere and go to sleep. White Sister whined miserably at his side, her ears flat to her skull. He scrambled to the wall and then found an escalator.

Romochka and White Sister emerged into the daylight in a completely unfamiliar part of the city. It was so different from his city that it might have been somewhere altogether unrelated. Unbroken buildings rose all around them, some exceedingly beautiful. The blue sky was filled at all edges of its vast basin with the intricate forms of grand and ordinary buildings, none of them concrete apartment blocks or factories. Grime-laden trees stood around here and there as ornaments, but there was nothing in sight that resembled a wild copse or a forest. There wasn’t even any garbage.

Romochka was too devastated to hunt. He scrambled past people and cars and into a small park across from the metro station. After his shock he needed sleep more than anything. He found a broad, low bush and crept under its bower. Trams squealed and rollicked along their tracks around one side of the park, and a busy lane curved along the other. As he closed his eyes he could smell exhaust, car brakes, the kartoshka and pirozhki from the stalls and, closer, vodka. A lady sitting on a park bench nearby was sipping it, raising her whole handbag to her face for each gulp. The leaves had been raked out from under this bush, and the dusty bare earth filled his nostrils, smelling naked and wrong. He fell asleep, leaving it to White Sister to snarl at anyone who tried to push in.