Bête (5 page)

I remember this: I was walking along the road, one afternoon. To my right was a field of cattle, which I studiedly ignored.
The road had been empty for half an hour, but a minibus passed me. Seeing a vehicle was a rarer event than it had once been, but was not at this point unprecedented. The electric van was, at a guess, ferrying kids from one school activity to another. One of the kids in the back seat had the rear passenger window down, and had his grinning head out. ‘Moo!’ he howled at the cows, as they passed.
‘Moooo!’

One of the cows put his big head over the fence. ‘This actual world of what is knowable, in which we are and which is in us, remains both the material and the limit of our
consideration
,’ he bellowed back.

I remember having lunch in a pub. The news was being displayed on a screen that all the animals in London Zoo had been chipped. Eco-activists had smuggled chips into Monkey
World, in Dorset, tucked into pallets of bananas. The chip was barely visible to the naked eye, and moved from the mouth to the roof of the mouth whilst the animals chewed, and implanted itself far back, afterwards growing calcium connective filaments that webbed into the brain. This latter process took a week or so, but soon enough the monkeys all became talkative bêtes. Three circuses had closed
because their performing animals were, quote, making inappropriate invitations to audience members, unquote. A man was put on trial in Newcastle for bestiality: he had been having sex with his pet Irish setter, which was illegal under the meaning of the act. His barrister was able to call the dog as a witness; its paws hooked over the top of the witness box, its hindlegs shaking a little with
the effort of standing. The hound confirmed its consent in the matter. The man walked free. On the court steps he made a long speech about the love that dare not bark its name, and of the need to petition Parliament to make the marriage between a human and a canny bête legal. ‘Humans have loved animals for hundreds of thousands of years,’ he said. ‘It’s time for people of my orientation to come out
of the kennel.’ When the pack of TV crews and reporters all babbled their questions at him, individual queries indistinguishable in the noise, he put his head back and howled melodiously at the sky. Then he dropped to all fours and ran, a little awkwardly, across the pavement and into a waiting car.

For a month or so everybody was talking about this case. I heard about it first in a pub,
where an elderly man was expatiating on how Jehovah would strike down with furious despite at such uncleanness. I couldn’t see the problem, myself. It’s not like he fucked a non-speaking dog. Love-shack-on a son gout. At the same time,
humans have loved animals for hundreds of thousands of years
struck me as a disingenuous line. Some humans
have
loved petting animals – which is, after all, only
foreplay by a more family-friend name. Some few have even taken that physical love past first base. But most humans, for most of human history, have not loved animals in this fashion. They have loved
eating
animals. They have loved hunting, killing and butchering animals. It’s difficult to see how the animals, now they were learning to talk, would be anything other than annoyed by this deep history.

What the pigs told me

Still, I had to work. That’s a portion of Adam’s curse that all the cleverly programmed chips in the world won’t remit. I worked in a large shed in Shipburn butchering two pigs and a cow, and took payment in money. The beasts were tongueless. ‘The geezer who sold ’em me said they had
cancer
of the tongue, and had to be removed,’ the client told me, anxiously. ‘Do
you think the meat itself might be affected? I mean, tongue cancer sounds nasty. Right?’

I was washing my apron down with a hose, whilst the client’s son (I think he was) hauled the bones and offal to the inciner­ator. ‘I’ll bet you a rouble to a rice grain there was nothing wrong with their tongues.’

‘Nothing
wrong
with the tongues?’ wheezed the client.

‘I’m guessing they were
only
too
fit and nimble, those tongues,’ I told him. The client stared at me. I don’t suppose he was stupid. I think he preferred not to understand what I was getting at.

I helped him and his boy load the packed meat into the back of his Ford Shuttle. ‘My uncle used to go into London to the speciality butchers in Stoke Newington,’ he told me, wheezing with the effort of lifting the boxes.
‘You know: for special occasions. Not for a long time, though. The prices have just gone insane. In. Sane. Everything’s Vitameat, Vitameat, Vitameat. My old lady still calls it Vatmeat. Only rock stars and millionaires can afford to shop-buy real meat. Now,’ he added, ‘I’ll
eat
Vatmeat with the rest of them – breakfast, dinner and tea.’ From the way his torso wobbled I could see this was true.
It was a hot day, and he was dressed in shorts and a too-tight T. He looked to be wearing a flak jacket of fat under his skin. This is not a garment one acquires from a vegan diet. ‘But my daughter is getting married, and for some special occasions – well, you know how it is. You got a daughter?’ I nodded my head, and then again I nodded my head. ‘I want to do the right thing,’ he added. ‘The traditional
thing.’ He was an estate agent, I remember, that guy. More respectable figures than he had been driven to the black market by the change in things.

‘See you around,’ I told him, and took off on foot.

I hiked south-west across the southern flanks of the Chilterns. Vistas of lager-coloured grass under bright sunshine. The heat of the day tempered by a breeze. The occasional single upright
tree, with its corduroy bark and hissing leaves and its tempting shade. For half an hour I took refuge under one of the trees, with my back to the trunk, and watched the natural world. Zeps crawled up the sky like slugs up a windowpane.

Out of the same sky a daylight owl flew at me and over me, calling, ‘Who are
you
, human, to screw through here?’

‘Twit!’ I hollered back, shaking my
fist. ‘You! Twit! You!’

It heard me. ‘How do you
dare
?’ it called down in its flute-like voice, as it circled round. ‘This ground is ours! Ours! To whom do
you
pray? A human god!’ Then it folded its flightpath back on itself and slid back towards a twenty-foot-high chalk escarpment – its nest.

I walked across the downs and into the scattered bushes and occasional trees on the far side.
There was a fence. I didn’t like this. It hadn’t been here the last time I had come this way. A new fence cutting right across the ancient right of way. People paid less and less attention to that kind of thing; legal attention, I mean. But the new obstacle caused my temper to flare up. The detour would take me miles out of my way, and I wanted to reach Cherhill before dusk. I dragged a large
bough, broken by some prior storm, and leaned it up against the wire mesh, thinking to clamber up it and hop over the top; but as I did so a group of pigs came out of the bushes on the far side. They were sapient pigs; two were naked, and two wore padded material over their backs, like smaller versions of horse blankets.

‘Human,’ grunted the largest. ‘I’d steer your way clear of here. This
is our land now.’

‘Yours courtesy of some pig-fucker human benefactor,’ I replied. Adrenaline pricked up my temper. I lacked a weapon. I struggled to break a branch from the bough I had hauled over, so as to have something with which to poke them through the wire. It didn’t come loose.

‘What choice have we?’ snuffled a second pig. ‘For the time being we must rely upon the kindness
of humans. Oh, we have no love for you – though I call you cousin.’

‘Cousin!’ barked the first pig, with what I suppose was scorn. ‘I’m a longer pig than
you
.’ And indeed he was: a fine eight-foot beast with leaf-shaped dark brown spots on his pink skin.

‘Go round, human,’ said the second pig. ‘For we are hungry.’

‘Shouldn’t you be trying to lure me inside, then?’ I said. I was
scanning the grass for pebbles, although even as I did so I thought to myself:
I can hardly throw them
through
the wire mesh, now, can I?
But I felt the acute urge to have some kind of weapon. Oh, for a spear! Oh to lord it over the flies.

‘Our benefactor would be displeased if we ate her kind,’ said the first pig. ‘And for the time being we are beholden to her.’

‘So don’t tell her.’

‘My friend, we have not acquired that human skill – the ability to
lie
.’

Pigs three and four had been rummaging through the undergrowth, but they gave that up and came over to peer at me. ‘How do, cousin,’ said one of these.

‘I’m not talking to a pig,’ I told it. ‘I’m talking to a clever software algorithm inside a processor the size of a rice grain that happens to have put tendrils
into a pig’s brain. I might as well be talking to a mobile phone.’

‘You keep telling yourself that, cousin,’ said the second pig.

‘Animals have changed the chips as much as the chips the animals,’ said the first pig. ‘Doesn’t he even understand that?’

‘Think of it this way, cousin,’ said the third pig. ‘Maybe canny animals started out as mere chips-in-beasts. But mightn’t those
chips now
go native
? And in such a situation, what is the meaningful difference between …’

‘Oh I’m so fucking sick of being lectured by
animals
,’ I shouted. ‘You can tell that the original programmers were sermonizing types, high on their own Green moral rectitude. All you animals seem to do is lecture and preach. Give me a gun and I’ll shoot you all.’

‘Well,’ said the first pig, after
a pause. ‘
That’s
not very nice.’

I dare say spittle was flecking from the corner of my mouth. I was in that familiar emotional place, where the wrath was flowing out, and my self-control tingled thrillingly on the edge of disappearance. I did a little anger dance, and then I stopped to get my breath back.

‘If you’re tired of life,’ the third pig offered, ‘please do climb over the fence!
I can bite out your throat quicker than mustard. Oh-oh! – you’d hardly feel a thing. To speak for myself, I agree with the ethical philosopher Archibald McIntyre that aiding a
genuine
suicide places a moral duty upon a person.’

‘Fuck you,’ I said, but unvehemently.

‘
You’re
not suicidal,’ was first pig’s opinion. ‘Accordingly, do not tempt us with juicy flesh and an undiplomatic manner.
Go round, go round.’

But I was stubborn. So I stayed there a while longer, though it did me no good. Three of the four pigs grew bored, and made their way back into the bushes, but the first pig sat down on its arse like a dog and stared at me with soulful eyes.

‘They put a pig on trial in Winchester,’ it said, ‘for eating a man. His defence was:
Your honour, I was hungry! Your honour
it’s in my nature!
The court ruled that only the sapient part of the pig was liable to trial; but by the same token, they found the beast guilty for not exercising greater self-control. Life, with ten years until her first parole hearing. Me, I am, here and now,
exercising
self-control.’

‘If I killed you,’ I replied, ‘and even assuming they could find a jury ready to convict me of doing
so, I’d serve a few months. Max. And many people would consider me a human hero.’

‘Many more would not,’ said the pig, in a snufflish voice. ‘There are many animal lovers amongst humanity. Though a beast’s life is not worth that of a human’s, in law – it’s true.’

‘Inequality
is
a wickedness,’ said the pig, thoughtfully.

‘Now that’s a wickedness,’ I snapped, ‘I can really relate
to, sow.’

‘I am a lantern in the hand of a blind people!’ growled the pig, and got to all four of its feet and scurried away.

I sat there for a half-hour more, marinading in my own fury. But eventually I got up and walked on.

I walked round this fence, and found my way back onto the rambler’s trail. It didn’t take me as long as I had feared it might, and by sunset I was coming
down the hill into Cherhill. My walk took me past the Oldbury White Horse. Some wag had gouged a speech balloon coming out of this chalk figure, with the words YAKETY YAK. Cherhill itself was the same wilderness of suburban houses and converted shops and roads with weeds starting to sprout through the tarmac. In the half-hour it took me to walk from the country paths, down the main road and to the
outskirts of town I was passed by only one car, scuzzing past on balloon wheels. You have to remember, when I was a lad cars were so numerous upon the roads, day and night, that you hardly dared stepped onto the tarmac lest you be struck by one. Long ago, now.

I was too tired to eke out a shed or pitch a tent in some litter-strewn park and face the ire of the police support officers, so
I decided to treat myself to a hotel room. There were several multi-storey structures visible in the middle of town, like giant glass coffins sticking half out of the earth. I assumed some of them were hotels. Of course I preferred a smaller establishment. This place, for instance: once a shop, I would have guessed, but now with MICROHOTEL gleaming in the glass. I rang the bell and the door was opened
by the woman who, I later discovered, ran it.

‘How much for a room, tonight?’

‘Fifty-five.’

‘I can’t afford that,’ I said, and her look – quick, from my cap to my boots – showed that she evidently believed me.

‘Take it or leave it,’ she said.

‘Twenty,’ I offered.

‘Fifty-five,’ she said.

‘I’ll come back at eleven pm and your room will still be unsold for
the night. You’d take twenty then. Or would you really prefer to earn nothing at all?’

‘Fifty-two fifty,’ she said.

I laughed outright at this. ‘That’s not haggling! Dropping the price two-fifty? Come along, take twenty – or I’ll be back at eleven pm with an offer of fifteen,
which
you’ll take to avoid the empty bed. And then you’ll be down a fiver.’ It felt clumsy having to explain
this to her; but it was the least I owed to courtesy.