by M. T Hill
‘Martha is fifteen now,’ the woman in grey tells him, tightening her grip.
‘Stop,’ Remi whimpers. ‘Please stop it.’
‘And you can see her again,’ the woman in grey says. ‘Would you like to?’
Remi looks at the fox. The fox is staring back at him.
‘You must do as we instruct,’ the woman in grey says. ‘Will you?’
Remi nods once.
‘Then be still now.’ She removes her hands. She moves to the tank of liquid, into which she places her arm. When she removes it again, her skin is filthy. She takes the pigeon collars from the surface, brings them towards him.
‘Open your eyes,’ the woman in grey says. She tilts his head back, using his chin. He wants to struggle but finds himself paralysed. She places the pigeon collars on his cheeks and, raising her wet forearm, allows the liquid to run along the deep channels of her skin, mass and bulge at her fingertips, and fall into his dry mouth. Remi’s throat seizes as he tries not to gag. Tallow grease. Lorry spray. Oiled puddle—
‘A ceremony,’ the woman tells him. ‘For a promise, these ancient fluids. As a country we worked with them for so long – did you think they were a gimmick? We are together, now. Our blood and oil. Go home, and we will be in touch.’
Remi staggers to the door on weak legs. The white light clicks off. The woman in grey whispers, ‘That’s enough, Rupal.’
Remi turns around. Rupal is still licking the floor. Something inside Remi twists and breaks, floats free.
12
In body, Remi is picking his way towards Hackney, towards the flat. In every other sense he is altered, swimming. His nose and mouth can’t quite break London’s surface, and each breath brings a trill of pain, a lightning in his chest. How has he forgotten what should be insoluble? He’s pushing against the inside of something. It has shifted outwards, started to give. At the thinnest point, it’s possible to discern shapes on the other side. A truth is over there, but its form has come apart. He remembers the funeral, not a burial. He remembers gas hobs, not a fire. If he’d ever intended to hurt his family that way, the impulse is utterly revolting to him now – a stranger’s resolve, an alien will: as exterior and unthinkable as the idea of hurting them with a ligature, a blade between the ribs, a hammer on thin bone. He stops to retch against a wall. Truly he believes he couldn’t and wouldn’t have done something so drastic, so unforgiveable. In turn, he questions how it could have even – or ever – happened. Would you really get away with something so heinous? He was never arrested – was he? Never sought, so far as he knows. He has never been haunted by the act itself – he has consumed enough true crime in his years to know that some killers return to the scene, attempt to relive their transgressions. If there’s a darkness in him, it’s surely personally inflected, inward facing. It doesn’t stem from blame or guilt. Surely – surely – Remi had made no attempt on the lives of Joan and Martha. Surely him turning the hob on and off meant nothing.
Away from the woman in grey, beyond her thrall, more doubts are hardening. Denial as deliverance. What proof really exists for Martha, except for the photo, or the video footage, both of which could have been manipulated or fabricated? The bug’s images of him standing in his kitchen, at the hob, were convincing, yes, but hardly definitive. Even the funeral footage seemed falsified, like a recital, a false-flag memory… they could have found models or actors, restaged each scene… If the woman in grey was really with a government agency, they had previous form.
But why? Why would they do this to him?
As he moves, Remi desperately hopes for clarity. Because the idea alone of Martha being alive is devastating. It brings to bear the possibility that in some awful state he truly abandoned her; that he wilfully left her, never mind Joan, and has somehow suppressed the memory of doing so. The dissonance hurts him physically. To admit Martha is alive is to also admit he has lied to himself so repeatedly, so effectively, that he has come to believe something infinitely worse.
Is he really so self-centred? This question is enough to make him stop in the street. Remi has long since stopped regarding the past as linear, or at least the forward-flowing stream that brought him here. He tends to look back on segments of his life as though reviewing episodes from an unreal television series – vignettes out of sequence, out of sync. In this new mode, he struggles to make any of them work rationally. The viewing angle has moved: he sees now that there are blanks and deep holes in the continuity, in the stitching of him. There are moments he thought were crystallised forever. Since he left Manchester, he has always had the sense that his life ended and restarted when Martha passed on. That he should have to suspend these ideas isn’t just painful – it’s existential.
And what about the news? His apparent – no, demonstrable – aversion to it? If he has any memory of a fugue, it must be buried by definition. There’s no real counter to his current detachment, him being the man he is, alone in his ways and answering to nobody but the clients he serves so punctually. Did he really lose himself so completely for that time? And does he accept that this was still him?
Why doesn’t he remember?
As Remi reaches the turning for the flats and comes off the canal towpath, he can’t help picturing his life as an infinite spreadsheet. He grows angry. He begins to grasp in totality the ways in which the woman in grey and her fox have surveilled and catalogued him. All those years. All these ways that technology has become his prison – and for what? What are they planning for him?
Remi washes into his flat on a tide of rage. He unlocks the door knowing what to do, what this urge is really about. He doesn’t wait or hesitate: he works purposefully, each fresh wave of loathing for the fox and the woman causing him to seek out and break something new.
First, he destroys the obvious things they might have used – machines with watching lenses, or listening microphones, or suggestions of either. He tears the bug’s charging mount from the wall and snaps it, gashing his hand. He stamps on his mobile phone until its screen is unreadable, and he drops the gathered wreckage from an open window to the car deck below. The noise of the debris energises him – he sets about ripping other objects from their perfect, just-so slots and slits, boxes and drawers, and throws these out of the window, too.
Next he sits and destroys his tablet and hard drives with a ball pein hammer, a diamond-tipped screwdriver. He takes a mesh basket and finds some accelerant and burns his English passport in an attempt to melt its memory chip.
He hunts for the less obvious things: anything he suspects could feasibly contain a camera or mic or tracker. A vented garlic pot, coin boxes, any hollow trinkets. Objects that he might otherwise ignore in everyday life, which would also make for ideal surveillance points. He makes a pile and goes through it with the hammer.
He boils the kettle and sterilises the screwdriver blade and cuts down towards the health insurance derm in his wrist, sucks at the wound until the capsule is there in his mouth. He chews until it breaks open. He swallows the insides. The aftertaste is caustic, how he imagines the flavour of singed hair.
He works like this into the night, thoughts dulled by the physicality of it all. Methodical in a way that perturbs and reassures him. That he’s capable of doing all this damage, to so much stuff he’s paid good money for – grafted and grifted and saved for – is a surprise of its own.
Only when he’s done – the flat smelling of his body, his skin bearing a film of sweat and blood and graphite – does Remi stop to consider if this was what the woman in grey intended. If the destruction of his personal life, his gadgets, was what she wanted. If his decision to act this way reflects or follows any sort of persuasion or suggestion on their part.
He dismisses it. Impossible to know. He can’t second-guess himself, let alone the woman in grey.
Exhausted, he lies down on the lounge rug, strewn with its plastic debris, metal fasteners, splinters, and closes his eyes to sleep, having found a sort of peace in being able to see nothing. At least
for now they can’t see him either.
When Remi wakes again, Rupal the fox is waiting at the lounge window. Part of him expected it, the rapid response, but then he remembers how many floors up the flat is.
Rupal has her face pressed against the glass, snout squashed and pale whiskers splayed out like fine cracks. Her body is arched, positioned sidelong for purchase on the ledge.
Remi weighs the fox’s presence, the devastation of his flat. A kind of shame and trepidation, his heart going, his wrist sore. Is this what the woman in grey meant by being in touch? The fox, unnaturally still, yawns widely at him, revealing a root-purple tongue and black-pitted teeth.
Remi snarls back at her. Rupal being the other tool that has captured and processed him, broken him down into parts, collected his remains and traces and impressions on the world, as a way to deconstruct and quantify him. And how. It’s the effectiveness, the single-mindedness, that disturbs him most of all. The idea she’s been Remi’s shadow since the reservoir. That in all this time he only remembers seeing her that once.
So when Remi goes to the window to slide it open, he does so with the diamond-tipped screwdriver drawn carefully from the shag-pile rug, held close against his right kidney. He opens the window, and the fox darts in with that impossible smile, licking her lips as though to say, why wouldn’t I be here?
Remi lunges at her. Rupal rolls playfully, seemingly oblivious. With his left hand Remi catches her by the throat and strikes somewhere along the spine, hears the metal scrape. He draws back his arm for another attempt, this time aiming upwards into the throat, and Rupal bares her teeth and yaps in panic and slides closer to him. She writhes against him like some lost pet, desperate, and Remi can’t abide it; can’t abide that she should want to be here. He brings the screwdriver down through Rupal’s skull, and the fox pushes her face deeper into Remi’s armpit, snuffling and whining and leaking, her brush swinging wildly. Remi recoils, gripping the fox by the lower jaw, fingers wet and hot in her mouth, and lands two savage blows to her snout, a third above the left eye. The impact shatters the lens in its socket, exposing a chain of tiny mirrors behind. With her single remaining eye, Rupal fixes Remi with a loving gaze.
‘No,’ Remi tells her. And Rupal paws at his thighs, Remi cross-legged with the fox rolling over and over, her face and coat shedding splinters of glass and metal. Except now she’s mewling, a sad, low moan that makes Remi want to silence her forever. ‘No,’ Remi whispers, and he raises the screwdriver once more.
He’s too tired to finish it. If it can be finished at all. The fox’s torn fur reveals some kind of armour plating. Blood-oil on the uppermost surface, with flecks like iron filings visible in the suspension. Rupal sits on him, wheezing, trying to stand and move but caving each time. Remi collapses backwards with the fox on top of him, a dead weight on his chest. Rupal, with her eyes slitted, licks at Remi’s face and neck, her fragments sprinkling his skin. Remi gives in. He drops the screwdriver and lets Rupal harvest his sweat.
13
Rupal is badly injured. When Remi cups her face and looks into her damaged eye, he can see the lens mirrors flipping in spasm.
‘Why did you come back?’ he asks her. ‘Why did you come here?’
Rupal slides off him and staggers in a tight circle, forelegs unsure. She keeps lifting her chin, forlorn, as if willing Remi to get up with her. No, insisting. The fox wants Remi to get up.
So Remi rises to his knees. He steadies himself over his hands. Rupal circles him, nuzzling his back, his arms. And Remi says, ‘I’m sorry,’ hopeless as a boy, voice cracking. Rupal stops. Remi says, ‘Rupal.’ Quietly, as though in confession.
Rupal visibly brightens at hearing her name. She taps her way close to him and puts her cold nose to his belly. Tentatively, he touches her head, then her flank. Her insides are trembling. He picks away the larger pieces of debris from her coat, sweeps fragments from her snout and ears with the back of his hand. He yelps as something slides into his finger, and immediately sucks at it. He can taste her, the sourness and rust. He curses and lifts himself to his feet and Rupal immediately reels away, cowed and wary once again. She leaves a smear of a sticky fluid on the floor.
‘No more,’ Remi says, surveying the upturned room, the ruin of the place. He’s not that man now. And slowly, Rupal returns to Remi’s feet.
‘Do you eat?’ he asks her. ‘Are you hungry?’
Rupal moves her head once to the side. A delicate movement, almost imperceptible. Is that an answer? Then another anguished moan as she lurches towards the door and begins to claw and scratch. Remi takes a step closer. Rupal spins on the spot and comes to his feet.
Remi nods. ‘You want me to follow you.’
Rupal lies down on her belly. Her white tail bob waving, her ears sharply up.
Remi pulls on his boots. A heavy jacket. He holds his head and hears with harsh clarity the sound and coarseness of the screwdriver entering Rupal’s orbit. He looks at his hands: narrow cuts through old scars, a flapping callus on his palm. He looks to Rupal, this wretched creature dripping mechanical fluids from her mouth, hanging on his movement.
He pockets the screwdriver. He makes a silent pact with himself. Seeing the state of her, he owes her that.
* * *
Rupal limps along the Regent’s Canal’s wet towpath some distance ahead of Remi, and then into the hiveways of Bethnal Green itself. Remi’s holding his hood against the wind, hanging back from corner to corner for fear of looking strange, and to preserve the natural order. A fox and human don’t travel together – interactions are fleeting, mystical. Their lines should not merge. Meanwhile, Rupal has gathered some strength in walking, though there’s a sagging to her front right shoulder; a slight but noticeable kink in her spine that hints at more serious internal injuries. The bushy tail she holds at a right angle, as if to counter a loss of balance.
As they go, this strange dance, Remi wonders if they aren’t heading to the small row of shops by the Overground station at London Fields. They traverse the mouth of Broadway, where the market stalls stand desolate save for a rough-looking man wearing a sandwich board promising salvation and jellied eels, in that order. Remi hurries past, hands pocketed; the fox has apparently sensed the stranger and jinked right into parkland. More people emerge from the treeline. He spots a circle of modern inflatable tents, the remains of a crate fire. It’s four in the morning, and dawn is coming.
‘Rupal,’ Remi hisses, but only when he’s sure of being alone. ‘Wait up.’
The fox loiters. She marks her territory and licks her forepaw, her belly. From a distance, you would never know her truth. Out here, in this rich and unkept grass, she’s every London fox that ever crossed him on a run; she is the city’s history and its survivor all at once.
The fox dips her head. She looks to the distance, scenting. Despite her injuries, she increases her speed.
Remi shuffles into a jog.
• • •
Remi finally catches up with Rupal on the corner of a back street. Here stands a vintage phone and subderm-seller’s kiosk, digital A-board glitching on the pavement outside. The neon on the wall above the kiosk is dead, grey letters spelling DOCTOR DERM, while gaudy stickers and aug-reality tags decorate the roller-shutter. Remi’s shoulders tighten as he notices the fox lying down. The pooling liquid beneath her. Here? Really?
Seeing him approach, Rupal stretches out her hind legs in the manner of a cat waking up. She wiggles her ears and closes her eyes. There’s a gap in the base of the roller-shutter, through which she slides with no small effort. Then, from inside, a lot of banging and rattling around, before a tense quiet settles.
‘Rupal?’
The fox barks once, muffled but sharp, and the roller door starts to squeak into its housing. A rhombus of dawn light reveals Rupal teetering on a stack of crates and boxes, her nose pushed against a simple industrial switch. As Remi ducks under, she moves away, shaking her face like the button had tickled her whiskers. The shutter closes beh
ind him.
Remi hunts for a light. Only the fox beats him to it – jumping across a rack of shelves to nose on a switch; an old energy-saving bulb phases on above him, warmer than he might have expected. He can’t see his breath, at least.
The fox pauses to give him a look. Then she jumps to the floor. Remi looks at his feet. He’s standing in a pile of discarded plastic moulds and torn paper. Looking closely, he notices phone batteries among the mess, some apparently gnawed, along with blotches of what could be battery acid. As if to confirm something, Rupal sniffs the ground and takes one of the damaged batteries in her mouth. She chews it with an awful grinding noise, then lets her tongue flop loose, dark saliva spooling off.
‘You don’t…’ He stoops lower as if to check. ‘Jesus, no. Don’t eat that.’
The fox leads Remi into the back of the shop, where she’s fashioned a bed from various chunks of packing foam, polystyrene and cardboard. The stench is obscene: concentrated urea, peppery and raw. Flies billow and reform in the corners. No, they are the corners. Remi covers his mouth and nose lest the air blister his throat. His eyes water.
The fox settles in her den, unperturbed. Remi squats to her level, noting her tiredness. There’s a cloying thickness to the space. A physicality to the air. Rupal’s single working eye has taken on a strange aspect, a vagueness, as though it’s struggling to focus on him.
‘Why in here?’ Remi asks.
Rupal pushes a half-eaten battery towards him. It’s leaking from two deep fissures.
He fingers the dry end of the battery. He slides it away from her. ‘You can’t bloody eat this stuff,’ he tells her. He scratches his head, because she can and clearly does. ‘What about… what about meat? I can get you some chops. Lamb or chicken. Or eggs.’
