The Puppy That Came for Christmas (3 page)

The new center was holding an open afternoon in a few days' time for prospective parents. However, since I'd never been responsible for a dog for more than an hour, we decided to phone to find out more. Nervous, I dialed the number and waited.

“Answering machine,” I said, putting the phone down. I didn't want to leave a message.

A few minutes later, it rang. A Scottish voice, amid a commotion and sounds of rustling and barking in the background:

“Hi, I'm Jamie, I run the Fenston Helper Dogs Center. Sorry, couldn't get to the phone quick enough. Are you interested in being a puppy parent?”

“Yes. Yes, I am. Well, maybe . . . I'm thinking of coming to the open afternoon—where exactly do I go?”

Ian couldn't come because he had to work, so I drove over to the center before its grand opening to check out exactly where it was. Still, I ended up being late on the day and just caught the official opening by the mayor. Then Helper Dogs gave a demonstration. I watched in amazement as dogs opened doors and turned on lights and helped their owners to take off their socks, shoes, hats, and coats. They could find keys, bring the phone, press emergency alarm buttons, take washing from washing machines, and make their disabled owner's life better in a hundred different ways.

Everyone who had a Helper Dog sang its praises.

“I couldn't go out before I had him, but now I go out every day,” one lady said. “He's my life.”

“If it wasn't for her, I'd have no reason to wake up in the morning,” said a man confined to a wheelchair by cerebral palsy.

A young man with no arms and legs had tears streaming down his face as he told us how his dog brought his prosthetic limbs to him each morning.

“She's everything to me. My whole world.”

I blinked back my own tears and swallowed hard. I now wanted to volunteer to become a puppy parent more than ever.

Rusty, the curly coated golden retriever, looked up at me with his big brown eyes, silently beseeching me for one of the treats I had secreted in my pocket. We were in the Helper Dogs center and I was putatively in charge of Rusty at an obedience class, but I couldn't shake the feeling that really he was in charge of me.

It had been a whirlwind few weeks. After my first visit to the center, I had come home ready to beg Ian to agree to taking in a puppy. Luckily, he'd guessed as much and had put a bottle of champagne in the fridge as I'd left the house. We'd decided to take the leap, opened the champagne and toasted becoming puppy parents. Since then, I'd been driving to see Helper Dogs once or twice a week, and, at Jamie's suggestion, I'd started attending puppy-training classes and was throwing myself into a new doggy world. I still didn't have a puppy, hence there was Rusty. Rusty's family had divorced when he was a puppy and neither husband nor wife had been able to keep him. He had ended up with Jamie and was an ideal training partner for me because he could do everything perfectly already.

November was dragging to its end. It was dark and cold, and the Christmas shopping hadn't kicked in yet—let alone the Christmas cheer—so I was pleased to have something nice to do. Having had a cursory look around the local pet shop, it was already promising to be an expensive Christmas: we had puppy supplies to buy and a long list of home improvements on which to get started. When I phoned Jamie to put our names on the official puppy parent waiting list, he had announced that he was going to pay us a home visit to oversee the preparations that would ready the house for its new occupant, and to chat about what being a puppy parent would involve. Two days of extreme tidying ensued, during which I did my best to imagine what the perfect puppy home would look like, and then tried to re-create it in our little terraced house.

“He's not going to be looking in our cupboards,” Ian had said, trying to reason with me as I chucked away out-of-date spices and piles of old magazines. Still, it was important to put our best face on, I thought, as I invested in a new mop, cleaning products and dusters. Escape-proofing the garden was most important, I decided, and there was an interesting-looking space behind the shed and garage wall where an inquisitive puppy could easily squeeze in and get stuck. Fortunately, the pimply assistant in the DIY superstore had been only too happy to supply piles of fencing and a padlock for the back gate.

Jamie's visit came around quickly. On the appointed Friday, the doorbell rang, and I opened the door to see him standing there in his Helper Dogs fleece, jeans and sensible boots, confident I'd done everything short of moving house to be as ready as possible for the pup. I affected the nonchalant air of a person who had always lived in serene tidiness.

“Hello, sorry I'm late. Bit of a dog emergency,” Jamie said as he breezed in.

I rearranged the biscuits I'd bought in case he was peckish, to cover for the fact that I'd been waiting anxiously since breakfast. It was nearly lunchtime. Perhaps I should offer him a sandwich? Come to think of it, I wasn't sure I had any bread. How could I have forgotten the bread? I hoped he wouldn't think the worst of me because of it. Back turned, heart racing, I boiled the kettle, while he told me a little about what being a puppy parent would entail.

“You'll either be given a very young puppy, which you'll keep for around six months.”

I nodded. “Cu-u-ute.”

“Or else you'll be given an older one that you'll keep till it's about a year old and goes off for its final training.”

Jamie took a swig of tea.

“I'd like a younger one,” I said.

“Depends what's available,” Jamie said. “Head Office decides who gets what, not me. Young ones are sweet but a lot of work—and very time consuming. Little puppies need to be taken out to the loo every few hours, so there won't be much sleep for you for the first few weeks . . .”

I didn't care about that.

“. . . and there will probably be more than a few little accidents in the house . . .”

“We're thinking of getting laminate flooring.”

“. . . and little puppies chew. A lot.” He'd spotted the computer wires. Ian was obsessed with gadgets and hung on to his old computers like they were his children. There were wires and leads for every occasion in every corner. They seemed to have a life of their own, reproducing and popping up in unexpected places as soon as your back was turned.

“I'll get Ian to box them in.”

“You'll need a gate to stop the puppy from going up the stairs,” Jamie continued. “And if you're given a baby puppy it'll need to sleep in your room for the first few nights, so you'll hear it when it wakes up . . .”

I nodded.

“And you'll need to take it to the toilet straightaway so it doesn't ever mess in its bed—you'll need to carry it up and down the stairs. Stairs aren't good for a little puppy's joints, especially the Labradors, Golden Retrievers and Labradoodles we use.”

 

We took our tea out for a tour of the garden, a square lawn fringed with dying bedding plants, a new rockery with perky shoots poking through, an arbor seat nestled into the bushes, a patio, a shed and a couple of trees.

“Where's the toilet area going?” Jamie asked. Helper Dogs needed an area covered with play sand or bark chippings, at least a meter square. I'd never toilet trained a dog before, but it couldn't be that hard, I told myself.

“Under the lilac tree?” I said. The tree was near the house and the patio.

Jamie frowned. “No, I don't think that'll work. You don't want to be sitting almost on top of the puppy's loo, do you? The ideal place, I suppose, would be down there.” He pointed to our recently built rockery. “But it'd mean . . .”

“Oh, we're not bothered about that old thing,” I said.

We went back inside and I made some more tea.

“I'll need to meet Ian, of course,” he said. “Bring him along to the center some time.”

My head was spinning. There was so much to think about and organize. So many things to buy for such a small creature.

He caught my pensive expression. “Don't worry, I'm sure you'll be great,” he said. “I'm just a bit concerned because you haven't had a dog before.”

I bit my tongue and resisted saying anything about Goro.

“When d'you think we'll get our puppy?”

“Not for a while yet—maybe sometime after Christmas. It depends when they're available. Could be March.”

That long? I sighed.

 

So here I was, three weeks later, filling my waiting time by learning about dogs at the Helper Dog class. Rusty now made me feel very welcome at the center. He recognized me as the lady who brought him nice things, and he hurried over every time I walked through the door. He'd do anything for a treat and spent his life on a diet. I wasn't so keen on, indeed was a little frightened of, Jamie's other dog, a German Shepherd called Queenie. Barely used to dogs at all, I certainly wasn't habituated to gruff Alsatians. How did easygoing Rusty manage to live with her? I never saw the two of them playing together, and although she was often at the Helper Dogs center, the other dogs treated her with deference or gave her a wide berth.

Each Helper Dogs session began with tea and coffee and the chance for puppy parents to report on how their puppies were progressing. We were early, so next to me and Rusty there were only two young puppies, Dylan and Daisy, and an older puppy called Arnie, who'd been pulled out of advanced training for a while because he kept barking all the time. Julia had Dylan, a Flat-coated Retriever. He had long legs that reminded me of Bambi. Len, a retired insurance salesman, had Daisy, a cute, chocolate-brown Labrador. I loved hearing how the puppies got on each week.

“I thought you might be interested in this,” Julia said to me one week, and she gave me a timesheet of everything she did with Dylan during a typical day. It looked like a full-time job with a strong emphasis on toilet training.

 

I wasn't quite so keen on the other class I went to each week—the clicker training class. Or so keen on Frank, the other Helper Dogs official who had moved down from Scotland with Jamie and now shared management of the training center. While Jamie concentrated on the Helper Dogs work, Frank ran the regular obedience classes for dogs of all kinds in the daytimes. These included agility and clicker work. Clicker work involved clicking a small handheld device followed immediately by giving the dog a treat. The clicking sound meant “good work.”

“The idea is that you reward Rusty as soon as he does what you asked of him,” Frank sighed as he explained it for the twentieth time, loudly, in front of the whole class. “If you're late with your click or click for inappropriate behavior then your dog will never learn what's expected from him—will he?”

I looked down at Rusty. He gave me a consoling look back. If it wasn't for Rusty, I might have been thrown out of the class as a hopeless case. Rusty was so smart he got just about everything right, even when I clicked in the wrong place.

As the class was finishing, I saw Ian at the door. We were off to the coach station to pick his mother up. Her visit was a big deal; because they'd treated him unspeakably when he was little, Ian still had trouble spending much time with his parents. His father, Bernie, and aunt, Mabel, had been to visit while I was in Japan, so I'd been spared some awkward family time—although Auntie Mabel had often looked after him and his sister during the toughest of times. Now, Barbara was coming to stay, despite Ian putting her off as much as he could. We were both apprehensive, though I was determined to make the best of the few days and get them over with without a fuss. We'd decided to go to the station together for moral support.

While he waited, Ian made a big fuss of Queenie, who lapped up his attention, rolling onto her back to have her stomach rubbed.

“Funny that,” Jamie said. “She doesn't usually like strangers—especially not men—apart from me and Frankie, of course.” He smiled and nodded his head. Ian had passed the approval test.

Barbara's coach from Stockport had arrived early, so she was waiting, smoking a cigarette, when we pulled up at the station. She was a wrinkled sickly looking woman, so tiny that you wouldn't expect her presence to be so disruptive. Ian still had trouble telling me about—or even remembering—the worst bits of his upbringing, and it was only under special circumstances that he would see her at all. As the coach driver pulled a large suitcase from the hold, she lit another cigarette. Ian hated smoking—perhaps because when he was little she'd spent all her kids' dinner money on cigarettes and sent them to school hungry—and had said to her before she came that if she smoked in the house he'd send her packing. I took the suitcase and put it in the boot. It was as light as anything; she couldn't have much in it.

Ian's mum and dad hadn't been good parents and now expected him to sort out all their problems—financial or otherwise—for them, but all I had been able to see, when he'd finally taken me to Stockport to meet them for the first time just before we got engaged, were two sick old people who tried as hard as they could to be nice to me. At first, I'd wondered why Ian hadn't cut all ties with his family or stayed to start a new life in America where he'd lived for a few years, and I felt if he could still be civil to them then I certainly could. A long while later he told me that he had thought about not telling me about his parents when we'd first met, and pretending they were dead. I'm glad he didn't. I was the only girlfriend that he'd ever taken to meet his family.

At home, Barbara admired the house, what she called the “woman's touch” I'd brought to her son's bachelor pad, but mainly she sat in the garden, drinking cups of tea and smoking. I took pity on her and sat with her awhile. She said she was trying to give up, and she seemed sincere. With her long auburn hair, she reminded me a bit of my sweet grandmother, and I tried my best to be pleasant to her, despite Ian's obvious antipathy and mistrust. We'd told my mum that we were trying for a child, and all the complications that were now arriving with it, but had said nothing to his family. I broke the news to her and found her surprisingly sympathetic.