Bête (17 page)

‘Oh God,’ said the man. ‘Ghastly.’

One of the dogs had eeled between the two front car seats and poked its head outside. It was staring at me. It put its head a little to one side.

‘Did you park on the far side of the copse?’ the woman
asked, evidently bothered by the absence of any motor vehicle she could ascribe to me.

‘Stop grilling him, Sandra,’ the man snapped, stepping towards me and holding out his hand. I shook it, and he cast a puzzled glance at my grimy fingers and palms.

‘You’re right,’ said Sandra. ‘I’m sorry Norman. How beastly – to find her already gone. We called and called. I
told
Phil she shouldn’t be left out here on her own.’

The man – I made the assumption he was Phil – had his phone
out. ‘I’ll notify the … well. I suppose the
authorities
. I wonder who to call?’ He put the phone to his mouth. ‘Siri, who must we notify of a death in the Swithley district?’

‘Dialling the number now,’ replied the phone.

‘Have
you
seen Phil?’ Sandra asked me. I looked at the man, now intent on his iCell, and when her gaze did not follow I realized that he was not the Phil to whom they
had referred. This was the point at which I thought of informing them of my true name and identity. But things had gone too far for that. I considered the likely possibilities for
Phil
, and deduced he was a man charged with checking-up on the woman inside the cottage. Given her state it was clear nobody had been to see her in a while. ‘Not for weeks,’ I said.

‘I never quite trusted him,’
said Sandra bitterly. ‘But Tark insisted upon him. Scan suggested three others, you know, and one of those was a woman. But Tark said: no, no, Phil’s ex-army, he’s the one.’

‘Ah, hello,’ said the man, evidently ‘Tark’. ‘I’d like to report a death. It’s my great-aunt. Great-aunt-in-law actually. She lives at Mod Cottage, yes, yes. That’s right. I’m there now, co-ords, that’s right. Cause
of death?’ He glanced at me, but carried on smoothly. ‘Old age, she was very old.’

‘I never trusted him,’ said Sandra again. ‘Never saw why ex-army was a recommendation. When you think of the types who go into the army in the first place.’

‘Discipline!’ Tark said forcefully. ‘
That’s
what the army teaches.’

The other dog, the non-bête one, squirmed fully out between the front
seats, eager to exit the car. In a moment it was free, and galloping through the long grass of the cottage garden into the trees. My stuff was there, and I almost went running after the creature; but I would never have caught it. ‘Toby,’ the man yelled, holding the phone away from his mouth. ‘To
bee
!’

‘Oh let him go, Tarquin,’ said Sandra. ‘He’s been cooped up in the car.’

The second
dog was still looking at me. There was no doubt in my mind as to the respective loquaciousness of the two hounds.

‘It wasn’t actually me who discovered the body,’ Tarquin told the person at the other end of his phone. ‘It was – yes, he’s here with me now. Yes. Called
Nor
man Speight. Ee-eye, yes. Ee, eye, gee, etch, tea, that’s. Oh he’s an
old
family friend. He—’ A pause. ‘Do you need to
speak to him? Oh. Yah. Nah, OK.’

‘We should probably go inside,’ said Sandra. ‘Have a cup of tea. But it feels odd, the idea of sitting in there and drinking
tea
whilst she’s—’ She gave me a queer look. ‘She is still in there?’

I nodded. ‘In bed,’ I said.

‘When did you find her?’ she asked me. ‘I mean, when did you get here? Where
did
you park, by the way?’

‘They’ll send
someone,’ Tarquin called, slipping his iCell back into his jacket pocket. ‘Doesn’t have to be an actual coroner. A GP or even nurse can sign off on the, you know. My God,’ he added, noticing the damage for the first time, ‘the
door
!’

He disappeared into the cottage, complaining noisily about vandals. Sandra was giving me more and more penetrating looks. ‘Are you all right, Norman?’ she asked.
‘You seem—’ When I didn’t reply she supplied her own explanation. ‘I suppose it is a shock. I mean, it’s not like she was young, but.’

‘Sandra!’ called Tarquin from inside the cottage.

Sandra went inside, and I heard her going up the creaky stairs. I sat down on the ground. I’m not as young as I used to be, and I was tired of standing up. The second dog slid slinkily out of the car,
and padded over to me. ‘You!’ it gasped. ‘Not! Noh! Man!’

‘Fuck you,’ I said.

‘I
know
,’ the dog growled, ‘yah! name!’

‘Bully for you.’

‘Womoh!’ the dog barked. ‘Womoh! Sacer!’

‘How cross would your owners be if I wrung your hairy neck?’

‘Hah!’ the dog said. It didn’t laugh; it spoke, or rather growled, the syllable. ‘Hah! Hah!’

The sound of Tarquin and
Sandra coming precipitously down the stairs was clearly audible through the wall. ‘My God, Norman,’ Tark shrieked, emerging through the back door. ‘Why didn’t you
say
she had the sclery?’ He had the lapel of his jacket turned up, and was holding it over his nose.

‘My God!’ Sandra cried. ‘We were in the same room! I almost touched her! ‘Oh God!’

The dog drew his black lips back and
grinned knowingly at me, letting his beef-coloured tongue loll. I experienced the sensation of dawning realization without knowing what it was I was realizing. Something going on, a profound insight into the way bêtes and humans were interacting. Something had changed. What was it, though? Sandra was washing her hands and face at the outside tap, gasping with the coldness of the water. Tark was on
his phone again, calling back. ‘Norman why didn’t you
say
?’ he called across to me, accusingly. ‘Hello? Hello? Yes, I called a moment ago.’

‘I see why you’re being so,’ Sandra said standing up, her sweater damp down the front. ‘So shell-shocked or whatever. My God, Norman! I didn’t know.’

Tarquin’s bray: ‘Hello, yes I
said
natural causes, I said – hello?’

The dumb dog came galloping
out of the forest, looking absurdly pleased with itself.

‘I reported natural causes but now it seems – yes—’ and he gulped, like a frog ‘—Sclerotic charagmitis, yes.’

The dumb dog came to a halt by it mistress, and began licking her wet hand. With a smooth motion she caught it by the collar – I saw now that the dumb dog was collared, and the bête’s neck was naked – and swept it into
the car. ‘Norm,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry. Call, yeah? You have my number. Yeah?’

The bête jumped neatly into the car, after its companion. In a moment Sandra and Tark were inside. The last I saw of them was them both rubbing something (sanitizer gel, I suppose) onto their hands. Then the doors whumped shut, the gyro gave up its tight-turning velocity and the engine buzzed into life.

In a moment they were gone.

I sat for a while in the sunlight. Then I went back into the trees, and I rolled up my tent, and I loaded up my backpack, and walked off.

I am drunk

I left because of the way the dog had been looking at me. It had not been at the forefront of my mind for a while, being so isolated; but it didn’t do to forget it – bêtes were at that point connected to
one another, thanks to the facile internet. The old internet. The dog seeing me meant that a great many other bêtes were aware of me. I needed to remove myself.

I hiked for half a day. Walking through a wood is a particular sort of perambulation: the way everything crowds around you makes it impossible to orient yourself with respect to the larger landscape by sight. Everything seems the
same; you appear to make no progress – except by noting the upward, or downward, slope of the ground. Not that it mattered where I was going.

Speaking to other human beings seemed to have tripped some switch in my brain, because I was chattering as I walked. ‘First sign of madness, eh, Anne?’ I said. ‘Can you even hear me? I wouldn’t blame you for pissing off – afterlife, nirvana, either’s
good. Why would you stay in amongst all these trees? Oh here’s a derelict car, Anne. You think they happened to leave a crate of beer in the back, Anne? No – no. Of course not.’ I explored the old Ford: white metal covered all over by the autumnal blossom of rust. The windscreen was gone, and the footwell full of years-old leaves. There was nothing in the back. ‘I know, I know,’ I said to the air.
‘My liver is grateful. You’re right, you’re right.’

The trees all around shuffled their leaves like a croupier readying a deal, only to scatter them all carelessly on the floor. The wind that moved up there didn’t reach to the ground. I moved on.

I only later became acquainted with the name of the disease Tarquin reported to the authorities on his phone: sclerotic charagmitis. The
scary sclery. That was my first encounter with it. It was obviously bad news, though. I found a good tree and set up my tent. Foraging brought in very little by way of food, though; and in a few days the weather turned cold once again. The clouds were black. The occasional blue-white flake of snow span in the breeze like a cinder, although snow didn’t settle.

I decided to forage again. The
next day I explored my new area. There was a row of empty houses maybe half a mile from my camp, but these had been properly boarded up – metal shutters over the windows, crossbars on all the doors. I could perhaps have broken in, but it would have been effortful, and the odds were the people who secured these properties had emptied them first. So I passed on.

I walked along the road between
two overgrown fields and came at last to a pub, standing in the midst of nowhereness. Autumn fields, ungrazed, bristly with man-high grass.

There was one vehicle in the customer car park, and another tucked away behind the external architecture of the air con, so I deduced the place wasn’t likely to be too crowded. I still had a little money on my chip, and I figured I could fill my belly,
and enjoy my first taste of alcohol in months, and then slip away again. Still, I had to brace myself to go through the door. I summoned up my courage.

Opening the door set off an electronic chime: the first ten notes of ‘Yellow Submarine’ – it struck me then, a weirdly melancholy tune, trotting along and then diving down into the gloom. It suited the inside, though, which managed to be
both very cheesily decorated and also extremely mournful-looking. Low-ceilinged, unmodernized, dusty.

There were more people inside than I had anticipated. Three were sat at tables staring at their drinks. Another man sat at the bar, nursing a tall glass filled with blue liquid like the sorts of things chemists used to stick in their front windows. Perhaps all four had crammed into the Prius
outside; or perhaps they had walked; or perhaps they were always here, sipping beer in a Sartrean silence. They all looked at me when I entered, without the least positivity in their faces. Two Labradors were sprawled on the floor – both, I guessed, dumb beasts.

The barman was a very large man wearing a MANCHESTER CUNTED shirt. His head was pear-shaped and massive, his face a landslide of
features. I ordered a pint and enquired after food, and he didn’t move from his stool, didn’t so much as reach for an empty glass. ‘No offence,’ he said. ‘But, from the look of yer.’

I handed over my chip. His eyebrows went up – as if I were trying to pay with dubloons, or an IOU signed by the devil. But he checked the credit. ‘This yours?’

‘Of course it is,’ I said.

‘Money in
it’s not been touched for months and months.’ Pronounced
mumfz
.

‘Odd you should say that,’ I said. ‘Given that I take the money out every night and rub my cock with it.’

‘Unspent since April,’ he said doggedly. ‘What you been living on?’

‘Air,’ I said. ‘You going to pull me a fucking pint, or you want the Archbishop of Canterbury personally to stop by and vouch for me?’

At this point the man sitting at the bar, the one with the blue drink, chipped in. ‘We’d rather,’ he said, ‘cash.’

‘I didn’t realize I’d stepped into a pub conveniently located on the outskirts of the fucking eighteen nineties,’ I said. ‘What’s it to
you
? You work here?’

‘Just saying,’ the fellow wheezed, not meeting my eye. ‘Dollars for preference. Euros at a pinch.’

‘My coach
and four is parked outside, I’ll just pop out, fetch my purse of golden guineas.’ I turned back to barman. ‘The chip’s kosher. Pour me the pint.’

All eyes were on me. Slowly, with a walrus grace, the barman slid from his stool and put a glass under the tap. The dogs laid their heads back on the floor. The people at the table went back to their mumbled conversation. Looking around I noticed
for the first time a large grey parrot perched on a beam, over by the back door. I took this for a stuffed ornament; but when the beer was put in front of me the beast swivelled his head and scratched its talons on the wood.

‘Food?’ I asked.

‘Jesus Onion,’ said the barman. ‘Red Yseult.’

‘Crisps?’ I said, a little peevishly. I was starving, and there’s nothing much
in
crisps for
the truly empty belly. ‘You got nothing more substantial?’

He gave this a think. ‘Porn cockatiel?’

‘You mean an actual prawn cocktail? Or you mean, flavoured crisps?’ A twitch of the head indicated that the latter, and I sighed. ‘Better than nothing I suppose,’ I said. ‘Three packs, please. Let us have one of each, why not, push the fucking boat out.’ Filling this order entailed the
barman moving to the far end of the bar, which took a while. Whilst he was occupied I drank my pint, more or less in one go. It was the single most delicious thing I had tasted all year. Any words of mine that purported to do justice to the experience would be mere mendacity. It transcended words. My whole head lightened, de-leaded. My heart relaxed inside my chest. I had not realized how wound
up and tense I was until I de-wound and untensed. The beer took the worst away from my hunger. I ate the crisps, and ordered a second drink. The barman scowled so hard it looked like the corners of his mouth had been pinned down to his chin with tent pegs, but he poured me another.