Wildlife

by Joe Stretch

  ‘Empty Chairs at Empty Tables’ is the one of the saddest songs on the Les Misérables soundtrack. It is the lament of a young man who has lost all his friends to the revolutionary siege. The vocal is accompanied only by a piano and the melancholy call of distant violins. Roger Hart slumps down in front of his computer the moment it begins.

  Allow me. Allow me. The people in the streets are behaving like robots. When it rains, their circuitry will get wet and malfunction. I hate the way I always have black dirt under my fingernails. El Rogerio says, let the heavens open.

  SUBMIT.

  A pop-up pops up on the computer screen. AND WITH THE WILD WORLD, A BEAUTIFUL PROPHECY, A BEAUTIFUL FUTURE, A BEAUTIFUL DICKHEAD.

  ‘. . . hiccup . . .’

  At times Roger regrets that he never sleeps and never leaves his flat. He regrets that he has made a recording of himself saying, ‘Whatever it is, just leave it by the door’, which he plays on full blast whenever anyone knocks at his door. The postman with a parcel usually, or the Tesco delivery man with more crisps. His only interactions are with the thousand or so fans that read his continuous blog on the Internet. His audience that grows each day. They are fascinated by his comedy and lurid detailing of life. My life has taken an unlikely turn, he thinks, his fingers hovering above the keyboard. Tell it like it is, Roger. Tell it like it is.

  5

  JOE ASPEN MISSES the little crumb of shit when he’s separated from it. He is walking down John Dalton Street in the direction of the Royal Exchange. His mind is fixed on the area of porcelain to which the evidence of love and Life still clings. He can’t wait to get back home to check on it. He ignores the people who pass him on the pavement. They are subdued. They lack the personality and the romance of the crumb.

  The sky is an outdated streak of piss. Joe Aspen walks under it. He turns onto Cross Street. Maybe, thinks Joe, in this Wild World we will all get our own private piece of sky to hold above our heads like an umbrella. I can’t bear to share this sky with others. I can’t bear to share it with Life. I can’t believe she’s marching about under the same sky as me. It’s painful to think about. Let’s hope the Wild World has sky-cutting tools. I will take my little section home and be happy with it. I will hold it above my head and get rained on. I will be quiet. I will be a happy puffin.

  Joe spots the pop star Asa Gunn the moment he enters the Royal Exchange. He’s over by the bar filling a plastic cup with water and then downing the contents quickly. The theatre was once the world’s biggest room. Nowadays it is Manchester’s most beautiful. Three enormous stained-glass domes cast a blue light into every corner. On days like this, when the sun has got its hat on, the Royal Exchange contains the perfect light for life.

  Joe approaches his colleagues who are beginning to congregate around a table near the entrance of the huge room. These people are not Joe’s friends. They are the new group who replaced the old group, Joe’s group. Joe is the only non-student who works here as an usher. His group, his friends, have all gone off in search of real jobs. Somehow Joe has not.

  ‘Good Christmas? Good New Year?’ asks David, a tall, posh, brown-haired drama student with a fancy spoon where his brain should be.

  ‘Not so bad,’ says Joe, deciding not to share the story of the bit of shit with these people and wondering whether David realises that he is destined for an upmarket, silk-lined casket and a surprisingly low-key funeral.

  As well as David, there are three girls. They’re very excited to see each other again having been away for the Christmas holiday. When they talk their fingers claw at each other enthusiastically like rat hands. They touch each other’s Christmas clothes. All four people, it transpires, received MP3 players from their respective parents.

  ‘Did you get anything, Joe?’ asks Merrill, a bouncy-titted girl with a pretty face imprisoned in frantic acne.

  ‘I got a calendar. But I bought it myself,’ says Joe, running his fingers through his dyed black hair. ‘It’s a wildlife one. January is a leopard. February is a crocodile. April is a puffin so I’m looking forward to it. April, I mean. I’m looking forward to April.’

  Joe rubs his lips, scraping off the flaked remains of his awful sentence. He spoke for too long, he realises. Merrill nods and points her tits and acne scars at someone else. Another shame. I spoke for too long, thinks Joe, getting up and leaving his colleagues to a fresh conversation about the Wild World. Students love the idea of the Wild World because they have a sense of detachment towards most things: wars, worlds, trends, survival.

  Asa Gunn is still drinking water at one corner of the square bar that juts out into the theatre’s foyer. He’s wearing baggy green combat trousers and a tight-fitting black T-shirt. Joe approaches him, takes a plastic cup from a stack and gestures that he’d like to fill it with water.

  ‘This week in America,’ says the pop star, filling Joe’s cup, ‘a man came second in a water-drinking contest and then died. He died from overconsumption of water.’

  ‘I know,’ says Joe. ‘And the winner survived.’

  ‘Winners do,’ says Gunn, refreshing his own beaker once again. His voice is high in pitch, his jaw is a little overwhelming and reminiscent of the word mammal. ‘It’s just a huge competition, life. There’s a fine line between victory and suicide.’

  Joe nods. Asa Gunn bares his teeth as he slurps from his water, his strong jaw protruding like freshly baked bread.

  ‘Well, good luck with the play,’ says Joe.

  The pop star tuts noisily, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. ‘Pointless,’ he mutters. ‘Probably pointless.’

  ‘I guess,’ says Joe, almost accidentally, walking away.

  In 2002, Asa Gunn was the unlikely winner of Pop Head, a TV talent competition that took Britain by storm. To the surprise of many, he went on to release quite a few hit records and firmly establish himself in the industry. His songs were usually sweet, sentimental little tunes that he succeeded in singing with a persuasive emotion and in a delicate, genuine-sounding voice. By 2007, many have forgotten Asa’s talent-show origins.

  After years of frolicking around in the tides of pop, where the undertow is vicious and where children sometimes shit, Asa Gunn wants to dip his finger in reality and sample its flavour with a thoughtful suck. This is why he’s come to Manchester. He wishes to act, to see people up close, the audience, he wants to pretend to be someone else in front of them.

  He’s just a jangling bag of nerves as Joe leaves him at the bar. He’s tapping his thigh with a flat hand. His cheeks are drained of colour. Probably just nerves, thinks Joe, as he walks towards the disabled toilet to take a luxurious and spacious crap.

  In the months leading up to Christmas, Life had become obsessed with the Wild World. Any article containing a reference to it she would cut out of the newspaper and pin to the noticeboard in the kitchen. When the Wild World was mentioned on TV she would nudge Joe and say, ‘See?’ in that beautiful voice of hers. She began stealing clothes from the vintage clothes shop she worked in. When she was finally sacked in mid-December she didn’t give a shit. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said to Joe, staring at her reflection in the wardrobe mirror. ‘Because everything is changing.’

  Thinking back, Joe realises that Life always hated the old world, or ‘the world’ as it was then called. She hated talking, for example. Life could not see the point in people talking at all. (‘What is there to talk about?’) Life thought talking was complete crap. She used to yawn loudly if Joe strung more than two or three sentences together.

  Life did enjoy sex. But she wasn’t massively bothered about the emotions of it all, the bond it created between her and Joe. She was fairly indifferent to the idea of orgasm. It’s true that she demanded that Joe finger-fuck her to climax on a daily basis but that was simply pragmatic. Her love of sex had nothing to do with desire for pleasure. No. Life seemed to think that if you kept having sex then life was somehow being lived, you were succeeding, you were happy. She wanted to fuck constantly only because s
ex was the cheapest, most exciting and readily available event that was on offer in Manchester. It didn’t matter that Joe was fairly shit in bed. Having sex meant life wasn’t passing Life by. That’s why her and Joe were forever fucking outside. If a conversation in a pub went on too long, she’d drag him to the toilets and bend over the cistern. Once, in an art gallery, she’d been so worried they were wasting their lives that she’d insisted they fuck in every disabled toilet in the building. There were six. It was tough. Life needed to be constantly living inside events.

  When an article in the Media Guardian suggested that the Wild World would have less to do with talking and thought and more to do with actual events she was overjoyed. ‘See?’ she said to Joe. ‘See?’ Within a month she had left for London.

  Joe wipes his arse and drops the dirty paper into the toilet. As he stares into the bowl his thoughts naturally turn to the crumb. The darling crumb.

  ‘Proof of Life,’ he whispers, waving his hand in front of the circular sensor, causing the toilet to flush. It crosses his mind, as the dirty waters turn, that his love for the crumb might not represent his love for Life at all, but something quite different – his love for life, which he is sure still exists at the very centre of his torso, as far away from the outside world as it can get.

  Half an hour later and the rehearsal is in full swing. Joe is standing with David guarding the entrance to the stage where Asa Gunn and the other actors are performing their play to an empty theatre. Only the director and her assistant sit making notes in the front row.

  ‘You might as well know, David,’ says Joe. ‘Life left me on Christmas Day and I’ve taken it badly. I feel like I’ve been shot and I’m in shock. I can’t find the entrance or the exit wounds. Without Life, I’m going to hate being alive. I love her. I now know that my life will never be genuinely good. Do you know what I mean?’

  Joe turns to David who stares back at him with blank eyes too big for his posh face.

  ‘I can’t hear you, mate,’ he mouths, fingers pointing to the white earphones that snuggle fizzing inside each of his ears.

  ‘You’re a cunt, David,’ Joe says. ‘You’re a cunt and they should bury you alive.’

  ‘What did you say, mate?’ says David, removing the earphones from his large, rugby ears and letting them hang from his neck, near to his well-brought-up nipples.

  ‘I said, David . . . I said . . . what exactly is the Wild World?’

  ‘The Wild World?’

  ‘Yeah, what exactly is it?’

  ‘Well, we don’t know, do we?’ says David, poshly. ‘That’s the whole point. We just know the rumours. If you’re asking me, then I’d say it’ll have something to do with virtual reality.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. In the Wild World, you’ll almost certainly be able to have sex with Marilyn Monroe.’

  Joe shakes his head. He doesn’t agree. Fucking dead film stars virtually, or living ones for that matter, is a lot like pissing shit off toilet bowls. Every man knows they could not resist doing it. But whereas cleaning toilets with piss is harmless, even helpful, virtually fucking the famous would certainly lead to every man being permanently plugged into the necessary machine for the rest of his life. It would be inconceivable to spend time doing anything but receiving heartbreaking tit-wanks from Marilyn Monroe. It would bring civilisation to an end. This is a fact. There’s a tacit agreement among leading scientists and computer programmers not to make film-star fucking possible. Joe is certain he will die having never pushed his penis into an advanced piece of technology. He’s right.

  It’s dark and it is ten to eight. Joe gets the bus from outside the Palace Theatre on Oxford Road where a large poster is advertising the Abba musical Mamma Mia!.

  It’s freezing on the bus. Shoulders hunch and point inwards. Buttocks turn to stone. Joe sits on the back seat downstairs. For the first time since she left, he’s not thinking about Life or even her excremental legacy. He’s thinking about what David had said about shagging virtual celebrities. He definitely doesn’t agree. Fucking celebrities is the old and not the Wild World. Even Joe, when he’d been living with Life, had enjoyed a few midday masturbations over celebrity magazines. We’ve been screwing fantasies for decades now. We’re bored by it. Deep down, we’re angry about it. The sexual dreams of the old world will, thinks Joe, be broken in the Wild.

  He gets off the bus on the Rusholme/Fallowfield border and walks to his front door at the top of Platt Lane. As he enters the apartment complex his thoughts return to Life and to the toilet bowl. It had been her idea to move to Rusholme. She enjoyed the multicultural atmosphere and how you could still buy unpackaged food from some of the stalls. He climbs the stairs up towards his flat. Footsteps. I want to scream. Life is simple. I want to scream.

  Joe finds the front door of his flat ajar. He pushes it open with an outstretched foot and peers cautiously down the hall. In secure complexes like this one, burglary is rare. Joe steps slowly into his flat. To his left is the bathroom door. He realises how little he cares about getting robbed. Bathrooms, famously, are the least robbed rooms in houses, and the only thing of value Joe possesses is a piece of shit. No black market trades literally in shit. Not even in Manchester. Joe takes a deep breath.

  ‘Hello,’ he says, in a tone of voice designed to ring out, unanswered.

  ‘Hello,’ comes the reply, a second later, followed by the uncontrolled shriek of a child.

  Joe doesn’t recognise the man he finds in his living room. He doesn’t recognise the baby that the man is holding and feeding either. He watches for a moment as the child’s chugging cheeks suck black milk from an upturned bottle, held gently in the fingers of the man. Why is the milk black?

  ‘How did you get in?’ says Joe, stepping forwards into the room.

  ‘Life gave me the key. I couldn’t risk waiting around in the cold with this one with me.’ The man nods at the child in his arms. He is scruffy, the man. Ripped jeans, a faded Rolling Stones T-shirt short enough to reveal an inch of his midriff and a few straggling pubes. His head is shaved, maybe even wet shaved. He’s about twenty-nine. One of those. Not quite thirty. He removes the bottle from the baby’s tiny lips. A trickle of black milk descends into the baby’s shawl. A series of black bubbles spreads across its lips.

  ‘There you go,’ says the man, placing the baby into a travel seat on the floor. The baby’s face creases, its eyes get desperate. Seconds later it is sucking on a dummy.

  ‘Now, Joe,’ says the man, standing up and shaking his arms back to life, ‘I’m sorry to barge in like this but I don’t have much time. We need you to look after Sally here for a week or so. Life says you’re good with secrets, that you don’t go out much and that you’re looking for opportunities in the Wild World. You’re perfect. And your academic record is excellent, we’ve checked. Any questions so far?’

  ‘Have you used my toilet?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ The man puts a hand on top of his hairless head.

  ‘Just tell me,’ snaps Joe. ‘Have you taken a piss since you got here?’

  Looking perplexed, the man nods his head. Joe sighs. Why is life impossible? He sits down slowly on one of the wooden arms of his sofa. He puts his head into his hands and leans forward. It’s gone, he decides. Would I fit round the U-bend? he thinks. Could I just about squirm round it and then swim through the pipes and drop into the Mancunian sewers? I could spend a lifetime sifting through shit, interrupting rats, throwing up, getting poisoned. I would gladly spend my lifetime just searching for crumbs.

  ‘I was absolutely bursting,’ says the man. ‘It’s hard to find time when you’re caring for a baby.’

  Joe says nothing. He knows that there is no point in going to check. The man has pissed in his toilet. A man has pissed in his toilet. The rules of the competition say that the crumb has been pissed away. He dreads to imagine this man’s pride as he increased the power, got the aim spot on and then strained to fire the crumb away before he ran out of juice. He was pr
obably panting when he’d finished. It would have held on pretty tight, that lovely bit of crap. But there is no point going to check. Because people succeed.

  ‘Listen, Joe,’ says the man, impatiently. ‘Sally needs feeding six times a day. I’m leaving you enough milk to get you through two weeks. She’s very well behaved. Everyone says so. You’ll be paid, of course, and Life says you could do with the cash. This is a great opportunity for you. You’re just the type of person we need at this stage. Low-key, unattached, no real reason to endanger –’

  ‘How is she?’ interrupts Joe. ‘How is Life? Is she OK?’

  ‘She’s fine. She said to say hello.’

  ‘Why is the milk black?’

  The man smiles a frown. ‘Sally needs certain things that other children don’t. In fact, I should say: don’t take Sally south of Birmingham.’

  ‘Where are her parents?’

  ‘Dead. Sally’s an orphan, see. Just keep her safe and in the north. You’ll be doing us a huge favour. Life said you’re the most caring guy she knows.’

  ‘It’s true,’ says Joe, getting up off the sofa and crawling in the direction of the travel seat. ‘I do care. I’m over-sensitive.’ He leans over Sally. ‘What’s wrong with her eyes?’

  ‘An infection. Nothing serious. They’ll have some colour in them soon, for deffo.’

  For deffo? Sally’s eyes are only black and white. Joe presses her nose lightly and Sally giggles a little, a few more blackish bubbles are blown about her mouth. ‘Hello there,’ Joe says to Sally. ‘Hello there.’

  ‘So you agree?’ asks the man, unloading large bottles of the black milk from a rucksack on the floor. ‘I bet you never thought the Wild World was this easy, I mean, bloody childcare, piece of piss, eh?’

  Joe quickly decides that Sally is the perfect replacement for the crumb of Life’s shit. I’ll take her. I need her. For so much of life, you are capable of nothing. Anything’s possible, sure, only it isn’t. Hardly anything’s possible. But right now, thinks Joe, I could, I could do anything.