“Arrested? What a wag you are, Jackson,” she had sighed.

“No, really-arrested and charged,” he said. Wag? What kind of a word was that?

“For brawling?”

“I believe the technical term is ‘assault.’ I’m up before the sher-iff in the morning, I have to stay in jail overnight.”

“For God’s sake, Jackson, do you have to go looking for trou-ble?”

“I didn’t go looking for it, it found me all of its own accord. Are you going to ask me if I’m all right?”

“Are you all right?”

“Well, my hand hurts like hell, and I’m wondering if I’ve got at least one cracked rib.”

“Well, that’s what happens when you go in for tomfoolery.”

Tomfoolery? His predicament seemed to have brought out the (even more) bizarre elements of her vocabulary. He thought she would be sympathetic, but she had more or less put the phone down on him, although he supposed he had woken her up in what was the middle of the night by the time he’d been charged and processed. He thought that perhaps she might have left him a nice message on his phone while it waited for him, with his other belongings, but there was nothing.

He knew that whatever happened he mustn’t mention the dog to Julia.

“You killed a dog, Jackson?”

“No! The dog just died, I didn’t kill it.”

“You killed it with the power of your thoughts?”

“No! It had a heart attack, or a stroke, maybe, I’m not sure.” He heard Julia light up a cigarette and drag hard on it. Her accordion lungs going in and out, wheezing their sickly tune.

He had watched in paralyzed horror as the snarling dog had lumbered toward him, like an overweight gymnast going for the vaulting horse, and thought, Holy Mother of God, because divine intervention seemed the only thing that could rescue him. He steadied himself, reminded himself of the drill, Grab its legs, pull it apart, and, lo and behold, the Virgin Mary herself must have interceded on his behalf, because just as the furious beast reached him, it dropped at his feet like a balloon that had been pricked. Jackson stared at it in dumbfounded astonishment, waiting for it to pull itself together and carry on ripping him apart with its teeth, but there wasn’t even a twitch in its tail left. Honda Man roared with some horrible inner dog-loving pain and fell to his knees next to the animal, and even though the guy was a crazy, enraged psychopath, Jackson couldn’t help but feel a twinge of sympathy for someone in the throes of so much grief.

He scratched his head, Stan to Honda Man’s Ollie, and wondered what to do. Running seemed like a good option, but somehow it didn’t seem right to just walk away. Before he could decide on the right course of action-kill Honda Man or comfort him- a policeman arrived on the scene. They may have been in a dark backwater of an alley, but they were close to the Royal Mile and had been making enough noise to wake poor old Greyfriar’s Bobby, sleeping the big sleep no more than a stick’s throw away. So shouting did work, he must remember to emphasize this fact to Marlee. And Julia.

Jackson supposed that, through a policeman’s eye, it didn’t look good-Honda Man on the ground, his nose a mashed-up mess, sobbing over his dead dog, Jackson standing over them both, scratching his head in bemusement, his mouth almost dripping with blood that wasn’t his own. Perhaps he should have just put his hands up and said, “It’s a fair cop, you’ve got me bang to rights, officer,” but he didn’t, he protested a great deal (“It was self-defense, he attacked me, he’s insane”) and ended up being cuffed and forced into the back of a squad car.

His appearance in court this morning had been swift and bru-tal. The arresting officer read out a statement to the effect that he had come across “Mr. Terence Smith” on the ground in a pool of blood, sobbing over the body of his dog. The victim accused the defendant of killing the dog, but there were no visible marks on the dog. The defendant appeared to have bitten Mr. Smith’s nose.

“Mr. Smith” himself made an almost credible victim-sharp-suited in Hugo Boss, his nose purple and swollen in a way that clearly incriminated Jackson. He had been a man going about his own business, walking his dog. Walking his dog-was there any more innocent pastime that a citizen could indulge in?

Jackson had refused to see the police doctor last night, claiming he was “fine.” It was stupid male pride that made him reluctant to admit to injury. “You are a visitor in our city, Mr. Brodie,” Sher-iff Alistair Crichton admonished him, “and I am only sorry that this isn’t the good old days when you would have been run out of town.” Instead he fined him a hundred pounds for assault and told him to “watch his step.”

“Why didn’t you plead ‘not guilty’?” Julia asked. “You’re an idiot, Jackson.” She no longer sounded sleepy, quite the opposite in fact.

“Thanks for the sympathy.”

“And so, what now?” she asked.

“Dunno. Guess I’ll try to go straight from now on.”

“It’s not funny.”

“Unless you like the idea of being a gangster’s moll.”

“It’s not funny.”

Jackson could hear a door opening and closing and then voices in the background. A man asked a question that Jackson couldn’t catch, and Julia turned her mouth away from the phone and said, “Yes, please.”

“Are you in a shop?”

“No, I’m in rehearsal. I have to go, I’ll see you later.” And she was gone. She couldn’t be in rehearsal, her venue was so far under-ground that no phone signal could penetrate the rock. Jackson sighed. Hard times in Babylon.

18

Louise had to spend twenty minutes waking Archie up, if she didn’t put the effort in he would still be in his bed when she came home from work. He had been in the shower for almost half an hour, she wouldn’t be surprised if he’d fallen asleep again in there, he certainly never seemed any cleaner when he came out. She didn’t like to think what other things he might be doing in there with his man/boy body. It was hard to remember that he had once been brand-new, as pink and unsullied as Jellybean’s paw-pads when he was a kitten. Now he sprouted hair and stubble, erupted in spots, his voice was on a roller coaster, swooping and plummeting at random. He was undergoing some kind of unnatural transformation, as if he were changing from a boy into an animal, more werewolf than boy.

It was almost impossible to believe now that Archie had come out of her own body, she couldn’t see how he had ever fitted in there. Eve was made from Adam’s body, but in reality men came from inside women-no wonder it did their heads in. Man that is born of woman and is but of few days and is full of trouble. Sometimes you wondered why anyone bothered crawling out of the cradle when what lay ahead was so darn difficult. She shouldn’t think like that, depressive mothers produced depressive children (she had read a clinical study), she had thought that she could be the one to break the cycle, but she hadn’t done a very good job.

She drank coffee and glared at the urn that was still sitting on the draining board. Woman is born of woman. Perhaps she could just scatter the contents in the garden like fertilizer. There was hardly any topsoil out there-thank you, Graham Hatter-so for the first time in her life her mother could perform a useful func-tion. She realized she had bit her lip until it had bled. She liked the taste of her own blood, salty and ferric. She was sure she had read somewhere that there was salt in the blood because all life began in the sea, but she found it hard to believe. It seemed po-etic rather than scientific. She thought of an embryonic Archie, more fish than fowl, curled in his watery environment, tumbling like a sea horse inside her.

She sighed. She couldn’t deal with her mother yet. “I’ll think about it tomorrow,” she murmured. The ghost of Scarlett passed through her, and she acknowledged her with a little salute. Good to see you, Ms. O’Hara.