THE SOUND OF BIRDSONG IN THE EARS OF A DOG: CHAPTER ONE

James Fairweather ─ ‘Cloudy’ as he was called by everyone who knew him on the street ─ had been sleeping rough for about eight years when the dog came into his life one freezing cold November day. The dog smelled alcohol on the man’s breath the moment that he went towards him, body held low to the ground in a pose of submission and tail wagging tentatively. Otherwise, the man crouched against the weathered limestone wall under the canopy of St. George’s Church was clean. There were no other unnatural smells on him. He smelled of alcohol, stale sweat, damp earth, and a long-unwashed version of himself.

The dog had slipped his collar in Hyde Park an hour earlier and, spooked by the car horns, by the rumble of wheels, by the petrol and diesel fumes, had run across the four lanes of Park Lane, miraculously dodging through the early-morning traffic in the half-dark that still cradled it. The dog had only just turned one year old; he was a black-and-white collie with sparkling, dark-brown eyes that now had fear in them. He would learn a new name that day.

‘Oi,’ Cloudy shouted out to Dave who was still cocooned deep within his sleeping-bag, ‘we’ve got a visitor.’ Dave’s sleeping-bag wriggled like a grub and his head emerged from one end. Cloudy took a swig from the can of lager propped by his feet, then put the can back down again and blew hard on his cupped hands as the dog kept trying to nuzzle up to him.

‘Wha─?’ Dave coughed up the word as his black-haired head emerged from the cocoon.

‘A dog,’ Cloudy replied. ‘It must be lost.’ Dave struggled to his feet, stamping them to get his circulating blood to reach his toes that were numb with cold, and walked over to pet the dog that was fawning around Cloudy.

‘She’s a beauty,’ Dave said, bending down to ruffle the dog’s neck, but tentatively as if it might bite him at any moment.

‘I think she’s a he,’ Cloudy answered him, laughing his hoarse laugh that condensed in the bright morning air.

‘Gimme some of your can,’ Dave pleaded. ‘I’m thirsty. What are you going do with him?’

‘What am I going do with him? I’ve no idea. Hope he’s found, I s’pose.’ The dog lay down on the stone floor of the church’s great entrance, right in front of Cloudy, and seemed to be trembling slightly. It was trying to fix him with its deep brown eyes.

‘D’you think he’s thirsty?’ Dave asked.

‘Could be; there’s a tap in the square. We can take him there for a drink.’

Dave folded his dirty blue sleeping-bag and rolled up the mat underneath it. He was only twenty-three and had youth on his side: give him five minutes and he would be up and ready for the day. Cloudy was a decade older and sleeping in this cold made him much slower in the mornings. He had been on the streets too long; he could really feel the weather and the constant fear, the endless scrabble for food and drink, getting to him now. No hostel would take a dog.

Hanover Square had now come back to life after the last clubbers had drifted away some time after 3am, leaving behind their joy-detritus of empty bottles and cans along the railings that enclose the sparse patches of grass and the flowerbeds. There is a tap for the gardener hidden behind a bush on the north side of the garden, a stone’s throw from the clamour of Oxford Street. Cloudy used the cord from his old-fashioned sleeping-bag as a short lead and tied it gently around the dog’s neck, making sure that it would not tighten as the dog pulled on this improvised lead. He was surprised to see that the dog offered no resistance, but simply seemed happy to have found someone who wanted to help him and dropped his head in readiness for the unfamiliar cord.

Cloudy walked the dog the hundred yards from the church up to the square, letting him lead the way as if he knew where he was going, sniffing at the pavement as he went. Dave followed behind, fumbling to roll a cigarette with cold fingers. The dog gulped greedily at the water from the tap until it seemed to have had enough. As Cloudy tried to take him back across the grass towards the exit nearest the bank buildings on either side of the entrance to Hanover Street, the dog suddenly stopped dead, arched its back and shat on the grass with no fuss, no scrabbled back-filling like cats do, and then was ready to be led on again. Dave laughed and said, ‘That’ll make the grass grow.’

Cloudy and Dave went back to their spot under the canopy of the Georgian church, the young dog sniffing around the steps and the wide pavement but generally staying near them, careful to avoid the road. Workers began to file into the buildings on St. George Street, one by one like erratically scurrying ants.

‘D’you think someone’s wanting him back?’ Dave asked.

‘How should I know? Could be, but he’s got no collar or tag on him,’ Cloudy answered, trying to scratch an itch midway down his back.

‘Finders keepers,’ Dave said.

‘He found us,’ Cloudy replied. ‘If he wants to stay with us, he can.’

The dog curled up by Cloudy’s feet, waiting for something to happen. He quickly fell asleep, and his back legs twitched as he dreamt of running and chasing across endless open fields.

*

Cloudy sold The Big Issue each day from his position up by Lloyds Bank, crying out ‘Bii-g Issue, ladies and gents, only one pound fifty, only one pound fifty,’ and then adding ‘I’ve only got seven left’, or ‘five left’ or ‘two left, c’mon you know you want one,’ until his quota for that day was sold and he had enough money in loose change, shrapnel, coppers and silver, to buy some cans and some food from the Sri Lankan newsagent on Maddox Street. In this life you can only shit for free: there was a public convenience a few streets away across Regent Street that did not charge an entrance fee. Dave and Cloudy tried to wash themselves there as well now and then, avoiding the cottagers and the dealers and the addicts who used the place as a drop-in centre. Cloudy and Dave were not users. Dave did not sell The Big Issue: he busked as best he could with a penny-whistle that he kept hidden in his sleeping bag. He had only been on the streets for just over a year: he had come to London from the north to get some work, but found that the streets were paved with squashed globs of spat-out chewing-gum rather than gold.

At around ten o’clock, Cloudy took the dog up to his spot outside the bank. He wondered if the dog had eaten already that day or, if not, whether he was hungry. He wondered what to call the dog for however long it stayed with him. Food would have to wait until lunchtime or whenever he had sold enough copies of the magazine to afford some for the both of them. The dog curled up by Cloudy’s feet as Cloudy bobbed up and down trying to keep warm near the lamppost at the junction of Hanover Street and Hanover Square. Most people seemed to ignore him and his repetitive sales patter completely, but there were regular appreciative glances and half-smiles at the dog from the passers-by.

He had sold five copies by twelve o’clock. It was not all profit, of course, as he had to buy enough of each week’s edition of the magazine first from The Big Issue at around fifty percent of the one-pound-fifty cover-price that he sold each copy for.

The pale sun was now high in the sky and the young dog was getting restless. Cloudy took him to the grass in Hanover Square to urinate. Early lunch-takers were braving the cold, hunched in their coats on the benches lining the paths that run diagonally across the square in a saltire cross pattern. The dog ran after a blackbird that was chattering and hopping on the grass in the farthest corner from the entrance that they had used. Just before the dog’s sharp jaws snapped shut on the bird, it shot up over the iron railings and, with loud cries of alarm, flew off between the buildings towards Oxford Street. The dog barked with the ecstasy of the chase, then cocked its leg against the nearest shrubs, subdued in their stunted growth by a life amongst car fumes and by the wintry air.     

In the newsagent Cloudy bought a sandwich and two cheap tins of dog food. He had no can-opener and had to find tins that did not need one. He mashed up the food with his penknife on the pavement at his pitch beside the lamppost, wiping the blade afterwards on the ancient jeans that had become almost a part of him, and the dog wolfed down the food hungrily, without stopping even to lick its lips or savour the taste of the processed meat.