Bête

by Adam Roberts

  ‘How did you sign the lease?’ I asked. ‘Tie a pen to a hoof with a rubberband?’

  ‘You’ve not been keeping up with the law, Graham,’ said the second cow. Of course they knew who I was. It dawned belatedly on me, standing there, that – like Anne’s cat – all these cows had read my piece. That they probably regarded me as a murderer. Awkward. But then again: fuck it.

  ‘A human can sign on our behalf,’ said the other cow. ‘It’s just as much within our rights to hire a secretary as it is within yours. There are plenty of humans keen to help us. They feel …’ And the cow rolled his massy head in a great circle, searching for the word, or dissuading a fly from settling, one of the two.

  ‘Guilty,’ said the first cow. ‘Is how they feel. Some of them.’

  ‘Some,’ agreed the second cow, putting a deal of emphasis on the m.

  ‘To mmake ammends,’ said the first, and I began to suspect they were mocking me. Bovine mockery was not something liable to sweeten my mood.

  ‘People are happy to drink milk from canny cows, are they?’ I sneered. ‘They don’t think of such milk as a freaky fucking abomination?’

  ‘Ab-hominid, Graham?’ said Cow 1. ‘Hardly!’

  ‘It’s not wholly consistent of you, Graham,’ said Cow 2. ‘If you don’t believe loquacious beasts are truly people then presumably you think we are no different to the same cows whose milk you stole—’

  ‘Ahemmm!’ interjected Cow 1, jovially.

  ‘—for so many years! Contrariwise, if you find the thought of drinking the milk of a canny cow distasteful, perhaps you secretly do think of us as people.’

  ‘ “Contrariwise”?’ I said. ‘Fucking seriously?’

  ‘Would you put a pregnant human woman in the milking machine, Graham?’

  ‘Would you brand a human woman, Graham?’

  ‘Ah, but would you shoot a woman in the head, Graham?’

  I couldn’t stem the adrenaline come flushing up through my system. My teeth ground together. My eyesight went a little funny, as if focusing more intently. Had there been a weapon – a stick, say – to hand, I would have lashed out. I contemplated swearing at them, but of course that would only have gratified them. ‘Guns,’ I said, concentrating to keep my voice level. ‘Of course, they’ve yet to build one that fits comfortably into the bovine cleft hoof. And til that day …’ With deliberate ostentation of gesture, I ran my clever fingers through my regrowing beard.

  ‘I believe what Graham is implying,’ said Cow 1 to Cow 2, ‘is that the prehensibility of human hands would prove more advantageous than the quickness of human wits – in the event of a conflict.’

  ‘Since human wits are no match for ours, when we put our heads together,’ Cow 2 replied, ‘Graham had better pray he is right in that.’

  This was the point Albert came back and took me inside the farmhouse for a cup of tea. I unclenched on my anger a little inside – this, at least, was a space into which the cows did not come; though I was still fuming. ‘Got anything stronger?’ I asked, as he filled the kettle.

  ‘Bit early in the day for booze, don’t you think?’

  ‘Coffee, then.’

  He made two cups and sat across the table from me. For a while we sat in silence. Bert has never been a gabbler, and I was working to dampen down my anger, internally. A woman put her head round the door. ‘Is the tractor fuelled, Albie?’ she asked.

  ‘Tikrita, meet my dad,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, hi. Tractor?’

  ‘I’m doing it next.’

  ‘Cool.’ She withdrew her head.

  ‘Girlfriend?’ I asked.

  ‘Comrade,’ Al said, and his face, momently, carried that parents are so uncool expression which children, no matter how old they are, never quite lose. ‘There’s Jacob too – he’s having a nap upstairs, I think, after an early start.’

  ‘And the cows actually own the farm?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Did you sign the lease documentation for them?’

  ‘Dad, don’t be antediluvian. There are such things are electronic signatures, you know.’

  ‘The cows outside,’ I insisted, ‘said they had human secretaries.’

  ‘I think they might have been pulling your leg.’ His big, pale, moony face looked across at me.

  I grunted. ‘They pulled my leg. I pulled theirs too, mind. And they’ve more legs than I.’

  Nothing. Tumbleweed might as well have rolled between us.

  ‘So,’ I said, after a long pause. ‘And all of you working for no wage?’

  ‘Bed and board,’ said Albert. But defensively, and his posture stiffened.

  ‘Look up slavery in a dictionary app,’ I said. ‘When you’ve a moment.’

  ‘A little rich for a human being to try and claim the moral high ground on the matter of slavery, don’t you think?’ he replied. ‘Given how we have treated the natural world for four hundred thousand years.’

  ‘So,’ I said, sitting back. ‘You’ll drive a tractor for these cows, since they’re incapable of driving a tractor themselves. And that’ll make amends for humanity raping Mother Earth for all those millennia?’

  Albert put the knuckle of his right thumb between his lips and chewed it, mildly. ‘I can only do what I can do, Dad,’ he said shortly. ‘But I can at least do that – or I guess I could do nothing. But doing nothing doesn’t sit well with my conscience. You know?’

  ‘You’re implying,’ I said, in a bristly voice, ‘that I am doing nothing?’

  ‘As ever, Dad, I’ve honestly no idea what you’re doing.’

  This meeting wasn’t going as well as I might have liked. I imagined Jen sitting at the table with us; she would not be pleased. I tried – genuinely – to rein in my rage. But that’s not such an easy thing.

  ‘I’m your father,’ I said. ‘I’m concerned for you. You had a good job – you left. It’s a fine thing to be concerned for the environment, and all. But you have to look out for yourself, too.’

  ‘Listen to you!’ Albert said, mildly enough. ‘You sound like you’re a hundred years old! The environment? Wake up, Dad.’

  ‘Working for cows?’ I retorted.

  ‘I might have thought you’d be pleased,’ he returned. ‘Going into the family business.’

  ‘Get your own farm and I’ll dance a fucking jig in the driveway,’ I returned. My voice may have grown louder than was entirely compatible with pleasant conversational interchange. At any rate, Tikrita put her head round the doorway again. ‘All tickety-boo?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure,’ said Albert. ‘Dad was just leaving. Weren’t you, Dad? Do try not to shoot any of the owners in the head on the way out, yeah?’

  ‘I think,’ I said, feeling the grip of The Stubborn tight upon my soul, ‘that I’ll sit here and finish my coffee before I go.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ Bert said, getting up. ‘You always do.’

  Alone in the kitchen I ran my gaze over the fixtures and fittings. Nothing was dirty, or tattered, but none of it was very expensive-looking either. There was a mackerel pattern of grime on the glass of the windows. The late autumn light caught on cobwebs in the coign of wall and ceiling. Stone flags, with one rush mat in the middle of the floor. How old was this farmhouse? Centuries old. Hundreds of years of human occupation, useful business, and now it was the legal property of its livestock.

  I went through to the hall. Beyond an open door I saw a room filled with computing equipment – state-of-the-art stuff, spread and stacked across a big desk and plugged into a shock-break unit. It struck me as a lot of processing power for a small dairy farm, but I was too cross, and proud, to think more about it.

  What Anne told me

  Now I’m going to tell you what happened with Anne. During the time over which the following events unfolded – two years, give or – I continued with the rhythm into which my life had fallen. There were no actual jobs to be had. To be precise, there were old-style jobs in the cities, whither most of the population had
gone. I have, in my life, done time in the cities, and I found the experience exactly as carceral as the phrase done time implies. The extra crowds, and the general atmosphere of decaying general economy, would not make the experience any more bearable. It wasn’t a resources problem, I think. The difficulty has always been: proliferation of people and kit as against the power to order, distribute and control that kit. Every chip added a new citizen to the population, but the majority of these hybrid creatures were cats, dogs – pets – and unproductive in terms of the larger economy.

  Hell is other people counts double for city people.

  At any rate, I continued my peripatetic life, butchering animals where I could, living more or less rough, circling back round to hot showers and a comfortable bed with Anne regularly enough. The honest truth is that, as gigs became harder to find, I became less assiduous about seeking work out.

  I watched vogues come and go. Consortia of animals hired teams of top-dollar lawyers to try and extend the legal rights of animals. A petition was presented to Parliament with a million human and nine hundred thousand bestial signatures upon it, the twelve-point charter. Nine hundred thousand! That must have been every single bête in the land. But they were always good at organizing themselves. Give them that. I don’t recall all twelve points of the Great Animal Charter, but I know that the right to vote, to work, the right to welfare benefits and the creation of a set number of specifically animal MPs and MEPs was part of it. It was never going to happen, of course. I don’t suppose the animals believed it would pass; their intention was to provoke dissension amongst humanity.

  Oh, there was plenty of that.

  I didn’t follow all the ins and outs; but it wasn’t possible to avoid hearing about the larger debates. People kept talking and talking. I remember one winter evening when I stayed in a country pub – rooms were €40, but the landlady permitted people to sleep on the saloon benches for a fiver. She even provided clean blankets. Everybody was talking about the likelihood of animal MPs. Outside, the winter threw hailstones at the windows like ballbearings; and the screen of the heater glowed orange. ‘The Emperor Nero made his horse a senator,’ said one old geezer with a dented face, stroking the cat in his lap – a dumb cat, I’m glad to say. The horse-senator was often invoked, back then. ‘That was Caligula,’ I corrected him. My pedantry displeased him and he scowled so hard it looked like he’d accidentally jammed his toe in a live electrical socket. ‘People have affection for animals,’ said the landlady. ‘But these aren’t animals. They are cyborgs. If the news talked of cyborg MPs people wouldn’t be keen.’ The man with the dumb cat lifted his beer glass with his left hand and began a long disquisition on the way the adaptive AI had evolved over its use in animals, to meld with the animal nature of the beasts. These canny bêtes were more than just phone-smart or computer-smart, he insisted; they were actually a new breed of animal-smart. I stopped listening.

  That winter was the first of a series of very cold ones. I remember hiking away from that pub the following morning through hip-deep snow, rough grained, scaldingly cold. Fewer and fewer people could afford to run private cars, and councils rarely bothered with snow ploughs except on mass transit routes, so it took me all morning to get four miles down the road to the next village. The sky was bright white-blue and my breath came out of my mouth in great feathery shapes. Overhead crows circled, but I couldn’t tell if they were capable of speech. Above them, zeps floated as placid and slow as clouds.

  I enquired at the village, but nobody had any work for me.

  Another day and I got to Avebury. All the fields were emulsion white. The blue-purple upstrokes of the old standing stones, each topped with a foreskin of snow, stood out starkly. I could hear the rumble of traffic from a long way off, and eventually I reached a rise that looked down upon the A4. It was one of the trunk roads deemed worth ploughing, and traffic ran up and down it – buses and trucks, mostly, running on glittering, crunchy tracks of salt.

  Tired of walking, and hungry, I caught a bus to Cherhill. Anne did not look surprised to see me. ‘Come in,’ she said, deadpan.

  ‘I need a place to stay,’ I said, stamping snow off my boots and coming inside. ‘But work’s been thin. I can’t afford €50 a night.’

  ‘How comical you are,’ she said in a flat voice.

  To warm me up she suggested a hot bath. She left me to soak alone for a quarter-hour; but then joined me in the bathroom. She made me stand up like a little kid and washed me all over with sponge. It was an old-fashioned bath, with metal legs and paws, and I sat on its edge with my feet on the floor. She took off everything from the waist down and straddled my lap. Anne was facing it with her feet in the water. Things were going well until she leaned away from me in a moment of increasing ecstasy. I was strong enough to stop her toppling backwards, my arms in the small of her back, but the centre of gravity slipped beyond some physics diagram tipping point. Even though the bath was half full of water it abruptly swivelled on its two near legs and angled. I felt the lurch in my gut, and a spurt of panic that the whole kit-and-kaboodle was about to topple on its side, spilling water everywhere. Then, two things, distinct in my memory: the black streak of the cat, Cincinnatus, exiting the bathroom rapidly; and the blissed-out expression on Anne’s face, her arms wide, her head back, her breasts spilling over the sides of her torso, left and right, like Dalí clocks.

  I lurched back, like a sailor on one of those Olympic yachts, the kind that stands on its side in the water counterbalanced by its leaning crew. The metal paws of the bath squealed on the lino, and the water sloshed up my back. For a moment everything hung in Zen-like balance. Then the liquid content of the bath swung in its pendulum back again, and the centre of gravity moved the millimetres necessary for the whole system to clatter noisily back onto four legs. Anne clutched me close, gasping.

  We dried one another and went through to the bedroom where, at her insistence, she finished me off with her mouth, refusing any further erotic engagement of her own. ‘If I come twice,’ she reminded me, before kneeling before me, ‘I’ll sleep the rest of the day.’

  ‘No kidding,’ I said.

  Afterwards we had some early supper, and then curled up together on the settee with a drink and watched television. I took it for granted, I suppose, that there were no guests. Indeed, looking back, I visited that house a dozen times and never saw a guest. Asking Anne about it would, I suppose, have seemed to me tantamount to mocking her for the lack of her success. So I never asked.

  We watched the news. I remember a report about the first outbreaks of what we would later come to know as scleritis in Wales and the North-West, but that may be my memory playing tricks with me. There were probably reports related to the increased shortages of energy, and the problems of increased population density in the cities, since people who couldn’t afford to commute to work had done the only other thing they could, and moved closer to the centres of employment. And reports about the backlash against animal rights; or else reports of increasing political ground being gained by supporters of animal rights – one of the two. There was always one or other such report on the news; it’s one reason why I stopped watching it. It must have been around that time that I saw an interview with Nick Amnosadikos. ‘What the government needs to understand,’ he said, ‘is that we stand on the threshold of a brilliant opportunity – to reverse the economic collapse of the last decades. Once the canny beasts are granted full citizenship they can be taxed! Why deny the contribution they can make to European productivity? Here is the key to a renewal of prosperity: instead of treating them like second-class citizens, integrate them fully into society.’

  All that.

  Cincinnatus insinuated itself onto Anne’s lap, displacing me. I refilled my whisky glass and moved myself, a little petulantly, to the far end of the sofa. ‘You’d be happy to pay taxes, cat?’ I asked.

  ‘A lot would have to change,’ said the feline, silkily, ‘for that to become a viable state of affairs.’


  On screen, Amnosadikos was patting the head of his dog, which animal was explaining to camera (in that slow, mumbly way dogs have) how eager it was to make regular payments to His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, in return for such trivial items as a passport and the right to work. ‘And what kind of work can a dog do?’ asked the interviewer, out of shot. The dog panted excitedly, its great red tongue hanging out of its mouth like an untucked shirt-tail. ‘Lots!’ he barked, though it sounded more like loss. ‘There are lots of jobs dogs could do really well!’ I understood this sentence only because the TV screen provided subtitles.

  ‘Dogs,’ said Cincinnatus scornfully. ‘Their mouths just haven’t the flexibility they need to articulate clearly.’

  ‘Not like you, my pretty,’ said Anne, and scratched behind the cat’s ears. ‘You speak so very clearly and well, don’t you, my darling one?’ I double-took, as the phrase goes. Her voice sounded so unlike the beautifully restrained level human tone she used with me. She came within (if you’ll pardon the phrase) a whisker of ootchy-kootchy.

  ‘The race is not always to the swift; though the flight may be,’ replied the cat.

  ‘Where do you get these from? Have you downloaded a Chinese cookie app?’

  ‘Nasty Graham,’ purred Cincinnatus, ‘thinks I’m a machine, instead of my mistress’s warm and loving familiar.’ It pressed its head under Anne’s chin, and she glowered at me.

  The row that followed probably didn’t happen that time – it probably happened earlier, say the fourth or fifth time I stayed with her. But it certainly happened, and I’ll going to fold it in here; because that evening is where my memory locates it. It is, you might say, an exemplary row. It epitomized our differences.

  We settled, as older people will, into a routine. This was not something we negotiated verbally, or concerning which we reached any formal agreement. The routine punctuated the year. I stayed a week, and then moved on – took the bus, or walked, and picked up work here and there as a butcher. But though my circuit still took me many weeks I now had a destination towards which I was working, and from which I could again depart. My alpha-omega. I butchered three lambs so that a synagogue in Reading could celebrate Passover properly; and I butchered a cow in Headingley; and I butchered eleven pigs in Birmingham that a retirement club had been feeding on scraps in a shed. All dumb beasts; although I also took money to kill, ‘humanely’, a talking dog whose head was swallowed by a Quatermassy lump of tumorous flesh. I chatted with people; sometimes they put me up; sometimes I paid for the cheapest doss; sometimes I cleared myself a coffin-sized patch of ground of flints and unrolled my one-man tent in a copse. But first wistfully, and then actively, and finally with that pain of desire that speaks to stronger attachment, I looked forward to returning to Cherhill.