Nadia grinds her teeth together. “I’m not good.”

“Good is forgettable.” Marie spits. “Good is common. You are not good. You are not common. You will show everyone what you are made of.”

Under her bear suit, Nadia can feel her arms beginning to ripple with the change. She swallows hard and concentrates on shrinking down into herself. She cannot explain to Marie that she’s afraid of what’s inside of her.

Finally, Nadia’s cue comes and she dances out into a forest of wooden trees on dollies and lets the magician trap her in a gold-glitter-covered cage. Her bear costume hangs heavily on her, stinking of synthetic fur.

Performing is different with an audience. They gasp when there is a surprise. They laugh on cue. They watch her with gleaming, wet eyes. Waiting.

Her boyfriend is there, holding a bouquet of white roses. She’s so surprised to see him that her hand lifts involuntarily-as though to wave. Her fingers look too long, her nails too dark, and she hides them behind her back.

Nadia dances like a bear, like a deceitful princess, and then like a bear again. This time, as the magician sings about how the jaybird will be revenged, Nadia really feels like he’s talking to her. When he lifts his gleaming wand, she shrinks back with real fear.

She loves this. She doesn’t want to give it up. She wants to travel with the show. She wants to stop going to bed early. She won’t wait by the phone. She’s not a fake.

When the jump comes, she leaps as high as she can. Higher than she has at any rehearsal. Higher than in her dreams. She jumps so high that she seems to hang in the air for a moment as her skin cracks and her jaw snaps into a snout.

It happens before she can stop it, and then she doesn’t want it to stop. The change used to be the worst thing she could imagine. No more.

The bear costume sloughs off like her skin. Nadia falls into a crouch, four claws digging into the stage. She throws back her head and howls.

The goat boy nearly topples over. The magician drops his wand. On cue, the mermaid girl begins to sing. The musical goes on.

Roses slip from Nadia’s dentist-boyfriend’s fingers.

In the wings, she can see Marie clapping Yves on the back. Marie looks delighted.

There is a werewolf girl on the stage. It’s Saturday night. The crowd is on their feet. Nadia braces herself for their applause.

Weredog of Bucharest by Ian Watson

Shortly before driving into Bucharest proper, we stopped for a pee in some bushes. Twice en route we’d seen men vomiting into roadside shrubbery, probably on account of drinking bad tap water, so use of bushes seemed normal. A tall sign announced: Parking, Kebab, Sexy Show, Motel, Telefon. We only required the first of those, just for a few minutes. We’d been in Inspector Badelescu’s black BMW (with 120,000 kilometres on the clock) for a little over an hour, but prior to leaving the island in the Danube, we’d had a few beers. Endless maize stretched around our roadside oasis, although a strong odour of pigs hung in the air, which must have been coming from the dilapidated barns nearby.

Slumped on their sides in the dust by the bushes, under some tree shade, were three tatty though sizeable mongrels, fawncoloured with white patches. At our approach, two of the dogs raised their heads and regarded us with utter apathy in their lacklustre eyes. The third remained sprawled as though life was too exhausting, or the temperature too high, to bother moving. Oh, all of a sudden one pooch scrambled up and stood facing us, its ears half-cocked like bat wings, its tail half-lifted.

Badelescu stooped, scooped up a stone, and threw it, not for the mongrel to chase and fetch, but at the dog’s flank. The animal yipped and scuttled away.

“Fucking things,” he said to me amiably. “Don’t worry about rabies, and I have my gun if they show their teeth. Most are too tired and weak with hunger. Welcome to Bucharest from its canine inhabitants.”

“A million stray dogs in the city,” Adriana, my impromptu translator, called after me-whether in warning or simply by way of explanation I couldn’t be sure. Adriana was unconsciously beautiful in the way that so many young Romanian women were-graceful, long-legged, fine sensuous figure in tight jeans and blouse. On the whole, Romanian women didn’t seem to realize they were gorgeous; because so many were, therefore this was normal. Adriana wore her dark silky hair in a very long ponytail, which I had held with great satisfaction in a tent on the island while with my other hand I gave her pleasure as her head tried to toss from side to side, but couldn’t, while she groaned and cries jerked from her.

Adriana was staying to guard the car since she hadn’t drunk so much, and it would have been more complicated for her to pee in bushes, the way we all had on the island.

So I sprayed the gritty soil, along with the Inspector, and Romulus -whose second name I couldn’t remember-and Virgil Gramescu. At times Romanians could sound like the Lost Legion, which in a sense they were. Inspector Badelescu’s first name was Ovid.

Quickly I returned to Adriana, who was smoking.

“Do you know, Paul,” she said to me, “when the Mayor of Bucharest proposed exterminating all the strays, Brigitte Bardot flew here on a mercy mission to dissuade him? According to one version of the story, Brigitte donated a lot of money for a dogs’ home. Consequently, two hundred strays live in luxury, then the extermination went ahead anyway. But it must have failed, or else the survivors bred very fast. The number of dogs on the streets is as high as ever.”

“Are they dangerous?”

“Only in winter, if they form packs. Sometimes a baby or little child gets carried off.”

Brushing back his oiled dark hair, Ovid Badelescu was about to say something when a jangle of bells sounded from within his shirt pocket, so he fished out his mobile.

And frowned, and queried, and queried again and again in Romanian.

He shut the phone and said, “Bad news. A young woman has been torn apart in an elevator in the centre of the city.”

“Torn apart?” I exclaimed.

“Not literally limb from limb,” he said. “I mean savaged to death, with terrible injuries. I must go there immediately. Do you want to see?” he asked me. “Or wait in the car, which might be tiresome in this heat? Virgil and Romulus can make their way home from there. Or you might prefer to have lunch with Adriana.”

Have lunch, or visit an appalling murder scene? I was incredulous. “Do you mean see the body?”

The Inspector laughed. “No, an ambulance is taking it to the morgue. Although you can visit the morgue if you’re really curious. I meant the scene of the crime. I’ve been called there because of a Jack the Raper murder I was involved with last year. Do I mean raper? No, ripper. Rapers don’t often rip. They may strangle or stab, but not do complete ripping. Not usually.”

“A solved murder?”

“The murderer might have been a Turk,” he replied. “But he disappeared. Ankara couldn’t trace him, nor Interpol in case he hid among the Turks in Germany.”

I couldn’t help wondering if he said Ankara and Interpol to enhance his importance. And I supposed I must attribute his comparative nonchalance, or what I took as nonchalance, first of all to the requirements of haste, and secondly to whatever other horrors he may have experienced in his job.

We’d been a mixed bunch on that cultural island in the Danube: lots of beautiful Romanian girls, and handsome youths, too, the annual event being sponsored by the Ministry for Youth Development. A Bulgarian kick-boxing champion who gave open-air classes, an astronomer who appealed to science-fiction fans, several musicians and poets, an American from an Institute for Human Development who believed that immortality is within our grasp, an angry German feminist. I could go on.