Natural History (13 page)

‘All right. Why don't I see you then?'

He was in Minehead early. It was growing cold and he shivered in his jacket. He went for a walk along the sea wall and sat down there for a bit, watching the boats bob and the gulls dive-bomb the water. He could smell rotting seaweed and salt and vinegar.

He waited for a long time and wished he'd brought a book. He looked at his watch. Seven minutes had passed.

He went to an amusement arcade—almost deserted, the cabinets flashing and whooping madly in the emptiness—and spent a few minutes deciding what to play. He found a big, old
Tekken
cabinet and pumped in some money. And then he wondered what Chris McNeil might think if—according to some horrible, inevitable coincidence—she should happen past and see him, bashing buttons, slamming weight on one foot then the other.

He blushed with mortification and skulked away from the arcade,
Tekken
still soliciting him from the corner.

Returning to the sea wall, he sat and waited and it grew fully dark and even colder and the gulls were points of white light on the black low tide, and she was late.

He heard footsteps behind him.

She was huddled deep into her coat and had her chin tucked between her shoulders. ‘Hello,' she said.

Then her position changed. She fossicked in her handbag, looking for cigarettes, and he felt the moment receding. Already he was nostalgic for it: it seemed to mark the end of something.

She offered him a cigarette. He took one. Accepted a light, bowing to the flame, brushing his fringe to one side.

‘So.' She crooked an elbow and he slipped his arm through hers. And that would have been enough; that shock of contact, prolonged, even through several layers of fabric.

‘Where are we going?'

She showed him her car keys, folded up in her hand. Then asked, ‘How old are you, exactly?'

‘Eighteen.'

‘Eighteen,' she said. ‘Eighteen.'

They walked to her car—a black Golf—which chirruped and flashed, and they got inside, and closed the doors with a heavy, night-time sound.

Inside, it smelled of new car and perfume and perhaps an undercurrent of long-ago cigarettes. He looked at her hand on the gear stick: the flexing tendons, the red nail on the thumb. The shape of her knee. The weird intimacy of her ankles, naked beneath the hems of her trousers. The seat belt, separating her breasts. The fine silver chain.

He looked at his jeans, his Converse. Strobing in the sodium light.

They drove past the salt flats. No lights. Just the water, cold silver on the near horizon.

The restaurant was less than half-full. They sat near the window, where they could watch people and cars and buses come and go. He pushed food round his plate and sipped Sauvignon Blanc.

She didn't say much, except that she was glad of his company.

She hated eating alone. Never got used to it. You always got funny looks.

‘Men,' she said.

There were laughter-lines at the corner of her eyes and mouth. They were inexpressibly sexy.

When the plate was taken away she lit a cigarette. Offered him one. A light.

He dug out his wallet and opened it, and she chuckled, not unkindly, and touched the back of his hand again. ‘My treat.'

As she signed the bill, she kept the cigarette in the corner of her mouth, looked at him from under her fringe, and said, ‘I'll claim you on expenses. Entertainment.'

He'd taken the next day off, just in case—so she offered to drop him home; she knew the way to Innsmouth, but after that he directed her through the lightless back road, past farmland and woodland.

His heart beat feverish and thin. But she didn't pull over, as he had been fearing and hoping she might, until they reached the house.

Then she yanked up the handbrake and the car was silent and they sat there in the dark.

She said, ‘Well, thanks again. For looking after me.'

She leaned over. He held his breath. She kissed his cheek. Her lips were cold warm on him: the blood beneath the lipstick.

He opened the door. He walked slowly because he could feel her eyes on him and it robbed the strength from his legs.

Her car made a three-point turn in the narrow road then pulled away; the red lights diminishing.

Charlie dug around for his keys, found them and went inside.

When he got back to work in the morning, she was gone.

The nearest decent library was in Barnstaple, thirty miles down the coast.

Patrick woke, still propped up in the kitchen chair, still wrapped in a blanket, having decided in his sleep to go there. Immediately, he couldn't wait. He shrugged off the blanket. It was a decision; better than waiting night after night at the open window, shivering and doubting what he'd seen, all those weeks ago. And it was better than praying for the cat to return—just once—to feast on the old ewe and prove him sane.

He called Harriet at home and made vague, muttering intimations of a domestic problem, exploiting her awareness of Jane's absence, his two teenage children. And he dropped Jo early at Nately's. Then he drove south to Barnstaple.

It felt good to be back in a library, hunting—his stomach growling, light-headed, because he'd forgotten to eat. It made him feel like a reporter again, the kind of reporter he had wanted to be. It was an adventure.

He swept through blurring microfiche, but still it took half a morning, searching local archives, to find the first mention of what he wanted. Seeing it for the first time, he wanted to cackle in triumph, like an old witch. But he gritted his teeth and counted down to slow his heart, then began the cross-referencing, the digging up and tracking­ down, taking books from shelves, accessing national-newspaper­ archives. He scribbled notes in long-unused, always-familiar shorthand­ on a spiral-bound notebook, bought fresh that morning.

Then, mid-afternoon, by now queasy with hunger, he took the notebook to a nearby café. Breaking off to shovel lunch down himself with a fork, he began to compile his notes, to work them into an order.

And when that was done, he scrawled the notes in longhand, and allowed himself wonder, with a self-satisfied smirk and a full belly, if all those nights at the window, watching the sheep survive, had been wasted after all.

In 1976, the last Labour Government had passed the Dangerous Wild Animals Act, which controlled the private ownership of, among other things, big cats.

It had long been rumoured that, rather than surrender their darlings to the ignominy of a public zoo, or death, the decadent wealthy who kept such creatures—the pop stars, the actors, the junkie aristos—preferred to set them free, to fend for themselves.

This had never actually been proven. But, in 1983, a farmer down in South Molton—Eric Ley—lost a hundred sheep, all of them to throat injuries.

It was the
Daily Express
that first named this predator ‘the Beast of Exmoor'. It offered a reward for its capture.

No luck.

Then, in 1989, following the loss of more livestock, the Royal Marines were sent in. Plenty of them saw the beast, or said they did—but always briefly, without sufficient time to execute a decent shot; none were fired. Eventually, the livestock attacks died off again, but only until the Marines were sent home—by which time the government had designated the Beast a myth, a hallucination, a hoax.

Such sightings were not confined to North Devon. Alien Big Cats had been spotted all over the United Kingdom. In 1980, a Scottish farmer trapped a lynx. He called it Felicity; it died in captivity.

Someone else—on the Isle of Wight—shot a leopard. He'd imagined a fox must be responsible for the death of so many ducks and chickens. Seeing what he'd killed, he kept silent for months, fearing that he'd harmed a protected species.

Patrick snorted, joyously, at the poor sap's folly.

And then he transcribed the notes which told him that, of all the big cats, leopards were the most adaptable. They were common, especially in dense forest. And, of course, they had once been popular with private collectors. This was particularly true of melanistic leopards, often known as black panthers. Very chic, a black panther. Very showbiz. Very Jackie Collins. In the right decade, in the right context.

Leopards were most active at dawn and dusk. But they would hunt in the day, too.

Patrick had been right to be cautious, and right to be scared.

In the late 1970s, a lynx had been captured in Barnstaple itself—not far, in fact, from where Patrick had just eaten a belated breakfast.

He thought of the beast in the woods—the hot, slinking predator who did not belong there—and he was overjoyed not, after all, to be mad.

11

FROM JANE'S NOTEBOOKS

The
Colonel Ebeya
arrived. It is a disintegrating hulk, the rusting corpse of a cyclopean water beetle. A horde of barges and pirogues is fastened to it: they float and meander like rotting lilies. They're loaded up with flesh to sell: fish, pork, crocodile, and fruit.

Every surface throngs, hums, with life, human and animal: the
Ebeya
is home to 4,000 people: merchants, children, soldiers, prostitutes.

The four of us—the five of us—share one cabin during the voyage, for safety.

The heat and humidity are unendurable. Elephantine roaches scamper the riveted walls. Mick and Richard share a terrified, girlish loathing for them. And there are rats. I hate rats.

We forced open the porthole window, but there's no relief—just the wide, flat river, like milky coffee, fog drifting along its surface, and the far, far banks and the forest on either side, green-black, broken only by low villages.

We have become sick and silent, like prisoners.

We feed the bonobo on fruit bought from the visiting pirogues, but every day it grows weaker. It clings to me now in constant mortal fear.

Dave wants to get shots of the decks out there, but Richard won't allow it. There are too many people, too much uncertainty, for Dave to go swanning around with a valuable camera mounted on his shoulder like a parrot.

My sickness is made worse by my knowledge of the fearless rats in the bathroom. I have to take someone with me when I shit—Camra Dave or Sound Mick or Richard hold my hand as I squat and the liquid squirts out of me in bursts and spasms.

In my turn, I hunt out the roaches, which like to mass in the gap between mattress and slimy bulkhead wall. These are big creatures, and fast. I kill as many as I can.

In the evening, the torchlight attracts insects in their multitudes and we sit in a queasy snowglobe of flickering moths, Camra Dave and Sound Mick and Richard and me and the sick bonobo, which they have come to despise, and it seems that there is nowhere else on the planet; that everything—cups of tea in china cups, clean socks, Marks & Spencers—has been a feverish dream.

After five long, long days, docking at Mbandandaka was barely a relief. The mash of bodies, moving in different directions, not moving at all. The soldiers with whips, the shouting, the blaring, the sun.

City Express Airline is due to fly to Kinshasa in two days.

The others checked into a hotel. I stayed behind to argue, pay extra, sign documents which claim to permit the bonobo on the short flight. I said, ‘No, I'm not smuggling. It's dying.'

I cradle the bonobo. I talk to her and she responds to me. I stroke her hair. She luxuriates in it.

She holds my finger.

Usually, Mr Nately perched on the edge of the desk—a typical teacher's­ place. Sometimes he sat there most of the afternoon, drinking tea; he talked, and sometimes Jo responded. But right now, he was staring at the window, watching fractal clouds surge past.

Jo sat in silence, unable to concentrate. Now and again she glanced at him. And at some point her lack of activity, like a clock that stops ticking, must have alerted him to a change in the atmosphere because he blinked and looked at her and said, ‘Pardon?'

‘Nothing.'

Looking up so sharply, he'd spilled tea. And now, irritated, he brushed at the wet spots on his thigh.

‘Sir, are you all right?'

‘I'm fine, yes.' Then, unknotting his tie, he admitted: ‘Actually, I am a tiny bit tired.'

‘Are you feeling sick? Should I go home?' She didn't want to.

Nately stretched his tie like a garrotte, men began to wrap it round his hand.

‘Really, I'm fine.'

‘Have you been staying up to watch Hale Bopp?'

He smiled—caught out—and Jo felt all right again. She felt herself relax.

‘I've been interested in its progress, yes. The curse of the internet talkboard.'

That made sense. It's what Jo would be doing, too—if she had a telescope in her garden, and access to the internet. She thought how strange it was that this man, who had few real friends (if any), and who seldom left his house (if at all), was part of a community that girdled the globe like the lace of fat round a kidney.

He talked to people in Japan, South America. Lots of people in the United States—even someone at an Antarctic research station.

She said, ‘Can I see them—the talkboards?'

He set the tightly-curled tie on the table and scratched at the crown of his head. A tuft of hair stood up. Curled up, the end of the tie came loose, like a snake's head.

‘It's Hale Bopp,' she said. ‘It's educational.'

Nately kicked his legs, thinking. Then he launched himself off the desk and landed flat on his feet. He clapped his hands, then rubbed them together.

‘Let me make a cup of coffee and we'll have a look. Five minutes. Then back to work.'

He booted up and logged on and showed Jo a list of the talk-boards he visited. Most of them were soberly named, like
www2.jpl.nasa.gov/comet
, but there were others like
FREAK SPACE!
and
DEVIANT SCIENCE
and
HAVOC ANALOG.
‘What's that?' She pointed to
HAVOC ANALOG.

‘Light relief,' he said. ‘A bunch of people who should know better, talking about things that don't exist.'

‘Like what?'

‘Well, right now, something called the SLO.'

‘The SLO?'

Nately sang
The X-Files
theme tune. ‘The Saturn-Like Object.'

‘What's that?'

‘A week or two ago, November the fourteenth, a man in Houston, an amateur astronomer, took a CCD photograph of the comet. And in the image, it seems to be
accompanied
by something. A UFO, apparently.'

He showed her the greyscale image. It revealed a bright spot, slightly pixelated, surrounded by a diffuse corona—that was the comet. Up and to the right was a second, smaller and sharper point of light. It had a ring around it.

‘A giant flying saucer, shaped like Saturn,' said Nately. ‘According to the photographer, it followed the comet for more than an hour. That night, he went on some freaky radio show to talk about it. The national media picked up on it, and then all hell broke loose.'

She leaned in close and frowned. ‘What is it?'

‘A bright star, probably. The Saturn effect is just an artefact. It happens sometimes, if you take a shot of a bright object using a spider.'

A spider was a secondary mirror system; metal vanes suspended it in the upper tube assembly of a telescope.

They looked at the image. He rubbed his jaw. ‘Or it could be a software glitch.'

‘So what's the problem?'

‘A software glitch isn't what people want to see.'

Nately thought for a moment, then decided. He clicked on one of the talkboards, then gave Jo the mouse and left her to roam while he stood at her side, sipping coffee.

Hale-Bopp isn't just another comet; it's bringing a PHENOMENALLY LARGE OBJECT which is DEFYING THE LAWS OF PHYSICS … Hale-Bopp should be ORBITING THIS OBJECT which is 4 TIMES LARGER THAN EARTH … but it's NOT … what does that say to YOU??!!!

The object clearly has mass, but nothing we can comprehend at this time. Perhaps the object is hollow or composed of a matter we do not yet understand. Certainly its movements suggest possible intelligent control.

People are freaked out, obviously. Hey, the new millennium is almost here, and ‘at forty-five degrees, the sky will burn'. That's what Nostradamus said in quatrain VI-97, right? Hale-Bopp will hit its perihelion in April '97 in the Northern sky at 45 degrees geographic latitude. And it'll be making the rounds about the same time Nossie scheduled Wormwood for a special guest appearance in the Apocalypse.

Jo read until Nately took the mouse from her and shut down
HAVOC ANALOG.

He said, ‘There are people on here—on the internet—who believe in all sorts of things: the Loch Ness Monster, alien bodies kept in American Air Force bases, big cats loose in Britain. Some of them believe the world is ruled by twelve-foot alien lizards.'

She giggled, and so did Mr Nately; and she thought of Patrick in the garden, erecting the cage.

‘Right now,' said Nately, ‘it's all about the comet. And the closer it gets, the madder they all become.'

Then he slapped his leg, once, resoundingly, and said, ‘Right. Break-time over.'

The Anchorage Hotel had changed, because Chris McNeil had slept and woken and showered there.

It seemed miraculous—but miracles, like murders, changed places and her absence left the Anchorage corrupted by spoiled magic. It changed the light, made it yellow and creeping and old, and it seemed to change the physiognomy of the people who worked there; it made them sly and knowing and secretive, and Charlie feared them.

But he began to pull yet more double shifts—weeks of them, accumulating money, hardly caring. He just wanted to absorb any last, glittering, carcinogenic particles of Chris McNeil.

Making up the room she had once stayed in, he still hoped to come across some undiscovered trace of her—a whisper of scent, a pencil chewed and dropped. There was nothing. It was just a made-up hotel room. The sterility made him want to vomit.

During his lunch-break, he sat on the empty beach, scoured by the sand, the Anchorage behind him. He rehearsed their evening together; although it had been full of silence and shy grins and the clatter of cutlery, he wanted to fix it in his memory, to recall her face from every angle, as if from multiple cameras. The shadows in her laughter lines.

How old was she? He didn't know. But, meditating on the details he had absorbed by staring at the visitor's book—her phone number, her address—he conjured a life for her: a dockside apartment, in which she lived alone, perhaps with a cat that sat on her lap, luxuriating in her touch as, in a white silk dressing-gown, she curled up on the sofa to watch TV.

Then, from nowhere, a suburban semi insinuated itself into his mind, devious as the reek of someone else's fart—a dog, kids. A husband. He doubled over the pain in his belly, hugging his knees, and returned to work with the wound still tender inside him.

In the laundry, Clive crept up on him and yelled
‘Boo
!'
and Charlie jumped and yelped.

Clive chortled and said, ‘Wake up, dreamer,' booming and malevolent. And he stomped off on his flat feet, headed somewhere in the big, half-asleep hotel, his empty kingdom.

Patrick had cooked a proper meal, boar sausages and buttery mash and green beans, and local wine breathing on the table.

Jo was upstairs, asleep. Charlie was at work; these days, Charlie always was.

The door knocked, and Patrick answered, and it was the old vet, Don Caraway—the wind flapping at the skirts of his mackintosh and erecting his comb-over, as if electrified.

They had finished the meal and started on a second bottle when Patrick said, ‘Don, I wanted to ask you something.'

Caraway showed compassionate, clerical dentures and cupped the ruby wine in liver-spotted hands.

‘Is it Jane?'

Patrick tilted his head and scratched beneath his jaw. ‘I don't know.'

He used an index finger to circle the rim of his glass. He looked into it. ‘A few weeks ago—a few months back—I saw something.'

He was aware of Caraway holding his gaze, taking his measure.

‘I think I saw a cat, Don. A big cat.'

He waited for the expressions of amusement, but they didn't come. Instead, Caraway sipped his wine.

‘Where?'

‘At the bottom of the garden. Where most people see fairies.'

But Don Caraway had grown more, not less, serious. ‘What kind of cat?'

Patrick rubbed his eyes. ‘Big. Black. Short legs, for its size. Rounded ears. Heavyish tail. A panther, I think. A black panther.'

Caraway crossed his arms. ‘Why are you telling me this?'

‘Who else am I going to tell?'

‘The RSPCA? The police?'

‘Come on, Don. Be serious.'

Caraway waved that away, dismissive.

Patrick said, ‘Look, you've been here a long time. You know the farmers—you know everyone. You must've heard the rumours, the stories—the sightings, or whatever. I just need to know what you think. Am I going mad, or what?'

For a few seconds, Caraway sat tugging at a long, sandy eyebrow. Then he said, ‘I did more than listen to the rumours. I saw some of those sheep, or what was left of them. I spoke to those farmers.'

‘And?'

‘I collected some faecal matter. It came back from the lab classified as canid. Dog shit.'

‘But you don't think it was dog shit.'

‘No. Is this why you bought the sheep?'

‘What sheep?'

‘Greg told me about it.'

Patrick groaned.

Caraway said, ‘People round here don't have a great deal to talk about, Patrick. You turned up, out of the blue, on a Sunday morning—desperate to buy a sheep. Any sheep. I mean, really. You thought that wouldn't get round?'

Patrick scowled and made a vague hand gesture.

Don said, ‘I suppose alarm bells should've rung, there and then. With the sheep. Are you trying to catch it?'

‘Yeah. No. Maybe. Do you think I can?'

‘Possibly.'

‘But you believe me? You think I saw what I think I saw?'

‘Oh, it's no secret the cat's here. Everyone round here knows it. I could take you to half a dozen people, right now—and they'd tell you stories to make your hair stand on end.'

Patrick shook his head. ‘I'd like to keep it to myself. You know.'

Caraway straightened and his face, in the gloom, became eager as a schoolboy. ‘You're a lucky man. I wish I'd seen it.'

‘Oh no, you don't.'

‘Oh yes, I do. A black cat crossing your path?—it's good luck, isn't it? Big cat—lots of luck. Stands to reason.'