Becca gave up eventually. The east wind won, the way it always wins, by simply outlasting her. She walked back to the old wooden bench, sat down beside me, and started on a drink she’d been ignoring the whole time she was losing to the weather. For a moment I thought she might have forgotten the dog altogether, or that I’d imagined the dog was hers in the first place.
Kids have it right, I think. The whole of the world used to be play, food, sleep, repeat, with room left over for dogs and cats and the friend next door and whatever was on at the cinema. My mother always said I was the naughtiest baby out of me and my sister, and I’ve never worked out how a baby earns a reputation like that. I was still turning the question over, wondering what Becca would say if I asked her the same thing about her own brother, when she started shouting for her dog.
Danny, Danny, over and over, panic climbing into her voice with each call.
“Are you looking for your dog?” I asked her, which was clearly the answer already, but you say these things anyway.
“Yes,” she said, and I pointed along the bank. “I saw a small white dog go that way.” She ran, maybe ten strides, then sprinted straight back to say thank you, then turned and ran off again before I’d finished smiling at her.
Minutes went by. I could still see her a long way down the bank, still searching, and my conscience started doing what consciences do when you’ve been careless with something that mattered to somebody else. I had seen the dog wander off. I could have said something before she lost him entirely, and instead I’d been sitting there thinking about dreams.
So I got up and went after her. The wind hadn’t given up either, and the temperature was dropping with the light, and between the slick pebbles underfoot and a party boat going past too loudly on the water, I could hear her crying before I reached her.
“I did see your dog along here,” I told her, aiming for reassurance and landing somewhere closer to the vague optimism adults hand out when they don’t actually know anything. “I’ll help you look. What’s your name?”
She told me, and it was a better name than I’d have guessed for her. Rebecca had always been a favourite of mine, though I don’t know why I’d ever assumed it carried courage and resourcefulness built into the letters. Names don’t work that way. People do. But Becca suited her regardless, so we kept it.
It was nearly dark by the time we found him, the two of us using my phone as a torch, checking under every bench and every rain-soaked log along that stretch of bank, until a patch of white fur gave itself away inside a hollow log where the dog had gone to get out of the wind. Becca ran at that log like she’d spotted an ice cream van.
It was Danny. She scooped him up and scolded him properly. Bad Danny, Mum will kill me if I lose you. So, not a dog person after all, whatever the cuddling suggested otherwise. She turned to me and said thank you, sir.
“Call me Anthony,” I told her, and she smiled and thanked me again, more informally this time, like I’d passed some kind of test.
We had a long walk back, and it turned out she lived in the same building as me, so I offered to see her home. Becca was nine. She had a younger brother I made a private note to ask her about later, purely to find out whether he’d inherited the naughtiness title too. She liked cats and didn’t much care for dogs, though Danny had been a gift from her father, who she hadn’t seen in a long time, which explained a great deal about how carefully she held onto him despite the scolding.
We got into the lift together and she pressed three floor buttons in a row, three, six, nine, with the specific, unbothered confidence of someone who knows exactly what she’s doing and doesn’t much care who watches. I leaned past her and pressed three more.
“You do that too?” she said. “My mum tells me off for it.”
“Do it when she’s not with you,” I said, and she gave me a look that suggested this was the best advice anyone had offered her all week.
I wish I could get her voice onto the page properly. Every word came out with extra syllables stitched in, like she was giving each one room to stretch. You toooo do that? My muuum tells me off, she’d say, and somehow it always sounded like a complaint and a joke at the same time.
The lift stopped at two, three, four, five, six, and finally nine, and she was out before the doors had fully opened, Danny tucked under one arm, me trailing behind like a second dog. A maroon door with three locks and the number forty five opened before she’d even finished knocking. Where did you go, her mother said, pulling her and the dog both into a hug at once, then looked up and found me standing there.
“Sorry, I’m Anthony. Flat eighteen. I saw your daughter down by the river after dark, thought I’d walk her back.”
“Anthony helped me find Danny,” Becca announced, entirely unbothered by how that sentence made losing the dog sound like someone else’s story. I’d never have volunteered that particular detail to my own mother at that age.
“Thank you, Anthony. Please, come in.”
I said I couldn’t, thanked her, said goodbye to Becca and to Danny, and told them both to come and knock on my door whenever they liked. Then I walked home the rest of the way on my own, the wind finally dying down behind me.
It was good, making friends.