Dogs live in the moment.
There were two packed suitcases by the front door, but Stan stretched his limbs and lifted his butt and did a spot of early morning grooming – languid licking, energetic scratching – as if we were going on just another walk around the neighbourhood.
It was a cloudless Sunday morning with everyone gone, the 500-year-old meat market all closed up and silent until the small hours of Monday morning. The office workers were out in the suburbs and the club kids were all tired out and tucked up in bed. Smithfield was shuttered for the weekend – the pubs, the shops, the cafés – and only the great cavernous restaurant Smiths of Smithfield was open for business and doing a roaring breakfast and brunch trade to hipster couples, many of them with pushchairs, who still made their lives in the city.
But it was all so quiet and still that as Scout, Stan and I walked under the meat market’s ancient arch, past the line of old red telephone booths and the plaque on the spot where they had executed William Wallace, that it felt as if the city belonged to us. The strip of shops on the far side of the market were closed but music was pouring from the flat above one of them – Sinatra talking to a bartender about the woman who just went away, Frank confessing that he would be happy to tell the guy all about it, but a man has to be true to his own personal code. That’s so true, Frank. There was a sign below the window that had been worn away by more than half a lifetime of weather and work.
We went around the back of the shops and up a flight of stairs. Mrs Murphy opened the door, framed by growing grandchildren. They were all much bigger than I remembered and I expressed the dumbfounded adult sense of wonder that time had not stood still. Their pale freckled faces crowded around Mrs Murphy. Shavon, a year younger than Scout, and her kid brother Damon, and Baby Mikey, around four now, a toy toolkit including a plastic hammer and screwdriver fastened around his pot belly. Their bandy-legged mongrel pushed his way through the crowd and began the butt-sniffing circle dance with Stan.
‘Biscuit! No! Stop! Leave him, Biscuit!’
Stan went off into the house with Biscuit without glancing back and I saw Scout wince with pain at our dog’s total lack of regret about leaving us. She handed Mrs Murphy a bag containing Stan’s supplements to aid his joints, digestion and itchy skin. He had quite an elaborate health regime. As he progressed further into the flat, Stan was greeted by the rest of the family. Mrs Murphy’s husband Big Mikey – a suave, wafer-thin man with neat silver hair – and their son Little Mikey – a black-haired heavyweight – and Little Mikey’s wife, Siobhan.
Stan was in good hands.
‘It’s only seven days,’ Mrs Murphy said, touching Scout’s hair. ‘He’ll be fine. And so will you, young lady. Here.’
She had made us sandwiches.
Scout was bewildered.
‘Don’t they have any food on the plane?’
‘Ah,’ Mrs Murphy said, ‘but British Airways don’t know how you like your sandwiches, do they?’
She had us there.
‘I’ll just go and say goodbye to him,’ Scout said, handing me the sandwiches as she went into the flat.
Mrs Murphy looked me in the eye.
‘I know you want – I don’t know what you would call it – a joined-up life,’ she said. ‘A unified life. You want it for Scout and you want it for yourself and you feel that if you got that life then everything would work out. But you have it already. It doesn’t matter if you don’t look like every other family in the school – or the world. It doesn’t matter if you love each other. That sounds corny.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t sound corny to me.’
‘But you are complete,’ she said. ‘You and Scout. You already have that unified life. That joined-up life. That family. You just haven’t quite realised it yet.’ She felt like she had said too much. But sometimes people feel that way when what they have really said is everything. ‘But I’m an old lady,’ she said. ‘What do I know?’
Scout was back.
‘Quite a lot, probably,’ Scout said, joining the conversation.
Mrs Murphy shooed us away.
‘Go on, the pair of you,’ she said. ‘Off with you. See you in seven days.’
We carted our suitcases down to Charterhouse Street and looked for a cab. We only had to wait a few minutes before one appeared, and Scout bounced up and down on her junior Asics, excited by the sight of the greatest view in London, one of the greatest views in the world, up there with the Taj Mahal and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon – the sight of a black London cab with its yellow For Hire light on, shining like the sun on a late summer day.
‘Yes!’ Scout said, punching the air as she had when she came third in the heats of the 50-metre dash.
Because children live in the moment too.
When I awoke in the recovery room, my head as light as freshly spun candyfloss after having my stomach pumped, a couple of DIs from New Scotland Yard who I had never seen before were waiting to talk to me.
It was the hot debriefing, also known as the golden hour interview, aimed at obtaining as much detailed information as possible from those involved in an incident, especially the chronological breakdown of events.
‘We know what happened,’ one of them said, and I realised that they seemed very young to me.
‘The cousins are keen to cooperate,’ the other one said.
‘They told us about the spat between father and son.’
‘Families, eh?’ said the other one, and they both had a smile.
‘Bumpus?’ I said.
‘We found him lying on one of those – what’s it? – car compactors. Everybody missed him. The uniforms. The shots. He was just lying there. You were having a little nap underneath.’
‘Looks like they were planning to recycle him.’
‘But they didn’t get around to it. One of the paramedics finally spotted him.’
‘So Bumpus is in custody?’ I said.
They looked at each other.
‘The morgue,’ one of them said. ‘Someone shot him. Point blank in the heart.’
‘And what about the gun?’ I said. ‘Did you find the weapon? Do you have any prints?’
One of them yawned. The other looked at his watch.
They were done with me. And they had had a long day.
‘What gun?’ they said.
Then they let me sleep.
‘Going somewhere good?’ the taxi driver asked us as we headed west to the airport.
‘Sicily,’ Scout said. ‘The jewel in the Mediterranean.’
Our driver nodded, suitably impressed.
Scout and I smiled at each other and then we settled back, alone with our thoughts.
The black cab sped west to the airport and the tower blocks along the Westway loomed high above us as the Sunday streets of Notting Hill bustled with life below, and already I could see the planes heading to the airport, thin flashes of molten silver in the renewed blue of a perfect sky.
Scout was reading her book. Dog Songs by Mary Oliver.
She was right – there are all kinds of poems in the world. But there was no getting around the fact that some of the best ones are about dogs. And we missed our boy already.
Then I heard the bells of an ice cream van in those endless streets of the sprawling, eternal city and I saw that Scout had closed her eyes and was leaning back in the seat of that black cab, as if she was listening to the bells of a Sunday morning church service, or the bells of St Paul’s Cathedral itself, rather than some Mr Whippy van getting the last of the summer trade.
Scout was making a wish.
And I turned my face away to watch the planes, because finally I had learned enough to not ask my daughter what she was wishing for.
Because then it could never come true, could it?