Learning to Talk: Short stories. Hilary Mantel

said, we don’t want that circus starting up again.

      So the years began in which I pretended to be someone else’s daughter. The word ‘daughter’ is long, pale, mournful; its hand is to its cheek. The word ‘rueful’ goes with ‘daughter’. Sometimes I thought of Victor and I was rueful. I sat in my room with compass and square-ruled book and bisected angles, while outside the children shrieked, frolicking with Mike. In truth I blamed Mike for alienating Victor’s affections, but there is a limit to how much you can blame a dog.

      With the move to the new house, a change had overtaken Mike, similar in magnitude though not in style to the one that had overtaken his brother X years before. I call it X years because I was beginning to lose track of that part of my life, and in the case of numbers it is allowable to make a substitution. I remembered the facts of things pretty well, but I had forgotten certain feelings, like how I felt on the day Victor arrived from Godber’s Farm, and how I felt on the day he was taken away to his new home. I remembered his straitjacketed snarling, which hardly diminished as he was carried out of the door. If he could have bitten me that day, he would have drawn blood.

      The trouble with Mike was this: we had become middle class, but our dog had not. We had long ago ceased trying to take him for walks on a lead. Now he exercised himself, running away at all hours of the day and night. He could leap gates and makes holes through hedges. He was seen in the vicinity of butchers’ shops. Sometimes he went to the high street and stole parcels and packets from baskets on wheels. He ate a white loaf, secretly, in the shadow of the privet. I saw that he looked dedicated and innocent as he chewed it, slice after slice, holding the dough carefully in paws that he turned inwards, as if praying.

      When my mother saw the neighbours leaning over the larch-lap, imparting gardening tips, she thought they were talking about Mike. Her face would become pinched. She believed he was letting the family down, betraying mongrel origins. I knew the meaning of the word now. I did not get involved in any controversy about Mike. I crouched in my room and traced the continent of South America. I stuck into my geography book a picture of Brasilia, the white shining city in the jungle. I placed my hands together and prayed, take me there. I did not believe in God so I prayed provisionally, to genies and ghosts, to dripping Clara and old dead George.

      Mike was less than five years old when he began to show his age. He had lived hard, after all. One year, he could catch and snap in his jaws the windfalls our apple tree shook down. Those he did not catch as they fell, the babies would bowl for him, and he would hurtle after, tearing skidmarks in the turf as he cornered; then with a backward jerk of his neck he would toss the fruit up into the blue air, to give himself a challenge.

      But a year later, he was on the blink. He couldn’t catch the windfalls if they rained down on his head, and when old tennis balls were thrown for him he would trot vaguely, dutifully, away from the hue and cry, and then turn and plod back, his jaws empty. I said to my mother, I think Mike’s eyes are failing. She said, I hadn’t noticed.

      The defect didn’t seem to make him downhearted. He continued to lead his independent life; smelling his way, I supposed, through gaps in wire netting and through the open doors of vendors of fine foods and High Class Family Butchers. I thought, he could do with a guide person really. Perhaps I could train up P.G. Pig? I tried the experiment we hadn’t tried in years, clipping lead to collar. The dog lay down at my feet and whimpered. I noticed that the foxy patches of his coat had bleached out, as if he’d been in the sun and the rain too long. I unfastened the lead and wrapped it around my hand. Then I threw it at the back of the hall cupboard. I stood in the hall and practised swearing under my breath. I didn’t know why.

      On New Year’s Day, a fortnight before my twelfth birthday, Mike went out in the morning and didn’t come back. My stepfather said, ‘Mike’s not come in for his tea.’ I said, ‘Mike’s bloody blind.’

      They all pretended not to have heard me. There was an edict against quarrelling anywhere near Christmas, and it was still near enough; we were lodged in the strange-menu days leading to the Feast of the Epiphany, when babies daub jelly in their hair and The Prisoner of Zenda is on TV and no one notices what time it is. That’s why we were less alarmed than we would usually have been, yawning off to bed.

      But I woke up very early, and stood shivering by the window, the curtain wrapped around me, looking out over land that was imagined because there was no light: leafless, wet, warm for the time of year. If Mike were home I would feel it, I thought. He would whine and buffet the back door, and someone would hear if not me. But I didn’t know. I couldn’t trust that. I ran my hand through my hair and made it stand up in tufts. I crept back to bed.

      I had no dreams. When I woke up it was nine o’clock. I was astonished at the leniency. My mother needs little sleep, and thinks it a moral failing in others, so usually she would have been bawling in my ear by eight, inventing tasks for me; the Christmas truce did not apply in the earlier hours of the morning. I went downstairs in my spotted pyjamas, the legs rolled up above the knee, in a jeu d’esprit.

      ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ my mother said. ‘And what have you done with your hair?’

      I said, “Where’s my dad?’

      She said, ‘He’s gone to the police station, about Mike.’

      ‘No,’ I said. I shook my head. I rolled down my pyjama trousers to the ankle. Fuckit, I wanted to say, I mean my dad, I don’t mean the substitute. Answer the question I put to you.

      The next day I went out calling, through the small woods that belted open fields, and along the banks of the canal. It rained part of the day, a benign and half-hearted precipitation. Everything seemed unseasonable, forward: the rotting wood of fences shimmered green. I took my redoubtable brother with me, and I kept my eye on the yellow bobble of his bobble hat. The minute he went out of sight, in undergrowth or copse, I called him, Peegee Pig! I felt him before I saw him, loping to my side.

      I had penny chews in my pocket and I fed them to him to keep him going. ‘Mike, Mike!’ we called. It was Sunday, the end of an extended holiday which had added to the dislocation of Advent. We met no one on our quest. Peegee’s nose began to run. After a time, when the dog didn’t answer, he began to cry. He’d thought we were going to meet Mike, you see. At some place pre-arranged.