A Girl Called Dog Page 3

  “George, George!” Eady called to the man packing oranges into a box at the front of the stall. “Look who’s come to see us!”

  George, who was tall as well as round, ducked under the awning and broke into a huge grin at the sight of the parrot. “Well, I’ll be—”

  Before George had the chance to say any more, Carlos had flown onto his shoulder, squawking and flapping excitedly, exclaiming, “George, George, George!”

  George reached up and scratched the bird on the back of his neck, just the way Dog did. Dog felt a little hurt that Carlos was greeting these strangers so warmly.

  “I’m sure we’re very glad to see you too, Carlos, old boy,” George laughed. “Very glad indeed.”

  Dog hung back, uncertain how to behave and afraid that she and Esme would be forgotten now that Carlos was with his old friends. She buried her nose in Esme’s fur and wished they could just go somewhere on their own.

  But George and Eady were far too hospitable to ignore any guest in their stall.

  “I think you’d better introduce us to your new mates, Carlos!” said George.

  The parrot shuffled down George’s arm and hopped deftly onto the back of Eady’s chair. He inclined his head first to Esme, then to Dog. “Esme,” he said, and then, “Dog.”

  “Dog?” said Eady and George together, and Carlos spoke in Uncle’s voice:

  “Lazy, good-for-nothing Dog!”

  Hearing Uncle’s voice, Esme put a paw over her eyes, and Dog shuddered. George and Eady exchanged a long look and a nod.

  “Right!” said George, bending down to speak quietly to Dog. “We get the picture, love. Carlos is good at givin’ the picture, i’n’t you, boy?”

  Eady looked carefully into Dog’s worried face. “Don’t you fret,” she said. “You’re safe as houses here. We’ll shut the stall up directly, then we’ll have something to eat, eh? Your little mate there looks like she might be partial to grapes.”

  Esme took her paw away from her eyes and wiffled her nose hopefully in Eady’s direction; Esme didn’t have much of a vocabulary but she knew what “grapes” meant.

  Dog huddled on a stool near the door, with Esme popping grapes on the floor beneath her, while Eady and George pulled down the shutters. Soon they were enclosed in a cosy little world of fruit and veg, singing kettles and rattling tin cups. Dog had no idea how to behave with humans. Even being looked at was strange and rather uncomfortable at first. She took food when it was offered to her, hardly daring to look up, but George and Eady didn’t seem to mind. They chatted to each other as if Dog, Esme and Carlos were the sort of guests they entertained every day of the week.

  While Dog ate her tenth slice of bread and butter (something she’d never eaten before and was finding particularly delicious), Eady fussed around her with clothes pulled from an old case at the back of the shop.

  “Here we are,” she said with satisfaction. “That’s what you need to keep the cold out, my girl.”

  Dog knew about doing what she was told, so she let Eady manoeuvre her into a pair of trousers and a jersey. Both were far too big, but Eady soon had the sleeves and legs of both garments neatly rolled up to fit.

  “Wish I had something better than this for your little tootsies,” she said as she helped Dog into a pair of red wellies.

  Dog had never worn anything but an old sack before, so her new outfit felt strange. She liked the trousers and the jersey – they were both soft and fluffy inside; it was as if she had fur like Esme, she thought happily. But she wasn’t sure about the wellies. It was hard to move if you couldn’t feel the ground. Dog shuffled back to her stool by the door, and pulled her knees up to her chin.

  George wrapped his big hands around a third mug of hot sweet tea and gave a deep sigh. “What are your plans then?” he asked.

  There seemed to be a lull in the conversation. Eady poured tea, Esme munched more grapes and Carlos cracked another Brazil nut. George asked his question again, and Dog suddenly realized that he was looking at her. She peeped up at him from under the dark mat of her fringe. George’s eyes were resting on her, light and warm, the way sunlight used to rest on her skin, shining like a blessing through the old pet-shop window. Never before had Dog been asked a question that she wanted to reply to. She felt in her throat for her voice, like someone reaching into a dark cupboard that has been shut for a long time. But she couldn’t find it.

  Carlos swallowed a piece of nut and spoke up for her. “Home,” he said.

  “Home?” said George and Eady together.

  Carlos flapped from the back of a chair to land on Dog’s shoulder. He tidied up a stray bit of her hair with his beak, then said again, more firmly, “Home.”

  “Which home, Carlos?” asked George quietly. “You’ve had few of those over the years. And which of them would do for your new friends?”

  “George is right, you know,” Eady chipped in, wagging her finger at the parrot now. “Which of your old homes would do for a little girl like Dog here? Doctor Alavarez? Mad as a hatter, and dead this long while besides. Madame Boursini’s? You couldn’t stand all that crystal-ball and Ouija-board nonsense yourself. What d’you think a child would make of it? And as for Miss Waspie! Well, you know perfectly well she isn’t a trapeze artist. You can’t take a child to any of those places.”

  Eady rolled her eyes in disapproval, but Dog was fascinated; she had no idea what a hatter was, or a Ouija board or a trapeze artist, but they sounded exciting. What a life this bird had lived!

  “Seems to me,” said George, “that you’ve got responsibilities now.”

  Carlos ruffled his feathers so they stood out like a pile of raked leaves and brushed Dog’s cheek. He shut his eyes. There was a moment of awkward silence, then Carlos’s eyes snapped open and his feathers grew sleek; Eady and George smiled at each other and then at Carlos.

  “You’ve got an idea, haven’t you, you crafty bird?” Eady laughed.

  Carlos tipped his head to one side. “Marmalade,” he said. “Old Marmalade.”

  “Well,” said George, “that’s going back a few years.”

  “Do you still know where to find her, Carlos?” Eady asked.

  But Carlos had no time to answer, because there was a sudden loud hammering on the closed metal blinds at the front of the stall.

  “Open up, open up. Police!”

  Dog leaped to her feet, sure that Uncle himself was outside waiting to catch her. In a second, Esme was in her arms, and Carlos flapping at the door, calling, “Out! Out! Out!”

  George and Eady exchanged one of their deep looks.

  “No time to get to the bottom of this, is there?” Eady said.

  “No,” said George, and reached for the lock. “Take care of yourself, Carlos. I know you’ll take care of your friends. Don’t forget we’re always here to help!”

  George pushed the door open, and the three companions rushed out into the frosty air.

  Chapter 13

  THE STREET ON the other side of the little iron door was empty, but Dog heard the wail of sirens arching over the top of the warehouse, like Uncle’s fingers reaching out to grab her. She ran, a little awkward in her new wellies, dodging the bin bags and trolleys, while Carlos flew on ahead. She fixed her eyes on him and tried to push away the feeling that Uncle was waiting at every corner with the black, black box in his hand, its lid gaping wide to swallow them all.

  Once again Carlos flew down the quietest back streets. There were few people, and the only cars seemed to be parked; the three companions ducked behind them, trying to creep unnoticed past the old ladies and pram-pushing dads that they met.

  Dog had never run so much in all her life. Just when she thought she couldn’t keep going for another second, Carlos stopped and landed on some tall iron railings.

  He looked around, as if reminding himself of something, then rasped one word at Dog – “Wait!” – before flapping off over the railings into the garden beyond, where Dog and Esme could not follow.

  For a mo
ment Dog was too out of breath to worry about where Carlos had gone. She sank down, her chest still heaving, and peeled Esme from her aching shoulders.

  They were in a wide road with rather grand houses on either side. Cars whizzed by in the distance where their road ran into another, but otherwise it was quiet, which meant they had outrun the sirens.

  Dog got her breath back but still Carlos did not return. Every second he stayed away seemed longer and longer, and Dog grew anxious.

  Then a large blue car with black windows pulled round the bend in the road and came towards them. To Dog’s horror, it slowed, then stopped right beside them. Dog was rooted to the spot with fear, sure that Uncle was about to climb out of it.

  If she could scream now, Dog thought, Carlos would come and save them, but her throat was tight and dry with silence.

  With a sinister, expensive buzz, the driver’s window slid down and a face looked out of the car. It wasn’t Uncle! It was a woman with shiny, whipped-up hair, her mouth pink as a mouse’s nose. Her eyelids were green like a lizard’s and her tongue darted slyly from between her teeth.

  “You’re that child, aren’t you?” she said. “The one from the pet shop? It was all over the lunch-time news.”

  The woman smiled a dazzling kind of smile, but her eyes looked at Dog just as a lizard looks at crickets the moment before it eats them. “I think,” she said, still smiling like a reptile, “you should come with me!”

  Dog held Esme close and wondered how far she could run before Lizard Woman would catch them.

  “Hhhhherrrr!” The most horrible wheezing noise came from the railings behind her. “Hhhhherrrr! Hhhhherrrr!” The sound was very loud and close now; Dog didn’t dare look round and see what was causing it. She felt caught between the wheezing and the smile, like a flea between two teeth.

  There was a screeching sound of very unhappy metal, and a gate opened in the railings right beside Dog and Esme. Through it came a tall, orange gas canister on rickety wheels, with Carlos perched, wobbling slightly, on top. A small, very ancient lady in a green velvet coat was pushing the gas bottle, to which she was connected by a long tube that ran from it into each of her nostrils. She was as wrinkled as crumpled newspaper, with hair as orange as the canister, standing up from her head like a flame-coloured exclamation mark.

  “Hhhhhherrrrrr!” she wheezed, breathing through the long tube to her nose. When she’d taken a truly enormous breath, she spoke to Lizard Woman.

  “Juliette,” she said in a quiet, raspy voice, “these are guests of mine, so there is no need for you to mention this to anyone, is there?”

  Lizard Woman’s smile had disappeared, and had been replaced by a vague frown, as if her face had been caught in a fog.

  “And it might be rather good,” the old lady continued, “if you just had a little snooze in your car, right now.”

  Her voice was papery and soft; it reminded Dog of dreaming, of being very cosy and falling asleep. It obviously reminded Lizard Woman of the same things because she had dropped her head to her steering wheel and was snoring gently.

  “Hypnotism!” commented Carlos as he made a short glide to land on Dog’s shoulder and gently nibbled on her hair.

  “Quite so, Carlos,” said the red-headed lady, smiling at the bird. “Still an awfully useful skill.”

  Carlos flapped his wings and blew Dog’s hair about in the draught. “Marmalade!” he exclaimed. “Marmalade!”

  “Of course!” wheezed the red-haired lady. “I haven’t introduced myself to your friends. I am Marmalade Zee, an old friend of Carlos. Now let’s get inside before my nosy neighbour wakes up.”

  And with that, and another huge, wheezing gasp, she shuffled back through the gate, with her canister clanking and wobbling beside her, and a small girl, a parrot and a coati following behind.

  Chapter 14

  MARMALADE ZEE’S HOUSE stood at the end of the long, tangled garden. Dog saw that it had once been beautiful: tall and elegant, with big windows and balconies, a steep, pointy roof and chimneys reaching proudly up into the sky, high above other, more ordinary, houses. But now it looked rather like its owner, crumpled and creased, as if it was just too much effort to stand up and keep all its floors and windows in straight lines. Many of the panes were broken, and one of the chimneys had fallen and made a big hole in the roof. Climbing plants had completely overgrown the doors and windows on the ground floor, so Marmalade led them, wheezing, along a sloping path that wound up to a terrace, level with the first floor. She pushed open a glass door with her stick and held aside a curtain to let them in: warm yellow light shone out into the blue-grey winter dusk, and Dog felt that, in spite of all its broken glass and crumbling walls, the house was still cheerful and ready to offer welcome.

  They stepped into a huge room lit by a number of hissing gas lanterns standing on the floor, and the last of the day’s light, gleaming faintly through huge windows that reached almost up to the high ceiling and down to the floor. The room was crowded with furniture, piled up in layers and towers and stacks, as if all the chairs and tables and beds and chests of drawers in the whole house had come into this one room for refuge. The only useable space was around a tent, pitched in the middle of the room. Beside the tent was a long sofa, and in front of it a fat-bellied stove whose wonky metal chimney disappeared through the ceiling between several enormous crystal chandeliers.

  Marmalade waved a vague hand at the tent as she sank down onto the sofa. “Awful hole in the roof, but the tent keeps the water off!”

  Dog didn’t need the explanation; she had never seen the inside of a normal house, and didn’t know that people don’t usually camp indoors.

  She noticed that Marmalade had organized her room very cleverly, so that she could do most of what she needed to while sitting on the sofa: on one side of the stove, a bucket caught drips from a hole in the ceiling, and on the other, bits of broken furniture were piled in a large basket to fuel to fire. Marmalade had only to lean forward a little, as she was doing now, to put more wood on the fire (a fat section of table leg, carved in a spiral) and scoop water from the bucket into a kettle, which she plonked on the stove.

  “There now,” she said brightly. “Tea in five minutes.”

  Marmalade pulled a large biscuit tin out from behind the cushions. The smell of coconut macaroons drew Esme like a magnet. In a moment she had joined Marmalade and Carlos on the sofa and was munching happily. But Dog hung back, not sure how to fit in with another of Carlos’s old friends.

  “Please,” Marmalade said to her, “come and sit with us. Any friend of Carlos is a friend of mine. Carlos and I have known each other for a very long time.”

  “A very long time!” agreed Carlos.

  Marmalade delved into the cushions behind her and pulled out a framed picture. “Look,” she said, holding the picture for Carlos to see. “Do you remember this?”

  Carlos peered at it, first with one eye and then the other, flapped his wings and squawked, “Carlos!” he exclaimed. “Baby Carlos!”

  Dog’s curiosity overcame her shyness. She climbed onto the sofa, accepted a biscuit and leaned in to look at the photograph that Marmalade held.

  It was very sunny in the photograph, and very, very green, with lots of big plants and leaves all around the four people who stood looking out. Three of the people didn’t have many clothes on. They had thick fringes of dark hair and big smiles. One of them was a woman, one was a man and one was a child. The man held a pointed stick and wore some beads around his neck, and the woman had a pattern of red paint on her forehead.

  Looking at these people made Dog’s heart race; she had never seen them before and yet something about them was familiar.

  Between the man and the woman stood Marmalade, looking much less crumpled and creased, and with no orange gas bottle or tubes up her nose. Her red hair was long and shiny and caught up in a fat plait over one shoulder. She held her hands out like a cup, and in the cup was a parrot chick, with a big wobbly-looking head and a
few tufts of feathers showing like dots of paint on its pink skin.

  “It was taken a very long time ago,” Marmalade told Dog. “More than thirty years now. I was working in the Amazon, in South America, studying a tribe there, the Maohuri. Well, that’s what I said I was doing. Really I was a bit like you – running away!” Her laugh changed into a fit of wheezing and it was a few moments before she could speak again.

  “I lived in a great forest by a river, with this family,” Marmalade continued, pointing a knobbly finger at the three people in the picture. “That’s Dawa and her daughter, Mankamo, and that’s Gikita – he was a fine hunter. And this,” she said, tapping the parrot chick, “is Carlos. Gikita climbed a tree to take him from a nest and gave him to me.”

  Dog looked in awe at Carlos: he really was very, very old indeed!

  “I didn’t want to take a parrot from its wild home,” Marmalade went on, “but the Maohuri kept lots of different animals – birds, coatis – and it would have been rude to refuse Gikita’s gift. Anyway, we were friends from the start!”

  Carlos squawked again and flapped in agreement.

  “We lived like parrots and coatis, all together under the trees.”

  Marmalade’s face shone with this memory. Dog’s face was shining too. She didn’t know what tribes were, or Theamazun, or Sufmerika, but now she knew what Carlos meant when he said “home”. It was the place where he was hatched, a real place where parrots and coatis and people all lived together, free and happy. Dog’s heart did somersaults.

  Marmalade took some more gasping breaths, and managed to say, “I would be living there still, but I got sick and I had to come back here. I never saw Dawa or Mankamo or Gikita again.”

  “Carlos!” Carlos said, and Marmalade smiled.

  “Yes, yes, I had you, Carlos – for a while at least!”