Bête

by Adam Roberts

  I handed the tab back to him. ‘I hate to sound like a troll,’ I told him, ‘but: so?’

  ‘So? How can you say so?’

  ‘You’re right. What I should have said, was: fucking so?’

  ‘But isn’t it true? Doesn’t the truth of it chime with your heart, Dad?’

  ‘The only thing that chimes with my fucking heart, Dad,’ I replied, as level-voiced as I could manage, ‘is your man’s raging antro, anthy,’ but I was tired and grief-stricken; and the words were tripping over my own lips. I took a breath. ‘Anthropomorphism of your man’s argument. War? War is a human notion. Only humans wage war. So, what – if human imperialism is wrong, then tell me why applying human concepts like war to animals isn’t more human imperialism?’

  ‘Because,’ he replied, his eyes glinting, ‘suffering is suffering, man. Pain is pain, man. War, yeah, maybe that’s a human conscript—’

  ‘Construct,’ I corrected.

  He didn’t miss a beat: ‘Struct, maybe it is, but pain is universal. We gotta take responsibility when we cause pain. We gotta – or what are we?’

  ‘What is that,’ I said. ‘Twenty years old? That piece of prose you showed me, I mean. Eternal Treblinka of the Spotless Soul. Thirty years old? We have wrecked the wild places where they once made their homes. Take a walk in the countryside!’ What with the depression and the bêtes – and the sclery, but I didn’t know about that yet – human beings had fled the countryside. ‘The cities are more crowded than ever, and whole villages are deserted – I’ve spent three years tramping the countryside moving from job to job and I’ve met a lot of beasts, though: loquacious bêtes and otherwise. Speciesism more deeply embedded within us even than sexism? Bollocks. Sexism engages male brains because they want to reduce the complexity of female existence to something simple, to turn women into instruments for their own desires, and for that reason sexism is protean, as complex as human interactivity. Speciesism? Speciesism is just another way of saying I like the taste of bacon.’

  ‘You’re wrong, Dad,’ he sang. ‘Wrong! If you listened to the animals you’d understand. They tell you. Straight from the horse’s mouth!’

  ‘Jesus, Albie. Animals aren’t talking. Nature has not woken up to language. What’s happened is we created an echo chamber, that’s all. It was no doubt inevitable, as soon as we invented computers. We invent computers and then try to make them think in our image. We tried the same with animals for thousands of years, from dressing up dogs in little jackets and trousers and gifting babbies with teddy bears, on up to myths and legends and stories of werewolves and walking fucking trees. We tried, but it all stayed in the realm of story because that’s all it was – a story. Made up. We tried to remake nature in our image and nature declined. But computing! Computing was ours from the get-go, ours to mould.’

  ‘It’s like you haven’t even talked to them!’

  ‘Them?’

  ‘The animals! It’s no echo chamber. I talk to the animals; they talk to me. You think I can’t tell the difference between talking to somebody else and talking to myself, like some nutter would?’

  ‘You’re not getting my point,’ I said, becoming heated. ‘You’re not understanding. Talk is the problem. Talk is what humans do – not what animals do. It’s like some super-spider took charge of the world and modified all the other animals so that they shat silk strands and wove webs with the stuff. The world would be clotted with webs, and every animal would be spiderlike. It wouldn’t be nature discovering its fucking inner spiderness – it would be imposition, exactly the same kind of imposition. Can you not see that? Talk is what we have, what makes us distinctive. Talk to us is what webs are to a spider, or speed to a gazelle.’

  ‘Talk is how we bring what’s inside our minds into the outside world,’ Albie said. ‘Animals have feelings and thoughts. Animals have always had feelings and thoughts – it’s just that only now have they been able to bring them out.’

  ‘It’s not the animals that are doing the talking,’ I insisted.

  ‘But that’s where you’re wrong! I was speaking to a guy who’s in chip development. He says the new type of chip is designed to meld with the corpus callosum, and synthesize a combined consciousness out of the animal’s brain function and the—’

  ‘Albie, I don’t care,’ I told him. ‘I don’t care at all. The amount I care is: not at all.’

  We did not part on good terms. We did not hug (but then, we had never hugged). We did not exchange hopeful or cordial words. He expressed what was in his heart, which is that he didn’t care to see me again. I told him to go marry a goat. Marry may not have been the particular verb I used, now I come to think of it.

  The council official coughed nervously. He had come back to tell us that the conveyor had been fixed, and that the cremation had begun, and that he was very sorry for our loss. Albie rushed past him, and hurried away.

  I got up and walked slowly through the main entrance. The spring sky was as blue as an Electric Light Orchestra song. It smelled fresh. Birdsong, of the old-fashioned beautiful gibberish kind, was everywhere. I took consolation in the fact that this day, this glorious day, Anne’s cancer was finally and irrevocably beaten, since every last cell of it was superheated and turned to ashes and dust in the council cremation incinerator. Too late for her. I stood outside and swore at the chimney, at the little black sparkles in the column of smoke going into the blue sky. Those little cinders had taken Anne away, as well. Since Albie had gone off in a temper, and since the council official had shaken my hand, gloomily, and gone back to his desk, I was alone. There was nobody to hear my swearing.

  Anne’s hotel had already been the subject of a legal challenge, prompted by whichever Health Security Incorporated had tried to evict her and repossess it to defray treatments costs. Anne, with her characteristic stubbornness, had refused to go. When a bailiff had called, she had invited him to evict her, warning him that should he cause her any injury in the process (and she was, she reminded him, suffering from cancer) she would seek to be financially recompensed from him personally, and not his employers – pursuing such recompense aggressively through the courts. She even brought out her iSlate and showed him the relevant statue that said as much. He left her in peace. No such strategy was available to her when the ultimate bailiff, Death, came. The hotel passed to the company.

  Since I was enough of a throwback not to own an iSlate, HSI were unable to reach me by the usual means, and had to send actual human beings. I had, had I not, been in a relationship with Mrs Grigson immediately prior to her death? I loved her, I told them, and my voice was as creaky as a cricket in the grass, as low as the hum of a thermostat. I loved her. In that ‘d’ was a whole cosmos of misery. Pursuant to the outstanding debts incurred by the party aforetomentioned, they said. Considering the common-law partnership established by the previously established relationship, they said. ‘Excuse me for interrupting,’ I told them. ‘But I have no money.’ In fact I had a chip in my boot with a few hundred euros upon it, but I wasn’t about to tell them about that. ‘By all means take me to court, but I own not house, car nor any other assets.’

  ‘Car?’ said one of them in disbelief, as if the possibility that I might own such a rock-star or plutocrat machine had so much as crossed his mind.

  ‘Nevertheless, Graham,’ said another one, in what he may have believed was a friendly tone.

  ‘Don’t call me Graham,’ I replied.

  He put up one hand, palm towards me, as if conceding my objection, as if apologizing for his slip. I say: as if, for he went on: ‘The thing is we’re legally obliged to have a name to put down as liable for the outstanding debts, and your name, Graham, is the one that—’

  After I punched him he sat his arse down on the pavement, holding both hands to his face and repeating, ‘But that’s my nose!’ and ‘It’s my nose’ in a wailing voice, as if he had for the first time been made aware of his possession of that particular facial appendage. The other feller stepped back, and
brought out a small lipstick-shaped object that I assume was a taser. But I wasn’t going to fight. Hitting the first guy hadn’t made me feel better. I turned and walked away.

  I walked quickly, and with a weird martinet precision to my steps, along the road. People stepped to the side. The buses swished by on their fat tyres, and their engines hummed grahammm and gave voice to their uncertainty as to the advisability of my antics with long-drawn hmmmms. At the still point of my hurricane brain there was awareness of how foolish I’d been. I have never since, and had never before, been so acutely conscious of my own pointlessness as a human being. That’s a crashing sort of thing to say, though, isn’t it? That’s a dangerous truth, right there.

  I sat on a public bench and a long period of time passed. Or it was a short period of time. It’s a bit stupid, isn’t it, talking about time as ether a dwarf or a giant. Don’t you think? One thing time does not have is physical stature. On the contrary, as my five-foot-one-inch lover dissipated as ash into the sky, I reflected, what time is good at is undoing physical stature absolutely.

  The three middle knuckles on my right hand had swollen up into three red, hard nipples. They hurt.

  I liked the fact that they hurt. I deserved to hurt.

  Looking back it is clear to me that I had already decided. But I did not know, at that precise moment, that I had decided.

  ‘Grahammm,’ purred Cincinnatus.

  ‘Not too late,’ I told the cat, when I had control enough of my tongue to give voice, ‘to whisk you back to the crematorium and stuff you in with her.’

  ‘Suttee,’ squeaked the cat. It was purring, or laughing, I don’t know. ‘Here, suttee suttee!’

  From where I was sitting, I could see where bushes and trees were starting to write spring upon the endlessly scrubbed-over palimpsest of the natural world. The bare parchment is white, though, isn’t it? White as bones, as snow, as bleach, as show’s over. The making of a palimpsest is all very well, but the underlying paper can only be scrubbed clean so many times, can only be overwritten so many times, before the very fibres that constitute it begin to fray and fall away. Yet another spring. Boring and heartbreaking in equal measure.

  ‘I loved her too,’ said the cat.

  I had a snarling riposte ready, but for some reason it didn’t come out. I was not weeping. I can tell you now: I have wept twice in my whole adult life, and the last occasion was when Anne was still alive.

  ‘She loved you, man,’ said the cat; and that last word could not have been further from the hippy idiom. ‘But she loved me too. In all the world, only we two can say so. That’s something, though, isn’t it?’

  ‘Fuck off,’ I said, in a small voice.

  ‘That’s the tenderest profanity I ever did hear,’ said the cat. ‘Graham, you damaged your soul a long time ago. A farmer is supposed to engage in husbandry of the land – and what sort of a husband to the land were you? Husbandry is making fertile; but you specialized in death. And death is not the truth of you, Graham. You have spent decades perfecting anger as your being-in-the-world, but your soul is not a furious soul, Graham. I know what manner of connection you had with my mistress; because it was the connection that offered you a route out of hell. And that means I know what her passing meant to you.’

  ‘Cat,’ I said, meeting its green gaze with my own pale blue one. ‘You haven’t the first fucking clue what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I believe I do, Graham.’

  I stood up. ‘Don’t call me Graham.’

  ‘Come to the Lamb, Graham,’ Cincinnatus squeaked with what sounded like panic. ‘Before it’s too late! You know what’s coming – war is coming. How could it be any other way? And when it comes you’ll be glad you spoke to the Lamb.’

  I was already walking away. The last thing I heard was: ‘Do it for her sake, Graham!’ And all the time I was thinking: they’re all interconnected, wirelessly hooked together. And I was thinking: I need to get away from all of them.

  I went to Tesco, and bought a rucksack, a tent, a billycan and a knife. The whole place was almost entirely deserted: only the bots rolled up and down the aisles now, pulling down stock and rolling away. It was more like a warehouse than a supermarket. I paid for my items, and had to decline the delivery options four times.

  I walked.

  I headed out of the town, and walked east. Eventually I came to Reading, and I stopped there for the night. The following day I walked on, south-east past the city, and came to the outskirts of Bracknell Forest.

  It was a brisk, windy day when I crossed the forest threshold. There had been a fence here, once upon a time; but most of the chainlink had fallen over and been overgrown. Cottonbud blossom speckled over the bushes. Debris left over from the previous autumn was shuffled out of the canopy by the winds, and pattered around me as I passed into the body of the forest in a rain of dry twigs and black clots of dead leaves. How had they not been blown down earlier? The wind was firm but not overwhelming. Rooks flew up and flew back down, and cawed, which pleasant sound pleased me more because there were no human words in it. A big tree, swaying slowly, dragged patterns of speckled light over the forest floor. Scree-slides of brightness.

  I tramped deeper in. I felt some small relaxation of the soul cramp inside my chest. Looking back (and I say this in the hope you’ll believe me when I say that I’ve always despised self-melodramatizing nonsense) I think I believed I was going into that wood to die.

  Not straight away, of course. There was no hurry. By late afternoon I was deep inside and I stopped and set up my tent. It was designed to be strung between trees, thereby elevating it from the damp and insect-infested ground; or else tethered to a broad bough halfway up a tree. I opted for the latter option. Then I sat and ate some food and drank half the bottle of wine I had brought with me. I was perfectly alone.

  When the sun went down I climbed into my tent and fell asleep.

  I was more alone than I had ever been. I became habituated to the woods. Or Stockholm-syndromed by Nature. Is there a difference between those two things? Between becoming habituated to a thing, and being Stockholm-syndromed? It sometimes seems to me that the whole of human culture has been an elaborate process by which we have hostage-negotiated ourselves into a less violent life, deprogrammed ourselves from the cult of Nature. The short-future blinkered perspective of life lived in the wild; the constant wariness, the justified paranoia; from the habitual violence, the animist superstition, the culture-less-ness. Nature: it’s not nice, it was never nice. Niceness is what we human beings built to insulate ourselves from – all that.

  Restlessness came and went. For a while I’d stay in my tent, or sit outside, and stare. That old gag: ‘Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits’. The latter.

  I’d move only when I had to, and I had to only for four reasons: to empty my bowels (verbum sap: don’t shit too close to where you sleep and eat); to fetch drink; to gather food; and, rarely, to step sharply out of the way of some larger-looking creature, sniffing around my site.

  There were many deer. I wondered where they had come from. The royal park was many miles east of my location – but it’s possible they came from there, and made their way unmolested into the forest. Maybe they’d come from somewhere else. One day I saw a stag: horns like two mahogany coat racks. It didn’t see me. It strode beneath my tree, stopped for a moment and pissed very noisily onto the turf. Then it strutted away. There were also squirrels, foxes, cats, dogs, birds. Most of these were dumb. A few were bêtes, and some of the latter would speak to me. In return I would mostly swear and throw things.

  I listened to the dumb animals. I’m not sure I’d ever done that before, in my whole life – and I had been a farmer! I found a Zen focus in bird warbles, to the point where I found the boundary line between chipped and unchipped creature hard to maintain. A song thrush chirped: dumb or bête? Wait – listen more carefully. Was it actually saying ‘keep-up, keep-up’? It sounded like it was, but maybe that was my brain rea
ding sense into its dumb song.

  Dusk was most fascinating to me. Working on a farm puts you closer to the natural cycles than most jobs, I suppose; but I don’t know if I’d ever before simply sat there motionless for the long hours as the sun set and the night bedded in. Away from artificial light, dusk is gentler on the eye than you remember it as being. It prepares the retina for darkness. It strokes the mind. Gradations of light and unlight dip the whole forest in some hazy solution, like a nineteenth-century photographer with his chemicals. The sunset does more than darkening the individual trees; it recombines them into odd, beautiful shapes. A blackbird’s flute cadenza. A darkness falling rapidly sideways, too large to be a bat, pulling a patch of blanked starlight over the higher branches: was this owl just hooting, or was it a bête mocking me with a pseudo-scary ghostlike oo-ing?

  I slept for a while, and woke in the dark. I slept again, and woke in the pre-dawn. I slept during the day, and woke. Then it was dusk again.

  A patch of lawn in a small clearing not far from my tree was starred with snowball-spatter daisies. Come night, these would curl their petal fingers into fists, and the grass would frame these miniature solidarity air punches. At night there were bats. I saw them, often at the corner of my eye, blacker on black. I couldn’t hear them. I remember growing up in Cornwall as a kid, and wandering the clifflands by the sea at night, and hearing the bats, their swooping squeaky voices. My old ears have become too coarse to do that now.