Just in Case

by Meg Rosoff

  Justin turned back to his mother. He assured her that bullying at school was not the problem. He was being bullied all right, but not by some thicko schoolboy.

  She was not reassured. ‘Stand still for a moment and let me look at you, David. I think you’ve developed a twitch.’

  Justin sighed, stood up, climbed the stairs and locked himself in the bathroom.

  He stayed there until the quiet click of toenails on wooden floor, a thump, and the reassuring sound of Boy snoring quietly in the hallway convinced him it was safe to come out.

  9

  I really like David.

  No I don’t. I don’t give a damn about him.

  I could run him down with a taxi. Give him a wasting disease.

  Or worse, ignore him altogether. Let him live out his irrelevant little life in Luton with a dreary doting wife, two point four gormless children, and a ticking bomb for a heart.

  But I do like a game now and again.

  And he plays so nicely.

  10

  Justin survived his first week at school.

  With Boy at his side, he managed to act out his role as an average member of teenage society, albeit an increasingly isolated one. Friends gave up trying to engage him in conversation: his clothes were weird, for one thing, and he no longer answered to his name, a fact they found exceptionally irritating. A decreasing number of people bothered talking to him before school, sitting with him at the library, or asking when he was going to lunch. He hadn’t realized his new identity would be so lonely.

  Peter Prince, however, chose the shower next to his after PE. ‘Hey,’ he said cheerfully.

  Justin looked up, grateful to be acknowledged. ‘Hey.’

  ‘Where’s your dog?’ Peter’s voice came from within the gushing stream of water.

  Justin thought he must have misheard. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Your dog.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Isn’t he with you today?’

  Justin looked at Peter. ‘Ha bloody ha.’

  Peter stuck his head out of the stream of water, his features dripping. He smiled shyly. ‘I love greyhounds.’

  Justin stared. ‘My dog is imaginary.’

  ‘Oh.’ Peter looked interested. ‘That’s unusual.’

  Justin put his head under the water. When he emerged, Peter was still looking at him. ‘Less work,’ he offered cheerily. ‘If the dog’s imaginary, I mean. Not so much grooming, feeding, etc’

  Justin continued to stare as Peter turned the massive, old-fashioned tap to OFF, wrapped himself in a damp greyish towel the size of a dishcloth, and dripped across the uneven tiled floor to his locker.

  The following day, Peter greeted Justin with a smile and fell into step with him as he walked home from school. Looking down to the approximate area of Justin’s left heel, Peter added, ‘Hiya, boy.’

  Boy trotted over and leant against him briefly as Justin watched in wonder. The boundary between reality and fantasy wobbled dangerously.

  Peter pulled a tennis ball out of his bag, and threw it hard across the ground. The dog sprang forward and shot off, moving so fast he blurred. ‘Wow,’ Peter said happily, ‘what a beauty. Very ancient breed, you know. Kept by kings. Pharaohs used them for hunting lions.’

  Justin looked at him.

  ‘Second only to cheetahs in speed. Huge hearts in relation to their weight; same size as ours.’

  Justin thought about this. Big hearts, long legs. All they needed was a slightly bigger brain and they’d rule the world. He kept walking, with his greyhound and Peter Prince lolloping at his side. ‘How do you know so much about greyhounds?’

  Peter looked embarrassed. ‘I read a lot.’

  They walked in silence for a while, Peter contemplating greyhounds and Justin contemplating Peter. They didn’t seem to have much in common. Did Peter imagine they might be friends? He’d had friends in the past, mainly based on mutual need – another person to kick a ball with, someone who had better games at home. Peter appeared to be without motive in attaching himself to Justin and Boy. He seemed content just to keep them company.

  At Justin’s house, Peter waved and walked on. Justin stared after him but the other boy didn’t look back.

  Oh well, he thought. At least Boy likes him. The two might have been old friends, the way they fell in together.

  But Boy’s my dog!

  Maybe it’s a plot, he thought. Maybe they’re working together. Maybe Peter is Boy’s human spy contact, brought in as back-up.

  He looked at Boy. The dog had managed to wedge his narrow back under the kitchen radiator for warmth and was snoring contentedly.

  I can’t even trust my own imaginary dog, Justin thought. How much lower can a person get?

  11

  Slowly, and in the absence of any competition, Justin began thinking of Peter as a friend. Peter wasn’t exactly a social asset, but he was sympathetic, intelligent, and his dogged constancy appealed to Justin.

  At school, their friendship attracted attention, as pretty much everything at a secondary school did.

  ‘Hey, look! It’s Stephen Hawking and Head Case.’ A pasty-faced group of younger boys sat on a wall outside the school gate at all hours, stabbing limp, fatty chips with wooden forks and jeering at anything that moved.

  Peter stopped and looked at them with clinical detachment.

  ‘Sometimes I wonder how their brains work,’ he said, resuming his walk alongside Justin, ‘whether there’s a mechanism by which serotonin is released in the process of attempting to demean others. It would explain a lot about the endemic nature of bullying.’

  ‘Maybe they’re just cretins. Maybe they’ve been subjected to foetal dumb-arse syndrome in the womb.’

  Peter smiled. ‘Just as likely. Still, it makes you wonder.’

  ‘It makes you wonder.’

  As they passed another set of jeering boys, Peter stumbled, deftly knocking one of the ringleaders off the wall with his elbow. The boy fell backwards with a satisfying thump, unleashing a volley of abuse. Justin and Peter ran.

  They slowed a few blocks later, laughing.

  ‘Nice move,’ Justin said.

  ‘Won’t make him friendlier next time.’

  ‘You want to go back and rehabilitate him?’

  Peter pulled the tennis ball out of his bag. As they stepped on to Luton Common, he threw it along the ground for Boy. ‘I meant to ask you,’ he began, without turning to face Justin.

  Boy brought the ball back and Peter threw it again, in a long high arc. ‘What made you… I mean… why’d you change your name?’

  Justin stopped. ‘It’s a long story.’

  Boy caught the ball in mid-air halfway across the common, placed it carefully on the ground where he stood and returned without it to the boys. Justin reached down to stroke his head. ‘Have you ever felt like fate has it in for you?’

  ‘No,’ said Peter, frowning. ‘Have you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s strange.’ Peter thought for a moment, then looked at Justin. ‘What does that have to do with changing your name?’

  ‘It’s part of my disguise.’

  ‘Your disguise?’

  ‘My disguise from fate. I’m hiding.’

  ‘Hiding?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘From fate?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Wow.’ Peter blinked at him. ‘You’re serious?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The silence lasted three-quarters of the way across the large expanse of withered grass.

  ‘Interesting,’ Peter said slowly. ‘Of course, I have thought rather a lot about predetermination, though perhaps not in exactly the way you mean. I sometimes get a feeling that something I remember hasn’t actually happened yet, but I’m not sure whether it really has happened and I’ve just forgotten that it has.’

  He screwed up his face.

  ‘I mean, if we accept that the universe is cylindrical and energy eventually joins up with itself, perhaps th
ought runs along the outside of the cylinder as well, repeating ad infinitum.’ He looked animated at the possibility. ‘That could mean that a thought actually has happened – in the sense of having taken place somewhere in the universe – along the outside of the cylinder, but can’t exactly be attributed to me as an individual. Or not yet, anyway.’

  Justin stared.

  ‘Let’s say, for instance, that you have the same dream over and over, only each time you’re not sure whether you actually had the same dream before or just dreamt that you did.’ He looked at Justin expectantly. ‘It could relate to the thinning boundaries between reality, that is to say active expenditure of energy, and thought, or passive energy. Either way, the existence of the act, or in this case, the dream, is not in doubt. The question you have to ask is how does it exist, and how do we define the energy of thought versus the energy of action. You’ve posed a very interesting question here.’

  He paused.

  ‘Take Boy. Does he exist or doesn’t he? You see him, I see him. Is that enough to vouch for his existence? I would say it is. Surely there’s a point at which an idea conjured by more than one brain has existence, not merely in the philosophical sense, but in the sense of being the object of expended energy. I’m quite interested in thought as energy, as valid an expression of energy as –’ he paused, watching Boy race a squirrel to a tree – ‘as a running dog.’

  Boy granted the squirrel freedom and it spiralled, panicked, up to safety.

  ‘It’s not exactly what you’d call fate. But possibly relevant in its way.’ Peter smiled apologetically.

  Justin felt dazed by Peter’s string of connections. His own brain soared and crashed, groped endlessly for elusive footholds in reality. There were dark corners he didn’t dare enter, creaking catacombs lined with the corpses of doubt, incomprehension and paranoia. His brain didn’t grapple with theories, it grappled with fear.

  They walked on in silence. A few hundred metres later where the road split, Justin stopped, wondering whether there was one last comment to be made. He couldn’t think of one.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said.

  Peter watched him go.

  ‘Justin!’

  Justin turned.

  ‘I… I think you should meet my sister. She’d like you. I mean, you might like her too.’ The embarrassed smile. ‘Anyway, you should meet.’

  Justin only nodded, but Peter looked pleased, as if something important had been settled.

  Each boy headed home, deep in thought.

  12

  Life continued to pursue Justin. In his second week of school, as he made his way towards the changing rooms after PE, the athletics coach pulled him aside.

  ‘Case!’ Coach barked. ‘Ever thought about cross-country?’

  Boy’s ears flicked forward. He liked a good run.

  Justin looked behind him.

  ‘You, Case! Did you hear what I said?’

  Justin nodded.

  ‘Well? We need more runners this year.’

  ‘But I can’t run.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ Coach spat. ‘Look at you. With a little training you could run all day.’

  Justin stared at Coach, amazed and suspicious. David Case had never looked like a runner. It was one thing to change your shirts, quite another to assume an entirely different body type.

  ‘Case!’ Coach snapped impatiently. ‘You’re not brain-dead, are you? That could disqualify you.’

  Justin shook his head: But I hate sport. And then: Perfect.

  Coach rolled his eyes. ‘An answer, Case. Any answer will do.’

  ‘OK,’ said Justin. Boy wagged his tail.

  Peter grinned when he heard. ‘You’ll like it,’ he said. ‘Not at first, of course, it’s horrible at first. But you get used to it eventually.’

  Justin didn’t expect to like it, now or ever. Cross-country seemed a perverse sort of self-abuse consisting of endless gruelling runs through the unattractive suburban landscape egged on by a wisecracking sadist whose life had repeatedly been blighted by mediocrity.

  Coach’s team had never captured a county championship. Coach himself had never discovered a future Olympic champion. No boy had ever returned to Luton Secondary years later to report that running had played a formative, nay, pivotal role in his life. The extra pay Coach received for three afternoons a week enduring the contempt and indifference of fifteen talentless teenage boys did not begin to compensate for the extent of his disenchantment.

  Despite knowing all this, Justin was secretly pleased to have been plucked from athletic obscurity. No one had ever suggested that he could run at all, much less all day. David Case was certainly no athlete, but Justin? Justin was loaded with potential.

  Without his noticing, he had already begun to change shape. Over the previous eighteen months he had grown six inches. His legs, always disproportionately long in relation to his torso, had lengthened further and his feet had grown two and a half sizes. But he was soft and slow, and it took a leap of faith to imagine he’d ever be different.

  His first practice involved circling the school track at what felt like excessive speed, with Boy bounding around him joyously. After ten minutes he began to flag. Thirty minutes left him collapsed by the side of the track gasping for air, legs shaking and contracted with cramp, lungs on fire, throat dry, stomach heaving. Boy licked his face once, then settled down gracefully next to him for a nap.

  ‘Hey, you suck!’ hissed one of his teammates.

  One by one they passed, skimming around the grey outdoor track, each competing for the most hilariously entertaining insult.

  ‘Hey, Granny.’

  ‘Puss puss pussy.’

  ‘Dickhead.’

  ‘Oi! Head Case!’

  This last, from Coach.

  Justin barely noticed the insults. He was too busy trying to restore the flow of oxygen to his brain.

  Peter said nothing as he flew past, but his silence exuded compassion.

  Seven of the fifteen boys on Justin’s team had been chosen for their ability to outrun the local constabulary, five others were blackmailed into participating, their academic potential so limited that alternative excuses had to be found to keep them in school. Most of this group whiled away unsupervised moments stopping for fags by the side of the track.

  Justin didn’t smoke, so he ran instead, discovering in the process that Coach’s evaluation had not been entirely wrong. Day by day he improved, modestly, steadily; soon he discovered a jawline and hard planes of muscle in his legs. He began to look different, rangy and fast, and best of all found he could run more or less indefinitely. His chest would eventually feel crushed under the strain of oxygen deprivation, at some point his muscles still pleaded with him to stop, but the pain took longer to set in, bothered him less, became familiar. He could keep up for longer periods and when he matched Peter stride for stride he felt triumphant.

  His dog helped, loping gracefully by his side, lean and effortless. When Justin felt discouraged he concentrated on Boy’s stylish gait, his noble spirit.

  I am a greyhound, Justin thought as he ran, I am king of dogs. I skim through time and space at the speed of thought. The unknown is my prey, I bring it to earth in a single exquisite bound.

  He could feel the syncopation of his paws on the track, his narrow muzzle piercing the air, no sound except the pounding of his large, noble heart. He ran silently. He was an air hound, a sight hound, deadly in pursuit of a rabbit, a taut bow, a spinning arrow. For whole minutes at a time he was graceful, joyous.

  The insults tailed off, at least from Coach.

  ‘How’d I do?’ Justin asked, panting, his legs shaking, body streaming with sweat.

  ‘Jesus,’ Coach muttered, staring at his stopwatch. Ten thousand metres in just under thirty-eight minutes.

  Justin’s chest swelled with pride. A few weeks ago he could barely stagger round the track.

  It gave him hope.

  Perhaps whatever it was, he could outrun it.

&nb
sp; 13

  Justin whistled.

  Come on, Boy! Walkies!

  Boy bounded over and jumped up on his master, nearly knocking him over. He was a big dog, nearly a metre at the shoulder. Justin rubbed him behind his ears. Good boy.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his mother watching him out of the corner of her eye. What’s the matter, he thought peevishly. Hadn’t she ever seen an imaginary dog?

  She appeared anxious, perhaps about the safety of his little brother in the presence of such a large animal, though Charlie showed no sign of fear. Anyway, surely he, Justin, was entitled to a pet of his own choosing. Come to think of it, why hadn’t she and his father provided one? Maybe if he’d had a real dog, he wouldn’t feel so threatened.

  Then again, maybe not.

  Justin wanted to see Agnes again, but his desire was tempered with uncertainty. He was young, not suave or knowing. Not brilliant or sexually irresistible. He had quite a handsome dog, but it didn’t exist. In short, he didn’t add up to much.

  Which made it all the more surprising when, a little more than a month after they first met, Agnes phoned him.

  ‘Justin Case, at last. There are twelve Cases in the phonebook; your number happens to be the eleventh.’

  Justin was struck dumb.

  ‘Hello? Are you there?’

  ‘I just… it’s just…’ Perfect, he thought, I’ve developed a speech impediment.

  ‘Never mind, I need to see you. I’ll meet you in ten minutes at the café on West Street.’

  Agnes hung up.

  Justin stared at the receiver. Why had she phoned? Perhaps he had amnesia. Perhaps he and Agnes often met at the café to chat about… about international economic destabilization.

  His life seemed to be getting away from him.

  He entered the café.

  ‘Table for one?’ asked the waitress with an air of resentment.

  ‘Two.’ His voice warbled slightly.

  She pointed at a table wedged between the toilet and the kitchen. He ignored it, chose a booth in the corner with a view of the street, sat down and ordered a cup of tea. By exercising preternatural restraint, he made it last nearly the entire half-hour during which Agnes did not show. Doubt and self-loathing took root in his brain.