Page 26 of Wrapped Up at the Vintage Dress Shop
They put the dog in the bathroom sink and as they gently washed it with baby shampoo, they quickly realised it was a girl and though it currently looked like a shrivelled-up little gremlin with bald patches and angry red, oozing sores all over its tiny body, especially where the rope had been digging into her neck, in a former life it had been a French bulldog.
‘We’re not keeping it,’ Phoebe said, once they’d fed the dog some chicken and she was curled up on an old towel. ‘She’s clearly got some infectious skin disease and she was probably dognapped and her original owner must be missing her.’
Unless its owner was the drunk man who’d abused the dog so badly that every time they went to stroke her, she flinched and shook even more.
Also, Phoebe had stolen the dog and there was CCTV everywhere. No doubt, her picture had already been circulated to every police station in the Greater London area.
It was something she’d worry about in the morning. For that night, the little no-named dog slept curled up under Phoebe’s bed.
Except when she woke up in the morning it was to find the dog lying on her chest, her head tucked under Phoebe’s chin. Despite the sink-bath, she didn’t smell too great and although Phoebe was desperate for a wee, she didn’t have the heart to wake her.
The poor little thing was exhausted. So she just scratched the creature behind its huge batlike ears with her long fingernails and the dog made this rumbling noise, almost as if she was purring, and in that moment, Phoebe felt something hitch in her chest, like her heart was remembering how to beat.
There was no way she could keep the dog. She should probably take it to the local dog warden or a rescue centre. That sounded like a sensible course of action, except Phoebe had stolen the dog, although maybe she could say that she’dfoundthe dog and hope that all the CCTV cameras in Tottenham had been out of order the previous night.
So even though Phoebe hated to ask anyone for help because she was perfectly capable of looking after herself and besides, she didn’t want to be beholden to anyone, she’d gone to Freddy.
Well, first she’d gone to Johnno. For someone who was always ‘going to see a man about a dog’, he didn’t have the first clue as to what to do with an actual, real-life dog.
‘If I were you, I’d go and see Freddy,’ he’d advised. ‘Then take it to a vet ’cause it’s got mange and fleas and God knows what else. Tell Freddy to pay and I’ll settle up with him later.’
‘You don’t need to do that,’ Phoebe had said stiffly. ‘You could take it out of my wages.’
‘Take what out of your wages?’ Johnno had winked then clapped his hands over his ears. ‘Whatever you’re going to drop from Mildred’s Greatest Hits, probably neither a borrower nor a lender be, I can’t hear you.’
Johnno and Mildred had met only the once when Phoebe had first gone to work at Johnno’s Junk as a weekend job and Mildred had wanted to check that everything was above board. They had nothing, not one thing, in common but for some strange reason, even though Johnno had blue hair and was wearing cowboy boots and Mildred was in a tweed suit that she’d had for forty years, it hadn’t been the disaster that Phoebe was expecting. There’d been some weird kind of mutual respect.
Mildred had died a few years before but it made Phoebe feel better about it, knowing that the two most important people in her life had come together, however briefly.
Freddy wasn’t the third most important person in her life. He was just a smiley, easy-on-the-eye bloke who gave her butterflies and kept asking her out though she couldn’t imagine why. But he was also a trained solicitor so she’d trotted off to his office with the dog.
‘I can’t go to prison,’ Phoebe had said once she’d reached the end of her tale of woe. ‘I mean, I could cope with going to prison but I was doing a good thing! He kept kicking her. What are the chances that he’ll actually go to the police to report me for stealing his dog?’
‘Slim to none, I reckon.’ Freddy had put a hand out to stroke the dog who was sitting on Phoebe’s lap and no doubt getting pus and flakes of infected skin on her dress, but the dog cowered away from his hand. ‘I doubt she’s got a microchip. You could just say that you found her tied up somewhere.’
‘But what about the CCTV? The witnesses?’
Freddy had grinned and Phoebe, as she always did when Freddy grinned, felt something inside of her melt. ‘I think the police have more urgent crimes to investigate than a woman rescuing a dog from a violent thug. It was very brave of you.’
‘It wasn’t brave. But it was the right thing to do. It’s wrong to treat anyone, even an animal, like they don’t matter,’ Phoebe had said fiercely. ‘Actually, it’s worse to treat an animal like that because they can’t stand up for themselves.’
Freddy had gone with Phoebe to the vet where they’d checked for a microchip, but the dog didn’t have one. They’d cobbled together some story on the way there about the dog being a stray and although, by law, they were meant to inform the dog warden who’d take the dog for seven days, she was in such a poorly state that she was admitted to the vet’s for emergency heartworm treatment.
It must have cost Johnno a fortune, but he never once mentioned it. Though the dog would be put up for adoption once she was better, Phoebe visited her every day. Phoebe was a cat person, of course she was, but there was something about Coco Chanel (the vet had needed a name for the dog and Phoebe hoped that the little French bulldog would have the same tenacity as her namesake) that touched her more deeply than she liked to admit.
Phoebe knew what it was like to be badly treated through no fault of her own. Knew what it was like to be an inconvenience. And she especially knew what it was like to not be wanted.
‘Once she gets the all-clear from the vet, I think maybe I’m going to keep her,’ she said casually to Freddy when he popped into the shop to see Johnno.
‘Of course you are,’ he said as if he wasn’t at all surprised. ‘Perhaps she can give me tips on how to win you over. Like, if she came with you when we go out for that drink.’
‘What do you meanwhenwe go out for that drink? Don’t you mean if?’ she’d asked, and Freddy had given her one of those smiles of his that made Phoebe forget exactly why she was still keeping him at arm’s length.
‘I’m an eternal optimist,’ he said and, although she still didn’t want him to get the wrong idea, Freddy had been very supportive and kept her out of prison and so it was only polite to . . .
‘One drink,’ Phoebe had said. ‘One quick drink to say thank you for your help. And I’m buying.’
‘Not only is she finally going on a date with me but she’s getting her round in.’ Freddy pretended to swoon and Phoebe had pretended that she was offended but her heart really wasn’t in it.
