Just the Way You Are, page 8
‘He can sleep on my bed.’ Joan sniffed.
‘Maybe. But I don’t think he can live off bin scraps. It’s not safe for you or him.’
She pressed her head back into his fur, shoulders juddering.
I took a deep breath, as item nine on the Dream List elbowed its way into my head.
‘How about he stays here? For tonight, until we see what the vet says. And while we make a proper effort to try to find his owners, just in case he was stolen or lost. Then we can talk to your mum.’
Joan sat up, her tear-streaked face glowing. ‘Are you sure? Do you promise?’
I nodded, rolling my eyes while secretly delighted.
‘Now, get yourself back home to bed while I clear up the mess outside and find something for this one to sleep on.’
I made a cosy bed for Nesbit on the kitchen floor out of an old pillow and a blanket. He came to just below my knee, but it was impossible to tell what breed he was beneath the tangled mat of chocolate fur.
‘Right, time to get some sleep, boy,’ I said. ‘It might be a busy day tomorrow.’
Nesbit didn’t agree. After half an hour of plaintive cries and scratches at the kitchen door, I gave up and moved his bed into the living room. Plopping him back onto the blanket, I turned to get under my duvet and found him already stretched out across my pillow.
‘No!’ I scolded, plonking him back on his bed. ‘Bed!’
In the end, we agreed to compromise. I eventually drifted off to soft, snuffly snores emanating from the furry ball curled up on my feet.
8
Getting woken up just before six by a stinky, mangy dog licking your face is as disgusting as it sounds. Once I’d recovered my senses enough to push him away and sit up, he gave me another wet nose-nudge for good measure, then hopped off the sofa.
‘Okay, okay. Are you hungry again?’ I yawned, looking for my phone to check the time. I flipped back the covers and swung my legs onto the wooden floor. Straight into a warm, yellow puddle.
Nesbit grinned up at me, pink tongue lolling out the side of his mouth.
‘I don’t know about you, but I need a coffee.’
By the time the vet opened at eight, we’d shared a companionable breakfast of scrambled eggs, cleaned another puddle and he’d thankfully managed a poop on the lawn. Joan found us in the garden at seven thirty, and enthusiastically helped give Nesbit a bath.
Six sopping wet towels, a bathroom sprayed ceiling to skirting board in muddy water and a change of clothes later, Nesbit found time to wee one more time on the floor before Joan took him outside to try to teach him some manners.
I found her there a few minutes later. ‘The vet said to walk him down in about twenty minutes.’ Bigley Vets’ Surgery was located in the middle of the tiny shopping precinct, in between the bakery and the chemist, so a lead would be essential. I cobbled something together out of a fabric belt, tucked a couple of plastic bags in my pocket, and off we went, Joan letting Nesbit drag her down the road as far as the turning towards the primary school.
‘Promise you won’t let him go back to that murderer!’ she begged, before finally handing me the lead. ‘Or back to a nice owner who lost him, without me saying goodbye first!’
Promises assured, Nesbit and I went to find out what would happen next.
By the time Joan came bursting into the back garden at three forty-five demanding answers, I was able to provide nearly all of them. To her overdramatic relief, Nesbit wasn’t microchipped and there’d been no reports of missing cocker spaniel puppies. He was probably around five months old, and it said a lot about his background that he wasn’t yet housetrained and he was tiny for a male spaniel. The vet had treated him for fleas, ticks and worms, sorted vaccinations and prescribed some stinky lotion for a skin condition that I didn’t want to know the details of, along with precautionary antibiotics.
I’d printed off a poster to go on the vet’s notice-board, and shared it on the local pet lost and found social media pages, but the vet was fairly confident that no one would be coming forward to claim him.
‘He seems healthy apart from the flaky skin,’ I said, placing two cold drinks and a plate of flapjacks on my newly purchased garden table, safely out of reach of bad-mannered puppies.
‘You got him a collar!’ She squealed in delight, lifting him onto her lap. ‘With your address on! Does that mean we’re keeping him?’
I couldn’t help sharing in her glee. ‘For now. It’s illegal not to have a dog tag, and I thought my phone number was best. He’s chipped now, with my details on the system. If your mum agrees to let him move in with you, we can swap it to hers.’
Joan nodded, enthusiastically rubbing Nesbit’s tummy.
‘I’ve also got him a lead, dog food, bowls and some toys to hopefully stop him chewing the entire contents of my house.’
‘What about a bed?’
‘Yep.’
I had a feeling that the bed was the biggest waste of thirty pounds I’d ever spent, but you never knew – if I was keeping this dog then I needed to establish who was boss.
‘Oh, and I got these.’ I handed her a couple of books on owning a dog. ‘Essential reading if we’re going to get Nesbit properly trained up.’ I’d had more than a few pointed glances as we’d walked home, Nesbit continually darting into the road, tangling himself up in the lead and lunging at every living creature we passed, be it human, canine, a huge ginger tom cat or a tiny snail. I was clueless when it came to pets, and with Nesbit it was clear I’d taken on no easy challenge.
‘We should do puppy classes,’ Joan said, flicking through the book. ‘I’ll teach him how to fetch and roll over.’
‘Sounds great, but you might want to teach him to respect other people’s property first.’
As if on cue, he wriggled out of her grasp, leapt at her shoelaces and started tugging them with his tiny teeth.
‘This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,’ Joan declared. ‘Even better than when we ran away, or meeting you at the library.’
‘Oh, so I’m second to a stray furball now, am I?’
Joan looked at me out of the corner of one eye. ‘Well, duh!’
I sat at my lovely garden table catching up on emails while Joan cavorted about in the sunshine, distracting Nesbit from the holes in the hedge, the niggles about Leanne, Mum and Irene Jenkins all safely tucked in my mental in-tray for another day. For a couple of hours, this felt pretty darn close to the life I’d been dreaming about for so long.
By the time I went back inside to throw together some home-made turkey burgers, there was another note pushed through my door:
Please ensure all dog mess is removed from the lawn and disposed of.
Any chunterings about the rude presumption that I might not clear up after my dog dissolved when I got up the next morning and found a chicken-wire fence had been installed around the entire border of the garden, thwarting any doggy escapes.
Steph and Drew were back from their holiday and came straight over to have a nosy at how I was getting on. They brought paint brushes and rollers, God bless them, and Nicky arrived proudly brandishing the new toolbox that his brothers had given him as a flat-warming present.
‘Got any jobs need doing, Ollie, then I’m your man!’ he announced, eagerly glancing around in case anything presented itself.
‘Well, now that you mention it…’
‘Um, kettle on first, if you don’t mind,’ Steph interrupted, before getting nearly bowled over by a fluffy whirlwind. ‘What is that?’
‘You got a dog?’ Nicky cried, pushing past his sister to follow Nesbit back into the garden.
‘You got a dog?’ Steph echoed, eyebrows raised in surprise.
‘Dream List number nine.’ I shrugged.
‘Well, yeah, but I’d have thought items one to eight might take priority. Like, getting your house sorted so you can sleep in an actual bed, and work in your home office.’
‘Those things aren’t on the list,’ I replied airily. ‘And I didn’t plan to get a dog. If anything, he found me. I’ll fill you in while I make us a drink.’
‘Is this a sticker chart?’ she asked a few moments later, nose wrinkled in disbelief as she stood staring at the fridge . ‘For the dog? Blue sticker for a wee, red for a poo? Ollie, I’m not sure living alone is working out for you.’
I shrugged, laughing. ‘It’s for me, really. Nesbit’s accidents were driving me mad, so I thought a sticker chart might help me keep track of progress and feel less stressed about it.’
‘What do you get when he makes a full day without an accident? A Bonio?’
‘He gets a Bonio. I’ll decide what I get once I know how long it took. Now, stop laughing at me and tell me about your holiday.’
We spent the rest of the day painting the bedroom in a pale green while Drew and Nicky repaired the cupboard doors and then ripped up the carpet, sanding the floorboards before painting them a fresh white. Joan appeared shortly after lunchtime, and she joined in with the painting too. After an early morning walk in the woods followed by the excitement of meeting new people, Nesbit was mostly happy to watch from the dog crate I’d bought so that I could leave him home alone without risking him gnawing a tunnel to Ebenezer’s house.
With Steph’s summer playlist on at a neighbourly volume, the windows open to allow the paint smell out and the country air in, a picnic lunch and a giant coffee cake for afternoon tea, I’m not sure it could have been any better had my friends been replaced by a Dream Man.
Did I think about Mum? Yes. Often. Karina had decreased her texts to every other day, and while I knew that Mum was starting to cope without me, this was the longest I’d ever gone without talking to the person closest to me. I found myself wondering what she’d think of the paint colour I’d picked, or wanting to let her know how my promotion was going, to laugh about Irene Jenkins. I knew she’d be nonplussed about me having a dog, and I found myself having imaginary conversations with her in my head, trying to justify this new life I was leading, in some vain attempt to win her approval.
During the week, it was easier to ignore that part of my life, to shut it away and focus on the million other, nicer things I had to think about. But my friends being here was a reminder that I was Olivia Tennyson, with a history and an identity outside of End Cottage and Bigley library. I asked myself a hundred times that day whether it was time to see her, or to at least try another phone call. I asked Steph, once, and the force of her reaction was enough to ensure I didn’t ask again. But now I was moving into my beautiful new bedroom, it needed curtains and bedding. Before long, I would make a trip to the Buttonhole to use their sewing machine. And before then, I would have to decide whether or not to ask Mum to join me.
Once Steph and Drew had taken a flagging Nicky home via the promised McDonald’s drive-through, Joan and I finished off the last of the picnic and decided to take Nesbit on an evening walk, with the hope of increasing the likelihood of earning a red sticker.
‘Just a short one,’ I instructed her, clipping on his new lead. ‘We’ll do the loop along the edge of the forest, round the clearing with the picnic benches and then back. Puppies this age can’t manage a long walk yet.’
But Nesbit didn’t agree. After fifteen minutes of joyful investigating, at the point we were turning for home, he froze, head lifted, nose twitching. As Joan gave a tug on his lead to pull him around, he suddenly lunged forwards in the opposite direction, yanking the lead out of her hand. Before we had time to react, he’d disappeared into the undergrowth.
I said a word that you aren’t supposed to say in front of eleven-year-olds, before racing after him. Joan plunged through the bushes, but that was going to be impossible at my size, so I ran around, down another footpath that would hopefully meet him somewhere on the other side.
‘He’s gone that way!’ Joan panted when we reunited a minute later. ‘Quickly!’
Huffing, puffing, leaping over fallen branches and launching ourselves past overgrown brambles, we blundered after him for what felt like forever, but was in actuality about half a mile. Every so often we’d spot him in the distance, stopping to sniff the air before he scampered off again.
And then we saw the focus of his mission. Up ahead, Nesbit wiggled through a slat in a wooden fence, into the most stunning of settings – a wide, open field with a brook burbling along one boundary, in the centre of which was the kind of house that put my Dream Cottage firmly in its place.
While not huge, it was like something out of Grand Designs – a wall of windows that spanned two storeys, a wide wooden porch beneath a steel and glass balcony.
One of these super-modern bi-folding glass doors was open, and without pausing in his stride, we watched, horrified, as Nesbit sprinted up the solid porch steps and straight inside the house, leaving a trail of muddy footprints behind him.
Joan looked at me, eyes wide, mouth open, as if to say, You’re the adult here – do something! Horribly aware that she was right, the only thing I could think of to do was follow him. I clambered over the fence, pointlessly calling the name he hadn’t figured out was his yet, hurried across the lawn and into a stranger’s kitchen.
Oh my. The kitchen was as stunning as the outside of the house. A huge island took up one half of the room. Behind it was a wall with a smaller window, a Smeg fridge and open shelving. The other half contained a magnificent wooden table and chairs. The table was set with numerous places, and the centre space was filled with bowls of salad, bread and other food all covered in cling film.
And there, underneath the table, was a puppy wagging his tail in ecstasy, jaws firmly clamped around an enormous roast chicken.
To make things worse, on the other side of the kitchen, sitting politely on a dog bed, no crate necessary, were two familiar-looking collies.
Crap.
At that point, a thirty-something man in a shirt and smart trousers walked in holding a wine glass.
‘Hello, is someone there?’ he called out, before spotting me, frozen in agony just inside the doors.
He instantly frowned, which was understandable. ‘Can I help you?’
Crap crappity CRAP!
‘Um… my dog…’ My voice trailed away into a whisper.
The frown deepened.
There was nothing to be done but step further into the house, get on my hands and knees and scrabble under the table to grab hold of the worst dog in the world and drag him out of there.
Nesbit, of course, disagreed. He’d hunted down a treasure beyond his wildest dreams, and he wasn’t about to surrender it without a fight.
As I crawled in, he backed out, dragging the poor chicken with him. After a couple of feet, the leg he was holding broke off from the rest of the bird, and he turned and fled.
Further into the house.
The man yelled, ‘What the hell?’ and was calling for back-up before I could think about extricating myself from underneath the table.
‘Some woman’s dog just ran upstairs with our dinner!’ the man barked.
‘What?’ There was a chorus of exclamations and animated questions. I contemplating remaining underneath the table until everyone had gone away, but then one of the collies wandered over and gave a soft growl.
There was nothing else for it. I scrambled through to the other side and straightened up, clutching the remains of the chicken. Here I came face to face with a gaggle of adults and children staring at me from the kitchen doorway. I was even more embarrassed to see that one of them was Sam.
‘I’m so sorry!’ I managed to squeak. ‘I’ve only had him since yesterday. My eleven-year-old neighbour found him in a plastic bag in the forest and I said I’d look after him for her.’
An older man in a suit glared at Sam. ‘What the hell is she doing in your house?’
‘Um… perhaps it’s best if I get him back, and then I can explain…’ I waved in the general direction of the doorway.
They looked at me, a mixture of confused alarm, outrage and one or two secretive smirks.
‘Where is he?’ Sam asked, face serious but thankfully not angry.
‘He’s… gone through there.’ I winced. ‘I think I heard him go upstairs.’
At least three of the children instantly pushed through the adults to find him, Sam straight on their heels. I took a couple of tentative steps to follow them, but the man who’d initially found me in the kitchen moved to block my way. ‘I don’t think so!’ He looked me up and down. ‘You can wait here.’
I glanced at my dishevelled jeans and top, covered in smears of dirt and bits of undergrowth. Reaching up to my hair, a tentative hand came away clutching a handful of twigs and a dead spider. I was sweaty from the chase, and burning with shame. When Joan appeared a moment later, her T-shirt sporting a giant rip, mud encrusting one cheek and wearing only one trainer, I didn’t suppose it helped my credibility.
‘Hey,’ I whispered, holding out a hand. She crept in and took it, eyes round with questions.
‘He ran upstairs, so some of the people here have gone to fetch him,’ I murmured. ‘It’s okay, one of them is Sam, who helped me move the bed.’
She nodded, face pinched with worry.
After an excruciating couple of minutes, where the only sound was various people huffing in indignation, Sam and the children returned, Nesbit firmly grasped in Sam’s hands. The collies hadn’t moved since he left the room.
‘Here we go.’ He handed me a very contented-looking dog. ‘I’ll need to change some bedding, but apart from that, no harm done.’
