Bête (20 page)

I got precariously to my feet, trembling a little – cold, or the aftershock of the rat’s attack, or something else I don’t know. I shouldered my pack and wedged my crutch under my left armpit.

‘You
have
been in the wars!’ Mary cried, with something that sounded suspiciously like delight. ‘I can’t holp you along, you know.’

‘ “Holp”?’

‘I’ve got the deer to drag,’ she said, and lolloped over to the carcass, kicked leaves over where it had bled out and unhooked the cord by which she had strung it up. I peg-legged across to her.

‘Maybe it wasn’t a bête,’ I said. ‘Maybe this one was a dumb beast.’

‘No,’ she said briskly. ‘It begged for its life in the King’s own English. Come along!’

She set off with the
cord over her shoulder, leaning her stocky frame forward. Despite her impediment, her age and the shortness of her legs she made rapid progress. It was all I could do to keep up with her. We passed an abandoned car so comprehensively rusted I mistook it at first for a heap of autumn leaves. Finally we reached a road, the tarmac poked through in many places with tufts of grass, and cracks everywhere
over the blackness like crazy paving. And finally we reached her house. She dumped the deer carcass outside her back door, and helped me inside.

‘First things first,’ said Mary. The first thing was tea, and she made me some, and I drank it. She also made me toast, which I ate with great relish. Then she bandaged my heel. The bandages didn’t look exactly clean, but I wasn’t in a position
to fuss about that. Her house was large and profoundly untidy; one of those places where, were you to tidy away the mess, you would certainly find another mess underneath. Mary herself, however, was briskly hospitable, and helped me upstairs to what she called ‘the spare oom’. ‘I don’t say
room
,’ she explained, as I sat grimacing on the edge of a wide, flobby matress, ‘as a sort of joke, you see.
When I say spare
oom
, I am …’

‘I get the reference,’ I told her.

‘Splendid! Soup?’

She brought me soup, and afterwards I fell asleep. I woke with the need to piss, but didn’t want to bellow downstairs for help, or even for directions. It was twinge-y getting off the bed and leaning on the wall out into the upstairs hall until I found a toilet, but I managed it.

I got back
to the bed before Mary put her large, lined face round the door. ‘Heard you moving about, Graham,’ she said. ‘You all right?’

‘Tickety boo, Mary,’ I replied. ‘Thank you.’

‘I’d say you look white as a sheet, but I’m fully aware
my
sheets aren’t clean enough to be white.’

‘I’m very grateful for your hospitality,’ I told her. ‘Really I am.’

‘When you live on your own,’ she
said, coming a little further into the room, ‘you start to see that a lot of domestic washing and cleaning is stuff and nonsense. I hardly ever wash. Does me the power of good. In the days of Queen Elizabeth, they used to believe that hot baths were injurious to the health. Who’s to say they weren’t right? I don’t mean the last Queen Elizabeth, of course. I mean the first Queen Elizabeth.’

This valorization of squalor was starting to make me feel itchy; so I changed the subject. ‘You don’t mind, living out here all on your own?’

‘It is a little isolating,’ she conceded. ‘But I make do. I’m not up-sticks-ing and moving to Reading. It’s like a concentration camp, now, that place. My sister used to live in Wokingham, but they’ve given up on Wokingham, it seems.’

‘I know.’

‘Once a week I hike out to the superstore. Otherwise I’m self-sufficient. Of course, there are the bêtes.’

‘Them,’ I said.

‘I’m no friend of these bêtes,’ she told me. ‘But increasingly they’re acting like the countryside belongs to them. Not whilst I draw breath!’ She laughed at this, as if it were funny, and left me alone.

I dozed again, but the pain in my leg kept intruding
on me, holding me off from deeper or more refreshing sleep. I woke with a start: dusk, the whole room shadowy and grey. I knew I was not alone in the room. ‘Oh,’ I said aloud, in a dull voice, ‘for
fuck’s
sake.’

‘You don’t have to worry about me, Graham,’ the cat murmured.

‘No? This morning a deer bit through my fucking Achilles tendon. After that some rats came at me with the definite
intention of ending my life.’

‘They’ve turned off the walkie-talkies,’ the cat said obliquely. ‘There’s nothing I could do, even if I wanted to. But I’m sorry about the rats. We chanced upon them, coming here.’

‘How lovely.’

‘They’re all dead now. They had nothing to do with us. I want you to believe that, Graham.’

‘Stop fucking calling me fucking Graham,’ I said.

‘We’re ships that pass, you and I,’ said Cincinnatus. ‘Ships that pass!’

‘So, pass
off
,’ I suggested. When it didn’t reply, I got painfully up and turned on the light. There was nobody in the room but me.

I wondered whether Cincinnatus had even been there. Perhaps I had experienced some kind of hypnagogic hallucination, there in the dusk of the room, worn out, unrefreshed by
sleep. Perhaps it was only a nightmare.

Mary kept a cat, but it was a superannuated and superbly lazy white beast, not in the least like Cincinnatus. ‘I used to have more,’ she said, that evening as we had supper together, ‘to keep the mice down. But the truth is, I don’t mind the mice. And a couple of my cats ate up those chips, you know, and started
talking
. Ugh!’ She shook her head. ‘I’m
not having that. Out on their ears. Not my lovely Hillie, though; he’s as speechless as any old woman could hope for.’

‘He’s not a bête, then?’ I asked.

‘Oh, no he
is
. Most of them are, now, you know. He just knows not to go gabbling on – or he knows, I’d chuck him out too.’

‘Oh!’ I said. I didn’t feel wholly comfortable, being in the house with a bête; although there wasn’t
much I could do about it.

We ate in silence for a while. ‘I feel like I’m imposing,’ I said.

‘Not at all! I’ve a whole deer to eat, more than I could possibly manage. You’re doing me a favour.’

‘I hope there is some way I can repay you,’ I said.

She shrieked with laughter. ‘I’m not interested in
your
hairy body, Graham! I’m a lezzer, you know.’

I felt my face grow
warm. I dare say I was blushing tomato red. ‘I didn’t mean that!’

‘Course you didn’t. You’re a gentleman. Oh don’t be so embarrassed. Eat more!’

‘I’ve eaten all I can, I think,’ I said, wiping my whole face with the yellow-stained napkin. ‘My stomach has shrunk, I think.’

‘All the more for me,’ she said, beaming, and helped herself to my left-overs.

It took me a
few nights to get used to sleeping in a bed again – it turns out, paradoxically, that the transition from sleeping rough to civilization is harder than the other way around. On day two, Mary pottered around the house, popping her head round the door from time to time to see if I was ‘chipper’. I read Aeschylus, in its fruity old Victorian English clothes. On one trip to the toilet I caught sight of
a white cat vanishing down the stairs, but I didn’t call after it.

Day three she was out all day, and when she returned she brought me paracetamol.

I dressed, and took a stroll round the overgrown garden, leaning on a stick. The contrast between the austere winter sunlight, westerly and reddening, and the crazy profusion of weeds and life was beautiful. Venison for supper again, and
a glass of Lucozade (‘help you get your strength,’ said Mary) and finally I hopped up the stairs and undressed and got between the sheets, ill-smelling yet somehow welcoming.

I slept.

Later that same night, Cincinnatus crept into the room. ‘You make it hard to track you down,’ he whispered in my ear, like the diabolic familiar at the ear of Eve in the big poem.

I was not wholly
asleep, and not wholly awake; and in that mentally crepuscular state the appearance of the feline slinking along the mantelpiece, like its own shadow, filled me with a pitifully childish dread. I struggled, at first helplessly and then with an inner wrench, back to full wakefulness. The words in my ear were an aid in that regard. With a yelp I sat up in bed, picked up the nearest thing to hand
– it was a glass of water, sitting ready for my dry-mouth morning on the bedside table – and hurled the contents at the intruder. The perfect equanimity with which Cincinnatus greeted being soaked was as clear as anything I had ever seen in my life that I was not dealing with a cat in the usually accepted sense of the word. It began wiping itself with its paw, and the stiffly tai chi motions were
at least cattish. ‘That’s a most
un
pleasant feeling on my fur,’ he said levelly.

‘You want that I should stick you in the microwave, dry you out a bit?’ I growled, getting my fibrillating heart back into a steadier rhythm.

‘Same old Graham.’

‘Oh,
call
me that,’ I said, exasperated. Now that I was awake the pain in my heel pressed itself forcefully upon my consciousness. ‘I tell
you what:
keep
calling me Graham. Then you can observe whether or not I snatch you up by your tail and make an impromptu helicopter blade out of you.’

‘Tetchy!’ murmured the cat. ‘Put your trews on, Graham. Come through. We brought the mountain to Mohammed.’

‘We?’

‘Oh
our
name is legion for we are many.’

‘A swarm of fucking cats,’ I said. ‘How marvellous.’

‘Dogs,
mostly; and big ones at that. Rats and, yes, a few cats, but mostly attack dogs. Dogs and sorcerers. I’m trying not to frame this as a threat, dear Graham, but you really
must
come now. We’ve gone to a lot of bother to arrange this meeting.’

I was still waking up. ‘Wait: you brought an army? Where? Inside the house?’

‘Just the Lamb, and a couple of immediate aides. And me of course.
But the remainder could
come
inside, if you like.’

‘Mary?’ I asked. A little shamefully, it only occurred to me belatedly that she might be in danger. It was partly that I was so unused to being indoors that some subconscious part of my mind believed the ceiling was a canopy of leaves.

‘She’s a dangerous woman with a rifle,’ is all the cat said.

‘Is she all right? She has offered
me hospitality, and bound up my wounds.’ Memories of the recent past jolted back into my head at that point. ‘Wounds which your fucking deer inflicted upon me. Put on my trews? I ought to crush your cat skull under my heel.’

‘Sorry about the nip,’ said the cat.

‘Nip? I’m a fucking cripple!’

‘A tot would help, surely?’ I thought it meant
child
, but it added: ‘We’ve even brought
some whisky down with us, you see. Knowing how much you like a finger or two. And not wishing to deplete Mary’s own stores.’

I dare say it was venal of me, but you must remember that – my short visit to the pub excepted – I hadn’t touched alcohol in nine months. The thought of a whisky took hold of me. ‘Is Mary OK?’ I asked again.

‘She’s fine – fine. Her own cat is with her. She won’t
be coming out of her room, though. Not until we have gone. And go we shall, Graham; just as soon as you and the Lamb have had your chat.’

‘Her own cat,’ I fumed. ‘I guess it was that bête gave me away?’

‘No, no, Graham. I appreciate paranoia has become second nature for you since you went native, but you can relax your suspicions. The wifi is properly off now. The only way a bête can
communicate with another bête now is by talking.’

‘Well blow me down,’ I said.

I sat for a long time in silence, the bedroom lit only by moonlight. Cincinnatus knew me well enough to factor in my stubbornness; and it sat there too, pulling and pressing at his fur with his right paw. Finally, the possibility of a dram swayed me, and I turned on the bedside light, and the sudden illumination
was as yellow and as stinging as grapefruit juice. It took me a while to coax my wincing eyes open again.

I got out of the bed with difficulty, and hopped over to the chair. My trousers were draped there; but when I laid my hand on them the fabric felt so stiff with impacted filth I couldn’t bear to put them on. So instead I wore the bedspread like a toga, and took my stick and limped awkwardly
down the stairs and through to the kitchen.

The Lamb was there; and it turned out the Lamb was a sheep, old and daggy and with grime worked into its wool. It sat on its hindquarters in the way only very old sheep do. It was trembling. ‘Graham,’ it bleated.
Gra-a-a-am
. ‘It’s a pleasure to see you again.’

There was a dog by the back door: a German Shepherd, standing very still. It took
me a moment to spot the three rats in the corner, all sitting up, and all with that miniature Parkinsonian tremor in their snouts. Fat, sleek-looking vermin. And when I looked again I saw there were more, in the shadows behind them.

‘Again?’ I said, as I lowered myself into one of the kitchen chairs. The cat had not lied: a bottle of whisky, tangerine-coloured under the naked bulb, sat on
the table; and an empty glass beaker sat next to it.

‘We’re old friends, you and I,’ wheezed the sheep. Its tremor was very pronounced. To my farmer’s eye it looked to be at the end of its time.

I unscrewed the cap, delighting in the little tearing of perfor­ated tin the action occasioned. That familiar glug-glug sound, that jovial chuckle a pouring bottle makes. I was old enough to
know it was laughing at me, not with me, but sitting there, in a room of talking bêtes, with my heel roaring in pain, I didn’t care. The stuff went in, scalding at the back of the throat, and went down warmingly into my belly. I may even have smacked my lips.

‘I’m sorry about the foot, Graham,’ said the old sheep. It sounded like Godfrey from
Dad’s Army
. ‘I told them to keep you in one place,
but they took my words rather more – violently than I intended. We can fix it, though.’

‘Wool and water,’ I said. ‘What should I call you?’

‘You can call me the Lamb, Graham.’