by Adam Roberts
‘I’m being perfectly serious. Isn’t that what love is? Two people, one mind. The particular madness you’d risk if you take up my offer is actually, precisely, the madness of love.’
‘She will come back to me,’ I said. My heart was pounding. I put both palms – cold – to my hot face. ‘I can’t believe it,’ I said.
‘Try,’ suggested the cat.
‘And I want to!’ I gasped. Even that admission was hard. ‘Indeed I do. But— Wait. I’ll tell you what it is. I don’t believe in resurrection. I don’t believe in coming back to life.’
‘And that from the lamed Fisher King himself!’ said the cat. ‘How ironic!’ And with a sudden flash of that speed of which cats are capable it leapt from the sideboard and darted into the kitchen and out through the cat flap.
The cat’s offer was a hammerblow to my mind. I dealt with it the way I always dealt with such shocks, by busying myself. I would have drunk, had there been any drink. But there wasn’t.
I explored upstairs. With my leg in its lamed state, even doing that was an adventure. A huge brown-green stain marked the wall next to the staircase, like a curtain of mould. Mushrooms were growing in amongst the fibres of the stair carpet on the right-hand side. I stepped up on my good foot, and used the stick to lever up my bad foot. Eventually I reached the upper floor. There were no mummified corpses, dead of the sclery, or anything so grisly. Indeed, the previous occupants had cleared much of their gear out prior to abandoning the place. I presumed the sofa and sideboard downstairs were too bulky and worthless to go; but the beds had all fled the bedrooms, leaving rectangles of darker-coloured carpet behind like Hiroshima shadows.
I went into the upstairs bathroom. The mirror’s coating of dust glittered. I wiped my hand across it exactly as if it had been condensation, and it cleared enough for me to get a look at myself. I looked rough. I looked haggard. Hag-ridden. There’s a concept.
A condensation of dust.
Quite apart from anything else I was layered with dirt. There was an old piece of soap in the soap dish by the upstairs sink, and although there was (of course) no hot water, the cold ran strong. I contemplated having a cold shower, but I didn’t want to disarrange the bandages on my left leg, so I confined myself to stripping to the waist and washing my torso and head. It made me yelp, and when I dried myself afterwards with a raspy towel it reddened my flesh like sunburn. What a pitiful figure I cut in the mirror now – my skin sagging off my ribcage, my once red chest hair ice-white, my useless male nipples pointing at the floor. I was shivering with the cold, and got dressed again.
There was nothing of use upstairs, so I went downstairs again, treading gingerly. There was a fireplace with chopped wood stacked next to it; and there were matches in the kitchen. I got a fire going, by dint of using a copy of The Da Vinci Code as kindling. The glue crumbled out of the spine of this when I picked it up. Like dandruff. Or snow. And talking of which, I wrapped myself in the sphinx-pattern blanket, on the sofa, with the fire starting to make its popcorn noises, and the quality of light at the window changed. Snow was falling. For a while I sat there, and tried to think about what Cincinnatus had promised. I say tried to think: the trial was in preventing my hope swamping all rational mental process. The thought of bringing her back. The thought of having her back. Of possessing her completely, inside me, for as long as I and therefore we both shall live. My gut tingled with the anticipation, like a kid on Christmas morning.
Would I be betraying my own kind to get her back? Maybe not. Would it matter if I were? Love feels like a positive thing, but that doesn’t mean it is virtuous. Love is no more a virtue than breathing is a virtue. Love is not the scale against which we should measure the rightness or wrongness of actions, for there will always be some people who love any action, no matter how base. We ought not to presume to congratulate ourselves merely on the fact of loving. Loving ought to be the medium through which we move, no more worthy of mark, in itself, than air. Loving ought to be the background noise of our lives. It ought to go without saying. But that was the thing about bereavement: it forced you to notice the medium. It compelled you to have to strain your ears. There is, you come to understand, a difference between love and longing.
How badly I missed her!
The fire was burning chirpily now.
Then, for only the second (and I sincerely hope, last) time in my adult life, I started crying. I cried like a kid. Hardship, I suppose, had kept the grief away. This momentary relinquishing of hardship, this sinking back into comfort, resurrected the weepiness. There’s a deep truth there, too. We don’t cry at our sufferings – for our sufferings are always there, to one degree or another. We cry in those moments when our sufferings recede for a moment. That’s the danger spot.
I stopped crying eventually. It was a consciousness of how foolish I must have looked, as much as anything else. I hopped up the stairs and washed my face in icy water, and came back down. My heart felt no lighter for the release of tears.
Soon enough the cat came back in. I heard the flap rattle. ‘Inclement outside?’ I asked, without looking round.
It jumped onto the sofa next to me. ‘Shall I sit on your lap?’ it asked purringly. ‘You can stroke me if you like.’
‘Don’t,’ I advised, ‘you get fresh with me.’
‘As you wish.’ And it curled itself up on the sofa beside me, and warmed itself at the fire.
We sat in silence for a while. ‘I suppose,’ I said eventually, ‘you don’t need me to say: I agree. I suppose you’re confident that I’ll do as you say now.’
‘Suppose makes a sup out of poe and sea,’ murmured the cat.
‘I’m not your slave,’ I said. ‘You talked about slavery, before? Well, understand this. I am a free man.’
‘Not a number,’ agreed Cincinnatus.
‘I’ll see about speaking to people – people in power. I’ll bring them the Lamb. But I can’t promise anything.’
‘We don’t expect promises.’
‘And I’ll do it in my own time.’
‘Your own sweet time,’ said the cat. ‘And how sweet the time is!’ It fell asleep, there and then.
II
•
Three Legs in the Afternoon
‘The throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and His servants shall serve Him … Blessed are they that do His commandments, that they may have right to the Tree of Life, and may enter in through the gates into the city. For outside are dogs and sorcerers, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.’
Revelation 22:3–15
4
Dogs and sorcerers
I left the house when I exhausted my supply of chopped wood for the fire. I might have scavenged more outside, but I was still recuperating. The thing to do would have been to cut up wood and bring it in whilst the fire was still burning, so it could dry out and serve as firewood in its turn. But I lacked the energy to do this, and my heel was treacherous. So eventually I simply ran out of fuel and then the house grew almost as cold as the frosty world outside.
I packed up my things and hiked into the wood. Cincinnatus followed me until I set up my tent; then left me alone.
I’m stubborn, but even my stubbornness has its limits. Soon enough the cold drove me from the woods. Through the summer Bracknell Forest had been endurable, and occasionally had even distilled itself into moments of extraordinary beauty and lived intensity. Looking back it is those moments that stay most with me. But the autumn was wet, and by November the cold came in properly.
Still, I stuck it for a few weeks. The first snow was light, and little of it settled in the forest itself. Then it thawed, and the air warmed a little. But by early December (best as I can judge) it grew very cold indeed. Snow came intermittently, but even when it didn’t the whole forest was as cold as outer space. Day would turn into night and back into day, and I would sit, shiveringly contemplating the spreads and throws of ivy scattered across the forest floor.
I saw Cincinnatus at various
times. He would come round to check on me; to see to what extent my mulishness was thawing, I suppose. Then he came by and found me packing my tent up. ‘Off?’ he asked.
‘I’ll go to Reading. Then maybe into London – don’t know.’
‘All the way to Downing Street!’
‘You want to come?’
‘From what I hear,’ said the cat, ‘bêtes are less welcome in the big towns now than used to be the case.’
‘Yellow of eye and also of courage,’ I said. So I got my kit together, and started off.
I could have limped without any need of an old man’s stick even as far as Reading, if it hadn’t been for the pack. But the extra weight put just enough pressure on my sore heel to make the stick a necessity. And so it was that I stomped off leaning on a walking stick for every swing of my left leg, like an old geezer. Three-legged man. I tried to acquire the knack of rolling the weight through the stride of my bad leg, to come clumping more forcefully onto the stride of my good. Better: I had some small motion in the left foot, though it still hurt to flex or straighten it.
Edge of my vision. Cincinnatus was a black shape moving against the white background.
I walked a little way, and rested. When I started off again, I found that Cincinnatus had sat himself on the top of my backpack. I didn’t shoo him off, though. I carried him with me.
The cat said: ‘I wish you luck, Graham.’
‘You better keep your half of the fucking bargain, bête.’
‘Our word, our bond.’
‘I’ve no idea where I’m even going,’ I said. ‘Or to whom I’m supposed to be speaking. Or even what the terms are I’m supposedly negotiating for. And another thing: what do I do with the Lamb when I get there? Do I find a high-rank general and feed it to his housecat?’
‘Or connect it to a computer,’ said the cat. ‘Might be simpler, Graham.’
I sniffed. ‘You can call me Graham,’ I told the cat. ‘So long as we understand one another. And by understand, I mean – none of your other bête pals have that intimacy. OK? Now fuck off.’
He hopped off the pack onto the frosty ground, and walked haughtily away from me with his tail up, like an aerial, and his puckered arsehole pointed in my direction. I didn’t see him again on that journey.
The seven gates of Thebes
I walked out of the woods, and tramped for several hours over abandoned farmland. Fields were bristly with thick weeds, like an aggressive parody of a meadow, but the walking was easy enough even with my limp. Thank you, stick. Soon enough I encountered a new fence, and beyond it a huge mega-field being tended by big automated combines. Bringing in winter wheat, I supposed. There are genetically modified strains that grow all year round. I stood at the fence for a while, just looking, until a bête dog came running over, its tongue out like an untucked shirt-tail. ‘You!’ it woofed. ‘Wha’? Wha’?’
It’s always a tricky business understanding canny dogs. Their mouths aren’t the right shape to make human-comprehensible phonemes. ‘I’m just looking, you fucking beast,’ I told it, amiably. ‘A man may look at a farm.’
At this it barked loud and long, ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’, and then it hurled itself at the wire fence with an impressive cymbal-crash noise. I couldn’t help taking a step back.
‘No!’ it barked, ‘Hu! Mans! Here! Fuckoff! Fuckoff!’
I took the hint.
For a while I skirted the fence, curious to see the farmhouse, if there was one. There had not been a mega-farm on this location before, I was fairly sure. But the area enclosed by the fence was huge, and walking right round it soon took on the habiliments of a fool’s errand. I climbed a small hill and stopped. Birds were circling and circling over one area; four or five dogs snapped and yelped and swore at them from the ground, hoping perhaps to scare them off – foolish plan, if the birds were canny birds – or perhaps just intending to stop them landing and messing with the crops. But (I thought) they could hardly hope to do that all day and all night! Could they?
I made my way round and climbed a hill behind the compound, giving me a vantage point. There was no farmhouse, although there were several barns – perhaps the animals lived in there. But presumably there had been a farmhouse, once. Had the bêtes demolished it? If so, why? Spite?
I looked about me, the ghost of my breath haunting the air in front of my face. To the north the view was of milk-coloured fields, stretching up to the outskirts of Reading – the snaggled spread of suburban houses and, on the horizon, the taller blocks in the centre. Many cranes were visible, like spindly gallows, and a couple of these were moving. Building work. Evidently Reading had not, like Wokingham, gone down the ghost town route.
Shouldering my pack, I set off that way: first over the crunchy fields, and then along a main road. This took me past several estates of boarded-up houses and rows of abandoned small-time shops. A labyrinth of unused roundabouts. I saw nobody else, and the only traffic to pass me was a row of four high-sided military trucks, a shock of green amongst all the white, like spring in vehicle form. I stood aside to let them pass; they did not acknowledge me in any way.
I walked on in silence for a long time, the only sound the pock of my stick on the tarmac; but then I began to hear a waterfall ahead. This puzzled my forest-numbed brain until my route took me over the M4. I stopped on my bridge for a while, the biggest billy goat gruff, and watched the trolls beneath. They were legion. It was hypnotic, actually: car after car after car; lorry after lorry; all sliding away beneath me hurrying to the forward horizon or sliding behind me to the backward and abysm. Where could so many vehicles be going? How could there be so many? I waved my walking stick above my head. I dare say none of them noticed.
It made a marked contrast with the complete lack of traffic on the smaller roads. Rank and rank of boarded-up housing. I tramped on, under a cold and eye-blue sky. A derelict petrol station, whose abandonment probably preceded even the coming of the bêtes. A park, in which two dozen goats pushed their snouts into the snow to graze on the lawn beneath. They wandered through the fixtures of the rusting children’s playground – impossible to tell if these could speak or not. I made my way up through what used to be Whitley and there was nothing going on. Not all the houses were boarded; and I saw a few people out and about; a few faces at windows, and at least one still-open shop. But it still felt like the end of the world.
The tower blocks of central Reading reared ever taller over the horizon, but before I could reach them I came up bang against a brand-new wall and a brand-new gate.
The wall was made of a great many pre-fabricated concrete slabs, and it stretched as far as I could see in both directions. There was also a gatekeeper, sitting inside a little booth and peering angrily at me through his window. He was a dumpy figure: dressed in green fatigues and sporting a white, wilting moustache like a double-tassel from one of late-era Elvis’ costumes. There was nothing MGM or Vegas about the way he spoke, though.
‘Oi, oi, supertramp,’ he called at me, from inside his little booth. ‘Fuck off back where you came in.’
‘What’s all this then?’ I asked.
With an ostentatious sigh he got to his feet and emerged from his booth. Lest I miss the fact that he was armed, he rested his right hand on the stock of his pistol, and hooked the thumb of his left inside the holster belt. ‘You’re going to tell me you got a passport?’ he asked.
‘You need a passport to go to Reading, now?’
‘Fuck off you don’t know that. Turn yourself round, right round, like a record baby and saunter back along that road you came up.’
I shifted my weight so that more of it went onto my walking stick. ‘This is all new since I was last here.’
‘I guess that’s what happens when you take a year’s holiday on the fucking moon.’
‘How do I get one of yon passports, then?’ I asked. ‘I’m looking for work.’
‘Work ain’t looking for you, friend,’ he replied. ‘Work’s moved on with her life. Work’s got
a new paramour now, and just wants you to leave her alone. It didn’t pan out between the two of you, and if you don’t stop fucking bugging her work is going to have a word with the proper authorities about taking out a restraining order.’ He tapped the butt of his pistol with his thumb, significantly.
I looked around me. Through the gate I could see houses, and people in the distance walking. There was nobody about on this side of the wall at all. ‘I suppose it must be boring,’ I said. ‘Sitting in your little booth all day.’
‘At least I got a booth, friend,’ he said.
‘Seriously, man,’ I pressed. ‘Can’t you help me out?’
His shoulders went down. ‘You’re poor at taking a hint, aren’t you, pal. Go on: fuck off, you stubborn bastard.’
‘And it is precisely that determination and mule-like capacity for sheer hard work that I hope to bring to the Reading labour market.’
‘Look,’ he said, taking his hand off his pistol. ‘The passport thing is health, mostly. I can’t let you through without you got a clean bill.’
‘My bill is clean. I’ve the cleanest bill in billtown.’ Something about his mode of speech was infecting mine, I think.
‘Without the documentation I can’t do nothing.’ He looked me up and down. ‘Where you been, anyhow?’
I thought about making up some story, but didn’t see any mileage in lying. ‘Living in the woods,’ I said.
‘Eating what?’
‘What I could.’
‘What? Wild mushrooms and that?’
‘Mushrooms the size of manhole covers, sautéed in wild garlic and witch’s spit.’ When he goggled at me credulously, I grew angry. ‘You think Bracknell woods is a fucking open buffet? I been eating what I could get my hands on, and it’s not been much. And I do not fancy spending the winter in the open, all right? I’ve lived here or hereabouts all my life; I know people in town and I’d like to go inside and rejoin the human race.’
The gatekeeper looked at me. ‘Whereabouts hereabouts?’
‘I had a farm. West of Holybrook.’
