The boy strode down the swaying bus, his grey-wrapped bundle in his arms, and sat between a bright brown-skinned man with levitating dreadlocks, and another man, thin and white and middle-aged with bitten fingernails and purple-black grooves beneath his eyes from lack of sleep. The boy's burden was a little cancerous Yorkshire terrier that grumbled and oozed feebly, dying, pawing the air.

It was better, the boy knew, to execute Derik, his dog. (None of this, `Have him put down,' or, `Put him to sleep,' for the boy; he believed he looked at himself unveiled and honest all the time.) Sixteen years was a long time to live - nearly as long as the venerable boy himself had lived - and besides Derik was miserable and eaten with cancer and better off dead. So the boy was on his way to the PDSA and there he would leave the dog. The car had broken down and the fifteen-year-old thought he was very independent and so his dog had to suffer the indignity of being driven to his death by good old public transport.

The black man on the boy's left smiled largely and deeply and reached a tender prodding finger out to the dog where his head showed outside the blanket. The boy thought he was a Rastafarian, but he didn't know exactly what qualified a person as one of those, so he cou nodded too.

`It's a nice dog, eh mon?' he said to the pale man on the boy's right.

The man sniffed, non-committally, uncaring. He seemed to be staring at the dog where he was slipping off his cruel short mortal coil with a stupid, clever, knowledgeable detachment, counting the dog's time as it ran down.

`Wha's it you do, mon?' the black man asked of him.

`I'm a surgeon,' came the reply after some seconds. It was like getting blood from a rich, well-bred stone. The cancerous ring around the dog's left eye was a magnet to his attention.

The big brown lips pondered the pallid little man.

`I couldn' handle dat, mon! All dat cuttin' and bleedin'... Nah for me. Must feel good to help people, though, mon?'

A black-shouldered shrug. `I've never really thought about it.' The puffy white ring burned into his brain.

`No, mon? If I wa' you, I'd feel like a god, mon, like a god. It's like dair used to be witches and magicians and stuff like dat, but now dair's doctors and nurses yah go to if -'

The surgeon suddenly turned to the boy. `I couldn't help it,' he said, imploring, talented hands sprouting from expensive sleeves.

The boy looked up for the first time. `What?'

`She was so young... but you can't blame me - if I hadn't killed her - well she was so eaten up - she practically asked me... and He was going to kill her soon, anyway.' He fingered a tiny solid gold crucifix inside his collar. `The surgery, we told her mum - the surgery to remove the cancer in her intestine, just six years old - was unsuccessful.' His fists clenched, his knuckles whitened, the remainders of each of his talented hands cringed. `But she was so young! Why did she keep looking at me, blinking at me with her wide white-brown-black eyes while she was anaesthetised?' He was crying now and spittle purled round his old yellowing mouth, and he suddenly stood and got off the bus as it stopped, walking quickly away.

The cool, cold, real air outside gathered the man's impassioned parts together into a wonderfully meaningless equipoise, a long troubled equation equalling zero. Rage and bitterness and loss were cooled and forced into a grudging, sordid coexistence.

The black man looked down for a moment then smiled. `Life goes on, eh, mon?'

The boy nodded.

Beaming joyously at emptiness he got off at the next stop, just outside the graveyard. He walked off towards a small cluster of beloved and acquaintances that stood on the fresh green artificial grass in a feeble circle around a grey stone cross.

The boy imagined he could see white marble teeth flashing at him across the churchyard as the Rastafarian wept gladly for his father, killed one night by a great horn-blasting truck which seemed to have been created beyond the night's mist for that specific purpose, and which was snatched away as soon as its task was done by the same heavenly hand that had made it. Prayers were released into the empty sky and sacred tears dropped and holy words were said... and it was all like a cruel, age-old derision beyond the pale of thought or faith.

And the misery and the pain were like a hard, harsh litany from a barbed tongue, and the crosses in the cemeteries symbolised a single, great, ever-rejoicing sacrifice, and execution was the symbol that hung on little golden chains around the necks of the faithful.

Grumbling motor, brick buildings, next stop.

The waiting room was brown, with a threadbare, gridded, industrial texture carpet. The leaves of noisome, decaying potted plants were ask, to ask, to ask... `What will they kill him with? What will they do with the corpse? How long before they burn or bury it?' and other such pointless questions. But the receptionist was very beautiful in a cosmetic, machine-tanned, phone-answering way, and he found he could not approach her. The room was so dreary and the people so depressing and false and she was so beautiful and, besides, they seemed such stupid questions to ask to the smooth, crystal, depthless face of things... And there was the option of walking away, of getting out of there as quickly as possible, and he took it.

When he returned home, he found the family had bought a pup, as yet unnamed, still so young as to be just a knot of fibrous flesh inside which a puny skeleton and tissues and organs were revealed.

He sat down and cradled the pup, and he could feel the tiny heart pumping wildly against the rib cage, eyes bright with a splendid lack of knowledge and the brutal, vigorous, vital lust for continued existence - to the next breath, and the next, and the next... And the boy saw that here at last might be hope, that here in fragility and stupidity was the artless wonder of life.

What would become of it was a different matter.

The End

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