Chapter Twenty-One
The blue cake was iced: balloons were blown: presents were given, mostly of the soap and lacy handkerchief variety. Holly gave Nan a box of cream chocolates. She had picked out all the caramels to eat herself, because Nan could not cope with them.
Clive did not give Nan his tape of birdsong after all.
“The growling in the background might scare her,” he explained. Holly doubted that, but she didn’t blame him for keeping the tape. He had the only sound recording in existence of a sabre-tooth cat.
And she had the only photographs of one, although her Dad’s camera had lost all its images, and when she charged up her phone the pictures Clive had taken with it were disappointing. The flash had given the cat weirdly green eyes and greyish fur; and, worse, there was no sense of scale. Nothing to show how big it was. They could have been pictures of a rather strange domestic cat, with fangs photo-shopped in.
All the same, Matt photo-shopped the green eyes back to gold, and printed off the clearest photograph for Clive to pin on his shed wall. He also helped Clive to rip a CD of birdsong off the internet, so that he would have something to give Nan at the party.
It was a very sedate party. It became even more sedate when Dad took the Frank Sinatra off the CD player and put the birdsong on, and they all had to sit in silence to listen to the tweets and trillings. Since most of the guests were friends of Nan and therefore over eighty, that didn’t seem to matter. Bill Barton and Ailsa brought the average age down by a little, but not much.
Nan smiled at the birdsong. She had a balloon tied to her wheelchair. Holly could tell that she was very happy, much happier than she’d been for months. Much of that was down to Uncle Ted, who had arrived the previous evening, rolling in like a hearty veteran pirate with red-veined cheeks above his white beard, and a strong, deep, burring voice.
Uncle Ted had immediately taken to Doofus. “Fine dog,” he said. Doofus was on his feet already, despite Lucinda saying it would be days; though he was moving very slowly. He walked stiffly over to Bill Barton and stood by him while Bill gave him a pat. Bill’s face went as stiff and painful as Doofus seemed to be.
“My daughter’s been on at me to get another dog,” he said.
“I think it’s too soon,” said Holly. “It takes a while.”
Bill nodded. “There’ll never be another one like Joey.”
“I know,” said Holly, but Mum put in brightly,
“Why don’t you try the dogs’ home? That’s where we got ours. He’s turned out rather big, it’s true, but he’s a treasure. Nan loves him, don’t you, Nan?”
“Doo,” said Nan. “Doo.”
“Yes, I know you do,” said Mum.
“He was abandoned on the moor,” said Dad. “Some people.”
“You told us that you saw one like him once,” Holly reminded Ailsa. “When was that?”
“Over thirty years ago, on top of Whitten Moor. It was a dog very similar to Doofus. Could have been his great-great-grandfather, I suppose,” said Ailsa. “But with a few more greats than that. It was when the heather fires along the tops were really bad.”
“I remember that,” said Dad. “We weren’t allowed anywhere near. What happened?”
“Well, I was foolish. Went up there trying to find a sheep and thinking I’d be fine,” she said, “and then I got myself trapped in the middle of the fires and didn’t know which way to go. The smoke was something dreadful. I couldn’t see a thing.”
“Scary.”
Ailsa pulled a wry face. “I don’t think I’d have burnt to death, it wasn’t like a bush fire, but I could have suffocated. I was starting to choke and cough when I saw a shadow in the smoke, and out came a big black dog. It seemed to know where it was going, so I followed it down off the moor. When I found myself back on the road I looked round for it, but it had gone. It was the double of Doofus, though.”
“He’s like that dog we saw in London that time, isn’t he, Meg?” said Uncle Ted in his jolly, rather booming voice.
“Af,” agreed Nan.
“What time do you mean?” asked Holly.
“It was in the war,” said Uncle Ted. “Second World, a long long time ago.” He winked at her. “Us kids had been evacuated, but after a few months we came back home again to London. When the bombing started we’d run down to the shelters or the Underground. We didn’t have an Anderson of our own. But we didn’t get any warning the night our house got hit.”
“A bomb?” asked Clive, wide eyed.
“It was a doodlebug,” said Ted solemnly. “A buzz bomb. A flying bomb, like a torpedo with wings. Horrible things. You’d hear them buzzing through the sky and then they’d go quiet, and you’d know you were in trouble. But we were asleep when it hit.”
“Nan never told us about that,” said Matt.
“No? Well, it was all a bit traumatic.”
“What happened?” said Clive eagerly.
“The doodlebug came down right through our roof. It smashed half a wall and demolished the stairs, but it didn’t blow up. Everything was dust and rubble. Our Mam was safe downstairs, but she couldn’t reach us. Me and Meg and Doris and our baby Wilf, we were stuck upstairs and couldn’t get down. There were broken rafters and piles of bricks everywhere and a fog of dust, and the whole lot was shifting and creaking with bits rattling away on all sides, as if it was ready to collapse. And in the middle of that lot was the doodlebug, like a great stranded shark.”
“Eh,” said Nan, in a tone of pain.
“We were all terrified,” said Ted. “We were crying with shock and didn’t know what to do. I thought we were going to die. Even if the doodlebug didn’t go off, the house would collapse. And if the house collapsed, the doodlebug would go off. It was just a toss-up which would happen first.”
“Doo,” said Nan.
“And then we saw this dog appear through a cloud of dust. A big black dog like yours. It must have found its way up through the house next door. As soon as we saw it, we knew there must be another way out. So we followed it, and it led us over the rubble through a hole smashed in the wall to next door’s house, and we got down that way.”
“And did the doodlebug go off?” asked Clive, agog.
“The house collapsed twenty minutes later, and yes, it went off then, and blew up half the street. But luckily they’d got everyone evacuated by that time. Nobody got hurt. Funny enough, nobody knew whose dog it was.”
“Doo,” said Nan, stretching out a trembling hand to Doofus. “Doo.” He strolled stiffly over to nuzzle at her fingers.
“We called him Rex,” said Ted, “and we wanted to keep him, but we had no house and no money to feed him. We kept him for a day at Auntie Edie’s place and then he disappeared. We were bereft. Never forgot him. This dog’s just like Rex, isn’t he, Meg?”
“Doo,” said Nan. She lay back in her chair, looking drained and relieved. Of course, thought Holly, she can’t say Rex. But that’s the tale she wanted to tell us all along.
Doo wasn’t for Doofus. Doo wasn’t for doom; or not exactly. Doo was for Doodlebug. Nan knew.
And then it was time for blue cake. Frank Sinatra replaced the birdsong, and the solemnity disappeared into laughs and jokes and many toasts: to Nan, to Uncle Ted, to Rex, to Doofus, to the memory of Joey. Holly and Clive drank their toasts in Vimto.
“And here’s to Clive and Holly,” said Dad unexpectedly, “for outstanding courage in the face of danger.”
The two of them had to stand in the middle of the room while everybody raised their glasses. Clive looked pleased and embarrassed.
“I wasn’t really brave,” he carefully explained, “because I wasn’t really scared. Not as scared as Holly. So she was much braver.”
Holly rolled her eyes. “Thanks, Clive,” she said.
But afterwards, when everyone else was talking, she felt she should boost Clive up a bit.
“Dad was right, Clive. You were really brave. How many people in High School will have faced a sabr
e-tooth and not been frightened?”
He gave her a sideways look. “Don’t be patronising. I know what High School will be like. I’m prepared.”
“Sorry,” she said. “But it is true. You weren’t afraid of a sabre-tooth. Why not?”
“I just wanted to see it close up,” said Clive, finishing off his third piece of cake.
“What are you afraid of, Clive?”
“Something happening to Mr Finney,” he said at once, with his mouth full.
“Is that all?”
Clive considered it. “Oh, well. Something happening to Lily, I suppose,” he said. “Or Mum. Never seeing my dad again. Falling off harbour walls. Black mambas. Global warming. Breaking my glasses on top of a cliff. Not being good enough to do what I want to do.”
“What do you want to do? Be a vet?”
“No,” said Clive. “I can’t, obviously, because of the exam thing, so I’ve already decided I don’t want to. But I’m afraid that when I do know what I want to do I won’t be able to do that either.”
“I haven’t even thought about it,” Holly said. She wanted to point out that Clive’s fear for Mr Finney was bound to be justified within a year, or less: Mr Finney was already two. But Clive must know that.
“I think I’m afraid of time,” she said. “I wish we could stop it. It just keeps on going. It takes everything away. Not just Nan and Mr Finney, everything.”
“It brings everything first,” Clive pointed out. He took off his glasses to clean them on his T-shirt, putting a thin smear of blue icing across them. “Time is change. No getting round it. Everything has to change. If nothing ever changed there would be no time.”
“But time controls everything. Except Doofus.”
They both looked at Doofus.
“The harbinger of doom,” said Holly, thinking, maybe Doofus knows when things will die, because all time is as one to him. He exists in time and outside it, on the boundaries, in the places where time leaks from the world. Not just on Whitten Moor, but in other places too: like London, seventy-odd years ago.
That morning she had shown Doofus the stone-with-a-hole, at which he sniffed keenly; and then she had carried it around the house and garden with him painfully following her, while she tried to work out where to put it.
Although she had thought of burying it deep in the garden, Doofus would not let her. Despite his wounds, he had firmly barged her away from the flowerbeds.
So she’d taken it inside; but that was no better. Doofus had not approved of anywhere in the house. When she attempted to put the stone eye in the airing cupboard, he got his head in there and pushed her arm away. Then he walked very slowly downstairs to the back door, and stuck his nose in the tub with the rosemary bush which stood just outside the threshold, next to the drainpipe.
So that was where the stone was now: buried in the tub under the rosemary bush. Once it was done, Doofus had stretched and lain down with a yawn. Not a half-howl, but a true yawn.
“He doesn’t bring doom. He just sees it coming,” she said to Clive now, thinking aloud. “But he’s a rescuer too, like Rex, and Ailsa’s dog. He tried to rescue us at Miller’s Clough. All that howling was to warn us. No-one died.”
“We didn’t let them,” said Clive.
“But that was down to Doofus,” Holly said.
At the sound of his name, his ears pricked up. He turned to look at her, with that unfathomable, deep, black gaze, like wells of night.
“Good boy,” said Holly. “Sausage, Doofus?”
The dog of doom limped over to her and gulped down the sausage that she held out. Then he stuck his nose into her armpit before briefly reaching up to lick her chin.
“Look,” said Clive in wonder, “he’s wagging his tail.”
“Why wouldn’t he?” said Holly, as she caressed the strong black head. Doofus seemed to like it, or at least, not to mind; so she stroked his ears. They were nothing like Pancake’s big, brown, floppy ears, but that didn’t really matter. This was Doofus.
She was proud of him. Her dog.
The End
About Emma Laybourn
I’m a qualified teacher and librarian who lives in the north of England. I’ve had seven children’s novels published in print form in the UK, USA and other countries; and I’ve also had numerous stories published in various magazines.
In 2012 I set up my website, Megamouse Books, to offer children’s ebooks and online stories, mostly free. If you have enjoyed this story, please take a look.
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