“Shut up! All I want is to get away from you!”
Crack!
“What you are suffering from is a bruise, technically called a subcutaneous haemorrhage. That means a leak of blood under the skin. You also appear to have a slight rupture of the left Achilles tendon. That’s this sinew here, which . . .”
“In view of your limited skill in swimming, it’s not advisable to go more than five feet from the edge of this pool. Beyond that point the bottom dips very sharply.”
“Shut up! I’m trying to get away from you, so—glug!”
”Insufficient oxygen is dissolved in water to support an airbreathing creature like a human. Fish, on the other hand, can utilise the oxygen dissolved in water, because they have gills and not lungs. Your ancestors . . .”
“Why, there’s that little bastard Tim Patterson! And look at what he’s got trailing behind him! Hey, Tim! Who said you had to live with this funny green teddy bear? Did you have to go have your head shrunk?”
Crowding around him, a dozen neighbourhood kids, both sexes, various ages from nine to fourteen.
“Tim’s head as you can doubtless see is of normal proportions. I am assigned to him as his Friend.”
“Hah! Don’t give us that shit! Who’d want to be a friend of Tim’s? He busted my brother’s arm and laughed about it!”
“He set fire to the gym at my school!”
“He killed my dog—he killed my Towser!”
“So I understand. Tim, you have the opportunity to say you were sorry, don’t you?”
“Ah, he made that stinking row all the time, barking his silly head off—”
“You bastard! You killed my dog!”
“Buddy, help! Help!”
“As I said, Tim, you have an excellent opportunity to say how sorry you are . . . No, little girl: please put down that rock. It’s extremely uncivil, and also dangerous, to throw things like that at people.”
“Shut up!”
“Let’s beat the hell out of him! Let him go whining back home and tell how all those terrible kids attacked him, and see how he likes his own medicine!”
“Kindly refrain from attempting to inflict injuries on my assigned charge.”
“I told you to shut up, greenie!”
“I did caution you, as you’ll recall. I did say that it was both uncivil and dangerous to throw rocks at people. I believe what I should do is inform your parents. Come, Tim.”
“No!”
“Very well, as you wish. I shall release this juvenile to continue the aggression with rocks.”
“No!”
“But, Tim, your two decisions are incompatible. Either you come with me to inform this child’s parents of the fact that rocks were thrown at you, or I shall have to let go and a great many more rocks will probably be thrown—perhaps more than I can catch before they hit you.”
“I—uh . . . I—I’m sorry that I hurt your dog. It just made me so mad that he kept on barking and barking all the time, and never shut up!”
“But he didn’t bark all the time! He got hurt—he cut his paw and he wanted help!”
“He did so bark all the time!”
“He did not! You just got mad because he did it that one time!”
“I—uh . . . Well, I guess maybe . . .”
“To be precise, there had been three complaints recorded about your dog’s excessive noise. On each occasion you had gone out and left him alone for several hours.”
“Right! Thank you, Buddy! See?”
“But you didn’t have to kill him!”
“Correct, Tim. You did not. You could have become acquainted with him, and then looked after him when it was necessary to leave him by himself.”
“Ah, who’d want to care for a dog like that shaggy brute?”
“Perhaps someone who never was allowed his own dog?”
“Okay. Okay! Sure I wanted a dog, and they never let me have one! Kept saying I’d—I’d torture it or something! So I said fine, if that’s how you think of me, let’s go right ahead! You always like to be proven right!”
“Kind of quiet around here tonight,” Jack Patterson said. “What’s been going on?”
“You can thank Buddy,” Lorna answered.
“Can I now? So what’s he done that I can’t do, this time?”
“Persuaded Tim to go to bed on time and without yelling his head off, that’s what!”
“Don’t feed me that line! ‘Persuaded!’ Cowed him, don’t you mean?”
“All I can say is that tonight’s the first time he’s let Buddy sleep inside the room instead of on the landing by the door.”
“You keep saying I didn’t read the instructions—now it turns out you didn’t read them! Friends don’t sleep, not the way we do at any rate. They’re supposed to be on watch twenty-four hours per day.”
“Oh, stop it! The first peaceful evening we’ve had in heaven knows how long, and you’re determined to ruin it!”
“I am not!”
“Then why the hell don’t you keep quiet?”
Upstairs, beyond the door of Tim’s room which was as ever ajar, Buddy’s ears remained alert with their tips curled over to make them acoustically ultra-sensitive.
“Who—? Oh! I know you! You’re Tim Patterson, aren’t you? Well, what do you want?”
“I. . . I. . .”
“Tim wishes to know whether your son would care to play ball with him, madam.”
“You have to be joking! I’m not going to let Teddy play with Tim after the way Tim broke his elbow with a baseball bat!”
“It did happen quite a long time ago, madam, and—”
“No! That’s final! No!”
Slam!
“Well, thanks for trying, Buddy. It would have been kind of fun to . . . Ah, well!”
“That little girl is ill-advised to play so close to a road carrying fast traffic— Oh, dear. Tim, I shall need help in coping with this emergency. Kindly take off your belt and place it around her leg about here . . . That’s correct. Now pull it tight. See how the flow of blood is reduced? You’ve put a tourniquet on the relevant pressure point, that’s to say a spot where a large artery passes near the skin. If much
