Peter Dickinson - Earth and Air

Invisibility had its advantages. She could now come indoors, and slept weightless at the foot of Steff’s bed. She trotted down to school with him and curled up under his bench or found safe corners to lie in so that she could still be nearby while he was doing stuff with his friends. At first he’d been worried about what might happen if someone happened to walk into her or trod on her, but she was careful not let it happen. As the days went by he came to realise that all the time she was with him she was performing an extremely difficult feat, a balancing act on a precarious rope bridge between the world of shadows and the world of flesh and blood. Any sudden jolt might toss her down into the nowhere between those worlds, any extra strain might unravel the fastening at one end or the other. A touch from his hand would do it.

So mostly she behaved as any other dog would have done. He had trained her not to eat anything except from his hand or from her bowl, but he had no shadow food to give her so she fended for herself, stalking shadow mice around the farm, or pouncing on small shadow creatures among the tussocks beside a path, or finding shadow scraps behind the kitchen door. Once, down on the shore, she dragged out something heavy from between two rocks and lay in a patch of shade holding one end of the invisible object between her forepaws and growling contentedly as she gnawed at the other end. She drank from a shadow stream that seemed to run down the far side of orchard. Steff asked Papa Alexi whether there’d ever been a stream there, and he said yes, but it had been diverted fifty years ago to water the fruit terraces. She peed and shat like a normal dog. Her faeces glistened a little while in the sun, but before they’d begun to dry and darken they faded into the ground.

She came with Steff when the man he thought of as Charon took him to meet his wife, Sophie, in a dark little bar in a backstreet, where none of the Deniakis or Mentathos people were likely to see them together. Charon fetched food and drink, but just had a glass of beer and left.

“Isn’t this wonderful!” said Sophie as soon as he’d gone. “Secret meetings again! And you look just like him, that age! My heart stopped when I saw you.”

They talked about Steff’s father—she told him a lot he didn’t know—and then about Steff himself, and his mother and his other family—she seemed to want to know everything—until it was time for her to catch the Mentathos truck home.

“Same again next week?” she said as she rose.

“Oh . . . Yes, please. If you like.”

It became a pattern for the next few weeks. She was like the cheerful and understanding aunt he’d never had. He didn’t know what she got out of it, but she obviously enjoyed their meetings. He told Papa Alexi and Aunt Nix about them, knowing they wouldn’t pass it on, but he didn’t expect anyone else at the farm to notice that he was getting back late on Wednesdays. He was wrong.

It wasn’t even a Wednesday. He got home at his usual time, just as the informal mid-day meal on the vine-shaded terrace was breaking up for everyone to go and have their afternoon rest. He was greeted by a shout from Mitsos.

“Hey, Steff. Where’d you get to yesterday? Not the first time, neither. Meeting some girl, I bet, down in the town. Tell us about her. Plump little piece, just coming ripe? You lucky little sod!”

Being Mitsos, he was aiming for maximum embarrassment, and a couple of months back he’d have got it. But thanks to Tartaros, and Ridiki’s return, and most of all to his meetings with Sophie, something had changed inside Steff. A joke Sophie had made to Charon a couple of weeks back even told him how to answer.

He picked up a chunk of bread, bit off a corner, chewed, and tucked it into his cheek.

“Dead wrong, Mitsos,” he said. “She’s a married woman.”

He chewed a bit more and added, “. . . and her husband isn’t jealous.”

Everyone laughed, partly at the joke, partly at Mitsos, but mainly with surprise at quiet, withdrawn, anxious Steff coming up with something like that. His uncle caught his eye and gave a nodded of approval—he thought boys should be able to stand up for themselves. Even so, it was a surprise when he returned after everyone else was gone, and Steff was finishing his meal, with Ridiki curled on the paving beside him. Steff rose. His uncle gestured to him to sit, did so himself, and picked up an olive.

“Got over losing that dog of yours?” he asked.

Out of the corner of his eye Steff saw Ridiki look up, amused.

“Just about,” he said. “I missed her a lot at first.”

“Hurts a bit every time, and the first one’s worst. Ready for another one, d’you think? Atalanta’s litter’s ready to look at. Got a chap coming tomorrow to choose one, but you get first pick.”

“Oh, but . . . I thought they’d all be spoken for.”

“You’re family. I’d give you one myself, but your mother’s sent the money. She wants it from her.”

Steff bent as if to scratch his ankle while he thought, letting him look directly at Ridiki for help. Her ears were pricked with interest and her eyes amused.

He straightened.

“Thank you very much,” he said. “I’ll go and look at them when Nikos’s finished his rest.”

As he watched his uncle walk away it struck him that he hadn’t seen Ridiki looking that lively for quite some time. Over the last few weeks she’d been spending more and more of her time asleep, and when she was awake her interest in everything around her was somehow less intense than it used to be. He’d started to wonder whether she was tired because it was becoming more of an effort for to maintain the between-two-worlds balance she needed for these spells of wakefulness.

Did she think another dog would be company for her, liven her up? Or for him, and allow her to go back into the shadows where she belonged?

Though she knew Steff well, Atalanta was a jealous mother, and Nikos had to hold her while Steff picked the pups out of the box one by one, turned them over to check their sex, and set them on the floor of the kennel-shed as if to see how they reacted while Ridiki looked and sniffed them over. Their eyes were open but still blurred, and the black markings they would have as adults only just visible as darker patches fawn birth-fur. The first three were bitches. They looked lost and miserable and headed straight back to the box with the rubber-legged waddle of small pups.

The fourth was a dog. He stood his ground, peering around with an absurd expression of eager bewilderment. Steff held out a hand. The pup sniffed at it, gave it an experimental lick, and sucked hopefully at a fingertip. When the hand was withdrawn he continued sniffing, to Nikos’s eyes at empty air, and then attempted to lick something, reaching so far that he almost tumbled on his face as Ridiki withdrew her invisible nose.

But not invisible to the puppy.

“Seen a ghost,” said Nikos, laughing. “You get that with some dogs. Hera, now, and she’s his—let’s see—great-grandmother.”

“Can I have him?” said Steff. “I don’t want another bitch, not so soon after Ridiki.”

“Good choice. You’ve the makings of a sound dog there. Mind you, he’ll look a bit like something out of a circus, those markings. There’s some wouldn’t want that.”

Steff hadn’t paid much attention to the markings, merely registering that the dog would be mainly the Deniakis golden-yellow, with a few black bits. Now he saw that these patches, still no more than a light golden-orange, were going to darken into five almost perfect circles, three on the left flank and two on the right, like a clown’s horse in a picture book. He was a comical little scrap.

“What can I call him?” he asked. “Did the old Greeks have clowns?”