The Puppy That Came for Christmas Page 6

  I rang them up and spoke to a lovely lady called Sarah, and finally decided to have the hair analysis myself. It was expensive—causing Ian to mutter that it was a waste of time—but I was willing to give anything a try, from acupuncture to consulting the zodiac, so I chopped a couple of inches off the edge of my thatch and sent it off in the post. How could it hurt? I reasoned. We needed all the help we could get; we’d even raised the end of the bed a few inches, to give gravity a boost.

  Jamie was sweeping the doorstep as we drew into the Helper Dogs car park early the next day. It was a bright, cold February morning and, squinting against the low sun, he recognized my car, gave a wave and then creased up with laughter. I got out and, rather defensively, suspecting I had biro on my face or something, asked what the joke was.

  “It’s not you,” he managed before composing himself. “It’s the little princess.”

  He pointed to Emma, who was sitting on her new car seat, resplendent in her new harness. We’d got frustrated with always putting her in her crate for car journeys. It was cumbersome and it didn’t allow her the freedom to enjoy the view, which seemed to me like a bad idea when she was supposed to be experiencing as much as possible. First, we found her a car harness in the pet shop, so she’d be safe; then, in a motoring shop, we saw a pink bolster seat with a crown and “Little Princess on Board” written on the cover—and so we’d bought that too.

  “Only you could get her something like that!” laughed Jamie.

  I didn’t see what was so funny. The car seat seemed perfect to me. Now Emma could sit in the passenger seat and look out of the window.

  Jamie came up to me after the class as I finished chatting with Liz.

  “About the blog you and Ian have been doing . . .” he said. “Well, I had a look at it and I think it’s great. Do you think you might be able to write it up as a column in the local newspaper?”

  Why not? We were writing about puppy life from Emma’s point of view, and the blog had become a hit with our friends. I was sure other people would like to read about all the trouble she had training her wayward puppy parents.

  A chorus of ooohs and ahhhs and isn’t it sweets greeted us as we walked across the tatty carpet tiles in the newsroom foyer. We went up to the front desk.

  “Hi, I’m here to see Jill Bryson—for the animal page,” I told the receptionist.

  She rang through as we sat down.

  “She’s lovely,” the receptionist said, coming out from behind her desk as Jill and some other journalists from the newspaper came down. Everyone made a big fuss of Emma, who looked gorgeous, behaved impeccably and managed not to pee anywhere or on anyone in all the excitement.

  “We’d love you to do a newspaper column about her,” Jill said.

  “I was thinking of doing the column from Emma’s point of view—what it’s like living with us and that sort of thing,” I explained.

  “Sounds good—look forward to reading it.”

  “How long? How long do you want it to be?”

  “Oh, about five hundred words, maybe eight hundred.”

  Every week? I hoped I’d have enough to write about.

  “And photos—we’ll need a photo with her column each week.” That wasn’t a problem. The first one would be of Emma sitting at the keyboard, tapping the keys and getting her dispatch to the editor, eager to start the presses on the next day’s edition.

  Ian came home to champagne.

  “Our little girl’s got her own newspaper column. She’s going to be famous!” I said as we clinked glasses. “But we need to have a new photo of her every week. We’ll need to take her to some interesting places.”

  Emma really seemed to have brought lots of reasons to celebrate into our lives. I phoned Jamie and he was delighted.

  “Maybe it’ll help recruit some more volunteers,” he said. Helper Dogs always needed more volunteers.

  For the first week I wrote about how I felt when I first met her, alongside Emma’s diary, which recounted the events from the eyes of a seven-week-old pup. Ian helped with the writing and we took hundreds of photos of Emma doing lots of things, which the newspaper used to accompany the articles each week.

  WEDNESDAY: FIRST DAY

  Still a little sleepy today. I’ve just arrived at my new parents’ house after a very long journey. They are a nice couple called Meg and Ian. They gave me lots of toys to play with and luckily don’t seem to mind if I make a little mess in the house. They keep putting me on some bark chips in the garden. I like chewing them.

  THURSDAY: TRAINING CLASS

  Meg took me to the Helper Dogs class this morning. I was so sleepy because Meg and Ian kept me up all night wanting to go out to the bark-chip area. I wouldn’t mind, but they never seemed to do anything when they got there. I met my brother Eddie at the class and we had a nice play together and he told me about the people he’s with—they kept him up all night too!

  WEEKEND: TRAINING IAN

  Ian’s training is coming along well—although he keeps saying “Shake hands” for no reason. I’ve found that if I wave my paw at him when he says this he sometimes stops. They also keep asking me to sit—can’t they see I’m much too busy to sit down?

  MONDAY: TOYS

  Meg put my toys in something called a washing machine and they spun round and round. I didn’t like it. I was worried about my favorite toy Spiky—I like to cuddle up to him at night and carry him around by his ear.

  WEDNESDAY: ELVIS

  I went to play with another Helper Dogs puppy today. His name’s Elvis. He’s a little black Labrador. Elvis loves sleeping even more than me. I tried to show Elvis how my mum carried me by the scruff of my neck when I was a baby, but Elvis didn’t like it.

  Jamie said the piece made him cry, which I took to be a vote of endorsement, but the newspaper found it too long and cut it mercilessly—so much that it may as well have been written by a dog, for all the sense it made. I felt I’d let Emma down and from then on always came in bang on my word limit, so they’d have as little justification to cut as possible.

  Emma was much keener on traveling in the car now that she had a car harness and could sit in the front seat. So I arranged one day to meet Eddie, Elvis, Liz and Jo at a country park. Waiting at one set of lights, the man in the car next to us rolled his window down and asked if he could buy Emma from me. I told him I wouldn’t sell her for any price, but as I drove on a little voice at the back of my head kept on repeating that Emma would be leaving me, whether I wanted her to or not. When she’d arrived, six months had seemed a long time, but, in the whirlwind of new duties and watching her grow, two months had passed in a flash. With every walk, every game and every bark, the day was coming closer. I turned on the radio and pushed the thought aside. It was too horrible to think about.

  Emma was over the moon to see Eddie and Elvis. She loved to scrap with her brother while Elvis looked on, bemused. She’d recently worked out that if she grabbed hold of another puppy’s collar with her teeth then the other puppy had to go where she wanted. Eddie was too fast and too wise to fall for this more than a few times, but she managed to hoodwink Elvis all afternoon. The park had a shallow lake that was perfect for dogs to paddle and swim in. Emma was having a lot of fun splashing around with Elvis (who loved any water and once ran under a Great Dane, so he could be showered with wee) and then suddenly started paddling. She was swimming!

  “Emma’s had her first swim!” I excitedly told Ian on the phone.

  Jamie wasn’t quite so impressed.

  Swimming isn’t advised as a regular activity as it may be hard for some disabled people to dry the dog off afterward, although it is good for the dog to be at home in the water. More than one Helper Dog has saved its owner from drowning, and one I heard of, Waldo, even pulled his owner, Gary, from the shower floor when Gary had a fit and fell unconscious. He then put Gary into the recovery position, covered him with a blanket and ran to a neighbor’s house to get help.

  To celebrate her newspaper col
umn and first swim, we took Emma to the pet shop to choose a new toy. Not that she needed any more: she now had two toy boxes, both pretty full. Ian loved buying things for her and rarely came home without something for Emma or me. He really was the best present buyer in the world, and he’d absolutely fallen for our little furball too. We hadn’t really talked about what it would be like to give her up, and as much as I was delighted that he loved her as much as I did, I also worried, late at night when trudging around the garden with the little one, that we were both falling head over heels without thinking about the inevitable heartbreak that was drawing inexorably closer.

  At the pet shop Emma chose three toys: a red dinosaur, a snake rattler and a sheep. Later on, still shopping, I gave Emma the new rattlesnake to play with and a man came over to make a fuss of her. He took the snake and let her chase it, then tried to trick her by hiding it behind his back.

  “Where is it? Where is it?” he said, moving the toy from hand to hand behind his back.

  Emma gave him a considering look, buried her head into the bag of new toys, pulled out the red dinosaur and started playing with that instead.

  7

  Jo proved to be as good as her word and took Emma in whenever I needed a bit of time to go to the hospital. It meant I didn’t have to worry when the appointment inevitably took longer than I’d hoped, and she didn’t mind if I arrived back, as I did one afternoon, a little upset and needing a cup of tea.

  “All right?” she asked.

  I shook my head. It wasn’t going well. I was very aware of the internal cogs creaking and the second hand ticking by on my poor old biological clock, and it felt like I was wasting the little time I had left—I was realistic that it wasn’t much. Maybe if we’d opted to go private and been seen quicker, I’d be pregnant by now. Everything had gone smoothly for the first few months on Clomid, but now my monthly cycles were anything but, and I was bleeding midway through as well. It was like my body was in revolt, doing everything it could to stop me from having any chance of getting pregnant at all.

  “My daughter had to wait five years between her three,” Jo said, as I told her all this and dried my eyes. “They thought they’d never be able to have another one, and then they had twins. Your turn will come.”

  But it was hard to find consolation after the monthly poking and prodding. I looked over at Emma, who was curled up asleep with Elvis next to a larger-than-puppy-size toy giraffe, and my heart lifted a little. I woke the little bundle up, strapped her on to her pink princess seat and took her home.

  Mum was on the phone.

  “Your dad and I have sold Gran’s flat,” she said.

  When my grandmother died, they’d decided to rent her flat out. It was a nice upstairs maisonette in London, with views from the bedroom toward the Thames, and given that I was looking for somewhere to live at the time, we decided that I should rent it from them. I’d lived a metropolitan life in Gran’s flat for more than five years before I met Ian, never imagining that one day I could be happy in the sticks, walking beside another river, seeing kingfishers and swans, herons and deer, with a beautiful puppy at my side.

  I heard some commotion in the background, and then Dad took the phone from Mum.

  “Listen, love, we wanted to help you out a bit, so there’s a check in the post for you.” He paused. “It’s for ten thousand pounds.”

  Once I got over the shock I kept the news close to me like a treasured secret all day. My mind was racing, and I couldn’t help but think of a thousand—ten thousand—things to do with the money, but first I had to talk to Ian. We discussed it that night over dinner.

  “What do you think your gran would have wanted you to spend it on?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Gran just always wanted her grandchildren to be happy.”

  “Do you think she would have liked a great-grandchild?”

  “Oh yes—she’d have loved to have one.”

  Ian stroked my hair and said softly, “I think we should spend the money on a private fertility clinic.”

  “Do you really?”

  Ian nodded and my heart lifted for the first time in a week. Maybe a private clinic would be the answer. We’d told the specialist, Mrs. Hughes, we didn’t want to go down the IVF route, and it wasn’t available to us on the NHS because of my age, but now it seemed more and more like a sensible option to explore, and I was sure it would be available privately.

  And so we decided that was what we would do.

  The weather now was warm enough to start dreaming of summer, and we began to talk about how much Emma would like to go to the seaside. Ian found a great holiday cottage—one of six—on a dog-friendly farm near the sea in East Anglia and booked a long weekend, as he could only get a few days off work. I drove Emma down during the day and we arrived in time to pick him up as his train piled into the small Suffolk station.

  The cottage was beautiful, although much smaller than it looked in the glossy brochure. From the very center of the living room, a twisting wrought-iron spiral staircase led up to a four-poster bed nestled among the eaves. Quite predictably, Emma went straight for the staircase—the only thing I wanted to forbid her—so I took her out for a walk around the farm to tire her out while Ian got us settled in and made some phone calls. It was rare that he could take time completely off from the office.

  On our stroll, Emma and I discovered there weren’t actually many animals on the farm. A couple of chickens scratching around by the farmhouse kitchen, some dogs and some ducks on the pond. I wasn’t sure what Emma would have made of anything larger or wilder than another dog, and she’d seen ducks already on the river at home. It was nice to see, however, that she got on well with the other dogs, as I’d been making the effort to socialize her. A homely smell of cooking greeted me as we returned; Ian was in the kitchen, with the back doors open on to our own little deck, which was encircled by a sturdy, Emma-proof fence and had a hot tub in the corner. Really, the cottage was perfect for us. Ian cracked open a bottle of wine, and with Emma now asleep on the deck beside us, we tried out the hot tub as we waited for the stew to stew.

  At bedtime I put the suitcase in front of the spiral staircase so Emma wouldn’t try to come up. She was exhausted, and we’d been hoping she’d implicitly understand the concept of “holiday” and have a little lie-in, but although we didn’t hear a peep from her all night, it wasn’t to be. She woke as usual at 5 a.m.—either because she wanted to help Ian with his morning commuter routine or because of the cocks’ untimely crowing, I didn’t know—and Ian obligingly went downstairs to let her outside. No sooner had he moved the suitcase and turned his back to put the kettle on, than she was up the spiral staircase to find me. Conclusively proving that a four-month-old puppy is more energetic than two fully grown adults, she was at the top before he could do anything. She jumped on the bed, extremely proud of herself, waking me from my doze.

  “Morning, Emma,” I said, from a warm, dream-clouded place. “How nice and still she is,” I thought abstractly from my fug; it was unusual for Emma to keep so still. The bed was very comfortable, so maybe I’d even snatch a few more minutes’ sleep . . . then I felt a warm spreading feeling on my legs and realized what had happened.

  “Emma’s weed on the bed!” I shouted.

  Ian raced up the stairs. Our accommodation might have been dog friendly, but that didn’t mean they wanted dogs on the beds and it certainly didn’t mean they wanted puppies having accidents on them. It was barely light outside, but the cockerels were getting more persistent.

  “Quick!” Ian said, leaping around the bed with his dressing gown flapping. We had stripped the sheets, washed the quilt and cover in the laundry room and festooned the insides of our tiny cottage with large sheets hung up to dry before anyone else was up.

  Emma loved the seaside even more than we’d hoped she would. The Suffolk waves were gentle, and once she’d got over the idea of a limitless expanse of water, she liked running in and out of them, snapping at them and then rolli
ng in the sand. It was the sand she liked best; it awoke within her an urge to dig, dig, dig, down and down, until she’d created a hole bigger than herself—which she then dived into and in which she became half buried when, in trying to get out, one of the walls caved in under her scrabbling paws.

  A minute later, barely recovered, she spotted a man about to go for a paddle, sitting on his towel having removed his shoes. She yelped and ran over and started attempting to pull his socks off for him.

  “What’s she doing?” he laughed (fortunately he wasn’t dog-phobic). We told him about Helper Dogs. She’d been doing what she’d been taught to do but had forgotten that she was supposed to wait to be asked to do it! Bidding him and his socks goodbye, we retired from the beach to a café and thence back home, where Emma collapsed in a sandy little heap, exhausted once more, and we enjoyed another evening surrounded by cock-crows and the dark, flat Suffolk countryside.

  Helper Dogs didn’t just help their partners at work; I’d heard many stories about how they’d improved their quality of life by enabling their owners to go on holiday, sometimes for the first time. A very calm black Labrador I met called Annie had an eight-year-old partner, Paul, who had autism and didn’t speak.

  “We’ve had our first family holiday ever thanks to Annie,” said Leila, Paul’s mother. “It would have been too stressful and too much for Paul to handle before. But she has such a calming influence on him. Plus, because of her special harness that’s attached to Paul around his waist, I don’t have to worry if Paul gets freaked out by something and tries to run off. Annie just sits down and Paul comes to a stop, and often sits down too!