The Dog Who Saved the World

It has become a big thing in the last year or two: Disease Transmission Risk. At school it’s DTR this, DTR that, and the only good thing about it is that you only need to cough in class to get sent home.

Last year, every classroom at Marine Drive Primary had a hand sanitiser installed by the door. I think it was a new law.

So one of my jobs when I’m at St Woof’s is the maintenance of the sani-mats and hand-sans in the quarantine area. The sani-mats are wet, spongy mats that clean the bottom of your shoes when you go in and out of the quarantine area, which is where dogs go when they’re sick.

Anyway, it all happened a few days after our first visit to Dr Pretorius and the Dome.

I had topped up the disinfectant in the sani-mats first, then I went into the quarantine section to see Dudley, who had a tummy bug. It wasn’t his first time there, either, so I wasn’t especially worried. If you remember, he’d been gnawing on a dead seagull at the beach, and I thought that might have been the cause.

He was behind a fence of wire mesh that comes up to my chin. There were wellies and rubber gloves by the entrance gate, which I put on before I went in. He wagged his bent tail weakly.

‘Hello, you funny old thing!’ I said. ‘Are you feeling better?’ Normally, I’d let Dudley lick my face, but we’re not allowed to do that with the quarantined dogs, so instead I gave him a good old tickle on his tummy. It wasn’t quite the same with rubber gloves, but he didn’t seem to mind.

A family had been in to see him a few days before, perhaps to adopt him, but I think he was just too odd-looking.

‘The little girl thought he was cute,’ said the vicar, ‘and she said something to her mum in Chinese. Then they all had a long conversation which I didn’t understand – except the dad was pointing to Dudley’s eye, and his teeth and his ear, and then they left.’

Poor, ugly Dudley! I thought of the little Chinese girl falling in love with him and then her dad saying he was too strange-looking.

Secretly, though, I was very relieved. I know it’s better for a dog to be with a family rather than in St Woof’s, but I couldn’t bear it if Dudley was adopted.

I looked at him carefully. He didn’t seem very well, poor doggie. He hadn’t eaten much of his food, but he had drunk his water and done a poo in the sand tray, which I washed out and sanitised, and I did everything right, exactly according to the rules. Then I threw his soggy tennis ball for him a little, but it didn’t excite him very much and anyway I bounced it too hard so that it went over the fence and rolled away and we had to stop.

I was coming out of the quarantine area, I’d done the sani-mats and I was about to do the hand-sans (which were empty) and who was standing there but Sass Hennessey. She did this little hair flick and stood with one hand on her round hip.

‘Hiiiii!’ she said but there was zero warmth in her eyes.

‘Hello, Saskia,’ I said.

‘I was just saying to Maurice that he’s got the place looking really smart now,’ she said.

Maurice? Maurice? Nobody calls the vicar Maurice, apart from my dad who’s known him for years. Everyone else calls him vicar or Reverend Cleghorn. It was so typical of Sass to call him by his first name, though. I was annoyed already, and what came next was worse.

‘That ugly old mutt in there,’ she said with her head on one side, all fake sorrow. ‘It really would be kinder just to put him down, don’t you reckon?’

That was it: the mean comment I mentioned before. It took me a few seconds to realise she was talking about Dudley. Dudley – my second-favourite dog in the whole of St Woof’s! I could feel my jaw working up and down, without any sound coming out.

‘Are you OK, Georgie?’

‘Yes, I’m fine, Sass.’ But I wasn’t. I was furious. In silence, I refilled the hand-sans, removed my gloves and put some of the gel on my hands, rubbing it in angrily while she just stood there. Then I took off the wellies.

‘Look, I didn’t mean …’

‘You know we don’t do that here. So why did you even say it?’ I was furious.

‘But if he’s very ill and old …’

I snapped, loudly: ‘He’s not that ill and he’s not that old. All right?’

I could tell Sass was a bit taken aback. She said quietly, ‘Ooo-kaaay,’ and I thought for once I might have got the better of her.

She bent down and gingerly picked up Dudley’s spit-soaked ball that had rolled towards the door. She handed it to me and I was forced to say ‘Thanks’. It was an odd sort of peace offering.

I turned the ball over in my hands as I watched her walk away, and then tossed it back to Dudley, shutting the quarantine door behind me.

I was still cross when I got back to my station. Ramzy was waiting for me, and he was holding Ben, the snarly Jack Russell, who was trying to lick his face.

‘Look!’ he laughed, dead proud. ‘I’ve made a friend!’

‘So you have,’ I said. ‘Good boy, Ben,’ and I let him nuzzle my hand. Then I went round the rest of the dogs in the station, giving them a final stroke before I left.

‘Bye, vicar!’ I said, pulling on the big door.

‘Goodbye, Sergeant Santos and Private Rahman!’ said the vicar, giving another salute. ‘Jolly good work!’

So that was it. Damage done. I had started the End of the World.

Obviously, I didn’t know it at the time. I’ve kept the secret till now: how I handled the tennis ball that was infected with Dudley’s germs, germs that he had picked up from the little girl who had wanted to adopt him. I then passed on the infection to poor Ben by letting him lick my germy hands, and then to the other dogs …

Turns out that all the DTR lessons in the word can’t stop someone being stupid.

Or – for that matter – being so furious at Sass’s mean comment that my mind was all over the place. Which amounts to pretty much the same as being stupid.

‘Give me a week,’ Dr Pretorius had said. It was seldom out of my thoughts. Another week of secret-keeping.

Secrets are easy to keep so long as no one finds out.

So long as no one sees you. Someone who knows your brother, say. Someone who has just started working at the Spanish City and notices you coming out of the door at the back of the arcade.

Sass Hennessey’s sister, Anna, for example, who is in the same school year as my brother Clem and whose mum had got her a Saturday job at the Polly Donkin Tea Rooms.

Give me a week, give me a week. It was going around in my head, like some annoying song that gets stuck, as I was walking back from the Spanish City, up our lane, swinging my school bag. I was surprised to see Clem come out of Dad’s workshop, wiping his oily hands on a towel.

We live in a farmhouse, although it’s not a proper working farm any more. Nearly all of the other farms around us have been sold for development. You can stand by Mum’s tree in the top field with the cows, and see houses and cranes and half-built flats in every direction apart from to the east, where the sea glints silver in the distance. (The cows are not ours, though I wish they were.)

Down the lane from our farmhouse is Dad’s workshop where he restores old cars, and a barn with bits of engines, exhausts, and car doors and stuff.

It looked like Clem had been expecting me.

‘Hi, Pie-face,’ he said. He was cheery. He used his nickname for me for the first time in ages. This made me suspicious but I smiled.

‘Been anywhere exciting?’ he asked.

The truth? I had been a participant in a medieval jousting tournament, charging towards Ramzy on a virtual horse (made from an old piano stool and the saddle I had seen on the first day in the loading bay).

‘St Woof’s,’ I lied. I hated lying, even to Clem. I could feel my cheeks going red.

‘And how is he?’

‘Who?’

‘That dog. Ben?’

‘Oh, fine! We went on the beach. The usual. He’s great.’ Clem was watching me, carefully, and I didn’t like it.

He paused for what seemed like forever before saying, ‘Instant recovery then?’

I gave Clem my ‘puzzled but innocent’ look: half-smile, blinking.

Clem said, ‘The vicar called me. He’s been trying to ring you but your phone’s been off.’

That was true: we always switched our phones off in Dr Pretorius’s studio – something to do with electromagnetism. I’d forgotten to switch mine back on.

‘Let’s keep this simple, shall we?’ Clem counted off on his blackened fingers as he said: ‘One: some dog called Ben is sick. He’s in quarantine. That’s the vicar’s message. Two: Anna Hennessey’s seen you at the Spanish City with your buddy Ramzy Whatsisname and some spooky old lady. Three: you’re lying to me, because you’re blushing. And four: I want to know why.’

‘Or what?’ You’ve got to remember: this is my brother. He’s supposed to be on my side.

‘Or I’m telling Dad.’

OK, so maybe he’s not on my side any more. Clem nodded, pushed his glasses up his nose with an oily hand and turned to go back into the workshop, expecting me to follow him.

Did I have a choice?

Up till recently, I’ve hardly seen Clem for weeks, it seems. He’s finished his exams so isn’t back at school till September. He was supposed to be going to Scotland with his friends, but it all fell through when one of them got a girlfriend. So he hasn’t got much to do before we all go to Spain later in the summer.

For the last couple of weeks, he has occupied himself by messaging people, listening to music, helping Dad in his workshop and growing a patchy beard. He now looks about twenty.

The thing is: I miss him. Something happened to Clem maybe a year ago. The brother I grew up with – the boy who played with me when I was tiny, who let me ride on his back for what seemed like hours, who lied for me when he didn’t have to when I left the tap on and the bath overflowed, who told me his screen login so I could watch stuff when Dad said I couldn’t, who once laughed so hard at my impression of Norman Two-kids at the corner shop that he fell off the bed and banged his head …

… that boy had moved out of our house.

In his place came a boy who looked exactly the same, but behaved differently. A boy who hardly smiled, let alone laughed. A boy who wanted to eat different food from us and, when Dad refused to cook separate meals, got shouty; a boy who could spend a whole weekend (I’m not joking) in his room, emerging only to go to the toilet; a boy whose response to pretty much everything was to roll his eyes as if it was the stupidest thing he had ever heard.

Dad said it was ‘normal’.

But … there was one good thing about Clem changing, and it was this: I think I succeeded in persuading him not to tell Dad about Dr Pretorius, and it was all down to his beard. Sort of. Let me explain.

He was full of questions, and the main one was, ‘Why is she so secretive? If I’d invented something like that, I’d want everyone to know.’

‘I don’t know, really. She says she’s got something even better to show us soon, but right now I think she’s probably scared that someone will steal her idea.’

And then I added something that – not to sound boastful or anything – was utterly and completely brilliant, and I didn’t even plan it. I looked at the floor, all sorrowful, and said, ‘I know it was wrong, Clem. I really should have told a grown-up. But … I think you probably count as that now?’

Clem took off his spectacles and held them to the light to check for dirt and smears. It’s something he does a lot. ‘Perfect vision required, eh?’ he said, obviously flattered by me calling him an adult, and I nodded.

‘So she says. It’s why she can’t test it herself.’

‘She’ll need to sort that out if it’s to be commercial. Two-thirds of people wear specs, you know?’ He picked up a spanner from the bench and turned back to the rusty old campervan that he and Dad had been working on, which meant our conversation was over.

‘You won’t tell Dad?’

‘Not for now. But be careful.’ He actually sounded like a grown-up then.

Now I could worry about something else instead. The vicar had said Ben was sick. What was that all about?

Everything, as it turned out.

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