‘Do you live near here?’ Keeley asked him as they picked their way up the street. The road narrowed significantly, until it was all but a pathway. She dropped in behind him.
‘I live in the Opera District,’ he answered. ‘I have a small apartment above a bakery. I rented it simply because of the aromas.’ He stalled suddenly, acutely aware he had just said something wrong. ‘Oh… I am so sorry. I did not mean to mention the smell. I—’
‘It’s OK,’ she answered. ‘I recall the amazing scent of fresh bread.’
‘It was a ridiculous thing to say. Thoughtless!’
‘It’s OK,’ she insisted again. ‘Honestly.’
He kept running, passing flashes of festive in the windows of the houses not knowing how to pick the conversation back up after that faux pas.
‘So, I’ve been wondering, what you do… as a job I mean.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Do you work at the zoo?’
‘The zoo?’ He suddenly wondered if he might smell. He hadn’t managed a shower this morning. He had woken irritably at the early alarm call until he remembered who he was meeting for the run. Then it dawned on him. Pepe.
‘When we met you were chasing a penguin,’ Keeley reminded.
He wanted the pathway to widen again, so they could jog next to each other. As cute as her bobbing ponytail and rear view was, he really wanted to look into her eyes. ‘I was.’
‘So, you don’t work at the zoo?’
‘Not the zoo,’ he answered. And he couldn’t tell her the truth about why he had acquired Pepe. He didn’t want her to think he was juvenile. And it had been juvenile. In the end his prank had played right into Louis’s hands. ‘I… work in…’
Emerging from the narrow street and onto a bigger road there was the sudden sound of squealing brakes followed by a loud wail that sounded very much like a cry for help.
Thirty
For a second, Keeley froze. Those sounds. Metal on metal. A tell-tale crunch. And then she came-to as a cry hit the air.
‘Mon chien! Mon chien!’
There was a small boy in the middle of the road ahead, his body draped over the prostrate form of a shaggy-coated brown-coloured dog. Keeley’s heart was already in her mouth as she powered towards them. It was the dog, not the boy. The boy had shouted out. The dog was not barking.
‘What’s happened?’ she asked.
The boy cried out again, this time so loud and with such anguish that Keeley dropped to her knees onto the ground next to the possibly-ten-year-old. ‘It’s OK. It’s alright.’ She had no idea if it was going to be alright. The dog was very still and with the boy lying over it she couldn’t ascertain exactly what had occurred. She assumed, given the boy’s concern, and the dog’s lack of movement that the animal had to be injured.
‘Une voiture,’ the boy simpered, raising his head.
‘Tu!’
Ethan had arrived and after this single first word that Keeley understood as ‘you’, he had started talking at speed in French to the child. She didn’t understand a word of it, so while the boy got to his feet she focused on the dog. It was breathing, but it was very slow and shallow, as if each rise and fall of its abdomen was taking it further and further away from this world…
‘Keeley,’ Ethan said. ‘This is a scam.’
‘What?’ she asked, looking away from the animal for a second then back to it again as if she was missing a vital component of the scene.
‘There is nothing wrong with the dog,’ Ethan carried on. ‘It will possibly not even belong to her. Come on. Let us carry on our run.’
‘Non!’ The boy was down on his knees again, hands in the dog’s mottled fur.
Keeley looked up to Ethan. ‘I think the dog is really hurt.’
‘Impossible. This girl is from the street. Yesterday I thought she was simply looking for food, but now she is trying out one of the oldest tricks. Playing on your sentiments. Make sure your wallet is secure.’
Had he really said ‘girl’? Keeley looked again at the now sobbing child who was cradling the dog’s slightly floppy head whispering softly in French. Was ‘he’ a ‘she’? It was hard to tell with her head covered by a hat and the rest of her/him dressed in gender neutral jeans and a baggy black jumper. ‘Ethan,’ she said her eyes now only on the dog, ‘I think the dog is genuinely very unwell.’
‘What?’
His word was coated in shock and surprise and in a second he had joined her on his knees on the road as the boy/girl cried out again, body trembling.
‘Well… we can take it to a vet,’ Ethan said immediately.
He made a movement like he was going to try and scoop the animal up from the concrete. Keeley reached out a hand, holding onto his arm and shaking her head. She whispered, ‘It’s best not to move him. Can you call someone? To come here?’
‘To come here?’ Ethan asked.
Was that the right course of action? To keep the dog still? Or was Keeley saying that because she remembered the words of the paramedics when she’d been lying half pinned into the back of the taxi, being ordered not to turn her head or move even a centimetre, calling for Bea and reaching to hold her hand.
She watched Ethan pull a mobile phone from the pocket of his joggers and make a call. She put an arm around the child, patting their shoulder. ‘Listen,’ she whispered. ‘You need to tell the dog you love him. Keep telling him so he can hear your voice. Tell him that he is the best dog in the whole world. That everything is going to be OK.’ A lump gathered in her throat as she lifted her eyes to Ethan who still had the phone to his ear, call not yet connected. ‘Can you… tell him in French.’
‘Her,’ Ethan repeated. ‘It is a girl.’ He took a deep breath and said some words in French. This seemed to make the girl cry anew and she buried her face deep into the dog’s mottled fur.
Keeley put her hand on the dog’s tummy and closed her eyes channelling hopeful, bright thoughts. This dog had to survive. It had to. She had to be able to save someone. She began to talk. ‘What a lovely, handsome dog you are. So pretty and…’
‘He is a boy dog.’ It was the girl, juddering out the words, shoulders shaking with either cold or emotion or perhaps both. ‘His name is Bo-Bo.’
‘What a splendid name,’ Keeley said. ‘A really lovely, lovely name.’
‘Is he… going to die?’ the girl asked, raising large haunted chocolate brown eyes and looking to Keeley for the answers.
Keeley watched the dog’s breathing. It was slower now, his abdomen barely moving at all. How many times had she sat next to someone at the hospice watching them come to the end of existence? She knew the signs in humans, knew humans had a will to hang on as long as they possibly could. Was it the same for animals?
‘Keep talking to Bo-Bo,’ she said quickly.
‘Someone is coming to help,’ Ethan said. ‘But I cannot sit here and just do nothing. I cannot. There must be something we can do. There must be. Where is it injured? There is no blood we can see… there is nothing. Perhaps it is in shock. Where is the car that has hit it? Did they just drive away?’ He reached out to the animal.