A Short Affair

by Simon Oldfield

  The doctor was right. I was forced to conclude – after a month or so of this awful existence – that I was indeed unclean. A pariah – excluded from all social norms, a mere body, prey to processes over which my mind could exert no control. Even the best and most malleable of wax earplugs only sealed the buzz in: an electric ear worm, vermiculating my very cerebellum. Exhausted, I held myself in readiness for the next sensation of pained plenitude, and when it’d passed I recommenced cleaning – intent on managing at least this much: a goo-free body, and gooless surroundings. To begin with, on my forays to the shop below, I bought copious supplies of cleaning products – bleaches and other reagents, rubber gloves, sponges, mop heads and absorbent cloths. The flat stank of ammonia – I wept. Each day was a smeary, teary progress, as I wiped and wiped again all two hundred square feet of the wood-laminated flooring. Then I bought a steam cleaner which was delivered pronto. With this magic wand, jetting out water vapour at a hundred degrees centigrade, I could reach every nook and cranny, liquefying all dirt and goo, so that its residue might be easily mopped up with some kitchen towelling. I shuffled down to the garbage hopper – once, twice, three times a day – to deposit my black bags full of crumpled waste, the cord of my old dressing gown dragging in the dried-out cherry blossom that lies in drifts on the exterior walkways and staircases of the block.

  There’s no love lost when you’re afflicted in such a way – because there’s no love possible. After all, who in their right mind would be able to cope with this: at a singular moment of passion, when kisses and caresses are being bestowed with passion and artistry – a cupful of silvery goo plummeting down onto bare and wanting flesh? Oh, no – oh, God! I howled to the moon – who showed her celestial face, peeking, silvery and discrete, between low and scudding clouds. And then it came to me – came to me as I was actually examining the stains in the rank nappy I’d just torn from my stinking loins. What was this? At the very core of the sodden clout there were small and glittery flecks – as usual. But this time, instead of taking the residuum for granted and discarding the nappy post-haste, I removed the flecks with a pair of tweezers and scrutinised them further under a magnifying glass. The tiny flecks did indeed seem to be metallic – could they actually be silver? From then on I began to assiduously separate out the silvery flecks from the viscous goo in which they were being deposited. To begin with I simply hovered over the latest cupful where it lay on the wood-laminated floor, pecking away with my tweezers – and did the same with the two pairs of nappies I wore overnight, but soon enough, irritated by such inefficiency, I constructed a sort of panning implement, using a sieve and layers of kitchen roll. On feeling the familiar pained plenitude, I would now wave my implement around, holding it beneath first left nostril, then anus, then right eye – a balletic prelude, perhaps, to a devastating backhand tennis return – before, as the pained plenitude reached its inevitable conclusion, deftly positioning it beneath the right orifice.

  In a week or so I’d managed to accumulate a small and glittering pile – which I shovelled into a small velvet drawstring bag. The next time I hobbled down to the shop, I took the bag with me, and when I paid for my purchases – kitchen roll, toilet paper, basic comestibles – I got it out, untied the drawstrings, and tipped a quantity of the silvery flecks onto the counter. Mr Vairavar – who owns the shop, sits all day, hunched at the counter, his eyes on the distant horizon of the top-shelf magazines – immediately straightened up: ‘What’s this . . . what’s this . . .’ he muttered, getting out a jeweller’s eyeglass and screwing it into his bilious, bagged eye. ‘What’s this . . . what’s this – why!’ he exclaimed. ‘This is highest grade silver, man – how is it that you knew I was a silversmith back home in Sri Lanka?’ I said nothing – the pained plenitude was upon me, so I staggered outside to void in the gutter. Leaf mould. Plastic twists and shreds. A crushed fruit-juice carton. The desiccated and washed-out face of a politician, smiling up at me from a scrap of newsprint. When I returned to the counter Mr Vairavar handed me my velvet bag with a smile, saying: ‘Is there more where this came from? Y’know, I’ve still got a crucible – and my other silversmith’s tools. If you’ve access to more of this – which is the finest grade of silver – then we could go into business together.

  And so we did. In the beginning Mr Vairavar simply offset my silver production against my grocery bill. Then, as his own production came on line, in the form of small but intricate pieces – rings, pendants, earrings, animal figurines – which he displayed in a tray by the till, he began to remit me small cash sums. These, after a few weeks’ accumulation, I began to invest in more complex sieving equipment: laboratory clamps, to which I could attach more kitchen-roll-lined sieves, so that, whatever strange pose I adopted, in whichever part of the flat, the goo would be caught and filtered. Mr Vairavar took on an apprentice – while the buzz that emanates from the units which power his freezers full of extra-strength lager and full-fat milk became fused in my mind with my own excretory labour. So the buzz ceased to be the buzz of alienation and anomie – and became the warm hum of industry. Now, when I crawl on all fours, or pirouette in a fugue of pained plenitude – or crouch down to squirt, or rise up to piddle, or place both of my hands behind my head as my left nostril jets out silvery spume – or reach for the kettle, only to have it slimed by my gushing eye, I feel nothing but a sort of stupefying pride: for what have I done? Surely, taken a nauseating and repulsive affliction – this smelly, silvery discharge – and turned it into the fount of a new industry? A primary form of extractive industry, which I manage – as I do its refining and preparation. An extractive industry which is in turn linked to a manufactory, a distribution system – wholesale and retail enterprises. The wood-laminated floors of my flat are no longer a terra nullius, but a territory with which human labour and ingenuity has been mixed – I stare now upon scuffed skirting boards and stained bathroom tiling, with all the pride of any self-made industrialist.

  As for Mr Vairavar – through him I feel connected to an entire network of people: makers and doers and buyers and wearers of his and his apprentice’s exquisitely made jewellery. I may still feel the intermittent pained plenitude – I may yet experience the randomised splurge. I may even remain in enforced reclusion, yet I know, that were all these folk to be confronted with my naked, straining and smelly form, rather than repulsion – they’d manifest only the sincerest gratitude. The last time I went to see my doctor, I sat in the surgery for a few moments, listening to him patronise me as he riffed on his computer keyboard – then I took out one of my velvet drawstring bags, crammed full of raw silver, and threw it onto his drug-company-gifted vinyl blotter: ‘Take that,’ I said, ‘and buy yourself a new attitude. You, Sigmund Freud, and all the other soul doctors have it wrong – far from coming into being as humans sought to hide the animal reality of their bodies, it is these processes themselves that lie at the very foundation of what we call . . . civilisation.’

  ROUGH BEASTS

  Jarred McGinnis

  Artwork by Declan Jenkins

  ROUGH BEASTS

  Jarred McGinnis

  The first monster from the sea was a boar. Amongst the cream of waves, a speck of black. The speck grew. A head became visible, then ears discernible, the yellow glint of eye reflecting the bright summer sun. And, tusks. Long, curved crescents that hummed violence. Opalescent with sea water, they cut the waves like the prow of an ancient warship. The beachgoers watched the beast born from the salt water. They held out their phones in selfie-salutes. Mothers gathered babies with nervous anticipation. Children squealed with excitement following potbellied fathers towards the shore. In the hateful pit of me, of us all, we wanted something to happen on this too-safe island.

  I was sitting fifty feet from the first victim. I watched the man with the shaved head hike up his orange-and-blue swim trunks before taking a picture of the animal as it emerged. His gold chain and watch sparkled in the sun. His large hairless body gleamed with sunburn. He was typing into
his phone when the boar broke left, ran straight towards him and, before he could react, drove the three-foot scimitar of tusk up between his legs, skewering him. It flicked its head and the body bounced and rolled towards the water line.

  The animal barrelled through a blue-and-white-striped windbreak, trampling a family, leaving a baby to scream and thrash in the sand at the disruption of her feed. A keening of voices rose as we began to realise what was happening. Bare-chested young men tried to stop the beast with the pointed ends of closed umbrellas and grill tops. The beach was sown with abandoned sandals and flip-flops. Crumpled towels lay everywhere as if the bodies they had wrapped had evaporated, leaving behind the whiff of burned paper and hair.

  Most people stood motionless with flat, empty expressions, holding on to each other. Others threaded through the crowd with their phones on record to accuse the dead. Remember that video showing the elderly woman, grey hair in a bun, her grandmotherly roundness tucked into a black one-piece, carefully stepping towards the body of a young girl? In the distance, you could make out the boar as it continued to rampage the beach. I was there, I swear, just out of shot.

  Howls of sirens drew closer. Men in tactical gear surrounded the boar as it obliterated an ice-cream van, its tinkling rendition of ‘Jerusalem’ refusing to succumb. The pop of their handguns felt an inadequate and nervous response. As the men grew familiar with the pleasure of the bright-red daubs bursting amongst the coils of fur, their confidence built. When the beast turned and charged, their fusillade stilled it in seconds.

  The boar drew a long, deep breath. Then exhaled. The sand wisped and settled.

  Eyes aimed at the animal’s chest, waiting for another heave. A hundred fingers curled around the curve of a hundred triggers. The smallest flex of muscle and their mechanism would happily acquiesce a hundred times. But, the monster was dead. One by one the guns relaxed their stances. Radios blathered hisses and commands. A single clap turned into several then shouts and cheers were added. A soldier took off his helmet and handed his phone to have his picture taken next to the vanquished creature.

  The boar jerked back to life and bit off his legs, roaring a rusty, throaty squeal. It stumbled to its feet and charged towards a forensics crew who had been spooling out plastic tape. Another roar of gunfire felled the animal. TV-news-production trucks gathered with the flies as flower tributes multiplied in the setting sun.

  In the following days, the TV and radio were all tragedy chatter. Hashtags trended. Celebrities made video appeals. There was this one girl who died. I don’t remember exactly why she was famous but it really drove home the senselessness of it all. I retweeted some stuff about her. Nothing else existed except the personal stories of the victims. We consumed their last minutes with our morning tea and toast. Their tragic ends fortified our bones. It became such that no one questioned who was on the beach that day, because we were all there.

  We took the kids down to the beach where the Boar emerged. It seemed the right thing to do. The stench of dying flowers was overwhelming. Tributes piled up until the sand was no longer visible and the beach became a pixelation of red, white, pink and green. A bank of flowers, easily taller than a man, had accumulated beneath the pier for those who couldn’t quite be troubled with the dozen or so steps onto the beach. The naked stems of lilies tumbled in the surf. As soon as our youngest boy reached the promenade the smell of perfume and decay turned his insides out. His hysterics had a liturgical air that people seemed to approve of. We stood in reverence with everyone else until he was hollowed out, emptied of bile and tears. When his mother scooped him up, he slept an angel’s sleep on her shoulder as we looked for where we parked the car.

  Besides fish unwillingly, and wayward whales, obviously, animals have been coming out of the sea for years. It was remarkable but nothing we paid much attention to. Most of them were benign. Sodden cats skulking, eyes darting as they trotted towards a clump of sea grass to hide and groom the brine from their fur. Dormice by the handful. The occasional pangolin might garner a few lines in the local press. I once saw a swarm of bees emerge from the Firth of Clyde. In ones or twos, sometimes in shotgun shot-blasts, they flung themselves into the hovering, swirling, buzzing mist above as it drifted shoreward. Sometimes, the animals that emerged were a welcome wonder. A trained seeing-eye dog, a golden retriever who only understood commands in Albanian, shook itself dry and trotted up to a young boy in a wheelchair. A male passenger pigeon, a species extinct for one hundred years, startled a surfer in Cornwall by resting on his wet-suited shoulder, looking just as bewildered as the young man. The animals that came from the sea had one thing in common. They all had the smell of burned paper and singed hair.

  Behind our house lay a strip of forest. Forest is too grand a word; think of it as a hedge with aspirations. A staggered line of old yews, beech and ash with the occasional prickly holly to shelter piles of fly-tipped rubbish. I sat on a discarded bathtub flipped over like a fat poodle soliciting belly rubs. Staring at the house, replaying pointless battles at work fought by email and PowerPoint, I rolled myself a cigarette and blew smoke towards the house. Rollies at my age, who was I trying to fool? Daydreams about affairs with women I knew and didn’t floated past my attention without any real conviction. I thought about taking down the bike hanging in the garage. Get myself in shape, finally. No excuses this time. Then, inevitably, I’d think about the cancer. Two years previously, I got breast cancer. Yes, men get it too. Everyone used words like ‘fighting’ and ‘beating’, but we knew in this battle I hadn’t fought anything. I had been a vessel to be filled with modern medicine’s best guess. When my wife drove me to my appointments, and I pretended her kale smoothies played a part in my recovery. To save my life, my participation was optional. That bothered me over and over.

  The sour smell of burning hair and paper wrinkled my nose. Dabbing out my cigarette against the tub, I sniffed at it. Does tobacco go off? Even the rustle in the bushes behind me didn’t register as I set to roll another. As I took that first lungful, my brain finally did the arithmetic. I spun around and jumped onto the tub. I may have squealed. A two-foot gerbilish beavery kind of creature, a coypu I figured out later, fluffed and nibbled at the innards of a torn bin bag. Its grey eyes made me think of the industrial ball bearings my company made. It was untroubled by my presence. The carbonised stink of the animal between us, I felt all the hate and anger I had been accumulating. My arms ached with the burden of my do-nothing, for my own life, for those people on the beach. I heard the echoes of spray-tanned politicians yelling into bouquets of microphones that something must be done. The animal paused its foraging, as if it had had a revelation of an important affirming truth. It looked up at me as if it was about to reveal this wisdom.

  I clubbed in its head with a pipe. Its leg spasmed then stilled but the weight of the galvanised steel against the animal’s body was a pleasure. I continued to pound at it. The fatigue in my muscles felt post-coital. I marvelled at how easy it is to unstitch a living creature and that I had done it. In the brush nearby, my eye was drawn to a wriggling of pink. A clutch of coypu babies squirmed and chittered with hunger. Fag ends, packing-peanuts and animal hair padded the shallow hole. The burned stench thick on my tongue, I shoved a mound of dirt over the squiggly, squeaking nest and tamped it down. When I came back into the house, my wife asked me why I was flushed. My shrug was a sufficient answer and she asked me to deal with the kids. I read them their bedtime stories while I thought about what I had done. Goodnight bears, Goodnight kittens, And goodnight mouse.

  As the sea’s animal-attacks became more commonplace, the victims faded from our attention. The newspapers tried to fit all the memorial portraits until the front pages became a tilework where you had a general idea at the hairstyle and maybe could make a guess at the person’s ethnicity. Their stories in multitude became as insignificant as our own. Their deaths seemed to be less tragedy and more cautionary tale. What were they doing on the beach anyway? She was out late, a bit drunk, wear
ing a skirt that made it hard to run – of course a Kamchatka brown bear opened her ribcage like a tin of baked beans.

  Instead we became drawn by the large portrait above the fold of the monster that caused the carnage. We all became instant experts in zoology, biology and ethology thanks to twenty-four-hour news and its animated infographics. We quoted the habitat range (not usually including Norwich) of the Florida panther. Wildlife encyclopaedias replaced serial-killer biographies and crime procedurals on bestseller lists. Invasive species (e.g. grey squirrels, crawfish, knotweed) were no longer our fault. The sea had turned against us and sent forth creatures smelling of ash. We wove conspiracies. The smell of burned paper and singed hair that hung over Manhattan for days after 9/11 was no longer a coincidence. We sought answers and as answers are so hard to find, we got angry. Anger felt like the conclusion we were looking for.

  A year after the Boar, a wall was being built along the thousands of miles of coast to keep out the animals from the sea. The whole family, wife too, did its part. We stalked the forest behind the house to stove in the heads of creatures great and small. Afterwards, we settled in around the television to cheer our military and the lurid night-vision silhouettes of apex predators with unspooling innards.