Once, they had let her take the dog for a walk, just down the avenue and back. A couple of times she had gone into the garden and played with it, throwing a ball. When she had got back home she had asked for a dog. ‘One like that. It’s a Labrador. I love it.’
‘We’re busy people, we both work, it wouldn’t be fair to keep a dog, especially not a dog like that and you’d soon lose interest in taking it for walks.’
‘Try a hamster,’ her father had said. ‘Maybe a cat one day? I’ll think about it.’
‘Cats make me wheeze,’ David had said.
So there had been no dog, no cat and the hamster had been forgotten.
She had called in a few times and asked to see the dog and they had let her. Its name was Archie and it slept not in the house but in a big workshop at the bottom of the garden. The woman, whose name was Mrs Price, had taken her down there when she went to fetch Archie for his walk. She’d liked the workshop. It had shelves, woodwork tools, a bench and stool, and a ladder up into a roof space where there was a window, and a couch covered in an old quilt. It belonged to the Prices’ son, who used it when he came home, which he rarely did now. He was in the air force serving overseas, flying Tornado jets, his mother had said. ‘I can’t think about it.’
The walls of the workshop had posters of planes, and others of The Simpsons. In the roof space there was a radio and a pile of aircraft magazines. It was a boy’s den. But she liked it because of Archie and because the idea of having a whole place to yourself, with a roof space, delighted her. She thought she might mention it when she got home, but in the end did not. She thought of asking for one like it, for Christmas, but that was how it stayed – a thought, and she got rid of it fast.
All that had been Before. She had not been to the Prices’ house since. She had not been anywhere. But then, standing at the door in the dark, looking towards the end of the drive and the gateposts, she had tried to think of something good, and had.
After that, everything was easy.