by Adam Roberts
‘And this dead body?’ I will ask (later). ‘Was he not also too ineluctably human to be accepted?’
‘He was different,’ they will say (later). ‘He was not Homo sapiens. He was Homo sacer. Wait,’ they will say (later), ‘and the memories will come. They tend to sift down into your mind, most recent first, earliest last.’
‘Why?’ There’s a lot of that, in my first minutes.
So there is a cat, black like a coot’s head. He tears out a chunk of flesh and tosses it down to me, and I eat it hungrily. He throws a second, and I gobble. He throws a third, larger, and with gristle in it; I swallow. It sticks a little in my throat, and I cough a while, and retch a while, and put a paw over my snout, but most of the meat goes down, and I put my back against the wall and watch. I start to feel queer, and then I retch some more, but to no effect. Then I go into the cupboard anyway, and curl up amongst the coarse straw, and sleep.
I’m awake almost at once, and I am no longer just the vixen. I come out of the cupboard and stretch my mouth, and try some barks, and some growls, and some shifting of my lower jaw from side to side.
The snow has immobilized the grass. But it wasn’t always snow. It was before, and the time when there was no snow. Leaves surge blackly across. Biter, bite a crescent from this apple, though your jaw is a different shape, and your teeth hurt. This white image in the apple’s flank is the moon. The moon is white and black together, and gives up a tar-dark seed. We bury the seed in the soil underneath the turf to settle it in the darkness. Growth: how high does the stem ascend? Touching whose white, elevate face? The incomprehensible cry is not incomprehensible. Night, and then day, is the fixture of rhythm.
It’s spring, and stormy, and the trees are making the same noise that thunder makes. It is a gloomy afternoon, and we are struggling on old legs over the grass and back into the house, and we are holding an apple in our right hand, green as a grasshopper.
Teeth hurt as we bite, but the tartness of the apple’s flesh is also its sweetness. The greenery of spring is a wreath upon winter’s grave. The cherry tree positively weeps blossom.
We have lived here for years (the memory flows flows flows into the the the brain, and the number of years grows smaller) with nothing but occasional bête visitors, and our memories. But the memories are enough. A human being’s memories, and a cat’s memories, triangulating the same subject. The winter is here. The summer that preceded it, and the leaves of the aspens shovel the air ceaselessly.
The nibble-edged circles of their leaves.
Past the aspens, to a field, hip-high with weeds. At the end of the field, the wall of the sky. There’s a tractor hulk in there, lobster-red with rust and drowning in greenery. We’re not as young as we used to be. Here’s a horse, pulling a flat-bed cart, and on the cart a box of supplies. Somebody, or somebête, has written on the side: Homo sacer. The beast and the sovereign.
Summer evenings, when the day turned a little cooler, working the patch of ground behind the old brick igloo, the dome webbed with ivy, the bricks turned to the texture of biscuit by centuries. We hoed along a file of cabbages, and hoed back up the other way. There was water in an underground tank, once (I believe) the cesspit for the house, now filled with rainwater and drainwater sweet as celery. There was an old pump action hose: so the foot worked up and down and the water drizzled over the clenched hearts of the vegetables. We grew potatoes below the wall, where it was cooler. I was the only person who ever tended those swollen roots, whoever plucked those cabbages. I was legion.
At night in the winter, we can pause before we set fire to the branches in the fireplace. Outside, the poplar twigs rub against one another in the wind like a thousand crickets’ legs. There are crowds of humans heaving and straining behind their walls, far from here. Over the hills and far.
What about before we came to this house? We lived in several places, but there was a happiness there. That was an Alcestis trick of great power, but the ground of it is: choice. If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. And here we are walking in a state of uncertain doubleness.
Here’s a memory: when I kept the farm, we grew some veg. Nothing commercial, just to make use of land and reduce household expenses – farming being the minimum-margin business it was. Carrots, cabbages, spuds. During the last year of the farm I ended up too busy to tend this garden, though, because I had to devote all my attention to maximize the cow income. So we hired a local lad to do it for us: a tall, slender lad with carbuncles on his face like red blossom against a white sky. Sulky, as teens often are. We didn’t pay him much (in fact we used a popular but illegal app to put the money on his chip without notifying the authorities, thereby not only paying him less than minimum wage but enabling him to evade having to make NI contributions). He didn’t stay long, either. He was only in the countryside because his mum was poorly, I recall; and after she died he walked off to the city, part of that great tidal shift of humanity from soil to stone that marks the last fifteen decades. But I mention him here because there would be times when I would be working my farm, having forgotten that he was there also, and would catch a glimpse of him out of my corner-eye, and feel a sudden jolt, as if a tendril of dread had trailed across the tender membrane of my mind. A ghost, a spectre, a revenant, a sign of my own impending death? No, relax Graham, it’s just Wilfred. Then my heart would settle. I mention it here because my (not yet our) journey from Reading was like that. Haunted, trailed, followed. A fury pursuing. Cain leaving Eden was not more harried. People misunderstand the ‘mark of Cain’, you know. It was not a sign of God’s curse, but of his protection. Not of divine ostracism – Cain had already been cast out, you remember – but of his sacredness. The mark told the world: leave this one alone. This one belongs to God, for good or ill.
All this talk of Cain. You can see where this is going. Jazon wasn’t blood, but he was my brother nonetheless, the closest to a brother I ever had.
Reading. The military officer had offered me a car, but I had turned him down. He thought this was spite on my part, since he had been the one to order me locked in a cell for all those days. But I (we) didn’t mind that. We (I) had long since grown used to solitude. It had taken them three days – said the military man – in order to ringfence a large enough computational resource. The initial contact had, or hadn’t, it was hard to tell, injected code into the system; but it didn’t seem to have had any adverse effects. And finally the authorities had talked to the Lamb, and a deal had been struck. The military had wanted to hold onto the Lamb, but he had persuaded them to have Graham port the chip back to the countryside.
Well all right, then.
Well, all right then.
Well. All right.
The leg ached.
We were not yet we. I walked, with a stick, through the gate and shook the gatekeeper’s hand. And I, the vixen, have foresuffered all, enacted in this same H. sapiens’ head. I who have sat at Thebes below the wall. At Reading, rather, below the wall. And walked. And walked amongst the lowest of the—
Boom, blows the wind. Boom, boom, boom.
I walked back into the winter landscape, with the Lamb again in my pocket. I was not yet we. But neither was I alone.
There’s another man, with two goods legs instead of one good and one weak and one stick. The nightingale sang also: her song is hoarse. I am being followed.
He trots along after me, and sometimes stops to do something (I don’t look back; I don’t see what) and then he doubles his stride and catches me up again. He is my oldest living friend, with his unruly hair and sepia skin and active mouth. With his crow-black coat, which he believes makes him look more clerical. Even when he is being a royal fucking pain in the perineum, I love him like a brother. Just, as the gag goes, not one of mine. That’s not funny, though. He was an Abel man.
‘Let it go, Preach,’ I tell him. Stomping down the weedy tarmac through the empty village that used to be Shinfi
eld. ‘Let it alone.’
‘I can’t do that, Gray,’ he replied, hurrying his pace to catch me up. ‘You’re about to do something terrible. I’m your friend, aren’t I? It’s my job to stop you making a buttock of yourself.’
‘Your job is to preach the gospel to the Reading populace,’ I said. ‘Your job is to leave me the fuck alone.’
‘Despite your bad language,’ said Preacherman, ‘I will not abandon you.’
At this, I stopped, and turned to face him. ‘This is the one thing I want in my life. This is the only thing I want in my life. This is the woman I love. I can be with her again. Why would you want to stop me?’
‘It will drive you mad, my friend,’ he said. ‘These bêtes are devils. What promise they made you, they will break. Whatever you think they will give you, it will only be betrayal.’
‘Hetheridge seems to think the treaty viable.’
‘He can only see the military side of things. He can’t see the larger danger here. They are not your kind.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘Graham,’ he said. ‘You have a duty to your kind. You have a duty to your soul. If I say you will lose your soul, should you go ahead with this, I’m not speaking figuratively. Your land and your people need you. This woman, however much she meant to you, is dead. Don’t stab your land in the back for the sake of one woman – a woman not even alive.’
‘If I had to choose,’ I told him, ‘between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’
He digested this, and then grew visibly wroth at this. ‘But that’s nonsense!’
‘It’s Forster.’
‘I don’t care how many stars you give it,’ he returned. ‘It’s dangerous nonsense.’
‘Love is love, mate.’
‘Listen to yourself! Like it’s not possible for love to be good or evil, just as people are good or evil. You think Hitler didn’t love killing Jews? You think devils don’t love to torment the godly?’
‘Goodbye, Preach. If there is to be peace – I mean, if the peace is going to work out – then perhaps we’ll meet again.’ I turned, and started plocking away again.
‘What about your duty, Graham?’ he called. ‘What about your duty to your land? What about your duty to your species?’
I loved poetry at school, and then, out of a kind of intellectual stubbornness, I refused to let it go, even though it was of less than no use to the business of running a farm. I studied Latin, which was equally useless. My little red notebooks of poetry, scribbled in only at those moments when I was sure I was alone. As my kids grew older they became less inhibited about mocking me for my literary pretensions. For Albie it was just the fact of it: so violent-tempered and emotionally clumsy a fellow aspiring to write poetry (of all things). Anger’s always been the point of poetry, though – check out the first word of mankind’s oldest poem, The Iliad, if you don’t believe me. Jen was more puzzled that I gave up publishing any of it, after the Eclogues. ‘What, not even online?’ No, not even online. I wasn’t aspiring to be Ted Hughes. I was trying to do something disinterested in a life that was, otherwise, all about the financial return upon labour and land. That was all about paying school fees and scratching the money together for vet bills and boiler repairs. I was writing poetry for myself, not for others, because the others did not need convincing that there was something aesthetically valuable in ‘nature’. Most of the others took that as a post-Wordsworth given. Not me. I was hip-deep in the shit of it. I wrestled it every day. Looking back, I think I was actually trying to persuade myself that there was beauty around me. That I did what I did for love, not merely out of a barren kind of duty. That I wasn’t simply going through the motions with my work, in my marriage, in my life. None of us wants to think that. Even if it is true.
I studied Latin. Duty is suffixed from due, which in turn is the English derivative from Latin’s debitum, owed. Which is to say, duty is the state of being in debt. One’s duty, is what one owes. The difference is that duty in the sense we now understand the term is supposed to be disinterested, whereas debt as we now understand it (which is to say, now that usury has been struck from the list of appalling sins by the Western world) is precisely interested … interest is due upon debt: interest, we might say, is the duty of debt. This elision of meanings has unfortunate consequences. Really, we need to remove ‘duty’ from the semantic field of debt. For too many people duty is a tiresome concept, something ‘owed’ or ‘ought’ (hence we say: ‘I ought to do more about global warming, I ought to give more money to charity’). But the sorts of things you owe now – the mortgage on your house, for instance – are things you are seeking only to rid yourself of. Duty, in the broadest sense, cannot be ‘discharged’; we can never be, and should not seek to be, in a position where all our ‘duty’ is paid off, and we can relapse into destructive selfishness. Duty is a freedom, not an obligation: a freedom from the tyranny of self, not a mortgaging of that self to society as a whole. Duty is always a free choice, a flowing-out of the human from ourselves to others. Duty is a liberality.
‘You owe it to humanity,’ said Preacherman, calling louder now, because I had left him that much further behind. ‘I’m your friend, aren’t I? You owe it to me.’
‘You don’t understand owe,’ I shouted back, keeping my gaze on the road ahead. There were animals dancing through the bushes, and sneaking through the places where the fences were falling into disrepair.
These memories live on, in me. I can see them, in my own head.
I left him behind, by dint of ignoring the pain in my leg and marching on faster and faster. But he caught up with me again. He was like a bad conscience. I couldn’t get rid of him.
‘Where are you going, anyway?’ he asked me, interspersing his stride with little trotty bursts of speed to keep up with me.
‘You know where I’m going,’ I said.
‘I know what Satan promised you – your woman, yeah? You’ll be reunited with her, even though she’s dead, correct? That’s a lie, Graham. Satan is the father of lies.’
‘I’m going anyway,’ I told him.
Preacherman was grinning at me. We were a good way south of the village now, and the road ran through fields, with the edge of the forest on the horizon. The view was of the low hills and shallow valleys of the south of England. Walk far enough in that direction and you come to the coast, where channel waves crisp and fall, making the pebbles rattlesnake and the foam sink through the grid of them. A line of surf all around the magic island like a slug’s silver trail, skirting East Anglia and Northumberland, hugging close about the crenulations of Scotland, a silver halo about the twin horns of Wales, close as a stocking on Wessex’s crinkly leg, and back along the long south coast.
Beasts peered from every hedgerow. Dogs gathered in a mass further down the lane. Maybe I was the only one who could see them.
‘I can’t let you,’ Jazon told me. ‘I’ll restrain you by main force, if I have to. Main force!’ He sucked his teeth, meditatively, and then said: ‘Wait. Is that hand force? Like the French for hand?’
‘I think so,’ I confirmed.
‘I thought maybe,’ Preacherman said, ‘it was, like, main as opposed to subsidiary force. I’m hardly going to restrain you with subsidiary force, now, am I!’
‘You’re not going to restrain me at all, Jazon,’ I said.
‘You’re not strong, the way you were, Graham,’ he replied, sorrowfully. ‘You’re not a match for me. Maybe once upon a time, but look at you. You’re a snowman who’s been out in the sun, my friend.’
‘You’re a big man but you’re out of shape,’ I said, more to myself than to my companion. ‘With me it’s a full-time job. So—’
Dogs were running alongside the road, and then doubling back, and running up again. I tried to count them, but the flow and sudden turns of the pack confused my eye, like a shark watching sardines.
‘And what?’ said Preacherman. ‘You can’t
intimidate me. I’m your friend.’ He reached out and put a hand on my arm. ‘Come back to the town, Graham.’
I look back at this. Graham’s not my name.
Preacherman was holding a gun in his right hand. ‘I’m a councilman now, Gray. An important person. Do you see this?’
‘It’s a gun,’ I said.
‘Good. Now, do you see this?’ With his left hand, he brought out a mobile phone. ‘It’s special. It’s plumbed into the military network. Mate, I don’t want to. You think I want to? I figure: shoot you in your bad leg, it won’t matter so much. It’s already bad, isn’t it? Then one call and a chopper will be here in twenty minutes.’
‘A chopper? The bike?’
‘A helicopter.’
‘I didn’t know the Reading garrison was operating choppers. Aren’t they a bit expensive, this day and age?’
‘You don’t know the first thing, Graham,’ said Preacherman. ‘The nation’s future is at stake!’
I felt frustration, but tiredness too. ‘I don’t understand why you want to stop me.’ I said. ‘I don’t get why it matters to you.’
Birds circled overhead.
‘Because you’re my friend,’ he said, in an imploring voice. It may be, if I think back, that he was reminding himself, not me, of this fact. What was he doing, anyway? Out in the middle of nowhere, with an angry old tramp swearing at him, and the beasts of the field gathering as a malign congregation. ‘And besides,’ he added, getting closer to the truth. ‘You’re special to them. And if you’re special to them, then we can use you. Against them.’
More dogs spilled out through the hedgerow. The presence of these creatures finally impinged upon his perception. He stood up taller, slipped his special-issue phone back in his pocket, and pulled out a crucifix. ‘You keep back,’ he called out, in a clear voice. ‘You bêtes – all of you! Get ye behind me. Understand?’
‘Jaze, you’re making a fool of yourself.’
