Natural History (17 page)

Nately told them no, nobody was out to harm him, not that he knew of, and nobody was controlling his thoughts, not even, apparently, him. And that nervous little joke led to a Section Assessment.

Then two psychiatrists and an Approved Social Worker assessed him again, by asking exactly the same questions—which he answered, this time without humour. Nevertheless, they decided to apply Section 2 of the Mental Health Act; he could be held for yet more assessment—and possibly treatment—for up to twenty-eight days. He might then be taken to a mental hospital to be assessed even more.

But he was hoping to have the Section rescinded by the ward's consultant psychiatrist. Then he would be allowed to go home.

Patrick said, ‘For God's sake—this is bullshit, isn't it? Wasting time and money, keeping you in here. Let's get you out, soon as we can. Come and stay with us. Come and stay for Christmas.'

He became aware that Nately and Jo were gazing at him with identically affectionate expressions.

He said, ‘What?'

And in the car, he said, ‘You owe me for this.'

‘I know,' said Jo.

‘Well,' he said, ‘I hope you do.'

Monkeyland held its first Christmas market that weekend. The stall-holders arrived when it was still dark, when the chimps were still huddled in groups, vigilant and full of night.

The stall-holders, in their woolly hats and Puffa jackets and ponchos and boots, queued at the van for Styrofoam cups of coffee and tea, and they sat crushed together on cold benches and low walls, smoking roll-ups and wrapping themselves tighter in their winter clothing.

The stalls went up: the candlestick-maker, the organic baker. The faux-ethnic cushions and throws, the jams, the wines, the cheeses. The cold sun rose behind a bank of mackerel cloud. The stall-holders flapped their arms and looked at the sky.

To get an extra fifteen minutes in bed, Patrick hadn't showered, and now he regretted it. He felt dirty and his beard itched in the cold. But gradually, the morning's motley air cheered him up—all these cold, sleepy, excited people with their steaming breath and their woolly hats and their polite and nervous conversations, hoping to sell the things they'd made.

And there, in one of the centre stalls, Sarah Lime sat on a bar stool. There were rips in her Levis and on her feet were tatty tennis shoes, and she wore a grey overcoat and a scarf round her neck. The scarf was the colour of raspberries, and set with dozens of little mirrors. Her hat was some kind of South American weave. It had flaps that hung round her ears, like Sherlock Holmes or Deputy Dawg.

All that morning, they caught each other's eye and made little faces; little grimaces of anxiety, acknowledgments of their half-established intimacy, topped-up in case it should weaken in the strangeness of the morning.

At nine o'clock, Patrick opened the gates. He was greeted with a smattering of applause, and that was good.

Half an hour later, Sarah brought him a hot dog in a paper napkin and a cup of tea with a plastic lid.

He said, ‘What's this?'

‘Breakfast. Lunch. Brunch.'

They half-squatted on a low wall by the rubbish bins; in summer, these bins were buzzed by a constant, slow vortex of wasps. Patrick hated wasps; they scared him more than any animal alive—except panthers.

He bit into the hot dog. Vinegary ketchup and yellow mustard smeared over his bristles and cooled there.

She said, ‘So. How you feeling?'

‘All right.'

She nodded.

He said, ‘Where are the nude self-portraits then?'

‘You.' She nudged him in the ribs. ‘It's too cold for nudes.'

‘It's too cold for anything. I wish I was in bed.'

‘Well, let's see how it goes. Have you heard from Jane?'

‘Not really. We watch the news, but you know.'

‘Me too. I watch the news.'

He finished the hot dog. Wiped sauce from around his mouth with the napkin. Scrunched it, threw it away.

He said, ‘It's in Africa. So who cares?'

‘She'll be all right.'

‘Oh, she'll definitely be all right. She's always all right.'

And now she turned to face him. ‘I didn't know you were that angry.'

He kept his eyes forward, her frown a milky blur on the edge of his vision. He could feel her breath.

‘I'm not angry. You love someone, you have to let them—y'know. You just have to let them.'

She drained her cup, crushed it, dropped it into the empty, waspless, winter bin. She was breathing steam. Her feet looked small and cold in the tennis shoes.

By five o'clock the visitors had trickled to nothing and it had become impractically frigid—fronds of mist rising in the sodium lights. Most of the stall-holders had long since begun to pack up, stripping their stalls down to skeletal cubes.

That last, quiet hour was cheerful—Christmassy. So Patrick closed the gates a bit early.

He approached Sarah Lime, packing up, and asked her; ‘So. How did it go?'

‘Really well.'

‘The nudes?'

She pouted, between the flaps of her hat. ‘There was a lot of looking. But nobody took the plunge.'

‘Shame.'

‘So. A bunch of us are meeting up, later tonight. Are you up for it? A drink?'

She looked almost comical in the Deputy Dawg hat. But Patrick thought of the scar that ran into the neck of her T-shirt: of tracing it with his fingertip. He thought of her body beneath him. He thought of making Sarah Lime cry out, dig her nails into him.

And then he thought of Jo, alone in the house. She'd keep the windows and the doors locked, and the telephone to hand. But she might wish to observe something interesting in the night sky; and there was
always
something interesting in the night sky. A marching band could sneak up on Jo while she watched the familiar pitted moon, arcing across her eyes.

And then, unbidden, he thought of his wife: he thought of her bad temper in the mornings, her disorganization, and he smiled, and loved her.

He said, ‘Best not.'

Sarah Lime kicked her feet. ‘Fair enough. Catch you in the week, then.'

‘Catch you in the week. Don't drink too much.'

She turned and backed away, making a fish-face at him from beneath her Deputy Dawg hat.

‘Some hope.'

She made another funny face and Patrick sat there, watching her go; it was dark and it was cold, and he was happy.

Monday morning, the rain hung cold and heavy on the fences, the trees; the snaking, naked hedgerows. Livestock that had churned the fields to a rich, fudge brown stood, unmoving and miserable.

As the Land-Rover came down towards the salt flats, Patrick could see the field below. He squinted; frowned. Slowed. Stopped the car.

The cattle had moved to the field's muddy edge. Some of them were nuzzling at the concrete trough. In the centre of the field, twenty magpies stood in a circle.

In the middle of the circle stood a single crow. It made no effort to fly away—it stalked, pompously, up and down within the circle. It was barking and clacking its great beak.

The magpies watched, unmoved, until one of them took a waddling step into the centre of the ring. It pecked the crow. The crow called out; harsher now. But still, it did not fly away. Instead, it faced its attacker and tilted its head.

Then the circle closed: the magpies rushed in, and the crow disappeared in a boil of white and black and iridescent green.

Patrick waited at the wheel.

The magpies attacked for perhaps a minute before, as one, they erupted into the air, scattering and separating.

The cattle at the trough raised their heads when Patrick opened the door and jumped out of the Land-Rover. He trudged through the squelching mud, climbed over the fence and crossed the field. He was nervously attentive, in the distant trees, to a raggy audience of crows and rooks.

The crow was a bloody scrap, smeared and folded into the mud: there were no eyes in its skull. Black feathers had been churned in the mud, had caught in the heavy, wet grass; they blew in the morning breeze, blood-tipped, whipping into small vortices.

Patrick's feet were cold in his boots: caked with mud to the ankles. The wind cut through his jacket. Feathers caught in his hair: he brushed blood across his cheeks, over his lips. He spat, angrily, coughing it up.

He looked at the crows in the trees. And he looked at the cows at the feeding trough. And he looked at the sky, which was slowly billowing white-grey and indifferent: the sun shone through it, a perfect, perfectly white sphere.

‘I've heard of it,' said Don Caraway. ‘Reports back to Chaucer. But it's uncommon. Obviously.'

Patrick shifted in his office chair, the phone hooked between his neck and shoulder. He had his muddy feet on the desk; a cup of tea balanced on his stomach. He had the blinds closed on Monkeyland, and he had draped his jacket over most of his landslide in-tray.

‘It was weird,' said Patrick.

‘It sounds weird.'

‘Is that it?'

‘What do you want me to say?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Perhaps they were punishing it.'

‘For what?'

‘Thievery. They're thieving buggers, crows.'

‘And magpies aren't?'

‘I don't know, then.'

‘This conversation is mad.'

‘You started it.'

‘Yeah, yeah. Cheers, Don,' Patrick said, and hung up.

Nately sat happily in the back seat of the Land-Rover, watching the fields—the cows, the sheep, the woebegone December.

As Patrick pulled up to the house, Jo leaped from the front seat and, like a gangly bodyguard, ran round the car to open Nately's door. She took the larger of his bags in two hands and carried it to the house, leaning hard to compensate for its weight.

All the way, she continued an unbroken commentary that had begun when they met Nately at the hospital. ‘It's very old,' she told him, ‘seventeenth century, I think. It was a farmhouse originally, but it hasn't been for a long time. You can see that it's old because none of the lines are straight, so Dad calls it Higgledy House, which is pretty funny, and Charlie goes on about it being haunted although of course there are no such things as ghosts. I told Charlie this when he was trying to frighten me one time, and he just made a loud noise and said “BUT THEY'RE WATCHING YOU” and actually I was pretty frightened, but I didn't tell him.'

They had reached the door. Patrick dangled his keys and said, mildly, ‘Jo, shall we let Mr Nately get inside?'

She blushed. ‘Sorry.'

They entered, and Jo asked Nately, ‘Would you like a cup of tea or a cup of coffee? We have some herbal tea if you'd like.'

Patrick said, ‘Herbal tea?'

‘It's Mum's. Top cupboard.'

‘Is it?' He made a face: who knew?

Nately was looking round the kitchen. Patrick said, ‘Sorry about the mess, John.'

Nately blinked at him.

Jo said, ‘Would you like to see your room?'

Patrick held up a hand in surrender, and let Nately go. He lit the gas ring and listened to them clump upstairs and there was a small lurch in his heart.

Jo had been preparing for days. She had washed bedding from the airing cupboard, and she'd taken the posters from her wall—Hubble starscapes, stellar maps, red exploding novae, a picture of the sun—and Blu-Tacked them to the spare-room wall.

She'd hoovered the threadbare carpet and opened the window, trying to air out the smell of damp. She'd pinned one of Jane's African wraps over the mouldy patch in the high corner of the ceiling. She'd put scented candles in empty drawers that had been rickety when Patrick and Jane bought the chest, years ago from a flea-market in North Wales. And she had selected a number of her favourite books and laid them on Mr Nately's bedside table, so he would have something to read.

Now Nately entered the room with his bag in one hand, and Jo's insides felt funny.

He stood in the doorway and took it in. The posters, the African cloth, the single, damp-warped low window that overlooked the garden and the coastal path and the woods beyond it.

Mr Nately set his jaw. Flexed it.

Jo waited. ‘Don't you like it?'

‘No,' said Mr Nately. ‘It's great.'

He sniffed and made a brave, happy face, and Jo understood—or thought she did—and she nodded like a butler and stepped backwards out of the room, and went downstairs.

Patrick was waiting in the kitchen. He heard her clumpy shoes on the loose stairs.

She came into the kitchen and saw Patrick's face.

‘What?'

‘Nothing.'

Patrick was reaching up and, with his fingertips, hunting for the box of herbal tea. He found it; it was camomile.

In the lead-up up to Christmas, the Anchorage had hosted a series of works parties, Christmas karaokes and other events. Charlie worked them all. The parties were desperate and grotesque, but he belonged in the Anchorage now, with its tat and its baubles; its blood-red bar and its tawdry orgasms.

Christmas morning, he was there to serve breakfast to the hungover and the childless. They hunched like gargoyles over their plates. He hated them, and he hated Christmas, and he was shambling, in a daze, not quite present—tormented by thoughts of Chris McNeil; of whom she might be with, on Christmas Day.

When he thought of her, lonely in a clean white bathrobe, watching the Queen's speech, something inside him went wrong. And when he imagined her at a Christmas dinner-party, it got worse. The other guests at this party were unclear to him—he didn't know who they were, or how old, or what they did or how they spoke. He just saw crystal glasses in elegant hands and hands touching thighs under tables.

He saw Chris McNeil lying beneath an anonymous man, being invaded, and he saw her legs tense in time with his thrusts.

And that was physical pain, pressure in his head like a great, oil-clogged engine.