Being a Beast (13 page)

I killed a fish with my teeth once, as a very young child, and by accident. I was by a pond in Yorkshire, with a jam jar full of small darting things, including a minnow.

‘Put it in your mouth', said Chris. ‘I dare you.'

And I did. Not only that, but I pretended to chew it. Then, in an early and dramatic illustration of the terrible principle that you tend to become what you pretend to be, I chopped it by mistake. Its muddy guts, full of midge larvae and aquatic worms, spilled over my tongue. The flapping electricity of its death quivered into my gums. I spat it into the pond. It was still twitching as a shoal of other minnows rose to eat it.

‘Cool', said Chris, horrified.

‘That was good', said I, far more horrified.

✴ ✴

I didn't enjoy turning over stones. This was mainly due to my phobia of lampreys. This phobia is yet another reason why I'm not qualified to write this chapter. For otters love them.

The phobia is biologically unintelligent. The Badgworthy Water has mostly brook lampreys, which don't parasitise other fish; and river lampreys, which are much less common there, have better things to do than try to burrow in through the thick hide of a large mammal. Yet I couldn't shake the picture out of my head: the sucker and those rasping jaws that eat into the side and then in, in, in, through the internal organs, until the host dies. Then the fat lamprey squeezy-squirms out between the ribs and goes off to spawn or to search for another animal.

Vedius Pollio planned to kill one of his slaves, who'd broken a cup, by throwing him into a pool of lampreys. The slave screamed (I can hear the screams now) and begged to be killed in any other way. The emperor Augustus, who was staying at the villa, was appalled, cancelled the decree and ordered that all of Pollio's remaining cups be smashed. Quite right.

That's the sort of thing that was with me at the bottom of the Badgworthy Water.

Lampreys are a serious argument against the goodness or omnipotence of God.

And so it might be argued that anything that kills them with enthusiasm is an agent of light. That thought's the closest I've got to feeling warm about otters.

✴ ✴

By and large, our relationships with fish are emotionally uncomplicated. No child really loves its goldfish. The magnate who shells out big money for koi carp loves the price tag, or the status, or the associated engineering, or the mere idea, or, in his better moments, the lugubrious rolling and stirring – the pace of the fish. But never the fish itself. When a desperate otter breaks in and pulls out the koi pool's emperor by its gilded face, the children won't sentimentally stroke or ceremonially inter the fish remains. A man who wouldn't dream of accelerating his BMW over a rabbit will happily winch mackerel into the air (a journey for them as far, and as significant, as being blasted to Jupiter would be for a human) and beam for the camera as they flappingly suffocate on the deck. The same man might well, without a wince, put hooks into the body of a live fish and let it thrash paroxysmally away in the hope of getting a bigger fish to swallow it. As a species we have a congenital, curious and near complete lack of imagination and empathy when it comes to fish.

But with crustaceans it's more complex. Yes, we boil them alive and stick spikes in their heads, but we often issue little murmurs of apology when we do.

This is very strange: they are at least as different from us (and therefore as blithely killable) as fish. Evolutionary aeons stand between them and our empathy. You'd have thought that the separation would be made more complete by that armoured, chitinous coat.

I think it's to do with the eyes. Crustacean eyes don't wink or have lashes or brows or expressions, but they're out there: they protrude; they come towards us; they wave to us. Or perhaps it's those arms, raised and opened to us in aggression that looks like welcome. We can't help thinking that they're making overtures to us. We can't entirely resist the suggestion of relationship. Perhaps we only ever respond to what is like us. Fish eyes are flat. Ours aren't. We think that flat things can't have souls. And since fish don't have arms and so can't hug, we assume that they don't want to be hugged.

Whatever: otters don't care. They need the calories. We are not like them: we often empathise when it's really costly, although we're depressingly good at choking down our empathy.

There are lots of crayfish in the river that runs by our Oxford house and in the stream in the wood where the children run wild. The children brought one back in a plastic bag and put it on my head and my face as I lay on the kitchen floor.

I'd thought that big crayfish would make an otter cautious – that those claws would engender a bit of respect. But this big crayfish was a tentative, almost gentle thing. Yes, it stabbed at my closed eyes when I poked at it, took hold of my nose and swung off my nostrils when I moved, and raised and stretched itself in that belligerent patriarchal welcome. But it was all rather pathetic. All the elaborate armouring and posturing wouldn't even be like a whisper of breeze on the face of that otter, powering out of the dark and flattening the crayfish against the stones with a commanding paw.

We put it in the freezer to kill it, and the boys fried it with chilli oil.

✴ ✴

Just as I'd put off the night river, I'd put off the sea. Both were like death. I am neither old enough nor young enough to write about the sea. It is both too big to be described and too basic to need description.

The land was like me: secondary, derivative, the product of comprehensible forces. The sea was not like me. Yet I wondered if I'd get closest to otters there, because the sea is strange even to most otters. It was hard to follow otters when they were being themselves in the East Lyn, but that was mostly because their true selves were so elusive. If we met in a place where we were both alien, we might understand each other better, as embattled refugees from different war zones have an uneasy fellowship. But whether or not that was right, the sea couldn't be put off indefinitely.

I floated and scrambled to the sea from Watersmeet, where the river writhes with fat trout. At night I could have stalked them with the torch I've so piously denounced. In the day I couldn't help snapping at them like a puppy. An otter wouldn't have bothered. If it had got this far downstream it would have hurried on, knowing that there were shoals of scaly succulence just beyond the smack and suck of the surf.

There are huge tides here in the Bristol Channel, but the land is so steep that you don't feel them. They keep to the sea. There's land here and there's sea here, but little no-man's-land. For a few hours each day there's a soapy, brackish ambiguity for a couple of hundred yards at Lynmouth, but the invaded land doesn't stop being land, just as the water stoats that we call otters don't stop being stoats.

Yet there's a scouring and a scraping and a screeching of stones and birds that roll through the water. In the dead of night, which is the life of night, the otters swim past the pasty shops into a forest of kelp and gutweed, just as I floated down like an inner tube one bright March morning. The fish there are a new kind of moon silver. The crabs cracked (it would have sounded like crackling wireless in an old submarine) by an otter at the harbour mouth are descended from crabs that ate children who drifted out on their airbeds, fishermen who stayed too long for one more box of fish, and dead otters washed down from the moor. And I can join with them; we can all eat each other.

The sea is different. It's not just land water and rock crumble. The land and the sea have different rulers, and so different rules. The moon tugs all the time at everything in the sea. The land is insulated from the moon. At most, the moon cuts on a clear night a few feet into river and lake water. There's a moon tide inside the bodies of earth women, but that's because they're all mermaids. (‘Yeah, right', said Burt.) You see land fish wallowing in moonlight, but that's because it's a luxurious novelty. It's like bubble bath for them. In the sea there's no escape from the moon. You can't have a moonless swim any more than a saltless swim.

Land otters, when they come to the sea, are at sea – as tentative and as baffled as I am. They lollop along the long, bleak beach at Dunster at the edge of the surf, like little children; for all the world as if they're frightened of getting their feet wet, but with a holidaymaker's delight in the fear.

✴ ✴

‘This is fun', said an otter-child who'd been swept down the East Lyn and then out to sea with me. ‘At least for a while.' I wasn't so sure, because by then I was more of an otter than him.

4

FIRE

Fox

The Tube is a syringe, pushing a solution of bodies and electric air into the city's limbs.

When you ooze out of Bethnal Green station, there's a grimy brick building by the road with a tired sign: ‘Come unto me and I will give you rest.'

There's a café round the corner. It used to be run by gentle, stammering, self-effacing Buddhists, and I used to regroup there over cheese and onion rolls after romantic routs. Now it's full of shrill, carefully unshaven metrosexuals eating pine nuts. There's a metallic noise which is either music or bad plumbing. Everyone's thin, and no one's enjoying being thin.

Outside that café, squeezed at both ends into calligraphic flourishes, was my first London fox scat, coruscating with purple beetles.

When I first came here it was a less brash, more confident place. People lived here because they did rather than because they should. There was no corrosive apartheid between the drinkers of ristretto and the eaters of pie and mash.

Back then I'd read a book and eat penne arrabbiata most nights down Globe Road, drain a carafe of rough Chianti and take a loop of the park before heading home. One warm October night, steering between drug dealers and copulating couples, I saw two foxes on the grass by the bandstand. They swung their heads smoothly over the ground like placid Hoovers, each swing marking a silver furrow in the dew. I crept closer. They took no notice. I crept very close: they raised their heads, saw that I wasn't a dog or a car, and went back to their swinging. They were harvesting crane flies. The ground was thick with them. The crane flies were laying eggs. That takes time, and anyway, the damp stuck their wings to the grass like stamps in an album. The foxes just had to peel them off with their tongues and suck them up.

I got down on my knees beside the foxes and grazed. There seemed nothing barbarous about crushing bodies that were so slight, so dry and so still. A victim needs to have viscera to evoke visceral disgust. The crane flies were pinioned by the surface tension and didn't move much. Think of a ticklish rice-paper garnish that turns to vanilla slime.

Half an hour later the foxes were still there, systematically working their patch under the sodium lighting, as I got stiffly up and walked home in a ruined suit.

It wasn't the first time I had tried to be a fox. When I was nine my father arrived home, excited: ‘Look what's in the back of the car. But be very careful.'

There, in black plastic bin liners, were two recently dead foxes – a dog and a vixen. Their lips were pulled back in a snarl. They looked angry to be dead. The vixen had swollen mammary glands. She had obviously been suckling cubs.

‘Don't touch their teeth', said my father. ‘They've been killed with strychnine.'

That's not a nice way to die. A farmer had once delightedly told me what it did to moles, and I could understand the bitterness of that fixed smile. Very soon after taking the poison, probably planted on a dead lamb, they'd have felt tremors and rising nausea. The tremors would have towered up, powered up, and turned into convulsions. In a dark field in Derbyshire they'd have repeatedly arched and extended their backs almost until they snapped, and then, when their diaphragms finally gave up, they'd have turned blue and died in an asphyxial froth of blood and foam. They were terribly lovely. From then on I signed off all my letters with the head of a fox.

We went out to try to find the cubs. We lay for three nights under a tarpaulin downwind of a hole in a hill. I bought a chicken with my birthday money, disembowelled and dismembered it and spread it tantalisingly around near the entrance to the hole.

This was a time when I thought I could will anything. I willed the cubs to come out. I asked (not knowing who or what I was asking) to be possessed by those adult foxes so that I could know where the cubs were, or persuade them that it was safe to emerge.

We shivered and we willed. They never came. It was my first real disillusionment.

If I'd been in Japan, the fox spirits would have jumped at my invitation. There they don't need to be asked in at all, let alone asked twice. Plenty of people in Japan are married, often unknowingly, and often satisfactorily, to eyelash-batting, stiletto-wearing fox spirits. It's not always good, though, and fox exorcism is big business. In everyday life you've got to be careful that you're not being beguiled by a fox. The danger's greatest over the phone, when you can't see the person you're talking to (presumably Skype is making it tougher for spirit foxes), and telephonic conventions have developed to avert it. There are some human sounds that foxes can't pronounce, such as
moshi moshi
. They're part of the standard greeting. If your opposite number doesn't use it, hang up.

But these Derbyshire foxes evidently took their metaphysics, like their rabbits, from the land, and the High Peak is part of the West. Here foxes are the definitive other: they won't cross the species boundary except when, as demonic agents, they tunnel into the soul, making it foul with their stench and mixing their dung with the mess of bloody feathers from other plundered souls.

Foxes let in disillusionment. They also let in death. The house, my bedroom and the shed to which I and my skins and bottles of formalin had been banished were full of corpses. But I hadn't really identified the corpses as dead. They were just little peninsulas of wilderness that reached gloriously behind our pebble-dashed walls; aids to
living
fully, unlike the people all around us in suburbia; nothing to do with extinction. They were silent and still, but that just meant that it was easier to study them than if they'd been slinking or flapping. It didn't mean that they had stopped being, or that they represented a threat to me or to anyone I cared about.

That changed when I was eleven. Here is the entry in my nature diary:

February 2

Found dead fox (
Vulpes vulpes crucigera
) down on a large patch of grass in the Mayfield valley. It was in a bad state of decomposition and Rigor Mortis seemed fully developed in the limbs.
*
Strangely enough, this specimen had been very neatly skinned. The skull and everything else on the carcass was intact. There were many maggots on the carcass which were all dead, probably because of the cold night. We took from the body the skull (including the lower Jaws and teeth) and the bones of the tail. We took these home and boiled them to clean the unwanted matter off. We then bleached them in household bleach (chlorous).

A sketch map followed.

The prose is revealingly constipated. There's plainly something missing. What's missing is the soul-rattling shock I felt. This fox was dead in a way that the strychnine foxes had not been, and for a fox to be dead was really pretty serious. Apart from swifts, foxes were the most obviously alive things I knew. I'd watched them alongside lean, wired, taut dogs. Even when the dogs were racing hard, the foxes sauntered. The very best dogs slouch; foxes glide. If even foxes could be killed this emphatically, nothing was safe: not my parents, not my sister, and not me. The grave opened.

And then, as I was still standing there in that cold field, came another thought: This very, very dead fox is more alive than a correspondingly dead dog. So an ontological snobbery was born: a belief in a hierarchy of being. Some being was so mighty that it would survive even cardiac arrest. It made me an insufferable little shit for years. I've never recovered, and nor have several of the people who've had to put up with me.

But here's the relevance for this book: I felt that if I wanted to be like a fox I could do it by, first of all, being very alive (which was a comfort), or by being splendidly dead (which is a rather stranger comfort).

✴ ✴

Foxes trickled up with the Pleistocene ice and then trickled down railway lines and canal fringes into the inner cities. They are Tories. Urban fox numbers correlate perfectly with blue rosettes. They like the gardens that come with affluence. Some commute – in both directions. Many (though not my East End foxes) have nice, leafy country houses and come to town, like the men in suits, for the rich, easy off-scourings of the city. Others choose to live and raise cubs under a lawyer's shed by the Tube station, and to relax and get a breath of fresh air in the country.

The East End of London doesn't vote Tory, despite the corporate laptops and the avocado foam, and the foxes here are hard pressed. There are shed-owning lawyers whose kids like to feed foxes, but they're in small ghettos with polished floor-boards, walled in by towering concrete cabinets where the desperate are filed.

The humans here have small brains. Smaller, that is, than those of the wild men from whom they descend. They've shrunk about 10 per cent over the past 10,000 years. Since dogs faithfully follow their masters, their brains have shrunk too. Dog brains are about 25 per cent smaller than those of wolves – their immediate ancestor. Domestication makes everything shrivel.

We don't know what effect inner-city living will have on foxes, but urban foxes have lost no length or weight. It's not surprising. Even in the fat suburbs, where they could live off bird tables, hedgehog food and the interested benevolence of the middle class, they choose to hunt. Like us, they are built to be multivalent. It's how they and we triumphed over heat, ice, drought and monoculturalists. Strenuous though it is for them – demanding a lot more ingenuity and energy than it takes simply to pick up pizza and lap up sweet-and-sour sauce – they've opted to listen, pounce, prospect and innovate. We haven't. In a few generations we've turned into sclerosed super-specialists, each in a niche so tight that our limbs can't stretch and our brains can't turn. I bet foxes' choices will keep their brains throbbingly big and keen and their legs like steel wire when we can't hoist ourselves from the sofa.

✴ ✴

It's easy enough to march to the urban fox's beat. They are those most onomatopoeic of creatures: crepuscular. They live, by preference and as befits brilliant physiological generalists, along the mucky tideline where the night washes into the day. Here in the East End, though, there are no proper nights: just dirty days, and nights of scorching twilight. For these foxes the dusk is not the dimming of the light but the thinning of the traffic. Sound and tremble take over from photons. When the taxis have dropped off most of the bankers, out come the foxes. They forage over a big area here (probably getting on for half a square mile) and show the generic fox's caching behaviour. They forage or hunt, then cache (usually burying, in an often rather messy, approximate way), and then continue to forage and hunt and cache before returning to cached food. It's hard to bury under tarmac: my foxes shove food clumsily under pallets and cardboard boxes used to deliver wide-screen TVs. Then, the territory trawled, they select what they need (going for the most toothsome first) and head home.

The traffic dawn and the sun dawn more or less coincide. Trucks shudder down the Old Ford Road; Porsches purr off to Canary Wharf; buses rumble west to disgorge people into open-plan, air-conditioned comfort, with cooled-water dispensers. The foxes lick last night's aloo gobi off their lips and curl up under the shed.

✴ ✴

The more respectably dressed you are, the harder it is to be a fox. No one has ever accused me of being respectably dressed, but even so I soon realised that I should be even more shabbily shambolic than usual. Someone in unstained trousers and an unripped jumper looks criminal if he's raking through a herniated bin bag, but if you're dirty, tired and slumped, no one minds. You're translucent. People look through you. The grubbier you are, the more translucent you are. If you're on all fours, sniffing at a sack, you're invisible. Except to the authorities. And even there, sleeping is more offensive than doing.

I was shaken awake under the rhododendrons.

‘Afternoon, sir.'

‘Good afternoon.'

‘Can I help, at all, sir?'

‘No thanks. All's fine.'

‘Can I ask what you're doing, sir?'

‘Just having a little sleep, officer.'

‘I'm afraid you can't sleep here, sir. You sure you're OK, sir?'

‘Fine, thank you. And what's the problem with sleeping here?'

‘It's forbidden, as I'm sure you know. Trespassing. The owners can't have people just sleeping.'

(Just sleeping?)

‘I can't see that I'm interfering materially with the enjoyment of its title of a property management company registered in Panama.'

‘Are you trying to be clever, sir?'

I could think of no palatable answer to this. The policeman didn't press me for one. He moved to another topic.

‘Why do you have to sleep here, may I ask?'

‘You may indeed ask, but I don't suppose you'll like the answer. I'm trying to be a fox, and' – I rushed on, trying to avert my eyes from the torrential haemorrhage of the officer's residual goodwill – ‘I want to know what it's like to listen all day to traffic and to look at ankles and calves rather than at whole people.'

This last observation was a bad, bad mistake. I knew it as soon as it was out. For him, calves, ankles and concealment in an evergreen shrub meant perversion so deep that it should be measured in years inside. But I could see him struggling to identify the right pigeonhole for my depravity, and imagining the paperwork. Uncertainty and workload trumped his instincts, and he told me to ‘bugger off home,
sir
' – the italics were powerful on his lips – ‘and get a life.'

‘That', I said, ‘is exactly what I'm trying to do.'

He looked paternalistically at me as I brushed the leaves off my jersey and walked home.

After that I cravenly slept under a groundsheet in my backyard.

✴ ✴

Foxes sometimes sleep on the central reservation of motorways. Three thousand vehicles an hour shriek past in oily vortices of dust, rubber, deodorant, vomit, electric muttering and what we've absurdly come to call power. I've slept on the verge of an A road myself, beneath a canopy of cow parsley and dock, wanting to be violated by noise and palpitation, and still being shocked by the unbrute brutality of the thrusting pistons. Even the most wanton wrenchings of the natural world – wild dogs in a tug of war with a baby gazelle, for instance – are tender and proper beside the violence of a bus or a train.