Page 30 of Crazy Spooky Love

Back in the office, I chuck the newspaper and the solitary glove down onto the coffee table and flop dramatically into the tweed sofa.

“One glove, and I need to buy a sodding dog.”

“You don’t sound very pleased about it.” Marina looks up from behind the desk where she’s engrossed in Twenty Years’ Experience as a Ghost Hunter by Elliott O’Donnell. “You should read this, it’s interesting,” she says, evidently not taking me seriously.

Artie stops midway through wiping down the whiteboard and his eyes light up at the idea. “Can I help you pick a dog?”

I groan. “I don’t think I’m serious, Artie.”

“You sound as if you are to me,” he says, nodding fast. “Very serious. You said, ‘ I need to buy a sodding dog. ’?”

“Yes, I know I did.”

The truth is that I always wanted a dog and my mother wouldn’t let me have one.

Now that I’m all grown up it’s on my bucket list. The thing is though, it’s quite a long way down my bucket list, behind train as a movie makeup artist in order to be the person placed in sole charge of applying Robert Downey Jr.’s mascara.

It’s that sort of bucket list, i.e., things I’d like to happen but most probably won’t.

But a dog…That could happen if I wanted it to, couldn’t it?

Now that it’s out there, the idea doesn’t seem too terrible at all.

“Dogs need walking every day. You hate walking.” Marina makes a fair point as she turns the page of the book, still not entertaining the idea.

“I can do that,” Artie jumpsin.

“Hmmm. Maybe you could get a dog and I can pretend he’s mine sometimes? I only really need him to fool Fletcher Gunn.”

That snags Marina’s attention. “You want to get a dog to impress Fletcher Gunn?”

“Not to impress him, no,” I protest too hotly, looking at her as if she’s lost the plot for daring to even suggest such a thing. “But I just sort of told him that I have a dog and he doesn’t believe me so I need to have an actual dog so I can prove him wrong.”

I don’t tell them that I have to call the dog Parsnip too. That’s not going to happen in a million years. But a dog…maybe. Just maybe. The idea is already growing on me at a frankly alarming rate.

Marina laughs. “A dog’s for life, Melody, not just to land a shag with the local reporter.”

Artie’s jaw hits the floor and I spring up out of the chair, cheeks hot.

“That is so not what is happening here!”

She doesn’t reply, and after a second I drop back down and fling my arm across my eyes like an overemotional teenager.

“Oh God, Marina, why him? I can’t stand the sight of him but I can’t seem to stop thinking about him ripping my clothes off either.”

Marina’s eyebrows hit her fringe. “Close your ears and make coffee, Artie.”

She comes and sits next to me on the sofa and pats my knee for solidarity.

“Come on, now, Bittersweet. Remember when I had that short-lived and totally inappropriate crush on Bazza Bowman? From here up,” she slashes her hand across her slender neck to demonstrate from precisely where up, “I hated him, but from here down, every time he was within three feet of me all I wanted to do was play hide the sausage. It’s just one of those chemical things.

” She pulls a face. “Sadly for both Bazza and me, it was more a case of hide the cocktail sausage, which just goes to prove my point. Some fantasies are best kept in your head.”

“You had sex with Bazza Bowman?” I say, distracted by her revelation. “You never told me that.”

“I try not to think about it,” she says quickly, rolling her shoulders and shuddering so hard that her high, dark ponytail quivers. “It only happened once in the storeroom behind his dad’s butcher shop.”

Marina briefly worked a weekend job for Bazza’s dad, and it now becomes clear to me why.

“I’m not casting aspersions on Fletch,” she says, holding up her crooked little finger like a diplomatic sex adviser. “More that you should never meet your heroes. That sort of thing.”

I cover her hand with my own and start to laugh. “I think that saying applies to people like the Dalai Lama or Michelle Obama.”

Artie brings a tray of steaming mugs over and sets it down on the coffee table in front ofus.

“About that dog…”

Who knew you could get a dog so quickly? Anyone would think the shelter wanted to see the back of the ball of blond fur that I’ve just manhandled into my mother’s kitchen and deposited on the floor.

My mother looks at the newest member of the Bittersweet family with blatant distaste.

“Only you could go to the dogs’ home and come back with a one-eared pug.”

The dog regards her balefully from his position on my foot.

“I had no choice, he followed me round and practically clung to my leg. Even the Magic 8 Ball said he was the one. He’ll grow on you. And he doesn’t have one ear, it’s just been bitten or something. They said he can still hear perfectly well.”

“What have you named him?” Gran peers over the edge of their dining table.

“I didn’t get to pick his name, Gran. He’s three years old so he already has a name. They advised against changing it because it’ll confuse him too much.”

Lucky for the pug, you might think. He doesn’t have to be saddled with Parsnip.

Hold that thought.

I flip open the rehoming pack and read out his details. “His previous owner was an American film and literature student who got him while he was at uni. His folks wouldn’t let him take him back there when he finished studying, so the dog wound up at the dogs’ home.”

Even I’m struggling to say his name without feeling like a fool.

Who in their right mind calls a pug Lestat?

“There’s a note from his previous owner,” I say, pulling it out of the pack.

Dear Lucky New Pug-Lover, please take the best care of my dark lord and good buddy, Lestat.

Sorry about the name, I’m an Anne Rice fan and vampires rock my world.

What can I say? I can assure you that the dog doesn’t go on nightly murderous rampages, if that helps.

I wish I could have taken him back to the States with me, but he’d have hated quarantine and my folks would have, like, killed me.

He’s one cool dude, but watch him because he’ll swallow pretty much anything, and he isn’t a big fan of cold weather, or rain, or wind.

He’s a bit of a couch potato, truth told, but he has a wicked sense of humor and he snores like a freight train.

You’ve been warned. Just buy earplugs, know what I’m sayin’?

Man, you’re gonna love him, and I’m gonna miss him. Yours sincerely, Tom Jones

There is silence in the kitchen while we all contemplate the new arrival, and then my mother finally speaks.

“You bought a one-eared pug called ‘Lestat’ from Tom Jones.”

“Not the actual Tom Jones,” I say. “And I didn’t have to buy him, just make a donation to the shelter.”

“I’d call him Plug,” Gran says, picking a prawn from her salad and tossing it down to Lestat, who hoovers it up noisily.

“Plug the pug?”

“Easier to remember than Lestamp,” she says, giving him a tomato.

It follows the prawn, and I start to see what Tom Jones meant about Lestat’s appetite.

I don’t correct her mistake, because I know full well she’ll never remember his name anyway.

She’ll probably just ply him with food from her plate and call him Plug forever, and from the way he’s just laid his head on her knee, I don’t think he’ll mind a bit.

“I think we should probably stick to the food the dogs’ home gave me,” I say doubtfully.

Gran bats her hand at me. “Your grandpa never fed Beefcake anything different from our food and look how well he turned out.”

What I really want to say at this point is that Beefcake, my grandpa’s bulldog, was spectacularly fat and lazy, as evidenced by his gargantuan body, which my grandpa had preserved by one of London’s leading taxidermists because he couldn’t bear to part with him.

When it transpired that Grandpa Duke’s ghost was to be tethered for eternity to Gran’s bed, it took four men to haul the glass display case up two flights of stairs to ensure that one man wasn’t parted from his dog, even by death.

“Right, I think I’ll take him up to my flat and get him settled in.”

Oh my God. I now know why Tom Jones called him Lestat.

He might be a couch potato by day, but at night this dog goes batshit crazy.

It’s just after 11:00 p.m. and so far he’s deposited the contents of his bowels on the living room rug, stolen and eaten a family-sized bag of cheese and onion crisps, and he keeps chasing his tiny, curled-up tail, as if it’s a thistle stuck to his ass.

He’s thoroughly uninterested in the lush new bed I’ve bought him, preferring the comfort of the sofa or me.

He’s run the pair of us ragged, and now he’s lolling on his back with his legs akimbo on the opposite end of the sofa.

He tried his luck at my end but I’ve banished him on account of his manky crisp breath.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he picks up the remote control in a minute and turns off the movie I’m half watching.

It’s like I’m suddenly in a relationship with the dog equivalent of Homer Simpson.

I don’t want to be his Marge. “Look, Lestat,” I say, and he rolls his eyes back in his head like a bored teen, “you and I need to establish some ground rules. The first one being, you stay on the floor, not the sofa.”

The sofa already has a fine new coat of Lestat-colored hair and he’s only been here for six hours. Predictably, he makes no effort to budge.

“And the peeing and pooing thing. We don’t do that in the house. It’s not polite.”