Down By The River

How to recognise members of the general public: they drive in cars, shop in supermarkets, support football teams, talk into mobile phones, wear clothes with writing on, mow the lawn, walk the dog, worry about the economy, discuss the weather, go on holiday for two weeks every summer, read the magazines that come free with newspapers at the weekend, they go for walks by the river. They do not, as a general rule, attempt to destroy Tokyo.

Benson lay in bed and wondered why his hands felt dry and raw, he held them up in the single slice of sunlight that cut across the room but they looked fine. From the angle of the sun on his bed he estimated the time to be ten thirty. He tried to remember if there was any need to get up that morning and decided there was not. He rolled over and lay with his head sideways on the pillow, his eyes wide open. Behind the wall the shower started, Jessie always had lectures and was normally gone by nine, but perhaps she had been out last night with her goth friend, Benson tried to remember if last night was the night, but could not.

When he was six, Benson had been riding in the back of his parents Volvo with Julio, their lab retriever cross. Julio had his head stuck enthusiastically out of the window facing forwards into the wind, tongue lolling out and watching the world flash by. Exciting stuff for a dog. A teenage girl with pink hair and luminous green socks had stepped out in front of the car, his parents decided later that she was probably high on dope. The road had a forty miles per hour speed limit, Benson's father was driving at forty five, he swerved away to avoid the girl just as a white ford transit van passed in the opposite direction. At a combined velocity of over eighty miles an hour the wing mirrors of both vehicles were destroyed and Julio's head was sliced off. The decapitated corpse fell back into the Volvo kicking and squirting blood.

The memory was always with Benson. After all the intervening years it was so familiar that it barely held any horror anymore, but it was always with him, whenever he saw a dog, or a Volvo, or a white ford transit van, or a girl with pink hair, he was back in the back seat with the thrashing corpse of his dog. The memory was permanent, it was part of who he was, he did not know what life would be like without it and he was not sure he wanted to find out, it was almost a comfort.

Jessie swabbed the make-up from her face and tried to force her hair back into shape. Her head hurt. A lot of the previous night was hazy, she remembered the club with Kayla, she remembered talking to the creepy man with the lisp, she hoped to hell she hadn't copped off with him, she had a dim memory of copping off with someone. Oh please don't let it be him. She looked at her hungover face in the mirror, her skin was grey, there were bags under her eyes, she was squinting, and her teeth felt wrong. She had already missed two lectures and if she didn't run she would miss a third. Oh god, she had a hickey on her neck. She had copped off. Oh please don't let it be the creepy guy with the lisp. But a hickey, it had to be him didn't it.

Holding her hand over it in case Benson was up she went back into her room and looked for a scarf. When she left the house she noticed that there was a bent road sign in the front garden, it was in Japanese, where in hell had he found that. She squinted at the sunlight, did sensitivity to light mean she had meningitis, she decided she didn't care either way and stepped onwards towards the bus.

All of Jessie's childhood dogs had died natural deaths at old ages, but the grief still cut right through her. The mention of any of their names, Willy, Lana, Cujo, Dexel, brought tears to her eyes. During her last call home her mother had finally dared tell her that Stanton was off his food. She had bought tickets to go back next weekend, the thought that it might be the last time she would see him choked her up, the thought that she might not make it in time brought tears streaming from her eyes.

The news reports were in staccato jumps, unsteady shots from mobile phones, a confusion of bright lights and shadows and Japanese, neon kanji signs crashed to the ground and burst like flashbulbs as the robot trashed a sushi bar and an amusement arcade sending teenagers fleeing before it in a panicking crowd that knocked and jostled the amateur cameramen. By the time a proper news crew arrived all they caught was the vapour trail as the robot jetted into the stratosphere. Every story ran with the same still image, a low resolution screen grab of two eyes like headlights peering over the roof of a building. Neither Jessie or Benson saw it, Jessie because she was at lectures, Benson because, when he finally got out of bed, he simply decamped, complete with duvet, to the sofa and turned the television straight on to cartoons.

He did not move till Jessie came home.

'You're back early,' he said.

'Feel like crap,' she replied, and sat on the far end of the sofa curling her legs up beneath her and then extending them under the duvet along with him. It was a small act of casual intimacy that meant nothing to her, and he knew it meant nothing to her, but it still sent a shiver of joy all the way through him.

'Good night last night?' he asked.

'Kinda.'

'Take your scarf off indoors.'

'No.'

'Then make tea.'

'You make it.'

'I can't get up,' he said, 'I'm naked under here.'

'You're never,' she said, and calling his bluff flung the duvet on the floor. She was half right, he was wearing just a hooded top and boxer shorts.

Realising he had lost, Benson stood up and went to make tea.

'What happened to your leg?' she asked.

'Cut it on a piece of metal.'

'When.'

'Last night, I went for a walk by the river.'

It is a truism of folk songs that people only ever go down to the river for one of two reasons, either A, to pray, or B, to shoot their baby. In real life there are many reasons, some go to walk, some just go to sit and eat their lunch, some go to fish of course, some drown puppies.

When he was at the river Benson had seen a man weigh down a squirming sack with a brick and fling it into the water. At first he did not realise what he had witnessed, not till after the man walked back past him and said 'excuse me' with a bad lisp and Benson had cut his leg on a piece of metal whilst watching the man over his shoulder. He looked at the water ooze slowly past him without a sign of the struggle for life going on beneath. There was nothing he could have done but he stood there till he felt certain anything in the sack must be dead. It had seemed respectful somehow. It had seemed a terrible thing to let the deaths go unobserved.

He did not tell any of this to Jessie, knowing how she felt about dogs, knowing that her own was on deaths door, remembering how she had reacted when, one drunk night, he had told her what had happened to Julio.

'What have we got to eat?' she asked, watching cartoons without interest or understanding.

'Beans on toast I think.'

'No meat?'

'I thought you were vegetarian?'

'I'll start next week.'

The blood coursing through Jessie's veins was cooling and stilling, with each beat of her heart it moved a little less, it awakened only a touch at the mention of meat, it hummed and tingled at the presence of Benson just a foot or two away. Inside Benson tiny machines replicated and spread out from the wound in his leg, drawing energy from his body heat and the fatty deposits lining his arteries, they repaired damage where they found it, they linked in a lattice around his bones, they gathered in chains at his muscles. They waited patiently, attuned to rhythms outside of themselves, ready to explode into action.

Only half a mile away the man with the lisp peered out of the window through dark glasses. He was bored with the girl in his bed, he wondered where the other one was.

Thousands of miles away, at a military base on the outskirts of Tokyo, men in uniform reviewed satellite and radar information from the previous night, tracking an object all the way around the world. A general looked at the line traced on the map and put in a call to his superior.

'We could get a kebab,' Benson suggested.

'I can't afford it. I spent all I have on the train ticket home.'

'I'll sub you, my Dad sent me a cheque last week.'

'Are you sure?'

He nodded.

'No hot sauce for me.'

'You have to order.'

'Why?'

'Because I'm paying.'

The sun set slowly over the rooftops. The moon readied itself to rise.

A chain of phone calls ascended a hierarchy in Japan and descended a similar hierarchy in Britain to finally arrive at a counterpart of the Japanese general. The Japanese general's wife had a Pekingese called Otsuka that she ignored and had become, de-facto, his. He loved it dearly but it did not fit the image he wanted to project and he paid the kid next door to walk it. His British counterpart kept two Pointers called Nero and Titus, his family had always kept Pointers for shooting, though he had not gone shooting since he married a woman violently opposed to all blood-sports, but he kept the pointers. He was out walking them when the call came through, he immediately headed back home, confusing the dogs who were used to their routes through the park.

The man with the lisp had once owned and raced greyhounds, but that was years ago. Recently a stray mongrel, part Collie, had adopted him. He put up with it, but would not put up with it reproducing. It sniffed around the girl on his bed and he told it to leave her. It never occurred to him that the dog needed a name. He left the house, shutting it in.

'Thif if delifiouf,' said Jessie.

'What was that?'

'Thif kebab, itf delifiouf.'

Benson ducked his head down to look at her. 'Is there something wrong with your teeth?'

'What,' said Jessie, putting a hand over her mouth, 'haf I got fomfing in them?'

She dashed off to look in the mirror.

'No, said Benson, 'but your voice.'

At that point, six things happened at once.

One. The moon rose.

Two. A car containing four special forces operatives pulled up outside the house.

Three. The man with the lisp rang the doorbell.

Four. Jessie, holding her mouth open in front of the mirror, realised that her canines had extended into two pronounced fangs.

Five. Beneath the river, the puppies finally chewed their way through the bag.

Six. Their mother roused the girl on the bed.

Jessie answered the door, hand held over her mouth, she had time to look surprised at the man with the lisp but neither of them had time to say anything before a sound like one garbage truck falling on top of another came from the kitchen. Two eyes like headlights peered over the roof of the house, and then, with a deafening roar, a robot rose into the sky on a column of smoke and fire and headed off in what the four special forces men in the car instantly guessed to be the general direction of Tokyo.

The man with the lisp stood on the doorstep, gazing up into the sky with his mouth open. Jessie ran back into the kitchen and saw that the whole back wall had been knocked down. The torn remains of a hooded top and boxer shorts lay on the floor.

'There goef our depofit,' she said to herself.

Three of the four special forces men, none of whom had ever owned a dog, leapt from the car and ran towards the house, the fourth remained in the car and described what had just happened to his radio.

The man with the lisp saw the men running towards him, dashed inside the house and bolted the door.

High above Britain two Tornado GR4s altered course to intercept the robot. Neither of the pilots owned a dog, although one had a partially blind wife who had a golden retriever seeing eye dog called Bojangles.

One of the special forces men waited at the front door whilst two sneaked around to the back of the house where they found the wall missing. They both pulled guns from shoulder holsters and stepped gingerly over the rubble into the room. Jessie stood watching them, dumbfounded. The man with the lisp walked in the door behind her, took in the situation in a second, grabbed a knife from the table and held it to Jessie's throat, just over her scarf.

'Take one more ftep,' he said, 'and I'll kill the girl.'

'Get off me,' said Jessie.

The two men stopped and looked at each other, not expecting this, and really not expecting the speech impediments.

'Itf theef teeth,' said Jessie, seeing the looks on their faces, 'itf all hif fault.'

'We want the robot,' said one of the men. And since it was obvious the robot was not there the four of them just stood there facing each other across the ruined kitchen, smoke wafting melodramatically around them.

Above their heads the pilot with the blind wife fired one AIM-120 AMRAAM missile, the missile exploded ten feet from the robot which in less than a hundredth of a second folded back in on itself, absorbing the shock of the blast and leaving only Benson, hanging there naked and unconscious, two thousand feet above the ground. Both Tornado's went flashing by without noticing him.

Back in the kitchen they heard the explosion, Jessie and the man with the lisp both started but the two special forces operatives did not so much as twitch. Then, from outside the house, came a furious barking and the part collie stray dashed into the room and, paying no attention to anybody else, crouched in front of the man with the lisp and growled furiously at him.

'That ftupid bitf,' said that man, 'fee let you out.'

'Is that your dog?' asked one to the special forces operatives.

'No,' said the man, and letting go of Jessie kicked the dog in the face. The dog skidded rapidly backwards into one of the special services operatives. Instinctively it twisted around and snapped at him, equally instinctively, the man shot it twice in the chest throwing it across the room where it landed on the floor limp as a wet jay cloth.

Jessie screamed.

High above, Benson fell lazily, tumbling gently.

The remaining two special forces operatives arrived in the room. 'The robot is down,' said one, 'are we done here?'

Nobody answered, they were all watching open mouthed as the dog rose to its feet, shook itself, and licked its wounds.

'Are we done here?' repeated the man.

'Hell yes,' said the man who had shot the dog, 'we are so done here.'

The tiny machines in Benson regrouped and reorganised after the chaos of their sudden withdrawal, with seconds left they noticed their plight and immediately deployed two external booster rockets to slow their descent. Benson landed with a splash in the river, half human half machine, severely startling one late night angler.

'You turned a dog into a vampire you fick bafterd,' said Jessie once the other men had all gone.

'Fuck no,' said the man with the lisp, throwing down the knife, 'the bitf turned me.' He walked away. The part collie watched, went as if to follow, looked at Jessie, dithered a moment, and then sat down where it was.

Benson, all human again, swam spluttering and gasping to the riverbank with little idea where he was and no idea how he had come to be there. He found five puppies in the water around him, struggling to climb up the steep muddy sides of the bank. He scooped them up in one arm and climbed out.