Lost Dog by Kate Spicer

Author:Kate Spicer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473559660
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

PART TWO

LOST DOG

CHAPTER SIX

Wolfy is curled up at the end of the bed and before I take him over to Will’s I really want a cuddle. Late October sunshine drenches the room in light and warmth. The other male animal is already up and changing the world one chore at a time. Sisyphus and the sybarite, and their dog. I’ll just have a moment of hedonic bliss with the dog and then I’ll get up. I pat the bed exuberantly. ‘Wolfy, Wolfy, come on Woofs.’

‘If he’s not coming he doesn’t want to be cuddled, Kate,’ Charlie shouts up the stairs in between his furious bathroom ablutions. ‘Wolfy, Wolfy.’ Pat pat pat. Pat pat. ‘Oh come on.’ I quit the doggy intonation and just plead in a mockney accent, ‘Gizza a little cuddle, mate.’

He half raises his body, then launches himself up the bed, close enough for me to roll him onto his back, soft underbelly exposed, where I stroke him, muttering inane nonsense, just making noises. In dogs like Wolfy with relatively small eyes, with a narrow, long, sighthound’s dolichocephalic head shape, the nictitating membrane that protects the eyeball is prominent. Slowly the shining black irises roll away under the pink corpuscles of his third eyelid so he looks like a zombie. The happy teeth come out as his muzzle relaxes and drops half a centimetre to bare the tiny baby teeth at the front of his lower jaw. I close my eyes and scratch his chest, and a blissed-out and peaceful smile lights up my whole body. I’m not thinking about anything. It’s taken a while to get him up here, but now he’s here. It’s heaven.

Soft underbelly. It’s an expression that’s used a lot to describe a weak spot. We use it so much we’ve forgotten its literal meaning. Turn over a hedgehog, an elephant, a lurcher, a woman, a shark, a sardine and there’s the softest part of the body below the ribs. It’s where you go in to disembowel or eviscerate an animal – or a human.

It’s dangerous to show a soft spot if you’re an animal, and animals like Woofs who’ve had unpredictable lives, who’ve been hurt, they don’t lie with four legs in the air like a thin dead cow with their heads lolling to one side and their pink tummies fully exposed.

Don’t show your vulnerability.

Castor is a different story. Raised from a puppy by Keith, he is lying exactly like this on Wolfy’s bed beside me. Soft belly upward, that is how trusting Castor sleeps all the time.

‘Aren’t you up yet?’

There has been much talk about Will and his family having Wolfy and, since Keith is at Seoul Fashion Week, ‘Castor too, if you don’t mind?’

Much as I try not to anthropomorphise Wolfy, I have this idea of him as a canine cousin to my nieces and nephews.

I want them to enjoy Wolfy as if he were the human cousin I’ve never provided. A desire for him to be family has probably been apparent to all.

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