Read Being Small for Free Online Page B

That had given me the necklace habit; when I’d had to take it off, next time we moved, Adam replaced it with a thick gold chain that hung heavy on the nape of my neck, rippled over my collar-bones and pressed into the point of my throat when I lay back. There’d been trouble over that, my mother thought it was too expensive to accept. I might have told her that it had cost him nothing, that he’d stolen it for me, but I was fourteen and not actually stupid. I told her it had been a gift to him but he had enough already, too many to choose from; he was thinning out his dressing-room, I said, passing on what he didn’t need, she had to approve of that. She grunted, and let me keep it. I made him pinch another, made him wear it visibly to lend
verisimilitude.
    I was wearing the chain now, I wore it always: in bed, in the shower, everywhere. I slipped my thumb beneath to pull it tight and slid a finger over the smooth suppleness of its links, as I grinned at the finger-sized Homer Simpson in my hand, with the key-ring hanging from his grasp.
    “Throw it away,” my mother said.
    “Do what?”
    “Throw it away. Oh, no, you can’t do that, can you? Here...”
    And she did, she just picked it up and tossed it, a casual five or six metres into the shadow and the undergrowth of the wood. I saw where it fell, but only dimly.
    “Mum...!”
    “Now whistle.”
    “Do what?”
    “Whistle. You can do that, I know. I endured the months you spent learning.”
    Well, I’d had to learn. I was a boy, I had a friend,
whistling was a necessary accomplishment. More than that, I’d had a dog, too briefly.
    I blew the two-note call I used to use for Max, but barely on a breath.
    “Perhaps a little louder?”
    I did it again, shrill and hard; in answer, from the undergrowth, came Homer’s trademark “D’oh!”
    When I could manage it, when I’d stopped choking on the giggles, I did it again. And then again, and eventually she said, “Actually it’s meant to help you find it when it’s lost, it isn’t a John Cage duet for one voice and a transponder. I’m bored with this. Go fetch.”
    I went to find and fetch it, whistling all the way; and more than Homer answered me. There was a sudden rush-and-skitter, all the familiar sounds of an eager and awkward body charging blindly. I had a moment to wonder if I was going to grieve again, cry again, lose my heart and hope again, before a mess of black came hurtling out between the trees and plunged at me, all eyes and fur and tangled limbs and happy mouth and heavy.
    Heavy enough that I sat down on the thin grass there and had young dog in my lap and all over me, his paws on my shoulders, his tongue in my mouth. I hugged him, because what else could I do? And told him he was fast, he was forward, we hadn’t been introduced and I never snogged on a first date. My mother’s snort at my back might have meant anything; I didn’t care. By now I was on my back and he was play-growling with his teeth oh so gently around my wrist while his tail thrashed widely, wildly as we wrestled.
    Distantly I heard voices with an anxious edge to them, calling a name he paid no attention to. Not a birthday present, then: neither a sneaky one from Mum nor a gift from any passing god, a stray dog needing shelter. Not a gift to keep. Okay, I could live with that, without this. I’d been doing it for months.
    “Nigel! Nigel, you futile fucking creature, where the shit have you got to this time...?”
    They came out suddenly from the shadows beneath the trees, two men. Nigel and I spared them a glance apiece and then decided to go on romping, while the same voice said, “Oh, whoops. Sorry about the language. And the dog.”
    “Ill-trained, the pair of them,” the other man said. “They’re not mine, I’m just walking them for a friend. Shouldn’t have let that one off the lead, really. It’s not that he doesn’t come when he’s called – he just comes when anyone calls, whoever they are. Or