She glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw that Courtney was already asleep, making little buzzing sounds, like a large bee.

Started Early, Took My Dog _2.jpg

Jackson wondered what a dog might need. Food and a bowl to eat it out of, he supposed. He found both in a shop called Paws for Thought. He sensed he was entering deep into unknown territory. He had a new role. He knew who he was, he was a dog owner. He found it hard enough coping with having a son, the dog felt like even more of a stretch.

‘Lovely Border terrier you’ve got yourself there,’ the woman behind the counter said.

‘Is it?’ Jackson said, studying the dog. He had assumed it was some kind of mongrel, not a breed. It certainly looked like a mongrel, and not a particularly prepossessing one either. There were traces of blood on the dog’s snout and on his fur and the woman said, ‘Oh dear, has he been in a fight?’

‘Sort of,’ Jackson said.

The woman gave the rope around the dog’s neck a disapproving glance and said, ‘What’s the poor little chap’s name?’

Jackson ran through a mental list of names that might be more suitable than the one the dog already had and came up with nothing, apart from Jess, but that name was owned for ever by the Atwells’ sheepdog.

‘The Ambassador,’ he finally owned up. ‘He’s called The Ambassador.’ The dog’s ears perked up attentively. Jackson wondered where the dog had got its name from. He tried to imagine its big, ugly owner – ex-owner – shouting ‘Ambassador!’ into the depths of a field. In Roundhay it had been a torrent of expletives that had flowed from Colin’s mouth. He supposed it was a joke, imagined someone saying, ‘The Ambassador needs brushing’ or ‘The Ambassador’s asleep in his basket.’

The pet-shop woman raised sceptical eyebrows and said, ‘The Ambassador? I would have thought that was a name for a bigger dog.’

‘He’s big inside,’ Jackson said defensively.

The woman swept her hand around the shop and said, ‘Anything else? How about a coat? For the dog,’ she added when Jackson looked at her blankly. It seemed to Jackson that nature had given the dog a perfectly good coat so he said no but bought a leather lead and left before he got carried away by, say, the small four-legged sailor uniform that was hanging behind the counter, complete with jaunty little hat.

Jackson took out his Swiss Army knife and, showing it to the dog, said, ‘Man’s best friend.’The dog sat passively while Jackson cut through the tightly knotted rope around its neck. ‘Good dog,’ Jackson said.

When Jackson first encountered the dog it had seemed unruly but now seemed merely full of spirit, walking nicely on the lead, no pulling or messing about, and appeared delighted to be in Jackson’s company. He wondered if he looked foolish striding along the streets with a small dog on a lead trotting purposefully by his side. He wondered how women felt about men with small dogs. Would they think he was gay? Would they find him more trustworthy than a man without a dog? (Hitler liked dogs, he reminded himself.)

He found himself pausing at traffic lights. He would normally have made a heroic dash across the road (or a lunatic dash, depending whose side you were on – Jackson’s or most of the women in his life) but now he was waiting stoically for the green man, suddenly transformed into a parent again by being in charge of something smaller than himself.

Back in the vicinity of the Merrion Centre (he wondered how the confused old woman had got on, he had trusted the Canadian girl not to call the police) he checked into a somewhat unsightly Best Western and asked for a double room because he didn’t like to think of himself as a single man in a single room. (‘You seem to be living the life of a travelling salesman,’ Josie said.

‘Let’s hope you don’t turn into a giant insect,’ Julia laughed.

‘Eh?’ Jackson said.)

The hotel gave him a twin-bedded room, which seemed worse, the unoccupied bed like a reproach somehow.

Jackson was a naturally frugal traveller. ‘Tight as a tic’s arse’ is what his brother would have said. He had been brought up on prudence and thrift – or to put it another way, in poverty – and the older he got the more he found himself reverting to parsimony. That didn’t mean that he was beyond the occasional startling largesse, to Betty’s waitresses, for example.

Jackson had stayed in some of the best hotels in the world but now he found himself quite content to sleep within the bland budget walls of the Travelodges and Premier Inns that he encountered along his nomadic route. They were places where you paused and moved on and nothing stuck to you. Waking in the middle of the night there was something comforting to be found in the drone of the engine of the hotel as it sailed on into the morning. He knew who he was in a hotel, he was a guest.

After his six months on the road he was beginning to wonder if he even wanted to stop. Jackson Brodie, the rambling man. A vagabond. Hotels were becoming boring, but what about a caravan? Josie’s parents had been in possession of a small Sprite that they had loaned to Jackson and Josie in the early days of their marriage when they still qualified as newly-weds and Jackson, just back from the Gulf and out of the army, had thought of enlisting in the French Foreign Legion if this was what his life was to be from then on – caravanning holidays in the company of Little Englanders. Now, though, he could see a certain charm in his ex-in-laws’ obsession with loading up the wagons and moving on, pioneers of the open road.

He could fit out a caravan (he imagined Romany rather than Sprite) as neatly as a little boat and a shipshape Jackson could boil up water on an open fire, catch rabbits with little wire traps, sleep with the smell of woodsmoke in his hair. Apart from the odd accidental roadkill or the mercy killing of a victim of myxomatosis, he had never knowingly dispatched a rabbit but supposed he could if it was a necessity. Especially if it was a big rabbit called Muffin.

On reflection he wasn’t a caravan man. And, truth be told, he was growing tired of his vagrant life. He wanted a home. He would like a woman in that home. Not all the time, he had grown too used to his own company. There was a time when he had been a man who only felt fulfilled when facing life shoulder to shoulder with a woman. He had enjoyed being married, perhaps more than his wife had. His real wife, not the crooked trickery which had been his second wife. (‘A Fata Morgana,’ Julia said. ‘A mirage.’)

Julia had once told him that the ideal partner was one that you could keep in a cupboard and take out when you felt like it. Jackson thought it unlikely that there were women out there who would acquiesce to being kept in a cupboard. Didn’t stop men trying to find them though.

Sensing animals would not be welcome in the Best Western he had sneaked the dog in, concealed in his rucksack. Beforehand, in the car park, Jackson had tipped out half the bag’s contents and invited a not entirely compliant dog to enter into the bespoke space. With some encouragement from Jackson, the dog had eventually settled into the innards of the bag. There was something to admire in the dog’s character. ‘Good dog,’ he said, because praise seemed to be called for.

Once he was in the room he released the dog from its prison. He opened a can of dog food and dumped it in the bowl he had bought and the dog ate as if famished. There was a ‘hospitality tray’ in the room with tea, coffee, a kettle and cups and saucers. Jackson took one of the saucers and filled it with water from the bathroom. The dog drank as if it had been in a drought.

He had dropped into a chemist on the way to the hotel and picked up an ad hoc first-aid kit and now used the TCP and cotton wool to clean up the dog’s scratches. The dog stood stoically while it was prodded and poked and only flinched slightly when the antiseptic touched broken skin or Jackson found a bruise. ‘Good dog,’ Jackson said again.


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