Dog Boy (14 page)

Romochka hunted deep in the city, partly because he needed the metro station in order to thaw out on the way there and back. He headed for the train stations, the throngs of people, especially people eating, and he filled his bag with scraps, gifts of food, daring thefts. He usually took only White Sister because she was almost invisible in the snow. She stayed nervous and loyal at his side while they trotted swiftly through the streets, but he went inside buildings alone, meeting up with her again at their own peed-on meeting places. He learned the rhythm of people’s stomachs, and hunted at the tail end of meal times. Often he ate all that he collected in the outward-bound metro stop to give himself strength for these hunts and then had to wait until people were feeding again. Once his bag was full, he headed home with enough miscellaneous foods to feed everyone.

And they had Laurentia.

But it was a long trail to any thronging of people with food on them and as fresh snow continued to fall, ranging widely became more and more difficult. The journey to the Roma and back took almost all night. It was a long hungry march in single file through territory after territory, human and dog, into the intensifying bewildering bustle, skirting the new army of snow workers and slow-moving vehicles as best they could; then a sleepy, almost dream-like trail home, with legs aching and the deadly cold encroaching. The snow was too deep and soft until they reached the scraped and salted streets, but these were very dangerous. They tried to keep to the less cared-for parts of the city: the alleys, building sites, railway lines. The snow banked high against the factory walls. On one occasion White Sister had to pull Romochka out of a snowdrift, tugging wildly at any bit of him she could get teeth into as he yelped and squealed.

Laurentia heaped presents on him. One week he staggered home with a stack of old blankets. She gave him a pair of some big kid’s boots lined with sheepswool. He took these things with a serious-faced, awkward thanks. But the coat left him speechless. It was brand new, with tags hanging off the collar. It smelled of shops and Laurentia’s touch, but no one else. He put it on, with Laurentia beaming at him. He wanted to get away. Her smile clung like cobwebs to his blushing face.

Once he was out of sight from the streetlamps of the Roma, and away from Laurentia’s happiness, he wrapped the coat around himself in glee. It was lined with ticked fur that gave off an animal smell. It was thick and soft around his hands and face and neck. The coat itself was a pale colour, quilted, thick and warm. It had pockets. Mamochka, Golden Bitch, Black Dog and the three were itching to have a smell, he could tell, but he trotted on ahead, making them wait.

When they came to the first meeting point they all quickly checked the messages, made their marks and then gathered around Romochka to smell the coat. He squatted as all of them sniffed it over, as they buried their wet noses around his face and hands, breathing in that rabbit-skin smell. Black Dog lost all sense. His eyes rolled, he buried his nose deep into the fur next to Romochka’s ear and began whimpering as he made chewing movements with his jaw. Romochka giggled and slapped him off, but Black Dog couldn’t keep away. All the way home, the big dog had a crazed look in his eyes and found himself nibbling at Romochka’s cuffs. He apologised every time Romochka whacked him but lost control of himself again immediately afterwards.

Whenever Romochka took the coat off, Black Dog’s eyes followed it, and, to save trouble, Romochka hung it off a high rafter whenever he wasn’t wearing it. For a while the coat changed the terrible winter for him and made everything easier. For a while it even made him more appealing to people when he went begging in the station; and it made them more appealing to him. Perfumes could not quite mask the skin and fur undertone on winter people: Romochka could smell sheep and fox and other unknown beasts. His coat made him feel a kinship with these fur-clad men and women. He was amazed, the first time he went into the bright lights, to see that the coat was sky blue.

 

The cold deepened. Even the blue coat could not keep Romochka warm. He risked hypothermia if he went very far at all. He got to the warmth of the metro some days, but no further, and he dreaded having to get home again afterwards. He could not get enough food, and hunger made him raise supplicant eyes, not to the faces of passers-by, but to the food in their hands. Getting to the Roma had become impossible. He dressed in all Laurentia’s gifts and wrapped a blanket over the top of everything.

Dressed like this, and with the dogs around him, he was more or less warm in the lair. Outside, his body was so hampered by his clothes and by holding the blanket in place that he was unable to do more than get to the metro. Then, by the time he got home to the lair, he was invariably freezing. He sought out the driest dog and cuddled close, shivering and shaking, while they gulped whatever food he had managed to bring home. He yipped urgently at them, hurrying them to come to bed. They all knew what to do now, and they flopped down around him, on him, with contented sighs as he patted them delightedly with his mittened hands.

Romochka stayed long hours in the metro, leaving only when he hoped the other dogs might have had time enough to get something or when his bag was full. Bit by bit his regulars re-established their routine. They carried their scraps from home and some helped in other ways too. The skinny lady gave him a stale cake and a pair of thick adult’s mittens one day; on another the dvornik tossed a woollen hat with ear muffs onto the ground in front of him.

 

Then one day, as he stumbled out through the metro doors to the grey world above, a balmy air swept over his face and a new smell filled his nostrils. The thaw had begun.

Laurentia wept when she saw them and heaped Romochka’s bowl up again and again. She clicked her tongue at how thin he was. She laughed a lot and sang to them. She made an insect-squashing motion with one hand on the back of the other when he asked solicitously about the gangsters and militzia. ‘One day the Roof will fall!’ she said airily, and Romochka grinned too, although he had no idea what she meant. She even, to Romochka’s shock and delight, held her breath, dived in and hugged him.

The city hunting territory was huge now. Its outer boundary towards the rising sun was a wide highway that roared day and night with heavy traffic, an afternoon and evening’s trot there and back. Between the rising sun and the setting sun, the southern boundary was the wide brown river, so far away that they could only get there after thaw. It could take from sunset to sunrise to get there and back. Between the river and the sunrise was the Roma. To the north, towards the winter Strangers, the boundary was the edge of a wilder forest that Mamochka feared. It had elk tracks at the edge.

Within Romochka’s hunting territory there were several metro stations and gradually he became familiar with them all. Spring and summer brought changes, however. Officials and militzia chased him if they saw him; a prohibition on dogs was sometimes enforced, and people veered sharply from him, clutching their noses, staring and frowning far more than they had in wintertime.

 

He no longer visited the stations only for warmth: he was people-watching. He knew there were trains far below. He could feel and smell them; vaguely, he could remember them. In his home metro he explored further, deeper. He headed past the shops near the entrance to the high atrium before the turnstiles and the abyss of the escalators. He watched people rise and descend; he watched them buy tickets, pass through the turnstiles and then disappear bit by bit: first their legs, then their middles, then their heads. On the other side of that arched maw blank-faced heads appeared, motionless shoulders, hands, legs. Then, when the feet appeared, the whole person suddenly moved and marched off.

He began to carry a few of his coins in his pockets and one day presented himself, frowning fiercely, at the cashier’s high booth. He stood back so the cashier would see that he was there, then leaned in and reached up. To his dismay he couldn’t quite reach the coin dish. He dropped his four coins on the bench near the little glass window. He had watched enough to know that more often than not these were wordless transactions, so he waited, heart pounding. It worked. The bored cashier barely glanced at him as he passed a ticket and two other coins back. He lost that first ticket on the way home.

He became practised very quickly. If the cashier waited, or looked annoyed and barked at him, he would put another coin down. Sometimes the cashier, as on that first occasion, gave him coins back with the ticket. It was mysterious and charming. It was something he couldn’t begin to explain to the dogs.

After a while, adept at buying tickets, he began to think of using them to go through the turnstiles, just like everybody else. He watched closely. He would have to put his ticket in,
just so
; take the ticket from the machine,
so
; then march through. Without a ticket, the turnstile would suddenly burst into life and bash his legs and thighs with two metal arms. White Sister would have to go through low on her belly, below the range of the metal arms. He’d tell her. He saw teenagers jump over the arms and saw a dog go under, and he could see that the metal couldn’t hit them.

He sat and watched for hours, daring himself to try it. He had imagined the sequence so many times that when he got up and walked forward it was as if in a dream.

The escalator seemed interminable. White Sister made herself small on the step below him and pressed her shuddering body hard to his knees. The snap of the turnstile arms above her head had scared her badly, and he could feel that the escalator was almost too much for her to bear. His legs too were shaking. He was both afraid and exhilarated, charged with the surge of power and weakness one feels when stepping over a boundary and into another’s territory.

They got to the bottom, and his jaw fell open. He had never been inside something so lovely. It was a soaring vaulted space with great painted scenes in panels along the sides and on the ceiling. He stood, staring. Suddenly there was a shocking noise and disturbance in the air. He grabbed White Sister as she tried to bolt, growling in her ear, struggling to hold her there by will, for he could not hold her by strength alone. The noise rose to a shrieking, deafening metallic grinding, and a train settled stunningly at the platform. It quieted to a steady roar. Romochka and White Sister were blocking the end of the escalators with people flowing around them both in a mad hurry. Then he was growling in her ear as the train’s roar rose to a sudden scream again, until it lurched and shot like a forest snake into its dark hole at the other end of the station. He still had her, shaking hard against him, mainly because she could see no escape back up the dark escalator through the moving forest of legs.

He wrestled her off to the side and sat down with her between a rubbish bin and an ornate bench. The people on the bench stiffened, sniffed about, looked at him with tiny glances of angry comprehension and got up to move elsewhere. He murmured in White Sister’s ear as another train screamed into the hall next to the opposite platform, stilled to a roar, emptied, filled, and screamed off, filling the whole huge space with deafening compound noise.

He kept at White Sister until her heartbeat settled. The monstrous trains came and went so often that she soon lost her flight reaction and settled into simple misery, clinging to him. Romochka smiled happily and began to look around at the fair, clean faces of the men and women, all depicted in rich colours, framed in carved stone. His heart burned at the sight of men and women hoisting a red tractor, men and women harvesting wheat, or building a brick factory in the sun. Men and women stern with resolve, pointing their guns at unseen intruders. Always sun-drenched, even though the real sky outside was the colour of river water.

He gaped, open mouthed and blank eyed. He ran his callused paws over the walls, staring up, not noticing or hearing the curses of the people who first tried to repel him with insults then scrambled to get away from him.

Crowds of people stood near the edge of the platform, each person almost touching the next, yet just distant enough to be alone. They were clearly not a pack. It was as if all these strangers had somehow agreed that their personal territory could be shrunk for the purpose of waiting for trains. People stared blankly up the tracks or straight ahead, none meeting another’s eyes. Bomzhi, with slightly larger personal territories, waited for trains, lay along the walls or stood next to loaded, tarp covered trolleys. There were gang children and homeless children too. Some were weaving in and out among the people, asking quietly for coins.

Memories unfurled; his neck hairs stirred. He almost felt the ticket clutched in his hand, his other sweaty and warm in his mother’s palm. Chatting, not noticing anybody. Not having to notice everything. He was suddenly filled with yearning for his lost smallness, for his mother’s hand holding his. Then White Sister shifted against his foot and he realised his eyes were tired from watching the people flowing on and off the trains. The grand and beautiful pictures on the walls began to make his head ache and his empty belly grumbled. He felt increasingly as if danger were all around and he couldn’t see or smell it. White Sister had been sleeping off her shaking terror on his feet, trusting his ease, but she woke up now at the smell of fear-sweat. He got up suddenly and they rode the awful escalator up to the daylight.