Bête (15 page)

Once I didn’t eat for three days, and passed into a near-shaman state.

Then I killed a deer in a positively Palaeolithic manner, by bashing its head with a rock. It was sick, I think – an unwell animal. It came through the trees with half a dozen other deer. I didn’t
hear them speak to one another, so they may have been dumb. I don’t know, though; maybe they were all bêtes, just not very talkative ones. The others trotted away, but this one got its forehoof snagged into a hole in the ground: not a trap I had set, just a natural declivity camouflaged by the leaves. The deer’s leg went into this little pit to the knee and in struggling to extricate itself it
wrenched something in the leg, because after that it limped on. I followed it.

In caveman times, we humans used to hunt animals simply by following them. We would jog after the animal without pause, continuously, driving it on until it dropped dead of exhaustion. We like to think of ourselves as fragile, and of the natural world as populated by gigantic tigers and bears and eagles large
enough to snatch a cow in their crooked claws. But the reality is the other way around. We’re tougher than other animals. We’re top predator. I followed, and the deer kept giving me anxious over-the-shoulder glances, and hobbled on. I think if it
had
been a bête it would have tried to reason with me. The fact that it didn’t attempt that reassures me, some. At any rate, it could not rejoin its
fellows.

I followed it for maybe half an hour, and then I stopped and hid behind a tree. The deer limped on a little way, and then lay down and began licking its hurt leg. I found a suitable rock and padded, as quietly as I could. The creature saw me coming, but didn’t get up. Instead it lifted its slipper-shaped nose and its Bambi eyes. Given the obvious differences between human eyes and
animal eyes, and how much human expressiveness depends upon the proportion of white on display, it was a disarmingly human look. It looked up at me, as if I had come to make the pain go away. I brought out the rock, and the expression changed. The deer stirred, trying to rise, and I threw the stone down onto its head. The first blow rolled its neck against the ground, so I picked up my weapon and
picked my spot and hit down, hard. I saw the bane of death enter the bloodstream, and the eyes lose whatever it is they lose when life evaporates. I’ve killed a lot of animals in my time, but never one like that.

It took me a while to drag the carcass back to my tent. I hung it from a tree eight hundred yards from where I slept, and cut the throat; but it was long dead, and the blood came
out only sluggishly. Then I did what I could to cut the best meat from the thing with my knife. I lacked the proper tools – I had relinquished all my butchery kit when Anne had died, and carried only a single blade into the woodland. But it was better than a Palaeolithic flint. I made a fire and started cooking two fillets of thigh until it started raining and the fire went out. Even though I was
very hungry, I waited until the rain stopped, and then everted my damp firestack to get at the drier stuff inside, and relit it. It smoked and spat and cackled like a witch, but eventually it got going again, and I held the two fillets over the hottest part on their sticks. The smell tickled some pleasure centre in my brain that I had forgotten I had. Just anticipating eating was a pure, physical
joy. When the meat was ready I had to exercise deliberate, self-conscious restraint to prevent myself gobbling both steaks straight down. They were delicious.

So I stayed for a week or so in and about my tent, drinking rainwater, cutting slices of increasingly game meat from my kill, and eating it
bien cuit
or rare, depending on how cooperative the elements were in terms of my fire. I felt
no desire to go anywhere else.

Hunger is a very simple tyranny. Recently generations have arisen that never experience it – never properly experience it, I mean. You have not lived with a belly so empty that the back of your belly button (that inner little knot of hardness just under the skin of the navel) touches your spine. You have never lived such that you have not known not only
where
your next meal is coming from but
if there is even going to be a next meal
. I cannot exactly recommend it, but it certainly simplifies things, and that might be counted an advantage. Of course, it does so by bleaching away all the refinements that adorn human life. When I was a teenager I had baited my father with the closest I came to adolescent rebellion: that I would not carry on with the farm
but would instead go to university (no!) and study English literature (no! no!) and write poetry like Hughes and Heaney (who?). Of these shuddering blasphemies I had actually committed only the latter, and then only in privately hoarded notebooks. But I had a thousand poems by heart, and this is what I discovered. When I was properly hungry they all vanished out of my head. I had all the leisure
time I could have desired, and often I experienced an acute sensation of boredom, but
nothing at all
from my former pretentions to civilization remained with me. There was only hunger, and the anxiety that that hunger would never be assuaged. It expanded, like insulating foam, inside my skull until everything else was pushed out. When I used my imagination it was only to conjure memories of food.
I dreamt of food. I fantasized about food. And after I killed that deer, I had a week of luxury of almost lascivious intensity – because for a whole week I didn’t have to worry where my next meal was coming from.

Eventually the carcass rotted too far to be edible. It attracted dogs from the first day I butchered it. Suspended by its rear hooves yards above the forest floor there was little
the dogs could do except leap and snap at its lifeless snout, but I had to scare the dumb mutts away with shouts and a stick. Each time I did so they came back with a larger pack, and every augmentation made them less fearful. It was too late in the year, and too cold, for flies to be a problem; and the occasional crow tugging to unravel the knitted thread of muscle flesh could be encouraged to
depart with a thrown pebble. But putrefaction could not be held at bay, and eventually I cut the thing down and let the dogs tussle over the remains, whilst I sat in my tree with a pointed stick, watching them.

Many mornings I would wake to find the forest floor flooded with mist; and I would poke my head out of my tent and look down, imagining I was in the gondolier of some balloon floating
above the clouds.

I go to Wokingham

Then for a time I became restless. I took advantage of one dry morning to pack everything up and yomp north-west. The meat had reminded me how enjoyable it was to have a full belly, and I had the vague plan of going to the nearest town – Wokingham – and obtaining supplies. There was still some money on my chip; and I was ready to go through the bins
if I needed to. As I walked, the clouds inked themselves in, and soon a light rain started.

I hiked through drizzle that made the carpeting leaves slippy. The weight of my backpack meant that I fell over a couple of times; but by the same token I fell onto beds of wet leaves and did not hurt myself. Only birds observed my comedy pratfalls, and since they said nothing to me they were either
not bêtes or else so deeply unimpressed they felt they had nothing to add.

I crossed several deserted roads, and eventually reached the place where the trees gave way to back gardens, and so on through the small ring of suburbs and up to Wokingham high street, which is shaped like a diviner’s twig.

The shops were all boarded up, and there was nobody about. There were many cars, parked
along the narrow roads; but all of the windscreens were plastered by POLICE AWARE notices, and every chassis was layered with the make-up foundation of months of dirt. One, parked outside what had once been a Costa, even had a rusting clamp fitted to its front wheel: an artefact from a previous age.

I made my way along the street, stopping at shops to peer through the chinks in the boarding,
or the lattice of the metal shutters, to see if there were any cans, or dried goods, or other comestibles inside that might make a break-in worth attempting. I saw a lot of empty cells: dusty and dim. Carpets showed tan lines where units had once stood. I saw little autumnal heaps of paper and envelopes piled on the inside of glass doors. A ghost town where even the ghosts had given up and moved
on.

I explored side roads. Some of the houses were still being maintained – or, at least, had
been being
maintained until recently; but most were already displaying inevitable symptoms of ongoing dilapidation. I essayed a few of these, and broke in at the back of a couple; but the owners had cleared out anything edible before departing. In one the burglar alarm had been set, and a strange
voice boomed out of the ceiling: ‘You have been captured on video! These images are being transferred to the authorities! You are an intruder!’ I looked about for a camera, but not noticing one gave the middle finger to the air in general. Only as I clambered out through the back door did I twig whose voice had been sampled for the alarm – which was still going on behind me (‘We’re on to you! Proceed
to the nearest police station with all haste!’). Patrick Stewart, of blessed memory.

I heard a few voices, but none of them were human. The machine at a pedestrian crossing spoke to me. I broke into a shop and checked out the supplies of bread makers and kettles and microwaves on the shelves, and a few even had enough battery power to chirp ‘Buy me! Buy me!’ in my direction. But it was food
I was looking for, and there didn’t seem to be any.

I walked all the way up to the railway station, thinking there might at least be a vending machine there; but the whole site was closed, and wire fences erected to stop people from approaching the building. My mood soured. Coming into town had been a bust; a waste of time and energy.

Coming back along the road into town I met a man.
He greeted me from a distance by shouting ‘Mucca! Mucca!’ at the top of his voice. When I got closer I could see the suspicion on his face. ‘What’s your game?’

‘I’m a tourist,’ I said, gruffly, unused to speaking aloud. My voice sounded monstrously unfamiliar in my own head. Was that
me
, John Wayne? Is this you?

The other fellow was twitchy. ‘What do you mean tourist? Pulling
your
leg, you mean.’

We stopped, a yard from one another, and observed one another warily. He had a skinchin beard and a pale, oval bald patch in the middle of his black hair. There was something not right about his eyes.

‘Visit Wokingham in the picturesque autumn,’ I growled. ‘The land flows with milk and honey and oh how welcoming the natives.’

‘Graham,’ he said.

‘Do I
know
you?’ I asked, crossly. I didn’t know him.

‘I didn’t know you were
called
Graham!’ he replied. ‘Didn’t bother to find out, sorry about the old woman, it’s a saveloy and the kindness would be remarkable.’ He was picking up speed. ‘There’s nobody
here
. You come to visit someone? You came in by train? He didn’t come by train, you fucker-witter, the station’s decommissioned. Cunt! I know that!
Scary sclery. Sclery.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m nightwatchmen. Appointed by the town council to look after things until, you know. We get off the war footing and back to normality, cunt! – and they all come back.’

‘Where did they all go?’ I asked.

‘Bracknell, some; Reading, more. Others went otherswise. He doesn’t believe you Benjamin Robert Haydon, standing on the shoulders
of
gigantic
giants. Anywayup, I’m still here. There’s no money. You can’t mug me. Hold no bolt-gun to my temples, cunny, cunny. When
Graham
was actoring, Rome – stop! Enough, or too much! Or one much, or no much, or minus. Minus.’

Over the months alone my brain had grown unused to thinking in the abstract way civilized human brains think: possibilities, counterfactuals, imaginative empathy.
But my time in the forest had certainly brought out the core
brute
way of thinking – by which I mean, I was finely attuned to anything that might impinge upon my personal survival. Animals in the wild are all paranoid, after all, all the time, and for good cause. And I had become an animal in the wild.

So it was that the truth of this strange man flashed up in my head: he was a human being
with a human’s thinking brain, but he had also been fitted, for whatever reason, with a bête chip, like a canny cow or a talking dog. As to why a human being would think it a good idea to get such a thing implanted inside him, I have no idea. Curiosity might be a motive; or some misplaced sense of Green-human solidarity with bêtes everywhere. Or maybe it had happened accidentally – perhaps even
he had been punished with it. It’s hard to see that even the most devout environmentalist would voluntarily seek out schizophrenia after this manner.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking:
the irony
. Fuck that.

I took a step back.
He
had not recognized me; his chip had recognized me. Plugged into the internet, it was talking with other chips – in the heads of cats and rats and dogs and
hogs. This was not a situation I was happy with.

His face flinched. I took another step back, and eyed his blue jacket. Its pockets were bulging; but with what? Was there a weapon in there? I glanced at the surroundings. There was precious little cover, unless I could break into one of the houses.

‘Where’s your chip actually located?’ I asked. ‘Inside the brain? Some of them are just
in at the back of the throat, roof of the mouth, that sort of area – isn’t that right? They put out filaments into the relevant centres of the brain. You want that I put my fist hard into your throat?’

‘Oh, Graham,’ said the man. ‘You’re
scaring
Benjamin Robert Haydon.’

‘Words cannot begin to express the vehemence of my regret,’ I said, backing away. ‘Are
you
keeping him here?’

‘He’s not the only one,’ said Benjamin Robert Haydon, and with a shoulder jerk that made his hands bounce up, ‘not the
fucking
snow patrol. In the lee of the scare. I’ll be master in my own house, thank you very much. Master-mistress of my parse, parse,
pass
ion.’ He rubbed his face vigorously. Then he stood still as a statue and said: ‘It’s more of a
challenge
, certainly, than a cow.’