Waiting for Doggo by Mark Mills Read Free Book Online

to paragliding (in a shallow bowl scooped out of the Surrey Downs). Less successfully, I also took her to watch Portsmouth play Southampton in the fifth round of the FA Cup.
    Are these meaningless memories? Am I completely deluded? J isn’t the only friend of mine to share an opinion on Clara since she jetted off to God knows where (although I’m not sure even He knows). Many of the others have let slip in various ways that they found her a bit of a handful, that we weren’t good for each other. I wonder how long I can keep telling myself they’re wrong, that the best of what we were was known only to us.
    Polly texted me yesterday, even though we vowed not to communicate for a couple of weeks:
Why aren’t I feeling more guilty? X
    Because you have no moral rudder, you hussy x
    LOL. God I miss you. Sorry, I shouldn’t say that x
    Might be flattered if you weren’t in, er, Wales x
    It’s not so bad x
    Liar x
    I can remember every delicious detail of that night. Damn, there I go again. Don’t worry, have to dash. Middle-class brats screaming for burgers and yours truly on BBQ duty xx
    Rereading the exchange later, it strikes me that Clara and I would never have been able to produce it, that anything we wrote would have been bogged down in an earnestness of her or my making. The alchemy with Polly is a law unto itself, a wild beast prowling through the undergrowth. I’m seriously tempted to pick the conversation up where we left off. In the end, though, I take Doggo out for his final dump of the day.
    I love where I live. My flat is on Chesterton Road, which is a continuation of Golbourne Road, which lies at the top end of the Portobello Road. It’s not quite Notting Hill, but in my opinion it’s all the better for it. The area has an edgy, front-line feel to it, although long-term residents probably think it has been gentrified out of all existence by yuppie ad men like me moving in. Either way, it’s still a rich mix of North Africa and Portugal, designer boutiques and junk shops, hardware stores and specialist bike shops for people who could buy a motorcycle for the same money. The whole thing is overlooked by that soaring testament to 1960s brutalist architecture, Trellick Tower, which stands sentinel at the northern end of Golbourne Road.
    This is my stomping ground. I’ve been here for three years now and I can’t imagine living anywhere else. I love it more than ever, even on Saturdays, when the whole world descends on the street market and the hordes of visitors spill from the pavements into the streets. Doggo, I sense, is coming to love it too, if only because the Moroccan chefs sneaking cigarettes out the back of their restaurants toss him scraps of food when we make our evening pilgrimage to Athlone Gardens. Athlone Gardens is Doggo’s latrine, the place where he dutifully craps and I dutifully bag it up.
     
    In American romantic comedies, owning a dog is a sure-fire way of bumping into cute girls before bedding them. You meet them in Central Park (maybe their dog tries to mount your dog – a bit of canine gender reversal to take the edge off the obvious parallel); you part on awkward terms, resolving to keep your distance from each other in the future so as to avoid a repeat of the ugly spectacle, et cetera, et cetera, right through to the final scene in the church when, just as you’re exchanging your marriage vows, her dog attempts to mount your dog once again (tee-hee).
    In Kensington Gardens on a Sunday morning, most of the dog-owning women make my grandmother look like a spring chicken, and the few fit ones are, well, fit. You’d have to be an accomplished athlete to stand any chance of exchanging even a few words with them, that’s how fast they run, their lanky pedigree hounds bounding along beside them.
    You could never describe Doggo as a lanky hound. He’s a stumpy, honest-to-God, salt-of-the-earth, deep-dyed, through-and-through mutt. Remarkably, he seems to have no sense of this