Dogsbody (13 page)

“It cost an awful lot,” she confessed to Sirius that night. “And I’ve almost no money of my own left now. My daddy sent me some money after he first went to jail, but he hasn’t sent me any more—I don’t think they give them much there—and I don’t know how I’m going to feed you, Leo, I really don’t. Duffie won’t let me buy your food with the housekeeping, and Uncle Harry’s fifty pence is just not enough. I shall be all spent up after Easter, and I don’t know
what
we’ll do.”

Sirius knew that he could get food from Miss Smith. He tried to tell Kathleen he would be all right by making a groaning noise and nosing her hand.

Kathleen understood he was trying to comfort her. “Not to worry, Leo,” she said. “I can be cunning and make sure there’s scraps. It’s dishonest, but we’ll manage.”

The short time the Easter holiday lasted was rather a thin time for Sirius. He did not dare go out, even to see Miss Smith, in case somebody saw how he got out. The first opportunity he got, he stood on his hind legs and bolted the top bolt on the gate. Tibbles had already bolted the bottom one. She did it every night. After that, he had nothing to do but hang about the house until Kathleen was free to take him for a walk, and to think about food. He was still growing a little, and he seemed to be hungry all the time. He had not intended to bother Kathleen for food, but he did. Whenever she was in the kitchen, he lay on her feet with a flop and
a groan, to show her he was dying of hunger. If this did not work, he sat where he could touch her hand with his nose whenever she passed him. And when it was near his suppertime, he followed Kathleen about, staring anxiously at her in case she forgot what time it was.

“Really, Leo, you’re like a starving beggar!” said Kathleen. “Do I ever forget now?”

When he was not thinking of food, Sirius worried that Basil would find the Zoi. Clive called for Basil nearly every day, and the two of them went off to hunt for the mysterious meteorite. Sirius tried to make them take him, too. Every time they left, he rushed after them to the door, ears pricked and tail whirling, hoping Basil would melt. But Clive hated dogs. Basil always shut the door in his face, saying, “Get out of it, Rat.”

Once, when Kathleen was shaking a mat outside the side door, Sirius managed to push past her and go bounding after the two boys. He thought that once he was with them, Basil might just let him stay. But Clive made irritated noises to cover up a jump of fear. Basil said, “Oh bother you, you festering Rat!” He seized Sirius by his collar and towed him rapidly back to the house. He was in too much of a hurry to go to the side door, so he opened the door of the shop and thrust Sirius inside it. “Don’t let the Rat out, Mum. He keeps trying to follow us.”

The shop was full of Duffie’s usual customers—the loud-voiced ladies in drab clothes who all called her Duffie. Duffie plunged among them and grabbed Sirius’s collar. “Blast Basil! Blast the creature! It’ll break everything in sight.”

“It’s a fine-looking animal, Duffie,” one of the women boomed.

“Not bad for a mixture,” said one with a sharper voice. “What kind of fearsome cross is it, Duffie?”

This voice struck into Sirius’s head and brought back a nasty memory. Surely the sharp voice went with a large strong hand that turned you upside down and then said you were not worth keeping alive? He looked up at the woman as Duffie dragged him past. She was a ruddy-faced being in corduroy trousers and heavy boots. She did not look big enough to have turned him upside down. But he was sure she was the one. The doggy smell on her trousers was the same.

“Eleanor Partridge, you’re a snob,” boomed the booming woman. “Mongrels are always far more intelligent. I like the look of this one. High I.Q., you can see.”

Because of this praise, Duffie did not bundle Sirius away quite as fiercely as she might have done. It was Sirius who sped to the house door, towing Duffie.

“I don’t like his eyes,” said the sharp voice.

Sirius burst through into the living room, bristling. Sacks and suffocation went with that voice. He threw himself at Kathleen, so upset that he tried yet again to communicate with her, and whimpered for sympathy. “Keep it
in
,” said Duffie.

“Silly!” said Kathleen. “You know they never take you. Be good now, and we’ll go out this afternoon.”

Kathleen was having to spring-clean the house. Duffie insisted on it after the flea. Sirius strongly resented it. Kathleen was scraping away layers of calm, familiar dust, and replacing it with
uncomfortably clean new smells of polish and disinfectant. It bored him silly, and he knew Kathleen was working far too hard at it. When she took him out at last, she was too tired to do more than sit on the gate to the meadow and throw sticks for him. Sirius resented this so that he did his best at first to stop Kathleen spending the whole day cleaning. He would stand, very patient and obstinate, with his head down and his tail stiffly out, exactly where he was most in the way. “Do get
out
, Leo!” Kathleen kept saying. She Hoovered his tail up twice, by mistake. But Sirius still stood in her way, until Duffie stormed up and delivered a long lecture on lazy sluts who spent their time playing with useless dogs instead of washing the paint down.

“
Do
get out of the way, Leo,” Kathleen said miserably, when Duffie had gone.

After that, Sirius simply followed Kathleen about. He tried to alleviate the boredom of it by exercising the right of a luminary to poke into odd holes and corners. One such corner had a mousetrap in it. That was horrible. He could not get the thing off his nose.

“Curiosity killed the dog!” Kathleen said, running to his rescue. “Poor Leo, No, don’t go in there! It’s full of mothballs.”

The mothballs were horrible too. They made Sirius feel ill. It was the only day he did not feel hungry. Altogether he did not enjoy that holiday. The only good thing in it was that Basil and Clive did not find the Zoi. Sirius made quite sure of that by examining every heap of muddy fragments Basil brought back. Basil was furious. One evening, when Sirius was sniffing at the finds, Basil kicked him.

“Don’t do that!” Mr. Duffield said sharply. “It would serve you right to be bitten.” He called Sirius over to him. “Come here, horse.” Sirius went over, low and slinking, not at all sure what was going to happen. Last time Mr. Duffield noticed him, he had been plunged in warm water. To his surprise, he got his head rubbed amiably. “You’re a most forbearing animal,” Mr. Duffield told him, “or I wouldn’t keep you. There must be at least two people in this house you’d give your eyes to bite—naming no names. Good dog.” Sirius thought this was most perceptive of Mr. Duffield. He wagged his tail heartily.

Just before the holiday ended, Kathleen, to her intense joy, had a letter from her father. It was the first one she had had since Sirius had been living in the house, and it did not strike him as a very good letter. It was written and addressed in smudgy pencil, on paper torn off something larger, and the envelope was very dirty and creased. But Kathleen was evidently so delighted with it that Sirius planted his front paws on her knees and congratulated her.

“Make it go down,” said Duffie. “It’ll be climbing on the table next. Does this father of yours bother to tell you when he’s coming out of prison?”

“Yes!” said Kathleen, joy all over. “He says in a month or so. Fancy!”

“Thank goodness for that,” said Duffie. “I’m not a charity. I’ve enough to do without feeding and clothing Irish children for a year. It’s high time that feckless terrorist was made to be responsible for you.”

Sirius wished he could point out to Duffie that she would have to do all the housework again if Kathleen left. But he saw that Duffie’s unkindness had not spoiled Kathleen’s joy. Kathleen was almost too used to Duffie to notice what she said. She took Sirius away upstairs to make the beds and talked to him excitedly.

“You’ll love my daddy when you meet him, Leo. He’s ever so sweet and kind and funny, and making jokes all the time. This letter’s not really like him. His spelling’s terrible. But it’s sweet too. He says he’ll come and fetch me as soon as he’s free. Just think, Leo! I’ll take you, and we’ll all go back to Ireland and live in a house by ourselves. Won’t that be marvelous? Daddy’ll love you. I know he will. And it won’t be long now. We’ve only a month to wait. I can hardly
believe
it, Leo!”

Sirius sat down in some dismay on a trailing end of blanket. This was something he had not thought of. Of course he would go where Kathleen went. And, if he had not found the Zoi before Kathleen’s father came for her, then he would be taken far away and never would find it.

“Leo!” said Kathleen, tugging.

He realized that she was trying to pull the blanket out from underneath him and got up dejectedly. Kathleen, as she tucked in the blanket, heard his feet ticker-tacking away.

“It’s all right. I’m not angry,” she called. “It’s just you always sit on the thing I need next.” But Sirius had his nose pushed out of the window in the next room, anxiously looking for Sol, and did not hear her.

“Yes, I see the difficulty,” Sol said. “I tell you what. Basil and his
friend keep searching upriver, near the place where you were born. Boys have such a knack of finding things that I think you should take a look there too. After all, you were put there first of all.”

“If you think I should,” Sirius said, without enthusiasm. Mrs. Partridge went with the place where he was born. And with her went sacks in the river. He was not at all anxious to meet Mrs. Partridge again. As soon as Kathleen was back at school, the first place he went was into town, to batter at Miss Smith’s door.

“School holidays over I see,” said Miss Smith. “On your own again all day, are you? Well, come in. I’ve got quite a bit saved up for you.”

She gave him an excellent meal, and they had a splendid reunion. But Sirius knew that the splendid meal was due to the fact that he had not been to visit Miss Smith for nearly three weeks. He was hungry again soon after, and he knew that Kathleen would not have enough food at home for a dog that had been roaming the town all day. The fact was, he told himself, he needed more food than Kathleen and Miss Smith could supply. That was what he told Sol, when Sol asked him why on Earth he was not going upriver. “I’m finding people to feed me,” he said. It made a splendid excuse for not going near Mrs. Partridge yet.

Sirius started his career as a beggar by trying to sponge on butchers’ shops. He went softly into a shop behind a customer.

“Sorry, madam,” said the butcher. “This is a food shop. We don’t allow dogs.”

“But it’s not
my
dog!” said the customer.

Then the butcher and his assistants held the door open and
waved at Sirius. “Shoo! Go home! Out!” They were so fierce about it that Sirius had to go. But in the second shop he tried, he sensed a spark of kindness somewhere. He was not sure where the spark was, in the butcher himself or in the customers, but he set to work to fan it. He whined and groveled. He trembled all over, his apologetic tail sweeping the sawdust and his sides sucked in until they nearly met in the middle.

“Poor thing,” said the butcher. “He’s starving. Give him that chunk of shin, George, and put him out.”

Sirius swallowed the meat on the pavement outside and then tried another butcher. And another. His technique improved all the time. He came to see at once, as soon as he entered the shop, who it was had the spark of kindness, and he concentrated on that person. If there was no spark, he left at once. He also discovered that if he put his ears as low as they would go, it made his eyes glow and gave his whole face a soft, appealing look. In the fifth shop, the butcher said, “I call it a shame, letting a lovely dog like that go half starved!”

Sirius went home very satisfied—though he was rather surprised to find he was not particularly interested in the lights Kathleen had bought for him.

The next day, he tried a new method. He went along several streets and, whenever he found a gate he could open, he went inside and boldly battered on the front door of the house. When it was opened, he sat on the doorstep, looking as appealing as he knew how, and wagging just the tip of his tail—ever so hopefully. He was surprised how often the person in the house exclaimed,
“Oh, you beauty!” and gave him a biscuit or a cake. Sometimes, of course, there was a dog in the house already. Sirius found it wisest to go away as soon as it barked. Dogs were jealous. Sometimes again, the person who opened the door was frightened of dogs. Sirius learned to detect this as soon as the door was opened. He did not waste time on such people. And then again some people were like Duffie. He met a blast of cold dislike. He left those doorsteps at once, but even so, he got kicked once.

Ranging the streets, always on the alert for providers, Sirius soon found that the best ones usually called to him first. Two old men called to him from seats and shared sandwiches with him. There was another old man called Mr. Gumble who insisted on Sirius going into his house with him, where he gave him a steak. It seemed that Mr. Gumble had just done well at the betting shop on the corner of the street. Sirius could see Mr. Gumble was very poor. Nevertheless, he accepted the steak, and went back to see all three old men next day. They loved feeding him. And he made them happy by being grateful and affectionate.

“You’re just finding excuses,” said Sol, who was both amused and exasperated by this begging.

“Not really,” said Sirius. “They want to make a fuss of something. Why shouldn’t it be me?”

“All right,” said Sol. “Now go and look upriver.”

But before he had gone half a mile in the right direction, Sirius met a bright pink van with a blue cow on top, drawn up near a play school. A very small boy reached toward him with a fistful of cold, sweet, white stuff. Sirius ate it all. And that was that. Having
discovered ice cream, Sirius could think of nothing else for a while. He found another pink van and begged at it like an artist. Sol, annoyed though he was, blazed with laughter at the way Sirius sat just a little beyond the queue, pretending to be too timid to go nearer, and yearned in every soulful hair for a drop of ice cream. He got a whole cornet too, from the man who sold it.