A Girl Called Dog Read online

  Carlos fluffed out his feathers and pulled his head into his neck.

  “Yes, you remember, don’t you?” said Marmalade. “Flying off out of that window? I was so worried.”

  “Came back!” Carlos rasped sulkily.

  “Yes, you did after three years!” Marmalade waggled her finger at him and he caught it playfully in his beak. She laughed. “You old rogue!” she said.

  The kettle on the stove began to whistle. Marmalade pulled a teapot, cups and more biscuits from under the sofa and behind cushions.

  When the tea was made, Dog sipped, and dunked chocolate fingers, with all she had heard whirling around her head. She looked at Carlos in wonder. He really was ancient. But parrots lived a long time, so he wouldn’t die soon.

  “I’m very glad to see you, old friend,” Marmalade was telling Carlos, “but I have the feeling you are not here to stay, are you?” She raised an enquiring eyebrow at Carlos.

  “Home,” he said. “Home!”

  “Yes.” Marmalade nodded. “I guessed that’s what you’d want. And you’ll take your friends of course. I haven’t seen a coati or a child like this since I left the Amazon.”

  Carlos climbed onto her shoulder and looked carefully into her face. “Marmalade come too?” he said.

  Marmalade’s eyes glittered with tears. “I’m too sick, Carlos. But I’m happy that you are going back at last.”

  For a moment they sat in silence while Marmalade took several long breaths. Then she got to her feet.

  “We must be practical,” she said. “You can’t go in an ordinary way. You will have to stow away on a boat. Luckily, just the right one is in port right now. Come and see.”

  Marmalade pushed her gas bottle across to one of the tall windows, and Dog and Esme followed sleepily. It had grown dark outside. Dog looked out in wonder at the jumble of streetlights in the blackness.

  Although Dog never knew it, the city where she had lived almost all her life was a great port, with huge cargo ships from all over the world coming and going to and from the docks. From Marmalade’s windows they could see the ships lined up ready for their cargos; the cranes; and dockworkers running about like ants under the floodlights; the dark sea and sky beyond. Dog didn’t really understand what they were looking at.

  But Carlos did.

  Marmalade looked through binoculars and pointed out the smallest ship moored at the dock, still huge but not the monster size of the others. “That’s the one,” she said. “The Marilyn. She crosses the Atlantic, then trades along the stretch of coast where your home-river has its mouth.”

  “Marilyn,” said Carlos thoughtfully. “Marilyn.”

  “She’s loading now,” Marmalade told him, “so she’ll sail tonight.”

  Smoke puffed from the Marilyn’s chimney and her horn blew low and deep, signalling her readiness to depart.

  “No time for goodbyes now, Carlos,” wheezed Marmalade. “You must hurry!”

  Chapter 15

  THEY LEFT QUIETLY, slipping down the side of Marmalade’s great crumbling house and into the front garden, as overgrown as the back had been. None of the streetlights worked, so the road outside was too dark for Carlos to fly. He perched on Dog’s arm and directed her, confidently telling her left, right or straight. His voice was quiet but he seemed to know what to do, and Dog was happy to follow.

  She felt hopeful. Her head felt like a clean drinking bowl, washed out and clear, not full of confusing mucky bits. They were going to get on a big boat – that’s what stowing away was – and they would be a very long way away from Uncle and the black, black box. They were going to the place that had been Carlos’s home, and live under a tree.

  But getting on the boat would be difficult and dangerous. She would have to concentrate hard. So she pushed away the wondering that was deeper inside – about the people in the photograph and whether she too had been hatched in a forest by a river and somehow been stolen away.

  Carlos’s directions seemed to be leading them towards more noise and bustle and light. Dog tried to keep calm but she grew very anxious. Every footstep, every voice could be Uncle ready and waiting; every car could be carrying him closer to them.

  They wound their way down steep roads and back alleys, and then into wide cobbled streets between tall stone buildings. The air smelled different here. It reminded Dog of the cuttlefish bones she sometimes gave the budgies, and the weed that grew in the goldfish tanks.

  The three friends scuttled along in the shadows, running from one darkened doorway to the next. At the end of the cobbled streets, the shadows ran out. The stone and concrete became sea, and the side of the Marilyn stretched up into the dark and mist of the night. Piles of huge crates and boxes stood on the dock beside it, moved about by forklift trucks and cranes; powerful lamps sliced the night into stripes of shadow and brightness. Men shouted and vehicles beeped. It looked like a total muddle.

  Just as Dog was taking in this scene, the sirens that she had thought they had escaped hours ago began again. Police cars screeched to a stop in the street where they were hiding, and policemen began probing the dark doorways with torches, dogs and shouting.

  They flattened themselves against the wall. They were trapped between the busy dock and the police, who were getting closer and closer. Carlos was silent. Dog could feel him hesitating. Her heart raced faster and faster as the voices of the police and the barking of their dogs came nearer. She couldn’t stand it for another moment. Without waiting for Carlos’s instructions, she ran, darting in amongst the chaos of the cranes and crates and busy men, using all the tricks she’d learned from years of staying invisible.

  Just as the police cars arrived on the dockside, Dog found a slit in a large empty crate, and with Carlos clutched in her arms and Esme on her shoulder, she slipped inside. They crouched in the darkest corner and waited.

  “Good!” whispered Carlos. “Clever! Very!”

  Outside, a man with a headlamp and a bright orange waistcoat shouted up to the crane driver, telling him which crate to grab in the machine’s jaws. “This one next, Steve. Ready? Up!” His voice was so loud that it sounded above the clatter and shouting all around. Each time he slapped a crate, it was scooped up and disappeared into the dark body of the ship.

  Peeping back through the slit in the crate, Dog could see the policemen moving amongst the dockers, getting closer and closer. At last one officer was standing right by their crate, talking to Orange Waistcoat Man. Dog could have reached through the slit and knocked his helmet off with her hand. Orange Waistcoat Man cupped his ear to try and hear what the policeman was saying, but it was too noisy, so he led the policeman away, to find somewhere quiet. Dog realized she had been holding her breath. She let it out shakily.

  Carlos spoke. “Phew,” he whispered. “Very.”

  Esme hid her nose in the straw in the corner of the crate, but Dog and Carlos peered out again. The police were starting to look inside the crates – poking their big torches through the slats and shining the beam around! Their only chance now was if their crate was loaded before the policemen arrived.

  Dog guessed what Carlos would do just in time to get her fingers in her ears.

  “HUUUUP! This one next, Steve. Ready? Up!” he shouted through the slit. He was certainly as loud as Orange Waistcoat Man, and even managed to copy the sound of the man’s big flat hand slapping the wooden side of the crate.

  At once, the crane’s claws fixed on them, and up they went, so fast that Dog felt as if her stomach had been left somewhere much closer to the ground. For a moment the dock, crisscrossed with lights and dotted with policemen, was laid out below them like a toy. Then they were swooping down onto the deck of the boat, bumping onto a forklift truck and swirling down a long ramp into the hold. Esme and Carlos, their claws like hooks, managed to cling to the sides, but Dog rolled around like a peanut in a jar.

  At last they were set down. Dog picked herself up, feeling bruised and giddy, and peered around in the gloom. They had got away from
the police, but in the corner of the crate, with wild staring eyes and the biggest, shiniest knife Dog had ever seen, was a fourth stowaway.

  Chapter 16

  THE MAN WAS huge. Much taller than Uncle, and wider too, though not at all soft and wobbly like Uncle was. In fact, where the light fell on him through the holes in the crate, he looked hard as marble. His eyes were wide, with so much white showing that the dark circle in the middle looked like a little hole. He stood with his feet apart and the knife held blade up in front of him.

  “One word,” breathed the man. “One single sound …” His voice was quiet and dry, like the scuttle of scorpion or a snake’s slither. “One single sound, one little move, and …” He turned the knife slowly to show its sharp, sharp edge and let it speak his threat for him.

  “I didn’t give all those policemen out there the slip just for you to give me away. Don’t move. Don’t even breathe. Maybe I’ll mince you anyway, to be sure,” he whispered.

  Dog thought she could see right through his hard shiny face to the meaning of his words. She imagined herself and her friends as a neatly minced pile of flesh and fur and feathers. So was this man who the sirens had been sounding for? Not for her and Esme and Carlos? She couldn’t be sure. One step outside the crate could still mean they would be sent straight back to Uncle. It was better to take their chances where they were.

  Outside in the hold, voices shouted instructions and the little trucks zoomed about as the last of the cargo was loaded. Inside the crate the seconds crawled by. The man went on staring, holding up his blade like a horrible promise, and the three friends went on being rooted to the spot in double fear: of being discovered and of being minced to bits.

  Just as Dog was deciding that she couldn’t stand another slow second of thinking of herself and her friends being shredded, the noise in the hold died down. The men and their trucks were gone, and the heavy door above them creaked and scraped as it slid shut. Everything was suddenly quiet and, even more suddenly, totally dark.

  In half the time it takes for a heart to beat, time went from crawl to sprint, so that several things seemed to happen all at once. The man made a kind of snarling noise and lurched forward, his heavy tread making the boards underfoot creak and grumble. Dog threw herself back, away from the whoosh of the knife slicing through the space where she had just stood. She fell against the wall behind her and scrabbled with her arms spread wide to try and feel for the touch of fur or feather.

  Her left hand closed on Esme’s nose, and her right was seized by the familiar horny clawed foot of the parrot. A moment later they were all tumbling backwards through the slit in the crate in a tangle of tails and wings and arms.

  The man’s wheezing voice followed them, not quite forming words any more, but howling like an animal in pain. In a panic to escape, Dog crashed into crates and boxes, sacks and packages. Carlos screeched, Esme yelped. Dog fell onto her hands and knees, and squirmed and wriggled between the cargo piled all around, with her friends clinging uncomfortably to her back. Only when she’d crawled down what felt like a mile of gaps, too narrow for any adult to follow, did she feel it was safe to stop and catch her breath.

  “Listen!” croaked Carlos. “Listen!”

  She expected to hear that horrible howl again, but instead there was a deep rumbling hum that was spreading through the vessel. It made Dog think of a giant heart, thrub-thrub-thrubbing; she could feel the whole ship waking up and coming alive; her rivets creaked like joints and the water slapped on her metal flanks.

  On the decks high above them, huge ropes were cast off, and with a grating growl the great iron anchor was hauled up and put away. Dog felt the ship begin to pitch and roll. This was floating – like the pets’ water dishes in the sink, but much, much bigger. She remembered Uncle’s “educayshun” again – “the blue part’s the sea”. The blue part, Dog remembered, went all around the green part – the land – so once you were on it, you could go anywhere; anywhere at all.

  “Home!” whispered Carlos. “Going home!”

  But Dog knew that the blue was very big and she suddenly felt very afraid. How would they find the green bit again, let alone a tree to live under? She took a deep breath. Wherever and whatever they did find, at least it wouldn’t be any sort of pet shop.

  Chapter 17

  THEY RESTED FOR a while, leaning against rough sacks stuffed with something hard and lumpy that smelled of oil, huddling close together so as not to lose each other in the blackness. Dog could hear Carlos’s feathers ruffle as he put his head under his wing – darkness was like an off-switch for parrots – and Esme snuggled into her lap and began to snore. But Dog stayed awake, still listening for the footsteps of the knifeman, even though she knew the spaces they had crawled through were too narrow for him to follow.

  Dog thought again about the map and the blue sea marked on it. She guessed it was much, much bigger than anything she could imagine. So they could be stuck here with no light, or food or water, for a long time. Animals could live for a while without food or light but not long without water, and already Dog could feel the dryness at the back of her throat. She wondered if you could drink the sea and how you would get to it through this giant metal drinking bowl of a boat.

  They couldn’t stay where they were, but which way would lead them to a better place? Carlos knew his way around the city, but he didn’t know this ship, and anyway, it was dark. As Dog was trying to think what to do, she began to notice small sounds through the hum of the ship’s engines: tiny patterings and faint scratchings. She knew what they were at once: rats!

  Dog had had many rat friends in the pet shop, and the thought that there were rats – many rats, by the sound of things – on the ship made the darkness seem less frightening. What were they doing here? Had they escaped from a pet shop too?

  Dog had an idea: rats were always good at finding food and water, so perhaps the rat sounds might lead them to a better place! She nudged Esme and Carlos awake and, with the two sleepy creatures riding on her back, began to crawl through the gaps between the piles of cargo, following the little scratchings and squeakings. Wherever the gap widened or split in two, Dog listened hard and chose the direction in which the rat sounds were loudest.

  She wondered how long they had been crawling in the dark. Was it still night outside or had day come again? Her eyes played tricks on her; coloured dots and blobs swam in front of her. Then they reached a metal wall. Dog turned along it, feeling its surface with her hand, and after a short distance felt the square edge of a door. She stood up. The door didn’t have a knob or a handle but it did have a wheel in the middle. Dog turned it one way and then the other until it began to shift. With a kind of clunk and a groan the door swung open just a crack.

  On the other side of the door was light, dim and green but definitely light.

  Carlos hopped down from Dog’s back with a squawk, and one after another the three friends squeezed through the door. They found themselves in an old kitchen, with a cooker that had clearly not been used for years and a dirty rusting sink. Dog turned the taps but nothing came out.

  One faint and very dirty light bulb stuck out from the wall above the sink. It gave just enough light to make out stacks of huge tins, each one twenty times the size of a normal cat-food tin, piled on the floor.

  It was clear that the tins had been here for a long time: many were rusted and covered in dents, and almost all had lost any sort of label. They smelled rather oily, and Dog doubted if they contained anything that could be eaten or drunk, but then Carlos made an unmistakable slurping noise, like someone sucking the last bit of milkshake from the bottom of a glass. Dog and Esme came running.

  Carlos had found a tin with the remains of a label. It showed something that could have been an orange or maybe a peach – something edible at any rate.

  Carlos half flapped, half climbed up the tin and, using his beak like a can opener, pierced a hole in the top. Esme and Dog pushed the tin over and a dribble of sticky liquid spilled out
onto the floor. Esme licked it up immediately. Carlos made for the next puddle, scooping it up with his beak and then working his tongue to swallow it down. Dog went last, sucking straight from the tiny hole Carlos had made. The liquid was sticky and too sweet, but it tasted lovely and stopped her thirst.

  There had been no rat noises for a while, but now Dog noticed she could hear them again, coming from the direction of the door. She realized the rats must have followed them into this old kitchen. For some reason that made her feel suddenly uneasy. And then she heard Esme screech with fear.

  Chapter 18

  DOG RACED TOWARDS the sound. Behind a pile of tins, Esme was being attacked by rats with spiky brown coats and mean eyes. They were swarming all over her as she bit and thrashed to get them off.

  Never in her life had Dog wanted to scream more than at this moment, but as always her throat was empty. Carlos dropped from somewhere above them and dive-bombed the carpet of rats that was starting to flow towards Dog. It was clear what the rats wanted – fresh meat, not dry scraps and tins their teeth couldn’t pierce. They were demented rats, driven mad from being trapped down here in the hold of the ship.

  Dog picked Esme up and shook her free of rats, then perched her on her shoulders and began to run, with Carlos flapping at her side.

  The doorway they had come through was now dark with rats, so there was no escape there. Dog ran in the opposite direction, towards the far end of the dim kitchen. She swept tins off a pile against the wall, down onto the crowding rats, and as she did so found the bottom rungs of a ladder that disappeared up into darkness.

  They were on it in a second. Esme, as best climber, went first, then Dog. Carlos flew in wide spirals to make the climb at the same pace as his friends. Fear made them fast, and they were soon high up, in the dim gloom close to the ceiling. Looking up past Esme’s ample bottom, Dog could just make out a kind of little round door in the ceiling.