by Adam Roberts
Preacherman’s name used to be Jazon – with a ‘z’, the relict of some forgotten popstar that his mum had fancied when he was still in utero. He confided as much to me one evening when we sat in somebody else’s kitchen drinking cold spiced rum out of sherry glasses. He went by Jason in the world of work, he said; but Jazon was on all the databases. Then he saw the light, and gave up everything to work for Mother Nature. When I first met him Preacherman talked about Mother Nature a lot; and the impression I gained was that whilst he conceded she might inflict famine and the ice-blast and the cold upon humanity, he was at least confident She would never lumber a person with a schoolyard-taunt-inducing ‘z’ in the middle of their name and so was to be preferred to any actual human/biological mothers who might be about the place. Fair enough, I said. I’ve a lot of respect for Mother Nature. I worked a farm for two decades, and feel I know her well. And one of her finest and noblest and redeemingest features is – she doesn’t fucking speak.
I mention Preacherman because I met up with him again recently in Reading. We’re both much older now, of course; although he was recognizably the same old Preacherman. I’ll come back to that. After we met up again, we went for a walk together. That walk is important. (Is that the riddle, you want to know? Is it Oedipal, this walk? Were walking sticks involved? How many legs? I’ll come back to that.) He was the same old Preacherman, though balder and crankier.
When I first knew him, he still had all his hair both above and below his face. He had passed through the belly of the Green beast and come out the other side. ‘They wanted me for my programming skills,’ he told me. ‘But they never listened to me.’
Why, Jazon? What did you tell them, that they ought to have listened?
‘I told them people would get fed up with listening to animals talking of nothing but Green propaganda. You know what they said to me? They said: why, what else would the animals say to humankind, Preacherman? You think maybe they would speak words of kindness for our hundreds of thousands of years of exploitation and slaughter? Of course they’re angry! We’re just giving them a voice to voice their anger.’
A fair point, Preach?
‘No way fair,’ said Preacherman, dividing his beard into two portions, taking one in each hand and tugging them into a Λ. ‘I said, people are gonna get urined-off at this. We need to vary the algorithms. Have cats say how much they love being stroked, that sort of thing. Get parrots flying around shouting, oyed-unno, traffic reports. Get people used to the idea of blatant bêtes. Once they get used to them, then we can work to realize their true potential.’
True potential?
‘They’re not really talking, I told them,’ said Preacher. ‘You do realize that, don’t you?’
Of course I do.
‘Not you: I’m talking to them. I’m telling you what I told them. I told them, it’s a clever algorithm, sure, but it’s the chip you’re talking to.’
If the lion could talk, Preach, we would not be able to understand it.
‘Exact-cisely. What we need to do, I told them, is work on augmenting the natural animal capacity for mentation. Oh they didn’t like this! A crazy set of maternal copulators, those Greens. Closed minds, the lot of them. Faith, not proof. It’s easy to believe the dog is talking to you, if you want to believe the dog is talking to you. And after all, it doesn’t really matter if people understand what the chip means, or not. That’s not what matters.’
What does really matter?
‘What matters,’ said Preach, ‘is that humankind leaves the natural world alone.’
After venting his anger, he would mellow, and talk in more positive terms about the Greens, and about the world. Preacherman would settle himself down, his belly filled with bean casserole and wine, and smoke a roll-up cigar. Not a roll-up cigarette, but a cigar of his own manufacture: a turd-shaped monstrosity whose smoke smelled of gangrene and scorched tyres. ‘Fools, not knaves,’ he would say. ‘Kings Stork, not Kings Log. Or is that not the correct plural?’
We had this conversation several times. Plurals are not my natural area of expertise, Preach, I would say. Not true, though. Language is a field. Farmers know how to work fields.
‘They mean well,’ Preach said. ‘The worst I’d say of them is – they don’t know their backside from their elbow. And factions? Oh, ho! Oh ho, factions! More splinter groups than a—’ And he’d wave a hand vaguely a few inches above his horizontal chest. ‘Wood. Than a piece of wood. Sixty per cent are Moral Force Greensters. Of the remaining forty, not all are mad-dog types.’ And he chortled. ‘I’d get a telling-off at caucus meets for using that sort of phrase. Mad dog? Unreconstructed doggism! ’ Puff, puff. ‘But you don’t need very many. If we’d stopped at giving the ruminants speech it would have been fine. But giving the predators speech – that was asking for trouble. Foxes and rats and wolves.’
Dangerous, I would agree, meditatively.
‘I’ve seen the footage – from your farm. The security camera footage. That rat!’
It’s not my farm any more. This, glumly said.
‘I’ve read your piece, too.’
It was all over the web.
‘You say that thing at the end: you say, rats are chewers, you’re right, there.’ Puff, puff. ‘They would never just swallow these chips, they’d chew it to crumbs. Or maybe not. Ha!’
Ha?
‘You ever seen one of these chips?’
No.
‘From your account, you’d think they were an, I don’t know, 1970s silicon chip the size of a postage stamp.’
What – rice-grain sized?
‘Much smaller. Smaller – than – that! Small enough not to slip into the rat’s stomach, but to adhere to the roof of its little ratty mouth and it not even notice. Not that it matters.’
Oh, it doesn’t matter now? This, in the tone of voice that implies a raised eyebrow.
‘It’s self-limiting. I mean, obviously it matters. It’s been a step change for humanity. But – you know. In the long term. Long term.’
Tell me about the long term.
‘In the long term it will correct itself. It’s not like we’ve altered the animal genome. This isn’t something that can be passed down the genius gene-line, from parent to child. When we grow tired of hearing a clever machine inside kitty purring human words to us, we’ll stop disseminating the chips and the whole sorry phenomenon will die out.’
Some people will never get tired of disseminating it. Some people love the talking of the pets.
‘Yeah,’ Preacher Jazon agreed, closing his eyes and breathing one long ectoplasmic tentacle of smoke. ‘But most will. The whole animal kingdom talking – that’s not a Narnian dream – enough people will stay interested in – long enough – to keep seeding – the environment with—’
But he had drifted off to sleep.
When the supply of traditional-style jobs ran dry, Preach and I fell in together. We travelled, begging couches to sleep upon, or making do with sheds and barns and abandoned cars. So many abandoned cars! Once people had moved incessantly, long distances, short distances, roads chocka day and night. Children trapped in the back of the car for whole days in conditions no prison would be legally permitted to sanction for its prisoners. Cars were totems, and we loved them. Then we woke up one morning and were all interconnected digitally and didn’t need to travel; and blimps delivered cargo much more cheaply and effectively; and energy shot up in price, and – suddenly – only popstars and billionaires ran cars. There was a year and more during which the police cracked down upon people abandoning their cars in the cities – they’re easily traceable, cars. So folk drove them many miles away into the middle of forests or moorland and abandoned them there. It was expensive and onerous, retrieving these hulks; and they soon became rusted and overgrown and mostly were left where they were. Havens of a sort, in our tramp-life. Especially when it was very cold, or very wet, we could sit in the back of an old Transit, Marmite-brown with rust and decked with streamers of ivy,
and peer out into the woodland air as it filled with rain and white noise. We would chew jerky, or wild onions, and drink what firewater we had, and talk about things. Having worked a farm for decades I was accustomed to solitude. Jazon found it harder. He kept an iSlate, and would watch rubbish TV on its foxed screen. In the winter its power would run down before the end of his show, and he would curse in that weirdly half-hearted way he had. Urine had lodged in his brain as a more intense profanity than fuck, anus carried much more transgressive potency for him than arse. ‘Come out from the clouds you anus sun!’ he would shout. ‘Charge my urinous iSlate battery!’ In the summer he often fell asleep with the rectangle shimmering with light and inanities coming out of the speaker.
There were lots of people like us. It’s the late middle-aged, and especially the men, who find it hardest to adjust when the whole economy has a conniption fit and barks back into life according to a whole new logic. And – well, is that because they are any less loved? Or is it only the toxicity of pride that makes them misfits? I’m a skilled and experienced executive worker, the Man sayeth. I’ll not take your job at a supermarket checkout! Maybe that’s it. I’m not angling for pity. Personally I’ve never seen the point of that kind of pride. But then, I was in a different situation to Preacherman. He had spent decades acquiring computer programming skills, only to find the discipline had metamorphosed out of all recognition in a matter of months. Now a child of ten could top anything he had to offer, pretty much. Moore’s law: the encheapening of processing power. A single cotton bud (two hundred for a euro) could analyse your ear wax and test the integrity of your eardrum, and download a spreadsheet wirelessly to your tab. There was more computing power in a sheet of toilet tissue (lighting up those numbers with cholesterol and likelihood of six common illnesses after you’d wiped your arse with it) than had been available to NASA during the entire Apollo programme. Dataseeds were injected into trees to turn each leaf into a weather-and-pollution analyst. When Jen was a baby, non-chipped nappies were actually more expensive than chipped ones (I’ve read the pooh! baby needs spinach! baby needs Calpol!) because demand was so low they had to be made in a specialist facility. When Jazon was young, he’d say bitterly, computing happened on ‘laptops’ that cost €100 – or more! – some of them. It was slow and labour-intensive. Then Jazon grew middle-aged and suddenly it changed. He was the medieval monk who had spent a lifetime mastering calligraphy and looked up to see a billion kids dabbling at their screens and conjuring amazing edifices of programming via systems wholly intuitive and adaptable.
So Preacherman was full of what the philosophers call ressentiment. He blamed society as a whole for letting him down. A century ago he would have become a communist or a hippy or an anarchist. Nowadays environmentalism is the only game in town, and all the righteous rage of the young filters through it. So he took his skills, such as they were, to the Greens. When I met him he was in a period of disillusionment. We tramped about the countryside. We slept rough. The rain came down through the trees like the whole forest was collapsing on our heads. We found an old van, once smooth and white, now sharkskin-rough and the colour of coffee. We broke the back lock with a rock and spent the night in the back.
In the morning the rain had stopped. A single blackbird flew meanderingly between the trees, like a lost glove blown on a strong wind.
‘Where will it all end, eh?’ Preach asked, meditatively. ‘What’s it all coming to?’
‘It’s going the same way it’s always been going,’ I told him.
‘But quicker. Yeah? You want to know what the gossip was, in the highest echelons of the Greens?’
‘You’ll tell me, whether I want to know or not.’
‘Plague,’ he said. ‘Gene-twerked. Lab-made. Miniature fingers rattling the Gs and Cs and As and Ts on the DNA spiral like beads on an abacus.’
‘Plague,’ I said, in a what-bollocks-you-speak tone of voice.
‘No need to be so dismissive, Graham,’ he said. ‘I’m serious. Scarring – scar tissue. It’s the Achilles heel. You know? Without the ability to clot and scar we’d drop down dead. But think what happens if your eyes scar over! Your lungs! They developed it for the Great War that didn’t come. It is waiting to be released. It’ll be the end times. Just think.’
‘All I can think at the moment,’ I told him, ‘is how hungry I am.’
We walked from town to town, and I offered my services as a butcher. My pool of customers was small, and ageing, but it held steady for a while. Of course, the cultural discourse of ‘butcher’ is now perfectly negative. Concentration camps, drone-killing-fields, slaughter as the idiom of hell. Long gone, the idea of jolly fat men in stripy aprons offering you a necklace of turd-shaped sausages, bright pink and promising deliciousness. But butchering is a skill, and cannot be acquired overnight. The killing and butchering of animals is not something into which Moore’s law can make any inroads.
So we went from town to town. I say I offered my services, but mostly it was Preacherman who had the contacts, and the social skills; who could insinuate his way into conversations and present me, with my skill set, to interested parties. At the beginning we got paid in money; later we tended to get paid in kind. I liked this less, since I’ve never been sentimental about meat – Vitameat is perfectly OK by me, so long as my belly is filled. But it was round about this time that Preacherman converted officially to that Christ the Carnivore cult, and for him a steak became a sacramental business. He expatiated at length about just how many times eating flesh is mentioned in the Bible.
Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything [Genesis 9:3].
As for the one who is weak in faith, welcome him, but not to quarrel over opinions. One person believes he may eat anything, while the weak person eats only vegetables [Romans 14:1-2].
For you are a people holy to the Lord your God, and the Lord has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. These are the animals you may eat: the ox, the sheep, the goat, the deer, the gazelle, the roebuck, the wild goat, the ibex, the antelope, and the sheep [Deuteronomy 14:2-5].
‘It’s Christ’s flesh we eat every Sunday,’ he told me.
‘If it’s all the same with you,’ I told him. ‘I’ll stick with my fucking croissant.’
‘Cross, you see?’ he said, gloatingly. I hated it when he got into one of these hyper-pious moods. ‘There’s no getting away from it! Jews and Muslims are defined religiously by what they don’t eat, pork, shellfish, whatevs. Only Christianity is defined – sacramentally defined – by what we do eat. More than that, the death of Christ makes carnivores of the faithful. Vegetarianism is Hitleran. Satan is a vegetarian!’
‘Think of all that half-digested meat sliding slowly through your viscera, though,’ I said to him. ‘Like the corpse of a giant slug. Slimy with its own decay.’
‘Hypocrite,’ he said. ‘I call you hypocrite,’ he added, in a simpering explainy voice, ‘because you eat meat too, see.’
‘Omnivore, me,’ I returned. ‘Variety is the spice of life.’
‘Space,’ he corrected.
‘Spice of life,’ I insisted, ‘is the phrase.’
‘Really? I always thought it was variety is the space of life. Like, it gives you room to move and stretch yourself. Doesn’t that make more sense? As a phrase, I mean? Why would you add spice to life? Are you going to put it in a mince pie?’ And he laughed at his own words. I didn’t.
Some weeks we ate well, and slept indoors. Other weeks we ate little, and slept outdoors. In the summer it didn’t matter so much.
We tramped down to the coast. The weather was good. We could tell we had entered the town proper when the advert billboards started talking to us as we walked past.
‘I am an African,’ Jazon told me, one afternoon, as we sat looking out to sea – Bournemouth, the southernmost stop on our peregrinations. ‘Hunting bison on the African
savannah – it’s in my blood.’
‘I thought you were from Streatham?’
He gave me a scornful look. Then he said: ‘Not bison, wait up. They’re America – yeah?’
‘I think so.’
‘Giraffe. Let’s say. Do humans eat giraffe? Lots of meat on a giraffe, I’d guess.’
‘More on an elephant.’
‘I feel my ancestors in my blood,’ he told me, stretching out his arms. ‘You could feel the same, if you emptied your mind of its mortal dream.’
‘My ancestors lived hereabouts,’ I said, indicating the coastline with my chin. ‘Or a little further west.’ There was a stink of seaweed and salty ozone. The tide was out, which meant that the old harbour and seafront road were once again underneath sky, although choked and clogged with bladderwrack and kelp. The swish and the swash of the waves. The low grumble of wind making the canvas of awnings snap and flutter behind us. The sun warmed my face. ‘That I’m still here suggests to me that what’s in my blood is a whole lot of inertia.’
Seagulls swept through the sky above us, mocking our earthbound limitations. ‘Ha,’ they hooted at us. ‘Weak! weak! weak! weak! weak!’
‘The problem,’ Preacherman said, ‘is that nobody is ringfencing the old animals, the dumb ones. They should put a big fence around the New Forest, or something, and fill the space with old-style beasts. They could make a fortune licensing hunting trips.’
Nobody was hunting any more. I looked back on my days working for Pro-Hunt with that nostalgia we reserve for periods of our life that seem more attractive in retrospect than they actually felt like at the time. Occasionally, individuals would make a civil disobedience point of killing an animal without checking in advance whether they were canny or not, and would then try to parley the Russian roulette law-enforcement post-mortem into publicity for their sect, or cause, or whatever. But a whole new generation was growing to adulthood for whom the idea of killing an animal was just bizarre. The term ‘Vatmeat’, originally derogatory and dismissive, had lost all negative connotations. As soon kill an animal for its meat as rip up a book to get writing paper, was how the youngsters saw matters.
