Spicer - LOST DOG: a love story

Kate Spicer is a lifestyle journalist who has written for the Sunday Times, The Times, the Daily Mail, the Evening Standard, Vogue, Red and Noble Rot magazines and The Pool, and has appeared on television in everything from Masterchef to Newsnight. She has made three acclaimed documentaries in the last ten years all of which still air internationally, including most recently Mission to Lars, described as beautiful by the New York Times.

To anyone who knows what it is to love and be loved by a dog.

The owner of Lewis Hamilton II is Nicholas Burton, one of the last people to be pulled alive from Grenfell Tower on 14 June 2017. His boy was killed that night, along with 71 of his neighbours. The following January, his wife Maria Del Pilar Burton, Pily, died in hospital as a consequence of the tragedy. Nicks ability to bring light into a room despite his great personal loss is astounding. He is a wonderful, warm man.

The clock barks twelve times and the day I decide to get a dog begins. I look up at my drug dealers clock. The numbers are replaced by TV family favourites. Its Lassies job to announce midnight.

What the hell is that doing here?

The heart of Tims place is not the hearth or the kitchen or even the TV, its a large marble-and-glass coffee table that must have been quite the natty thing in the eighties when Tim was a young man about town. Now the town comes to him, and hunched over his period monstrosity holding rolled-up notes, they sniff cocaine up into their respiratory system, where it is absorbed through the blood vessels in the mucous membranes, into the bloodstream where it shoots around the body and arrives at the brain. Boom, theres a big rush of dopamine. Delicious dopamine is the happy drug made in your own body. If only you can get enough of it, it makes life feel grand, even when you feel grim.

In this state time flew by. Every hour an echo from my innocence calls out more time past. More of my life, wasted. It seems Lassie has only just barked her warning that everyone should be in bed when Bagpuss starts his soporific yawning. Its 1 a.m. Sleepytime for kids. Not for Tims visitors though, they felt talkative, perverse, horny, animated, they shouted, they confessed their truest darkest thoughts, they argued and pointed fingers at each other, one did a rigid hipped sexless sexy dance, they bonded for life and became fast friends until, that is, the drug wore off and all that merriment is replaced by the urgent grubby desperate need for more cocaine. No ones your friend then, aside from Tim. Dear old Timbo.

Tim wasnt a dealer, not exactly; at first, he was very generous with his Tupperware full of finely milled snowy-white toot. This was no tawdry 30 pub dust. A gram of Tims very moreish gak was 130. Hence he attracted a nicer fiend, if there is such a thing. Eventually though, he just said no, and then you started paying him.

Sitting under the clock, now with the little hand on Mr. T, are two delinquent bankers. One is considered a genius of his speciality, the other is a more humdrum financial talent but far more handsome, if you go for that sharp-suit-and-slicked-back-hair kind of guy. They are bellowing at each other about LIBOR and complex financial transactions. Lets call them the Libores.

Theres another woman here, a young one with coltish legs in a pair of knickerbocker-style leather shorts and a dainty singlet that shows the sides of her cute bee-sting tits. Shes the brainy bankers girlfriend, not that hes paid any attention to her all night. Lets call her Chica. Tim is alternating his attention between the birds and the bankers. He is riveted by Chicas chat about her ambitions as an influencer. Which is a good thing, because she aint letting anyone else get a word in edgeways. For now it feels like we are all getting on like a house on fire, though Im experienced enough to know its the drugs talking, and listening; Im old enough to be her mother and, dont be fooled by the inky-black hair, Tim her grandfather. In the morning we will have nothing in common.

I sit with my head inclined to indicate that Im all ears, though Im not at all. I am just enjoying the anaesthetic escapism from a non-specific discomfort that throughout my whole adult life I have never quite been able to escape unless I am high, on what has changed over the years: drugs, sport, booze, love, work, theyre all great numbing agents. Eventually though, I always land up back here.

The ashtray fills to overflowing and once an hour another snappy catchphrase from childhood falls through the gloom. It is dark everywhere in the flat except the coffee table, lit by an overhead lamp and our eager attention.

By four my mood is starting to seriously flag and I descend into a hunch-shouldered silence. What chat Ive managed to edge in to Chicas self-absorbed monologue is grinding to a halt. The gas is running out.

I need more. Drugs.

Theres a susurrant squeak of dead animal hide against Chicas delicious skin as her legs move on Tims old white leather international playboy sofa. It sounds like guys making moves in old cars. This flat really is the land that time forgot. Specifically daytime. I cannot remember ever seeing the curtains open. I look up. This fucking clock really doesnt belong here. It belongs in a playroom, or a happy family kitchen, one bathed in sunlight and smears of biscuit.

Phil Collins is on Tims mega-stereo with the big dials. Tims got the drugs, and where theres drugs theres usually someone happy to have sex, but hes always struggled with the rock n roll part of the equation. He is sitting, intent on Chica, now discussing monetising her Instagram account and advertisers and brands that will pay her for content. Im sure you could attract a male audience too

My cynicism is creeping back. Once, I had found it sad and offensive to my feminist principles, the sight of these younger women being slowly corrupted by the Tims of the world, older men with expensive drugs. Now I shrugged. The ordinary undoing of fortunate people didnt move me anymore. The French writer Huysmans said a heart is hardened and smoked dry by dissipation and that sums it up better than I ever could. Nice girls move to London, nice girls get corrupted, and pretty willingly, from what I could remember of my own swift descent. I know its meant to be a tragedy of gender inequality, but to me, its clich.

Chica, zipping through the lines like a pro and filling us in on her plans for a brilliant life, doesnt realise all this yet. She theatrically holds the phone above us. Selfie!

No, no, no. No way. I can see the hollowed-out ocular sockets. Lack of focus in the eyes, the lifeless 5 a.m. skin, grey roots and the fuzzy jawline. I put my hands in front of my face.

Come on! I cant believe youre the same age as my mum, she says, excitedly.

No! I speak like I would to a dog about to steal a steak.

She still looks flawless. The satiny fabric of her smooth skin and her loose and easy slender body, her hair still a glorious reflection of her natural golden hope. Her beautiful eyes with only a mere hint of blue shadow underneath them stare intent and briefly hurt from her luminous dew-kissed face. Oh no, why?