Waiting for Doggo (19 page)

‘Oh, you know – the wrong side of confused.’

‘Of course you are. I was right to tell you, wasn’t I?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘You don’t sound convinced.’

‘What if he doesn’t want to meet me?’

‘It’s possible. I’d be surprised, though.’

She’d be surprised, but I’d be left in some weird limbo, caught between two fathers, effectively ignored by the one who thinks he sired me and rejected by the other, who did. I can’t bank on a happy reunion after thirty years. I know from Mum that he has a family of his own, a wife, children, and I really wouldn’t want to do anything to jeopardise that. After all, he’s as much a victim of this situation as I am. Until yesterday, neither of us even knew the other existed; we were united in our ignorance. Mum didn’t exactly set out to trick him, but as she said, she knew what she was doing, allowing herself to fall pregnant by him. He has every right to take the news badly.

‘It’s sweet of you to think of it from his side,’ says Mum. ‘But then you always were a considerate boy.’

Or maybe I’m just preparing myself for the worst. Mum has established that he’s on holiday right now, and even when he gets back she’s going to have to play the situation very carefully, diplomatically, out of respect for his circumstances. It’ll help her cause that I’m not looking to rock any boats. I’ve told her I don’t want or need any kind of public recognition from him (or even a clandestine relationship, for that matter). All I’m asking for is a chance to sit down and look my biological father in the eye. I’ve also decided that no one else needs to know, not Dad, not Emma.

‘Really, Danny? Are you sure?’ The surprise in Mum’s voice is coupled with a palpable note of relief.

‘What’s the point?’

‘Honesty?’ she suggests tentatively.

‘Christ, at what price? I can’t face the fallout. Can you?’

‘It’s your decision.’

‘Yes, it is. And thanks for letting me get there by myself.’

I hear her stifle a sudden loud sob. ‘Oh God …’

‘What?’

‘How did you get to be so … so grounded?’

‘Clara calls it cold-hearted.’

‘That girl’s a fool. One day she’ll wake up and realise what she’s done.’

‘Y
OU STILL HAVEN’T
called him?’ asks Edie.

‘The evening sort of ran away with me. Suddenly it was too late.’

It’s a version of the truth. By 9.30 p.m., after my long conversation with Mum, I’d sunk the best part of a bottle of Rioja and couldn’t face slurring my way through a conversation with Patrick Ellory.

‘Do it now,’ says Edie. ‘I insist.’

‘Oh, you do, do you?’

‘Come on, Doggo, let’s give Mr Hopeless some privacy.’

He answers his phone with just one word – ‘Ellory’ – but it’s loaded with warmth and jocularity. I see an Englishman in the traditional mould, good at sports and fixing things. He’s a barrister, due in court later, but more than happy to chat away about his Aunt Geraldine, Doggo’s former owner. ‘Nutty as a fruit cake. Always was. Never found anyone clever enough or stupid enough to marry her.’

She spent her whole life in the same house in Wandsworth, a large double-fronted property with a wild expanse of garden, which is where she discovered Doggo, cowering in the old Anderson shelter beside the potting shed (just as she had done as a young girl during the Blitz).

‘She’d been feeding him up for a couple of weeks when I first met him and he still looked like he was at death’s door. God only knows what state he was in when she found him. My wife called them “the odd couple”, and they were, knocking around that crazy old house together. You know, I think he was the husband she never had, the only living thing she ever really loved. I’m glad for her she found that happiness at the end. Are you still there?’

‘Yes, I’m sorry, this is very interesting. What happened to her?’

‘She had a massive stroke.’

Doggo was the one who alerted the neighbours. When the ambulance arrived, they had to break into the place because all the doors and windows were locked, or so it first appeared. They later found that one of the dormer windows in the roof was open, which meant that Doggo had made his way up there and outside on to the slates.

‘I’ve seen it and it’s one hell of a drop, even with the rhododendron bush I’m guessing he landed in. He must have. There’s no other way he could have survived that fall.’

Ellory still feels bad about dumping Doggo at Battersea, but it wasn’t feasible to integrate him into their life, already ruled by a couple of cats. ‘And none of my cousins wanted him. They’re more concerned about putting the house on the market and cashing in. But I’m the one with power of attorney over her estate, and I’d never let that happen as long as she’s alive.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘It’s the principle of the thing.’

‘No, I mean … she’s alive?’

‘Didn’t I say?’

‘She’s alive!?’ says Edie.

‘After a fashion. I think the phrase he used was “persistent vegetative state”.’

‘But she’s alive.’

‘Technically, I suppose.’

She casts a glance at Doggo. ‘You know what we have to do, don’t you?’

‘No.’

‘Liar.’

‘Edie, we can’t. She’s a vegetable. Is that how you want him to remember her?’

She grabs my forearm. ‘Dan, I have a feeling about this. Trust me. We have to do it.’

I know she’s won, but I’m not going down without a fight. ‘I thought we said no socialising.’

‘This is work.’ She flashes me a smile. ‘We’re talking about the office postman, remember?’

St George’s Hospital in Tooting is a vast, sprawling complex of impressively unattractive brick buildings (conveniently located, I notice, just across the road from Lambeth Cemetery).

I hang back with Doggo while Edie makes a first foray inside. We’ve figured that they’re not going to let us just waltz into the stroke unit with a dog at ours heels, and we’re right. Edie returns with the news that guide dogs only (and in special circumstances) is their hard-and-fast policy on animals. ‘I was tempted to ask about the ones they’re butchering right now in the name of medical research.’

‘I didn’t know you were an animal rights activist.’

‘You should have seen me at university. I had a balaclava and everything.’

It’s a simple plan. We’ll smuggle Doggo inside in my backpack. There’s only one problem: he won’t go anywhere near it, let alone climb inside it. The more we try and coax him, the more mistrustful he becomes. He even growls and gives me a warning nip on the hand. I tell him we’re going to find Geraldine; I tell him Geraldine is desperate to see him; I tell him Geraldine has a giant bag of Choc Drops waiting for him. He won’t be swayed.

‘Maybe he’s claustrophobic,’ suggests Edie.

No, there’s something else. He’ll jump off a roof for her, but climbing into a backpack is a step too far? It doesn’t make sense. I pull out my phone and call Patrick Ellory. It goes to message. ‘Patrick, it’s Daniel here. I’m sorry to bother you again, but I’m just wondering if Mikey knew Geraldine by another name.’

We stroll the streets for a bit before installing ourselves in the beer garden of a dismal pub. An hour later, we’re still there and even Edie’s enthusiasm is beginning to flag. Reluctantly she agrees to call it a day. The three of us are making for Tooting Broadway tube station when Patrick Ellory calls back: ‘You’re absolutely right. She was always Zsa Zsa to him.’

‘Like the actress?’

‘
Moulin Rouge
was her favourite film.’

I wait till we’re back in the hospital car park before springing it on Doggo. ‘Where’s Zsa Zsa?’ He visibly stiffens, his eyes searching mine for signs that we’re talking about the same thing. ‘Let’s go and see Zsa Zsa.’ He barks three times and spins on the spot like a dervish. I squat beside him with the backpack and he jams himself inside it head first. I manoeuvre him round the other way and raise my finger to my lips. ‘Shhh,’ I say as I close the zip on his wide-eyed and expectant little face.

We’re taking the lift to the second floor of the Atkinson Morley Wing when I see that it’s just gone 8 p.m. – the cut-off point for visiting.

‘Relax,’ says Edie. ‘Just let me do the talking.’

No amount of talking will blag us to Geraldine’s bedside in the stroke unit, because she has been moved to the intensive care unit. When we get there, Edie tells me to wait outside. I’m talking to Doggo over my shoulder, assuring him it won’t be long now, which is why I don’t see the two hospital porters approaching along the corridor until they’re almost level with me. I smile and nod at them. ‘Evening,’ I say, and from the look they exchange, they evidently think I’m on the lam from the psychiatric unit.

Edie reappears. ‘Okay, here it is – she’s my grandmother, you’re my boyfriend, and we’ve just flown in from Vancouver.’

‘What were we doing in Vancouver?’

‘God knows. I didn’t say. It just came to me.’

‘Maybe it’s where we live.’

‘If you want.’

‘I hear it’s a great place – right on the water, mountains for skiing close by. I can see us there. Yeah, let’s go for that.’

‘Dan, I don’t think she’s going to ask.’

‘She’ turns out to be the sister in charge, tall, unsmiling, brusque in manner though not unfriendly. Her name badge reads: LYDIA. She shows us to the far end of the ward. I can feel Doggo shift and squirm in the backpack as we run the gauntlet of comatose patients, almost as if he senses the presence of people hovering on the fringes of life, kept from death only by the machines stacked around them. The hum and hiss of ventilators is broken by a staccato symphony of beeps from the monitoring equipment.

The place is manned to the hilt, and I’m thinking there’s no way in the world we can whip out a dog without one of the nurses spotting us when, thankfully, Lydia shows us into a room with only one bed.

‘We try and give them a bit of privacy at the end if we can.’

‘How long?’ asks Edie.

‘Soon, although your grandmother’s a fighter. She was unconscious when she got here, but you learn to tell what they’re like, to read the signs.’ She glances at the monitors. ‘It’s all up there. She doesn’t want to let go.’ She gives a warm and unexpected smile. ‘I’ll leave you alone with her.’

Geraldine doesn’t look like a human being; she looks like something spat out by the sea, cast up on the shore – a piece of driftwood weathered back to its toughest knots and sinews and bleached by the sun. This impression is reinforced by the rhythmic ebb and flow of the ventilator, like waves breaking softly on the sand. It’s easy to look beyond the plastic valve in her mouth, to ignore the many tubes, wires and cables running in and out of her, and see that she was once a beautiful woman.

I unshoulder the backpack and lay it on the end of the bed. Releasing Doggo, I immediately clamp my hand over his muzzle. ‘Ssshh.’ He understands – what doesn’t he understand? – and yet when he sees her lying there, he can’t help letting out a tremulous whimper. He treads carefully towards her and licks her cheek several times. Then he buries his snout in her neck, just below her right ear, and pushes hard. And again. Trying to stir her, force her back to consciousness. I know it’s not going to happen; she’s too far gone. I turn to Edie, who reads my pleading look and shakes her head.
You’re wrong
, say her eyes.
It wasn’t a mistake
.

Doggo barks twice in frustration before I manage to calm him, silence him. I think we’ve got away with it, but a few moments later the door swings open. Lydia’s quick, appraising look takes in Doggo sprawled over Geraldine. ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ she hisses. ‘Get it out of here.’

‘They only had each other,’ pleads Edie.

‘There are rules!’

‘And there are some things bigger than rules.’

Lydia’s having none of it, though. ‘I’m calling security.’

Fortunately, she casts a parting glance at Doggo, because it stops her dead in her tracks. He’s staring at her, his dark eyes utterly bereft, without hope. I don’t hear it at first – my ears aren’t trained to such things – but Lydia’s are. Her eyes flick to the heart monitor. It’s nothing dramatic, a slow ascent: 53 … 54 … 55 …

Even Doggo is staring at the monitor now, but probably because we all are. 58 … 59 … 60 …

Edie is the one who spots the movement. ‘Her hand …’

A twitch. Something. Nothing. But there it is again, a sort of spasm in the desiccated claw. I take the hand, as light and fragile as a fledgling bird, and gently lay it on Doggo’s head.

61 … 62 … 63 … 63 … 63 …

I could swear he’s emitting a long, low sigh when the alarm goes off. I just have time to register the flatline on the monitor before Lydia hurries over and flicks a switch on the machine, killing the piercing wail. Doggo doesn’t seem to understand what has happened until the ventilator is also turned off and he no longer feels the rise and fall of the bony chest beneath him.

We all look at him lying there, stuck to her, almost as still as she is. For a horrible moment I think he’s going to will himself after her, down the same dark road, but when I run my hand from his head to his hindquarters, he looks up at me.

I can hear Edie sobbing gently behind me and I don’t want to turn because I know I’ll lose it too.

‘This never happened,’ says Lydia. Even in the subdued lighting of the room I can see the sheen in her eyes.

‘Thank you,’ I say.

She turns at the door. ‘Who are you really?’ Before I can trot out the lie, she shakes her head as if to say, it doesn’t matter.

I
HAVE TO CARRY
Doggo up to Edie’s flat.

‘It’s weird, he seems twice as heavy as usual.’

They’re about the first words I’ve spoken since the taxi picked us up at the hospital. I can’t imagine what the driver made of us – Edie and I in sombre silence on the back seat, shoulder to shoulder, with Doggo laid across our laps like an old picnic blanket.

Doggo gets the sofa and the fillet steak that Edie had planned for her own dinner. I’m ravenously hungry, and when he refuses to eat, I demonstrate what’s expected of him.