Everybody Died, So I Got a Dog Read online

  About the Author

  Emily Dean is a writer and radio presenter. She is Frank Skinner’s co-host on the award-winning Frank Skinner Show (Absolute Radio) and currently presents a hugely successful podcast for The Times called Walking the Dog. She spent eight years as Deputy Editor of InStyle magazine and has written for titles such as The Times, the Evening Standard and You magazine. She lives in London, supports Arsenal and her career highlight was when Mark Gatiss called her ‘sci-fi royalty’ due to her childhood role in BBC cult series Day of the Triffids.

  EVERYBODY DIED, SO I GOT A DOG

  Emily Dean

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Emily Dean 2019

  Picture (here) © Michael Testa, michaeltesta.co.uk

  The right of Emily Dean to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Hardback ISBN 978 1 473 67136 2

  Trade Paperback ISBN 978 1 473 67137 9

  eBook ISBN 978 1 473 67139 3

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  To my sister Rachael – for everything xx

  I think it is only fair to tell you that I was devoted to your mother. I owe my very life to her. She was brilliant, beautiful, and loyal to the end. I shall always treasure her memory. To you, her daughters, I pledge my friendship, forever and ever.

  Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  Footnote

  Prologue

  This is a story about losing an entire family and gaining a dog. But you’ve probably worked that out already. As spoiler titles go, this one is up there with that film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. If you want to tell the unvarnished truth, though, I reckon you should do it from the very outset.

  I didn’t know that my journey back from loss would involve dogs. They had always been symbols of a life I’d longed for but never had. I couldn’t have predicted that a crossbreed called Giggle and a Shih Tzu who looked like the star of a film called Chewbacca – the Early Years would change everything.

  There are certain things you have to accept in life. No good ever comes from a sentence beginning, ‘I hope you won’t take this the wrong way …’ One day, the people you love will no longer be here. And you’ll probably die without ever really knowing how to pronounce the word ‘furore’. But, perhaps it’s never too late to try and get your shit together.

  When you wake up one day with nothing, in a sense you have everything. What if you could start your life over again?

  Part One

  Treacle

  Chapter One

  We would never be a dog family. It was Cookie Monster who made me realise that.

  The epiphany came while I was watching his performance of ‘One of These Things’, the lighters in the air hit of Sesame Street. Something about his cover version spoke to me. He really made it his own. As his ping-pong eyes bobbed about wildly, contemplating four plates of cookies, he delivered the words that would stay with me for the rest of my childhood. ‘One of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn’t belong! Can you guess which thing is not like the other thing? Before me finish me song?’

  He didn’t have to finish me song. I knew already which thing was not like the others. It was my family. Because the others were dog families. And we would never be a dog family.

  People with dogs represented every aspect of domesticity that was right and functional. We represented everything about family life that was curious and unpredictable. Those people with their spaniels, their setters and their terriers inhabited another country – they simply did things differently there. I longed for a dog, desperately, passionately. But not as much as I longed for us to be a dog family.

  Dog families gave their children something called ‘tea’ at around 5.00pm. When my older sister Rachael and I went to friends’ houses, their mums would produce Marmite soldiers, fish fingers or Findus beef Crispy Pancakes and orange squash. We would then be ushered into a room with a pastel floral sofa and yucca plant, to watch Blue Peter. The dad’s plum Ford Sierra would nose into the drive around 6.30pm and a Collie or a Labrador would race to the door to greet him. ‘Hey you, how’s my good boy!’ the dad would say, ruffling a furry neck. The dog would lick the dad dutifully and the whole family would settle down to watch David Attenborough’s Life on Earth before bedtime.

  Dog families set aside money for phone bills and insurance policies and cleaning products and food for the freezer. We existed on overdrafts and loans, which went on black cabs, first editions and paté from a posh shop called Fortnum & Mason. Dog parents taught you how to ride a bike. Our parents gave us masterclasses in deconstructing poetry, opening bottles of wine and charming bailiffs. And if the children in dog families asked, ‘Why is Granny being horrible to me?’ the mums tended not to respond with, ‘You know why, it’s because she’s on AMPHETAMINES, darling.’

  In the unlikely event dog families got a parking ticket, they paid it before it escalated into court appearances. They ate Rice Krispies before school, not the melon and Parma ham starter from last night’s dinner party. They didn’t use letters marked ‘Final Demand’ as wine coasters. They didn’t forget to mention that the Sex Pistols would be filming in your bedroom today. Dog families punished you for misdemeanours by sending you to your room or withholding your pocket money. Not by sticking a series of handwritten Shakespeare quotes up on cupboards. ‘This above all: to thine own self be true’ or more hauntingly, ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths.’ And dog-family car singalongs didn’t generally kick off with a song that began, ‘Sit on my face and tell me that you love me …’

  For the first seven years of my life we moved between houses, schools and continents with the casual indecisiveness of someone idly surfing TV channels. One moment we were living in a Victorian mansion flat in Battersea, the next a wisteria-covered cottage in Surrey, suddenly a wooden bungalow in New Zealand, then a modern beach apartment in a northern suburb of Sydney, before transferring to an Art Deco flat overlooking the city’s harbour.

  We witnessed a boat capsizing on our first day in Australia. ‘Darlings – HIGH drama!’ cried my mother, as my parents woke us up and ushered us on to the balcony to watch a rescue crew drag what was left of a man’s life ashore. ‘Shark attack!’ my father informed us
, guiding us through reports on our new marine neighbours in a National Geographic magazine. Two weeks later my parents were telling friends over midday carafes of wine how ‘extraordinary’ it was that we’d shown such reluctance to get in the sea. ‘We even hired an Olympic coach!’ they said, with a shrug. Perhaps shark-gate was their subconscious way of connecting us with the essence of our own existence, as we moved through life like Great Whites, torpedoing between friendships, houses and schools, bouncing frenetically from ‘So sad you’re leaving!’ cards to ‘Welcome to your new home!’ tags attached to poinsettias in empty rental houses.

  It was a lifestyle that required ambassadorial levels of charm, resilience and portability to carry off. ‘The itinerant Deans!’ was the cry with which we were often greeted in the book-filled houses of our literary friends, uttered by dads in paisley shirts as mums smelling of woody Seventies fragrances struggled to rescue lunches ready two hours previously. We came; we gave great anecdote about my father’s career as a BBC arts reporter and documentary maker – ‘Michael, tell everyone about when you interviewed Barbra Streisand!’ ‘Did Gore Vidal really try to seduce you?’ ‘The Duke of Windsor documentary was simply wonderful!’ then, often pursued by taxmen, we disappeared.

  Shortly before my seventh birthday and just after Rach’s ninth, after eight homes, three countries and seven schools, my father gave us a taste of domestic stability. He had fallen hopelessly in love with a magical nineteenth-century folly in north London called Holly Village. My mother hurriedly enrolled Rach and me at the local primary school, which was filled with the glorious progeny of dog families.

  The house was decorated with mossy gargoyles and turrets, and wreathed in ivy. Our landlords, like everyone to whom we owed money, were shrouded in malign mystery, but I knew them as ‘The bloody Walkers.’ ‘Don’t write on the walls, girls, remember the bloody Walkers!’ ‘They want the rent again, those mean bloody Walkers!’ I had never encountered the enigmatic ‘bloody Walkers’ but I imagined them as hooded figures running skeletal fingers down an inventory of comments like ‘Fag burn on nylon duvet’, written in scratchy Gothic script.

  So under the haunting gaze of Karl Marx, our formidable stone neighbour in nearby Highgate Cemetery, we settled into life at Holly Village. I got to know its alcoves and ancient Bakelite telephones, the smell of damp and the Victorian larder filled with Dijon mustards and gourmet preserves in place of the Pedigree Chum tins and family-sized Ribena bottles favoured by my school friends’ mums.

  The house had only two bedrooms. ‘Well, technically three, darling!’ my mother insisted, of a spider-infested turret crammed with old costumes and wigs, manuscripts of abandoned attempts at plays and theatre programmes. There were also scrapbooks filled with newspaper cuttings of my father’s TV appearances. Before his move into documentary reporting, he had been one of the rotating hosts of a BBC arts discussion show called Late Night Line-Up along with the broadcaster Joan Bakewell. It was the kind of show where men with vast sideburns and women in knee-high suede boots smoked and argued into the night with playwrights, philosophers, artists and actors. The job had filled our address book with literary names such as John le Carré and Doris Lessing and given my father the unanticipated honour of being the first man to appear on British colour TV – a moment probably lost on the seven dusty academics watching.

  My parents’ jobs were mystifyingly absent from my book What Do People Do All Day?, which featured animals happily engaging in human professions. There was a walrus wedged into dental nurse’s scrubs. A jumpsuited raccoon tinkering underneath the chassis of a car. A rabbit in cabin-crew uniform welcoming a fox on to a plane. But I couldn’t see any dad bears in floral shirts, cigarette in paw, chatting to Germaine Greer about gender politics. And there were no mummy pigs draped in silk kimonos on garden loungers, applying sun tan oil under a speech bubble that read, ‘Darling, get off the phone, my agent might be trying to call.’

  ‘My agent might be trying to call’ was a phrase Rach and I heard a lot when we were growing up. Followed by my father conspiratorially whispering to us with amusement, ‘But alas, he never does.’

  My mother’s acting career had been derailed partly by the arrival of first Rach and then me, but also by my father’s addiction to relocating, which explained the slightly erratic nature of her credits. ‘Is your mum famous?’ friends would ask throughout our childhood. ‘She played a Turkish brothel owner in a police drama,’ we’d reply, to blank looks. ‘A corpse in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes? She was in a Tampax ad?’ We would watch our peers’ interest dissolve, as their dreams of introductions to the man who played Danny in Grease collapsed.

  Not long after our return to England my mother began to dabble with bouts of understudying in West End theatres. ‘Right, just off to break a leg, girls!’ she would announce, zigzagging down the stairs of Holly Village in strappy heels and snug designer jeans. She would envelop us in vast scented hugs as she left, perfumed with bergamot, tobacco and exotic adult otherness. This was Nighttime Mum, the one who commanded smoky dressing rooms filled with boisterous actors, who flirted gently with the Stage Door man and urged her colleagues to have ‘just another glass, get it down you!’ Daytime Mum wasn’t like that. She insisted we have ballet lessons, took us to art galleries and cooked coq au vin the way my father liked it. Daytime Mum smothered us with soap-scented cuddles and soothing ‘there there’s’ if we were sick. The two characters seemed to be stuck in an eternal tussle.

  My parents encouraged Rach and me to immerse ourselves in my father’s work, so we would stay up late to view a studio debate about the morality of cosmetic surgery or an interview with a literary giant, sleepily trying to make sense of questions such as ‘Doris Lessing, have you always found yourself sitting in judgment on your civilisation?’ as we curled up alongside my sister’s ever-present Rupert Bear doll. Rupert, like us, carried the travel scars of a hardened foreign correspondent, having accompanied Rach across the world. He was her most treasured possession. Perhaps Rupert’s appeal lay in the fact that he always returned safely to idyllic village life after his adventures, a denouement less easy to lay bets on in our storyline.

  Rach was consistently drawn to representations of a gentler, bygone time. She collected period costume dolls and concealed her conventional beauty with an Old World eccentricity. Even her entry into adolescence would eventually be heralded not by slamming doors but by honking Handel on her trumpet in the bathroom every night, locked away from the commotion. My interests were generally more brash and peer-endorsed. I collected infant status symbols – a Chewbacca notebook, a Paddington diary, a TV-advertised memory game called Simon, that announced your defeat with a dramatic bass tone. But Rach had no desire to be like anyone else. She didn’t share my longing to be part of a dog family. She regarded our family life with good-natured grace.

  Her view of me was similarly tolerant – the exasperated love of an indulgent parent who wheels out euphemisms like ‘spirited’ to excuse questionable behaviour. ‘Emmy, that’s a silly-billy thing to do,’ she chided quietly when she caught me smearing toothpaste on my visiting grandfather’s neatly folded trousers. ‘You have too many personalities,’ she would often sigh when I lurched between tears and laughter in less than sixty seconds. Sometimes I would lure her over to the excitement of the dark side. She watched in horrified awe as I offered a babysitter ‘apple juice’, handing over a steaming glass of freshly decanted urine, and giggled as I placed a Whoopee cushion underneath the chair of a visiting BBC producer. But mainly our bond was rooted in the sibling language known only to us, and the secrets of our unconventional world.

  Rach and I shared a room, partitioned down the middle. Our beds were separated by a bamboo curtain, a flimsy Gaza Strip that divided our territories, which were prone to constant border disputes. On Rach’s side a nylon-caped William Shakespeare doll clutched a scroll next to a miniature Bible and a padlocked five-year diary marked PRIVAT!!! On mine were books with titles like The Naughti
est Girl in the School, glittery eyeshadows and pink hairbrushes, as well as a small shrine to Henry VIII, whose ‘drive it like you stole it’ approach to life had much in common with our own. And like Henry’s courtiers, we never quite knew what was coming next.

  It was impossible to predict what would cause a parental meltdown in our house. When, aged ten, I told my mum that I ‘wasn’t really enjoying’ the piano lessons taught to us by a parasol-wielding diva, it triggered a long festival of mournful handwringing, punctuated by cries of ‘Do you know how deeply those words hurt me?’ But decanting wine into a Charles and Diana wedding flask to get drunk at school a few years later got me a ‘you GUYS!’ eye roll. Similarly, my father smiled indulgently when we stole his Playboy magazine from under the bed and produced it in front of guests but erupted in rage when he spotted a Jackie Collins novel in Rach’s schoolbag. He declared it to be ‘heroin of the mind’ and suggested she ‘wean herself on to cocaine instead,’ presenting her with a Jeffrey Archer novel.

  Rare visits from dog families filled me with fear. I prepared for them like military platoon inspections, encouraging my mother to wipe cobwebs off the cooker, styling her in more conservative ‘mum’ clothes and urging her to take down the youthful photo of her, naked, straddling Christine Keeler’s infamous chair.

  ‘Your house looks like a church. Do you really live in there?’ friends would ask, poised for a tour, as their parents dropped me off after swimming parties. My T-shirt was invariably damp with a cocktail of chlorine and an outbreak of sweat at the prospect of them witnessing the noisy bohemia inside.

  ‘Yep! See you tomorrow at school. Bye!’ I would yell, abandoning manners for self-preservation, racing through the cobbled arch, past the manicured communal lawn that was maintained diligently by our neighbours. You shall not pass, I screamed internally. You and your dog-family ways don’t have the necessary clearance levels to cross into our peculiar sphere. They were too pure, too equable to be greeted with my dad’s wake up calls (‘Hands off cocks, girls, feet in socks!’). They lacked the stomach to cope with my alcoholic grandmother’s aggressive renditions of ‘Delilah’, as she offered Rach and me puffs on her cocktail cigarettes. And they simply weren’t hardy enough to witness my mother asking the car thieves my dad was making a documentary about, ‘Tell me, Keith, is this a BUSY time of year for you, work-wise?’