As we approach the gates, I take one last look back at the house. It’s smaller than it had seemed when we were passing, more picture-book cottage than mansion. Perhaps it is just the perspective. Behind me, already further up the slope, the Dog is zigzagging between grass verges. Our dog. It is time to go.
I shift the rucksack from one shoulder to the other.
“I can carry it,” she sats. “It’s still my turn.”
“I’m carrying it. It’s not heavy.”
“He’s my dog.”
And for a moment, I really am tempted.
The Dog is a coward. I love the Dog, but it’s undeniable. Some qualification is needed here. The Dog meets each day enthusiastically. He isn’t afraid of strangers, though he isn’t especially friendly to them either. The Dog hurtles after rodents and medium-sized birds with no thought to what it will do if it catches them. Once, in the park, the Dog actually caught a squirrel. By the time he had let it go, the poor thing could only drag itself away by its front legs. The kindest act would have been for someone to stamp on its head or knock it with a large stick. I couldn’t. I watched it crawl away and told myself it had a fighting chance. I even used that phrase: a fighting chance.
All of which is only to say that Dog isn’t a coward about life in general. Rather, the Dog is afraid of other dogs. You might, understandably, mistake this for simple disinterest. Nineteen times out of twenty, the Dog acts as if other members of his species don’t exist. If one comes up to his face, he turns in the opposite direction. If they trail after him, sniffing his arse, he trots off. If they are playful or aggressive, he runs into the nearest bush or hides behind your legs. Sometimes, you hear him whimper cartoonishly though the leaves.
The Dog is a small to medium sized, very beautiful male dog of the kind originally bred to fetch birds, with a striking line of symmetrical, evenly-spaced liver-coloured spots running along his spine. His beauty isn’t up for discussion. People in the street or in the park can’t help stopping to tell us how beautiful the Dog is.
The Dog is a coward, a beautiful and occaisionally even sweet coward, but I don’t blame him for what happened, at least not entirely. There had been a bad mark over the day from the start. There were, quite literally, signs. Signs all over the walk. The countryside was littered with signs. I don’t know if I was noticing them more than normal, but the sheer number got under my skin. Of course, there were all the usual warnings: private, keep out, keep to the path, private woodland, no public right of way, private wood, trespassers will be prosecuted (where ‘prosecuted’ sounds like something painful that would happen immediately). I don’t know why they bother. Even if you had wanted to stray from the portion of earth allotted to you, the landowners were so fastidious with their fencing, some of which was electrified, though there was no livestock, that you were funnelled between fields like lines at a theme park. That’s England: one big theme park.
The signs bothered me. I couldn’t stop thinking about them and wouldn’t stop talking about them. Wasn’t every keep out sign an insult to the reader’s intelligence? As if you didn’t know that if someone had put up a fence, they didn’t want you in? The signs had put me in a bad mood. Even so, I wouldn’t say either of us were feeling especially on edge as we approached the house. And the house had no signs at all, though it had more cause for them than most.
We were a long way from any village. The path took us down through a small copse behind a set of incongruously isolated bungalows, then joined a bridleway beside a field. Deep grooves from the local four-by-fours ran through the white chalk. Soon, the bridleway veered left into a vegetable field, merging with the mud and the raked lines through the crops. A neat gravel track continued through a pair of brick-pillared gates. Behind the gates was the house. This second path, the one through the gates, was marked on the GPS as our right-of-way. On the map, it ran past the front door: between the house and what we assumed was the garage, which was itself large enough for a family. No signs. Not even a name.
The house was huge. Its gates, tall, iron, brick pillars topped with some kind of stone animal, were wide open, and the gravel path arced across a flat expanse of lawn bordered by fir trees, spreading ever wider until it became broad enough for several cars as it passed the house itself. This was a redbrick pile, a few stories high and not, seen more closely, absolutely humongous, yet clearly Tudor or medieval or faux-medieval or faux-Tudor and indented and extended at every opportunity with turrets, sloped roofs and windows so that its true size could only be guessed at; a moat, purely decorative, no more than a metre wide, circled the building. Behind the garage we could make out more outbuildings, which might have once been stables, beyond which the drive climbed up to another gate. But for the nearly cut lawn, it could have been abandoned.
“You can give me the bag,” I said.
“I don’t mind.”
“It must be my turn.”
“Once we’ve passed the house. Besides, it’s practically empty.”
For a moment, I thought I might be about to suggest we turned around. The house was big and we were small. I was English. Besides our map, there was no clear indication this was even a right of way. Then the Dog rushed through onto the lawn, running in wide loops, nose to the earth, as if swung from a giant centrifuge. We called him back. As unsettling as it was, the absence of signs, in that moment, felt like a statement of trust from the absent owners, one worth trying to repay. It took what felt like a long time for the Dog to return. We were sure someone would appear. It was impossible somewhere so large could be so empty. Unlike many of the houses we had passed the day – huge houses hidden down long drives or behind high hedges, huge houses which you would not know were there from the road, huge houses which even their neighbours might not have ever known existed, houses with nothing but tired grass in our massive gardens, huge houses with desultory, dry fountains in the middle of featureless gravel drives – this place looked lived in. There was gardening equipment near the “garage”, a tennis ball in one of the flower beds. But other than our own voices, the only sound was the wood pigeons and, further off, a low rumbling which must have been the road back to London.
When the Dog finally returned, I knelt to clip its lead back to its collar. It was at that point, exactly as the aluminium sprung back, that the barking started. From my haunches, crouching at the Dog’s eye-level, I looked in the direction of the noise. Two long-haired dachshunds were making a beeline for us across the gravel. From here, their stumpy legs didn’t even look ridiculous. The Dog, of course, was already beginning to cower. When I stood up, the dachshunds were already at our feet. Snapping. Without a word, all three of us began to walk towards the gap between the garages and the house, following the line we knew or believed we were entitled to. The dachshunds circled us, yaps filling the air, occasionally darting in. Surely someone would notice us now?
From the way their dogs moved, it was clear that their primary target was our Dog. They wanted all of us gone, but they wanted the Dog gone most. The Dog did not want to be there, either, but he couldn’t escape. There was always one small, dark blur in front of us, another behind and somehow, at the same time, two blurs biting our ankles. We moved, limbs tripping limbs. It was slow progress, excruciatingly slow, and we can’t have been going for more than a few metres when it happened. I saw the foot of the front door’s wide stone staircase. I heard a high-pitched squeal. The Dog sprung right up into her arms, or else tried to, because within the same movement he’d dropped down to the ground again.
He had jumped up, slammed into her chest and dropped back to the floor.
“They bit him!”
The dachshunds were still circling. The Dog was twisting from side to side. I couldn’t see its head. Why didn’t it fight? Give us a chance? I could see the slope up ahead, the gate at the top of the hill.
When I was a child, we had not had dogs and barely knew any friends who did, so I had been afraid of them. The only friend I had with dogs was a boy from nursery, who I didn’t like anyway. My parents were always making me play with him, because no one else liked the boy either. It was sad, really. The boy had a Westie which used to go for me as soon as I had come through the door into their lushly carpeted, creamy hallway. I would run into the living room and clamber up onto the beige leather sofa, the thing nipping at me all the way. Another time, on holiday, we stopped at a bed and breakfast in the middle of nowhere. The owners’ dogs, two squat pugs, chased me into the garage. My parents found me there, standing on an upturned bucket, screaming, pugs circling like sharks. We found somewhere else to stay. Later, they said they’d been grateful the excuse. There’d been something off about the house. Too many dreamcatchers.
Perhaps that’s one reason I like the Dog. I understand where he’s coming from.
The Dog was shuffling backwards now, staring up with big brown eyes, begging to be carried. He had given up. Low and to my left, I saw one of the dachshunds dive at his back legs, jaws open like a crocodile clip. I gestured towards it, but rather than use my arms the movement began from the hip, becoming a whole, swift swing of a leg. The yapping stopped. We began moving forward again, actually making ground. The Dog trotted ahead, as if nothing had happened.
“Did you see? It had a moat.”
Somehow, she hadn’t seen.
“It’ll be for show. Decorative. You couldn’t fortify that house. It’s in a dip.”
“Maybe that’s what the dogs were for. Strange that they’d just run away. I’m trying not to look back, it’ll only egg them on.”
The Dog looked back at us. She shook her head at him. Honestly.
I looked back. Offset beside the front door, taking up more than one floor and framed in black iron there was a long, thin window. I stared at this window for a few seconds to see if there was anyone was on the staircase, then, satisfied there wasn’t, tracked the low redbrick wall running around the outside of the moat, which rose into a full-sized wall behind the building (perhaps hiding a walled garden which would have roses in the summer) before tracking back to the front door and the steps we had just passed, the tiny stone bridge over the water and over to where the two dachshunds were standing, our only leaving party, though only one was standing, and they were leaning over the other as it lay with its legs and head extended, as if resting by a fire. There was, I think, a whimpering.
We looked at the Dog, who was waiting a few metres ahead, tongue hanging out at a silly angle, one ear flipped over its head. Silly for us, I mean.
For a moment, I wondered if I could blame him. The Dog must have done it. It was believable. Animals snapped. The Dog was bigger than the dachshunds and it had snapped. I’m sorry, our Dog killed your Dog. Which would make the Dog a dangerous animal. When dogs killed children they had to be put down. But this wasn’t a child, it was a dachshund. And the Dog had a good record. He wasn’t violent. In fact, he was a coward. Or, at least, he was a coward most of the time. Almost all of the time. The Dog was only violent to that one terrier on our street, the one dog who the Dog would break its lead to get at and wouldn’t stop clawing at unless you put your whole body in the way, the one whose owner thought our Dog was out of control, a monster, the dog whose owner would probably testify against us at trial. But anyone who mattered would know that he couldn’t have done it. I knew. She would know. The Dog would know. And I loved the dog, I truly did. No, I would have to go to prison. Still, I hesitated.
“You kicked it?”
When she stared, it was like her whole body was behind it.
“How hard did you kick it?”
“Not hard. I was shooing it. It must have jumped into my foot.”
Part of me was as terrified, angry, upset and ashamed as I should have been. The other part of me had already decided that I was going to get away with it. That certainty came with its own sense of calm. I wasn’t going to prison. I wasn’t paying those people anything. Their house was huge and no amount of money would bring their pet back. There would be a way out of it. I looked back. The dog, their dog, was crouched by the other, licking its face. They were such small things. A pigeon cooed. The road, somewhere, rumbled. She swung the rucksack to the floor and sat down next to it, head in hands.
That rucksack, I thought. It was practically empty.
Some housekeeping: I changed the name of the newsletter (it was too self-deprecating, even for me). There are other changes afoot too.
You kept me on the edge of my seat! Great read and I’m still not sure what exactly happened to the Dachshund.
I really enjoyed this! Very sinister. I was bracing myself for something even worse, if you can imagine.