Ree falls to the floor, sobbing, and Sally feels awful. She has never before allowed such an eruption of cruel thoughts about her daughter. Somehow, that reached Ree through the ether and made her feel worse. And it’s true, Sally didn’t defend Champ when she easily could have. It’s not that she thinks Ree’s wrong; she just can’t understand why you’d ever allow yourself to say the most hurtfulthing possible to someone you loved. Now, if the worst happens, Sally will always have Ree’s words in her head…
But the worst won’t happen. She’ll do anything to stop it, whatever she has to. Ree would too, she thinks. In spite of her merciless outburst, Ree is Sally’s most likely ally if it turns out that something extreme needs to be done; Sally knows this beyond the slightest doubt.
“Dog bites don’t go to jury trials,” Toby says. “Do they, Dad?”
“Of course they don’t,” says Mark. “Can both of you girls stop acting like some kind of execution order’s been issued? Look at me and Tobes—we’re not losing our minds, are we? I’m sure we can sort this out. It might just take a bit of communication, a bit of to-ing and fro-ing with the official channels, but the fact is, if Champ didn’t do it and you were out walking him at the time—”
“You don’t know anything,” Sally says, talking over him. “You have no idea what could happen. Dogs that bite people get put down all the time. All it would take is for the police to believe Tess and not me. And they’ll use Furbert against us, his history.”
“Sal, there’s no ‘history.’” Mark makes air quotes with his fingers. “You’re talking about Furbs like he was…Harold Shipman or Myra Hindley or something. He nipped a few people’s hands once or twice—that’s it. As far as I can remember, he only drew blood once. And none of the people he nipped ever made an issue of it. The main problem was in your mind: your constant paranoia that one day something worse would happen.”
And now it has.Yes, Champ is a different dog, an entirely soft and non-bitey one, but she was nevertheless right about something bad happening.
“The Gaveys know about Furbert’s…tendency,” she says. “Lesley will make sure the police know all about it too.”
“So what if she does?” says Mark. “There’s no such thing in British law as canine guilt by…belonging-to-the-same-family association.”
Is he being deliberately obtuse? Isn’t it obvious what Sally means? The police will wonder if the same woman, or family, who failed to stop one dog from biting people might also have failed to control their second dog in exactly the same way. That will strike them as quite likely, no doubt.
Sally has to stand up now, even if it means waking Champ; she has to get out of the house. “No, you stay here, Champy,” she says as he springs upright too, with a big yawn and a stretch, and automatically follows her as she goes over to the shoe rack.
Sally bends and strokes both sides of his head at the same time. “You wait here for a bit with Daddy and Ree and Tobes. Okay? I’ll be back soon.”
“Back? Where are you going?” Mark asks.
“Out,” says Sally. “I need to think.” She opens the front door and sees an imaginary semicircle of armed police, guns all pointed in her direction, in the unpopulated space between her house and the Barn opposite.
7
Really, if she wanted to be accurate, Mum should have said that she needed to think some more, because she’d already packed in some fast and detailed thinking while listening to Dad explain that everything would probably be okay. That was a bad move on his part, assuming he wanted to gain any control over the situation, which he definitely did. You can always tell the difference between when he’s happy for Mum to be the boss (most of the time) and when he decides he needs to be manly and take charge, and it was clear from his voice at a certain point that he’d gone into Taking Charge mode.
By trying to be reassuring, he made Mum suspicious. His role in our family is to warn us about terrible things that will probably never happen and explain why everything is more terrible than we think it is, and then Mum steps in to Enjollify the crowd and tell him he’s being daft. Like, whenever Tobes talks about how he wants to go traveling in Thailand for his gap year, Dad’s always straight in his face with stories about people who had drugs planted on themto take through the airport and are now rotting in Thai jails, as if this is bound to happen to Tobes too.
So when Dad started to say, in a slightly bored, impatient voice, that everything would be fine in relation to Champ and Tess Gavey’s accusation against him, what Mum heard him say was, “No one needs to worry about this because I’m not. I love Champ, as dogs go, but I’m never going to let myself get hysterical over a dog. Nothing dog-related could ever ruin my life.”
When she heard all those things Dad hadn’t said or thought (he genuinely believed everything would be sort-out-able), Mum decided he wasn’t on her and Champ’s side, and especially wouldn’t be, even more than he wasn’t already, if things got really bad. Not properly. Not in the way she would need and want him to be. Remember, Mum had already chosen the knives she would use to gouge out the innards of the local constabulary. She had a feeling Dad wouldn’t be on board for that level of fight-back.
As soon as she had affixed that “not properly on my side” label to Dad, she started to think and plan, furiously and unilaterally. I wish she’d known then that she could rely on me no matter which way things went. Maybe I should have spoken up because, like Mum, I knew I’d have no qualms about killing in order to save Champ’s life. (That’s not what happened and not what I did, in case you were thinking you’d guessed.)
The point is, Mum and I have a lot in common. She is very much a sides person, as am I—far more than Dad or Tobes. Or Champ, who is a side pup, singular. He’s so sweet that he believes there’s only one side and we’re all on each other’s. Champ loves everybody. Mum, in contrast, loves very few people: Dad, her children(“furry and non-furry,” as she always says), Granny, Auntie Vicky, and her two closest friends from school, Tash and Oonagh, whom she sees only about twice a year each. That’s it. Although Mum’s never thought of this and probably wouldn’t like to know it about herself, that’s why she finds it so easy to form love bonds—one-sided, obviously—with inanimate objects: houses, usually. The way she turned our move from Shoe Cottage to the Hayloft into a weird kind of tragic love-triangle drama would have seemed utterly bizarre to anyone who wasn’t used to her peculiar ways.
I feel guilty sometimes, almost like a spy, when I suddenly remember with a rush of “Oh yeah!” that Mum has no clue how well I know her. So often I hear her talking to Champ when she doesn’t think I’m listening or even in the house. She tells him everything; he’s the only member of the family whose judgment she doesn’t fear. When we first put Shoe Cottage up for sale (or Shukes, as we called it, because Mum once said that the way to show a house you loved it was by giving it a nickname), the way she talked about it to Champ when she thought no one was eavesdropping was insane. She patiently explained to him why we needed to move house, even though it was “heartbreaking”:
“The thing is, Champy, I know you love our house, and the garden—it’s the only home you’ve ever known. Well, since the farm in Llandysul, but you might not remember that now. Shukes has been home to you since you were ten weeks old. And it’s not even that the garden’s too small for you or not nice or interesting enough—I think you love our garden, and I think you’ll miss it. All those lovely smells! We’ll all miss our lovely Shukes, but we have to be brave and leave it, even though it’s our perfect house, really…butit’s only the house and garden that are perfect, you see. Their position and situation really isn’t. You’re still so little, Champ, and…well, I hope you’re going to live till you’re at least…”
Mum fell silent for a few seconds, and I knew what she was thinking: What age should she wish for that was the perfect mix of realistic and as optimistic as possible? “Eighteen!” she said eventually. “I’ve heard of smaller dogs like you living until sixteen, definitely, and I reckon you can beat their record, Champy. Which means sixteen more years of you wanting to roam around the garden freely, going out and coming in whenever you want, as is your absolute right…and the problem with this house’s garden is that it’s at the front.” Mum sighed. “Otherwise, it’s perfect. Well, most people wouldn’t think so—almost everyone would say it’s way too small, but it’s ideal for us. We don’t want or need a huge garden, and we’ve made this one beautiful over the years…but we can’t leave you unattended in it even for a minute, can we? No, we can’t. We can’t, my lovely boy. Anyone could open the front gate, or climb over the wall and steal you. It’s terrible and it shouldn’t happen, but it does: Horrible people steal dogs sometimes. So we have to move house!
“We’ve been putting it off and putting it off because we love Shukes so much, and kidding ourselves that maybe it’s okay…but it’s just not, and that’s all there is to it! We can’t watch you whenever you’re in the garden for the next however many years, and we don’t want to restrict your garden time either, like we have to now. Don’t we? Yes, we do. We do! And we had to with Furbles too, didn’t we? Poor Furbles! His garden time always had to be cut short, and now yours does and…it’s not ideal, is it? No! No, it’s not ideal, my baby.Oh, my babiest of boys! My boy-est of babies!”
It sometimes takes Mum longer to get to the point when she’s talking to Champ because she lapses into singsong mode.
“Here’s the thing, Champy.” She leaned in closer to him and lowered her voice to an excited whisper. “I’ve worked something out and it’s a real game-changer.”
I was standing behind Mum at this point. I saw Champ’s ear twitch. Was he suitably intrigued? He definitely loves listening to her voice and doesn’t seem to care what she says.
“We only don’t want to move because we haven’t yet found our even-better-than-this-house house,” she went on. “Do you see what I mean? This might be a bit of a complicated concept for you, but maybe not.”
Maybe not? Seriously?I had to roll my eyes and my head simultaneously when I heard that.
