The Extinction Club

by Robert Twigger

  Like many original ideas, the saving of Milu crept up on Herbrand Russell. It wasn’t the product of just one meditative holiday afloat on the Tamar River. One can imagine the cumulative thinking of several summers, paddling around, slowly arriving at the grand idea.

  RUSSELL, EARLIER

  AS AN undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, Russell was drawn into a group of high-spirited sportsmen. Wagers and challenges were their only interest. On one occasion he was given the choice between chopping down Benjamin Jowett’s favorite tree—a three-hundred-year-old mulberry tree—or poaching a deer from the park in nearby Magdalen College.

  The leader of these ruffians was one A. J. H. Hartley, a tall, gangling fellow with a penchant for shooting at policemen with a rook rifle. The deer would have to be hanging in the meat larder of Hartley’s servant in Hythe Bridge Street by dawn of the appointed day. If not, the forfeit could only be delayed by chopping down the tree and leaving it as faggots on the doorstep of Jowett’s lodgings. This too before the renowned Master of Balliol awoke and took his morning bowl of meat broth.

  Failing both challenges, the forfeit was one hundred pounds, to be placed in the cap of the first beggar encountered that day in the low district of Jericho. Success would bring only honor and the chance to accept future challenges.

  Their plan was simple enough. Affix the nets, which were extensive, between two trees in the dark end of the deer park. Then approach a sleeping or grazing deer with stealth and drive it toward the net. It was poaching with no finesse.

  They had agreed upon a young male, but quickly saw that it would be a case of snaring whatever they could. Russell didn’t like that side of it, but then it was a rag and to be expected.

  The deer shifted uneasily across the grass as the young men approached. Lloyd-Evans, Russell’s second, indicated a nervous doe that dipped its head to eat and then looked up every few seconds. The nets were in place. This was their chance. They started in at a silent walk, intent on the prey. The doe lifted its head again. They stopped. Lloyd-Evans nodded very slightly. Both men started to run. The doe and half a dozen other deer fled with effortless speed over the hard turf. Both men were sprinting as fast as they had ever run and were still lagging behind. But it was the finest feeling to be running on foot after deer. Russell had hunted on horseback and stalked on the estate in Scotland, but this running was the finest feeling.

  With a dull thwack the doe hit the loosely hung net. Its head and foreleg were trapped for a minute. Long enough for the young men to be on it with their simple weapons. Now the deer was barking, a pathetic low-toned bleat of fear, which nevertheless sounded as loud as Great Tom striking to Russell and Lloyd-Evans.

  Lloyd-Evans used his nobby black wood club, again and again at the side of the skull. “No different to taking a priest to a perch’s head,” he said, breathing hard. Russell used the net to entrap the deer further and hold it still.

  Russell was no sentimentalist. He had shot deer, rabbits, pigeons, grouse, pheasants, and partridge. He had clubbed fish to death on a riverbank. He’d seen a fox’s head ripped half away by two hounds. But this clubbing of the roe deer was different. The elemental brutality of it. The fact that it wouldn’t die easily. This was the way savages behaved.

  In the end Lloyd-Evans stabbed it six times in the back of the neck with the stiletto he carried everywhere. “Hartley would be proud of you,” said a grim Russell.

  Rolling the limp beast in the net, they carried it like a heavy sack toward the wall of the park. Humping it to the top of the wall, Russell suddenly motioned for silence. A bobbing lamp was coming along the perimeter toward them. Coming at a jogging pace. They could only crouch on the wall and wait. Russell sensed Lloyd-Evans adjust the grip on his club. The proctor came toward them, not looking up, half walking fast, half hurrying his steps into a run; preoccupied with his breathing, he didn’t see two men and a deer in the bright moonlight above him.

  “Do you know,” said Lloyd-Evans, as they swaggered home, having stowed the beast with Hartley’s tame servant, “I would have knocked that man down if he’d tried to stop us.”

  “And I might have helped you,” said Russell. He never hunted again.

  For some reason this proved to be the last real challenge proposed by the raffish Hartley and his friends. Months later, Herbrand Russell came down from Oxford and took a commission in the Grenadier Guards.

  The mulberry tree still stands in the Balliol Fellows Garden.

  EDEN

  THE PLACE where it all started, the place where all species are represented in full, before depletion by time, meteor attack, or the work of the Major and his friends. Eden stands at the opposite end of the spectrum to the dead world, the world extinguished of all life, what scientists gleefully tell us we have to look forward to in 150 million years.

  But the phrase “look forward to” only has meaning with regard to events that can be looked forward to, that are within a sensible human time frame—within my lifetime, or my children’s, say. It is utterly meaningless to draw any ordinary conclusions from the supposed knowledge that the world will be extinguished long in the future. It’s just an easily told story, nothing more. The opposite of Eden, the smoking, charred corpse of a planet that Earth is destined to become, is, in any meaningful sense, an invention of the science-fiction writer’s mind.

  CHERNOBYL

  SURPRISING FOOTAGE from Chernobyl, filmed from radio-controlled planes fitted with video cameras—the place is teeming with wildlife. In the absence of man, animals return even to the poisoned zones. Deer, rabbits, foxes, field mice—all running through the deserted concrete shells of towns, past the abandoned cars and open doorways and the trees growing up through cracks in the road.

  EDEN II

  CONSERVATION IS an attempt to fix Eden, but in life things keep on developing. That which looks fixed is an optical illusion.

  The moment conservation becomes thinkable, Eden slips from our grasp, since wild animals are no longer wild if they can be conserved, corralled, looked after. They are tame animals in danger. Wild plants and animals do exist, but they are hardly exotic—rodents, feral pigeons, certain snakes, undersoil fungi, woodlice, cockroaches. Animals that often accompany man in his dwelling places but are not controlled by man. Survivors.

  Eden after the fall is defined by these survivors: its pests and parasites, its weeds and scavengers, its unwanted population and its mountains of garbage.

  Just as a petri dish full of multiplying bacteria will eventually poison itself with its own excreta, so the human race races up to the limit of self-poisoning before maintaining an uneasy symbiosis with its waste products. The animals closest to us now are the ones that eat our prodigious filth. Our friends the rats, the roaches, the seagulls on the landfill outside town.

  MISTAKE

  IHADN’T HEARD from the Major for months so I decided to send him a postcard. I sent one of Woburn Abbey. Even though he would never admit it, I knew that a postcard would be welcome. I was careful to keep the message bland: no mention of Milu or even my connection to Woburn. I avoided, too, any words that might annoy the man, words like conservation, ecology, or even nature. Europe’s first nature reserves, he was found of pointing out, had been built in Hitler’s Germany. To the Major, all greenies were crypto-Nazis.

  HISTORY

  FROM THE deer records I could see that for the first few months of a deer’s life it was hard to tell if it was male or female—there was a special column in the record book for “sex indeterminate.” After a month or two, sex indeterminates graduated into either males or females. I wondered what I would think if I came across this book a few centuries from now, perhaps with no other supporting documents. I might think that those fools in the past actually believed that deer went through an asexual phase before becoming either male or female. I might assume that, on the written evidence I had in front of me, if I knew nothing of deerkeeping. Fortunately, Callum had told me earlier, “It’s bloody hard to tell if a calf i
s male or female, not without bringing them in for a thorough examination, and we’re not going to do that.”

  WORLD WAR 1

  THE DRIVER knew better than to speed through the estate. His master, the duke, now colonel-commanding, sat in the back, working through papers that related to war and the management of men to fight that war. He took in the numbers, the numbers of men they would need to recruit. The “target” figures set by the War Office. Already half the estate was fighting; they were down to a skeleton staff working halfway into the night. The papers spoke of “the spirit and self-sacrifice of the New Armies.” How “if they had been able to devote more time to training they would have been able to hold on to many points of importance, but from which they were driven by the enterprising German machine-gunners.”

  Russell had fought in Egypt; he knew war and thought it no more or less than man’s estate, in these troubled times, the Prussian tribe grown noisy and seeking dominion and the English soul clamoring for a chance to wield the sword. He had known war, yet this war was proving different. A shake of the head wouldn’t make that difference go away. Finding no pleasure in duty, commerce with the public, acts of office, vainpuffery, and manorial license, the duke nevertheless did everything that was required of him. At the tail end of a world where public office meant power and the freedom to be mightily eccentric, the duke pursued his daily round of duties with an actors forbearance, an actor who can rarely leave the stage.

  Herbrand Russell looked up, saw the trees black against the dark-blue evening sky. Some way ahead there were lights in the village and, carrying faintly, the rising and falling sound of a church bell. He stowed his papers in a scratched leather briefcase. Dimmed the acetylene reading lamp. He had always followed the rules, done what he wanted, but within the rules. Now the rules were taking on an insidious life of their own. Cattle and sheep were arriving daily, a “quota” that the estate “must support.” He had received the official documents from the estate office, crude calculations made from erroneous figures purporting to show the number of beasts the estate should farm; domesticated beasts—the deer didn’t count anymore. The real work of his life could very well be slaughtered by a clerk making a calculation about sheep and cattle. Very little hay had been grown, and the winter grass was pitifully overgrazed. The sheep would go to market, but more would take their place. The Pere David’s deer would die, the meat disappearing into grateful stews and game pies from Woburn Sands to Ampthill, and Milu would be no more.

  No damnum fatale. This must not be allowed to happen. Wearing a stern face close to the glass of the side window, the car gathering pace over the iron cattle-grid, he felt no self-pity but a determination to hug the burden of his life closer, what he had made himself, without the rules. He glimpsed some great catastrophe on the horizon. Moving through lifetimes and coming to meet men soon.

  FARM SAVE

  MY MOTHER telephoned. She hadn’t won the lottery, but she had been to visit the old farm all the same. She had gone with my aunt. My aunt had said, “When you leave the home you were brought up in, you always feel a bit homeless all your life.” They were torn between sadness at seeing the old place, what with all the caravans and it being not as neat as my grandfather kept it, and that curious nosy pleasure of poking around in an updated version of the past. My mother said that the people they talked to who hadn’t moved away had a much better memory of the old days than she or my aunt did.

  When the auction occurred, the farm didn’t reach its reserve price. There was still a chance we might be able to buy it back in the future.

  EGYPT VII

  PEOPLE SAID I ought to meet Lothar if I was so interested in books. Lothar had a huge number of books and he’d certainly know where to get more. Lothar was also the official German biographer of Nobel prizewinner Naguib Mahfouz. Anyone who wanted to meet Mahfouz had to meet Lothar first.

  In 1992 Naguib Mahfouz had been stabbed in the neck by two Islamic fundamentalist students. This attempted assassination was prompted by Mahfouz’s book Children of Gebelaawi, which he’d written thirty years earlier. The book was considered to have atheistic leanings and was banned in Egypt, though Nadim said he knew a shop where we could get it under the counter. Since the stabbing, Mahfouz had been weakened. He was often too weak to write. He no longer went to the coffee shops in Khan al Kalil.

  Lothar had translated many of Mahfouz’s works into German, though not Children of Gebelaawi. It was the translation connection that led to Mahfouz agreeing that he could be his official German biographer.

  It turned out that I had been in the same room as Lothar on a previous visit to Cairo, though I did not remember him. The mutual friend whose room Lothar and I had been in put us in touch. Lothar invited us to an If tar supper at his Nile-side apartment on Zamalek, just past the 23 July Bridge, a very classy location. In fact, I couldn’t resist asking him the cost of his apartment. It was rent controlled, less than two hundred U.S. dollars a month, with big, high-ceilinged rooms, double doors, and a balcony big enough for a party. Lothar had invited some people over to meet my wife and me, which was very civil of him.

  Lothar’s houseboy tended to the two large charcoal braziers that glowed on the balcony in massive upturned woklike contraptions. The boy then scuttled in and finished off the cooking. Lothar said that he had taught him how to cook himself.

  I’d already see Lothar’s book collction—pristine, along one side of the Large, dark living room, it reached from floor to ceiling. Although everyone had said Lothar had lots of books, there did not seem so many to me. But they were nicely laid out.

  All the big books were on a shelf that just fitted their size. The same was true of the small-format books. Lothar said, “I got the shelving made to fit the books. Now when I buy a new book I have to throw one away the same size.”

  I thought he was joking, but this is in fact exactly what he did. He had decided that one thousand books was enough for anyone. When he decided to buy a new book—and it was a tough thing to decide, he intimated—he would then chuck one away.

  I noticed that all the books looked new. This was because Lothar never bought secondhand books. When I quizzed him about Ezbekiya Gardens, he said he’d heard about it but that he had never been there. He told me he had a rota system for dusting his books—one shelf was dusted every month. No one else was allowed to do it except Lothar. His previous houseboy had been fired for touching his books. “They don’t respect them,” he said.

  By now I could hardly bring mysalf to ask Lothar to lend me some books to read. As a way of sidling up, I said half-jocularly, “Have you earmarked any books to throw away?” “No” he said. That was it. All I could do was gaze at the pristine ranks of books in their dust jackets, admittedly a lot of German and Arabic titles but a pretty good showing of English books too, including obscure books of literary criticism, which I find always make good holiday reading.

  Outside, by the glowing charcoal braziers, Lothar spoke about Naguib Mahfouz. People asked him respectful questions about the Nobel prizewinner’s health, current opinions, whether he would publish again. Lothar gave considered replies to all such questions. It was not hard to see that he relished being the gatekeeper. He then spoke about all the famous people he had met who had wanted to meet Naguib Mahfouz—they’d needed him not just as a contact but also as a transltor.

  “What’s Naguib Mahfouz like?” I said.

  Lothar looked at me quickly. “He always says ‘we’ when he means ‘I.’ It’s a kind of courtesy peculiar to his generation.”

  As we were leaving, I overheard Lothar explaining that his book would take many more years to complete. “It’s exhaustive,” he said. “The last word.” I understood then that Naguib Mahfouz was his scam, like the pyramids and the mega-expensive bookshop, there to attract people in. If he finished the biography, the scam would have to end.

  I’M IN THE DARK

  THE NOVELIST’S latest novel was at proof stage. He was now checking for typos and small erro
rs. Auk Books were generous; unlike some publishers, they didn’t charge the author if the number of typos went above two hundred. This novel, the breakthrough novel, was about the dark. Most of the novel took place in a house where the lights were never switched on and the curtains were always drawn and it was always night and the occupants were blind anyway. Always wearing dark glasses. The prose was dazzling, like cut glass, Klaudia said. The prose was the only thing that wasn’t completely dark. Or it was dark, but like black cut glass it flashed light darkly.

  “Your next novel,” I said to the Novelist. “It sounds dark.”

  “Yep,” he said. “In fact, Klaudia suggested we call it The Dark. What do you think?”

  “Perfect title.”

  I’m not trying to belittle the Novelist. His novel had lots of other good things in it. A subplot involving a World War II commando raid on Norway. A singing automaton that also played chess. A pair of Siamese twins who hated each other’s guts even though they had the same guts. Breakthrough stuff if handled in the right way, and I believed wholeheartedly that if anyone could handle such material it would be the Novelist. Just sitting and drinking beer with him (his favorite was real ale brewed in South-wold), one’s confidence in him grew and grew. You felt you were on some trawler out in the North Sea, with his capable hands on the wheel. A storm of words was brewing up, but he was rock solid. By the fourth pint it was hard to understand why he hadn’t already won a Nobel Prize.

  In fact, talking about Nobel Prizes, the Novelist is the only person I’ve ever met who not only knows 1951 Nobel winner Par Lagerkvist’s name but has actually read his novel Det Besegrade Livet (Triumph Over Lies). In Norwegian.