After Brock by Paul Binding

‘Jolie blonde’, like the Cajun song the band was striking up again, the fiddler double-stopping and bow-scraping like he’d soon go mad with longing for love. Katey went on: ‘I know what a nice guy you are, Nat. But maybe you ought to sober up a teeny bit. Try getting on to your feet.’
    â€˜Easy!’ I said, doing what she had suggested, ‘in fact nothing could be easier.’
    Adrenalin sped through me. Accordingly my legs felt steadier than they had for at least an hour. I seized Katey by the right hand and pulled her towards the nearest garden wall, and she, thinking it best to humour me, allowed herself to be pulled. We reached the wall’s base. ‘I’m going to climb up,’ I told her releasing my hold of her, ‘most direct route to Mr Fox.’
    She made some genteel noise of protest, but I wasn’t having any, and, surprising myself with my neat, effortless movements, leapfrogged onto the top of the wall. I half-cheered when I succeeded in my action.
    â€˜It’s great up here,’ I called down, ‘why don’t you join me? The two of us can run along the tops of several garden walls until we’ve reached his den. Hope the noise of the party hasn’t driven him away, but they’re pretty resilient, foxes.’ Also, of course, it was late, well gone midnight, and my fox, like many another, would be out searching for food more likely than not. ‘He may not be at home, I will admit,’ I went on, ‘probably round and about scavenging at this hour, but we may get a glimpse of him on his way back. Foxes are much more scavengers than hunters, you know. People get them wrong. Of course they do take chickens and rabbits, and personally I wish they wouldn’t. But truly foxes prefer finding things to killing. They mean us well, and we should mean them well.’
    â€˜I’m sure we should,’ said Katey, ‘but I don’t think you should go looking for any foxes the way you are at the moment.’
    â€˜Leave him be,’ said Josh, ‘Nat always does what he fucking wants. He’s not much of a one for reasoning.’
    â€˜No, I hate reasoning,’ I agreed, and began to move away from the pair along the wall, swaying rather more than I liked, I have to confess, and some wide wobbles brought my heart into my mouth. But by fifty yards I had stabilised myself. Really the garden of the house wasn’t so enormous as all their pride in their property made you think. I was out of it and onto their neighbours’ wall in a remarkably short time. And, now I had left my hosts behind, I felt a new, most curious energy possess me.
    I began to run along the wall, and then the wall after that. Fucking exhilarating, better than any dream, looking down from a height of more than three feet into gardens full of shrubs and brick-sided pools, and rose bushes, with bedroom lights shining down onto the darkened lawns, and a dog (or two?) barking up at me, but nobody anywhere taking a blind bit of notice of my moving presence. I might have had a Kalashnikov with me, after all. Above me London’s lights met the night sky in what looked like a huge static barrage balloon and, all in all, though I knew I would pay for it all and in the near future, like now, it was the best night walk I have ever had.

    But I must have taken a wrong turning, or a wall too many; I hadn’t been counting. I looked around me. The garden shed underneath which the fox lived – sheds are foxes’ favourite habitat – was nowhere in sight. Been dismantled? Or maybe I’d got the location slightly but significantly wrong. Four doors away, I had told Josh, but I was now looking down on an alleyway. I would have to jump down into it, and cross over if I were to make for any next garden. And the only one I could see into from my eminence, on which my stance was decidedly shaky, was an extremely tidy place, with a big shrub,