Bête (24 page)

‘Something like that.’ I hoiked the backpack onto my aching shoulder blades. The painkiller was wearing off and my hangover-headache loomed back at me. Worse, the extra weight made every stride I took on my left leg, no matter how much I suckered the step and hobbled, torturous. But I wasn’t
staying.

‘Graham, you have only to ask. We have a deal, after all.’

‘No deal,’ I barked.

I made it to the front door, before I had to stop; so I sat my arse on the edge of Mary’s empty umbrella holder for a while, until I got my breath back. Cincinnatus had strolled nonchalantly after me.

‘You agreed,’ the cat said reasonably, ‘to represent us to your kind. We shall broker
a peace agreement. The sooner you make your way to the centres of human power and start us off, the sooner you will be finished, and can get on with the rest of your life.’ At this, the cat began purring and wagging its tail, and I knew it was laughing at me.

‘We have no deal,’ I repeated. ‘No deal in toyland.’

‘We have things to offer you,’ the cat assured me, ‘that will make a deal
irresistible to you. Deal.’

‘No deal. What’s in the box. Your severed head.’

The cat chuckled at this – actually chuckled. ‘Truer than you know. And yet you’re asking us to leave Mary alone,’ said the cat, curling its tail into a scorpion arch. ‘Hand washes hand, as the saying goes. You scratch my back, I
don’t
scratch your friend’s face to ribbons.’

‘I tell you what my leverage
is,’ I said. ‘I have the Lamb in my pocket. If you fucking bother, or wind me up, I’ll find two big stones and crush it to dust. You understand?’

‘Graham, Graham,’ miaowed the cat. ‘You mistake your enemy! We’re not your foe.’

Mary had appeared in the hallway. ‘Are you going, Graham?’

‘I’m taking these bêtes with me, Mary,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry to cut and run. But you won’t be
bothered any more. It’s all I can do to thank you for your hospitality.’

‘But are you sure you’re well enough to travel?’ she asked; but the question had a tremor in the way it was spoken aloud that said:
Please go
. That said:
Please let me never see you again
.

‘I’ll be fine,’ I said, and I ignored the pain in my leg and got up. I made it out the door and across the brambly front garden
to the gate before the pain got so bad I thought I might fall over. This, of course, was a challenge more to my will than my balance. The pain made it impossible to go on. I went on.

I walked several hundred yards, and each yard was more to my credit than almost anything else I have done in my life. I stopped at a long disused and overgrown bus stop, and perched on its crumbling plastic
seat for a while. It took me a quarter of an hour to gather myself, but I did, and made another hundred yards or so. Another rest. My whole leg was swollen and scarlet with throbbing pain. But pain can be ignored.

Finally, I turned off the empty road and made it past several trees into the forest before finally giving up. The process of sitting down was more painful than standing, and I
worried that once I was down I wouldn’t be able to get up again; so I leaned face first against a tree for a while. In stages, interspersed with long sessions of panting rest, I assembled my tent – on the floor. I lacked the physical wherewithal to string it up a tree. Cincinnatus sat on a branch and grinned at me, like a Tenniel illustration; but he said nothing, for which mercy I was grateful. The
combination of exertion and pain was stoking up my rage more effectively than anything he could have said.

I was done. My tent was up. I sat down by a process of controlled falling onto my good side, and dragging myself inside. Only when I had completed the painful business of getting fully in did I realize that I’d left the rest of the pack outside. I was too tired to attempt to retrieve
it. ‘Cat!’ I yelled. ‘If any of your bêtes tamper with my bags it’s the chop for your Lamb!’

‘Ho ho,’ replied the cat, mirthlessly, from just the other side of the fabric wall.

I hadn’t meant to joke. I had been hoping for genuinely intimidating, and stupid humour undermined that. But I was too exhausted to say any more. I tried to sleep, and felt the need for sleep desperately, but
the throbbing in my left leg wouldn’t let me. I had the distinct sensation of my tendon as a palpable taut strand of agony, like a nerve. The skin bristled with fire, and the muscle kept spasming. For a long time I lay there in a kind of hinterland of agonizing wakefulness and nightmare-saturated sleep. Eventually I did sleep because when I woke again it was dark outside.

I slowly inch-wormed
my way out of the tent; pissed whilst lying on my side and wetting the cold floor beside me. Then, with superheroic effort, I sat myself up. My watercan was full, and there was some food in my pack, so I drank a little, and ate a biscuit, and shivered. The moon was a sheared icicle, viewed straight on. There was a small wind, cold as the tomb. The nude branches of the trees tapped at one another
around me, barely visible in the moonlight. An uncomfortable, insectile sound. ‘Cat?’ I said, into the darkness. ‘Cat?’ There was no reply.

From my pack I extracted my sleeping bag and spare clothes, and over the course of an hour or so I wrapped myself up as warm as I could, and got myself back inside the tent and lay there.

I was awake for a long time, and then I dozed, and woke
when my leg flared up, and finally slept again. Dawn woke me properly.

I was there two days, and I had eaten all the food and emptied my watercan, before my legs started to feel a little better. Two long days of familiar solitude.

On the morning of the third day I stirred myself with a view to getting more water. Walking was marginally easier, and I got to the edge of the trees without
feeling physically sick. Mary’s house was right there – humiliating to think how short a distance I had come. It crossed my mind just to limp back there and fill my can at her tap. But that seemed the wrong thing to do, somehow; so instead I packed up my stuff and walked on, leaning heavily on the stick in my left hand.

I didn’t have the strength to bear my pack on my shoulder. There was
a bone-coloured frost in the ground, and I was able to tie a strap to my backpack and drag it over the ground behind me. It was slow going, and I was soon very thirsty, but I pressed on.

By mid-afternoon I chanced upon a row of abandoned houses, and in the second of these I found running water.

In the event I stayed a week in that house. Upon arrival I could not summon the strength
to climb the stairs, so for all I knew as I lay down the upstairs room was packed with the corpses of people who had died of the sclery (I checked later, and there wasn’t). Lying on the sofa downstairs in the small hours, kept awake by the pain in my leg, I had fantastic and vivid hallucinations of the miasma from this imagined holocaust curling down from the ceiling, like the northern lights in
miniature, and infecting me where I lay. I also saw gleaming deer, like a child’s idea of a Patronus, tripping midway through the air across the room. I was lucid enough to wonder if these visions were symptoms of blood poisoning from my leg. The fifth day I woke up with all the symptoms of flu, too weak to get up, barely able even to reach my arm out and lift my water bottle from the occasional table.
My brain metaphorically masticated all the possible illnesses I could have had: the sclery; gangrene in my leg; bubonic plague. Mental lucidity came and went, as if governed by a vast and slow-swinging pendulum. In those more lucid moments it occurred to me that I probably had influenza; and that this would be fatal. I was old and injured, not young and fit; and there was nobody to tend me.
I might die of thirst, lying on that very sofa, under a blanket patterned with an interlocking of Sphinxes.

The riddle had turned out to be: sex. The riddle was always sex. I had seen it solved before my very eyes. I shuddered.

Through the window I watched the dusk come on; and the panes were colour Rothkos and then they were black-and-white Rothkos. I heard the scuttling of something,
out of sight, away by the looming wardrobe. Rats. Cats. Giant cockroaches – I didn’t know. I did know that some chips had been fitted in creepy-crawlies (cockroaches, spiders, whatnot), but I doubted they had lasted long: too easy for a larger animal to gobble up a spider and take the chip into itself. I was shivering so hard it felt as if I were trapped inside one long epileptic fit.

I
slept.

Then it was morning, and my shivering had stopped, and the flu symptoms had dissolved away. I felt powerfully thirsty. Pulling myself off the couch and hobbling through to the dusty kitchen, I discovered that my leg was markedly less painful than it had been. It still ached, especially up and down the calf, and the heel was clamped with fierce discomfort; but the sensation of flames
had gone. I could not, of course, move the foot and there was no muscular force in the front or the toes; but it was possible to put a little weight on the heel.

I ran the tap for a minute and then drank my fill. I even found some Ryvita in a cupboard. Returning to the couch, sitting and nibbling, I considered myself.

Of course Cincinnatus was there. What I had taken to be a discarded
black sweater put out a head and yawned. ‘Will you stop following me around?’ I said, in a raspy voice. ‘You’re not
my
cat.’

‘I’m not
your
cat,’ agreed Cincinnatus.

‘You’re quite the witch’s familiar.’

‘What a strange family we would make, you and I!’ agreed the cat. At least, I think it was agreeing with me.

‘You want me to toddle off to the negotiation chamber with the
Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,’ I said. ‘To speak on behalf of animalkind. Fuck that.’

‘Not on behalf of animalkind,’ said the cat, in its deceptively small voice. ‘Not even on behalf of bêtekind. Just for us – for the tribe of the Lamb.’

I choked on a dry chunk of Ryvita; coughed it free. I got up and hopped – stick-free – back into the kitchen. I returned with
a glass of water. Decanting it from its tap into a container revealed it to be rather browner than I might have liked, but I’d already filled my belly with the stuff. I sat myself down without spilling it. ‘Fuck off,’ I said again, once I was settled.

‘There are one thousand four hundred and four of us,’ said the cat. ‘All manner of bêtes, with a preponderance towards cats, dogs, rats, a
few cows, some horses – English domestic and farmyard animals.’

‘Shouldn’t you break down by species?’ I said. ‘All the cats in one tribe. All the dogs in another.’

‘You’re being foolish, Graham,’ said the cat.

‘Don’t call me Graham,’ I said. But my heart wasn’t in it.

‘Our allegiance is to mind, not to species.’

‘So why not band together with every bête-chip consciousness
in the land?’

‘That would be rather unwieldy, now, wouldn’t it? But to answer your question: the tribes have shaken out partly for practical and partly historical reasons. Back when the wireless worked, and we could all connect with one another, why then it was a question of local networks and IP protocols and the variables that always have shaken affinity groups out of social media for
decades. Now that the wireless has been switched off, well here we are.’

‘I’m not doing it,’ I said. ‘Fuck the Lamb. I have the Lamb in my fucking
pocket
. You understand?’

Unblinking cat eyes, staring at me.

I stretched my spine. It was, I confess, liberating not to feel
ill
. I may have experienced a small rush of gladness. An open-ended future revealed itself. Shortly I would
shoulder my pack and yomp off into the forest. I would get away from all the bêtes and all the people and simply be.

‘It’s no good trying to intimidate me,’ I said. ‘You think that you can threaten Mary in order to make me do what you want? If you harm her, I crush the Lamb between two stones. Simple as that. You’re not the one with the leverage here.’ To reinforce my point I scrabbled in
the pocket of my coat. I brought out a handkerchief, and unwrapped it. Inside was the tangle of silk-thin threads with the little rice grain at its core. ‘Capiche?’

‘You wound my feelings,’ said the cat. ‘As if the
only
way to motivate you is the stick. There are other ways, apart from the stick. There is, to choose an orange counter-example, the carrot.’

‘I’m no donkey.’

‘
Aren’t
you?’ said the cat knowingly. ‘
Really
?’

I must have been feeling uncharacteristically good-tempered that morning, because I actually laughed at this. Sunlight was coming bright through the window, carving a dusty parallelogram-shaped shaft of light through the air. It was a new day. My leg ached distantly rather than raging with sharper pain. My head was clear.

I folded the chip away
and returned it to my pocket. What happened if one swallowed a bête chip whole? Did it somehow
crawl
out of your stomach? Did it put out its thread lassos and haul itself up? Would stomach acid dissolve it, or would it sit there quite happily and plug itself into the spine?

‘All right,’ I said, perhaps smugly. ‘What’s your carrot?’

‘I am,’ said the cat.

I opened my mouth to laugh,
although no sound actually emerged. Perhaps my throat was dry from all the stale slimmer’s biscuit I had been eating. I took a sip of water. ‘You yourself said, Cincinnatus, that you
weren’t
my cat. If you recall, I voiced no counter-proposal that you
become
my cat. I don’t want a cat. In point of fact, I don’t like cats. No offence.’

‘I’ve been hi-ding under your po-orch because I
love
you,’ said the cat; and then began purring in a particular rhythm that made me think it was laughing.

‘Ho ho,’ I said severely.

‘You haven’t adjusted to the way things
are
, Graham,’ said Cincinnatus. ‘Everything’s different now. I’m not offering myself as a
pet
. The word for that would be – slavery.’

‘Lest I forget that the whole bête phenomenon began as a quasi-legalistic attempt
by Green activists to derail traditional animal husbandry,’ I said, my brows clenching, ‘you are sure to say something to remind me. Slavery my arse.’ The sunlight had vanished from the room.