The year is 2021, and London has fallen.
This is the story of:
A nervous man, fearful of straying too far from home.
An abandoned orphan, who needs to be taken to safety.
And one incredibly sweary dog, who just wants to chase squirrels…
When the world is going to the dogs, will YOU be the one to take a stand?
Adrian J Walker was born in the bush suburbs of Sydney, Australia, in the mid-’70s. After his father found a camper van in a ditch, he renovated it and moved his family back to the UK, where Adrian was raised. Ever since he can remember, Adrian has been interested in three things: words, music and technology, and when he graduated from the University of Leeds, he found a career in software.
He lives in London with his wife and two children. To find out more visit: www.adrianjwalker.com
ALSO BY ADRIAN J WALKER
The End of the World Running Club
For Bronte, and all the dogs of Peckham Rye Park
The machine goes on and – BOSH! – we’re away. This is a good bit, definitely. I get the smell first, graveyard dirt, burned grass and old lemons fingering their way up my snout. Then I hear the gurgle and roar of the water, the drip, drip, drip into the pot and I open my eyes and see the green light in the kitchen. That’s another good bit. It’s 5 a.m., still dark outside, but my head’s up, tail wagging, looking at the door, waiting as the coffee fills, waiting, waiting, waiting …
And then, finally, the door opens and there he is. There he fucking is in all his fucking glory. What a body. What a mind. What a man. What a fucking god.
I’m skittering and sliding, halfway across the floor before I even know I’ve left my bed. And he’s rubbing his hairy face and scratching that huge arse of his, releasing that heavenly aroma of salt, peat and tripe that’s all for me and before he knows what’s happening I’m in the air and bouncing at him – bounce, bounce, bounce until he gets down and gives me a scratch, both hands behind my ears, face-to-face so I get the sweet fog of his breath, a rich soup of saliva and half-digested food that’s been marinating beautifully for the past eight hours. And it’s too much, I just have to lick him, so I do, and he lets me, and it’s fucking brilliant.
I love him. Reg. My master. Without fail, the best bit.
Reg gets his coffee – UHT cream and three sugars for Reg, being a man of substance – while I scurry in a daze of ecstasy around his frayed slippers. He drinks it and sighs – a good bit because here comes more breath, more bliss for us down here on the linoleum. I’m reminded of what he ate last night, which is usually something hot with meat and a lot of cheese or bread or spices – oh fuck me those spices, like ants exploding up my nostrils – and I’m dizzy just thinking about it. Because I’m hungry. I’m always hungry. This is in no small way down to the fact that our gaff smells constantly of food – fermented cow’s milk, mostly. It’s our very own house of cheese. But it’s also because I am a dog, and therefore my throat, my belly and my tongue are like a single organism; a gnawing, insatiable beast that only lives to consume any fucking thing it comes into contact with. Meat, vegetables, eggs, grain, wood, hair, shit – yes please, lots of that, ta very much – meat, concrete, insects, spiders, chicken skin, fish skin, my own skin, Reg’s skin, fruit, old fruit, rotten fruit, rotten meat, oh yes indeed, crockery, bone, leather, plastic, polyester, wool, sock, pant, shoe, skirting board, and did I mention meat?
All of it. Down my gob, bish bash bosh, thank you and good night.
Except apples. I can’t fucking stand apples.
Anyway. I’m hungry, and Reg, God bless his fetid socks, knows this all too well. So he fills my bowl.
Now, I will admit that there is an element of tension at this point in proceedings. I have no idea what I’m going to get for breakfast. It could be dry, it could be wet. It could be some delicious slop from a plate in the fridge, or fat-smeared crusts from his bacon sandwich. My belly beast is straining to feed and it has no idea what it’s going to get. I can’t control it, and the anticipation is killing me.
Know this about dogs: this is how we spend most of our existence. We are endlessly at the mercy of things beyond our control. Hunger, thirst, heat, sex, sleep, itching, violence, flying objects, scent, meat. Something’s always there leading us on to the next moment. Act and react, that’s what we do.
So I stand on the brink of this new world of breakfast, trembling like a pilgrim father in the waters of Cape Cod.
And then it comes and the smell smashes into me and my mouth’s flooded and it doesn’t even matter any more. A fucking good bit. My bowl’s on the floor and I’m in it, chomping it, inhaling it. By the time it’s done, I can barely remember who I am or what it was I just ate, and, quite frankly, I couldn’t give a shit.
Nice bit of water for pud – lovely – and I’m off again, spring in my step, belly beast sated for the time being. What’s next? Reg has opened the curtains by now so I get up on my hind legs, paws against the glass of the balcony doors so I can see out. We’re so high up I can see for miles. My entire kingdom is laid out before me in the creeping dawn; the roads, streets and terraces crawling about, knotted together like worms in turned soil. I know it all by heart. Every shrub and hedgerow in The Rye, every crevice and tar-caked bin on the high street, every piss-stained corner, every burned-out car, every fallen, vine-strewn building, every smashed window and human skeleton. I know it all, and I fucking love it.
My name’s Lineker and I live in South London. I don’t know what I am. Bit of this, bit of that, bit of the other. Terrier, retriever, hound. I never knew my dad, and my mum’s just a big warm, milky memory – her tongue on my brow, pink and wet and smelling of heaven, me crowding against her tits with the rest of them little fuckers, pulling out that rich white elixir and feeling my strength swell. Ah, me old mum. Probably kicked the bucket now, I expect.
So no, haven’t got a Scooby what my breed is, pardon the pun. I used to hear people say I was ‘Heinz 57’, on account of the beans, which, to be completely honest with you, is confusing, not to mention insulting. I’m not beans and I’m not a watered-down version of other dogs – I’m an original. Special edition. Custom shop. Mould broken. One in a fucking million.
What I do know – what I am fairly fucking sure about, as it happens – is that I am the last dog on earth.
I know!
Me and Reg – my master, my two-plates (plates of meat, feet, keep up) – we’re bachelors. We live alone in our palace – sixth floor of a Peckham high-rise with stairs so dank with urine I could swoon. Forty, fifty years of the stuff, all spread about on top of each other, just amazing. Anyway, it’s just us. We don’t have time for ladies. Too busy.
Actually, when I say we don’t have time, that’s not strictly true. Little porky. I would have time, it’s just, you know, there aren’t any ladies to have the old time with. No skirt for Lineker any more, ho hum, woe is my poor old todger, etc., etc.
Reg? Well, I can’t speak for him but I couldn’t tell you when he last had a female two-plates back in Casa del Formaggio, even before things got quiet out there. Don’t know why. Fair enough, he doesn’t match your average Prince Charming photofit and you wouldn’t hear many gussets slapping onto the balcony tiles if he ever crooned up in that voice of his, which I’m afraid has the timbre of a bookish mole – that adenoidal tenor you associate with cardigans, electronics catalogues and notebooks full of train numbers but which I think is simply the mark of a man who knows his fucking onions.
Yeah, Reg is prime material in my book. Tall, wide, hairy, lovely guffs and a huge heart – almost huge enough to match his breath, which is fucking enormous. It’s beyond me why he’s not been snapped up, but there you go. What do I know?
Maybe it’s because he works so hard. He’s a writer, you see. An author. A wordsmith. That’s why he’s awake every day before dawn, scribbling away in that book of his to crack out a few pages before we head out. I’ll wander around and have a snooze somewhere, floating in breakfast’s dreams. I’ll slumber till he’s done, unless he decides to masturbate, of course, in which case I am very much awake. It is a privilege to witness this, an honour. So I sit up, back straight, paws together in solemn reflection as this beautiful act unfolds. I tell you, it’s enough to make a grown dog weep.
What else about Reg … oh, yes, Reg’s favourite thing is football, or rather, a very short period of football history spanning the late ’80s and early ’90s, during which the English football team got further than usual in the World Cup. That’s why I’m called Lineker, after his hero, Gary. He watches old tapes of the matches, and one in particular that ends in a penalty shoot-out. Every time he cheers them on as if he doesn’t know how it’s going to end. Sometimes even I’m surprised when they fail, which they always do.
So that’s Reg: writing, football and me.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. How does yours truly know so much about all of this? I am, after all, just a dog. I understand. You like asking yourselves questions like that, don’t you? You clever little monkeys.
How best to answer? Hum hum … well, couple of ways I could do it: I could try to explain to you how we think in different speeds, or how we can tell what you’re thinking just by looking at the way your shoulders slump, or how we talk to you and to each other, not just with sounds but with smells and looks and the way we position our bodies (which, actually, isn’t a whole lot different to you).
I could try to tell you how dogs don’t just pick up fleas and sticks but everything. Things you never see, like the quiver of a cat’s whisker (don’t, just don’t, get me started) or the flash in a man’s eye that tells me he’s nervous, or excited, or that he’s about to do something he shouldn’t. I could try to tell you that every little thing you do, everything you say, every little expression that flickers upon your chops: it all goes in these furry noggins and that’s where it stays, whether you like it or not. (Me, I like it. I like it very much indeed, thank you.)
I could try telling you what it’s like when we find ourselves awake in the middle of the night, triggered by nothing more than a tightening in the air, as if space has been suddenly gripped by some unknown hand, and that this twist in the fabric of things carries with it messages encoded in ways that cannot be turned into words, and we have to get up and see what’s what.
I could try to explain things in this way, using simple sentences and facts, but sometimes plain language just does not cut the mustard.
Poetry, however – now there’s a mustard cutter. That’ll chop your Coleman’s right down the middle.
Now I … ahem … I dabble in the old poetry myself, as it happens – STOP LAUGHING – I do. It’s hard not to when you live with a literary giant such as Reg. I’ve picked up the craft and I practise for hours, looking out of our window at the city and the infinite shapes and colours it makes. I’ve had a little go at explaining how exactly I know all these things, and so far this is the best I can come up with.
So here, if you’ll humour me, is my poetic meditation upon the mysteries of canine intuition.
The world howls.
Yeah. You’re disappointed. I’m sorry. Really, I am – I hate it when you’re disappointed. Makes me feel fucking awful if you want the truth of it. But … bollocks … what can I say? That’s all I’ve got right now.
Gulp.
Don’t worry, I’ll keep trying, I promise.
Anyway, the point is I do – know about all this stuff, I mean. So don’t be surprised or scared if I happen to know certain things about you; whatever it is you think you’ve done, you naughty monkey, I still think you’re fucking magic.
Now, where was I? Oh yeah, life! Our fucking brilliant, stupendous life.
After breakfast, Reg and I hit The Rye.
Peckham Rye is where we take our walks, Reg and me. It’s what you might call my territory, my turf, my manor. Not exclusively mine, of course. Plenty of other dogs tread The Rye – at least they used to. I can still smell most of them, still tell where and when they took their last pisses before … well, I’ll get to that in a bit.
It’s winter now so our walks are cold. I don’t mind it. It’s not as though summer’s much to write home about these days anyway. Winter’s all right by me. And the smells. We’ll get to smells too.
Quite often I’ll lose track of time on The Rye. I’ll find myself deep in the tall grass, dodging this way and that, jumping up occasionally so I can get my bearings and see where Reg is, chasing those little wisps of things that have been and gone either the night before or decades past. And then I’ll stop and I wonder where I’ve been. There’s nothing but the blades rustling and the heavy clouds brooding above. Sometimes, I swear, I even forget who I am.
And then I remember: I’m the last dog on earth.
Then I hear Reg’s whistle, sharp as a magpie, and it all comes back and I’ll dart out to meet him.
We usually have to collect a few things afterwards. Reg has his favourite haunts, of course; very predictable, my Reg. Doesn’t take us into places we’ve never been before, no shops we haven’t already been round a million times, stairways we’ve not checked, doors we’ve not already opened. And he’s punctual, too. Never one to be late, this fella, oh no. If we’re out for too long he gets anxious, quickens his step and lengthens his stride. Got to get back bang on the dot. Solid as a rock, he is. As a rock.
Once inside it’s free time, really. He might give me a snack and something for himself. Cup of Rosie or a King Lear for his lordship, depending on his mood. Then it’s more writing for him and more nap time for yours truly. By now I’m properly pooped, so I slump down on the sofa and drift away to the scribbling of his pencil, already ravaged by the morning, and of the fact that this is and will be a day like every other day of our glorious lives.
Your own problems always outweigh those of the world.
I am looking out at a dead city. A black hole where once a hundred million stars shimmered – the happy lights of homes, offices, restaurants, pubs and cars. Their absence should dismay me but, in fact, it is only the absence of one which does.
I have a feeling that Beardsley is on the move. Either that or he is dead.
I hope he is dead.
Beardsley is not his real name, of course, just the one I gave him. It could be a man or a woman, or men, or women. He could even be a family, though I doubt it. I cannot imagine the technicalities of raising children here now.
Shilton looks a little dim tonight, too. One or two of his bulbs dead, I expect. Either that or he’s conserving them for fuel. I wonder where he gets his supplies? Pearce looks all right and Butcher’s erratic as usual, but Beardsley … well, he’s not been on for five nights now.
Perhaps you’re sitting in the wrong position, Reginald, I thought to myself when I first noticed. Unlikely, I thought back, but I recalibrated, just to be sure.
Always be within reach of a tape measure. That’s a good rule for the book.
Diagonal distance from Reginald’s left eyeball to left corner of balcony window = 35⅛ inches (I’m an imperial man): check.
Diagonal distance from Reginald’s right eyeball to balcony door handle = 31¾ inches: check.
Seat height = 18⅞ inches: check.
Gaffer tape strip on seat matches gaffer tape strip on floor matches gaffer tape strip at base of balcony door: check.
Window clean: check.
Straight back, head facing forwards: check.
Commence light count.
Shilton: check
Pearce: check
Walker: check
Butcher: check
Parker: check
Wright: check
Waddle: check
Gascoigne: check
Platt: check
Lineker: that’s us, check
Beardsley: nothing.
So that is a problem.
They’re highly satisfactory, these binoculars. My vision is less than mighty – a moderate myopia of roughly -3.23 dioptres has necessitated glasses since childhood – so it is rather a treat to see distant objects so close up. There’s not much you can do about this ceaseless fog, mind you; I have not seen a clear skyline since 2018. I acquired them from a camping shop off Peckham High Street – 12x magnification, crystal-clear lens, nice and light but strong and solid, and well out of my price range, of course. There is no possible way I could have afforded them before.
They are, primarily, for the wildlife. Peckham is full of it these days, especially down on The Rye. Rats, mice, pigeons, cats, woodpeckers, chaffinches and those bright green parakeets that screech through the trees on the southern rim. Jimi Hendrix brought them into London during the ’60s, so it goes. Great fun to watch, and, what with them and three years of uncut grass and trees left to grow wild, the whole place looks like a jungle.
The woods are deep and dark now, full of fox stink, and I have spotted the odd badger there too. The squirrels are still as numerous as ever, and due to the warm winter we have, until recently, enjoyed, they are all fat and slow after a two-month binge on nuts. They cover every branch with their whirling, squirrelly blur.
Full of life. Sometimes I just sit and watch it all squirm and jump and flutter through these marvellous binoculars of mine.
But they are not merely for zoological observation. I use them to keep an eye on the lights too.
Beardsley was the first of them. It was the evening after I found my generator, Bertha, just over three years ago. The power had been down for weeks and, having made my decision to stay by then, I knew I had to take things into my own hands. Luckily I had expertise in these matters for I was a trained electrician in another life.
People say that, don’t they? In another life. As if life isn’t a single stretch of time but many of them: a series of befores and afters. We do have a queer way of looking at the world.
Anyway, I had just dragged Bertha up ten flights of stairs – and I am no Geoff Capes, believe me – so I was having a well-earned rest when I spotted a glint through the window. I thought I was seeing things at first, maybe because of the exertion. But no, there it was: a little glimmer in a dark mass of buildings about a mile north of our block. I took a closer look, thinking it might be just the low sun reflecting in a broken window, but it was definitely a light – steady and orange, electric, man-made. Another stay-behind, just like me.
Foolish of me to believe that I had been the only one.
I circled the light on the window with a marker pen and watched it all evening. When the light turned off my stomach turned. I did not like to think of whoever had made it out there, moving about in the dark and getting up to things.
It was there the next day, and the next, and the next, like clockwork: same time, same place, right under my mark. I made records in my book and, eventually, when I accepted that he was a permanent fixture, I adjusted the boundary on my map.
I had drawn my map long before the lights appeared, long before the fog descended, and long before all of this happened. It marks the streets to which I keep, and we should all have one if you ask me.
You only need a small space in which to live. I calculated it.
The surface area of the planet is 197 million square miles, with only 58 million square miles of this comprising land. Much of this land is uninhabitable, and people tend to stick to coasts and cluster in packs, forming cities, like London. London takes up 3,236 square miles and, when I drew my map, was home to 14 million individuals. This means that, if you split it equally, every square mile of London’s dirt would contain 4,326 people, with room for a little one.
That comes in at 716 square yards for every man, woman and child.
Of course, when you factor in public parks, private land, underground parking, tower blocks and all the places you just can’t go, plus the fact that you do have to give a bit of wiggle room, the equation for how much space you should move about in gets a little complicated. Plus I had a dog, so he needed space too.
In the end the borders of my map ran from Ada Road in the north-west to the bottom of Bremmington Park in the north-east, running south to Homestall road and west again to Calton Avenue. Two square miles. I consider this generous.
When I spotted the lights I brought the northern perimeter in a few streets, just in case I bumped into anyone.
I cannot touch people, you see? If I do, well, I get the heebie-jeebies.
This has not always been the case. For thirty years of my life I was perfectly normal, but then … well, when my affliction took hold I could see that it had the potential to make my life rather difficult. Two reasons:
a) I lived in London, an enormous city full of people, all with skin, all moving, all liable to get close enough to touch, and
b) I was an electrician, so I had to meet people fairly regularly.
But actually, in a place like London people keep their distance anyway. The only ones I had to be on the lookout for were handshakers.
Handshakers were mostly men in middle-class houses who offered you tea and biscuits while trying to talk to you from the corner. Quite why you would want to welcome a stranger sent to fix your fuse box in such an effusive way is beyond me, but there you go.
Whenever I sensed a shaker, I would stand well back from the door, tools in one gloved hand and a laminated sheet in the other explaining my condition. Once they had assimilated the information written thereon – generally with some amount of awkwardness – we would be safe to proceed.
So I stay within my boundary and I do not touch people. Those are my rules and, happily, the world in which I now live makes sticking to them rather easier than before.
Oh, and I cannot go near water either.
Before you ask: no, I am not insane. Water is dangerous, that is merely a fact. I can assure you, I am no lunatic.
Something has come over me lately, though, I will admit that. I do not really know what it is, but it is close, I can feel it, like breath down my collar. My thoughts keep winding themselves up in knots, the same ones again and again, reminders, things that might never have happened, or maybe they did, I don’t know, I just …
This is why I am writing my journal again.
I had a therapist, way back.
‘When your thoughts get too much,’ she said, ‘try writing them down. It might help, especially since writing is one of your hobbies. How is that novel of yours going?’
I did not like that word: hobby. Birdwatching, that is a hobby. Dog-walking too. Anything that takes your mind off things for a while. Eighteen years I have been trying to write this book of mine, and it does not feel like my mind is off anything. I just cannot seem to finish it; I do not know how. There’s this Duchess, you see …
But I digress. The lights.
Beardsley and I, it appeared, were not alone. Over the following weeks nine additional lights appeared, and I marked each one on the window and in my book. One night, as I worked on rigging the generator up to my flat’s electrical supply, I realised – with some amount of dread – that I was a little light too. They would see me, as I saw them.
I had to have a little sit down at that.
Would one of them come to call? Thankfully, the answer, so far, has been no.
The first light, the other nine and me: eleven lights in total. A bit of a gift, that number; I knew instantly how I would christen them. We would be the England squad from the 1990 World Cup semi-final against West Germany, 8 p.m., 4th July, Stadio delle Alpi, Turin – a game I have seen many times. We took Lineker’s namesake, of course.
But now, with Beardsley gone, it looks as if we are down to ten men. One less stay-behind. He shall have to be rubbed from the window.
You would probably say I was mad for staying. There is no electricity, no water, no refuse collection, little in the way of fresh food and no people. Mad – I know that’s what she would have said.
So why did I stay?
Because leaving would have meant change, and that is something I like to avoid at all costs.
It came slowly, with little chinks appearing as if another reality that existed behind the curtain of our daily activity had decided to crawl through. It was nothing spectacular. You saw more heads raised than usual. More nervous eyes met on the street. Bus conversations went on louder and longer than was deemed normal and rang with words that made the ears of other passengers prick.
It was the year of an election – the last of its kind, as it turned out – and amidst the usual distant Westminster rhetoric you heard other voices closer to home. These were the fringe campaigners, supporters of strange causes echoing from a past most thought had been buried for good.
One day, after walking Lineker, I passed a long trestle table on the pavement that was piled high with leaflets and taped with printouts and photographs. I glanced at the middle-aged woman sitting behind it in her shawl and boots and, suspecting some kind of left-wing activism, quickened my pace.
‘Well hello, little Reggie H!’ came a familiar voice.
My boots scuffed to a halt and I looked back. The woman was standing now. She raised an eyebrow.
‘Don’t you recognise me?’
I frowned. Then it hit me.
‘Angela?’ I said, turning to face her. ‘Angela Hastings?’
I had grown up with Angela. At school she had been the heavyset girl with a loud mouth who commanded playground games. She had an unusual blend of precocious authority and mischief, and grew into an early developing, make-up-wearing, fierce-eyed teenager who tried everything before anyone else would dare. We were in the same year but different social groups – which is to say, she had a social group whereas I had none. She made fun of me. It was only when we were fifteen and she started going out with a friend of my brother’s, four years her senior, that we started moving in the same circles. She became a regular at the Wheatsheaf, where my brother took me when Mum needed privacy. As with most other boys my age, Angela represented a version of female sexuality you could not hope to attain and would be terrified of if you did. But we all thought about it anyway, sometimes, deep in the night.
She grinned and winked, and with a sigh she plunged her hands into her cardigan pockets.
‘It is you, then,’ she said. ‘My, my, it has been an age, Little Reggie. I think the last time I saw you was …’
She stopped and an awkward ripple crossed her face – a transitory expression which I had long ago learned to recognise as pity. She shook her head.
‘I was so sorry when I heard, Reggie,’ she said. ‘Really, I was. How have you been?’
‘I am just fine, thank you, Angela,’ I said. ‘Just fine.’
She nodded, smiled hopefully and looked down at Lineker.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I see you have a dog.’ She kept her eyes on Lineker. There was a change in her countenance then, a tightening of her jaw which I remember considering extremely odd. ‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard that can help.’
Lineker gave a low growl.
‘Lineker,’ I warned.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, looking up. ‘He can probably smell mine. I’ve got three at home, for my sins!’
She let out a raucous laugh – the same laugh I had heard many times from the corner table of the Wheatsheaf, where I had spent countless evenings sitting quietly in the shadow of my brother’s social life.
I looked at the table in front of me. ‘So, er, what’s all this about then?’
She sniffed and cleared her throat. ‘We’re campaigning to overhaul Rye Lane,’ she said, straight-necked and beaming.
‘What, you mean structurally?’ I asked. ‘Rooftops, tarmac, that kind of thing?’
‘No. I mean we want to completely change it. Rip out the phone shops, pound shops, stinking fish markets, the places selling substandard African goods … we want to restore it to its former glory, Reggie. Make a fine British street out of it again.’
I watched her, chin raised and face pinched with an unsettling mixture of pride and disgust. I hardly knew what to say.
‘That is quite an ambition, Angela,’ I said at last.
She shrugged. ‘We need to be ambitious if things are going to change.’
She motioned to the table.
‘You should take one, Reggie, educate yourself.’
I picked up one of the garish pamphlets and looked it over. On its cover was a cheap photograph of a man in a suit smiling.
‘And who is this?’ I asked, referring to the stranger who would soon be known the world over.
‘That, Little Reggie, is our future,’ said Angela, in a tone I had never before heard her adopt. It chilled me.
‘Is that so?’ I said. I was beginning to suspect that Angela Hastings’ sanity had, somewhere along the line, taken a wrong turn.
‘Why don’t you join us?’ she said with a welcoming smile, as if she was offering nothing more sinister than membership of a local church. ‘We can always use an extra pair of hands. Plus, we’re a sociable lot, you know.’
There was that awkward ripple again, followed by an encouraging nod. ‘It would be a great way to meet other people.’
I placed the pamphlet carefully back on the table. ‘I don’t think so, Angela,’ I said. ‘Thanks all the same, but I think I’ll stick with Lineker here. You could say I, er, prefer the company of dogs to people right now.’
I ventured a smile, but her expression had already darkened. Her sympathy, her brightness, her hope – it all fell away like dust. Beneath it was a stone-like glare. Lineker growled and this time I did not stop him.
‘Change is coming, Reg,’ she said. ‘Whether you like it or not. You can’t hide from it.’
I can, I thought. I can and I will.
‘Goodbye, Angela,’ I said, and left.
‘Bye, Little Reggie!’ I heard her call after me, her brightness somehow restored. ‘I’ve always remembered you – stay safe, now!’
Less than a year later a crowd watched as that first tank rolled into Peckham – its buffoon of a driver careering into the rail arch and bringing down the train that is still there to this day, covered in mud and creepers. By that time I had already lived in my flat for twenty-five years. I would not have been able to tell you the last time I had escaped the M25’s snaky coils, and I had not been north of the river for almost a decade. I wore the same clothes, read the same paper, watched the same telly and drank the same brand of tea every single day, without fail.
Then it all happened. I watched people howl and run from tanks and bombs and those chest-beating brutes in their purple jackets and golden plumes. I watched it all and stayed quiet; it was just another change, like a hurricane – devastating and treacherous, but it would pass. I would not let it take me with it. Not this time.
Change: something to avoid at all costs.
I was born in 1969, at almost exactly the same time that Mr Armstrong’s feet settled upon the moon. My mother said I should have been called Neil, but unfortunately my brother had already claimed that name. So Reginald it was, after nobody in particular. My dad had hightailed it for Ireland long before I was born, so it was just me, Mum and Neil, and our Nunhead flat.
I have lived in London all my fifty-two years, so have witnessed half a century of change swirling about its streets. I have seen roads break apart and snap together like a child’s train set. I have witnessed buildings rise and fall like dominoes, big and fat or sharp and spiky like broken bottles. Fashions have changed too – clothes, shoes, haircuts, scraps of coloured fabric slapped over each other, each one screaming it’s the best of the bunch, but it never is. Music, film and theatre; the next big things arriving in limos and tripping down red carpets with their faces all shiny and their nails as sharp as razors. People – they change the most. Friends become strangers, lovers become distant memories, children … children do what they do. Voices change. People’s accents, the words they use and the things they say. Opinions, minds, feelings. Those things change faster than light.
Month after month, year after year, fad after fad, it all just goes on and on and on. Change, change, change.
It is simply not for me.
That is why I stayed, so things would not change any more.
You need very little to live. Shelter, food and water; they are the staples. You might argue that you need a bit of company now and then, maybe even a bit of the other. I need nothing of the sort and, in any case, sexual conquest is a young man’s game.
The basics, that is all you need; everything else is just dust.
We’re doing all right, Lineker and me. Bertha is thrumming away, the fuel store is healthy, plenty of bulbs, food and water, and the heating is doing a cracking job, even if I do say so myself. Good thing too because it is finally getting cold.
And I have my writing to keep me busy. Although this Duchess, she’s really starting to give me a headache. If I could just find a way to … I don’t know.
Like I say, something’s come over me lately. I don’t know what it is, but it’s drawing in.
Squirrels are cunts.
They are, though. Cunts, the lot of them.
Ooooh, if I could get my claws on one, what I wouldn’t do to that stupid, vacant, twitching little cunty face … it’s enough to, I tell you, it’s enough to …
I know, I know, I need to relax, it’s just … my head, calm down, Lineker, come on mate, chill out.
I’m fine. It’s all good. I’m sitting down. Calm, calm, calm …
This is my most favourite spot: by the window, looking out. It’s long and tall with a view of countless buildings stretching away into the fog. Sometimes I can see gulls flying between them in great flocks. They seem to move slowly from so far away, not like individuals caught up in their own instincts – squawking, pecking, fluttering and stinking like salt rats – but as a single thing, a tide rolling in slow motion. They’re not themselves any more. They’re part of something else, a bigger unit with instincts of its own.
The best time to watch them is late afternoon when the sky bleeds orange. I lie with my chin on my paws and let my eyes go free, soaring out through the dirty glass to find them. I’ll look for vegetation – tree branches poking out through windows, or vines wrapping around pillars; that’s where you’ll usually see them first, as a dark patch rippling on the green. If I look harder I can see them fidgeting, making themselves ready. I imagine I can see their beaks glinting in the falling sun and hear the deafening caw of a thousand ideas, all trying to find the same one. Then suddenly they’ll rise up without warning, first like an arrowhead hooked in a ragged cloth; then like an animal trapped in a sack, a blob pulsing and struggling to find a common direction, and then they find it and become it – a swooping, swirling wash of shadow, a song with no words and no tune. A howl. They’re part of The Howl.
I try to find one, just one to follow, and I get lost in the beat of its wings against the air and I wonder what it would be like to fly, or even just to run beneath them all. To one day follow them through those strange, lonely buildings out there and through streets I’ve never seen, just once. Just once to go out a bit further.
And then they fall, as if whatever has been carrying them has dropped them, and they swoop down and lose themselves through the hole in some giant rooftop, and I imagine them fluttering about finding perches on rafters thick with their own rich, creamy excrement, and the wonderful din they’re making, and hearing, together, as a flock.
And then I hear sighs and whines and I realise that it’s me making them. Sometimes when I make these noises he’ll come and ruffle my ears or scratch my chin and my tail will start thumping, even though I’m still out there somewhere, lost with the birds. Then he’ll go back to whatever he was doing, and I’ll watch him do that instead, and gradually I’ll find myself drifting back inside and off to sleep. And I’ll dream of those filthy gulls in their shit-packed rooftops, and what it’s like when you forget yourself and become something else.
It wasn’t always like this. I had a flock of my own once, my pack. Dogs are social animals – a bit like wolves but not quite so up themselves, know what I mean? Bit self-important, wolves, if you want my opinion. Your average male wolf takes himself very seriously. No room for fun or frolics with these fuckers, it’s all nose-to-the-wind, paws-cracking-bracken, flesh-is-the-life, blood-is-the-creed kind of stuff. And all that breathy grunting; fuck me, you don’t need to make that kind of racket when you’re running. And your lady-wolves – even worse. Fucking hippy earth mothers, the lot of them.
Not that I’m against all that, you understand, not that I don’t feel that electricity when I’m deep in the woods, not that I don’t like a good howl, it’s just, you know, have a word with yourself! Have some fun for a change.
I wouldn’t say that to their faces, of course. Wolves are scary. They’re also armed to the teeth (and I do mean the teeth – these little canines of mine have nothing on their flesh-tearers), not to mention highly unpredictable. You do not want to get on the wrong side of a wolf, or any side, for that matter. I can tell you that from personal experience.
That’s called foreshadowing, that is. I learned that from Reg. Basically there’s going to be a wolf somewhere in this story, so you want to read on.
Where was I? Oh yes – despite our difference in outlook, dogs and wolves do share a common heritage. Somewhere along the line, probably about the time you lot got interested in moving dirt around and growing things, whatever existed before us split into factions. We – us dogs – crept a little closer to you, intrigued by the warmth of your flames and the smells of your cooking meat, the nice little noises you made with your voices, and the safety of your settlements.
We heard howls from the mountainside: Fools! Come back! They’ll kill you! Eat you! Murder you with their spears! They’ll betray you like they’ve betrayed The Howl! They’re not fit for this earth, brothers and sisters! Come back and be saved, do not abandon your sacred creed! You’ll be gone! Doomed! Damned! Awroooooooooooooo!
Yeah? Well, look who’s laughing now, sunshine. Have you ever heard of Pedigree Chum? Chewsticks? Chicken korma leftovers? Ever had a belly scratch? Ever played with a ball? Have you ever even seen a ball? Do you know what they’re capable of? Have you ever sat by a fire – INSIDE – and drifted off, safe within four walls you don’t have to look after and a roof that keeps you dry and a floor that isn’t crawling with worms trying to get up your arsehole and eat whatever pitiful shreds of rotten deer meat are gargling away inside your scrawny little innards? Have you? Have you ever stuck your face out of a van window and let the wind drag your tongue out and hope it never stops? Have you ever touched sand? Drank seawater until you puke? Have you ever had someone else clean up your shit? (Actually, not entirely sure why that happens and, to be perfectly honest with you, wouldn’t mind if it stopped.)
Have you ever gazed up into a hairless face haloed with sunshine and wondered if it was possible to love anything more? Eh? Have you?
Have you fuck. You still have to skulk about in forests, sleep in the snow and count your dead children every morning. How do you like them (yuk) apples?
Again – not to their faces. No fucking way.
So we diverged, us and the wolves. We went our own separate ways. But we still hang out in packs, that’s not changed.
I haven’t seen my pack for three years.
There are two bits I remember from back then, back before it all went different. The first was a good bit, one day in winter.
It was a cold one. February. Clear blue skies, frost on the ground and my shit almost freezing solid before it hit the crunchy grass of The Rye. We were there early, sun still a red blister bursting over the Peckham rooftops. That time in the morning was lovely and quiet before all the traffic started up, very peaceful on my ears. Quite a different story going on in the old conk, though. The morning air was already a cacophony of different scents and I could smell each and every one, clear as day.
We moseyed through the gate and Reg unhooked me and then I was off. My paws scrabbled at the concrete and the universe soared past, the air like arctic seawater rushing over my face and a thick mist billowing in my wake. I was off into The Howl.
I’d caught the scent, see. Unmistakable. Like oil and eggs. I could already smell its filthy claws fidgeting, its stupid tail twitching.
My heart was in overdrive and I was already up the path, left onto the common and shooting into the bushes. And there in the clearing he stood – the daft prick – bold as brass, that brainless face on him, looking at me as if this had never happened before. He dropped it – nut, twig, pebble, whatever the fuck he’d been fiddling with – and darted off. But, I thought, I’ve got you this time, you little tart. I had a head start, didn’t I? The mist gave me some ground. This time, you’re mine. I’m going to sink my teeth into your trembling little rump and drag out your … fuck, he’s gone up a tree.
I skidded to a halt and leaped up at the trunk a few times, barking uselessly. He stared down at me with those vacant brown eyes.
‘Ar ’ey, Lin, did you get it, mate?’
I turned to see a familiar black shape loping through the mist. Wonky.
‘You what?’
‘That squirrel,’ said Wonky. ‘Did you get it or what?’
Wonky sat down next to me and looked up at the branch, all panting and expectant, staring right at the squirrel I had just failed, yet again, to catch. The squirrel rippled its tail and relaxed.
I’d met Wonky a few years before when he and his two-plates moved down from Liverpool. He’d seemed a bit nervous, right leg in bandages after a run-in with a Staffy back home – hence the name; he developed a limp that stayed with him after the bandages came off – so I’d taken him under my wing a bit, you know, looked after him. We’d got close after that and, well, I suppose you could say he was my best mate. After Reg, of course.
He was a good dog, our Wonkers. Loyal, good-natured, good laugh, typical Labrador. But I tell you this right now: there was fucking nothing going on in that thick black bonce of his.
‘Do you see anything in my mouth, Wonk?’ I sighed.
‘Ey?’ he said, eyes darting at me, then back at the branch. Clouds of his breath were pumping into the mist. ‘No, why?’
‘Do you see anything on the ground? Fur, blood, entrails, that kind of thing?’
Wonky glanced down.
‘Er, no. Why? Come on, Lin, tell us. Did y’get it or what, lad? Hey!’
Wonky suddenly jumped up at the tree and started barking. The squirrel watched him for a bit and wriggled up out of sight.
‘Come back down here, y’little bastard!’ shouted Wonky. ‘I’ll ’ave you, I will!’
By the way, you should know I’m doing this for your benefit. Dogs don’t talk – not in the way that you think – although if you think you’ve cornered the market where communication’s concerned just because you make that wonderful noise you call talking (and it is wonderful, believe me, I could listen to it for hours) then think again. You’ve only been here for a few hundred thousand years. Do you think the world got to where it was before you turned up without a bit of natter? You’re having a laugh. You only have to listen for a few minutes. Shut your eyes and open your ears – the world is one big chinwag. One big howl.
But going back to Wonky and me, although this happened as I say, we weren’t speaking. I’m making it up. Poetic licence – learned that from Reg, too.
‘I’ll fookin’ ’ave you!’
I shook my head and went to leave, but I felt a snout in my tail.
‘Well good morning to you too, young lady,’ I said, looking round at the black and white Border collie currently engrossed in my hind quarters. Scapa withdrew and gave a happy sniff.
‘Morning,’ she said. She nodded up at the tree. ‘Miss another one, did you?’
‘Afraid so,’ I said.
‘Bonny one too, by the looks of it.’
‘Bonny? There’s nothing bonny about those little twats.’
‘Ach, I think they’re nice.’ She wagged her tail. ‘Furry wee rascals.’
‘Yeah,’ I growled. ‘Well I’d like to rip their furry heads off.’
Scapa clucked. ‘You’re so angry, Lineker.’
‘I’m not angry, I’m just, I mean, have you seen …’
‘Ar ’ey, Scap!
Wonky bounded down from the tree and lolloped over.
‘Good morning,’ laughed Scapa as he ran round behind her. ‘And how are you, then?’
‘I’m all right, lass, thanks for asking, how about you? ‘Ey, your arsehole smells lovely today, by the way.’
‘Ahh, thank you, Wonk. That’s really nice of you. I’m all right.’
We could tell she wasn’t.
‘What’s up?’ I said. ‘Your two-plates not letting you up on the bed any more?’
Scapa frowned, indignant.
‘I’ll have you know, my master always lets me up on the bed. No, absolutely nothing wrong in the bedroom department. Just … he seems a bit worried. Don’t know what’s wrong.’
‘Hey!’ shouted Wonky, wagging his tail. ‘Me an’ all!’
‘Really?’ said Scapa.
‘Yeah! He almost forgot to fookin’ feed me this morning. Just sat there listening to that radio, didn’t he, shaking his head, rubbing ’is brow. I ’ad to bark as loud as I could just to get ’is fookin’ attention!’
‘What about you, Lineker?’ said Scapa.
Reg had seemed a bit gloomy, come to think of it. I shrugged.
‘Time of year, I expect. Dos Platos always get the doldrums in winter.’
‘Aye, ’spect your right there, la’,’ said Wonky. ‘Come ’ead then, let’s be off.’
We made our way out of the clearing and found Reg with Wonky and Scapa’s owners in a huddle of bleary-eyed, serious faces, hunching their shoulders against the cold. Then we ran off, tumbling against each other as we went.
A voice met us at the crest of the hill.
‘What ho, chaps!’
The silhouette of an Irish setter stood proudly against the sky, tail sweeping in fine, slow arcs. Jeremy. He beamed at us as we approached. His chestnut coat shone and steamed in the rising sun.
‘Top of the ruddy morning to you all!’ he announced.
Jeremy liked to draw on his Irish lineage a little too much, but the truth was he was as posh as the queen’s knickers.
We said our good mornings and circled around. Pebble was there too, a charcoal greyhound with a slender snout and a clipped tail. She was sitting patiently by her owner as she talked urgently into a phone. I noticed Jeremy’s owner shaking her head at the ground.
‘Your two-plates acting weird too?’ I said.
‘Well,’ said Jeremy, putting on a brave face. ‘I don’t know about weird, but Mildred’s certainly upset. She could barely get out of the door this morning for crying, poor love.’
He looked wanly across at the stout woman in a wax jacket, who was patting Pebble’s owner on the shoulder.
‘Fuck me,’ I said.
‘Quite,’ said Jeremy. ‘Fuck you indeed, and fuck me also, old boy. Fuck us all, in fact. Any sign of improvement, Pebs, love?’
Pebble padded over and nosed Jeremy’s midriff.
‘Nowt,’ she said. ‘She smells like dead voles. That’s fear, that is; fear and dismay.’
We all agreed that was exactly what fear and dismay smelled like.
‘This is no good,’ said Scapa. ‘No good at all. I feel nervous.’
Jeremy brightened.
‘Not to worry. Probably just something going round, what? Wonky? Wonky, what’s wrong, old sport?’
‘Lineker,’ said Jeremy. He raised his eyes over my head.
‘What?’
‘Watch out.’
Boom!
Stars flying, ribs heaving, the earth spinning, as if a hundred-pound boulder had just slammed into my side at forty miles an hour. Which, as it turned out, was almost exactly what had happened. Except the boulder was Wally.
‘Hurr hurr hurr!’
His voice bellowed behind as I landed in a heap by a tree.
‘Gotcha! Hurr!’
I raised my head and shook off the impact.
‘Fuck me, Wally, bit of warning, eh?’
‘Nah, where’s the fun in that? Hurr hurr hurr!’
Wally was a Staffordshire bull, face like a bear trap, coat the colour of mud.