I met Meena in the corridor. She had her fingers intertwined with those of a man in a terrible hat.
‘Are you having fun?’ she shouted.
‘What?’ I could barely hear her.
She came closer and more or less screamed in my ear, ‘Are you having fun?’
‘Yes!’
Several hours of swimming later and as the tides of people drained out of the front door, the house became a house again. No longer my private ocean. I went looking for Meena and I found her in the back garden, holding a cigarette a few centimetres from her mouth and watching, detached, as a man I recognized as her former flatmate Lawrence gesticulated wildly and said something that was clearly an accusation.
I stepped out into the cold garden.
‘You know, the thing that really irritates me …’ Lawrence said.
With narrowed eyes, Meena took a drag from her cigarette.
‘… is that you don’t even care,’ he finished.
‘You’re right. I don’t,’ she said, exhaling smoke at the same time as smiling, so that she looked like a Chinese dragon.
Lawrence threw his hands up in a gesture of frustrated defeat and pushed past me, back inside the house. Meena sucked on her cigarette. She was so calm and still, I felt I should have left her alone.
‘Can you hear that?’ she asked.
I strained my ears. I could hear laughter coming from the living room where the remaining party stragglers had washed ashore.
‘Listen,’ she said.
Then she threw her cigarette into the grass and walked off to the end of the garden. I followed her, and as I reached the bottom of the garden where there was a line of dark trees, I could hear it too. It sounded like a baby crying.
I don’t remember much until we were on the other side of the fence, in the neighbours’ garden. The grass was overgrown and littered with discarded junk – there was an old iron bathtub among the weeds, and a rusted lawnmower. A baby doll without arms was lying in the grass, staring at me with its wide-open eyes.
The sound, like a child whining, had fallen quiet then. We crunched through the long grass towards the line of trees at the back of the garden. And then we saw him, behind the rotting shed, chained by his neck to the trunk of a silver elm. When he saw us, he let out a little cry.
‘Oh my God,’ Meena whispered. Then, to the dog, she said in a quiet, soothing voice, ‘Hey there, fella.’ And she half crouched and crept towards him. The dog let out a high-pitched whine.
Meena got closer while I hung back, watching. ‘What if he bites?’ I asked.
‘He won’t bite, will you, pal?’ She was almost close enough to touch him. He looked up at her with doleful eyes and cried. He had a cut across his nose that was infected. A thick line of pink flesh with dark edges.
When she was close enough, Meena crouched down beside him and held her palm out flat. The dog sniffed it and gazed at her. His leather collar was attached to the chain that bound him to the tree, and all around his neck was a red ring of exposed skin where he’d tried to pull himself free.
‘You’re a good boy, aren’t you?’ she asked, and he let her stroke him on the top of his head. He closed his eyes and leant his head towards her. With each breath in, we could see the ridges of his ribs.
‘Would you like to come with us?’ Meena asked, continuing to stroke his head. His stumpy tail flicked once, twice. ‘Roger?’
‘His name is Roger?’
‘Well, he needs a name,’ she said, ‘Why not Roger?’ Then she flicked something silver in her hand.
‘What is that?’ I asked. ‘Is that a knife?!’
‘You never know when you might need one. I keep it in my boot,’ she said, and then, stroking Roger’s head, she said to him very seriously, ‘Now stay still.’ Roger looked up at her with his big brown eyes.
Carefully, Meena cut the leather collar with a sawing motion. ‘It’s okay, baby,’ she said softly, while he cried at the pressure of the collar on his neck.
When he was loose, he turned to Meena and licked her hands. His gentle thanks.
Once we got him through the gap in the fence, we gave Roger water we poured into an empty Neapolitan ice-cream tub, and some meat from the host’s fridge. Inside, the party was continuing, but now we were a party of three and we didn’t care.
‘We should take him to a vet,’ I said as we walked, the dog alongside us, around the side of the house and to the front garden.
Meena nodded, stuffing her Swiss Army knife back into her left ankle boot.