A Puppy Called Hugo

‘And we’ve missed you,’ Jenny cried.

She rushed towards her mum and gran and wrapped her arms around them. I gulped, I didn’t want to miss out on a family hug. Together with Peg and Hugo, we bounded towards the women and pushed our noses into their laps and knees, much to their delight.

‘They’re everywhere.’ Jenny giggled in delight.

‘Oh you dogs are gorgeous.’ Doreen smiled, bending down to smother us with kisses.

‘And we think you’re gorgeous,’ Hugo barked, licking her hand.

‘But not as gorgeous as Peg and Gail,’ I barked loyally.

Gail beamed down at me, and planted a sloppy kiss on my snout. ‘Percy, you’re the best boy in the entire world.’

I howled in delight. There was nothing nicer than being surrounded by family.

As we broke apart, Sal glanced balefully at a box marked ‘outdoors’. ‘Shall I take this out to the garage?’

Doreen flashed her a grateful smile as she got to her feet. ‘Thanks, love.’

‘And I should get cracking as well.’ Gail smiled, as she finished her second cupcake. ‘Where do you want me?’

Doreen handed her daughter a pair of scissors and gestured to a box with black writing all over it. ‘The pots and pans are in that one,’ she explained. ‘Can you give your father a hand with them in the kitchen. He knows where everything goes.’

Nodding, Gail picked up the box and turned to Eric who was still engrossed in the paper.

‘Are you ready, Dad?’ she asked.

Eric glanced up from the crossword in surprise. ‘Ready for what?’

‘To help me unpack the kitchen stuff,’ Gail replied patiently.

Eric looked blank as he scratched the bald patch on top of his head. ‘If you want, love, though I don’t know where any of it goes.’

‘You do,’ sighed Doreen in exasperation. ‘We discussed it not half an hour ago!’

‘Did we?’ Eric narrowed his blue eyes in confusion.

‘Yes! What’s wrong with you?’ she grumbled. ‘You’re always forgetting things these days.’

‘Am I?’ Eric asked, his blue eyes rich with surprise.

‘Yes!’ Doreen sighed again.

Gail raised her hand in between the two of them.

‘Come on, you two, there’s no sense arguing now. Dad,’ she said, turning to Eric, ‘why don’t you come and help me with all this. I’m sure that together we can work out where everything’s meant to go.’

Eric put down the crossword and obediently got to his feet. ‘All right, love.’

Together they trotted off to the kitchen leaving Doreen alone in the living room. As she set her teacup on the coffee table, she sank her head into her hands.

Watching the rise and fall of her shoulders, I suddenly realised she was crying. Turning to Peg, I gave a little bark of worry and we padded across to the elderly woman.

Getting nearer, I saw her body was wracked with sobs. I was dumbstruck. Doreen always put a brave face on things and I had rarely seen her cry, not even when Jenny was so poorly. She was known for her strength, something Gail had relied upon when they had faced difficult times.

Exchanging worried glances with Peg, we did the only thing we pugs can do in times of crisis. We used our tongues to mop up Doreen’s salty tears, determined to be there for as long as she needed us.

‘Do you think she’s all right?’ I whined quietly to Peg in between licks.

‘Fine,’ she yapped in reply. ‘She’s probably just upset because she’s tired with the move. It’s very distressing you know, upending your home.’

As Doreen’s cries became quieter and she stroked each of us in turn, I moved my head and crawled onto her lap to show her how much I loved her. Breathing in her warm, homely scent, my doggy instinct fired on all cylinders as something told me there was something very wrong indeed.

Chapter Three (#ulink_e265e544-ebb6-5304-a98e-84faa6ef72b3)

The next morning I woke to what I could only assume was all hell breaking loose. Opening my eyes and sitting bolt upright in my basket in the kitchen, I tried to make sense of the scene playing out in front of me.

Gail was standing at the stove, balancing a screaming baby Ben on one hip and heating his bottle with the other hand. At the table, Jenny was bellowing into her mobile phone, making plans to meet a friend at the cinema, while Simon was sat at the pine kitchen table engrossed in paperwork and furiously typing away at his laptop.

Blearily coming to, I looked around for Hugo, but he wasn’t in his basket or in the garden. Anxiously, I padded out of the kitchen and into the sitting room. Even though it was the middle of summer Hugo loved nothing more than curling up on the sheepskin rug by the fire, but he wasn’t there and neither was he anywhere upstairs.

Returning downstairs, anxiety gnawed away at me as I wondered where Hugo would go. He was still poorly, so he couldn’t have gone as far as the park and, besides that, he knew never to go there alone. There was a chance he could have gone to see Peg, I thought, but again, he had never been there on his own, and I knew that the times we had visited he hadn’t taken in the route as he had constantly yapped all the way there.

A creeping sense of horror coursed through my fur as I started to imagine all the places he could have gone and all the things that could have happened to him. Just as I was imagining Hugo being eaten by a hungry pack of wolves, or abducted by a Cruella De Vil type, the house phone rang, interrupting my nightmare.

‘Oh you’re kidding, Mum,’ Gail gasped into the receiver, still jiggling Ben on her hip.

There was a pause before she spoke again. ‘We’ll be right over, and again I’m so sorry.’

I watched with interest as she hung up the phone and turned to Simon.

‘You’ll never guess what’s happened.’

‘I dread to think looking at the expression on your face.’ Simon grimaced, glancing up from his computer.

‘Hugo has just turned up at Mum and Dad’s,’ Gail explained with a sigh.

Simon raised an eyebrow. ‘On his own?’

‘On his own,’ Gail confirmed.

The family fell into silence as they contemplated this news leaving me to consider what I had just heard. On the one paw, I felt a huge wave of relief crash over me as I realised my little boy was now safe. But on the other what was Hugo thinking of? Fury ate away at me as I realised how little he had learnt since being under my charge. I had told him repeatedly never to go anywhere alone, but here he was not only disappearing before my very eyes but bothering poor Gail’s parents just as they had moved in.

‘But how did he get there?’ Jenny asked eventually, putting her phone down for the first time that morning.

Gail looked pointedly at Simon. ‘I guess through that cat flap we’ve never got around to fixing.’

‘Ah.’ Simon winced. ‘Sorry, I’ve been meaning to mend that for ages. I will get on to it, I promise.’