Victor found him by the roadside in October.
The puppy sat on the edge of the highway, wet and very small, watching the cars pass with a look that seemed to wait for someone specific. Victor was driving to his allotment to dig up potatoes at the time. He stopped for a second, thinking he would only take a look. But the puppy lifted its head, and that was the end of it. The potatoes stayed in the ground for another week.
He named him Mars. The name came from the neighbour, Vera, when she spotted a ginger, floppy-eared creature with oversized paws in the hallway.
“Red, nosy, hopeless,” she said. “Mars. Fits.”
Victor laughed then.
Mars grew fast. By spring he occupied the entire left half of the sofa and considered it his right. Victor grumbled at first, then gave up. Sleeping alone in the flat was worse than sharing it with a dog that snored and sometimes twitched a leg in its sleep.
They became friends not all at once but gradually, the way people befriend each other when there is no rush. The morning walk. The bowl of food at seven in the evening. The television. Sometimes Victor talked to Mars out loud. Mars sat beside him and listened with a serious expression, only occasionally yawning wide enough to show all his teeth.
“You’re right,” Victor would say. “Enough.”
And he would switch off the telly.
—
The accident happened in April, on their way back from the evening walk.
Victor later remembered little of how it happened. Slippery ground, a car swerving onto the pavement from around the corner, Mars on the lead, and then the lead snapped. Victor was thrown against the kerb. He hit his side, lay there for several seconds, hearing only his own breathing and a distant shout somewhere.
When he got up, Mars was gone.
The lead lay on the asphalt. The plastic buckle had cracked in two.
He searched until midnight. Walked three blocks, called the name, asked passers-by. They shook their heads. Someone said they had spotted a ginger dog running towards the railway crossing, but that was forty minutes ago and they had not seen it since.
At home Victor sat in the kitchen and stared at the empty bowl for a long time.
Then he got up. Wrote a notice, printed twenty sheets. In the morning he put them up all over the neighbourhood, then rang three veterinary clinics and the shelter on Mill Lane.
“If a ginger dog comes in, a mongrel,” he said into the phone. “Please call. Here’s my number.”
A week passed.
Then a month.
The notices faded under the May rain, and Victor replaced them. Then again in June. The veterinary clinics said nothing. The shelter on Mill Lane called twice, both times mistaken, both times the wrong dog.
In July Vera said cautiously from behind her door:
“Victor, maybe get another one. There are so many at the shelter.”
“No,” Victor replied.
She never offered again.
The flat without Mars became different.
Not empty, no. Things stayed in place, the fridge hummed, the neighbours stomped overhead at half past nine as usual. But something had changed.
Victor picked up an old tennis ball from the floor that Mars used to chase down the hall. He put it on a shelf. Thought about it, then tucked it into a drawer. Later he took it out again and left it on the shelf.
In the mornings his hand automatically reached for the lead by the door. The lead hung there. There was nowhere to go.
He began going for walks alone. The same route, the same time, just without Mars. He could not explain why. He simply walked.
In August his daughter called from Manchester.
“Dad, come and stay. Live with us for a while, take a break.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
He paused. “What if he comes back?”
His daughter paused too. Then she said “all right” in a voice that people use when they want to say something else but decide not to.
Mars came back in October.
Victor heard scratching at the door just before seven in the evening. At first he thought he had imagined it. Noise from the stairwell, a draught, anything. But the scratching came again. Insistently, with pauses, as if someone knew the door would open, you just had to wait a little.
He opened it.
Mars sat on the mat.
Older. The fur was trimmed in a few places where there must have been injuries. His left side looked a little sunken. And around his neck was a collar. Someone else’s – leather, brown, with a brass buckle and a small tag that read: “Buddy.”
Victor stood in the doorway for a long time looking at him. Mars sat and looked at Victor. Right ear drooping, a ginger patch on his forehead shaped like an uneven star. The same eyes, amber with a dark rim.
“Where have you been?” Victor said.
Mars stood up, stepped over the threshold and walked into the hall the way someone who knows the layout by heart does. To the right, to the bowl. The bowl was still there, in the same place. Empty, of course.
Victor closed the door. Went to the kitchen. His hands shook slightly as he opened the fridge.
“Alright,” he said. “Alright.”
The next morning he drove to the veterinary clinic.
Mars was examined, given the necessary vaccinations, and checked for a microchip. Victor asked about the collar. The vet picked up the tag and read it aloud:
“‘Buddy.’ Is that another name?”
“Someone gave him another name,” Victor said.
“He lived with someone?”
“He lived somewhere for six months. I don’t know where.”
The vet looked at him, then at Mars, then back at Victor.
“It happens,” she said. “Dogs sometimes leave, then come back. Especially the clever ones.”
Victor did not answer. He watched Mars sit on the metal table with a calm expression and tolerate the examination.
On the back of the tag they found a phone number.
Victor called from the car, while Mars sat on the back seat looking out of the window.
The receiver was picked up after the third ring.
“Hello?”
“Good evening,” Victor said. “You had a dog. Ginger. You called him Buddy.”
A long silence.
“Yes,” said the voice. A woman’s, not young. “I did. He left us in September. We looked for him.”
“He’s with me. He’s my dog. His name is Mars. He went missing in April.”
Another silence. Then the woman said:
“He lived with us. We fed him, treated him. He had wounds.”
“Thank you,” Victor said.
“He’s a good dog.”
“Yes.”
A pause.
“Do you live far?” the woman asked. “From Birch Lane?”
“A different area.”
“Good Lord. He came to us in April. Just lay down by our fence and would not leave.”
Victor stared through the windscreen at the grey courtyard with leafless poplars.
The conversation ended almost by itself. Victor put the phone away. Mars snored on the back seat, lying with his head on his paws.
At home Victor removed the strange collar from Mars. Put it on the table and looked at it for a long time. Brown, leather, with the tag reading “Buddy”. Well made, not cheap.
For half a year the dog had been somewhere. And still he came back.
Victor thought about the woman from Birch Lane. How she fed him every day, stroked him, got attached, probably. And then one morning in September she went out and he was gone. And she searched. Maybe called around the notices.
He picked up the phone.
“It’s me again,” he said when she answered. “I wanted to say. If you want to come and see him, I don’t mind.”
Silence.
“Really?” she said.
“Really.”
She came on Saturday. Gail – sixty-four, in a grey coat and with a shopping bag that held apple jam and a packet of the exact dog food Mars had grown used to over those six months.
Mars saw her from the hall and did not rush, no. He simply walked over and pushed his nose into her palm. His tail wagged happily.
They had tea. Gail told how she had found him by the fence in April, how she took him to the vet, how he was scared the first days and then settled in. Victor told about the accident, the snapped lead, the notices he had put up.
Mars lay on the floor between them and dozed. Sometimes he lifted his head, looked at one, then looked at the other.
“He chose both of us,” Gail said.
Victor looked at the dog. Then at the woman beside him.
“Looks that way.”
Victor put the strange collar into a desk drawer. He did not throw it away.
Mars went back to occupying the left half of the sofa and chasing the tennis ball down the hall at one in the morning. The notices on the lampposts got soaked under the November rain and peeled off by themselves.
Gail came every Saturday. She brought jam, sometimes asked for advice about her blackcurrants – she had a garden on Birch Lane, and Victor knew about gardens. They talked while Mars dozed between them.
One evening Victor took the leather collar with the “Buddy” tag out of the drawer and looked at it. The tag shone under the lamp.
In the hallway hung two leads. One red, old. One blue, new – the one Gail had brought one Saturday and hung up without a word, without asking permission.
