Natural History (7 page)

At a first, cursory glance, the letter resembled an invitation to attend a local function, perhaps high tea at the Lord mayor's house.

Dear Whore
(it read)

I know how much you love it I know the things you do. Your ‘husband' doesn't know, does he. But I do, I know. I have stood close to you I touched your arm I could smell the cum on you

As well as the letter, the envelope—which was postmarked Bath—contained Polaroid photographs of Jane's house, and Jane in her car, and Patrick walking Jo to school.

They went to the police. A young PC took them to an office. He listened, then read the letter to himself as Jane sat there, squirming. Then he tugged at an earlobe and told them the best thing was, keep an eye out for anything unusual.

‘Like what?' said Patrick. ‘A pervert in a tree? In my wardrobe? What?'

‘Anything unusual.'

The kids knew nothing of this: not the letters, nor the injury it caused to their parents' marriage, because Patrick and Jane made a furtive secret of it all, keeping their frightened arguments, to hissing spats in otherwise empty rooms.

But there was hardly any need for all the whispering and skulking around. The kids were teenagers; Patrick and Jane were little more than fixtures so permanent they'd become morally invisible.

When Jo wasn't at school, she was in her room, reading. Now and again she could be found in the living room, watching
Star Trek
movies on VHS.
The Voyage Home
was her favourite.

Charlie was struggling with some unhappiness of his own. Something was wrong. He alternated, apparently at random, between resentful silence and confrontational malice.

Patrick thought Charlie resented Bath, because he liked it; liking it unsettled him. He'd liked other places, and left them.

So it was Patrick's idea to acquire for him a token of domestic permanence. At Bristol Dogs' Home Charlie picked out a mongrel terrier—a perky bitch called Blondie who sat panting in his lap all the way home.

Blondie never learned the proper place to shit. Every morning, Patrick scooped her curly black turds into a carrier bag, knotted the carrier bag and threw it in the dustbin.

She had not been spayed. That was Patrick's job, and he never got round to it. It was an omission he regretted, because Blondie's oestrus drew to the door a jostling, whining pack of males. This feral presence bored Patrick and infuriated Jane; she equated the dogs' pink, importunate cocks with the obscene letters. Charlie cursed the horny dogs under his breath; he thumped the windows, threw out buckets of water; he ran outside wielding a golf umbrella like a club, breaking up the pack and driving the dogs away.

Patrick disliked Blondie. Secretly, he kicked her up the arse when no one was around; she cowered and scuttled away with her tail covering her genitals. In the garden, safe from Patrick's toecap, she cheerfully ran in circles and yapped at passers-by, her tail springy and erect.

She didn't like being alone with Patrick, yet she was alone with him much of the day. So when she ran away there was no real reason to suspect anything but an escape. Probably her new life of urban scavenging would be cut short by the dog-catcher; or perhaps a speeding car on a dual carriageway. Perhaps, like Lassie, Blondie would come home.

But perhaps not.

A week after she disappeared, someone left a Milk Tray box on their doorstep. A curl of shit had been mashed into the circles and squares of the liner tray; and inserted into the shit like a crippled flag was a Polaroid of what Jane eventually decided might be the foetus of a dog. It lay, curled and purple, on a yellow baby blanket, edged with a wide ribbon of satin.

When Patrick allowed himself to consider this, he grew very scared. Because he was scared, he never discussed it with Jane. She was scared, too.

Charlie had been made happy by the way Blondie clung to his heels, her busy claws skittering on the old tiles and floorboards. So which was worse? The likelihood that she'd gone because she wanted to? Or the slight probability that Blondie had been taken by a stranger who wished his family ill?

Neither Patrick nor Jane knew the answer to this, and they kept silent. The guilt made them angry with each other.

The letter that followed contained a photograph of Jane on the doorstep, peering into the Milk Tray box, and Patrick, lost in the shadows behind her, his daylit hand on her shoulder. Jane's face, however, was blistered and melted, because someone had burned it with a cigarette lighter. Then, using a sharpened, orange pencil—in many places, it had scratched away the surface of the Polaroid to reveal the white paper backing beneath—they had circled on exaggerated breasts and grotesque, elongated nipples. With the same pencil, they had punched a hole through Jane's crotch and drawn tear-shaped drips down her thighs, pooling between her legs. Piss, semen, blood?—who knew?

One day I'll cum on you and in you and over you I'll roll you in cum I'll stuff your fucking mouth with it.

Now Jane and Patrick shouted at the police, but there was still nothing the police could do; not until a crime had been committed.

Britain had no anti-stalking laws, and no privacy laws either.

Jane contacted the National Anti-Stalking and Harassment Campaign. They told her that most people assumed ‘anti-stalking' had something to do with animal rights activism. Jane laughed down the line, and hung up. And then the letters stopped.

There was a tentative, hopeful month. Perhaps the writer had moved to another target, one that was easier to terrorize. Perhaps he was in prison for something else, or in hospital. Perhaps he was dead.

It was easy to say all that, and to say it all again and again, murmuring it over breakfast, and over the telephone, and in bed, and in the bathroom, as Jane pissed and Patrick cleaned his teeth. But it wasn't so easy to believe it.

It was preposterous, after those years spent researching real beasts, to be so disturbed by an inadequate man with a word-processor­ and an erection—someone who probably still lived with his mother. And after that, to be equally terrified by his silence.

For many months, being afraid had made them unhappy. They squabbled, and squabbles became arguments. They stopped having sex. They argued about that, too.

Sometimes, Patrick hated to be in the same house as her, the same enclosure. He sat in the pub, reading novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard—novels Jane loathed for their racism and colonial presumption; novels Jane loathed because they had been written for children in knickerbockers and stiff collars; children who were dead long before Patrick was born. She hated Patrick for hating England, and for falling back upon childhood romance—dreams of hazard and deliverance; tales where the villain, in the end, could always be confronted and destroyed.

To break the impasse, Jane booked a family holiday; the first they'd ever taken.

They spent a month on the coast of Barbados. The ocean crashed and boiled on jagged black rocks. They laid towels on spiny grass in the midday heat. They hired a car and drove round the island; Patrick stopped to join a game of cricket on a parched village green. Jane bought a flowing, tie-dyed cloth to wear knotted at her hip. They lunched on flying fish sandwiches with hot sauce. When the kids were asleep, Patrick and Jane played Scrabble, got drunk, made love.

They visited a wildlife reserve, and were surrounded by slow, convulsing tangles of copulating tortoises. Occasionally, a male would stretch his sinewed neck and groan in the tectonic agony of orgasm.

Patrick laughed, looking sideways at his kids: Charlie said, ‘
Gross,
man,' and Jo mimicked him and tickled him under the armpits and he said
‘Oi
!' and tickled her back and they ran, chasing each other through the mating tortoises.

They flew home, and Patrick hated Bath and he hated their house. It felt like a pair of shoes a stranger had been wearing. He'd never liked it: now it made him cooped up and furious.

He tore open his suitcase and stuffed clothes, dirty and clean, into drawers. He kicked open internal doors; jammed on taps with a savage twist of the wrist.

And then—as she'd been planning in Barbados, but could never find the right time—Jane told him about Monkeyland.

She took him to Beacon Batch. It was a hazy spring day, and at the same flat summit she stopped and slipped her arm through his. With her other hand, she pointed.

She said, ‘There's Weston super Mare.'

He chuckled, because that conversation had been sixteen years ago. He'd never thought she might remember it—or at least that part of it. So much had happened since then.

He felt there were four of them up here: the people they had been, and the people they had become. They were breaking like clouds and passing through one another and merging.

She rooted in her daypack and took out a flask. Flasks had come on in sixteen years; this one was silver, and tough—you could drop it from a high cupboard and it wouldn't smash.

She poured a cup of tea and they passed it back and forth. Above their heads, two kestrels hovered on the muscular updraught. Patrick could see their power and control; how they corrected first in one direction, then the other.

He looked at the pale blue dab of Weston, at Bristol Airport, at Bristol itself; and at the other walkers, ascending the hill. The last time Patrick and Jane were here, they came alone—except for Charlie, and he was still a secret inside her. And they had been very young.

Patrick wondered if the closing of this circle meant their marriage was over, and he thought of it spiralling up on the thermals, disrupting the balance of the predating kestrels.

Jane said, ‘We need a change.'

It was true.

‘Look at you. You're caged.'

That was true, too.

‘You'll go mad. Like one of the polar bears.'

Since the day they met, Bristol Zoo's polar bears had been diagnosed as psychotic. Their compound was too small. They wandered up and down all day, vanilla yellow, waving their heads like dead geraniums.

‘You're trying hard. But look at you.'

He nodded, too scared to speak.

‘There's a chimp sanctuary. In Devon.'

He looked at her.

‘It's miles from anywhere. It's on the edge of Exmoor. It's peaceful. Next to the ocean. You could walk, dive, cycle. Burn some of it off.'

All that pent-up energy, she meant.

‘Come on,' she said. ‘It'll be an adventure.'

5

Late in the evening of 24 March 1996, Jo and Patrick stood at the far end of their wild garden in North Devon, knee-deep in grass and early dandelions, and she showed him Hyakutake—the first of that year's two great comets. By now, it was among the brightest objects in the sky.

Emission of diatomic carbon made it shine blue-green, but Patrick's colour vision was poor and, when he looked up—following­ her pointing finger and her instructions—he could see only another bright, white dot. But he cried out, ‘I see it!'

Behind the comet followed a haze of tail which, she told him, stretched across thirty-five degrees of night sky.

‘Thirty-five degrees,' he said, whistling.

There was a silence. They watched the sky.

Then, without looking at him, Jo reached out and took Patrick's hand. She held on for a second. Her hand was thin and long and dry. She squeezed once, hard, and let go.

Patrick realized that soon he would lose his daughter. She would grow up and away and love someone else.

The dark stadium of sky curved overhead. He could still feel the warmth of her hand. This was their last moment, he thought—watching the great comet in the back garden.

He wished he could see the blue-green of it.

As he blinked, a white line arced across his field of vision.

He said, ‘Did you see that?'

‘I saw it.'

‘Shooting star,' said Patrick and, next to him, Jo nodded.

‘Shooting star,' she said.

The next day, she was allowed to stay late and observe the comet through Mr Nately's telescope.

Hyakutake would be moving very rapidly—about the diameter of a full moon every half-hour. That was fast enough for its motion to be detected by the patient but unassisted human eye.

In the dark kitchen, woolly hat on his head, Nately said, ‘Shall we?'

Jo pulled on her own hat, knitted wool, striped like a bee; it made her hair stick out like a clown's. She followed Mr Nately into the garden, the universe wheeling overhead, spattered like milk. It was cold enough to see her breath.

Mr Nately unlocked the heavy brass padlock on his shed and stepped inside. Then there was a loud noise, amplified by the silence, as he rolled back the roll-off roof. Jo thought of a cafeteria opening for business, rolling up its vandalized metal shutters.

Inside the shed was a reflecting telescope, wide as a barrel—a Dobsonian mount that Mr Nately had made himself, right down to grinding out the primary mirror. Shoved in behind it, there was room for a single office chair, and Mr Nately let Jo take it.

She sat and put her eye to the viewer. Mr Nately placed a pale hand between her shoulders. She could feel it there. Now and again he murmured an instruction, his voice quiet in her ear, but he allowed her to make the adjustments herself, to familiarize herself with the equipment. It took some time to locate Hyakutake, and to get it in focus, and to learn how to follow its fizzing trajectory.

As she did this, he spoke to her: ‘Ancient people knew the heavens much better than most of us today. And something changing up there was scary. Eclipses, meteor showers, comets—they were always met with dread.'

‘Well …' Jo was squinting like Popeye ‘… they were primitive.'

‘But when Halley's Comet swung by in 1910, the press reported that Earth would actually pass through its tail. This was not long before the First World War, remember; there was a lot of anxiety about poison gas. So newspapers caught hold of the story, just like modern newspapers latch on to health scares, or Satanic abuse. What they didn't print is what the astronomers said, that the tail was too vaporous to be harmful. So newspapers got sold and conmen sold anti-comet pills. People boarded up doors and windows.'

‘People are silly, though.'

‘Well, yes. But at the same time, every few million years a comet actually
does
hit the Earth. Perhaps it was a comet that brought us water. No water, no life. Or maybe a comet brought life in the first place. And maybe it was a comet that wiped out the dinosaurs.'

Jo screwed up her eye, even tighter. It helped her to concentrate. Hyakutake was very bright, and moving so quickly. It was so close. It would never be closer.

Mr Nately said, ‘I think our fear of them is coded right down in our DNA. Just like the fear of serpents.'

Later, she dozed on Mr Nately's sofa. He laid a scratchy, clean blanket over her—it smelled faintly of lavender. Almost asleep, she listened as he pottered around, locking and double-locking the windows and doors, hiding the keys from sight in drawers and cupboards.

Perhaps, she thought, Mr Nately was protecting her from the werewolves and witches that nightly sprang up like mushrooms in the ripe darkness of the forest.

Perhaps it was simply a habit, because he lived alone, far from anybody, overlooking a creepy orchard on one side and a lonely lane on the other. Perhaps he did it every night; locking the doors against the woods. And perhaps he slept safely under wool and lavender blankets, overlooked by his ranked and silent books—his histories, his textbooks, his science.

Jo was asleep when Patrick came to collect her. He lifted her, still asleep, into his arms and carried her to the Land-Rover. She had half a memory of it, a broken dream of being taken from the cottage in the arms of a great, slow giant, and carried to the thin, cold air at the top of a distant mountain. And that was Jo's best day, ever.