But the tarred road, the brute imposition of man’s will on nature, was not something he found pleasing. A thing of beauty like this should not have been tamed thus.
The parliament appeared to his left and opposite it stood Holyroodhouse, another of Her Majesty’s palaces. The restored parliament with nationalistic leanings right next to the English monarch’s residence. And along from it, blocks of low rent council flats. A tumultuous history and the contradictions of modern Scotland side by side. Yet, somehow, it all worked.
His eyes were drawn to the green spaces, the lawns ahead. A woman was being dragged along by a black mastiff on a long lead.
“Princess, stop,” she said. “Stop right now, Princess.”
What a name for a dog! What a choice of pet for a woman who, in all likelihood, lived in one of the flats nearby. He checked his watch. It was only a little after eight. In the early afternoon he liked to watch the Dog Whisperer. There were a few daytime programmes that he watched religiously, Columbo, Murder She Wrote, Countdown, Judge Judy and Poirot formed the rest of his selection, which was only occasionally broken by cookery programmes. Of all the shows he’d watched, none gave him the same insight into the insanity of western society as the Dog Whisperer.
The woman pulled on the leash, but the dog was too powerful, forcing her to take giant strides to keep up. Coming in the opposite direction, a man and his whippet walked side by side in perfect harmony. “Calm, submissive state” was what Cesar Millan would have called it. The ideal relationship between man and dog. Before he could begin to appreciate the show, the Magistrate had had to get his head round the fact that ‘these people’ lived indoors with their dogs. When Cesar went round saying that he rehabilitated dogs, and trained people, it made perfect sense. Anyone who lived indoors with a filthy animal clearly needed help.
The show’s format was always the same. A distraught dog owner, usually a woman – occasionally with a partner whose dislike of the dog could never quite be expressed in front of the camera, except, that is, by cold stares, or the resigned shaking of the head – would speak about Fifi, or Bubu, or Coco whom she loved as much as life itself, but who was driving her to distraction.
Cesar Millan, the Third Worlder, the Mexican, would be called in. He was a small man, with perfect white teeth and a ridiculously well groomed beard. He would arrive smiling, always smiling, and sit down with the family. While they explained their problem, Cesar listened patiently, observing the dog and sometimes pushing it off his couch if it tried to sit with him uninvited. His diagnoses were usually simple. The dog was a pack animal that shouldn’t be treated as a child, but treated as . . . well, a dog.
Cesar would then work with the dog, master him, and correct the problem. He would teach the owner correct body postures and subtle ways of understanding their dog’s mind. His method was psychological, an attempt to restore balance. The dog, unused to discipline, would revolt. Cesar would poke it in the ribs, or click his fingers, point and say, “tsh.” The animal would resist, sulk, go mental, but Cesar would not relent. Some of the battles were of mythic proportions, like Jacob and the angel. No matter how long it took, Cesar pressed on, until finally, as if by magic, the dog succumbed. The tail would go down, the animal would relax into the “calm, submissive state”, and only then would Cesar, the stern master, show it affection.
Almost always his prescription involved the need for more exercise. The episode would conclude with smiling, grateful dog owners whose lives had been turned around, and who now kept their animals in a “calm, submissive state”. A shot of Cesar walking in the wilderness, holding a shepherd’s staff, surrounded by his own happy, peaceful pack of dogs faded with the credits. The same format, week in, week out, and the Magistrate could not get enough of it.
The silver birches, bared of their leaves, stood like skeletons on parade by the pond on the Meadowbank side of the city. The giant struts of the stadium and sports centre loomed over the locale. The Magistrate saw a red kite, which he mistook for an eagle, soaring in the sky. He breathed faster from the exertion of the walk and felt better for it. His calves throbbed a little as he walked up the incline. The ruins of St Anthony’s stood below him and, when he looked down onto Holyrood, he could just make out the ruined abbey adjacent to the palace.
The Magistrate’s vision skimmed over the roofs of the city. Cranes in the west looked like brontosauri feeding off the rooftops. The houses were tiny, like dolls’ houses huddling together from the cold. The Restalrig high-rises brutally punctured the cityscape, and he swept over Leith to Granton, where flats fractured the skyline. In between the extremes, a hundred church spires stood out. From this point he could take in most of the city and, beyond, the Forth, calm and grey. On a day like this he could even see across to Fife. The Magistrate felt like a colossus striding over the narrow world. Everywhere he turned the view was breathtaking. Right then the saudade hit him pretty bad and, for a moment, he could see Bindura, the low prospect, the giant mine chimneys in the distance, but the memory was like a flicker from an old videotape that had been dubbed over. He could only hold the image in his mind for a brief second before it vanished into the mist hovering over the Forth.
The Mathematician
Farai opens his eyes, sits up and swings his legs off the bed. The red LCD on his radio clock tells him it’s 06:01:23, meaning he’s 1 minute and 23 seconds late. He doesn’t use an alarm, his body knows when to rise and right now it’s telling him he needs to pee. He rubs his eyes and yawns.
Eminem, Malcolm X, and Adam Smith (no relation to Ian) look down on him from the posters on the wall. He steps on layers of white printed paper with black ink lettering, numbers, symbols and words from his inkjet. Around the bed are various thick textbooks. The papers feel smooth under his bare feet as he walks across the room and opens the curtains. His bladder screams out. He ignores it. He’ll go in his own time.
He goes to the living room and says good morning to Mr Majeika, who is hopping around in his hutch. Mr Majeika is one of those unoriginal rabbits trying to imitate dairy cows. Farai opens the hutch and strokes his black and white fur. ‘Your bedding needs changing, Mr Majeika. Fancy a bit of lettuce, just to get you started today? It’s good for you, coz you’re getting fat, shasha.’
Mr Majeika wiggles his whiskers in reply and observes Farai lazily.
Farai gets himself a glass of water and a few leaves of lettuce for Mr Majeika. He turns on the TV, switches it, via remote, from the live reality TV feed of housemates in the Big Brother house to Bloomberg. The Nasdaq is ↑, the Dow’s ↑, FTSE’s ↑, so life is good. He fires up his Vaio FE550G. He thinks about how it’d have been great to buy defense shares before the war. Raytheon’s ↑, doing great with all those Tomahawks flying across the desert, lighting up Iraq.
He checks his uni email account, 43 unread messages, and it’s only Monday, before the start of the business day. Most of it is junk. He logs off and goes on zse.co.zw. The connection is slow. The screen blinks like he’s on dial-up. He taps his fingers on the keyboard, trying to absorb the news on TV, making sense of the red, silver and green data stream running at the bottom of the screen. The ZSE page is down.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ he says, leans back in the chair and picks up the landline. He dials out international – direct, spare no expense when it’s business. It’s the AIMs where the fun stuff happens.
‘Hello.’
‘Dad, it’s Farai, how’s Mwana doing?’
‘I’m fine, your mum’s fine too, so is the dog and your little sisters, thanks for asking, Comrade Fatso.’
‘Sorry, Dad, I haven’t had my coffee yet. I’m still booting up.’
‘Mwana’s
