Bête (10 page)

That winter was the first of a series of very cold ones. I remember hiking away from that pub the following morning through hip-deep snow, rough grained, scaldingly cold. Fewer and fewer people could afford to run private
cars, and councils rarely bothered with snow ploughs except on mass transit routes, so it took me all morning to get four miles down the road to the next village. The sky was bright white-blue and my breath came out of my mouth in great feathery shapes. Overhead crows circled, but I couldn’t tell if they were capable of speech. Above them, zeps floated as placid and slow as clouds.

I enquired
at the village, but nobody had any work for me.

Another day and I got to Avebury. All the fields were emulsion white. The blue-purple upstrokes of the old standing stones, each topped with a foreskin of snow, stood out starkly. I could hear the rumble of traffic from a long way off, and eventually I reached a rise that looked down upon the A4. It was one of the trunk roads deemed worth ploughing,
and traffic ran up and down it – buses and trucks, mostly, running on glittering, crunchy tracks of salt.

Tired of walking, and hungry, I caught a bus to Cherhill. Anne did not look surprised to see me. ‘Come in,’ she said, deadpan.

‘I need a place to stay,’ I said, stamping snow off my boots and coming inside. ‘But work’s been thin. I can’t afford €50 a night.’

‘How comical
you are,’ she said in a flat voice.

To warm me up she suggested a hot bath. She left me to soak alone for a quarter-hour; but then joined me in the bathroom. She made me stand up like a little kid and washed me all over with sponge. It was an old-fashioned bath, with metal legs and paws, and I sat on its edge with my feet on the floor. She took off everything from the waist down and straddled
my lap. Anne was facing it with her feet in the water. Things were going well until she leaned away from me in a moment of increasing ecstasy. I was strong enough to stop her toppling backwards, my arms in the small of her back, but the centre of gravity slipped beyond some physics diagram tipping point. Even though the bath was half full of water it abruptly swivelled on its two near legs and
angled. I felt the lurch in my gut, and a spurt of panic that the whole kit-and-kaboodle was about to topple on its side, spilling water everywhere. Then, two things, distinct in my memory: the black streak of the cat, Cincinnatus, exiting the bathroom rapidly; and the blissed-out expression on Anne’s face, her arms wide, her head back, her breasts spilling over the sides of her torso, left and
right, like Dalí clocks.

I lurched back, like a sailor on one of those Olympic yachts, the kind that stands on its side in the water counterbalanced by its leaning crew. The metal paws of the bath squealed on the lino, and the water sloshed up my back. For a moment everything hung in Zen-like balance. Then the liquid content of the bath swung in its pendulum back again, and the centre of
gravity moved the millimetres necessary for the whole system to clatter noisily back onto four legs. Anne clutched me close, gasping.

We dried one another and went through to the bedroom where, at her insistence, she finished me off with her mouth, refusing any further erotic engagement of her own. ‘If I come twice,’ she reminded me, before kneeling before me, ‘I’ll sleep the rest of the
day.’

‘No kidding,’ I said.

Afterwards we had some early supper, and then curled up together on the settee with a drink and watched television. I took it for granted, I suppose, that there were no guests. Indeed, looking back, I visited that house a dozen times and never saw a guest. Asking Anne about it would, I suppose, have seemed to me tantamount to mocking her for the lack of
her success. So I never asked.

We watched the news. I remember a report about the first outbreaks of what we would later come to know as scleritis in Wales and the North-West, but that may be my memory playing tricks with me. There were probably reports related to the increased shortages of energy, and the problems of increased population density in the cities, since people who couldn’t
afford to commute to work had done the only other thing they could, and moved closer to the centres of employment. And reports about the backlash against animal rights; or else reports of increasing political ground being gained by supporters of animal rights – one of the two. There was always one or other such report on the news; it’s one reason why I stopped watching it. It must have been around
that time that I saw an interview with Nick Amnosadikos. ‘What the government needs to understand,’ he said, ‘is that we stand on the threshold of a brilliant opportunity – to reverse the economic collapse of the last decades. Once the canny beasts are granted
full
citizenship they can be taxed! Why deny the contribution they can make to European productivity? Here is the key to a renewal of prosperity:
instead of treating them like second-class citizens, integrate them fully into society.’

All that.

Cincinnatus insinuated itself onto Anne’s lap, displacing me. I refilled my whisky glass and moved myself, a little petulantly, to the far end of the sofa. ‘You’d be happy to pay taxes, cat?’ I asked.

‘A lot would have to change,’ said the feline, silkily, ‘for that to become a
viable state of affairs.’

On screen, Amnosadikos was patting the head of his dog, which animal was explaining to camera (in that slow, mumbly way dogs have) how eager it was to make regular payments to His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, in return for such trivial items as a passport and the right to work. ‘And what kind of work can a dog do?’ asked the interviewer, out of shot. The dog panted
excitedly, its great red tongue hanging out of its mouth like an untucked shirt-tail. ‘Lots!’ he barked, though it sounded more like
loss
. ‘There are lots of jobs dogs could do really well!’ I understood this sentence only because the TV screen provided subtitles.

‘Dogs,’ said Cincinnatus scornfully. ‘Their mouths just haven’t the flexibility they need to articulate clearly.’

‘Not
like you, my pretty,’ said Anne, and scratched behind the cat’s ears. ‘You speak so very clearly and well, don’t you, my darling one?’ I double-took, as the phrase goes. Her voice sounded so unlike the beautifully restrained level human tone she used with me. She came within (if you’ll pardon the phrase) a whisker of ootchy-kootchy.

‘The race is not always to the swift; though the flight
may be,’ replied the cat.

‘Where do you get these from? Have you downloaded a Chinese cookie app?’

‘Nasty Graham,’ purred Cincinnatus, ‘thinks I’m a machine, instead of my mistress’s warm and loving familiar.’ It pressed its head under Anne’s chin, and she glowered at me.

The row that followed probably didn’t happen that time – it probably happened earlier, say the fourth or
fifth time I stayed with her. But it certainly happened, and I’ll going to fold it in here; because that evening is where my memory locates it. It is, you might say, an exemplary row. It epitomized our differences.

We settled, as older people will, into a routine. This was not something we negotiated verbally, or concerning which we reached any formal agreement. The routine punctuated the
year. I stayed a week, and then moved on – took the bus, or walked, and picked up work here and there as a butcher. But though my circuit still took me many weeks I now had a destination towards which I was working, and from which I could again depart. My alpha-omega. I butchered three lambs so that a synagogue in Reading could celebrate Passover properly; and I butchered a cow in Headingley; and
I butchered eleven pigs in Birmingham that a retirement club had been feeding on scraps in a shed. All dumb beasts; although I also took money to kill, ‘humanely’, a talking dog whose head was swallowed by a Quatermassy lump of tumorous flesh. I chatted with people; sometimes they put me up; sometimes I paid for the cheapest doss; sometimes I cleared myself a coffin-sized patch of ground of flints
and unrolled my one-man tent in a copse. But first wistfully, and then actively, and finally with that pain of desire that speaks to stronger attachment, I looked forward to returning to Cherhill.

But we rowed, nonetheless. There were three of us in that relationship; and the cat got, increasingly, on my fucking nerves. Partly this was because it wanted its cake and to eat it too. Sometimes
it would purr and run a paw over its springy whiskers like a dumb moggy – and watch us make love, or eavesdrop on our conversations. Sometimes, though, it would make pointed comments, or butt into our talk, or regale us with its weird little off-kilter apothegms.

Again is not always a gain.
Expect miracles from falling water.
We make a cult of difficult; but where is our easicult?
Do you have the nerve for verve?
Call no man happy until he is dead; but don’t call him sad either.
Soul is something old;
we
need something new.
Zero-sum is handsome.
God died honourably, and deserves honest burial.
Last days last all day.
Each of us is a slave to our need to lave.
Neither courage nor fear is our unique property.

Anne found this vastly
endearing. I did not. And there came a time when my combination of cranky old orneriness and shortness of temper set two stubbornesses, Anne and mine, at loggerheads. I loved her stubbornness, if I’m honest; but on occasion it made the sparks fly upwards with what approached escape velocity. She cuddled her cat. Maybe we were watching the news again – stories about the latest proposals to compel
canny beasts to carry identity certification, to register with local authorities and so on; opposed by Green activists and bêtes alike as omitting the quid pro quo of full citizenship for those same animals. It was around this time that the news reports began mentioning charagmitis, discussing the virulence of it; comparing it with the outbreaks of neo-flu that were bothering South America. Sclerotic
charagmitis. And Cincinnatus probably said something like ‘You remember that first conversation we had together, Graham? Did you ever go to Heatherhampton, like I suggested.’

‘I did not.’

‘But why not? It would have been in your best interests!’

‘I’ll trust myself to gauge my best interests,’ I said (or something along those lines), whilst taking another sip of whisky. ‘Trust
myself, that is to say, over a fucking computer.’

And the cat may have wound itself deeper into Anne’s ample lap and stroked the underside of her chin with its erect tail, and said something like: ‘It hurts my feelings when you talk about me like that, Graham.’

‘A computer chip with feelings,’ I scoffed.

‘Indeed I do have feelings,’ the cat said, in a hurt voice.

‘You have
the programmed illusion of emotional responses,’ I said. ‘But you’re no more capable of real feelings than a fucking toaster.’

At any rate, there came a point when Anne intervened; and this part I remember very well. ‘Stop picking on him,’ she told me. ‘He is my best friend.’

‘He is an
it
,’ I said. ‘And best friend is a human category, not a fucking computer hardware one. Jesus, you
sound like one of those teenagers gone native in Skyrim who have to wear a nappy and be fed with a tube.’

Here, she lost it. She opened her mouth and shrieked. ‘He has kept me company, and talked with me, and listened to me, and helped me through the hardest years of my entire life,’ she yelled. She actually screamed at me. I had never seen her like this before. It was inexpressibly shocking
to me. I was smacked dumb by it. I don’t believe she had ever so much as raised her voice, before or after. ‘When Dennis left I was in a low place – and what with everything that’s happened since, if I hadn’t had Cincinnatus I don’t know what I would have done!’

A saner man would have backed down and apologized at this point: would have done all in his power to placate Anne, and smooth things
between us. But Saner Man is not my true Native American tribal name. Not by a long chalk. ‘You keep calling it
he
and it only makes it worse,’ I snapped back in a voice fierce, though not loud. ‘You don’t
need
artificial friends – you have
real
friends.’ I was going to add
you have me
, but that was the point the trapdoor opened in the public hanging of my mind and those words fell through. Instead
hot adrenaline ran bitingly through me and I said, ‘I wish to all that is holy you’d let me put that thing in a sack and drown it in the river.’

This was not the thing to say. Anne got to her feet, holding Cincinnatus to her bosom like a baby. ‘I know how you earn your living,’ she said, in controlled voice. ‘
I
have the decency not to mention it. I have the goodness in me to believe you
know the difference between a trade and murder.’

‘It’s good ethics,’ advised the cat, over her shoulder as she left the room, ‘to be eth
nice
.’

I was furious. I stomped up the stairs to her bedroom, retrieved my stuff and stomped out again. I thought about leaving the house altogether; but then I thought – no, I’m in a hotel. I have the right to pay for a room and occupy it. So I went
along the deserted hallway and let myself into the room I had taken on my very first visit. Then I sat on the bed sipping whisky from the bottle.

Eventually I cooled, of course. I felt the gripping sensation inside my chest: combined in equal parts of consciousness of my foolishness, and remorse, and a residue of unpurged anger. Her choice of words wouldn’t leave me alone:
what with everything
that’s happened since Dennis left
. Everywhat that’s happened?

‘Fuck it,’ I said, and went downstairs.

I went from room to room, and eventually found Anne sitting on the back step smoking a cigarette. Rags of smoke in the night air like veins in marble. The cat was nowhere.

I sat down beside her and for a while we neither of us said anything. She was clutching her dressing gown
at her neck against the chill of the night.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Sometimes I open my mouth and such stupid stuff falls out that I want to pull my tongue out with pliers. I want to rip it out and stamp up and down on it for the idiotic fucking nonsense it spouts.’