Bête (13 page)

‘Car?’ said one of them in disbelief, as if the possibility that I might own such a rock-star or plutocrat machine had so much as crossed his mind.

‘Nevertheless, Graham,’ said another one, in what he may have believed was a friendly tone.

‘Don’t call me Graham,’ I replied.

He put up one hand, palm towards me, as
if conceding my objection, as if apologizing for his slip. I say:
as if
, for he went on: ‘The thing is we’re legally obliged to
have
a name to put down as liable for the outstanding debts, and your name, Graham, is the one that—’

After I punched him he sat his arse down on the pavement, holding both hands to his face and repeating, ‘But that’s my
nose
!’ and ‘It’s my
nose
’ in a wailing voice,
as if he had for the first time been made aware of his possession of that particular facial appendage. The other feller stepped back, and brought out a small lipstick-shaped object that I assume was a taser. But I wasn’t going to fight. Hitting the first guy hadn’t made me feel better. I turned and walked away.

I walked quickly, and with a weird martinet precision to my steps, along the
road. People stepped to the side. The buses swished by on their fat tyres, and their engines hummed grahammm and gave voice to their uncertainty as to the advisability of my antics with long-drawn
hmmmm
s. At the still point of my hurricane brain there was awareness of how foolish I’d been. I have never since, and had never before, been so acutely conscious of my own pointlessness as a human being.
That’s a crashing sort of thing to say, though, isn’t it? That’s a dangerous truth, right there.

I sat on a public bench and a long period of time passed. Or it was a short period of time. It’s a bit stupid, isn’t it, talking about time as ether a dwarf or a giant. Don’t you think? One thing time does not have is physical stature. On the contrary, as my five-foot-one-inch lover dissipated
as ash into the sky, I reflected, what time is good at is undoing physical stature absolutely.

The three middle knuckles on my right hand had swollen up into three red, hard nipples. They hurt.

I liked the fact that they hurt. I deserved to hurt.

Looking back it is clear to me that I had already decided. But I did not know, at that precise moment, that I
had
decided.

‘Grahammm,’
purred Cincinnatus.

‘Not too late,’ I told the cat, when I had control enough of my tongue to give voice, ‘to whisk you back to the crematorium and stuff you in with her.’

‘Suttee,’ squeaked the cat. It was purring, or laughing, I don’t know. ‘Here, suttee suttee!’

From where I was sitting, I could see where bushes and trees were starting to write spring upon the endlessly scrubbed-over
palimpsest of the natural world. The bare parchment is white, though, isn’t it? White as bones, as snow, as bleach, as
show’s over
. The making of a palimpsest is all very well, but the underlying paper can only be scrubbed clean so many times, can only be overwritten so many times, before the very fibres that constitute it begin to fray and fall away. Yet another spring. Boring and heartbreaking
in equal measure.

‘I loved her too,’ said the cat.

I had a snarling riposte ready, but for some reason it didn’t come out. I was not weeping. I can tell you now: I have wept twice in my whole adult life, and the last occasion was when Anne was still alive.

‘She loved you, man,’ said the cat; and that last word could not have been further from the hippy idiom. ‘But she loved me
too. In all the world, only we two can say so. That’s something, though, isn’t it?’

‘Fuck off,’ I said, in a small voice.

‘That’s the tenderest profanity I ever did hear,’ said the cat. ‘Graham, you damaged your soul a long time ago. A farmer is supposed to engage in husbandry of the land – and what sort of a husband to the land were you? Husbandry is making fertile; but you specialized
in death. And death is not the truth of you, Graham. You have spent decades perfecting anger as your being-in-the-world, but your soul is not a furious soul, Graham. I know what manner of connection you had with my mistress; because it was the connection that offered you a route out of hell. And that means I know what her passing meant to you.’

‘Cat,’ I said, meeting its green gaze with
my own pale blue one. ‘You haven’t the first fucking clue what you’re talking about.’

‘I believe I do, Graham.’

I stood up. ‘Don’t call me Graham.’

‘Come to the Lamb, Graham,’ Cincinnatus squeaked with what sounded like panic. ‘Before it’s too late! You know what’s coming – war is coming. How could it be any other way? And when it comes you’ll be glad you spoke to the Lamb.’

I was already walking away. The last thing I heard was: ‘Do it for her sake, Graham!’ And all the time I was thinking: they’re all interconnected, wirelessly hooked together. And I was thinking: I need to get away from all of them.

I went to Tesco, and bought a rucksack, a tent, a billycan and a knife. The whole place was almost entirely deserted: only the bots rolled up and down the
aisles now, pulling down stock and rolling away. It was more like a warehouse than a supermarket. I paid for my items, and had to decline the delivery options four times.

I walked.

I headed out of the town, and walked east. Eventually I came to Reading, and I stopped there for the night. The following day I walked on, south-east past the city, and came to the outskirts of Bracknell
Forest.

It was a brisk, windy day when I crossed the forest threshold. There had been a fence here, once upon a time; but most of the chainlink had fallen over and been overgrown. Cottonbud blossom speckled over the bushes. Debris left over from the previous autumn was shuffled out of the canopy by the winds, and pattered around me as I passed into the body of the forest in a rain of dry
twigs and black clots of dead leaves. How had they not been blown down earlier? The wind was firm but not overwhelming. Rooks flew up and flew back down, and cawed, which pleasant sound pleased me more because there were no human words in it. A big tree, swaying slowly, dragged patterns of speckled light over the forest floor. Scree-slides of brightness.

I tramped deeper in. I felt some
small relaxation of the soul cramp inside my chest. Looking back (and I say this in the hope you’ll believe me when I say that I’ve always despised self-melodramatizing nonsense) I think I believed I was going into that wood to die.

Not straight away, of course. There was no hurry. By late afternoon I was deep inside and I stopped and set up my tent. It was designed to be strung between
trees, thereby elevating it from the damp and insect-infested ground; or else tethered to a broad bough halfway up a tree. I opted for the latter option. Then I sat and ate some food and drank half the bottle of wine I had brought with me. I was perfectly alone.

When the sun went down I climbed into my tent and fell asleep.

I was more alone than I had ever been. I became habituated
to the woods. Or Stockholm-syndromed by Nature. Is there a difference between those two things? Between becoming habituated to a thing, and being Stockholm-syndromed? It sometimes seems to me that the whole of human culture has been an elaborate process by which we have hostage-negotiated ourselves into a less violent life, deprogrammed ourselves from the cult of Nature. The short-future blinkered
perspective of life lived in the wild; the constant wariness, the justified paranoia; from the habitual violence, the animist superstition, the culture-less-ness. Nature: it’s not
nice
, it was never
nice
. Niceness is what we human beings built to insulate ourselves from – all that.

Restlessness came and went. For a while I’d stay in my tent, or sit outside, and stare. That old gag: ‘Sometimes
I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits’. The latter.

I’d move only when I had to, and I had to only for four reasons: to empty my bowels (
verbum sap
: don’t shit too close to where you sleep and eat); to fetch drink; to gather food; and, rarely, to step sharply out of the way of some larger-looking creature, sniffing around my site.

There were many deer. I wondered where they
had come from. The royal park was many miles east of my location – but it’s possible they came from there, and made their way unmolested into the forest. Maybe they’d come from somewhere else. One day I saw a stag: horns like two mahogany coat racks. It didn’t see me. It strode beneath my tree, stopped for a moment and pissed very noisily onto the turf. Then it strutted away. There were also squirrels,
foxes, cats, dogs, birds. Most of these were dumb. A few were bêtes, and some of the latter would speak to me. In return I would mostly swear and throw things.

I listened to the dumb animals. I’m not sure I’d ever done that before, in my whole life – and I had been a farmer! I found a Zen focus in bird warbles, to the point where I found the boundary line between chipped and unchipped creature
hard to maintain. A song thrush chirped: dumb or bête? Wait – listen more carefully. Was it
actually
saying ‘keep-up, keep-up’? It sounded like it was, but maybe that was my brain reading sense into its dumb song.

Dusk was most fascinating to me. Working on a farm puts you closer to the natural cycles than most jobs, I suppose; but I don’t know if I’d ever before simply sat there motionless
for the long hours as the sun set and the night bedded in. Away from artificial light, dusk is gentler on the eye than you remember it as being. It prepares the retina for darkness. It strokes the mind. Gradations of light and unlight dip the whole forest in some hazy solution, like a nineteenth-century photographer with his chemicals. The sunset does more than darkening the individual trees;
it recombines them into odd, beautiful shapes. A blackbird’s flute cadenza. A darkness falling rapidly sideways, too large to be a bat, pulling a patch of blanked starlight over the higher branches: was this owl just hooting, or was it a bête mocking me with a pseudo-scary ghostlike oo-ing?

I slept for a while, and woke in the dark. I slept again, and woke in the pre-dawn. I slept during
the day, and woke. Then it was dusk again.

A patch of lawn in a small clearing not far from my tree was starred with snowball-spatter daisies. Come night, these would curl their petal fingers into fists, and the grass would frame these miniature solidarity air punches. At night there were bats. I saw them, often at the corner of my eye, blacker on black. I couldn’t hear them. I remember
growing up in Cornwall as a kid, and wandering the clifflands by the sea at night, and
hearing
the bats, their swooping squeaky voices. My old ears have become too coarse to do that now.

I existed.

After a while there would be some indefinable change in my bones, and I’d feel the urge to roam. I would wake, and drink from the stream, and eat whatever I had. Then I’d zip up my proofjacket
and stalk away. I would explore.

Increasingly what I found was – empty houses. Farmhouses, retirement crofts, short rows of ’70s brick-and-concrete houses dropped into the countryside at the end of a dirt lane. They’d been occupied once upon a time, but were no longer. Sometimes that
once upon
was evidently a recent time. I would knock ostentatiously upon the door, and when there was no
answer I’d force entry, one way or another, and take what was to be taken. Tins; dried good; anything edible.

Finding food was the main event of my life. I scrounged what I could. I tried setting. One day I caught a fish. I was having no luck with my line, and wasn’t nearly young or quick-reacting enough to simply pluck one from the stream; but I found some old netting in the shed of an
abandoned house, and using a piece of that I bagged a trout. I threw it onto the grass, and for a while it did its impression of an epileptic. Then it just lay there, its gills still opening and closing like lips, peering at me with one eye. That eye: greased and glassed into its socket, round as the moon, or the sun in eclipse. Catching it felt like an achievement. I was hungry. I considered how
best to cook it. I had noticed some aluminium foil in one of the houses I periodically visited, but didn’t want to go and fetch it (a combination of ‘couldn’t be bothered’ and ‘didn’t want to leave the fish and certainly didn’t fancy schlepping it with me’). So in the end I caked it with mud from the river’s edge, left the lump to dry in the sun, and finally baked the whole thing on the fire. This
worked well enough, although the clay ball didn’t break cleanly after I levered it out with two sticks. I ended up using a fork to lever out chunks of cooked flesh from the shards, and ingested a certain amount of dirt with my meal. On the other hand, clean dirt is no poison, and the fish flesh was delicious.

For all I know it was a talking fish. It didn’t say anything to me, though. It
promised me no wishes.

At dawn, the birds grow agitated, singing and hallooing and making all their bother, flying through the sky and circling about. I heard it every day, as I had when I had been a farmer. The difference was that when I was a farmer I was always busy with something, and the dawn chorus was only a kind of background noise. Now I bent my whole attention upon it. I
was struck, as I never had been before, how like human weeping bird cries are. The dawn chorus would descant like a figure composed by an alien Bach, flirting with recognizable harmony, but always breaking free of the too patterned or too regular to soar and swoop.

Then, the sun would swim above the horizon, and the birds would calm down again; settle back into the trees. I sat and watched,
perched on my own bough like a bird. Nothing happened for a very long time. Eventually: movement. Two deer flitted past – one, then the other. Dumb beasts, I think. Hooves kicking briefly amongst the bright green ferns, and then gone, leaving the ferns to shake out their last few trembles and be still.

Clouds came, and the air darkened. It grew slowly colder for a long time, and then there
was a sudden thickening of the pressure, a sharper drop in temperature, and I knew the rain was about to come. I adjusted my coat, and pulled out the hood, but otherwise I didn’t move. The rain fell with a clatter that was smoothed by persistence into something more rhythmically melodic, a large scale hushing or shushing. Cords of water, thick as stethoscope rubber. Dark as any grey was ever dark.