Dog Read online

  Dog

  Naomi Jessica Rose

  Copyright © 2018 Naomi Jessica Rose

  All rights reserved.

  Cover illustrations by Ivan Rose

  For Mikey

  Table of Contents

  Dog

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1: Dog

  Chapter 2: The High Shelf

  Chapter 3: World War III and the Horrible Girls

  Chapter 4: King of the Castle

  Chapter 5: Dog

  Chapter 6: Rescue

  Chapter 7: Miss Moore

  Chapter 8: Baba Yaga

  Chapter 9: Dog

  Chapter 10: Dog’s Dinner

  Chapter 11: Archie’s Mum

  Chapter 12: The Trouble with Harry

  Chapter 13: Dog

  Chapter 14: Found

  Chapter 15: Saturday Night

  Chapter 16: Sunday Morning

  Chapter 17: Dog

  Chapter 18: As Time Goes By

  Chapter 19: Strategy

  Chapter 20: Disappeared

  Chapter 21: Dog

  Chapter 22: The Cupboard

  Chapter 23: Where Are We Going?

  Chapter 24: Mum’s Dog

  Chapter 25: Dog

  Chapter 26: Top of the World

  Chapter 1: Dog

  Dog did not like the new house. It smelled wrong and the things she expected to find were not in the places she expected to find them. Most of the things she expected to find were not there at all. She wanted to go home to Mum.

  The family seemed to realise this as well because they kept shutting the doors. They would go out of the doors and shut them behind them, so Dog couldn’t follow. But Dog was patient. She curled up in her old bed, which smelled the same as it always had, and she went to sleep.

  Chapter 2: The High Shelf

  Archie lay on his bed and tried to read his book. It was a book he’d been given as a prize at school and he really wanted to read the whole thing by the end of the holidays. He could always tell Miss Patel he’d read it, even if he hadn’t and she’d believe him, but he wasn’t keen on that idea somehow. The prize was for the ‘most improved reader’ and Archie was determined to prove Miss Patel had given it to the right person.

  The problem was he didn’t like the book. It was about pirates sailing ships in tropical seas and a girl who had run away from home. Archie didn’t really get it if he was honest. The girl didn’t seem anything like the people he knew. Never mind. He ploughed on. A whole page of description of the inside of a cave. A whole page? Surely that wasn’t necessary? The words said themselves in Archie’s head, but they didn’t seem to be able to stick together and mean anything. And anyway, there was so much noise coming up from downstairs it was impossible to concentrate. Archie sighed.

  When his mum was at work in the summer holidays, Archie’s brothers were supposed to look after him. It was a joke really, and his mum knew it. Rafe and Hector only ever looked after themselves. And when his mum came home they would have done something even more awful and she would look so unhappy. Sometimes she would cry.

  Archie listened. He could hear them laughing. He could hear banging and crashing. It didn’t sound good. He picked up his bookmark and looked at it. It had a photograph of him on it, smiling like crazy for some reason, and underneath the photo it said ‘To Archie, from Miss Patel’. Archie wished there was a picture of Miss Patel on the bookmark too. He put the bookmark carefully into the book and closed it, gathered himself up from his bed and went downstairs.

  It wasn’t an entirely new or unexpected scenario that met his eyes when he got to the bottom of the stairs, but it was still pretty alarming. The twins had found some long planks of wood from somewhere and had laid them around the living room, making ramps up and over the sofa and the chairs. Rafe was sitting on his bike in the middle of the rug, issuing instructions to Hector who was on his bike too, halfway along a plank balanced precariously between the blue squashy sofa and the green upright armchair.

  “Really?” Archie stood in the doorway with his hands on his hips.

  The twins both looked at him. Archie’s brothers were supposed to be identical, but they weren’t. Rafe was round like a ball with pudgy cheeks and usually a sleepy, disinterested expression on his face. Hector was frame-like and bony. He seemed taller than his twin, but that was only because Rafe hardly ever stood up. At this moment though, the looks on their faces were exactly the same; a kind of waking up innocence followed by a glare of resentment. At least for a moment they were.

  And then Hector remembered what he had been doing and turned his attention back to balancing his BMX on a beam. Too late though. He began to wobble, hastily twisted the handlebars this way and that to try to correct himself and finally toppled off sideways onto the floor, bike and all, with a shout of alarm.

  Archie wasn’t in the least worried about his brother’s wellbeing. “What’s mum going to say?” he asked as he watched Hector untangle himself while Rafe laughed his rather nasty, thuggish laugh.

  “Shut up Archie,” Hector said. “Go and help an old lady cross the road or something.” He wasn’t hurt at all. He got back on his bike and prepared to ride up the slope onto the sofa once again.

  Rafe was unhappy about that though. “Oy, it’s my turn!” he said, thrusting forward on his own bike. This annoyed Hector, who was already embarrassed about falling off. He began bunny hopping his bike aggressively, trying to smash into Rafe’s. It was kind of fighting, but also kind of not. Rafe and Hector acted out fighting against each other all the time, but it was only when they teamed up and went for a third party that they were really dangerous.

  Fighting with bikes in the middle of the living room, however fake, was pretty much certain to cause the kind of damage that would make Archie’s mum cry. The borrowed planks were filthy and the bikes had been leaving tracks all over the place. Hector’s bunny hopping knocked the coffee table and sent a glass rolling over to smash on the floor.

  “Now look what you’ve done!” Archie said.

  His brothers ignored him. Rafe managed to push Hector out of the way and get his bike up onto the sofa plank. Archie watched the plank bending under the considerable combined weight of Rafe and his bike. He watched Rafe’s elbow knock into the large framed photograph of three neatly-combed, grinning boys and set it swinging on its nail. And Hector wasn’t just sitting there either; he had decided to ride round the course the other way.

  Archie could only think of one thing to do, though he didn’t really have much hope for success. He scrambled up onto the wobbly plank in front of Rafe, blocking his path so he was forced to jump his bike down to the floor which he did surprisingly neatly. Archie jumped down too and heaved up the plank he’d been standing on.

  “Stop messing up our course you little bleeper!” Rafe said, planting his feet firmly either side of his bike and glaring.

  Archie sighed. It was completely ridiculous to try to build a BMX course in the living room. It was never going to work; there wasn’t nearly enough room. “Why don’t you just go to the park like normal people?” he asked.

  Hector had got down too. He grabbed at the plank Archie was holding, but Archie was really cross and he gripped it tight. “You’re going to break everything!” he said.

  “What does it matter?” Hector asked, seeming honestly to want to know. “This place is a wreck anyway. You can have a go on my bike if you want.”

  “No!” Archie flung the planks off the sofa and lay down on it, full length.

  “Excellent,” Rafe said, laughing. “A new obstacle.”

  Archie lay there obstinately as his brothers re-laid the planks over the sofa and on top of him as well. He knew they wouldn’t go as far as to actually ride their bikes over him, but he was still annoyed that t
hey didn’t care about wrecking the living room. They were expecting him to give up and go away. Well they were going to get bored waiting for that. Archie kicked and wriggled so the planks fell off and his brothers tried to put them back on. The planks were heavy and hard and Archie was inevitably banged on the head and bumped around painfully, but he kept on twisting and pushing nonetheless, even though he knew what would happen in the end.

  “I’ve had enough,” Rafe said. Rafe was always the first one to have had enough.

  “Me too,” said Hector and he threw down the plank he was holding and simply lifted Archie up, high up above his head.

  Archie’s brothers had always been large. Even Hector, who was bony, was huge and heavy and strong. Archie was small. He was also weak and badly co-ordinated, useless at football, unable to hope he might ever be able to join in with King of the Castle. Up in the air he kicked and squirmed, but Rafe came to hang on to him too, dragging himself up to his proper height for a change. Held there by both of them, Archie could hardly move. His brothers lugged him halfway up the stairs where there were shelves built across the back wall of the stairway, all the way up to the ceiling. There weren’t many books on the shelves, and those there were lived on the lower shelves where they could be reached. There was all manner of other old junk as well as books, but the top shelves were empty, as the only person who ever put things there was mum, and she couldn’t reach very high. The twins could reach higher. The shoved Archie on to the highest shelf they could get to and left him there.

  Being put on the high shelf was a fairly frequent occurrence in Archie’s summer holiday experience. He couldn’t get down by himself. He had to wait for the twins to relent, or for his mum to come home, or some stranger to wander into the house by chance, which sometimes happened. He could hear that his brothers had returned to their project. He looked around at the dust on the shelf where he was wedged. There was a fat old spider in a corner, crouching in an elaborate web decorated with its neatly-wrapped dinner. Archie’s stomach rumbled. He wished he had his book with him.

  Chapter 3: World War III and the Horrible Girls

  Soralina was disturbed by her smaller sister rushing into the bedroom. She looked up from her book, frowning. Ana was puffing and her cheeks were pink, she plunged into the cupboard and slammed the door behind her resolutely. World War III, Soralina discerned. Ana’s radar for that kind of thing was much better than her own, especially when she was reading. She had been lost in a world of tropical seas and pirates, spiralling off into wonderland, noticing absolutely nothing around her. But perhaps stopping was a good idea. Her mother had only let her chose three library books, despite Soralina pointing out that the library would allow her as many as fifteen. Her mum hadn’t believed her and had said that anyway, if they got fifteen books for Soralina and fifteen books for Ana they would have to get fifteen books for Niki too, and where would they put them all? And the chances of getting to the library again these holidays were minimal, so Soralina was rationing her books. This was the first one; it was the same book that her friend Archie had won as a prize at school. Archie had promised to lend the book to Soralina when he finished it, but Soralina didn’t expect that would ever happen so she had taken matters quietly into her own hands. The book was amazing. Soralina had known it would be because Miss Patel had chosen it.

  She picked up her bookmark, the one that Miss Patel had given her on the last day of school, put it into her book and listened. She could hear quiet voices, nothing alarming yet. It was all right for Ana, shutting herself into the cupboard with her music. Soralina did not want to be there when the storm broke. She opened the door to the living room cautiously.

  Soralina and her family (one mum, one dad, one sister, one brother) lived in two rooms in a tall townhouse. One of the rooms was the living room and kitchen, the other the bedroom. They shared the bathroom on their landing with another family. Soralina’s mum and dad were both in the room which was also stuffed with all of their things; mum’s sewing things, the washing, dad’s electronics. There was a daybed in there too, where dad often slept and where he lay down when his back hurt too much for him to sit up. He was sitting up now at the table, frowning into the insides of a television he taken to bits and mum was talking to him in a serious murmur while she rocked the baby she looked after during the day. Niki was cooing happily in his playpen, for now anyway. Soralina recognised the expression on her father’s face. There wasn’t much time to spare.

  “Mum, can I go out to play?” she asked.

  “Go where?” Her mum spared her a moment of concern and a worn out smile to go with it.

  “To Archie’s. Just for an hour.”

  “All right then,” her mother said. “But it had better just be an hour Soralina. We’ve got so much to do this afternoon!”

  Soralina checked the time on the clock on the wall. She wondered if an hour would be long enough to avoid the whole of World War III, but she had no intention of being any longer and letting her mother down. She clattered hurriedly down the stairs listening carefully in two different directions; up for her parents voices, raised, it seemed, the minute she had closed the door, and down as well, for any sound of the horrible girls.

  The horrible girls never made much noise. They were a recent phenomenon, turned up just in time for the school holidays. No-one seemed to have been around or to have noticed when they arrived at the house next door but one. They were just suddenly there, taking up the whole street with their enormous menacing presence. Soralina and Ana had begun calling them the horrible girls at once.

  “You shouldn’t talk about other people that way,” their mother had told them. “You don’t know the girls. Perhaps if you talked to them you could end up being friends!”

  “No-one could be friends with anyone that horrible,” Ana said defiantly, and it was true too, their mother simply didn’t understand.

  “Well I don’t want to hear you talking like that!” she had said.

  So Soralina and Ana talked about the horrible girls in English, that way their mother wouldn’t know.

  And today the horrible girls were out in force.

  “You can’t come this way.” One of the girls stood on the pavement in Soralina’s way, feet apart, arms crossed.

  Soralina had no idea what any of the girls were called or how old they were. She didn’t even know how many, there seemed to be no end to them. They had brown eyes and neatly plaited hair scraped back tight from their faces and most of them were bigger than Soralina. There were three others all stood staring now, two behind the low wall in front of their house, one in the open doorway.

  Soralina lifted her chin and tried to walk around the girl, but the girl moved over and stayed in front of her. Soralina took a step back, her foot slipped off the edge of the kerb and she stumbled into the road. The girls laughed and the one girl stepped into the road too. “You can’t walk on our path,” she said. “So what are you going to do?”

  Soralina looked left and right along the street. There were cars parked there. Some had been parked there for time out of mind and would never move again, but there were no cars coming. She crossed the road and climbed the grassy hump on the other side, where there were tall trees planted between the little road outside the houses and the main boulevard. She looked back and saw the girls all standing on the pavement staring at her, hands on hips in identical poses. But they didn’t follow. Soralina could feel her heart thudding away inside her now and she made her way down the hump and crossed the boulevard carefully, heading off towards the Castle and beyond that to Archie’s house.

  Chapter 4: King of the Castle

  “Hi Soralina!” someone called.

  Soralina was still thinking about the horrible girls. She wished she could be strong and brave, able to think of the right thing to say that would make the girls leave her alone, but she just couldn’t and that was that. She looked up and there was Harry-Beau standing on the top of the Castle and waving at her, smiling so widely that she fou
nd she couldn’t help smiling too.

  The Castle was part of the local park. It was a huge wooden construction with a variety of ways in and out and up and down and none of the children round about could help but be awed by it. The little kids played on the Castle fine enough in the daytime when they were out with their mums and their uncles and their childminders, but when the bigger children took it over the little ones all skittered away to a safe distance. They would watch the big ones play King of the Castle with their mouths hanging open for as long as they were allowed.

  Archie’s mum always laughed when they talked about how the kids at the park played King of the Castle. “That’s what we used to play when we were little!” she said. “You had to scramble up to the top of wherever it was and push everyone else away, then you were King of the Castle and sang the song. It was banned at my school!”

  “Why was that?” Archie had asked, interested.

  “Because it got too rough. All that pushing and shoving turned into fighting half the time.”

  It was strange to think of King of the Castle as being about little kids pushing and shoving, laughing. This version was nothing like that; it was deadly serious. Soralina watched as Harry looked over his shoulder and then jumped backwards, flipping like a pancake on his way down. How could he do that? How could anyone? Harry turned so gracefully in the air, and Soralina was filled with envy. She’d tried standing up on the top of the Castle, but she couldn’t even make herself jump off forwards, it was such a long way down! Harry didn’t land very gracefully though, he crumpled and rolled and stayed where he was, all in a ball on the ground.

  “Are you all right Harry?” Soralina asked quietly.

  “Who’s your girlfriend Harry?” someone called down.

  Soralina looked up. There were three other boys on the top of the castle, Mohammed, Fordy and Ran. Harry got up and scowled at her, making his wide handsome face ugly and mean. Then he looked away as if Soralina didn’t exist.