With Boy’s reappearance, Justin felt calmer, more connected to reality. That his reality encompassed an invisible dog and the occasional presence of the voice of doom seemed less significant than his ability to sleep at night, rise in the morning, and interact meaningfully with other human beings during the day.
This morning, from the kitchen window, he had seen a large muscular tabby prowling along the walls of the back garden. It disappeared suddenly, emerging from beneath a hedge with a mangled blackbird in its mouth. Though upset by this spectacle from the perspective of the bird, Justin admired the cat’s ruthlessness, the way its lean belly hung from angular, powerful shoulders and hips, and nearly brushed the ground as it stalked.
‘Have you seen Alice this morning?’ Dorothea entered the kitchen, still in her nightdress, followed by Anna.
Justin nodded, stirring porridge on the front burner for Anna, and pointed to the outdoor hutch. ‘He’s there, with Boy.’
It was a mild morning, and the greyhound lay in his favourite position, stretched out by the heating vent, watching over the hutch through one half-open eye while Alice hunkered somnolently, half-buried in straw, secure in the presence of his bodyguard. Dorothea had been concerned that Boy would revert to the instincts of a natural cat-killer, but since his reappearance he had seemed content just to observe; he barely acknowledged the presence of the cats.
‘Well, that’s a relief. It’s been a terrible night,’ she said, her face grim. ‘You must have heard them. Non-stop yowling. The fox has the neighbourhood all wound up.’
Sightings of the fox that lived at the bottom of next-door’s abandoned garden occasioned great excitement and required special vigilance where Alice was concerned. Dorothea referred to her as a vixen, which puzzled Justin. How could she know? A fox was a fox, especially at a distance.
‘Don’t be absurd,’ Dorothea chided him. ‘She’s small for one thing, and delicate around the chops. And for another she’s sneaky. She thinks like a woman.’
Justin nearly laughed, but stopped in deference to Anna, who listened anxiously, her exaggerated terror mixed with a frisson of pleasure.
‘What about Alice?’ she gasped.
‘Alice,’ Dorothea pronounced through clenched teeth and narrowed eyes, ‘is in danger. Because right now that fox smells rabbit.’
Dorothea squinted out of the window at the mangy red creature on the fence, then turned back to face Anna. ‘Once she has the scent of rabbit in her nostrils it’s curtains’ Dorothea grimaced horribly and drew her finger across her neck in a slicing motion.
Anna’s face went blotchy with fear and her eyes filled with tears. ‘Poor Alice,’ she cried.
Dorothea shot her sister a look of contempt. ‘Don’t be pathetic,’ she commanded disapprovingly. ‘It’s nature’s way’
‘Alice!’ By now Anna was howling.
Dorothea threw Justin a look of infinite suffering, but Anna appeared so genuinely stricken that he felt obliged to step in.
‘Don’t worry, Anna. No fox in his right mind would take on a rabbit the size of Alice.’ He took her hot podgy hand in his two, and held it for a moment. Her answering gaze was full of devotion and the desire to believe him. When she looked at him that way he felt clear, almost luminous.
‘Sentimental idiocy,’ Dorothea declared calmly. ‘Foxes eat rabbits. Doesn’t matter how big they are. Predator and prey, that’s the natural order of things. If the fox gets Alice, too bad, that’s his fate.’
Justin stared at Dorothea, who tilted her face away, triumphant.
All this fuss about one little life. It’s only a rabbit!
The fear-switch in Justin’s head flipped to ON.
Isn’t it?