Jack found him by the roadside in October.
The puppy was sitting on the edge of the motorway, soaking wet and tiny, staring at the passing cars like he was waiting for someone specific. Jack was driving to his allotment to dig up potatoes that day. He braked for a second, thought he’d just have a look. But the puppy lifted his head, and that was it. The potatoes stayed in the ground for another week.
He called him Mars. The name came from his neighbour Vera when she saw this ginger, floppy-eared thing in the hallway with paws too big for its body.
“Ginger, nosy, hopeless,” she said. “Mars. Suits him.”
Jack just laughed.
Mars grew fast. By spring he’d claimed the entire left side of the sofa and acted like it was his by right. Jack moaned about it at first, then gave up. Sleeping alone in the flat was worse than sleeping with a dog that snored and twitched a leg in his sleep.
They didn’t become mates overnight. It happened gradually, the way people get close when there’s no rush. Morning walk. Bowl of food at seven in the evening. Telly. Sometimes Jack talked to Mars out loud. Mars would sit next to him, looking serious, only occasionally yawning, showing all his teeth.
“You’re right,” Jack would say. “Enough.”
And he’d switch off the telly.
***
The accident happened in April, on their way back from the evening walk.
Jack didn’t remember much of it afterwards. Slippery road, a car came out of nowhere onto the pavement, Mars was on the lead, and then the lead snapped. Jack got thrown onto the kerb. He hit his side, lay there for a few seconds, only hearing his own breathing and someone shouting far away.
When he got up, Mars was gone.
The lead lay on the tarmac. The plastic clip was cracked in two.
He searched until midnight. Went around three blocks, called his name, asked passers-by. They just shook their heads. Someone said they’d seen a ginger dog running towards the railway crossing, but that was about forty minutes ago, and they hadn’t seen him since.
Back home, Jack sat in the kitchen and stared at the empty bowl for a long time.
Then he got up. Wrote a lost-dog notice, printed twenty copies. Stuck them up around the block the next morning, then rang three vet surgeries and the shelter on Mill Lane.
“If a ginger dog comes in, a mongrel,” he’d say into the phone. “Please call me. Here’s my number.”
A week passed.
Then a month.
The notices faded in the May rain, and Jack replaced them. Then again in June. The vets stayed quiet. The shelter on Mill Lane rang twice, both times a mistake, both times the wrong dog.
In July, Vera said gently from behind her door:
“Jack, love, maybe get another one. There’s plenty at the shelter.”
“No,” Jack replied.
She never brought it up again.
The flat without Mars felt different.
Not empty, exactly. Things were in their place, the fridge hummed, the neighbours clomped about upstairs at half past nine as usual. But something had shifted.
Jack picked up an old tennis ball that Mars used to chase down the hallway. Put it on the shelf. Thought about it, then tucked it in a drawer. Then took it out again and left it on the shelf.
Every morning his hand would instinctively reach for the lead by the door. The lead hung there. No need to go anywhere.
He started walking alone. Same route, same time, only without Mars. He couldn’t explain why. He just did it.
In August, his daughter rang from Manchester.
“Dad, come visit. Stay with us, have a break.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
He paused. “What if he comes back?”
His daughter paused too. Then she said “okay” in that voice people use when they want to say something else but decide not to.
Mars came back in October.
Jack heard scratching at the door just after seven in the evening. He thought he imagined it at first. Noise from the stairwell, a draught, who knows. But the scratching came again. Insistent, with pauses, like someone knew the door would open, just needed to wait a bit.
He opened it.
Mars was sitting on the doormat.
Older. His fur was clipped in a few places, where there must have been wounds. His left side looked a bit sunken. And he had a collar on. A different one, leather, brown, with a brass buckle and a small tag that said one word: “Buddy”.
Jack stood in the doorway for a long time, just looking at him. Mars sat and looked at Jack. One ear flopped, a ginger patch on his forehead shaped like a lopsided star. Same eyes, amber with a dark rim.
“Where’ve you been?” Jack said.
Mars stood up, stepped over the threshold, and walked into the hallway the way someone walks when they know the layout by heart. Right to the bowl. It was still there, same spot. Empty, of course.
Jack shut the door. Went into the kitchen. His hands trembled a little as he opened the fridge.
“Right,” he said. “Right.”
The next morning he drove to the vet’s.
Mars was examined, given his jabs, checked for a microchip. Jack asked about the collar. The vet picked up the tag and read it aloud:
“‘Buddy’. Is that a different name?”
“Someone gave him a different name,” Jack said.
“He lived with someone?”
“Six months somewhere. Don’t know where.”
The vet looked at him, then at Mars, then back at Jack.
“It happens,” she said. “Dogs sometimes leave and then come back. Especially smart ones.”
Jack didn’t answer. He watched Mars sit on the metal table with a calm expression, tolerating the check-up.
On the back of the tag they found a phone number.
Jack called from the car, with Mars on the back seat looking out the window.
The phone was picked up after three rings.
“Hello?”
“Hi,” Jack said. “You had a dog. Ginger. You called him Buddy.”
A long silence.
“Yes,” said a voice. Female, older. “We did. He left us in September. We looked for him.”
“He’s with me. He’s my dog. His name is Mars. He got lost in April.”
Another silence. Then the woman said:
“He lived with us. We fed him, treated him. He had injuries.”
“Thank you,” Jack said.
“He’s a good dog.”
“Yeah.”
Pause.
“Do you live far?” the woman asked. “From Birch Road?”
“Other side of town.”
“God. He came to us in April. Just lay down by our fence and wouldn’t leave.”
Jack stared through the windscreen at the grey courtyard with leafless poplar trees.
The conversation sort of fizzled out. Jack put the phone away. Mars was snoring on the back seat, lying with his head on his paws.
At home, Jack took off Mars’s unfamiliar collar. Put it on the table, looked at it for a long time. Brown, leather, with the “Buddy” tag. Good quality, not cheap.
Six months somewhere. And he still came back.
Jack thought about the woman from Birch Road. How she must have fed him every day, stroked him, got attached. And then one morning in September she came out and he was gone. And she looked for him. Maybe put up notices, called around.
He picked up the phone.
“It’s me again,” he said when she answered. “Just wanted to say. If you’d like to visit him, I don’t mind.”
Silence.
“Really?” she said.
“Really.”
She came on Saturday. Margaret, sixty-four, in a grey coat and with a string bag that had apple jam and a bag of dog food – the same stuff Mars got used to over those six months.
Mars saw her from the hallway and didn’t rush over, no. He just walked up and touched his nose to her palm. Wagged his tail happily.
They had tea. Margaret told him how she’d found Mars by her fence in April, taken him to the vet, how he’d been scared at first and then settled in. Jack talked about the accident, the snapped lead, the lost-dog notices.
Mars lay between them on the floor, dozing. Every now and then he’d lift his head, look at one, look at the other.
“He chose both of us,” Margaret said.
Jack looked at the dog. Then at the woman beside him.
“Looks like it.”
Jack put the unfamiliar collar in a desk drawer. Didn’t throw it out.
Mars took back the left side of the sofa and started chasing the tennis ball down the hallway at one in the morning. The lost-dog notices got soaked in the November rain and peeled off by themselves.
Margaret came on Saturdays. Brought jam, sometimes asked for advice about her currants – she had a vegetable patch on Birch Road, and Jack knew about gardens. They talked while Mars dozed between them.
One evening Jack took the leather collar with the “Buddy” tag out of the drawer. Looked at it. The tag gleamed under the lamp.
In the hallway hung two leads. One red, old. One blue, new – the one Margaret had brought one Saturday and hung up without a word, without asking permission.