AFTER LEAVING REGENT’S PARK, THE JACKALS RELEASED earlier snouted around for a long time in a shadowy rubbish collection point behind a gastropub on Marylebone Road. They scrounged among lemon rinds and stale loaves of pain de campagne, and licked sweet dark oil leaking from a broken deep fryer. The canines would dart away whenever any of the workers came outside to dump bottles and cans or to take cigarette breaks, but always drifted back, more nervous and irritated. Eventually the jackals managed to tip a giant blue recycling bin filled with lager cans and the huge clatter scared them away. But the pack was in a bit of a state now, a peculiarly canine blend of curiosity, fear, and bloodlust.
They ran south, into Marylebone proper, staying close together and attracting almost no attention. It was May Day. An emaciated young hedge fund trader who normally monitored the Asian markets at night was crouched, wide awake, in his new red Bayerische glider outside the famed London Clinic. He had taken off work to wait for an appointment at 7:00 A.M. He had been unable to concentrate on his accounts. He was trying to eat a carton of Kung Pao Prawns and crab puffs picked up in Chinatown. It wasn’t going well. Like Dr. Bajwa, he had metastatic lung cancer, although he had never smoked, yet unlike Dr. Bajwa, his had been discovered cruelly late. It seemed to be in the air, like radon gas. His appetite had been absent for weeks. He kept putting prawns to his mouth and taking them out. When he saw the jackals, he rolled down the window and clicked his fingers to attract them.
“Allo,” he said. “Come on, busters, let’s have a pet.”
The jackals at times showed few inhibitions around people if it served their purposes. One trotted up and began licking the traces of sweet, peanuty sauce off the trader’s bony fingers. The man was lonely. He had faced his disease, so far, with great valor, but he was far away from his family and friends in Yorkshire. He thought of his small collie, Barney, from his childhood—a loyal little animal, who used to chase hares in the beetroot field across the lane. He wondered if he ought to move home to die.
“You’re right good sorts,” he said. “Right good tykes.”
The other dogs surrounded the hand and the good smell wafting from the Bayerische.
“That’s it,” he said. The trader looked around the street. He saw no one. He turned the carton upside down and let all the food fall on the pavement. One of the jackals lunged forward, snarling at the others, bullying them back, but they resisted, and every jackal managed to get at least a mouthful. The viciousness of the animals took the trader aback.
“Steady,” he said. “Steady, boys.”
Then the jackals ran off, south again. Their loyalties were only to the pack.
Humans were one thing, but as the night wore on, the roars of cars and lorries were making them increasingly angry and jittery. The pulsing thrums of internal combustion engines were shocking to them, like a distant background noise they had always heard in their captive lives suddenly turned up to maximum volume. Eventually they fled over to Harley Street, which was relatively quiet at this hour—nearly 4:30 A.M. The unseasonably cool, dry air of the night, passing over the warm, damp streets, had created a thick layer of fog. They stayed on the wide, clean pavements, which had none of the Mars bar wrappers or the scraps of the Sun found in most London byways. The place smelled of old, strange human skin to them, skin rinsed of the body odor and sex and food scents they could detect on their zookeepers. They had made fast work of the goat from the petting zoo, but they hadn’t been able to eat much. They felt more relaxed and hungry for blood again, and they were yipping faintly, happyfury, happyfury.
The iron fence fronting the doctor and dental offices on Harley Street had all been painted recently in the same glossy black enamel. The consistency and predictability of the fence bars gave the jackals confidence. They had latched onto a kind of geometry that fit the canine mind. In their color-blind vision flashed steady ticking of bars, like the demisemiquavers of thirty-second notes. And what was that music? It went like this: find-kill-find-kill, trilling in the speeding heart of dog-time.