Dogsbody

There was a new pair of feet present belonging to someone Basil and Robin called Dad, and Kathleen called Uncle Harry. They were the largest feet of all, most interestingly cased in leather, with beautiful strings which came undone when they were bitten. Sirius backed away, his tail whipping, rumbling with delight, a taut shoelace clenched between his teeth.

A voice spoke, more like a clap of thunder than a voice. “Drop that!”

Sirius let go at once and meekly went on to the last pair of feet, which were Duffie’s. He did not like Duffie, nor the smell of Duffie, but her feet were interesting. The leather on them was only in straps, leaving the ends bare. The ends of both feet divided into a number of stumpy lumps with hard, flat claws on them that looked quite useless. He nosed them wonderingly.

“Get out of it!” said the cold voice.

Sirius obligingly retreated, and – whether it was his dislike of Duffie or simply a call of nature, he did not know – left a puddle between the two sets of toes.

“Oh Leo!” Kathleen plunged down on the spot with a cloth.

“Dirty Shamus Rat!” said Basil.

“That creature—” began Duffie.

The thunderous voice cut in, rumbling peaceably. “Now, now. You’ve had your say, Duffie. And I say a house isn’t complete without a dog. What did you say his name was, Kathleen?”

Sirius gathered that he was safe. What the thunderous voice said in this place, the other people obeyed. He went on exploring the room while they argued about what to call him.

The argument was never entirely settled. In the days that followed, Sirius found himself answering to Leo, Shamus, Shamus O’Cat, Shamus Rat, Rat, Dog, and That Creature. More names were added as time went on and then dropped. These were the most constant. Basil called him most of them. Duffie called him That Dog or That Creature. Robin usually called him Leo when he was alone with Kathleen, and Shamus if Basil was there. The thunderous voice never called him anything at all. Neither did the cats. Before long, it was only Kathleen who ever called him Leo.

Sirius did not mind. He could tell by the tone of their voices when they meant him, and he answered to that. He like Kathleen’s voice best. It was soft, with a lilt in it which none of the others had, and usually meant he was going to be fed or stroked. Duffie’s voice was the one he liked least and, next to hers, Basil’s. When Basil called him, it was to flip his nose or roll him painfully about. Even if he did neither of these things, Basil made Sirius feel small and weak, or troubled him by staring jeeringly at his eyes.

His eyes soon lost the milky, puppy look. They became first grass-green, then a lighter, wilder colour. “Wolf’s eyes,” said Basil, and added The Wolf temporarily to the names he called Sirius. About that time, Sirius discovered he could eat from a dish and gave up feeding from a bottle. He grew. And grew. And went on growing.

“Is this thing of yours going to turn out to be a horse?” wondered the thunderous voice, in one of its rare moments of interest.

“A Great Dane perhaps?” Robin suggested.

“Oh, I hope not!” Kathleen said, knowing how much Leo ate already. Sirius realised she was worried and wagged his tail consolingly outside his basket. It was a long, strong tail by this time, and he filled the basket to overflowing.

His tail was a great trial to everyone. He would wag it. He beat dust out of the carpet with it every time one of the household came into the room. He meant it as politeness. In a cloudy part of his mind, which he could never quite find, he knew he was grateful to them – even to Duffie – for feeding and housing him. But only Kathleen and Robin appreciated his courtesy. The rest said, “Must that creature thump like that?” and at other times there was a general outcry.

There were times when that tail seemed to have a life of its own. When he was trotting around the house, Sirius normally carried it arched upward in a crescent and forgot about it. He dimly thought, in that cloudy part of his mind, that he could not always have had a tail, because he never remembered it until it was too late. If the least thing happened to excite him, if Robin started to dance about, or Kathleen came in from shopping, Sirius would bound jovially forwards and his tail would go whipping round and round in circles, hitting everything in its path. Ornaments came off low tables and broke. Cats were battered this way and that. Papers flew about. Basil’s fossils were scattered. The next thing he knew, a cat was scratching him, or a strong arm was beating him. He was beaten oftener for wagging his tail than he was over house-training. One of the most constant memories he had of those early days was of lying aching and ashamed under the sideboard, while Kathleen, often in tears, cleared up a breakage or another kind of mess. Duffie was always looming above her.

“I warn you, Kathleen. If that creature ever gets into my shop, I shall have it destroyed.” Her cold voice was so menacing that Sirius always shivered.

The shop took up the two rooms in the front of the house. Duffie spent most of every day in it, either making odd whirrings and clatterings in the nearest room, or talking to all the people who came in and out in the room farthest away, which opened on the street. These people were mostly women with loud voices, who all called the owner Duffie. If Duffie happened to be in the living-room looming over Kathleen when they came, they would stand and shout, “What-ho, Duffie! It’s me!” until Duffie came.

Now, in those days, Sirius’s whole world was the house and the yard behind it. The shop left very little of the world downstairs over, so he was naturally curious to see into this shop. He was naturally curious anyway. Kathleen often said, “I know they say Curiosity killed the cat, but it ought to be killed the dog. Get your nose out, Leo.” Sirius made a number of attempts to poke his blunt, enquiring nose round the door that led to the shop. Duffie always stopped him. Mostly she kicked at him with a sandalled foot. Sometimes she hit him with a broom. And once, she slammed the door against his nose, which hurt him considerably. But he kept on trying. It was not that the dusty, clayey smell from beyond the door was particularly pleasing, or that he wanted to be with Duffie. It was that he felt he was being cheated of the greater part of his world. Besides, the cats were allowed inside, and he was rapidly becoming very jealous of those cats.

By this time, it would have been hard to say whether the cats were more jealous of Sirius than he of them. He envied the cats their delicacy and disdain, the ease with which they leapt to places far out of his reach, and the way they came and went so secretly. He could not go anywhere or do anything without somebody noticing. The cats, on their part, disliked him for being a dog, for being new, and for taking up everyone’s attention.

They were three rather neglected cats. Until Kathleen came, no one except Duffie had taken any notice of them at all. Duffie, from time to time, took it into her head that she loved cats. When this happened, she would seize a struggling cat, hold it against her smock and announce, “Diddumsdiddy, Mother loves a pussy then!”

Romulus and Remus, who were twin tabbies, both escaped from this treatment as soon as they could fight loose. But Tibbles bore it. She had an affectionate nature, and even this seemed better to her than total neglect. Tibbles was an elegant cat, mostly white, with a fine tabby patch on her back, and worthy of better treatment.

All three welcomed Kathleen with delight. She fed them generously, knew Romulus and Remus apart from the first, and gave Tibbles all the affection she wanted. Then Sirius came. Kathleen still fed the cats generously, but that was all Sirius would let her do. The day Sirius found Tibbles sitting on Kathleen’s knee was the first time he barked. Yapping in a furious soprano, he flung himself at Kathleen and managed to get his front paws almost above her kneecaps. Tibbles arose and spat. Her paw shot out, once, twice, three times, before Sirius could remove himself. He was lucky not to lose an eye. But he continued to bark and Tibbles, very ruffled, escaped on to the sideboard, furious and swearing revenge.

“Oh Leo!” Kathleen said reproachfully. “That’s not kind. Why shouldn’t she sit on my knee?”

Sirius did not understand the question, but he was determined that Tibbles should sit on Kathleen’s knee only over his dead body. Kathleen was his. The trouble was, he could not trust Kathleen to remember this. Kathleen was kind to all living things. She fed birds, rescued mice from the cats, and tried to grow flowers in a row of cracked cups on her bedroom windowsill. Sirius slept in Kathleen’s bedroom, at first in the basket, then on the end of her bed when the basket grew uncomfortably tight. Kathleen would sit up in bed, with a book open in front of her, and talk to him for hours on end. Sirius could not understand what she was saying, but he darkly suspected she was telling him of her abounding love for all creatures.

One night, when it was spitting with rain, Romulus forgot about Sirius and came in through Kathleen’s bedroom window to spend the night on her bed as he had done before Sirius came. That was the first time Sirius really growled. He leapt up rumbling. Romulus growled too and fled helter-skelter, knocking over Kathleen’s flower-cups as he went.

“You mustn’t, Leo,” said Kathleen. “He’s allowed to. Now look what you’ve made him do!” She was so miserable about her broken flowers that Sirius had to lick her face.

After that, Sirius knew the cats were putting their heads together to get revenge. He did not care. He knew they were clever, Tibbles especially, but he was not in the least afraid of them. He was at least twice their size by now and still growing. His paws, as Kathleen remarked, were as big as teacups, and he was getting some splendid new teeth. Robin, who was always reading books about dogs, told Kathleen that Leo was certainly half Labrador. But what the other half of him was, neither of them could conjecture. Sirius’s unusually glossy coat was a wavy golden-cream, except for the two red-brown patches, foxy red, one over each ear. Then there were those queer green eyes.

“Red Setter, perhaps?” Robin said doubtfully. “He’s got those feathery bits at the backs of his legs.”

“Mongrel,” said Basil. “His father was a white rat and his mother was a fox.”

“Vixen,” Robin corrected him.

“I thought you’d agree,” said Basil.

Kathleen, who seldom argued with Basil, said nothing and went away upstairs to make the beds, with Sirius trotting after. “I think you’re really a Griffin,” she said. “Look.” She opened the door of Duffie’s wardrobe so that Sirius could see himself in the long mirror.

Sirius did not make the mistake of thinking it was another dog. He did not even go round the back of the mirror to see how his reflection got there. He simply sat himself down and looked, which impressed Kathleen very much. “You are intelligent!” she said.

Sirius met his own strange eyes. He had no means of knowing they were unusual, but, all the same, just for a moment, he seemed to be looking at immeasurable distances down inside those eyes. There he saw people and places so different from Duffie’s bedroom that they were almost inconceivable. That was only for an instant. After that, they were only the green eyes of a fat curly puppy. Annoyed by something he could not understand, Sirius yawned like a crocodile, showing all his splendid new teeth.

“Come, come!” said Kathleen laughing. “You’re not that boring!”

Those splendid teeth had Sirius in trouble the next day. The urge was on him to chew. And chew and chew. He chewed his basket into a kind of grass skirt. Then he went on to the hearthrug. Kathleen tore the hearthrug out of his mouth and gave him an old shoe, imploring him not to chew anything else but that. Sirius munched it threadbare in half an hour and looked round for something else. Basil had left a box of fossils on the floor. Sirius selected a piece of petrified wood out of it, propped it between his front paws, and was settling down to some glorious gritty grating when Basil found him. Basil kicked him, rolling and howling, across the room.

“Stinking Rat! Do that again and I’ll kill you!”

Sirius dared not move. He wagged his tail apologetically and looked round for something else to bite on. Nicely within reach trailed a black chewy wire from a shelf above. He had his head up and the wire across the corners of his mouth in an ecstasy of chew, when Robin descended on him and put a stop to that.

“Kathleen! He’s eaten the telephone wire now!”

“I’ll go and buy a rubber bone,” said Kathleen. She went out. Robin, rapidly and furtively, dreading Duffie coming, wrapped black sticky tape round the telephone wire. Basil was anxiously making sure none of his fossils had been eaten.

No one attended to Sirius, crouched under the sideboard. He lay there, nose on paws, and there it came to him what it was he really wanted to chew. The ideal thing. With a little ticker-tack of claws, he crept to the door and up the stairs. He nosed open the door of the main bedroom without difficulty and, with a little more trouble, succeeded in opening the wardrobe too. Inside were shoes – long large leather shoes, with laces and thick chewable soles. Sirius selected the juiciest and took it under the bed to enjoy in peace.

The thunderous voice found him there and chased him round the house with a walking stick. Duffie spoke long and coldly. Kathleen wept. Robin tried to explain about teething. Basil jeered. And throughout, Tibbles sat thoughtfully on the sideboard, giving the inside of her left front leg little hasty licks, like a cat seized with an idea. Sirius saw her. To show his contempt and to soothe his feelings, he went into the kitchen and ate the cats’ supper. Then he lay down glumly to gnaw the unsatisfactory rubber thing Kathleen had bought him.

“That settles it,” said Duffie. “That Creature is not going to spend all day in the house when you go back to school. He’s going to be tied up in the yard.”

“Yes. Yes, all right,” Kathleen said humbly. “I’ll take him for walks when I get home. I’ll start getting him used to it today.”

She had bought something else besides the bone. There was a red jingly strap, which she buckled round Sirius’s neck. He did not like it. It was tight and it itched. But, twist as he might, he could not get it off. Then Kathleen hitched another strap with a loop at one end to the red one and, to his great delight, opened the side door on the outside world, where he had never been before.

Sirius set off down the side of the house in a delighted rush. He was brought up short with a jerk and a jingle. Something seemed to be pulling his neck. He strained. He dragged. He made hoarse choking-noises to show Kathleen what was wrong. He stood on his hind legs to be free.

“No, Leo,” said Kathleen. “You mustn’t pull.”