Serious Sweet (11 page)

It's like in World War II, people turned out their animals back then as well: they dumped them, or murdered them, and this is that again. There were feral cats in shoals on Clapham Common. Hundreds of thousands of hearts being stopped and trusts broken. This is like that again. It will be like that again.

Meg knew the loss of pets hadn't been the worst thing about the war, but it was still vile in its own way and shouldn't be replaying in peacetime. There shouldn't be families queuing up for clothing handouts and tinned goods, as if they'd been blitzed, and no one should have to abandon or harm any type of domestic friend.

Certain individuals take to it, though – cruelty – and would enjoy it at any time.

Somebody brought in a greyhound last week with both its front legs broken. Ditched by a road, a sandy-coloured greyhound, they'd found it just thrown out like nothing and by a motorway – not a road, somewhere more unsurvivable than a road. The wounds were infected, infested. There was opened bone.

She didn't, despite working in a shelter, have much to do with the animals' welfare, other than indirectly. Meg very rarely met them, rarely saw them when they had no future.

But I was there when they delivered the roadside dog. I saw its face. The eyes. It looked so tired. And it was still trying to do what might please us, but it wasn't managing. It couldn't move as it intended any more.

Meg was an office person. Insulated. When she'd come in to talk about the job and was all nervous at the interview, she'd nonetheless been insistent about that. It was a risk, getting emphatic, but she'd written a script out for what she should say, if and when she met them at GFH, and she'd semi-learned it so she'd have confidence and that meant she could be calm and straight with them. It turned out they quite understood her reasons for wanting to be boxed away. Honesty could backfire, but in this case it hadn't. They liked dented creatures at GFH. They'd hired her. Mr Davis had hired her. She was expected to work for twenty hours a
week – which was, conveniently, both all GFH could give her and all that she could take.

They put the greyhound down, which it would have understood as going to sleep. The process would have felt like resting and being offered kindness and the end of pain and wouldn't have troubled it.

I was the one who was troubled: seeing it try to stand. And I was troubled by imagining somebody breaking its legs, either before or after putting it into a car, or into something, putting it into the boot of a car, the back of a Land Rover, a van, crippling it and then chucking it away.

I cannot identify with deciding to break a living creature's legs and so the act sticks in my thinking. I cannot climb down into the mindset of somebody who would do that … It's a puzzle I return to because it's got no solution. Picking at something with no solution is a nice low-grade kind of self-harm I can really get behind.

But I would rather not have this on-board – not any of this information.

The Emergency Section, the rescue people – I couldn't do their job. I would be constantly furious.

Some of them are. Like David, he does look constantly furious. Except when he's sitting on the grass in one of the exercise gardens and letting the dogs come and make a fuss of him. They can tell he needs affection.

Hector was a master at that: the provision of timely love. He had greeted Meg when she came in, fresh from her hospital appointment – fresh was the wrong word, but it would do – as if she were his best, best girl. He'd nuzzled very delicately at her hands and hadn't bustled. His courtesy had made her unsteady, blurred the room for a moment. And he had kept closer to her than usual ever since, which she wouldn't have thought possible without her wearing him strapped around her in some kind of harness.

He's a proper liability if you're trying to get downstairs – right under your feet every step. Always manages not to trip you, though, which is the way with spaniels. Otherwise there'd be mountains of pensioners killed by them every year. Heaps of dog-owning corpses found on suburban landings and in stately hallways.

But Hector's generally careful – abused animals are. He knows when he's being annoying and he stops then before you get cross. The prospect of a human getting cross makes him craven, sets him sliding along the floor away from anticipated bad stuff to which neither of us should particularly give headspace – bad stuff that happened earlier.

Like in the kids' shows I used to watch – ‘Here's one we made earlier.'

Hector the cautious, nervous case.

It's reasonable to be a cautious, nervous case.

And I'm not an idiot. I do know, I have worked it out: people who've been damaged by people go and work with salvaged animals because the animals have also been damaged by people – but they aren't people, so they're OK.

And the animals are also not idiots.

Hector's bright. He's probably brighter than me. He's the lots-of-greats-grandson of that first clever wolf that trotted up out of the dark and lay by some human fire somewhere and looked useful and fond and dependable: a trainable asset.

Smart, but not smart enough to know that we might hurt him.

He does try, though, to be safe. If you're loved, you're safer, so you need to induce love.

Hector is training me to love him.

No need to argue about whether I need a fresh education from a dog with shocked ears and a bathroom fetish. I'm a bankrupt accountant – two words you don't want in the same sentence, or anywhere near your CV. I'm working part-time, because I couldn't cope with full-time, in a home for broken animals … I'm clearly in need of help and advice from any quarter, thanks. I'll have whatever's on offer, thanks.

I should always say thanks, even when I don't mean it, because it is good for me to be grateful.

Borrowing the brains of a dog – that'd be lovely.

And he borrows my scent. If I'm with him all day, he smells of me. He smells of having decided he would like a life with me. He smells of wanting to survive and guessing I could help him do that and I admire his faith and his – patchy, but even so – banishment of fear. I breathe this in and out and so does he and I trust him and maybe he does the same with me.

And I am grateful for that. Really.

I am also grateful for the way the trees fit up into the sky and seem completely right and I am glad of all those other places, fissures in the world's hardness, where I can find what's right, sweet, harmless.

There is beauty. I cannot avoid it. In patches. In pieces.

We convince each other of this – if not the world and I, then Hector and I are often quietly confident about it.

And when I come here in the mornings, he's changed a bit overnight and started to smell like the kennel and the kennel maids and stuff, which isn't me. So I reclaim him – he encourages that. He would like me to decide that our problems would be solved if he just came and stayed at my house. Most of what he does is trying to make that plain.

They're clever – the things that want to live with us.

But in my case, the things are probably unwise.

I could be wrong, though. I let Hector decide.

When she wasn't being manipulated by a dog, Meg spent her days not doing GFH's accounts. She could be near the paperwork, could even look over the figures sometimes to be helpful, but that was it. She was officially an absence in the financial-planning sense, which felt lovely.

Meg was here to keep up with admin, write begging letters and maintain the GFH website. Admin was just admin, she could do admin – it required a love of numbing repetition. (Meg loved repetition. Or else she certainly loved being numb.) And it wasn't hard to get into web design, learn the basics – coding was supposed to be fashionable now, all the kids were doing it. It was even less hard if the one site you had to deal with already existed and was very simple and you were determined and had a lot of time on your hands to learn about HTML and CSS, because you had become – just for an example – unemployable in your original profession.

Meg wrote most of GFH's rehoming ads and took the display photos of each inmate. Paul who was tall and from Purley (Tall Paul from Purley: you wanted to say it all the time in your
head) helped out on the site when he was around. Susan was a gatherer of information and finder of problems. (She was also an ecology bore and fond of discounted designer luggage.) Those two were the other purely administrative staff. (Which was to say, people who never had to deal with fluids or excrement at any time.)

There was Laura, too.

Laura did have to be mentioned. She was based partly in the office – that couldn't be helped – but she knew nothing about computers and wasn't allowed near them, because she fucked things up. Laura knew about empathy and how to screen candidate owners and how to arrange events to generate publicity and funds – at least that's what she claimed and it was fairly true … As Meg knew nothing about empathy and was often able to claim she was electronically busy when consulted about possible events, Laura was kept slightly at bay.

When necessary, Meg spent time updating the information on hard-to-move animals. Recently, the chief exec, Mr Davis – he could be called Peter, GFH wasn't hierarchical – had allowed her to make little films designed to give visitors a better idea of who they might like to have, all new and grateful, about the place and on their furniture and ready for fun and companionship and excursions. This wasn't difficult or expensive and wasn't intended as a fiendish grab for institutional power, as she'd felt others might see it.

Or as my paranoia about others seeing it might see it.

Christ, I'd be better off if I had a stroke, got stabbed in the forehead – then at least some of this crap would shut up, surely. I would leave myself alone.

She wasn't doing badly, though. She could offload her superfluous waves of negativity into the work, try to turn them, make them innocently spin. She couldn't face the animals, was unable to withstand their type of grief, but she was meant to be emotional about her work: it was an advantage. So she harnessed her general outrage and turned it into outrage on their behalf. It was a source of energy. And if she described the candidates – her living
responsibilities – with enough energy, then they'd have the best chance of being liberated quickly and fitting their new owners.

The tiny things – hamsters, guinea pigs, gerbils, lizards – they don't give you much to work with unless they're little bastards and it wouldn't do to mention that.

The little bastards are termed sprightly.

I say ‘sprightly', rather than ‘miniature, violent git who will try your patience'. I say ‘cheeky'. ‘Vivacious'.

A vivacious gerbil.

As if.

‘A little package for a big personality.'

It's justifiable to say that if it will get the thing into the care of kind hands, let them hold it and understand that it's alive and should be able to stay that way, because even unpleasant things deserve to live.

One of my many personal mottoes.

I'm just one great big Christmas cracker, me – stuffed full of mottoes.

And when she worked on the films – the mostly honest and completely well-intentioned films – she'd added some open-source music from a couple of places that were OK with GFH using the material in dog- and cat-loving, not-for-profit ways. She aimed to find a score –
big word for what was just a tune, a couple of minutes of a tune
 – a score that set the proper level of not melancholy exactly, but appeal. The filmed sections were appeals.

Here's Laika rolling about on her back and hamming it up and giving a paw in return for a treat, because she's a star and knows a thing or two and how could you refuse her? She's sad without you. You're sad without her.

‘Like I'm sad without you.' Meg was at her desk now, having made a cup of powdery instant coffee – that was only her first cup, so she was all right on caffeine consumption – and she was sitting with Hector's breathing leaned tight against her foot, at rest exactly where he liked it. Paul wasn't in today, Laura was off sluicing, Susan was looking into something to do with the wrong kind of hay.

Meg only spoke to Hector when they were alone.

‘Because I don't want to seem daft.'

And she moved her foot slightly, pressed his ribs, so that he was aware she was speaking to him and not the telephone. He was perfectly able, anyway, to distinguish between her telephone voice and the one that was for human beings and the one that was for him. Only the last was of any real importance. If she was occupied too long on the phone, especially, he would find it dismaying and ask for attention, come up from under the desk and stare at her starvingly, or set his front paws on her and try to lick her face. (This last was not allowed and would only happen towards the end of a very long call.)

Meg patted her knee and he scuffled up and forward to set his chin there flat, so that his head could be made a fuss of. This was intended to please and calm them both.

And maybe she still smelled of hospital at the moment and of anxiety – traces remaining – and Hector wanted her to smell of him instead.

‘It isn't daft to say I'm sad without you. So there. I would say that to anyone who asked me. I am sad without Hector.' Which was, of course, too sentimental a thing to mention in an empty room with a fond dog when you were still slightly hurt in a number of ways and also thinking that you've got the definitive statement now – your menopause is here, pretty much here, and that happens to adult women, it does happen – it's only that you would have wanted to exist as a female person in receipt of tenderness before it did.