by Neil Cross
It swivelled its blunt snout in Jamie’s direction and regarded him through tiny, idiot’s eyes.
Nervously, Jamie remounted.
As he watched, the man freed himself from beneath the car. He was Craig Hooper. On Saturday night, he had tried to kick down Jamie’s front door.
Jamie considered the wisdom of heading back the way they’d come. But Stuart had seen Craig Hooper too, and he was already astride his mud-splattered mountain bike.
With a flurry of hand movements, Stuart indicated to Jamie that it was best to keep silent and cycle past as fast as they could. The car was several metres away. It might be possible to gather enough speed to pass Craig Hooper without him even seeing Jamie, let alone recognizing him.
To Jamie, this sounded dishonourable. But he knew it was stupid to face Craig Hooper, who was at least eighteen and therefore a godlike and indestructible force. So he scanned the glass-sparkling concrete ground and garnered in his right hand a small, kidney-shaped pebble. He nodded that Stuart should go first, which he did with relief and without complaint, wobbling uncertainly at first on his oversized bicycle.
Craig Hooper was smearing his hands clean on his chest when Stuart passed him, a half-noticed blur. Craig Hooper was at an age when young boys are beneath contempt and all-but invisible.
Jamie settled his foot on the pedal and kicked off.
Stuart was right. By the time Jamie reached Craig Hooper, he had gathered some momentum.
Speeding past, he called out one word—
Wanker!
and threw the stone.
Hooper looked up. The stone hit him above the right eye. He fell back. His trousers caught on the Capri’s loose bumper, which ripped free of its rusty housing.
This freed the dog. It set off in immediate, silent pursuit of Jamie.
All this Jamie knew because he glanced over his shoulder without reducing his speed. Because he was doing this, his front wheel hit the kerb and he was thrown, head-first, over the handlebars.
The impact smashed the wind from him. Before he could get up, the dog was upon him.
Jamie punched it.
It bit his hand.
That hurt so much, Jamie could hear it.
Jamie used his bodyweight to throw the dog from him. It scrabbled away, nails scratching on the concrete. Then it rounded to attack again. Craig Hooper was calling its name:
‘Bronson! Bronson!’
But the dog had Jamie’s blood on its tongue and in its hot throat.
As Jamie reached for his toppled bike, Craig Hooper ran towards them. One hand cupped his bleeding forehead. He was still calling the dog’s name. There was panic in his voice.
Jamie’s bike grew complex in his hands. He looked up, struggling with the handlebars, and saw that Stuart had turned and was cycling back towards him. In one hand, Stuart waved a wrist-thick branch. Stuart braked behind the dog. He steadied himself on one foot and brought the branch down, across the dog’s spine. The dog yelped, perhaps in surprise. It turned, sinuously, and bit Stuart’s leg.
Jamie was close enough to kick it. He aimed for its swollen testicles and instead punted it in the taut, pink stomach. The dog yelped, in pain this time. It took a moment to reorientate itself. In his haste, Jamie was unable to mount the bike. He swung one leg over the saddle and lost his footing. The bike slipped from under him. The dog bit into his thigh and worried the flesh like a rubber bone.
Jamie fell. The bike was beneath him. One leg was twisted beneath it. The dog was on top of him. He grabbed its collar to keep its jaws from his face. Its breath stank. Its snout flashed like a camera.
Finally, Craig Hooper’s hand closed on the dog’s collar. He lifted it, kicking and writhing, into the air. Craig Hooper was screaming at them to ‘fuck off, fuck off while the dog bent and curled and snapped its jaws and barked and snarled, three feet above the ground.
Jamie righted the bike and mounted it, successfully this time. He saw that Stuart was waiting on the nearest corner.
Jamie would never have believed it was possible to cycle so quickly. He seemed without weight and of infinite velocity, the bike skimming the surface of the earth like something devoid of friction.
They discarded the bikes in the Ballards’ driveway. Stuart raced to the front door. Tears came with its familiar scent. He cried out: ‘Mummy!’
(Jamie had promised never to tell anyone, but he told Sam. They exchanged a look, and giggled.)
Mrs Ballard pressed a clean towel to Jamie’s thigh, giving him a glimpse down her blouse and a head of her perfume. He thought she might detonate with repressed panic before the ambulance arrived.
The sound of its sirens brought some relief. Mrs Ballard and Stuart rode in the ambulance with Jamie. Stuart was given a dressing to press to his own wound, which seemed almost desultory compared to the great level of care and attention the paramedics paid to Jamie.
‘There’s like a big vein in the thigh?’ Jamie told Sam. ‘Apparently, if the dog had bitten the vein I might have bled to death.’
He marked a tiny measure between thumb and forefinger.
‘It was this close,’ he said.
Sam exhaled, whistling through his teeth.
‘How many stitches?’
Jamie looked up at the female nurse who’d come in to change his drip.
‘About sixty,’ she said. ‘In the thigh. After the wound was cleaned.’
‘Sixty?’
‘And twenty more in Jamie’s arm and wrist. And a couple on his forehead, where he banged it.’
She tugged Jamie’s earlobe and said, ‘He’s been in the wars.’
Jamie smiled up at her, subservient and proud.
Sam asked if he might have a word with her in private. He followed her from the cubicle. She told him that, yes, there would be some scarring. The bites were quite serious, and it was in the nature of such injuries that the flesh was ragged and torn at the edges, and difficult to stitch cleanly. But there’d been no real muscle damage and the scarring might not be as bad as Sam was expecting—modern colloid treatments had reduced the kind of permanent disfigurements that once had been common. Jamie was lucky to have suffered no concussion, despite giving himself a fair old whack on the head. She’d seen boys of his age killed by less serious tumbles. The worst of it was, he’d lost a lot of blood. He’d been fortunate to get to the Ballards’ house without passing out, and more fortunate that Mrs Ballard had known how to fashion a tourniquet. It was she who’d done most to ensure that Jamie’s injuries didn’t have more serious consequences.
While she spoke, Sam cupped a hand over his mouth and nodded.
She asked if he’d like to speak to a doctor. He said no, and thanked her, then he put his head through the gap in the curtains round Jamie’s cubicle and told him he was going to make a phone call. He went back through reception and into the car park, lit a cigarette, turned on his mobile and called Mel.
When he spoke the words ‘savaged by a pit-bull fucking terrier,’ the other smokers gave him impressed glances.
He put the phone in his pocket, ground the cigarette beneath his shoe and wandered back through to the ward. He already felt at home. Hospitals did that. They became too familiar, too quickly. He stopped off at the Coke machine and got a can for him and a can for Jamie.
He took them to the cubicle. Jamie couldn’t move easily.
Sam popped the can for him, and sat back and watched his boy drinking.
They didn’t really speak until Mel arrived. They heard her before they saw her, a rushing through the swinging doors, a low, theatrical whisper, asking where her nephew was. Jamie smiled at Sam’s fond irritation, and called out to her. She must have been close because they could hear the catch in her throat and the accelerated clicking of her heels. She battered her way through the curtains and threw herself at Jamie. She smelt of wine and perfume.
&
nbsp; Jamie was kept in overnight. Sam and Mel waited at his bedside long after he fell asleep. Finally, a nurse ushered them out.
Sam called a minicab from a vandalized free phone on the reception desk. The A & E department was beginning to fill with closing-time casualties.
The minicab, when it arrived, smelt of a hundred years of cigarettes. Sam and Mel were cold and grubby with tiredness. The streetlights slowly pulsed and strobed over their heads. The driver didn’t attempt to engage them in conversation, perhaps judging them recently bereaved.
In the morning, Sam called at the Ballards’. Their front garden was orderly and groomed, with gardenias in concrete pots either side of the front door.
Martin Ballard was at work. His wife, Jane, came to the door. She was tall and as pink as a sugar mouse. She was very showered and perfumed and coiffed, as if permanently expecting company.
The house made Sam feel adolescent and scruffy, and when he explained who he was, he stumbled over his words. But Jane Ballard smiled and stepped aside to let him in.
She called Stuart downstairs. Barefoot in a Liverpool FC strip, he limped down. Sam thrust out his hand. After a nervous, confirming glance towards his mother, Stuart extended his hand and shook manfully.
‘I wanted to thank you,’ Sam told him. He was monitoring the tone of his voice, wary of the patronizing manner that crept in when people addressed the old or the young.
‘It took some bottle,’ he said. ‘Doing what you did.’
Stuart looked proud. Sam guessed he had never been so praised in his mother’s presence. He clapped him on the shoulder and broke the moment.
He said, ‘Make sure you come and see him.’
‘Is he home?’
‘Later today. They kept him in overnight, just to keep an eye on him.’
‘Is he off school?’
‘For a bit, yeah.’
‘He’s all right, though?’
‘Thanks to you, he is.’
That was perhaps a compliment too far. Stuart said, ‘Nah,’ in a strange tone and looked at his bare feet. Then he said he had to go (he didn’t bother trying to explain where), and went back upstairs, greatly exaggerating his limp.
Sam watched him.
‘Brave boy,’ he said.
Jane Ballard was looking at the stairs where Stuart had been, as if noticing for the first time the space he had occupied.
‘Yes,’ she said.
There was a mystery behind that look which Sam had no desire to investigate.
He said, ‘I wanted to thank you, too.’
She turned to face him. The odd look had gone and she had again adopted the self-conscious languor she’d worn to the door like a nightdress.
Sam was surprised to find himself responding to it. He shifted his weight.
He said, ‘They told me at the hospital …’
He broke her bright, unblinking gaze.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘You really helped.’
She smiled.
‘It’s very nice of you to say so.’
‘Not at all. And please thank—’
‘Martin?’
‘Please thank Martin for me, too. I hope I wasn’t rude.’
‘Not at all.’
‘It was a bit of a shock, that’s all. I wasn’t thinking straight. But I can’t believe I didn’t thank him.’
‘Really,’ she said, ‘don’t give it a thought.’
Sam looked down and smiled.
‘I didn’t know if I was coming or going.’
‘Of course not. Your child was in pain.’
He couldn’t predict from what angle this conversation would approach him next.
‘Yes,’ he said.
She touched his shoulder.
‘They don’t stop being precious,’ she said, ‘just because they’re growing away from you.’
He brushed at his eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
She squeezed his upper arm.
‘Don’t be silly.’
He smiled.
She said, ‘Jamie’s a lovely boy.’
‘Yes,’ said Sam.
‘And he’s always welcome here.’
Sam could feel the sun on his neck. He enjoyed standing there in the hallway being outmanoeuvred by Jane Ballard. But it was time to go. He jingled his car keys round his index finger, in unconscious and perhaps guilty mimicry of her husband.
On the way home, he stopped off to buy some things for Jamie: a pile of magazines, a couple of books, a new driving game for the PlayStation. He stopped off again at the local chemist to pick up some prescription painkillers and antibiotics, and while he was there he bought some Lucozade, a warm bottle of which had become such an integral component of British illness that it seemed to evoke another time, like a faded postcard of the Silver Jubilee.
He took the carrier bags to the boot of the car, and dumped them in. Then he went to the camping shop, to find something he could kill the dog with.
15
He’d known the camping shop by the railway station since he was a child. He was disappointed to discover that it was no longer the fusty, underlit store of his recall; its dustiness would have suited his furtive intent. But the camping shop had been rebranded as an Outdoor Adventure Centre, and it was vivid and halogen-lit. Somehow, extra floorspace had been acquired; there was now room near the back of the ground floor to erect a four-man tent on a square of Astroturf, around which browsed a number of young people in primary-coloured, sleeveless fleeces.
Sam wandered up and down before locked glass cabinets that contained racks of knives, multi-tools, binoculars, torches and compasses. He felt smug and wise. When the first rush of wisdom had passed, he became worried that a particular sales assistant was watching him too closely, so he went and examined with an expert eye the display of rucksacks and hiking socks.
When Sam was very young, he and his father had sometimes gone camping. He remembered little more than the pride he’d felt, the weight of the rucksack on his shoulders, the straps grating his skin and the sunburn on the back of his unprotected neck. Like Jamie, Sam had been scared of cows—except his fear had a precipitating event. His father had hurried them across a particular field, towards a stile that never seemed to get any closer. Too late, Sam’s father realized that in the northeast corner of the field there stood a bull; solid and lumpy as an ingot of lead. The bull appeared to be uninterested in them. But it was built like a train, and it could charge like one if it chose. Sam recalled the repressed and fearful quiver in his father’s voice.
This had been an acute, early moment of self-consciousness and separation. Although some years were to pass before he learnt the full extent of his father’s weaknesses, and many more years yet before he began to understand them, Sam never again regarded him with uncritical awe.
He sometimes wondered if he’d passed that experience on to his own son. Perhaps at the sight of cows, Sam let off some pheromonal fear-signal, alerting Jamie at a pre-conscious level that his father, the divine protector, was himself frightened by these doe-eyed, slow-moving ruminants.
Approvingly, Sam fingered the nylon weave of an orange rucksack. He tested the padding of the shoulder strap. Then he wandered over to inspect the walking boots. His own pair had been brown leather, piously dubbined, and they had chewed his feet bloody for six months. His father had assured him it was worth it; the boots would last a lifetime. But Sam didn’t want them to last a lifetime. He wanted rid of them. They ruined the camping weekends, and they ruined getting home, too—because his father insisted that newspaper be spread on the kitchen table and the boots be dubbined before Sam was permitted to slip into a cold, blissful bed.
He felt vindicated by history. During the intervening thirty years, the design and construction of hiking boots had been revolutionized. He felt old, and wi
ser still. The new boots were ranked on Pyrex shelves, mounted on the rear wall of the shop. His kind of boot still existed, but they were tucked away on the top left-hand shelf, where only the most determined customer could reach them. The new boots were constructed of strong, lightweight, waterproof, foot-friendly and colourful materials that required little or no maintenance.
Sam passed through wisdom to melancholy. It was sometimes disturbing, how quickly his memories of childhood had come to belong essentially as well as factually to another century. The colour was fading from his memory. He and his father slogged up rainy hills in their vicious boots and scratchy woollen socks, like characters in a Hovis advert.
He bought two Leatherman multi-tools, one for him and a miniature version as a gift for Jamie. He also bought two eight-inch fishing knives with serrated blades, a smaller version with a six-inch blade, a landing net, such as might be used for salmon, and a small spear-gun designed for deep sea fishing, the kind included in most boats’ emergency ditch-kits. He bought a couple of compasses too, for no reason other than that he liked their weight and design. Finally, he bought a pair of gloves and some thick grey socks with a black heel and toe-piece.
He wanted to look like he was maintaining a permanent kit, but he needn’t have bothered. The shopkeeper, a stringy man with grey, cropped hair, was as uninterested in Sam as his colleague was suspicious. He was poring through a colour catalogue, marking off items on a checklist with a chewed ballpoint pen.
Sam put the kit in his shoulder bag and hoped he wouldn’t be mugged. It would be embarrassing to be rolled by two bored teenagers when he was carrying such a selection of weaponry.
It was a short drive to the builder’s merchants, where he bought two broom handles and some duct tape. As an afterthought, he selected a couple of pick-axe handles, just to make sure.
Mel had gone to pick Jamie up from the hospital. There was no way to be sure they wouldn’t be home early, but Sam couldn’t wait. Without bothering to remove his coat, he made the first spear on the kitchen worktop, taping a fishing knife to the end of a broom handle. With it, he jabbed at the leg of lamb he’d left there to defrost. The blade penetrated the flesh, but the impact wrenched the handle from his grip, hurting his wrist, and the knife was torn free of its makeshift housing.
