Her eyes narrowed. ‘Are you involved with drugs?’
‘No.’
‘Blackmail?’
‘No.’
‘Witness protection?’
‘No.’
‘Spooks?’
He shook his head. ‘No, nothing like that.’
‘Then what?’
Justin fidgeted, shifted his weight from one foot to the other, chewed his thumb. ‘I discovered my old self was doomed.’
‘Doomed?’
‘Doomed.’
‘In what sense, doomed?’
‘In the sense of standing poised on the brink of ruin with time running out.’
She stared.
‘Which is why I need to change everything, all of me. I can’t be recognized.’
The girl frowned. ‘But who do you think will recognize you?’
He dropped his voice. ‘Fate. My fate. David Case’s fate.’
‘Who’s David Case?’
‘Me. That is, I used to be him. Before I started changing everything.’
‘You’ve changed your name?’
He nodded.
‘So, you’re running away from fate,’ the girl said slowly, ‘and you think all this is going to make a difference?’
He shrugged. ‘What else can I do?’
‘Stop believing in fate?’
Justin sighed. ‘I wish I could.’
Neither of them said anything for a long time. The girl studied a chip in one of her nails.
‘Well,’ she said finally, with the smallest hint of a smile. ‘It’s different.’
He looked at her.
‘Not uninteresting,’ she added.
‘Not?’
‘No.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘Not.’
She extended her hand. ‘My name is Agnes.’ The fingers she offered had pale green fingernails. ‘Agnes Bee.’
‘Justin. Justin Case.’
She blinked, digesting this information. And then all at once she beamed, her face illuminated with delight. He took the hand she offered. It was surprisingly soft and warm, and he held it cautiously, not sure when to let go. He had no experience of touching older women.
‘How very nice to meet you, Justin Case.’
Still smiling, Agnes turned to one of the racks and pulled out a shirt: poppy-coloured, long sleeves, ruffle down the front. She thrust it at Justin, along with the brown and lavender paisley.
‘Try these. I’ll keep looking.’
Justin looked at the shirts. ‘I don’t think so.’
She ignored him.
He sighed, took the hangers, and entered the tiny changing room at the far end of the shop. There was barely room to turn sideways.
The first shirt fitted. He buttoned it and looked around for a mirror.
Agnes swept the curtain aside and Justin found himself viewed in reverse close-up portrait through the wrong end of a Nikon 55mm DX lens. Click click click, click click click. Three frames per second. Two seconds. He leapt back with a startled squeak.
Agnes’s face emerged from one side of her Nikon. ‘What?’
‘What do you mean “what?” That.’
She frowned. ‘Turn around and let me look at you.’
He turned around and let her look at him.
‘Not bad.’ She beamed approval, then put the camera down and picked up a small pile of clothes. ‘I’ve been keeping an eye on these things for ages. For exactly the right person.’
The thought of being exactly the right person appealed to Justin so completely that he tried everything she brought him and attempted to like it all. She brought him a turquoise flowered shirt, a skinny brown cardigan that he thought must have been designed for a woman, and a pair of white canvas trousers that had to be cinched with a belt. He put them all on and emerged from the cubicle, nervous.
Click click, click click click. Five shots aimed with deadly accuracy at his head. Agnes lowered her camera and considered him. ‘Excellent. You’ll take them all.’ She squinted, her head turned slightly to one side. ‘You’re very lucky I was here today.’
Justin nodded uncertainly.
‘Of course this is only the beginning.’ She spotted a red and white vinyl bowling bag and crossed briskly to pick it up. Justin watched her. He had no idea what she was talking about, but the feeling fitted with his new life as a stranger. There was even something reassuring about it.
Agnes carried the clothes to the till, accepted a small pile of creased £5 notes from Justin and handed them to the sour-faced woman. The money looked as if it had been crammed in a piggy bank for years, which it had. ‘That’s all he has,’ she told the scowling troll. ‘It’ll have to do.’
While the woman harrumphed and muttered irritably, Agnes flicked through her camera’s digital display.
She looked up and gazed solemnly at Justin. ‘You photograph like an angel, Justin Case.’
Was he being solicited for a child pornography website, or perhaps a fanzine article on fashion disasters?
‘Never mind. Next time I’ll bring proofs.’
Next time?
‘I’ve enjoyed our first meeting immensely.’
He tried to smile, but it came out lopsided, uncertain. Click click click.
On the way out of the shop, Agnes spied a pair of pristine black jeans half-hidden under a pile of shirts. She stopped, examined them and tossed them to Justin.
‘Try them on.’
Agnes Bee waited outside the tiny changing room as he pulled them on. They fitted perfectly.
She swept back the curtain once more. ‘Could you scream?’ she asked happily.
Justin nodded. He thought he probably could.
6
Allow me to introduce myself.
My name is Kismet. Turkish, from Persian qismat, from Arabic qisma; lot, from qasama, to divide, allot. SYN: Chance. Providence. Destiny. Luck.
Fate.
I’m the one with my finger on the scale, the bullet, the brakes. The one who chooses which sperm, which egg, who lives, who dies.
Fate giveth, fate taketh away.
But we were talking about David.
Poor feckless little David, holding fast to his stunted little life. It could almost be amusing.
Almost.
You. Come closer. Let me whisper in your ear.
Your friend, your character, your David is a fool. A chump. A little white mouse with a pink twitching nose.
I have my paw on his tail. Watch what happens when I lift it.
See? Let him have his little scamper. I’m not hungry just now.
A little later, perhaps.
You’ll know.
7
Justin’s parents refused to address him by his new name.
‘How do you expect us to change what we call you after all these years? It’s unnatural.’
He didn’t even try explaining about his fate. He knew they weren’t really paying attention, what with all the first-time walking, talking and weeing going on in other parts of the house.
Justin felt sure that unless they actually found him with a loaded gun in one hand and a suicide note in the other, they wouldn’t worry overmuch about the levels and sources of his anxiety. But that was OK. He didn’t expect much from them. He knew they were busy. He knew they’d tried to be good parents. They’d paid attention to him when he was younger, took him to zoos and sports days, bought him snacks. Pretended his Christmas list really went to Santa. Gave him an instructional video about sex.
He also recognized that his younger brother was cuter, more biddable and less philosophically challenging. Under the circumstances, his parents’ preference for the baby made sense, as did their lack of understanding on the subject of their older son’s doom. He didn’t exactly understand it himself.
They had refrained from commenting on his recent metamorphosis, having read in the Sunday supplements that teenagers were likely to behave in an eccentric manner, but Justin noticed his mother trying to peer into his mouth sometimes wh
en he spoke. He suspected she was looking for a tongue stud. The thought of such a piercing sickened him; it made him sad that this was the level on which she believed he operated.
‘Hello, David,’ she said as usual on the morning he came down to breakfast in a poppy-coloured shirt with a ruffle down the front and a pair of white trousers cinched with a belt. She glanced at her husband, and a look passed between them suggesting a subject of previous and mutual concern. Folding his newspaper, Justin’s father cleared his throat.
‘David,’ he began in the manner of a pronouncement.
Justin raised his spoon to his mouth and paused.
‘David. I want to know, that is, we want to know, to enquire really, your mother and I, neither here nor there in any real sense, simply to access the facts, well, ahem. That is to say. You’re not homosexual, are you?’
Justin placed the spoon in his mouth and then returned it slowly to the bowl. Across the table, his brother sucked on an apricot.
‘No no no!’ The little boy laughed, waving his arms emphatically to no one in particular.
‘Because if you are, your mother and I want you to know it’s fine.’
Justin chewed and swallowed.
His parents glanced at each other.
‘Well?’ asked his mother anxiously.
Justin looked up, as if seeing her for the first time. ‘Yes?’
‘Are you…?’ She blushed. ‘You know.’
‘HO-MO-SEX-UAL.’ Exasperation caused his father to shout.
Justin lifted his spoon and pondered the question. Milk dripped off it as it hovered, loaded, in mid-air. Homosexual? It hadn’t really occurred to him. He supposed it was possible. Anything was possible.
‘Not that I know of,’ he said finally.
His father exhaled impatiently and returned to his paper. ‘Well, that’s a relief,’ he snorted. ‘Life’s complicated enough without having a poof for a son.’
8
School started the following Tuesday.
The radio blasted Justin awake at precisely 7 a.m. and he sat bolt upright in bed, shocked, blood pumping rapidly through alarmed organs. He hadn’t been up before noon all summer.
Groaning, he flailed at the snooze button until the noise stopped, and fell once more into a deep sleep. At the fourth repeat, he sat up in bed, reached over and pulled back one of the curtains.
It was pissing with rain.
The gloom was so thick he could barely see the road from his bedroom. He sighed, facing the prospect of a new school year with all the pleasure of a worm facing a beak.
I wish I had a dog, he thought, searching under the bed for his new paisley shirt and white canvas trousers.
Justin stood up, one arm in an armhole and one lying slack by his side. He felt suddenly that if he could walk into school today with a new name, new clothes and a dog – the sleekest, most elegant greyhound in creation – he might possibly survive. But he had no greyhound, and the chances of getting hold of one before eight thirty seemed tragically slim. It was already ten past.
He said goodbye to his mother, picked Charlie up off the floor and whirled him around till he squealed with glee. Then he shook hands with his father and set off to meet his fate.
The thought of a pet, even an imaginary pet, soothed him. He stopped in the drizzle along the half-mile walk to school so that his dog could sniff lamp posts, trees, dead birds.
Here, boy! Come on, boy!
He called his greyhound happily. The creature possessed an effortless grace combined with serenity, dignity, wisdom. The dog’s soft eyes contemplated the world with calm compassion. His body was smooth and elegant, his chest deep, legs strong and well-defined. What a combination of the physical and the spiritual! Surely no ordinary dog, no mere mortal dog could claim the attributes of – of – of Boy.
Good Boy! Boy was no poodle. Anyone could see that.
As he reached the school gates, Justin found himself in the midst of an excited crowd of hormonally charged human particles, each one bouncing randomly off its fellow particles, converging finally into groups of twos and threes that went about the age-old business of swapping cigarette ends and lies about summer sexual conquests, picking up old friendships, and resuming grudges exactly where they’d left off.
The new term held endless golden promise: new victims for bullies, new excuses to fail literacy and play truant, new opportunities to pursue what their parents laughably referred to as an education.
‘Hey, Case!’ He heard a wolf whistle. ‘Nice shirt.’
It was an education all right.
Justin nodded, exchanging greetings with a variety of individuals, many of whom he had known since primary school. Some could be categorized as friends, some were nodding acquaintances. Most knew his name.
It was not going to be easy to explain his new identity.
He turned to Boy, and the greyhound slipped his velvety muzzle into Justin’s hand. He left it there for a long moment, imparting strength, grace and wisdom to his owner. Justin felt himself briefly illuminated by the contact, fortified by the touch of his fabulous beast.
‘Hola.’
He looked up. Peter Prince was fair-haired, toweringly tall and skinny, with bony knees and a relentlessly cheerful smile. He was known (if at all) for his peculiar genius in matters relating to astronomy. He and Justin crossed paths only in Spanish and history, subjects at which neither of them excelled.
‘Good summer?’
‘Only if you like psychic torment,’ Justin said.
‘That’s too bad.’ Peter appeared genuinely sympathetic. ‘I don’t suppose today’s going to be much of an improvement.’
‘No.’
Peter looked at him closely. There was definitely something different about David Case. It wasn’t just his clothes, though they certainly suggested a calamity of some sort. It was an air of unease. Bordering on crisis. Not that David had ever been convincingly average, Peter thought, though perhaps he’d managed to convince himself that he was. People did.
He frowned, struggling to piece together the puzzle, but before he could reach a conclusion, the bell rang and they were swept through into the Victorian building’s main hall on a scrambling tide of humanity.
Justin found a seat in his first class with Peter to his left and Boy sprawled at his feet.
‘Welcome back, etc. etc. etc.,’ intoned Mr Ogle, with the jaded air of a factory pieceworker at the end of a forty-eight-hour shift. Eleven seconds into the new school year and already he radiated weariness. ‘You are no doubt as happy to be here as I am. I can only hope –’ he scanned the thirty faces in the room, some innocent, some insolent, the rest mainly blank with indifference – ‘that this year will be less of a trial than last.’
The class shuffled with doubt.
Mr Ogle pulled out the class register.
Justin’s heart began to pound. Oh god, he thought. Here we go.
‘Archer, James.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Bodmin, Amanda.’
‘Yah.’
‘Cadaprakash, Matthew.’
‘Yes.’
‘Case, David.’
Justin raised his hand halfway. ‘Justin, actually.’
Mr Ogle stopped and looked down at the register. ‘David, surely? David Case, unless I’m grossly mistaken?’
Justin shook his head. ‘No. It’s Justin.’
‘Justin Case? Just-In-Case? He looked up at the class, his features uncharacteristically animated. ‘Is this some sort of joke?’
The class evidently thought it was. It was bad enough that David Case had arrived for school so peculiarly dressed. But to have changed his name as well? The first-day tensions dissolved into timid chuckles which spread clockwise around the room, gaining momentum until Justin’s fellow students were choking, then screaming with laughter, tears rolling down their faces.
Peter looked down at his hands, embarrassed for the student formerly known as David.
Mr Ogle whacked his book agai
nst the wall with a resounding crack! and his delirious charges fell silent. The silence had an exhausted, joyous quality and Justin slumped in his chair, hoping to remain invisible in the aftermath. But the forty minutes that followed caused his hope to evaporate in a flurry of sideways glances, sniggers and whispers. The moment class finished, he stood up, arranged his features into a blank, looked neither left nor right, moved at a steady pace. He knew better than to thrash about. As long as there was no trace of blood in the water he’d be safe.
Not that it mattered, he told himself. He had bigger fish to fry. Bigger fish had him to fry.
With a sympathetic smile and a wave, Peter left for his next class while Justin steeled himself for a day of humiliation. His few tenuous allies dwindled in number as the day wore on. The joke played to responsive audiences in six more subjects.
At precisely three thirty, the bell rang and he went home, slammed the front door and collapsed in a chair. His mother looked up from folding laundry and smiled.
‘How was school, darling?’
‘Hell.’
‘What about your classes?’
‘Torture.’
‘And your friends?’
‘Scum.’
His mother considered him, frowning. ‘You’re not in trouble are you, David?’ She pondered the matter, her brow furrowed. If he wasn’t homosexual, perhaps he was dyslexic? The tabloids often cited dyslexia (school lunches, overcrowding, immigration, absent fathers) as a source of problems at school.
‘David, love, can you tell the difference between “dog” and “god”?’
Justin’s eyes snapped open. What a bizarre question. He had never known his mother to possess a metaphysical bent. Dog? God? He wasn’t at all sure he could tell the difference.
He reached for his dog-god and stroked the long, curved back for reassurance.
‘It’s not bullying, is it?’
‘Not bull-ee. Bird-ee!’ interrupted his brother, who had put down his toy monkey and begun flapping his arms like wings. ‘Fly!’
Justin turned to him, suspicious and discomfited by this suggestion (was it a suggestion?). He often had a feeling that Charlie knew more than he let on. The child smiled at him winningly.