Chapter Thirty-Three
Thirty-Three
Walkies
I go hesitantly back into the bedroom, and find the man sitting up holding the water I gave him earlier and digging frantically at the blister pack of pills.
He swallows two and collapses onto the bed.
‘Do you need anything else?’ I ask, embarrassed by how enthusiastic I sound, as if I’m only too pleased to be offering my non-existent nursing services to a man I don’t know.
He goes quiet as he thinks.
‘Yes, please.’
I wasn’t expecting him to actually say he needed something else. He’s already had the pills and the water. What more does he want? Lymphatic drainage massage? A freshly whipped-up batch of herbal tonic? The pagan incantation for health?
‘Could you get some food for Ted?’
I feel bad for my uncharitable thoughts.
‘What kind of food does he eat?’
‘Dog food.’
‘I gathered as much,’ I say, icily. ‘Any particular brand?’
‘He eats fox poo, so he’s not fussy. Can you also get some milk for tea?’
‘From where?’ I say, looking around the room, as if a pop-up newsagent might reveal itself at any moment.
‘The shop.’
‘What shop?’
‘The island shop. It was closed this morning.’
He sneezes so fiercely that he blows a blood vessel in his eye.
‘Um, I’m afraid I don’t know where the shop is.’
‘Follow the trail of litter and you’ll get there.’
He lies back, groans piteously and begins to doze again.
When I look down at Ted, he’s staring up at me, wide-eyed and serious. It’s the perfect name for him: facially Ewok, but with a certain gravity of demeanour that puts me in mind of a gentleman with a silver cane and a top hat.
He’s looking directly into my eyes. Is it normal for dogs to give this much eye contact? I thought they were supposed to dislike a direct stare, some evolutionary throwback to wolves, but this dog is extremely comfortable with prolonged eye contact. It’s almost as if he’s trying to look into the deepest recesses of my soul and get the measure of me.
He whines and it occurs to me that he probably badly needs a walk, as well as some food, if he’s been stuck in this house all day with a sick owner. Poor thing must be crossing his legs.
What is the etiquette of walking somebody else’s dog? Should I wake up the snotty man again to tell him I’m taking his dog with me to the shop?
Perhaps I could just give the dog a ten-minute stroll down on the beach, so he can stretch his legs and do his business?
‘Do you want to go walkies, Ted?’
Ted runs in a tiny circle on the spot and shows me the bottom row of his teeth. It is the perfect underbite. The sort of underbite that could have its own Instagram account with a million fans.
‘I’ll take that as a yes, then, shall I?’
I could swear that Ted nods.
‘Where’s your lead, boy? Show me your lead!’
Ted walks to the kitchen table and snuffles around. He comes out dragging a bright-red leash, attached to a tiny harness bearing the words POLICE DOG MERCH – which seems somewhat incongruous with a dog who probably weighs less than my left knee.
‘What about poo bags?’ I say, and Ted nuzzles a plastic container attached to the leash.
Is Ted fluent in English? I narrow my eyes at him.
‘How about a ball?’
He runs behind the sofa and returns carrying a half-size tennis ball, which I presume is designed for small-jawed dogs with very little in the way of snout.
I think about leaving a note for the man, just in case he wakes up and thinks I’ve dognapped Ted, but I can’t find any paper or writing implements, so I’ll just have to assume he has the general intelligence to figure out the situation.
I hear a hiss and see Nemo glaring at me from the bookcase as if I’m the world’s worst traitor, instead of the person who saved him from a rehoming centre. I consider giving him a conciliatory head-rub, but he’s got a definite gleam in his eye, and I don’t want to risk a swipe from the murder mittens.
I click Ted’s harness into place, and we climb the narrow, rather wonky steps to the cliff path. At the top, Ted seems to know the way to go and, as we progress, the rubbish strewn in hedges does seem to increase. I really must bring a bag with me next time and do a litter-pick.
Teds stops every few paces and I remember Henny telling me once that it’s important for dogs to smell the scents of other animals, that it was like reading the news feed on social media, and cocking their leg was like leaving a comment.
When Ted has left about fifty-eight comments in a hundred-metre stretch of cliff path, we reach a narrow track leading to a little beach. He seems like a smart sort of dog, but even so, I’m concerned that if I let him off his leash, he might run for the horizon never to be seen again. What if he tries to swim back to the mainland or something similarly bonkers? With the powerful Atlantic rollers, he’d be drowned in minutes.
I try a test.
‘Here, boy,’ I say, breezily, as he sniffs a pole supporting the metal handrail.
No response.
‘Heel,’ I say.
Still nothing.
‘Look at me, Ted,’ I say, increasingly desperate.
Complete indifference.
‘Come?’
In a flash, he’s by my ankles staring up at me, waiting for a treat, I presume. I don’t have a treat, so I go with some encouraging words about his superior intelligence, along with a lavish mane ruffle.
His recall word is ‘come’. We can do this. We can totally do this.
I unclip him from the leash and he immediately starts bombing around the beach, running for joy and kicking up his back legs for extra lift. He’s so joyful, just existing in the moment and loving every second of it, that I can’t help smiling. Several other dogs run over to greet him, and he approaches them warily, gives their hindquarters a respectful sniff before taking turns chasing and being chased, throwing in a few feints and fake pounces to mix things up.
He is delightful. Other walkers ask me his name and I actually feel a little bit of pride that they think he’s mine. It’s all going magnificently until a surfer emerges from the waves. It’s only April and the water must still be very cold because he’s wearing both rubber boots and some sort of rubber headgear. I’m smiling in the surfer’s direction, vaguely wondering if I should learn to surf while I’m here, when Ted spots him. He freezes. The hackles go up on the back of his neck and he emits a single warning bark. The surfer keeps walking. He’s out of the water now and on the sand and he hasn’t seemed to have noticed us.
‘Hey, it’s okay, Ted. It’s not a man-seal, it’s just a surfer.’
At the word ‘surfer’, Ted erupts into a sequence of savage barks. He runs up to the guy and stops two metres from him to continue the volley. From a distance, it’s clear that Ted stands eight inches at the withers, barely clearing the man’s ankles, but this doesn’t hold him back. He is furious and itching to tear out a throat.
‘I’m sorry,’ I call to the man. ‘He’s never done this before.’
Well, not in my ten minutes’ experience of walking him, anyway.
‘So…’ he says, bending down to put out his hand to Ted, and then grinning up at me. ‘I thought you had a cat, not a dog?’
‘Oh, it’s you – same red surfboard! Sorry, I didn’t recognise you with the rubber hat. Two surfs in a day?’
‘Standard. Different spots for different tides. It’s my day off.’
He’s so addicted to catching waves that he surfs one beach in the morning and another in the afternoon. I find that very weird – because who wants to get dry twice – but also quite cool.
‘I’m always up for a bit of double-dipping,’ he says. ‘Triple-dipping when it feels right.’
He says this with a completely straight face but there’s a swirl of innuendo that’s impossible to ignore.
Ted sniffs his hand warily, and consents to reduce the volume of his barking by 20 per cent.
‘I think it’s your hood,’ I shout.
The surfer keeps smiling at Ted.
He looks flushed and happy and not the least bit bothered by Ted’s evident hostility.
My gaze lingers on his eyes. This man has really nice eyes. Twinkly, a few lines around the edges, but vivid blue. I could sink into those blue eyes forever, I think – and then try not to imagine the squelching of eyeballs.
‘He’s really going for it, isn’t he?’ he says, grinning at me.
‘Yes. He has a thing about people with hats,’ I lie brazenly. I have no idea how Ted views people in hats, but I feel strangely compelled to protect Ted from criticism.
‘That’s a lot of people,’ the man says, and I realise belatedly that I am also wearing a hat. A blue baseball cap, which I am wearing backwards to protect my badly sunburned neck, which took a scorching on the boat ride over.
I am momentarily struck dumb. Ted isn’t. He takes his barking volume back up to 100 per cent and increases the frequency by a further 50 per cent.
‘What’s your name?’ the surfer asks.
My stomach flips a little. He’s not just nice-looking, he’s gorgeous, even in a wet neoprene hood and matching booties, and he’s asking me for my name.
‘Lindy Hougassian,’ I say, and add a cheerful, ‘Halloon.’
He looks a little confused.
‘What’s yours?’ I say, because perhaps he thinks I’m rude for not asking him back.
‘Joshua,’ he says. ‘But I actually meant the dog’s name. I was talking to him.’
‘Oh! Ted. He’s called Ted. Because he looks like a teddy.’
A teddy with an anger management problem.
I can feel myself blushing. I genuinely thought it was possible that this surfing Adonis might be hitting on me, that he might be about to ask me for my number.
Joshua kneels down and says, ‘It’s okay, Ted, you can chill now. I know I’m wearing a stupid outfit, but it’s just to keep me warm in the sea, because it gets cold after a while out there, and I get an ice-cream headache.’
Ted goes instantly silent as if he understands this sentence and feels embarrassed of his previous behaviour.
‘Nice to meet you, Ted,’ Joshua says, and holds his hand out. Ted pauses a moment, and then lifts a reluctant front paw for a handshake.
‘He’s cute,’ Joshua says, and adds, ‘Noisy but cute.’
‘Sorry,’ I say, as Ted runs to the water’s edge and starts playing with a pebble, as if none of this unpleasantness ever happened.
Joshua takes his hood off to reveal his tousled, blond waves. My heart skips another beat.
‘Whereabouts in New Zealand are you from?’ I ask.
‘I’m not – I’m from Loor. My dad’s a Loorian, although he lives on the mainland these days.’
But he definitely said he was from New Zealand – and what about his accent? Is he some sort of pathological liar? He can evidently read my expression because he elaborates.
‘I lived in New Zealand for eight years until recently. My mother was from there. She was a professional driver.’
‘Like a chauffeur?’
His face registers surprise. Maybe he means a taxi driver. Why am I asking for specifics? What is wrong with me? He doesn’t know me and has no need to give me any more information about his own mother than he feels necessary.
‘It sounds mad, I know, but she was actually a racing car driver.’
I can feel my eyes widen.
‘But she lives here now?’
Still asking for specifics. Why? There is no need for specifics. All I need to do is nod and look politely interested.
‘No, she died.’
‘Oh god, I’m so sorry,’ I say, feeling my eyes widen in horror. ‘In a crash?’
For the love of god, why have I asked this? How incredibly nosy can one woman be? Where is Ted with his incessant barking when I need him?
Answer: Ted is sitting at the waterline looking at the horizon, while some small seabirds pootle about in front of him. He’s as peaceful as a Buddhist monk. Not a wuff in him.
‘Breast cancer,’ Joshua says.
‘Shit, I’m so sorry.’
The pause here is truly awful. More of an ensuing silence than a pause, it turns out, because neither of us has anything else to say.
I look over to Ted for help. Having taken his fill of the view, I watch as he stands and arches his back in a particular manner.
‘Oh, I’d better go,’ I say, motioning to Ted and airily flapping a poo bag.
‘Gotcha,’ Joshua says, nodding in solidarity.
‘Worst part about having a dog,’ I say, as if I’m experienced at having a dog and therefore know such things.
He shakes his head. ‘Nah, you’re wrong – the worst part is when they die.’
He reaches out to touch my baseball cap and spins it slowly to the front so that my face is shaded.
‘Your nose is burning,’ he says.
My hand immediately goes to cover my nose, as if it might fall off any second, and I accidentally poke myself in the eye with the plastic poo bag, which I’ve forgotten I was carrying, but he doesn’t notice. He’s already jogging off up the beach, leaving me to scoop Ted’s poop and recover from the heart flutters and general mortification.
This surfer dude is the most attractive man I have ever met, and every time I try to talk to him, an animal manages to ruin my game.
Another neoprene-hooded surfer emerges from the sea, and I pause, breath bated, waiting for Ted to lose his shit and start barking at him.
Not a peep. Not a low growl. Not even a hard stare.
‘So you play favourites?’ I say, and I’d swear on my life that Ted gives me a nod.