Woof-Woof-Woof-Woof-Woof

.

He was my dad but I never called him that, I called him The Reverend. His beaked eyebrows and clerical shirt sealed at the neck with a collar the colour of dry bone seemed to insist upon it, even when we weren’t at church. The Reverend reversing his car into the driveway. The Reverend scooping post from the mat, separating Mam’s catalogues of tulip bulbs and waterproof shoes from the letters that arrived addressed to him in manila envelopes. The Reverend demonstrating, very slowly because his knees gave him trouble, how to save a free kick from the goal we had marked between two apple trees in the back garden. He needed to have a lie-down afterwards.

‘The Reverend wants a moment to himself,’ Mam said. ‘Practise your keepie uppies instead.’

In the arrivals gate at Gatwick airport on my way back from his funeral, I bent double as if to vomit. I should not have flown to Aberdeen. There was a perfectly good rail service from London, I could have read the paper or done a crossword. Instead, I scrolled despondently through football scores and ate a series of nasty airport sandwiches. Hands shaking, I checked my phone for a missed call. I needed to hear him say it, I needed The Reverend to preach in his mighty baritone as he had done every Sunday at church. But of course, there was nothing.

I don’t think The Reverend ever went on a plane. He knew nothing of package holidays to Crete or breakfast pints in the departure lounge Wetherspoons. He had never fallen asleep between two strangers, dribbling over a travel pillow impulse-bought for £27.99 and misplaced immediately upon leaving the airport. He was ignorant of stag dos in Prague and souvenir fridge magnets, surge price Ubers and duty-free cigarettes.

The Reverend had not allowed himself the pleasure of such things. And now he never would.

*

Two months after the funeral, I got the voice note. I’d been out for my morning run and returned to find a message on my phone from an unknown number. I pressed play.

‘Woof-woof-woof-woof-woof.’

The bark began as a low rumble, building quickly into a throaty and frantic howl. I thought of flared nostrils, raised hackles and sharp teeth. My palms began to sweat. The worst thing was that I could not tell whether the barker was a dog or a human barking like a dog.

Option one was just weird. Who risks their hand waving a phone at an angry dog’s mouth? But the alternative was unnatural, ominous even. A human barking like a dog. And yet something about the bark; its enunciated growls and the pointed beat of that final yap told me that the sound could only be human.

That afternoon, I called Mam. I did this a lot since being made redundant from my job as a copywriter. The bosses had told us on a video call. Our services were no longer required due to a company-wide efficiency drive. This was confusing because until then I’d never considered myself a particularly inefficient person. I often ate lunch at my desk and stayed late to meet deadlines. ‘It is what it is,’ the HR manager shrugged after the call ended, handing me a cardboard box for my belongings. ‘And we’ve counted the staplers, so don’t be getting ideas.’ Now my days were spent looking at job listings. I called Mam mostly to fill the hours between lunch and dinner.

In our house, talking and smiling were administered frugally.

‘Someone sent me a weird voice note,’ I said as soon as she picked up.

‘Job hunt’s going well then.’

She was panting and I could hear music thumping in the background.

‘Where are you?’

‘It’s Thursday,’ she gasped. ‘On Thursday, I do Kylie Minogue Zumba at the leisure centre. Remember I told you?’

She had told me about the class but I refused to believe it. When the Reverend was alive, we didn’t even play the radio. I tried to tell her this but I was drowned out by the chorus of ‘I Should Be So Lucky’. I heard a door swing shut and Mam’s voice re-emerged.

‘Tell me about this voice note,’ she said, catching her breath. ‘What did it say?’

‘It didn’t say anything. It was a human barking like a dog.’

‘A dog?’

‘Yes. Well, I assume so. I couldn’t think of another animal that barks.’

‘Seals bark,’ Mam said. ‘Ow-ow-ow. They bark and clap their flippers.’

‘It wasn’t an ow-ow-ow, it was a woof-woof-woof. And there were no flippers involved. Whoever recorded this voice note definitely had hands.’

‘Why don’t you call them and ask?’

There were many things I did not know about the voice note but one thing I did know was that I was not going to call the unknown number.

‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘I will not be doing that.’

Mam laughed.

‘Put it out of your mind, love. Do something relaxing this evening. Like me, I’ve found this clever app to draw my cross-stitch patterns. You upload a photo and it’s done in a flash.’

‘But you love drawing cross-stitch patterns,’ I protested. ‘You spent the Easter weekend on those dancing bluetits.’

‘Exactly, a whole weekend of my life I’ll never get back.’

I looked at the kitchen window. Outside, dusk was beginning to fall.

‘I can’t relax this evening,’ I said. ‘I have to be up early tomorrow for my run.’

When Mam replied, she sounded tired.

‘Oh, Ebby. You’re just like your father.’

*

Ebenezer was The Reverend’s choice. At school I was Scrooge, a playground taunt he must have seen coming but that did not spoil his fondness for obscure Old Testament names. When I moved to London, I became Ebby, but I would always hear my full name in his voice: all four thundering syllables of it.

Our church was of the resolutely dour strain, built from Caledonian stone blocks the size of small children and windows through which daylight fell in cold, bleached columns. The Reverend stood at a lectern. He did not need a microphone, he had learned to project his voice as a young man in theological college, sent to the Outer Hebrides to test his ministry against the fearsome edge of the world and returning with a vocal range that could take down a force-nine gale.

He began with an instruction from the Bible.

‘Keep the sabbath holy. For six days, you will work but the seventh day is a day of rest. This must be the day you dedicate to the Lord.’

When The Reverend was preaching, I had to dare myself to look at him. But then it would happen and it was never as bad as I feared. All I saw was the man who lived in our house with us, whose black shirts were occasionally dusted with what looked like snow when Mam forgot to check our pockets for tissues before putting a wash on. The man who did not get bored helping with maths equations or waiting his turn in a game of draughts. Who could sit for hours, days it had seemed when I was a child, at his desk in the study, head propped on fist like a cartoon of a man thinking but that really was what he was doing. Thinking.

‘The Reverend wants a moment to himself,’ Mam said. ‘Go and catch the end of Byker Grove.’

Some nights at the kitchen table, he froze – knife and fork in mid-air, fish fingers going cold – and stared into the distance. Mam carried on, reminding me to put my PE kit by the front door ready for tomorrow morning.

The Reverend did not move. He was thinking; working even when he was here at the kitchen table with me and Mam, eating fish fingers.

At the lectern, he told us, ‘Six days for work. Sunday for God.’

The way he said it made it sound like work was the important bit. More important even than God.

*

The day after the voice note arrived, Abigail came over. She wasn’t my girlfriend anymore but we still spent Friday evenings together. That night I was making pasta, tortellini alla panna. It was messier than I expected, the pasta dough kept getting stuck around the rolling pin. When I finally managed to roll it out and add the pork filling, then form the individual pasta parcels, I realised I had forgotten the dried sage. This was annoying because I’d bought a jar specially from the greengrocers that morning after my run.

‘You know, you can just buy these readymade,’ Abigail said, leaning over the breakfast bar to survey my flour-strewn kitchen. ‘They do all the flavours. Wild mushroom, chicken, sweet potato.’

‘Maybe we can add the sage afterwards,’ I said. I was trying to consult the recipe book but my fingers were covered in meat juice. ‘Like as a topping. A light dusting of sage. That sounds nice, doesn’t it? Sage dust?’

Abigail gave me a pitying look.

‘You have flour on your nose.’

I had never known someone to be so blatant about their passion, to luxuriate in it like a bubble bath.

The tortellini exploded when I added them to the pan of boiling water. They actually didn’t taste too bad, we agreed, so long as you ignored the gloopy texture and possibly undercooked pork. The sage dust however was a disaster, like eating a particularly fragrant mothball. As we ate, I played Abigail the voice note. We agreed that it was not a dog barking and certainly not a seal. Nor was it a barking owl, a possibility I had not considered until Abigail brought it up, explaining that the bird was native to Australia and known for its distinctive, dog-like call.

‘But this bark is one-hundred percent human,’ she said.

‘Who sent it?’ I asked. ‘And why?’

Abigail chewed thoughtfully for a moment.

‘Why don’t you message back and find out?’

I shook my head.

‘Fine,’ she said, but there was a strange look on her face. ‘Give me your phone. We’ll Google the number.’

I looked down at my plate. The exploded tortellini was like a crime scene.

‘I don’t want to do that.’

‘Come on, Ebby. It will take literally a second.’

She got up and tried to reach into my pocket for my phone, smiling to make as if it were a game. I twisted away from her.

‘Don’t you want to know who the human barking like a dog is?’

‘I do, but not like that,’ I said, pushing her off me.

She sighed and sat back down.

‘I want to do it properly,’ I said. ‘The way we used to do things, without shortcuts. Maths homework, competing in triathlons, baking pavlova.’

‘You made a pavlova and tortellini alla panna? Jesus, Ebby.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I was giving an example of something that takes a lot of effort – whisking eggs, chopping fruit – but is worth it in the end because you get to eat a delicious pudding.’

Abigail put both her elbows on the breakfast bar.

‘This is about your dad.’

As I denied it, I could feel my face go red.

‘No, this is about pudding. Delicious pudding.’

She ignored me.

‘You know, having a good work ethic is just being an obedient little capitalist.’

‘The Reverend wasn’t a capitalist,’ I said. ‘He didn’t even have milk in his porridge.’

Abigail was silent. I stood up and carried our plates to the sink. She watched me scrape the uneaten food into the bin.

*

The first time I met Abigail, I had lived in London for less than a week, which is to say, I had been Ebby for less than a week. She was the office manager’s assistant at the company that would later make me redundant. I moved from Aberdeen for the job, dragging two suitcases on the train and taking a room I’d viewed on a Skype call. In the gleaming entrance foyer, she thrust out her hand.

‘You must be Ebenezer.’ She saw my expression and laughed. ‘I’ve got access to the HR files. I know all the secrets.’

‘It’s Ebby,’ I said, shaking her hand weakly.

Abigail was to give me a tour of the office. She pointed out the fire exits, the lunchroom and the desks where my new colleagues typed seriously on laptops. Every so often she would stop and spin on her heel, asking how a daughter had done at parents’ evening, complimenting a new haircut. Her face when she spoke to people was dazzling. And then she would introduce me with a magnanimous sweep of her arm. ‘This is Ebby, the new copywriting genius.’

It was like being carried by a wave. Abigail talked a lot and smiled a lot, and I was unused to either of these things. In our house, talking and smiling were administered frugally, certainly not before the day’s work was done. Even Mam, who loved to gossip with ladies after church or on the phone to her sister in Durham, limited herself to housekeeping practicalities or whether it was likely to rain tomorrow when The Reverend was around.

‘I’m jealous,’ Abigail said. Our tour had come to an end and she was showing me how to use the coffee machine. I hadn’t told her that I didn’t drink coffee. ‘You can write. I love reading but I could never write.’

‘Of course you could,’ I said. It seemed to me that there was nothing this woman could not do.

The coffee machine beeped. She handed me a mug.

‘Nah. Too much like hard work. I’d love to read your writing, though.’

‘I’ll only be doing basic copy at first,’ I said. ‘For the smaller campaigns.’

Abigail looked confused. Then she was smiling again.

‘Not this shit. There must be stuff you actually enjoy working on.’

*

I gave Abigail the leftover pasta in a Tupperware container. I could tell that she didn’t want it but she accepted, even kissing me on the cheek as she left. When she had gone, I moved from room to room. After feeling pinned down by the mystery of the voice note, I was buoyant with energy. I would find the human who barked like a dog and when I found them – and I would find them, I vowed, stumbling over the running shoes I’d left in the hallway – it would be my sabbath. A well-earned day of rest.

‘You will eat the fruit of your labour,’ The Reverend said, reading from the Bible that sat on the lectern, a cloth tassel marking the page. ‘Blessings and prosperity will be yours.’

Abigail and I stopped having sex, just before she stopped being my girlfriend; just after The Reverend died. We never spoke about it but I’m certain it was my fault. The pleasure of another person’s warm body no longer had a place in the world I was making for myself.

*

On Monday morning, I skipped my run and went straight to the library. The phonebooks were kept in a back room with no window, only a blueish strip light. I pulled one of the brick-sized Yellow Pages down from the shelf and opened it. The pages were furry with dust. I ran my finger along the first listing: ABBOT, Aaliyah. The number was not a match.

I returned to the library every day, working my way through the alphabet beneath the buzzing light. I no longer looked at job listings. My job now was to find out who sent the voice note.

A week into my search, Mam called.

‘It’s the start of Lent today,’ she said.

Lent was The Reverend’s favourite time of year. I’d been so busy at the library that I hadn’t noticed what day it was.

‘What are you going to give up?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I’ve done away with all that now. Now that he’s gone.’

‘Remember the year he gave up TV? We had to miss the Britain’s Got Talent final.’

‘Yes,’ Mam said. ‘It was bloody annoying.’

The next day at the library, I thought about The Reverend bending on his dodgy knees to pull the plug from our television set. Just as Jesus resisted the devil during his forty days and forty nights in the desert, we were to resist the temptation of Ant and Dec and sequinned acapella groups.

I opened another phonebook. I held my breath against the dust.

I learned that the flipside of joy is the sheer devastation you feel when it is taken away.

That afternoon, Abigail called to invite me out in the evening.

‘Please come, Ebby. You could use the break.’

‘It doesn’t work like that.’ I was thinking about all the numbers I had to get through. ‘You can’t enjoy the fruit until you’ve done the labour.’

I could hear her moving on the other end of the phone.

‘And you’re so sure you’ll get your fruit? After all this labouring.’

‘Yes,’ I said. I had to swallow then. ‘My work will be rewarded.’

Abigail replied, ‘I’ll text you the address.’

*

I had always been good at writing. The Reverend encouraged this. He lent me books and told me to make a list of the new words I learned. Many of these words he suggested himself, turning them over like shells combed from the beach. Sacrilegious, obedient, ecumenical. This was how I learned to write, plodding through essays at school and then university. I graduated with an English degree and impeccable vocabulary, but no joy in the act of writing.

It was Abigail who taught me about joy. We got together a month after our first meeting, and what she said at the coffee machine that day was true. She read everything – literary classics, free newspapers on the tube, sci-fi, Shakespeare – and she would tell me about her reading over beers in the living room of her flat, eyes wide and alive. I was amazed. I had never known someone to be so blatant about their passion, to luxuriate in it like a bubble bath. The Reverend’s passion – and even the word in relation to him sounded wrong, overblown – showed itself in the austerity of his character. Never with a hand gesture or raised voice.

Abigail, meanwhile, was amazed that I could write.

‘But you can write, Ebby,’ she’d say, when I protested that all I wrote was marketing copy. It was just work. ‘Writing is a joy and you should treat it that way.’

So, I wrote her a story. It was about a statue in Hyde Park that comes to life after a forest spirit casts a spell. It was silly, I could not imagine what The Reverend would have said had he read it, but I stayed up all night to finish it. The next day in the lunchroom, I handed the printed pages to
Abigail.

After half an hour, she looked up.

‘Ebby. It’s amazing.’

On our one-year anniversary, I told Abigail about The Reverend. I described him lost in thought at the kitchen table, playing football in the back garden. The sermons he preached at the lectern.

‘Wow,’ was all she could say. ‘I mean, wow.’

At the time, I was working on a new story. It was about a flood that engulfs a small town and I was having trouble with the ending. We were in her living room again, where I was hoping we could talk about it. But she sat motionless now, staring into her beer.

‘I’d like to meet him,’ she said suddenly. ‘The Reverend.’

I answered honestly. I felt that I owed it to her, this person who was so honest about everything, even passion, which is the hardest thing of all.

‘I don’t think The Reverend would like to meet you.’

Not long after that, he got sick. A week after the funeral, Abigail and I broke up and I lost my job. At some point during all this, we stopped having sex and I stopped writing stories. I learned that the flipside of joy is the sheer devastation you feel when it is taken away. The story about the flood remained as it was on the night I told her about The Reverend, without an ending.

*

The address Abigail texted was an axe-throwing bar in the centre of town. It took me fifteen minutes to find her because the place was alarmingly dark for an establishment where people were expected to throw sharp objects at walls. She was standing next to a large wooden bullseye, wearing protective goggles and a pink wristband.

‘The wristbands limit us to two drinks,’ she said, slipping one on my hand and forcing me into a pair of goggles. ‘Any more than that and we’d be unsafe to operate an axe.’

The goggles had a funny tint, now the bar was dark but also yellow.

‘I don’t want anything to drink,’ I said. ‘I need a clear head for the library tomorrow.’

I wanted to leave but the axe-throwing instructor had arrived and begun his demonstration. We were to hold the axe above our heads, core steady, then a big swing and release. Abigail went first. She raised her axe into an elegant yet forceful loop and let go. The blade bit the wood. She had scored a bullseye.

‘See, Ebby,’ she shouted over the cheers of the instructor. ‘Axe-throwing is fun.’

‘But what does it achieve? Throwing an axe at a wall. Nothing. It achieves nothing.’

Abigail tried to hand me the axe but I walked out of the bar and did not stop until I had crossed the road, when I heard footsteps behind me.

‘You’re going to work yourself to death,’ Abigail said. ‘Just like The Reverend.’

She was panting and her hair was all mussed from the goggles.

‘That’s not what happened,’ I said.

‘It was a stroke, wasn’t it? Caused by exhaustion.’

My mouth went dry. I couldn’t look at her, so I looked down instead.

‘The doctors couldn’t say for sure,’ I croaked. ‘Yes. Maybe. We don’t know.’

‘No,’ she said gently. ‘Of course.’

She sat down on the kerb. After a moment, I joined her.

‘What happened to your story about the flood?’ she asked.

It was as if she had poked me in the ribs. My search for the human barking like a dog was all that mattered now, I did not want to be reminded about writing.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘I’d like to know how it ends.’

‘There’s no time for writing.’ I didn’t like the ache that was building in my chest. ‘I have to find out who sent me the voice note.’

Abigail twisted to face me.

‘You probably think the reason we broke up is because we stopped having sex, but it’s not that. It’s because you stopped writing. You chose work over fun because you think it will make up for how The Reverend died, but it won’t. It will only make you miserable.’

My chest was throbbing. I got unsteadily to my feet.

‘You don’t know anything about The Reverend.’

All at once, Abigail was wearing her goggles again and crossing back over the road.

‘You’ve forgotten,’ she called over her shoulder. Before I could answer, she gave an awful laugh. ‘I’m terrified of dogs. The neighbour’s Labrador bit me when I was five. I still have a scar. It’s been torturous to hear you go on about that voice note.’

I wanted to say something but my tongue wouldn’t move in my mouth and then, Abigail was gone.

*

The next day in the library I reached DAAL, Aaron, but was no closer to finding the number. I pushed the phonebook away and rubbed my eyes. A memory came to me. Mam and The Reverend in London for a rare visit. We went to the Victoria and Albert Museum. He had read about an Edinburgh silversmith known for plainly wrought communion chalices, one of which was in the museum’s collection. Mam said she’d leave us to it and went to find the Dior dresses. We agreed to meet in the café.

The chalice was at the back of a display case containing miscellaneous ‘Scottish silverware, Medieval to early modern’. You couldn’t really see it, there was a dented tankard in the way, but The Reverend gave a nod. We moved with the flow of visitors through the ancient coins and watercolour paintings until we arrived in a very different room. There was almost no light and the ceiling was high. On each wall hung an enormous tapestry.

‘They belonged to Henry VIII,’ The Reverend said. ‘He was a great one for tapestries. Hampton Court, Esher – wherever his court travelled, he’d have them rolled up and transported. Remarkable, really.’

‘They’re huge,’ I said, feeling at once that this was a stupid thing to say but The Reverend agreed.

‘Gigantic. They needed to be. Tapestries were for keeping the cold from draughty Tudor dining halls, as well as for decoration.’ He pointed to a section in front of us. ‘This one shows a hunting scene. See the dogs with their tongues out?’

I moved closer to the tapestry. The dogs had faces like gargoyles. As I peered into their eyes, I saw the stitches that formed the picture. Each one was as small as a fingernail.

‘It must have taken so long,’ I said.

The Reverend sat on the bench in the middle of the room. I wondered whether his knees were hurting again. Mam would berate him for tiring himself out looking at fusty old things in cabinets when we met her in the café. She’d try to make him put jam on his scone but he’d refuse. I sat down next to him.

‘No looms, no mechanical devices.’ He was addressing the gargoyle dogs. ‘Each stitch done by hand. Hours, days, months, years of threading needle into fabric.’

In the dim light, his face shone with the sallow luminescence of a waning moon. He did not look like a man who could deliver a sermon; he did not look strong enough to lift the cloth tassel from the Bible on the lectern. I wanted him to stand up, to shout scripture at me but he stayed where he was with slumped shoulders, staring at the tapestry.

‘But it was worth it,’ I said. ‘All those stitches were worth it because they made a beautiful tapestry.’

The dogs watched us with hungry eyes. The Reverend stared back, saying nothing.

*

The next day I made it as far as FABRON, Casper. Back at home, I took out my phone and pressed Abigail’s name, then jabbed to cancel. We had not spoken since the night at the axe-throwing bar. Of course, I remembered her fear of dogs. The sheets rucked at our feet, a candle that smelled like fir trees burning softly. The scar was beneath her left ear and I traced it with my finger.

But if I allowed myself to think about it, to think about anything that wasn’t the woof-woof-woof-woof-woof, then I was a failure. A work shirker, a deficient labourer who deserved no fruit. I needed to put in the hours at the library like the weavers of Henry VIII’s tapestry, planting my tiny needle into an impossible, billowing thing the size of a ship’s sale, in and out, in and out, until my eyes burned and my fingers turned to blisters.

I needed to do it because I needed to know that it was worth it.

*

When I got to the library the next day, the librarian was waiting for me. I noticed that the door to the back room was closed.

‘I’m afraid I have some bad news,’ she said. ‘It’s the phone books. The council decided that it would be more convenient for people to access directory information online. They were taken for recycling first thing this morning.’

‘I don’t want convenience,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to access information online.’

A security guard appeared then and took me by the shoulders, bustling me out of the library as if I were an old phone book. I tried to explain. I tried to tell him about tortellini all panna and axe-throwing bars, about Henry VIII and cross-stitch bluetits. But he wouldn’t listen and eventually my voice gave way and I was outside on the pavement alone. That was when I took my phone from my pocket and opened the voice note. I tapped to call the unknown number.

After two rings, a familiar voice answered.

‘Hello, Ebby. I was wondering when you’d give in.’

*

Abigail poured milk into a jug. She added tea leaves to the pot, then water just off the boil. She picked up the tray and nodded for me to follow her into the living room.

We sat together on the sofa. Light fell through the bay window and onto the coffee table. I looked at the faded wood and asked, ‘Why did you do it?’

Abigail put her hands in her lap.

‘Well, I wanted the fruit so I had to do the labour.’

Her eyes were shining but I didn’t understand. She laughed.

‘I guess you were the fruit. I wanted you back, but like you were before The Reverend died. Back when you were writing stories and learning to enjoy yourself. I thought that if I did it his way – the hard way – and sent that voice note, then it might get through to you.’

It was like I’d been winded. All I heard was breath going in and out of my nose.

‘That night with the pasta,’ I said, when I was able to speak again. ‘You wanted me to Google the number.’

Abigail shrugged. ‘You wouldn’t have found me, I borrowed a burner phone from the office. But I wasn’t worried. I knew you’d never give in.’

She poured the tea. Her hair was fastened in a clip and there, exposed beneath her left ear, was the scar.

‘You hate dogs,’ I said.

‘Yep. I really do.’

‘It must have been horrible to bark like that.’

She handed me one of the mugs and cupped her hands around the other.

‘It was horrible. I wanted to get the bark exactly right so I watched YouTube videos of dogs and screamed myself silly. Then I practised in front of a mirror and that freaked me out too. By the time I recorded it, I was shaking.’

Guilt cascaded over me. I had made Abigail suffer, and for what? I thought about The Reverend at his lectern. A man who wanted to help us become better people and ended up a sacrifice himself. How much longer might he have lived, had he allowed a little joy? Jam on his scone and a loose-fitting shirt. A cheap flight to London to see his son before he became too ill to travel. I wanted so badly for his hard work, his suffering, to have been worth it. But now, in Abigail’s sun-warmed living room, the awful truth came to me.

‘It wasn’t worth it,’ I said. ‘In the end there is no reward.’

Dust was dancing in the light from the window. Things seemed to be happening in slow motion. I knew how to end my story then. The flood water recedes, the small town is changed forever. Abigail put her hand on my knee.

.

.

Phoebe Hurst is a writer from Peterborough. She is an assistant editor at The Guardian, and has had stories published in The London Magazine and Aesthetica. She is working on a novel.

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