How to Be Human

by Paula Cocozza

  Footsteps chimed on the pavement behind her, but Mary was not going to be tricked into distraction. She watched the fox. Her front garden was reflected in this window anyway. It hung over him like a garden within the garden, a phantom mid-ground in which the soft edges of her shrubs, the long fingers of her giant palm, lurked. Just then, the outline of a passerby with a stroller stepped into this ghostly oasis. A tiny hand waved from beneath its awning. She liked it when that happened, but you had to catch them fast before they disappeared into the thick foliage of the laurel. After the stroller vanished in there, she heard its wheels bump up the step next door. It must have been Michelle.

  Focus, Mary. Don’t let him go now. So what if you’re tired and hungry. So what if you’ve crawled to the end of another miserable day in a job you hate, and tomorrow will bring only more of the same, which will feel not the same but worse, and you can’t sleep and can’t eat, which means there’s only waking and working, waking and working. And now this. What was she going to do?

  She dropped her hip to pry off her shoes, one foot jabbing at the heel of the other, and that was when … he did. She saw it. He bent his ear to her. Just the one. His right. He really did. Tipped it forward, then pulled it back, showing her the darker hairs inside. First a wink, and now he had practically doffed his cap. Outrageous! She rapped hard on the glass. His fur filled the shape of the leaves and made them rust. The phantom garden vanished into the movement of his body. Each limb knew its duty. He regained his feet and changed direction in a single stroke. He didn’t look back, didn’t rush. She watched him over the wall, the white tip the last of him. Then she went to check that both doors were locked.

  * * *

  THE SOUND WAS a siren, a baby crying, a shriek that seemed to pass through a human pitch and turn animal. Mary opened her eyes. She reached for her clock, but her hand fell through unfurnished space. She had traveled in her sleep to the wrong side of the bed, the side that used to be someone else’s. She sat up, unpeeling her back from the damp sheet, and kicked off the duvet.

  The room was silent. Only the lull came in through the open window. That’s how she thought of this special piece of night when the main road had fallen quiet and the birds had yet to sing—an overlapping of silences that meant it was around 3:45 a.m. Over the five months since Mark had left, Mary had come to know these hours well, but it still surprised her how quickly they passed. There was such a brief lapse from 3 a.m., when there was hope of sleep, to 6 a.m., when there was none. She got up.

  Her room was at the front of the house, and the window frames bloomed amber from the street. The blinds, which had long since reneged on their promise of blackout, sagged and curled at the edges to reveal a wavy slice of road. She pulled back the fabric, and a fly buzzed against the glass in protest. “Sorry, Mr. Fly,” she said. Then out of her sleepy eye something darted. A red smear of tail, a blur on the road, a moving speed mark, gone. She held her breath for further news, but all was still. Perhaps it was just the strange intimacy of seeing the street when no one else was seeing it, but Hazel Grove looked different.

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING Mary had her key in the front door when Eric called out. He was reversing down his path and nodded at the pram. “I hope she didn’t wake you. We’ve got a bit of a sniffle.”

  Mary clocked the “we,” and wondered as she turned the key, double-locking, why parents chose to live so much in their children’s lives that they gate-crashed their first person. Eric and Michelle had moved in about a year after her and Mark. The four of them—and this was not something to be taken for granted with neighbors—had seen the insides of each other’s houses. True, she thought of them as neighbors rather than friends, but they were friendly neighbors. Eric, especially. And then the children came. First one, then, not long ago, this tiny other.

  “I didn’t hear her,” Mary said at last. These days, Mary herself made very little noise through the walls.

  “I’m hoping she’ll be better by next weekend. He glanced toward his top windows, where the curtains were closed, and lowered his voice. “I really want to get Michelle out.”

  Mary hadn’t seen Michelle since the birth. It was Eric who had dropped by to show off the baby—Flora, had they called her? He had stood on the doorstep while Mary tried to sound appreciative. She looked again at the pram where Eric was stooped over the parasol. So this scrap was the source of all the noise. She had been born early, a pale slip in an enormous carry-cot.

  “This is hopeless,” Eric said, tilting the parasol. “You think you can burn at this time of day?”

  “You could stick to the other side of the road. Run through the sun, slow through the shade. Would that work? Where’s George this morning?” She had no interest in George, but the little boy heard his cue and roared out from behind the hedge with his familiar scowl. He looked such a little shit. “Ah, there you are!” she said. “Excellent hiding place!”

  “Say hi to Mary, George,” Eric said, his tone wavering between a command and a plea. He caught the boy under his arms and lifted him up. “Come on, Georgie, you can say hi, can’t you? Mary’s going to look after you next Saturday. We hope.”

  The child hid his face in his hands, turned his head, then, as his legs began to thrash, kicked his father in the groin.

  “I should get going,” Mary said. She was thinking of her meeting at ten. What had Dawn said? “Lateness non-optional.” A formal hearing, the paperwork for which was stuffed unread in her bag. It was pretty dire for a member of the so-called People team to be on the receiving end of the procedures she was meant to implement. “Embarrassing,” Dawn had said. In fact, that was the only upside, that the whole business, rumbling on for months, had exposed Dawn’s managerial deficiencies. Mary had come down the path into the street and, unusually, was closing the gate behind her. “But sure, Saturd—”

  Soft, the thing her foot found instead of the pavement. Her sandal slid moistly forward, and she lurched, her bag jumping off her shoulder, the strap unspooling quickly down her arm to her wrist. It was so hot that when the wetness touched her toes, she was grateful for its coolness, till she looked down and saw it. She had painted her nails blue the night before, and now, with her gold sandals, they seemed to mock her. “Shit!”

  “Oh dear,” Eric said, sniffing from a safe distance. “Fox.”

  “What?”

  “That’s how they mark their territory. You think this is your house. He thinks it’s his.”

  Christ, she thought. I’m not going through that again. It is my house. My name on the mortgage. But she didn’t stop to answer. She was already hobbling back up the path.

  “You’ve got to let them know who’s boss!” Eric called. “Find the hole. Mary…” He checked behind him and then said, softly, across her front garden, “Get some vet’s poison. You can buy it online.”

  Mary flinched in understanding; the sensation was a small, interior nod. That was what Mark would have said too. The fox had entered her garden. He had laid a trap for her on the pavement. He was attacking her from the front and the back. He was there in the day, at night. She had no idea what he wanted, but she knew his incursions amounted to a sustained campaign against her. As soon as she got to her desk and Dawn stopped staring at her, she would go online.

  “Shall we say seven next Saturday?” Eric said.

  Indoors, Mary gripped the banister, hopped up the stairs and washed her foot over the bathroom sink. Why did he have to make her late today? The mess was so deliberately placed. He seemed to want to get her into even worse trouble at work. Of course he didn’t want that. He was a fox! But at the same time, she believed, from the force with which he was imposing himself, that he had sensed her vulnerability. She splashed at the porcelain. The fox’s smell curled around the basin but would not run out with the water. She dried off and in the bedroom sluiced her foot with Mark’s old cologne. She had seen it in a box while he was packing, and now it lived on the shelf that used to be his. (He had put it up, and
in that sense her shelf also felt like his.) There was little else left of him: a couple of shirts, a little wooden puzzle they had bought in the souvenir shop of some museum. She shut her eyes to the long streak of coffee that stained the wall.

  This residual Mark was pretty good company. He gave Mary freedom and independence and never lost his temper. She had whittled him down to the perfect partner. Mark in a bottle, helpfully warding off the prospect of total solitude while kept in check by a heavy glass stopper. Today, though, she was letting him out. Whew. The cologne was potent. She slopped some on the other foot too. Show the fox who’s boss. That was the name of it, Boss. The fox was hardly going to notice that the logic was erratic, that this was Mark’s scent. You couldn’t expect a fox to be reasonable.

  Ten minutes later, she stood the clean sandals on a few sheets of the local paper outside the kitchen door. Water soaked into the print, making the eyes of the poor owl in the photograph transparent. “Tawny owl,” she read, just as words from the other side of the page began to appear through his beak. Apparently they were nesting in one of the old factories by the canal. It would almost be worth losing sleep to catch a hoot, she thought, toeing a shoe clear of his feathers. She loitered by the step a moment. The sky was cloudless, and the sun brightened a small circle of lawn, like the floor of an amphitheater. What a waste. The disciplinary, an afternoon of conducting staff reviews while air-con froze her arms … She would leave as early as she could, come out here and make the most of it.

  * * *

  WHEN SHE REENTERED the house that evening, Mary could tell from the postmark that the envelope on the mat was from work, presumably containing belated confirmation of today’s appointment. Her department was a shambles. She stepped over the letter and headed down the hall. It mystified her how Dawn had got that job, how she had the nerve to harass Mary for recurrent lateness and persistent failure to fulfill tasks, when she, as manager, couldn’t even send out a letter on time. At the back door, Mary drew the bolts and cranked the handle up and down as clunkily as she could. The rattle was fear’s emissary, sent out on reconnaissance while she hung back in its cover. If the fox was there, he would hear it and take off.

  The noise filled the garden. Then she followed, and she was in the garden, and he was on his feet. Or perhaps he had already taken to his feet at the sound. She thought to shout or chase him off, but the sight of him so close sucked away her breath. His jaws slackened to liberate his tongue, and he licked his lips with her thoughts. As she hesitated, stalled by the sheer physical fact of him, the fox seemed to occupy more richly the space that her hesitation created. His fur thickened. And the next thing she saw, after his intrusion, the absolute wrongness of his being there, was how magnificent he looked.

  In the sunlight, his coat was glossily auburn with lowlights, which she thought of (absurdly, she realized) as expensive. He was making an effort with his posture. Head up, back not slumping, haunches taut, as if he had instinctively adjusted his tension at the sight of her. He lifted his snout; she supposed he was sniffing the air. Most striking of all, he was holding out his tail unquiveringly straight behind him. He must have been six feet, nose to tip, and like those large dogs she tried to avoid in the park, he seemed taller than a subservient animal should. His legs were black, giving her the idea that he was a creature of two halves: bright and conspicuous above, below full of subterfuge. He shone with a predatory capability, to which she felt herself instinctively deferring.

  At that moment, the patio darkened, and Mary glanced up. The sun had entered thick cloud, and even though the air was as warm as it had been a second before, and even though in a minute or two the sun would reappear, the effect was as chilling as a flame abruptly snuffed.

  The dullness touched the top of the fox’s head with a cool flutter. His ears twitched at the sensation, but his eyes watched the human Female’s feet as they Beetled back, Beetled back, enough to say. Respect.

  The garden began to brighten, and the sun, edging out from the cloud, warmed Mary’s arms. “Not so sleepy today, then,” she said under her breath. She tried to speak without moving her lips, because she felt sharply alert to the idea that any small movement from her might elicit a larger one from him. There was nothing to do but stare because stopping staring struck her as the greater act of communication. Without a window between them, she felt unable to rely on the balance of power which yesterday she had assumed. Was he still in a cage of her making? Would he obey again her command to leave? His poise today was a stillness with caveats: every hair bristled with his power to surprise. Her palm turned upward, moved of its own accord, as a magnet moves. But she did not otherwise stir; his eyes held her in place.

  He yawned then, dropped his lower jaw like a drawbridge and let it hang. There was something careless about the way he so casually showed her his fangs—there was no other word for them—and it was unclear to Mary whether the carelessness implied harmlessness or its opposite. His pink tongue flicked up, a string of saliva impaled on one spiked tooth, and then he shut his mouth, turned, and headed for the back wall. Something about the way he did this—the way he kept his head up, held his brush aloft—suggested that he left out of choice, and on another day he might just as easily choose to stay. His exit, his magnanimous readiness to be the one to go, alarmed her, but she couldn’t think why.

  Mary hastened to the lounger to consolidate the territory she had regained. There was no sound from Eric and Michelle’s garden, and she had no neighbor on the other side; the house had been empty since old Mrs. Farnworth died last year. Mary stepped out of her skirt, unbuttoned her shirt and slipped her bra straps from her shoulders.

  Since yesterday she had been waiting for this moment, the chance to nourish herself with sun and rest, but now that she was alone, the garden felt unsettling: not so much empty as temporarily vacated. It reminded her of flat-sharing with Saba years ago. There must have been ten or twelve apartments in that mansion block; and the garden, which they could all access, never felt private, even when you were the only one in it. As she lay out here now in her underwear, the space felt uneasily communal, as if she mustn’t inhabit it too fully or freely. The fox had gone. She had the place to herself. But for how long?

  She wished she had remembered her book, but she knew if she went to fetch it, the fox would take her absence as permission to return. So she lay there thinking instead about what had just happened, and her mind kept returning to one thought. Since there was nobody to hear, she said it aloud. “He was as interested in me as I was in him.” It was hard to dispel the idea that he had come back for a second look and that his repeated raids amounted to some sort of mission.

  Perhaps because of this sensation, Mary heard every noise as a trespass. She jumped when a scorched leaf clacked across the patio. A shrub knocked against the fence, and each time she wondered who was at the door. Inside the clank of cranes where the old estate had been demolished, she heard the ringing of a telephone. Dawn had cited “entrenched lateness.” And a “disappointing attitude.” And other things Mary could no longer remember. Mary had been given every chance, but poor Dawn had been left with no choice … The disciplinary had ended as Mary knew it would, with a formal warning. Now every sound struck her as an attempt by some greater force to drive the threat home to her. If she lost the job, how long would it take to lose the house?

  At some point, she must have dropped off because when she next looked the lounger was in shade, her skin cool. Mary dressed quickly and walked down the garden; she had the idea for some exploring of her own. Twice the fox had made his exit over her rear wall. Unlike her neighbors, she had no gate to the woods, and the wall bowed at the force of a huge lime tree which was bursting through her boundary. Seven bricks had already fallen, making a desultory gravestone on the other side.

  Peering over the back, with the masonry chilling her forearms, Mary saw that although the light had gone from her garden, something of the day was still left out here. One perfect rectangle of the hazel tree b
lazed yellow, a bright window of leaves. It looked for all the world as if someone—and she knew who—had got home and put the light on. She marveled at the size of the fox’s garden: all the woods and no mortgage! A picture flitted through her mind of him beneath the hazel, stretched out in front of the TV after another hard day sunbathing, and suddenly she grasped what she had been unable to grasp earlier. The distinctive manner of his exit—his ease over the wall, his readiness to oblige her by leaving—made it clear that his departure was not an expression of compliance but of hospitality. In her garden, he saw himself as proprietor and her as his guest.

  * * *

  MARY DIDN’T SEE the fox the next time he came. But she knew he had called because when she went outside the following morning to retrieve her sandals, they had gone, and a pair of blue boxers lay in their place. Torn and dusty, they were the sort of classic style that Mark used to wear. She wrinkled her nose in disgust. Now what was she going to do? She paced her garden, scouring the long grass for a telltale flash of metallic leather. When she walked back to the house, dirty as they were, the boxers seemed to mock her. Men’s underwear had no place in her house at the moment.

  She looked up at her neighbors’ windows. God! Did they belong to Eric? “No,” she said. It was bad enough the fox had stolen into her garden, but she refused to let him break into her imagination too. The fact was, she would have to spend another day in the wrong shoes. Always the wrong shoes, bought two years ago for the promotion she hadn’t got. She was, now as then, joint second-in-command of a people department sub-team of four. She felt herself irresistibly stepping into the footprints of a long-term failure. It was a delusion to think that working in HR for a university was stimulating, that it to some extent kept alive her own hopes of a second degree. If you worked in HR, your business was nothing but people and their problems. The underpants, scooped into a carrier bag, went in the trash can as she clomped to the pavement.