The Taxidermist's Lover

by Polly Hall

  I knew from your breathing when something was troubling you. It rattled from you in uneven throaty bursts, not just from the years of smoking that had lined your lungs but as a sort of cacophony of the creatures you had touched emerging from within, as if the stray feathers and hairs of the animals had lodged inside your chest and nested there. When you woke in the morning, you’d clear your throat, the night-time bubbling up and out just like it had stowed away inside you, then been expunged by your movements. Dust and ashes shifted, then settled. You were the vessel for all the souls that passed through your hands. Their maker. Their grave. Their cause.

  Preparation for Christmas started well before Advent. The urge to shop and wrap and make lists overcame me. The weather had been so unpredictable all year, so I always kept the larder stocked full of essentials, boxes of candles and plenty of matches. The logs were piled high in the living room. We even had a generator so didn’t need to rely on the outside world at all, provided we had enough fuel and logs for the fire.

  A trip into town always made me feel more grounded, as if I needed to step out of the magic bubble we had created together and enter the real world. The dense, synthetic trappings of the commercial world brought me back with a whump. For all the time I spent in my own company, paradoxically, I felt more connected to the life around me, as if I had honed the skill of attunement through my sensitivity to others’ rhythms and patterns.

  At first, I found myself remembering the smell of my mother’s hair, chamomile and geranium oil wafting about her and the deeper, sharper, synthetic scent of my father who worked away for months on end. He seemed to be made from an artificial substance that was molded to his transient life, rigid yet bendable, whereas Mother was soft and yielding, like a tall grass. I guess I took on both of my parents’ traits, and that was how the battle inside me raged endlessly.

  It occurred to me that Rhett and I would never have to deal with the slow demise of our parents in old age. We had lived through their horrendous sudden death when we were children. They had been healthy and vibrant one minute and gone the next. I had tried to talk to Rhett, but a steely look always came across his face. He would go pale and distant then make some excuse about needing to do something. He was good at running away. He had been running all his life. I guess I was his anchor, the place he came home to.

  When I met you, I knew you were a combination of all the elements—fire, air, water, earth; an alchemical pot of deliciousness. You were the one to whom I always ran. Some days I would sense the fire taking dominance and you would whisk me up in your arms and we’d dance until the sweat poured from our bodies and we had to strip off our clothes to cool down—you lying like a starfish on the lawn and me spread across you, panting and laughing. Those were our summer days. On other days your presence would ground me, bring me back to earth to secure me to the physical world we inhabited. Then the presence of water seemed to make you fluid in these winter months, swimming in and out of my focus like a pike, stalking minnows through the reeds. Often, I would catch you looking at me, just breathing that slow, steady inhalation and exhalation as if you were studying a sculpture.

  Our lawn had reduced to a slow growth; small patches of mud formed where the saturated ground was no longer able to absorb the incessant rainfall. Then the sharp spikes of frost appeared as the temperature plummeted, especially at night time. Everything seemed so dark and hopeless.

  That was probably why November was carnival month in this part of the world. Not the showy, feathery street carnivals of South America, but a different kind of bright procession—a winter carnival illuminated and paraded at night time when all the natural daylight had vanished. It seemed to me that this was a good excuse to dress up and play the fool because anything was allowed.

  Men who normally sported conspicuous tattoos dressed up as little girls with pigtails and short skirts, secretly enjoying the feel of suspenders on their hairy thighs and reaching down to rearrange their sweaty balls in baggy synthetic panties.

  They would keep their make-up on long after the carnival procession finished, glittery fake eyelashes extended from their rough faces like trapped insects, lurid shades of lipstick bleeding over their lip line as they drank their pints of lager.

  My parents took me only once—a spontaneous decision to have family time on a winter’s night. The sky was clear black and dotted with stars. Although bitterly cold, we were cozy, wrapped up in scarves and mittens, padded out in layers of jumpers and coats and double-socked feet inside our boots. My father must’ve been home because I remember him lifting me up onto his shoulders so I could get a full view of the passing trailers (or floats, as they were called). A Hawaiian hula theme, a Jungle Book reprise with human-sized fluffy lions and dancing elephants in cartoon costumes and the haunting grey ghost ship with human mannequins, carnivalites painted up like chalk and ash with staring black eyes, cutlasses held aloft in mock battle and dry ice billowing out around their legs.

  The winter carnival—a great parade of illuminated floats piercing through the dark night like a slow-moving, giant centipede. All coyness dissipated like the hot vapor puffing out from the onlooker’s cheeks. The floats were pulled by tractors or lorry hubs and decorated to match the theme—the drivers sometimes sported hats or full-face masks like the one you wore at Halloween. The music rose up from speakers on a continual loop. The generators spewed out dark spluttering fumes. Outsiders might wonder why a mass of people would want to stand on the pavement for hours on a wintry, November night watching vehicles decked out in colorful, costumed, dancing troops of adults and children.

  The smell of diesel from the generators mixed with the fried fat from the burger stands and saccharine hit of candy floss on sticks—it all stuck to the inside of my nostrils. The myriad lightbulbs screwed onto the carts in neat rows sometimes shorted out and were left reflecting the lights from other carts, dull and lifeless. Sometimes the spectators would clap as they passed, much the same way a paraded coffin is applauded as it makes its final journey.

  Floats had been worked on all year, stripped back from the previous year and re-kitted out with new sculptured fittings, repainted and sprayed, decorated by volunteers’ hands. All this work paraded in just a few days of the year, in the dark. The bystanders, mostly static, watched and sometimes pointed, clapped or just stared in awe at the butch men painted up like hairy geishas exposing more flesh than was decent, or the misjudged costumes implying sexual promiscuity among farmers and their livestock.

  On the night my family attended, Rhett was keen to get home so he could play with his new dartboard. He kept asking if it had finished and could we please go. My brother, so unlike me, always looking to the horizon.

  Your taxidermy creatures were not so different from the painted mounts of animals on those carnival floats, hyper-real but poised for action. Yet they were fake and did not feel the music as it bounced off their artificial frames and effused into the night air. They came to life through some other intervention.

  Mention of the carnival procession triggered some dark memory in my soul, as if the concentration of scenes had unleashed a furious recognition of what my life would become. It was a parade of dead souls, a slow-moving compulsion toward an ending where the lights would go out and we would return to darkness.

  There was no way we could go to the carnival this year, unless we swam across the moor and reached the town by the waterways. I was not disappointed. We had Christmas to look forward to after all. We had returned to ancient times, where the land had become a watery grave, but I had you, and you had me.

  We stood together in the attic room and looked out toward the river. For days now its swollen edges had been widening. Then, as soon as the land could no longer absorb any more water, its course was set. The river crept stealthily toward us after bursting its banks, coming a little nearer every day. I would measure its progression by landmarks that still poked above the rising flood water. Four fields, then three, then the nearest gatepost level with the big o
ld beech tree, or the top of the submerged road sign that warned of crossing deer.

  The mass evacuation of farm animals had set a frenzied news team upon the village. Farmers from across the country were spurred into action to help their kin save threatened livestock. Loaded up onto lorries and trailers, the cows and sheep and horses were shunted to makeshift barns and a big agricultural center near the higher ground of the motorway. Meanwhile, sandbags were positioned around the houses, possessions moved up a floor and provisions stockpiled so people would not have to make too many trips across the floodplain. We were becoming a ghost village set apart from the rest of the county.

  There was indignant horror that this could be allowed to happen again after the floods only a few years before. Campaigns for the drainage of the land, early warning systems, new pumps and the dredging of rivers did not stem this cruel deluge. Water would find its level, its way; it would always seek the easiest course. No amount of human intervention could stop it.

  Some people had already moved out of their homes, predicting the same devastation that had wreaked havoc before, but some resilient stalwarts stayed put. Penny was one of them. Speaking daily to the local and now national media who circled the floodplain in noisy helicopters. Angry clusters of villagers met in wellies on the puddled higher road with hastily drawn placards berating the government for ignoring the plight of residents who lived on their own doorstep. They blamed them for not doing enough, for sacrificing the few for the many, for putting money above lives, for not learning the lessons of the past.

  Meanwhile, you finished the moat and came into the house looking disheveled.

  “I’ve taken the dogs to Penny’s—she’s leaving the village,” you said. “There’s no sign of the water receding. In fact, I think we should prepare for the worst.” If Penny was leaving, it must have escalated more than I imagined.

  “What do you mean? What’s the worst?” I said. We were higher up on an elevated mound of land, and the water was only just at the edge of the village. We weren’t cut off. Yet.

  “Scarlett. It’s time to be realistic. We either sit it out here or we leave. In the next few days. Maybe tomorrow—”

  “No, I can’t leave,” the feeling of dread swam over me. I couldn’t go. There was no way I’d be able to cremate all those poor trapped creatures if we uprooted and left them to the floods. This was our haven. You were my foundation, I know, but I couldn’t bear to leave the house for fear I would be plagued forever. My temples began pulsing and I felt sick. Besides, if I left, how could Rhett find me if he decided to turn up? When he decided to turn up.

  “My darling,” you held me tightly, “it won’t be forever, just until this flood situation eases.”

  “But where would we go?” I know I sounded like a spoilt child.

  “There’s nothing to stop the flood if the other river bursts, and that one’s on red alert too. You saw how quickly that water moves.”

  “But—the moat, isn’t that enough to hold it back?”

  “It might be—I don’t know. It was bad before, but no one expected it to happen again so soon.”

  I looked out toward your workshop. The place where I had presented my dreams before you, not knowing they would turn into nightmares so quickly. Next to it, under the buddleia, was a small shrine of stones and beneath that our child, who came into this world already dead. Had he survived, would we be facing a different decision to protect our offspring, to put them first? But it was just the two of us. Would things have turned out differently if I had agreed to leave at that moment, left our home and the creatures who harangued my every waking moment and sometimes my sleeping moments too?

  That night, ferocious winter storms hit the South of England with such force that buildings were battered, roof tiles flung like frisbees, untethered objects were relentlessly smashed, glass shattered. Whirlwinds hurled leaves and rubbish and dirt at any permanent structure. The water that lay like a silk sheet on the Levels turned into a giant lake, waves breaking on its surface as if it remembered its tidal cousin, the sea. The wind was visible; it had form and substance like a raging angry bull charging full speed and goring all that got in its path. The sky hurled down arrows of ice and snow—thundersnow—as we watched in disbelief. It felt like punishment, like prophecy.

  We battened down the hatches. We secured all the windows and moved some of the irreplaceable antiques to the top floor of the house. We sat in the lounge with a pile of logs in the big basket against the wall and the old sofa as our refuge. The creatures seemed to implore me, wanting some answers to this tempest that they could not outrun. I turned away from them, tried to ignore their frustrated whimpers and groans.

  You had positioned the binoculars in the bedroom upstairs so we could look out across the moor toward the main road out of the village when we went to bed. I looked through the lenses and saw only chaos: swamped abandoned cars, the tops of trees reaching up through the muddy floodwaters, showing where the ditches used to be, the windows of houses staring like empty-eyed orphans left to fend for themselves The wind screamed through the house. It was angry, without definite rhythm, and turned my muscles into a knotted mess.

  Perhaps I had done too much over the past month. Purchasing all the Christmas goods and presents, storing the food in the freezer, sealing packets of dried food in plastic containers and placing high up in cupboards. We would not be hungry if, or when, we got stranded.

  We had been glued to the local news reports dominated by the flood. An aerial view of our house panned round, a helicopter shot. The house with the moat flashed across the bottom of the screen. We were called the eccentric couple who decided to face the flood. Some even likened you to Noah. They said you were creating a stationary ark for all the species you had stuffed, a sort of makeshift home filled with taxidermy animals. They kept showing a clip of Penny struggling to get all the dogs—our Labradors, her poodles and the labradoodle puppies—into her Range Rover. St. John was nowhere in sight.

  In bed I snuggled into you, burying my head beneath the covers so I created a sort of soft cocoon. Your snores were drowned out by gusts of raw wind buffeting anything in its path. You seemed unaffected by the raging storm. My body ached, more with each passing day, and even though my mouth was dry, I didn’t want to leave the bedroom to fetch a glass of water. Each squall of wind seemed to threaten the rafters with destruction. At one point I thought it would be better to sleep downstairs and risk waking in a pool of stinking flood water than stay upstairs and be wrenched from the house if the roof blew off like Dorothy’s in the Wizard of Oz. I could hear the trees bending and groaning, their branches like motorized whips in the wind. Even the trees sounded like rapid water.

  I heard glass breaking and tried to wake you. But you only stirred slightly and turned over. You must’ve been exhausted, all that physical labor and the flood taking its toll.

  I left you. That’s right. I got up and went to the bathroom. No, I went downstairs first to see what had broken. It was definitely glass, but there was no draught and the windows in the lounge were all shut. The wind died down to a steady howl, less gusty but still strong enough to worry me and make me tense.

  Then I saw the movement. I thought a bird had got in somehow, but now I know I was just kidding myself. I knew what it was. There was no mistaking its sleek black feathers and luminescent white fur. The crabbit was moving about, flapping its ungainly wings; it had knocked a glass vase from the shelf. It moved in circles like a wind-up toy, not sure of its bearings. I felt sick, watching the way it stumbled and flapped, too weighed down by the heavy haunches of the rabbit body. Its crow wings could never take flight again.

  A deep bovine cough startled me. I spun round to see the cowstrich lift its cow head at me, taking a tentative large-toed step on ostrich legs, tilting like an overloaded crane. A flick of its legs backwards made me bolt out of the room. I slammed the kitchen door, frantically trying to think, but the lack of sleep had dulled my wits. Now I had trapped myself in the kit
chen and there was no way to alert you. I scrabbled in the kitchen drawers and the cupboards. A knife—what use would that be? They were already dead. The force of their souls had reanimated them. I had to set them alight and cremate them fully. The touch of the match was not enough to free them. All it seemed to do was make them more agitated, as if I had given them a taste of freedom and cruelly snatched it away.

  I grabbed the shed key off the small hook and opened the outside door. A gust of sharp air penetrated through my dressing gown. I was barefoot so stepped into your big boots, still muddy and damp. Shuffling outside, holding my gown about my waist, I kept my head low to protect my face from the lashes of icy rain that sprayed me like bullets.

  I felt in my pocket for the matches. Inside the outhouse you kept a couple of spades, a fork, an ancient petrol mower, shelves full of rusty tools. I stepped over the unopened crates next to the bottles of wine covered in dust, some broken furniture, an old engine sticky with black oil, a used tractor tire. Spent cartridges from your shotgun littered the stone floor, and cardboard boxes of live rounds were stacked together next to plastic bottles of tomato feed and slug pellets.

  The roof rattled as the wind drove through it. The building groaned like an old ship. My flashlight lit up a bright red container on the floor. I shook it, gauged by its weight that it was half full, and opened the lid to sniff the fumes. This was my only option. To douse them with petrol and set them on fire. They’d be incinerated, their souls would be released, and we could go back to how we once were. Untroubled. This was all I needed, and while the adrenalin was rushing through me, I knew I had it in me to set them all alight. That was all I could think of, so I didn’t even hear you appear.

  “Scarlett?” I remember the tenderness in your voice as you faced me. “Scarlett?” You said my name again. We could only see by flashlight, but you looked from my face to the petrol can and back. “What are you doing out here?”