“You really don’t say much, do you?” she said. “How about you write your name on it instead?”
Writing isn’t like talking and it’s good for telling someone something without saying it. On the card, instead of writing my name, I wrote: Sam is my friend. Mrs Cooper tapped the message on Sam’s hand.
Sam gave a felt tip to Mrs Cooper (because he doesn’t find writing easy) and tapped out what she had to write for him on his picture. Mrs Cooper gave me the card and went off to cook the tea.
She had written for Sam: Cally and me, one who feels and one who sees. It was like a little poem. I thought I knew which one was me and which one was him.
I looked closer at the picture I wanted to keep. There was Sam, my new friend, grinning from under his floppy dark hair, the huge green common and trees behind him, and another familiar shape in the background. A silver-grey dog.
My insides lurched; my head felt like it would pop, I could feel my breath caught tightly at the top of my chest. Sam leaned close, tipped his left ear; he put his hand on my arm. He looked thoughtful; he seemed to know something was up. He pulled his boxes of cards over, opened the lids, found a card with the word, WHAT?
Sam smoothed his fingers across the bumps on each card I handed him. DOG – Sam nodded. BIG – Sam nodded. I couldn’t find a card for Homeless, so I gave him the card for LOST.
Sam’s eyebrows bunched up. So I pulled him outside, made him stand where he had been standing, held his arm out, rolled his fingers under until just his first finger was pointing across the common.
Homeless was still there, far away, his nose to the ground. I climbed on the wall, made myself as big as possible in a star shape, waved and laughed and laughed. Homeless’s head rose, his ears twitched forward. And then he came, slowly at first, then galloping straight to us across the common.
I put Sam’s hand on Homeless, but he never let go of me. I felt his hand tighten round mine as he felt all over the tall body, felt for the right way to smooth Homeless’s scruffy fur. Homeless let him touch his great teeth and cool damp nose, find the end of his curved tail. Sam was jittery and laughing. I don’t suppose he’d ever felt anything quite like Homeless before and I was glad they met, that I had someone to share Homeless with. I smoothed Homeless’s ears. Soft as my mum’s hair.
Sam took two photographs of Homeless because the first one just had his tail and back legs. Homeless just wouldn’t keep still, winding round us as if he had to keep us together.
“Wait!” Sam suddenly said.
He left me with Homeless, went inside, bumping into the doorway in a hurry to go in. He came out with some cheese and slices of ham and Homeless wolfed them down.
Sam put his hand where his heart would be, patted his chest, then put one of his cards in my hand. Sam stopped moving. He was so still I wondered if he’d fallen asleep standing up.
I looked at the card. It had a picture just like the one on the Flat to Rent sheet Dad showed us. A picture of number 4 Albert Terrace. It said HOME.
22.
THEN MRS COOPER CAME OUT. SHE SAID, “IT’S nearly teatime.” Her eyes popped wide when she saw Homeless.
“Goodness!” she said. “Where did he come from?”
Sam went quiet. His face was serious. He held his hand out for Mrs Cooper to tap what she was saying.
“You don’t often see Irish wolfhounds these days.” She laughed. “Not much call for them, what with there being no wolves here any more. I think he must be lost, don’t you?”
She checked for a collar, but he didn’t have one.
“We ought to find out who he belongs to, although I can’t imagine how anyone could lose something quite so big.”
Homeless sat down. He looked into my face. He seemed to know something wasn’t right.
“Somebody will be missing him. I’d better make some phone calls.”
Sam didn’t let go of Homeless; he didn’t let go of me while Mrs Cooper went in to make the calls.
And then Dad arrived.
“How the hell did that dog get here?” he snapped.
“The children found it,” said Mrs Cooper, coming back out.
“But what’s it doing here?”
Mrs Cooper blinked. “I thought we’d better check if it was lost.”
“And?”
“And I checked, and nobody’s reported it missing.”
Dad took a deep breath, snapped his eyes at me. “You going to tell me what’s going on?”
I put my arms round Homeless, looked into his soft brown eyes, looked into Dad’s icy blue eyes. Sam still didn’t let go of me, but he held my hand up with the card saying HOME, turned his left ear towards Dad.
Dad closed his eyes. “No,” he said, “we’re not keeping it.”
And I wished and hoped and tried to believe. Would anything that I said make him say yes? I put my hands together like a prayer.
“No! We can’t afford it.”
Sam spelled something on his mum’s hand.
“What about if we shared the cost?” said Mrs Cooper.
“I said no!” Dad growled and glared. “And right now I’ve got enough problems.”
Mrs Cooper said quietly, “Such a shame this all seems a problem,” which made Dad’s mouth screw tight.
It wasn’t like him to bite his tongue, but you could tell what he was thinking. It was written all over his face. Stop interfering, mind your own business and get out of my winter cave!
He looked at me once more. “NO!” he shouted.
Homeless’s ears pricked at a whistling sound. He looked over his shoulder. Someone was standing by the trees, a small dark figure with a purple Puffa jacket, but only I saw him. Jed. Homeless slipped through my hands, through the open gate, and ran.
Mrs Cooper sighed, “Oh, well, problem solved. For now.”
Dad glared at her, said, “Someone else can sort it out. They’ll soon forget all about it.”
Forgetting is one of the words I hate. I know what it means – it’s when you can’t remember. And when you can’t remember, you’re not as good as when you can.
Dad pushed through us, called back without looking, “Cally, come inside now.”
Mrs Cooper whispered to me, “I’m sorry, I think I made things worse.”
Sam tapped on Mrs Cooper’s hand. I could see she was making sense of the taps and shapes on her hand, listening to something. She shrugged, smiled. “Sam says, don’t worry. You’re not alone.”
23.
DAD WAS LYING ON THE SOFA WATCHING TV, his shirt untucked, a bottle of beer in his hand.
“We can’t have a dog here,” he said. He sat up, put the bottle down and pressed the mute button.
“We can’t afford it. You’d want it to have a good home, wouldn’t you?”
There was no point