Victor found him by the roadside in October.
The puppy sat on the edge of the highway, soaked and tiny, staring at the passing cars as if waiting for someone specific. Victor was driving to his allotment to dig up potatoes, and he stopped for a second, just to have a look. But the puppy lifted his head, and that was that. The potatoes stayed in the ground another week.
He called him Mars. The name came from the neighbour, Vera Thompson, when she saw a red, floppy-eared creature with paws too big for its body in the hallway.
“Rusty, big-nosed, hopeless,” she said. “Mars. Fits him.”
Victor laughed at the time.
Mars grew fast. By spring he took up the whole left side of the sofa and considered it his birthright. Victor grumbled at first, then gave up. Sleeping alone in the flat was worse than sleeping with a dog that snored and occasionally twitched his leg in a dream.
They became friends slowly, the way people do when there’s no rush. Morning walk. Bowl of food at seven in the evening. The telly. Sometimes Victor talked to Mars out loud. Mars sat beside him, looking serious, only occasionally yawning wide enough to show every tooth.
“You’re right,” Victor would say. “Enough.”
And he’d turn the telly off.
—
The accident happened in April, on their way back from the evening walk.
Victor didn’t remember exactly how. Slippery road, a car came onto the pavement from round the corner, Mars was on the lead, and then the lead snapped. Victor was thrown against the kerb. He hit his side, lay there for a few seconds, hearing only his own breathing and someone shouting far away.
When he got up, Mars wasn’t there.
The lead lay on the asphalt. The plastic clip had cracked in half.
He searched until midnight. Walked three blocks, called his name, asked passers-by. They shook their heads. Someone said they’d seen a red dog running towards the railway crossing, but that was forty minutes ago, and no one had seen him since.
At home Victor sat in the kitchen and stared at the empty bowl for a long time.
Then he got up. Wrote a lost-dog notice, printed twenty copies. In the morning he put them up all over the neighbourhood, then called three veterinary clinics and the shelter on Miller Street.
“If a red mongrel comes in,” 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 he replaced them again in June. The vets never called. The shelter on Miller Street rang twice, both times wrong, both times not his dog.
In July Vera said cautiously through the door:
“Victor, maybe get another one. There are so many at the shelter.”
“No,” Victor said.
She didn’t bring it up again.
The flat without Mars felt different.
Not empty, no. Things were in their place, the fridge hummed, the neighbours stamped upstairs at half past nine as usual. But something had changed.
Victor picked up an old tennis ball from the floor, the one Mars used to chase down the hall. Put it on the shelf. Thought about it, then put it in a drawer. Then 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. No need to go anywhere.
He started taking walks alone. Same route, same time, just without Mars. He couldn’t explain why. He just walked.
In August his daughter rang from Manchester.
“Dad, come and stay. Live with us for a bit, take a break.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
He paused. Then said, “In case he comes back.”
His daughter paused too. Then said “all right” in the tone 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 imagined it. Noise from the stairwell, a draught, anything. But the scratching came again. Insistent, with pauses, as if someone knew the door would open, just needed to wait.
He opened it.
Mars sat on the doormat.
Older. His fur was trimmed in a few places where there had obviously been wounds. His left side was a bit sunken. And on his neck was a collar. A different one, 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 red patch on his forehead shaped like a lopsided star. Same eyes, amber with a dark rim.
“Where have you been?” Victor said.
Mars stood, stepped over the threshold, and walked into the hall the way someone walks who knows the layout by heart. To the right, to the bowl. The bowl was where it had always been. Empty, of course.
Victor shut the door. Went to the kitchen. His hands shook a little as he opened the fridge.
“Right,” he said. “Right.”
—
The next morning he drove to the vet’s.
Mars was examined, given the necessary jabs, 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 didn’t answer. He watched Mars sit on the metal table with a calm expression and put up with the examination.
On the back of the tag they found a phone number.
Victor called from the car, with Mars on the back seat staring out the window.
The phone was picked up after three rings.
“Hello?”
“Hello,” Victor said. “You had a dog. Red one. You called him Buddy.”
A long silence.
“Yes,” said a voice. A woman’s, not young. “We did. He left us in September. We looked for him.”
“He’s with me. He’s my dog. His name is Mars. He got lost in April.”
Another silence. Then the woman said, “He lived with us. We fed him, treated him. He had injuries.”
“Thank you,” Victor said.
“He’s a good dog.”
“Yes.”
A pause.
“Where do you live?” the woman asked. “Near Birch Lane?”
“Different area.”
“Good Lord. He came to us in April. Just lay down by our fence and wouldn’t leave.”
Victor stared through the windscreen at the grey courtyard with bare poplars.
The conversation ended by itself. Victor put the phone away. Mars snored on the back seat, lying with his head on his paws.
At home Victor took off the strange collar. Put it on the table, studied it. Brown leather, brass tag reading “Buddy”. Good quality, not cheap.
Six months the dog had been somewhere. And still he came back.
Victor thought about the woman on Birch Lane. How she must have fed him every day, stroked him, grown attached. Then one morning in September she came out and he was gone. And she looked for him. Called around, maybe checked notices.
He picked up the phone.
“It’s me again,” he said when she answered. “I wanted to say. If you’d like to visit him, I don’t mind.”
Silence.
“Really?” she said.
“Really.”
She arrived on Saturday. Gail Peterson, sixty-four, in a grey coat and a string bag containing apple jam and a bag of dog food – the kind Mars had got used to over those six months.
Mars saw her from the hall and didn’t rush, no. He just walked over and pressed his nose into her hand. Wagged his tail happily.
They drank tea. Gail talked about how she found him by the fence in April, how she took him to the vet, how he was scared at first and then settled in. Victor told her about the accident, the snapped lead, the posters.
Mars lay on the floor between them and dozed. Occasionally he lifted his head, looked at one, then the other.
“He chose both of us,” Gail said.
Victor looked at the dog. Then at the woman beside him.
“Seems that way.”
Victor put the strange collar in a desk drawer. Didn’t throw it away.
Mars went back to occupying the left side of the sofa and chasing the tennis ball down the hall at one in the morning. The posters on the lampposts got soaked under the November rain and peeled off by themselves.
Gail came every Saturday. She brought jam, sometimes asked his advice about currants – 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. Looked at it. The tag glinted 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.
