All puppies are cute. Much cuter than babies, I think, though of course that is only my opinion. But it was the first time Cupcake had ever properly met one, so naturally she thought he was special. She asked me what sort of breed he was. “Is he a pedigree?”
I said I didn’t know. “He could just be a mongrel.” I added that some people reckon mongrels are best. Cupcake shook her head.
“I think he’s a pedigree,” she said. She didn’t know any more than I did! She didn’t even know as much as I did. But it was obviously what she wanted to believe, so I didn’t argue with her.
Now that we knew the puppy was there, we started taking quick peeps over the wall before getting on with our tennis practice. My tennis practice. Cupcake seemed to have got more interested in watching the puppy than helping me prepare for Wimbledon.
If he was in the garden by himself, without the old woman, we’d call to him and he’d come rushing up, all happy, tail wagging and ready for a game. Even I wasn’t quite brave enough to climb over again, but we broke bits of stick off a nearby tree and threw them for him, and once we found an old burst football and lobbed that over, and he carried it off as proud as could be, shaking it from side to side.
Sometimes the old lady was out there, hanging washing on a clothes whizzy thing, or prodding about in the flower beds with a trowel. She never played with the puppy like we did. He tried so hard to make her! He used to run and fetch a toy and push it at her, or drop it by her side then back away with his bum in the air and his tail whirring in circles. I knew what he was saying. “Go on, missus! Throw it for us!”
But the old woman just ignored him. Either that or she shoved him out of the way. She really didn’t seem to like him very much. Quite often she’d shout at him.
“Just stop bothering me!”
One time she whacked him for digging up one of her flowers. Poor little boy! He didn’t know it was wrong. He was just trying to have fun. Another time we saw him in the garden by himself, tossing something small and bright into the air and catching it as it came down. Me and Cupcake were clapping and going “Yay!” and “Well done!” I suppose you could say we were encouraging him. Maybe we shouldn’t have, cos all of a sudden the old woman came bursting out of the back door and started screeching.
“You bad dog! Bad! Drop that! Stop it! Drop it this instant!”
At first the puppy thought it was a game, he thought she was playing with him at last, but then he started to cower, and his ears went back and his tail crept between his legs, and the old lady grabbed the small, bright thing he’d been playing with and gave him a sharp crack across his nose. Oh, he did yelp! We felt so sorry for him. In a doubtful voice, afterwards, Cupcake said, “I suppose he has to learn.” But you don’t teach children by hitting them, so why teach puppies that way? We hated the old woman for that.
“I told you she was horrible,” said Cupcake.
We still didn’t know what the puppy’s name was. The old woman never seemed to call him anything except “Bad dog”. We just called him Boy. I was the one who came up with the name Cookie. We were perched on our bucket, dangling a pair of old woollen tights over the wall for the puppy to play with. I’d tied a big knot in one of the legs, and the puppy was tugging and making little growly noises.
“Thinks he’s sooo clever,” crooned Cupcake. “Such a big grown-up boy!”
She was getting to be like one of those yucky, show-off mums who are for ever going on about how wonderful their kids are. I tried teasing her about it, but instead of laughing – cos it was funny, well, I thought it was – she just hunched a shoulder and went “Humph.” It wasn’t like Cupcake; she usually has a good sense of humour. I can almost always make her laugh. But she’d been a bit down just lately. The puppy was the only thing that seemed to bring a smile to her face.
I said, “Here! You play with him.” I thought it might cheer her up. She took one leg of the tights and obediently hung on to it, but not with very much enthusiasm. She’d suddenly gone all miserable and quiet. I did my best to make a game out of it. I said, “Grr!” and “Go for it!” and shook my head madly from side to side making growly noises, but the puppy could obviously sense there’d been a change of mood cos he dropped his knotted end and sat down instead to have a scratch.
I said, “Here, boy!” And then, “Know what?”
Cupcake said, “What?”
“We ought to call him Cookie.”
There was a silence. I said, “The dog in Joey’s book? He looks just like him!”
Cupcake sighed and said, “Mm… maybe.”
“He does!”
Joey had this book, Charlie Clark, all about a little boy called Charlie and his dog, Cookie. Charlie and Cookie got up to all kinds of mischief. The book was one of Joey’s favourites; almost as big a favourite as Man on the Moon. I don’t know how many times he must have read it, but it always had him chuckling. He loved the idea of a boy and his dog having adventures. Maybe it’s because he’d have liked to have adventures, same as all the tough little kids who lived in our block and were always getting into trouble for climbing on garage roofs or kicking footballs through windows or jamming the lifts by messing around with the buttons. Joey couldn’t do any of those things – but Charlie could! So could Cookie. Charlie and Cookie went everywhere together. And in spite of Cupcake and her “Mm… maybe,” our puppy looked just like Cookie’s twin. Brown and white and cheeky.
That was when I had my great idea – well, I thought it was a great idea. Why didn’t Cupcake ask her mum if they could have a dog?
“For Joey,” I said. “Joey would love it!”
Know what? All she did was grunt. Like, hmm.
“I’m thinking of Joey,” I said.
She didn’t say anything at all to that. I felt like shaking her. I said, “Well?”
“Well, what?” said Cupcake.
“Why not try asking her?”
“I’m not asking my mum if we can have a dog! She’s got enough to do, looking after Joey.”
“But it would make him so happy!” I said.
“How?” She suddenly turned on me. “How would it make him happy? He couldn’t play with it, he couldn’t take it out for walks, he c—”
“We’d take it out!”
“And that would make him happy?” She didn’t have to bite my head off. “How d’you know what’d make him happy? He’s not your brother!”
That really got to me. “Doesn’t mean I don’t care about him!” I said.
She obviously felt a bit ashamed, then. She mumbled something about being sorry, but that it wasn’t like I was responsible for him. I said, “No, but I still don’t like it when he’s sad.”
She muttered, “I expect you’d be sad if you were in a wheelchair.”
If I was in a wheelchair I’d be so frustrated I would probably scream and smash things. But Joey was such a bright, sunny little boy! He’d always just seemed to accept that there were certain things he couldn’t do. Until I’d gone round the previous weekend I’d never known him to be grumpy. Cupcake had been riding round the garden on Joey’s tricycle singing her silly cupcake song, but for once he hadn’t shown any interest. Usually he demanded that I do “the bird poo one”. I did offer. I said, “Come on! Let’s do it together… you get on the bike and I’ll push you, and we’ll both sing. Fudge keeps a-falling on my head… ”
But he wouldn’t. I grabbed his hand and tried to coax him, but he just snatched his hand away and shouted, “Don’t