Learning to Talk: Short stories. Hilary Mantel

fire. It ran to Victor and sniffed him. It raced in a circle and bit chunks out of the air. Its tongue panted. It jumped on Victor and began to pulverise him.

      Mike – let it be understood – was not an extra present for me. Victor was my dog and my responsibility. Mike was the other dog: he was everyone’s, and no one’s, responsibility. Victor, as it proved, was of sedate, genteel character. When he was first put on his lead, he walked daintily, at heel, as if he had been trained in a former life.

      But when the lead was first clipped on to Mike’s collar, he panicked. He ran to the end of it and yelped and spun into the air, and hurtled out into space, and turned head over heels. Then he flopped down on his side, and thrashed around as if he were in danger of a heart attack. I fumbled at his collar, desperate to set him free; his eye rolled, the fur of his throat was damp.

      Try him again, when he’s a bit older, my mother suggested.

      Everybody said that it was nice that Victor had got his brother with him, that they would be faithful to each other, etc. I didn’t think so, but what I didn’t think I kept to myself.

      The puppies had a pretty good life, except at night when the ghosts that lived in our house came out of the stone-floored pantry, and down from the big cupboard to the left of the chimney breast. Depend upon it, they were not dripping or ladies or genteel; they were nothing like the ghost of drowned Clara, her sodden blouse frilled to the neck. These were ghosts with filed teeth. You couldn’t see them, but you could sense their presence when you saw the dogs’ bristling necks, and saw the shudders run down their backbones. The ruff on Victor’s neck was growing long now. Despite everything my mother had vowed, the dogs did not get food out of tins. They got scraps of anything that was going. Substitutions were constantly made, in our house. Though it was said that no one thing was like any other.

      ‘Try the dog on his lead again,’ my mother said. If a person said, ‘the dog,’ you knew Mike was the dog meant. Victor sat in the corner. He did not impose his presence. His brown eyes blinked.

      I tried the dog on his lead again. He bolted across the room, taking me with him. I borrowed a book from the public library, 101 Hints on Dog Care. Mike took it in the night and chewed it up, all but the last four hints. Mike would pull you in a hedge, he would pull you in a canal, he would pull you in a boating lake so you drowned like cousin Clara, when her careless beau tipped her out of the rowing boat. When I was nine I used to think quite a lot about Clara, her straw hat skimming among the lily pads.

      It was when my brother P.G. Pig was born that my mother broke her own rule. I heard the cousins and aunts talking in lowered voices about the choice of name. They didn’t take my views into account – no doubt they thought I’d recommend, Oh, call him Victor. Robert was mooted but my mother said Bob she could not abide. All those names were at first to be ruled out, that people naturally make into something else. But this left too few to draw on. At last my mother made up her mind on Peter, both syllables to be rigidly enforced. How did she think she would enforce them when he was a schoolboy, when he went to the football field, when he grew to be a weaver or a soldier in a khaki blouson? I asked myself these things. And, mentally, I shrugged. I saw myself in my mind. ‘Just asking!’ I said. My fingers were spread and my eyes were round.

      But there was something else about the baby’s name, something that was going to be hidden. By listening at doors, by pasting myself against the wall and listening at doors, I found it was this; that the baby was to be given a second name, and it was to be George, which was the name of my aunt Connie’s dead husband. Oh, had Connie a husband, I said to myself. I still thought that widow, like mongrel, was a category of its own.

      Peter George, I said to myself, PG, Peegee, P.G. Pig. He would have a name, and it would not be Peter, nor would it be Pete. But why so hushed? Why the averted shoulders and the voices dropped? Because Connie was not to be told. It was going to be too much for her altogether, it would send her into a fit of the hysterics if she found out. It was my own mother’s personal tribute to the long-destroyed George, who to my knowledge she had not mentioned before: a tribute which, to pay, she was prepared to throw over one of her most characteristic notions. So strong, she said, were her feelings on the matter.

      But wait. Wait a minute. Let logic peep in at the window here. This was Connie, was it not? Aunt Connie who lived next door? It was Connie, who in three weeks’ time would attend the christening? As Catholics we christen early, being very aware of the devil. I pictured the awful word ‘George’ weighting the priest’s tongue, making him clutch his upper chest, reducing him to groans until it rolled out, crashing on the flags and processing down the aisle; and Connie’s arm flung up, the word ‘Aa…gh!’ flashing from her gaping mouth as she was mown down. What an awful death, I said to myself. Smirking, I said, what a destruction.

      In the event, Connie found out about the naming in good time. My mother said – and thunder was on her brow – ‘They told her in the butcher’s. And she’d only gone in, bless her, for her little bit of a slice of –’

      I left her presence. In the kitchen, Victor was sitting in the corner, curling up an edge of liver-coloured lip. I wondered if something had provoked him. A ghost come out early? Perhaps, I thought, it’s George.

      Connie was next door as usual, going about her tasks in her own kitchen. You could hear her through the thin wall; the metal colander knocking against the enamel sink, the squeak of chair legs across the linoleum. In the days following she showed no sign of hysterical grief, or even nostalgia. My mother watched her closely. ‘They never should have told her,’ my mother said. ‘A shock such as that could do lasting harm.’ For some reason, she looked disappointed.

      I didn’t know what it was about, and I don’t now, and I doubt if I want to: it was just some tactic one person was trying on another person and it was the reason I didn’t like to play cat’s cradle, patience, cutting out with scissors or any indoor games at all. Winter or not, I played outside with Victor and Mike.

      It was spring when P.G. Pig was born. I went out into the field at the back, to get away from the screaming and puking and baby talk. Victor sat quivering at my heel. Mike raced in insane circles among the daisies. I pushed back my non-existent cowboy hat. I scratched my head like an old-timer and said, ‘Loco.’

      My brother was still a toddler when Victor’s character took a turn for the worse. Always timid, he now became morose, and took to snapping. One day when I came to put on his lead he sprang into the air and nipped me on the cheek. Believing myself an incipient beauty and afraid of facial scarring, I washed the bite then rubbed raw Dettol on it. What resulted was worse than the bite and I rehearsed to the air the sentence ‘Hurts like hell.’ I tried not to tell my mother but she smelled the Dettol.

      Later, he chased P.G. Pig, trying to get him on the calf. PG marched to the German goosestep. So, he escaped by inches, or even less. I plucked a ravelled thread of his towelling suit from between Victor’s teeth.

      Victor didn’t attack grown people. He backed off from them. ‘It’s just the children he goes for,’ my mother said. ‘I find it very perplexing.’

      So did I. I wondered why he included me with the children. If he could see into my heart, I thought, he would know I don’t qualify.

      By this time we had a new baby in the house. Victor was not to be trusted and my mother said a sorting-out was overdue. He went away under my stepfather’s overcoat, wrapped tight, struggling. We said goodbye to him. He was pinioned while we patted his head. He growled at us, and the growl turned to a snarl, and he was hurried out of the front door, and away down the street.

      My mother said that she and my father had found a new home for him, with an elderly couple without children. How sad! I pictured them, their homely grieving faces softening at the sight of the white dog with his useful brown saddle. He would be a substitute child for them. Would they dip their old fingers into the ruff at his neck, and hold on tight?

      It was strange, what I chose to believe in those days. P.G. Pig knew better. Sitting in the corner, he took a sideways swipe at his tower of blue bricks. ‘Destroyed,’ he said.

      About a year after that, we