The Flower Arrangement (20 page)

“You fucking idiot! You could have been killed!”

*   *   *

Katy didn't answer the door. Phil's hand trembled as he tried to fit the key into the lock. His legs shook as he walked along the hallway, trailing slush from his boots on the candy-striped runner, calling her name, though he already knew from the darkness in every room that the flat was empty. He pulled off his gloves and checked his phone.
No buses. No taxis. No, I don't want a lift on that death trap you call a bike. I'll be there as soon as I can! XXX.

He paced back and forth, afraid to stop moving, trying to pull himself together. Past the sink and the cooker and the kitchen island, past the empty fireplace and the gilt-framed mirror, past the shelves of books and the three unframed watercolors of the sea and the framed picture of Katy and her sister, one blonde, one dark, as different as day and night. Past the rectangle of lighter paint by the light switch where the framed picture of Katy and her ex-boyfriend used to be.

“You fucking idiot!” he whispered, echoing the angry driver of the 4×4. “You could have been fucking killed!”

He hadn't hung around to talk to the driver. He just climbed onto his bike and took off as fast as he could in a cloud of his own exhaust fumes. Idiotically fast in the snow, as if by accelerating hard he could get away from what had nearly happened. And as long as he was riding fast, his head tucked back into his neck, his eyes straining to see through the snowflakes that flew at his visor, he could outrun it. But the fear had caught up with him the moment he stopped. His head was light. His chest was tight. His tongue bitter with the aftertaste his heart had left when it jumped into his mouth on the bridge.

On his sixth lap of the room, Phil realized that he was being
watched. He hadn't noticed Katy's dog curled up in his basket. Pat was a greyhound—literally a
gray
hound. His coat was mottled silver. His long mousy snout was dappled with gray. His whiskers were white. He was old, really old, but Katy had persuaded herself that he was immortal.

His head was resting on the wicker rim of the basket but his molasses-brown eyes followed Phil as he marched back and forth, and the two or three wiry silver hairs that counted as his eyebrows twitched with concern. As Phil passed by again, Pat tried to get up. He managed to get two creaky front legs and one back leg into upright positions, wobbled for a moment, then collapsed down again with a deep sigh.

“No, Pat! I'm okay!” But it was too late. The dog was already trying to rise again. This time he managed to get the fourth leg involved. He tottered unsteadily out of his basket and blundered toward Phil with a queasy and embarrassed look, slipping and sliding, unable to find a grip on the polished wooden floor.

“Shit!” Phil said. Pat looked at him for a moment quizzically, then sighed and sat obediently and clumsily just where he was by the sofa. Then, like a drunk letting go of a bar, he slid down onto the floor in a tangle of limbs. He looked up at Phil, surprised and, for some reason, wagged his tail.

Phil went over and bent down. A long, wet, mobile nose poked into his visor and Phil realized that he was still wearing his helmet. He tugged the strap open, pulled it off, felt the relief of cool air on his overheated scalp and took a few deep breaths. He unzipped his jacket and the spears of the daffodils scattered around Pat, who sniffed them with interest.

“Come on, let's get you back into your basket.” Phil knelt and slipped his hands under the dog to lift him up, but Pat looked so mortified that he changed his mind and slid down onto the floor beside the dog instead. “You know what? Why don't we just rest here for a minute.”

He ran his shaking hands along the dog's side. He could feel every
rib through the short, smooth fur. He pinched a tuft of it between his thumb and forefinger. “I came this close to being killed,” he said to the dog. “This close to never seeing Katy again.”

The dog let out a shuddering sigh, as if he understood.

Phil took one of Pat's paws in one hand and covered it with the other. When he was five or six he had decided that he was too old to have his hand held, so his sister had come up with the idea of making “hand sandwiches.” A way of comforting him without making a big deal of it. She had found so many ways to mother him, to make up for all the mothering he had missed out on.

By the time he heard Katy's key in the door, Phil's heart rate had slowed and his breathing was back to normal. “Let's not tell her what happened,” he whispered to the dog and to himself. “We'd only freak her out.” When she opened the door, he was sitting on the sofa with the daffodils in his hand and Pat at his feet.

“Look at this!” Katy grinned. “A bromance! You should have lit a fire, Phil, you look frozen.” Her cream beret and coat were dusted with snowflakes. The ends of her hair were damp. The tip of her nose was pink. She looked too good to be true.

“Come here!” Phil ordered her. “Warm me up.”

“I'll do my best, but I had to walk all the way from Mount Street. It's crazy out there. Are those daffodils?” she asked, amazed. “In December?”

She kicked off her shoes, crossed the room and knelt down and patted Pat, then Phil pulled her up into his lap and kissed her.

He pulled off her beret and buried his face in her hair. The brush with death had heightened every sense. His nerve endings fizzed as they undressed one another, their lips locked, her fingertips freezing on his warm skin. He had escaped; he was alive. Every moment felt like a miracle.

Afterward, Katy pulled her coat back on like a dressing gown and lit the fire and put the daffodils into a vase. Phil wrapped himself in the rug and hopped through their scattered clothes to the fridge to
cobble together a supper out of what he could find. A few slices of Parma ham, half a jar of olives, a couple of bagels and a lump of stale lemon drizzle cake that went, mostly, to Pat. They ate it all hungrily and naked, then, suddenly craving wine, they pulled on their clothes to go to the wine shop.

Katy wanted to take Pat, so Phil got him togged up in the weird dog coat she had bought him on the Internet. A black waterproof with red fleece lining that made him look like a canine Dracula. To Phil's relief, as much as Pat's, Katy did not even try to put on the blue nylon and Velcro dog boots she'd bought to stop him sliding on the wooden floors. So far, she hadn't managed to get more than three on at the same time.

Phil carried Pat down the steps and put him down on the path outside the gate. The sky was clear now. The blizzard had packed up and left town, leaving behind a pristine white carpet crusted with ice crystals rolled out along Seafort Avenue. Pat lifted his long snout and sniffed the air coming in from the sea.

“Do you think he'd make it to the sea wall?” Katy looked hopeful. Phil doubted it. Since he'd come on the scene, the farthest the dog had been was the end of the street. But Pat's tail was high and his nose was pointing toward Wales. He trotted off slowly, slightly sideways to stop himself slipping on the snow.

Phil and Katy followed him. The air was so frigid that it almost hurt to breathe. They wrapped their arms around one another and thought of all the Christmas cracker jokes they could remember to distract themselves from the cold. What do you get when you cross a snowman with a vampire? Frostbite. What do you call people who are afraid of Santa Claus? Claustrophobic. Why did Santa go into therapy? Because he suffered from low elf-esteem.

They had to stop twice so Phil could pick the ice out from between the pads of Pat's paws, and by the time they got to the sea road, all three of them were shivering, but it was worth it for the view. The beach looked like a glass of Guinness, the sand a wide band of white, the water beyond it a deep velvet black. The sky glittered with stars.

Pat stopped to sniff delicately at every gatepost. Phil guessed this was just an excuse to catch his breath. He peed twice, defiantly, managing somehow to balance on the slippery path on three creaky legs. Phil wanted to give him a high five. Maybe he was immortal. Maybe Katy was right.

They left Pat sitting patiently outside the wine shop and went inside, gasping with relief when the warm air in the shop hit them. They were at the till when they heard the yelp. High and sharp and startling, like glass shattering. Katy was at the door in a heartbeat, Phil right behind her. They arrived outside in time to see the cyclist picking herself up off the road, a girl of about twenty with a streak of blood running from her hand onto the fluorescent yellow sleeve of her jacket.

She looked around, stunned.

“Are you okay?” Phil said.

“I'm fine, it's only a graze. But there was a dog,” she said, as if unable to believe it. “He looked like he was wearing a cape. He sort of tottered out in front of me. I swerved but I caught him with the front wheel.” She looked around. “Where did he go?”

“Pat!” Katy called out, standing out in the road. “Pat?”

The three of them searched for a few minutes before Phil found the dog cowering beneath a white van. They tried to coax him out but he wouldn't budge. He was panting, and his eyes in the beam of Phil's iPhone torch blazed with fright.

“I don't think he can get up,” Phil said, and before he could stop her, Katy was first on her knees, then lying flat in the snow, wriggling underneath the van. Phil had a sickening flashback to the moment when the bike almost slid under the 4×4. “Come back.” He crouched down. “Let me do that!”

But she had already squirmed under the chassis and reached Pat. “Get me something to put him on,” she said, her voice muffled. He stood up and ran to the wine shop and came back with a flattened cardboard box. He passed it to her, and she somehow managed to maneuver Pat gently onto it and slide him out.

He whimpered when Phil picked him up, box and all, but then lay still as they retraced their steps to the house where the cyclist told them a retired vet lived. The lights were off, but Katy hammered on the door and after a minute he came out, a man in his late sixties in a plaid dressing gown who led them past a living room, where a coal fire blazed, into a small, tidy kitchen. He found a towel to spread on the table and Phil laid the dog gently on it.

“Is he a biter?” the vet said, over his shoulder.

Katy shook her head. Beneath the ceiling spots, her face was whiter than her coat. She held Phil's hand while the retired vet examined the dog, and squeezed it so hard every time Pat whimpered that he had to clench his jaw.

“The back hind leg is badly sprained, maybe broken.” The vet washed his hands at the kitchen sink. “But it's hard to tell without an X-ray.”

Katy still kept tight hold of Phil's hand. She hooked the fingers of her other hand under Pat's leather collar. “I can take him to my own vet in the morning.”

The man sighed and retied the belt of his dressing gown carefully. “How old?”

Katy swallowed. “I don't know,” she said evasively. “He was a stray when I found him. I think he might be fourteen.”

The vet raised one bushy gray eyebrow. “More like fifteen or sixteen.” He bent down till he was nose to nose with Pat. “You, my man, should be in the
Guinness Book of Records.
” Pat's tail tapped twice on the kitchen table as if he was agreeing.

“And you, my dear”—he turned to Katy—“have to decide whether you want to put this poor old fellow through a surgery he probably won't survive. Or to do the kindest thing, which might be to let him go.”

*   *   *

“I can't have him put down.” Katy rubbed the velvety tip of one of Pat's ears between her fingers. “I can't do that to him.”

They were back at home on the sofa, the fire dying, the dishes from their impromptu supper still on the coffee table. Phil had found a bottle of sherry that Katy used for making soup and forced her to drink a glass.

The dog was sedated after the Valium the vet had given him. The thin whip of his tail was tucked between his legs, and his back left leg had an awkward twist that didn't look good.

“But I don't want him to be in pain.” Katy put a hand over her mouth. “What am I going to do?”

“You're going to get out of those wet clothes and have a shower.” Phil hauled her to her feet and unbuttoned her coat. It was soaked from where she'd lain down in the snow under the van.

He walked her to the bathroom and turned on the shower. He put a towel on the radiator, then went into the bedroom and turned on her electric blanket. Pat gave a few little yelps of pain as he was carried down the hall, but he looked around, surprised and faintly pleased, when Phil put him carefully on the bed. And his ears pricked up to listen to the sound of Katy's voice from the bathroom, calling out a thank-you to Phil for the warm towel.

The dog's eyes had seemed to be dimming, like two faraway torch beams moving farther away into the night. But for a few seconds they seemed to brighten, sharpen, intensify. He looked straight at Phil as if trying to communicate something.

“You love her, don't you?” Phil said softly. The dog blinked and then closed his eyes. “Me too.”

*   *   *

“Phil, I'm so sorry,” Katy whispered at about five in the morning. They were whispering so as not to disturb Pat, who was sleeping fitfully between them. “You must think I'm incredibly stupid to be getting so upset over a dog when it's only been a few months since your dad's been gone.”

“No, I don't think you're stupid. Love is love, Katy, and loss is loss. And I'm not so sure Dad's really gone. Lara thinks he's still around.”
He swallowed, knew he risked sounding crazy, then went ahead anyway. “Maybe she's right. Sometimes, in the queue in the Spar, or traffic, waiting for the lights to change—I get the feeling that he's standing there with me.”

“Do you ever feel your mother around?”

“I don't know.” Phil's mother had died when he was two. He didn't remember her as a person, only as a collection of sensations. Light and warmth and ease. He thought of her sometimes when he caught the flare of sunlight bouncing off the wing mirror of a car ahead of him in traffic, or felt summer sunshine on the back of his neck. Once in Hua Hin, a butterfly had landed on his arm, the spots on its wings the exact blue of her eyes in the photographs, and for a few seconds he had the strongest sensation that she was with him, that she had made this trip back into the world just so they could spend that one moment together.