Waiting for Doggo (3 page)

‘Angels.’

‘Angels!?’

‘She met a bloke called Brendon who persuaded her she’s got a guardian angel.’

‘You’re having me on!’

‘His name’s Kamael.’

A look of vacant incredulity falls across J’s face. ‘I rest my case.’

J and I met at Warwick University, where we both studied English. It’s one of those rare and rather special friendships (more common between men than women, in my experience) where two people utterly unlike each other in character and temperament hit it off. I tend to come at life cautiously, grateful for whatever it bestows on me; J attacks it as if it were an assault course, every hurdle and impediment tailored to slow his progress. He has the energy, drive and ambition of ten men, possibly a hundred.

There’s common ground between us, of course. At Warwick, it was our passion for literature. We blathered on for endless hours about how we would carve out careers for ourselves in publishing. Publishing needed people like us – young minds in tune with the digital revolution that was just starting to shake up the industry. We figured we would have to go our separate ways to begin with, but only in order to learn the ropes. At the first opportunity, we’d set up our own outfit together, build it into a multimillion-pound business and flog it off to the highest bidder.

Well, we both sold out long before then, J accepting a job offer from McKinsey during our last term at Warwick, and me winning a place at the D&AD Graduate Academy soon after. A management consultant and an ad man: that’s what we’ve become. Talk about derelict dreams.

I sometimes console myself with the thought that at least I make my living from words, but the truth is, I produce pithy straplines for companies I care next to nothing about. I’m a copywriter, and not a bad one. There are some hideous awards trophies gathering dust in my airing cupboard to prove it. Things were better before Trev (‘Fat Trev’, as he once insisted on being called, though no longer) had his breakdown. He was my art director. We work closely together, copywriters and art directors. It’s a creative partnership, a team of two. We even move jobs together. I knew Trev was a depressive; it’s why he was such good fun to work with. I guess I should have seen it coming, even alerted someone, but the thing is, he was producing his best ever stuff when the proverbial straw broke the camel’s back. He’s okay now. Only okay, mind. The meds have stripped him of everything that once made him him. There are no rough edges left, no highs, no lows, and certainly no laughs, but at least he’s alive. It turned out he was thinking of swallow-diving off the block of flats he lives in near Bermondsey.

Maybe Clara’s right, maybe I’m cold-hearted, but I can’t help smiling whenever that image comes to mind: Fat Trev swallow-diving. It’s something to do with the comic coupling of bulk and dainty finesse, like that ballet-dancing hippo in Disney’s
Fantasia
, the one prancing around in a diaphanous tutu. I hope that one day I’ll be able to share this thought with Trev and have a good giggle about it. Meanwhile, though, I’m on my own.

It hasn’t been easy. I’ve been wandering in the wilderness for almost six months now, eating into my savings, fretting about mortgage payments. No one wants a lone copywriter. I’ve still got enough of a name to wangle a meeting or two with the people who were our rivals for those hideous trophies. Mostly, though, they’re just curious to meet me and get the first-hand dirt on Fat Trev.

Indology might be different. I’ll know soon enough.

‘Indology?’ scoffs J. ‘What kind of name is that for an ad agency?’

‘Not a bad one,’ I counter, defensively.

We’ve moved on to another bar by now. They’ve gone for a post-apocalyptic look: raw brickwork and rough concrete and industrial steel lamps, which might or might not be the next big thing in interior design.

‘They’re small, new, independent.’

‘Okay,’ J concedes. ‘I get the Ind—, but the –ology …?’

‘It suggests a kind of method, a rigour. Like psychology, theology, sociology—’

‘Wankology.’

‘Apparently they ran it past the focus group but it got a thumbs-down.’

J laughs and grips my arm. ‘Sorry. I hope it comes to something, I really do. When’s the interview?’

‘Day after tomorrow.’

J has to close his eyes to make the calculation. ‘Thursday. I’m in Frankfurt. Ever been?’

‘Frankfurt?’

‘Don’t bother, it’s a shithole. Good people, though, the Germans. I’ve got a lot of time for the Germans.’

That heartens me. J is from German-Jewish stock and lost a bunch of his family three generations back. He knows the stories – they were fed to him with his mother’s milk – and yet he’s still prepared to bury the hatchet and move on. His largesse makes me feel much better about the far more trifling matter of being dumped by the woman I thought I was going to marry.

I
REMEMBER WHAT
B
ETH
said at the dogs home (with a misting of pity in her eyes): ‘I mean, look at him’. But the truth is, I’ve never really looked at him, never sat and scrutinised him as I’m doing now.

Clara was right – he
is
small and, in spite of her efforts to pretend otherwise, he
is
ugly. I didn’t actually grow up with dogs, but I know them, they were a feature of my life from an early age. By and large, though, they were big dogs, dogs that could fill a room with their boisterous, panting presence: retrievers and Labradors and setters. These were the dogs my grandfather loved, far more, I suspect, than he ever loved (or even liked) my grandmother. That said, she’s the one left looking after Hecuba – a colossal, neurotic Bernese Mountain Dog – while my grandfather slowly fades from life in his horrible rest home.

Doggo couldn’t be more different from a Bernese Mountain Dog. He is everything a Bernese Mountain Dog doesn’t wish to be. He is tiny, white and almost entirely hairless. I say almost, because there are tufts of hair here and there, wild patches, like the bits of a lawn a lazy gardener has failed to mow. There’s a strip of shagginess along his spine, and a touch of the same at the tip of his thin tail. There are also tight curls – not brown, not yellow, but something in between – at the back of his forelegs. They suggest a dose of spaniel, as do the three neat forelocks of the same colour (piss, possibly). The snout is all wrong for a spaniel, though. It’s too stumpy, too pug-like. It hints at something Oriental, like a Pekinese. No, it defies any obvious categorisation. It suggests a dog who has careered headlong into a brick wall then chosen not to have corrective surgery. There’s a droopy, somnambulant quality to his eyes that reminds me of a bloodhound, but the eyes themselves are lively and alert. Right now, though, they are pinning me to my chair with a cold and searching steadiness.

Does he know what I’m thinking? Does he know I’m wondering whether his front haunches are so much more developed than the hind ones because his head is too big for his body and the muscles have to work overtime?

He blinks lazily from the sofa.

He has adopted the sofa as his own over the past couple of days, and out of sympathy (for the loss of his mistress) I haven’t fought him on it. He liked Clara. He perked up in her company, as we all did.

‘Where is she, Doggo?’

No one knows. Not Fiona, not Hatty, not any of her good girlfriends. Unless they’re all lying to me. Part of me wants to indulge the paranoia, steep myself in the conspiracy of it, but I’m pretty sure Polly was being honest when I spoke to her earlier and she told me the family still hasn’t heard a peep out of Clara. Apparently their parents are tearing their hair out.

Polly and I have spoken three times since her sister hopped on a plane and disappeared. We’ve exchanged many more texts than that. I might have been the first to add a kiss to the end of one of them, but it was Polly who doubled it, then tripled it. I’ve kept pace with her, matching her every time. At this rate we’ll be up to xxxxxx by the end of the week. There are probably rules about such things, codes known only to a select band of initiates. Maybe xxxxxx means ‘I’m happy to have you do
y
to me’.

6x=y

It strikes me that if x is 4 (the number of years Clara and I have been together), then y is Polly’s age, which happens to be six years younger than I am. There’s a pleasing circularity to the equation, although it’s poor justification for where my mind is really taking me.

I guessed right: Polly is indeed in Wales, where the white-water rafting is better than ever after the recent downpours. She’s driving up to London on Saturday with a vanload of kids, heading back on Sunday with a fresh bunch of the little shits (her words, not mine). I’ve already booked the restaurant where we’re having dinner. It’s a great little Italian place, intimate but buzzy, just a few minutes’ walk from my flat. I popped in there earlier to choose the table, and I’ve just texted Polly to say that if she can’t face the cab ride back to the flat she shares in east London then she’s welcome to crash at my place. I signed off with only one x, which I figured was a decorous way of saying: no, not like that.

It
is
my place. Clara officially moved in with me about a year ago, but mine is the only name on the deeds. Her flat, way to the west beyond Acton, is rented out, and a portion of the proceeds goes towards my mortgage every month. Not any more, I now know, because I checked last night – the day her money usually lands in my bank account – and I saw that it hadn’t. That shows foresight, a certain degree of planning. For all her apparent skittishness, Clara can be surprisingly pragmatic.

A thought occurs to me. I check the mail I’ve allowed to pile up unattended on the side table in the hall since she left. There’s not one letter addressed to Clara, even among the junk. Going online, I discover that there’s a lead time of five working days for the Post Office’s redirection service.

The forensic eye I’ve just trained on Doggo begins to spot things it hasn’t before now, things like the gaps in the bookshelves and the CD stack, and the missing cushion on the armchair, the cushion she bought in Cornwall last Easter. A minute later I’m on my knees in the kitchen, checking the cupboards. The wooden salad bowl we haggled over at a street market in Bungay is no longer there, neither is the Magimix. I’ve pictured her hefting a couple of armfuls of her clothes into a waiting car, but we’re starting to talk serious volume now: packing cases and at least two trips in a car, and questions of storage. The stuff in her letter about it being a knee-jerk impulse to bolt seems less likely with every cupboard I open.

I’m strangely relieved. Impulsive departure suggests a degree of sudden revulsion – ‘Oh God, I can’t take it any more’ – whereas a planned exodus, however upsetting in its own way, allows you to share in the reasoned thinking that informed it. I can see why she left. Of course I can, because I’ve felt like doing it myself a couple of times. She beat me to it, though, and with a brutal panache that almost makes me feel proud of her. How sick is that?

Truly sick, says Doggo’s look.

He has abandoned his precious sofa and crept up on me. I’m still on my knees in front of the kitchen cupboards, so we’re almost eye to eye. Am I wrong? He now seems to be regarding me with something that trembles between pity and disdain.

We see what we want to see, I remind myself. I’m obviously suffering from a case of the Kuleshov effect. The great Russian film-maker proved it almost a century ago with his montage of an actor gazing at a bowl of soup, then at a dead girl in a coffin, then at a beautiful woman stretched out alluringly on a divan. Kuleshov’s audience was blown away by the wildly divergent emotions the actor was able to bring to a blank stare – ravenous hunger, grief, and sexual desire – until Kuleshov revealed that the footage of the actor was identical in every instance. They simply saw what they wanted to see. They brought their own expectations to the table.

That’s what I’m seeing now: myself, rendered abject by my sleuthing, reflected back at me in Doggo’s black and slightly bulbous eyes. He probably just wants a Choc Drop. He knows they live in the cupboard under the kitchen sink.

‘Who wants a Choc Drop?’ I say, in that weird way you do to dogs and small children.

He wags his tail.

I
T’S AN UNPREPOSSESSING
entrance, a grey door at the far end of a cobbled yard in the heart of Soho. There’s an intercom on the wall and a nameplate that reads:
INDOLOGY
.

Beyond the grey door, an industrial steel staircase climbs to a spacious reception area. They’ve gone for an enigmatic look, nothing overtly corporate or self-congratulatory (like framed awards certificates on the walls), nothing that can define or date them. An attractive young brunette with a pixie crop and geeky glasses looks up from her computer. I told her my name when she buzzed me in, and she clearly knows why I’m here.

‘They’ll be with you shortly. Grab a seat. Can I get you something to drink?’ She’s well-spoken and she has shrewd blue eyes.

‘A coffee would be great.’

‘What kind? We do all kinds.’

‘Small, strong and black, please.’

‘Double espresso?’

‘Single.’

‘You’re hired,’ she jokes.

I like her already. I like her more when she rises, rounds her desk and offers me her hand. ‘I’m Edith.’ It’s a name from another era. It suggests parents with an interest in odd and arcane things.

I’ve been kicking around in the business long enough to know that it’s people like Edith who will one day be running outfits like this. They’re not professional receptionists; they take what they can, anything for a foot in the door. They’re smart and, above all, patient. In Edith’s case, the long levers and gamine looks won’t hinder her rise through the ranks.

‘It’s Colombian,’ she says when she returns with my coffee.

‘And if
they
don’t know about drugs, who does?’

I fear at first I’ve overdone it with my reply, but she smiles. ‘You should have said. We have Coke, too … normal and Diet.’