town on the Tuesday morning. I stopped, glared up at the wheeling gulls and a couple of thrushes, then got some grass and wiped the yellow-white mess off the front guard. It was a bright, sunny day and a light breeze blew. The forecast for the next few days was good, and I hoped the fine weather held for Eric’s arrival.
I met Jamie in the lounge bar of the Cauldhame Arms for lunch and we sat playing an electronic game over a TV table.
‘If he’s that crazy, I don’t know why they haven’t caught him yet,’ Jamie said.
‘I’ve told you; he’s crazy but he’s very cunning. He’s not stupid. He was always very bright, right from the start. He was reading early and getting all his relations and uncles and aunts to say “Och, they’re old so young these days” and things like that before I was even born.’
‘But he is insane, all the same.’
‘That’s what they say, but I don’t know.’
‘What about the dogs? And the maggots?’
‘OK, that looks pretty crazy, I’ll admit, but sometimes I think maybe he’s up to something, maybe he’s not really crazy after all. Perhaps he just got fed up acting normal and decided to act crazy instead, and they locked him up because he went too far.’
‘And he’s mad at them,’ Jamie grinned, drinking his pint as I annihilated various dodging, multi-coloured spacecraft on the screen. I laughed. ‘Yeah, if you like. Oh, I don’t know. Maybe he really is crazy. Maybe I am. Maybe everybody is. Or at least all of my family.’
‘Now you’re talking.’
I looked up at him for a second, then smiled. ‘It does occur to me sometimes. My dad’s an eccentric . . . I suppose I am, too.’ I shrugged, concentrated on the space battle again. ‘But it doesn’t bother me. There are a lot madder people about the place.’
Jamie sat in silence for a while as I went from screenful to screenful of wheeling, whining craft. Finally my luck ran out and they caught me. I took up my pint as Jamie settled in to blast a few of the gaudy formations. I looked at the top of his head as he bent to the task. He was starting to go bald, though I knew he was only twenty-three. He reminded me again of a puppet, with his out-of-proportion head and stubby little arms and legs waggling with the exertion of punching the ‘fire’ button and jiggling the positioning joystick.
‘Yeah,’ he said after a while, still attacking the oncoming craft, ‘and a lot of them seem to be politicians and presidents and things.’
‘What?’ I said, wondering what he was talking about.
‘The madder people. A lot of them seem to be leaders of countries or religions or armies. The real loonies.’
‘Aye, I suppose,’ I said thoughtfully, watching the battle on the screen upside down. ‘Or maybe they’re the only sane ones. After all, they’re the ones with all the power and riches. They’re the ones who get everybody else to do what they want them to do, like die for them and work for them and get them into power and protect them and pay taxes and buy them toys, and they’re the ones who’ll survive another big war, in their bunkers and tunnels. So, given things being the way they are, who’s to say they’re the loonies because they don’t do things the way Joe Punter thinks they ought to be done? If they thought the same way as Joe Punter, they’d be Joe Punter, and somebody else would be having all the fun.’
‘Survival of the fittest.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Survival of the -’ Jamie drew his breath in sharply and pulled the stick so hard he almost fell off his stool, but he managed to dodge the darting yellow bolts that had driven him into the corner of the screen ‘- nastiest.’ He looked up at me and grinned quickly before hunching over the controls again. I drank, nodded.
‘If you like. If the nastiest survive, then that’s our tough shit.’
‘“Us” being all us Joe Punters,’ Jamie said.
‘Aye, or everybody. The whole species. If we’re really so bad and so thick that we’d actually use all those wonderful H-bombs and Neutron bombs on each other, then maybe it’s just as well we do wipe ourselves out before we can get into space and start doing horrible things to other races.’
‘You mean we’ll be the Space Invaders?’
‘Yeah!’ I laughed, and rocked back on my stool. ‘That’s it! That’s really us!’ I laughed