Bête (16 page)

An unpleasant sensation, something crawling and uneasy, was inside my skull. Did I not like this. ‘An experiment?’ I asked.

‘Oh Benjamin Robert Haydon was only too
keen
to have the chip,’ said Benjamin Robert Haydon. ‘And that’s the question, though, isn’t it, Graham? Would you feel any compunction about putting the bolt-gun to
his
head?’ I turned on my heel and marched as fast as my hunger
and my heavy pack permitted, away from that person. ‘Tell me in what the difference inheres,’ he called after. ‘Tell me
why
it’s different, Graham.’

They knew I was there, which meant I needed to be somewhere else. I heard footsteps, and Benjamin Robert Haydon was trotting after me. But then he stopped, and grappled with his own head with both arms, putting his elbows in front of his face.
Then he let his arms hang loose at his side. I had stopped my retreat, to observe this strange display, but I picked up the pace again sharpish. The last thing he said to me was: ‘You should have gone to see the Lamb when the cat told you! Now it’s too late! It’s war, Graham! War!’

I moved quickly through the suburbs. When I felt I was far enough from the centre I even gave over some time
to searching a few of the houses on the way out. I found a packet of bourbon biscuits, some dry pasta and a tin of catfood. So the raid wasn’t a complete waste of time.

I go to a house

I found another spot in the woods, and pitched my tent again. The only animals I saw for a long time were dumb. At least, as best as I could tell.

The weather turned colder still, and – for the
first time – I began to think seriously about rejoining civilization. Day turned to night and back to day, and I asked myself when had I last felt
warm
? I wrapped everything I had about me but still couldn’t stop shivering. Shivers passed up my body from legs to neck in waves, like a fever. Freezing clouds shook their flour sieves over the trees. A chill deposit of white accumulated on the forest
floor at a compound interest.

I watched flakes of snow land in one of the open bowls I was using to catch rainwater: the first few dissolved in the water, but soon they lay themselves as gently on the surface as lilypads, and spread themselves into star-shaped crystals. Soon enough all the branches had thin white ropes carefully laid across their tops, and the red-brown leaves on the ground
were spotted and foxed with white.

Food wholly filled my thoughts. If I tried to think of anything else, my brain shoved thought back to food. Nothing else mattered.

I went foraging and hunting and felt ravenous all the time. The layer of ice over the top of one of the forest ponds reminded me of the fat in a pork pie; and the black tube of a fallen tree trunk made me think of chocolate
logs at Christmas. At one point I became convinced that there was a slice of cured ham simply lying on the forest floor. I picked it up with trembling gloved hands, and wiped the snow from it. A leaf, of course; perhaps slightly pinker than the rest but very obviously a leaf. I was stumbling about in a hallucinatory daze. You’re wondering why I put myself through it; why I didn’t just go back
to the comforts of real life. I can only reply:
haven’t you been paying attention?

I had more or less resolved to give up the forest and return to humanity when the weather warmed. Not that it got warm, exactly; but it stopped snowing and I stopped shivering, and managed to catch three fish in one day. Some of my strength returned to me.

One morning was unusually misty. I walked the
forest, my legs cloaked in invisibility, just a torso bobbing along the top of the clouds. My foot fell away beneath me and I was sliding down on my arse before I realized that what I had taken to be the hushing of wind in the trees was actually the noise of the stream. The water was painfully cold, and put tongues up inside both my trouser legs to my thigh. I stomped home in a bad mood.

Then the late autumnal sun came out and warmed the mist away, and I dried, and lay on a bough feeling more at peace. This was a turning point, of sorts.

I packed up my stuff and walked off.

After a day’s walk I slept in a tree, and got up again before sunrise and walked on.

I came upon a cottage, an hour or two after dawn: the sun low in the sky. I was very hungry.

The back
door was old chipboard, and the corner where it fitted into the door jamb was scrabbled away near the ground. Canny beasts might have done that, though they’d be more likely to pick the lock, or break a window; so I figured dumb beasts. And I figured the owner hadn’t mended the door, so they must have vacated. Like any other beast of the field, I wondered if there was valuable stuff inside there,
so I went over, and pulled at the broken corner of the door with main strength. It wasn’t too hard to break it up to the lock, and since the key was in the hole on the inside I soon had it open.

Inside was dim, and smelled of fusty old nothing. There was a tang to the air as well, something vaguely chemical and tart, but only faintly so. The back door gave me access to a small room containing
an off-white washing machine, circa 1950-something, and all the paraphernalia needful for the cleaning of clothes. There were shelves with white cardboard boxes foaming at the mouth with powdery white, and a spotty green clothes basket propped in the corner. Everything looked tatty and old, excepting only a new pack of rainbow plastic clothes pegs, still in rank and file, biting a rectangle
of cardboard. After months of nothing but natural hues there’s something really inexpressibly shocking about the
brightness
of new coloured plastic. Only the green of fresh spring leaves can match it for intensity and texture.

I went through to the kitchen. The floor under the table seethed with woodlice. I rummaged through the cupboards, and put two tins of peeled plum tomatoes and one
of chickpeas in my rucksack. There was a loaf in the breadbin but it looked like a woad-painted bust of the elephant man. The fridge was unplugged and empty; somebody had already cleaned it out. In another cupboard I found a pack of supernoodles in blue foil next to a miniature bottle army of half-empty and empty spice jars. I left the spice jars, telling myself that I wasn’t about to start haute
cuisine-ing it; and the bread was obviously beyond the pale. But I took the rest. That was the whole of my haul.

It wasn’t a large cottage. The sitting room was a dusty sofa and a dusty easy chair, a television in the corner and a bookcase. From the latter I took an 1890 prose translation of Aeschylus’s
Oresteia
, because I liked the dignified old royal blue binding, and because I fancied
having something to read when the boredom became overwhelming. The other volumes were all sermons, commentaries upon the Revelation of Saint John, preacher’s autobiographies with smiling black-and-white photographs of their authors’ phizogs on the cover. A strange hoard, really. There was a low table in front of the sofa, covered in dust, and upon it only one thing – the triangular blade of a sheep’s
shoulder bone, clean as a whistle. A paperweight, maybe. Strange to find it there all on its own.

For some reason I was reluctant to go upstairs, but in the event I figured: in for a penny. So I stepped up the loudly complaining wooden stair slats, and put my head into the little bedroom that was all that was up there. Somebody was in the bed, and although they were very obviously not breathing
I called out ‘Hello? Hello?’ in a quavery voice. I felt my own foolishness quite sharply as I did this; for even if she
had
been alive, how would calling out ‘hello’ with a question mark at the end defuse her panic at a stranger crashing through her bedroom door?

She was lying on her back with her arms outside the duvet, and her head on the pillow, and she looked about two hundred years
old. This, looking back, may have had to do with the scleritis, since the scar tissue chews up a fatal proportion of a person’s mucus membranes and this tends to dry the body out. Blackness had seeped from her nostrils, and the corners of her eyes, and had left dried snail trails down the sides of her face and on the pillow; but the eyes were completely occluded with scar tissue, and the lips looked
like they had been repeatedly cut up and stitched back together.

This was the first victim of scleritis I ever saw. Only belatedly did I feel the jolt of panic in my breast. My own foolishness again. She had clearly not died of natural causes; and whatever she
had
died of might very well be contagious. I went down the creaky staircase like a boot avalanche and burst out into the daylight,
gasping.

My panic soon left me, and I felt doubly foolish – first for blundering in without a second thought, and then for over-reacting so stupidly. I returned to the cottage later that same day. I wanted to see if there were more things inside worthy of salvaging; I wanted at least to be thorough. But I was reluctant to go straight back inside. So I retreated to the edge of the woodland,
fifty metres from the cottage back door, and slung my tent between two fat elms, far enough into the forest to be invisible to anybody looking inside. It is a little hard for me to remember exactly why I did this; except that I wanted neither to leave the cottage nor, yet, go back inside it. Hunger was doing my thinking for me. My brain was not.

I stayed there three days. Every now and then
I left my tent to draw water from the cottage’s external tap, easing the hose off its spigot like a dairy farmer decoupling the milking machine. I was no longer a farmer. The first time I filled my billycan from the tap I worried whether the mysterious disease that had destroyed the woman inside was also in her water supply. But I hushed my paranoia and drank, and I was fine. I opened my haul
of tins with a knife, one one day, another the next, and ate the contents cold – the chickpeas were particularly filling. I slept in the afternoon. I was woken by the sound of a telephone, ringing inside the cottage. I listened to its chirruping insistence, softened to a pleasant kind of washboard rhythm by the distance. Eventually it stopped. The telephone rang twice more, once that evening and once
again the following morning.

On the second day I ate fresh-picked mushrooms and one unwary hedgehog, which I cooked in my usual way by rolling it in mud and baking it in an open fire. There’s not much meat on a hedgehog and I finished the meal still hungry. But I was holding off the supernoodles as a special treat, so I sucked a pebble to take the edge off my hunger.

The third day
was bright, and I felt a weird febrile joy rising from my hollow, complaining stomach. I stared at the way the leaves looked in the brightness: fin-shaped, ten thousand of them. Breaking sunlight into a web of brightness that trembled on the ground. It seemed almost an omen, so I sneaked back into the kitchen to steal a saucepan, and took it outside. I cooked up the supernoodles in that pan over an
open fire, and broke my fast with them. What a meal they made! I felt like a cow at a salt lick. It wasn’t the noodles as such; it was the little pouch of salinated curry powder. My head nearly imploded with the delight of it. I could have wept with joy. Scalloped patterns of shade on the forest floor. Afterwards I slept and woke up feeling refreshed in a way I had not for months.

The success
of this persuaded me back in the house yet again. I had, clearly, been neglecting my salt intake; and even if there were no more good food in the cottage I had seen spices and table salt in those cupboards. So I braced myself and went back in the musty-smelling kitchen, and put a cylinder of Tesco own-brand salt in my backpack. I searched amongst the spice jars but all were empty, save only
a quarter-full vial of cinnamon, which I took.

I searched the rest of the ground floor. There was a half-sized wooden door that opened onto some down steps, which in turn led down to a tiny cellar – perhaps six foot square. This smelled strongly of earth and decay, and the light didn’t work. By the small amount of illumination coming in from outside I saw nothing edible down there. I was
hoping for wine, but there was no wine.

Coming back up I heard the distinctive fizzing noise of an approaching car, and hurried through the back door in time to see it turn from the main road onto the overgrown driveway. The wheels of the vehicle puffed up, or otherwise expanded, to accommodate the shift from tarmac to turf. A large-framed, rectangular car, white-coloured. The windshield
was darkened against the bright sun, though the side windows were clear. I had evidently been seen. There was no point in making a run for it. So, I zipped up my backpack and stood placidly.

The car turned broadside to me and stopped, the electric motor shifting low hum to high-pitched whine as it transferred its momentum to its gyro. The driver’s door opened with a sigh, popping out before
swinging wide. Inside was a woman in her thirties, and just beyond her a man of about the same age. Two dogs occupied the rear seats. Both the canines poked their heads out the open door, over the top of the driver’s seat, to take a look at me. One of the two quickly grew bored and drew his head back inside, but the other continued staring at me with a peculiar focus that told me what it was.

The woman addressed me: ‘Norman?’

Living in the woods had driven a kind of placidity into my soul I suppose. I neither denied nor acknowledged the name. I simply stood and looked at her.

Behind her, the man spoke: ‘Good God, Norman. What’s with the
beard
?’

‘Hardly recognized you!’ The woman hopped lightly from the driver’s seat. ‘Where’s your car?’

‘Norman,’ said
the man, popping the passenger door and climbing out with considerably less grace than his partner. ‘Is she all right? We’re braced for the worst. We’re braced.’

I shook my head, slowly. The woman opened her mouth a little way, and pushed her knuckles inside.

‘Were you with her at the end?’ the man asked.

‘She was gone,’ I replied, ‘when I got here.’ I spoke with that croaky
quality any voice acquires when it has not been used in a while. The sound of my speaking failed to disabuse them of their idea that I was Norman.