How to Be Human

by Paula Cocozza

  He registered this information with a small flick of brush. His attention was divided between her and the front door. He fixed on it as if an enemy lurked behind there.

  “Oh, he won’t come back,” she said. “Way too busy. More fairy lights to put up. Intestinal tracts to be extracted from giant prawns.” His tongue slid out between his jaws. “Eric, do this. Eric, do that.” There was no budging the tape. She yanked open a drawer, and he leapt back as it glided out on its rollers. She laughed and grabbed the scissors.

  “I hope this is something interesting…,” she began and stopped. Surely not that, not so soon.

  The package was just a little larger than the letter box, and its corners had been scuffed by Eric’s, Michelle’s, and probably the postman’s efforts to push it through. Mary snipped the seal and pulled off a long ribbon of brown paper. Eric had said that the chance of Mark coming tomorrow was extremely small, which showed how much he knew. The ribbon kept coming. So Mark had mentioned the barbecue to Eric, had he? “How very interesting,” she said. “First he bumps into me; then he bumps into Eric. That’s a lot of bumping into people.” She reached the end of the sheath of paper and started to unwind the bubble wrap. The miniature portholes of the final layer magnified the label, and she read it easily. She knew her fox was watching, and she felt herself redden.

  “Nothing interesting!” she said brightly.

  The box itself was surprisingly small, considering how much it had cost. She slipped out the vial and hid it in her hand. All that packaging for this tiny, cool thing. The glass was tinted brown, and when she tipped it up, she could make out powder slipping darkly from one end to the other. It had got here fast, and yet it seemed to her that she had ordered it in a different age. It was hard to think of a less accurate representation of her feelings toward Red than the poison she held behind her back.

  He watched expectantly, but she wasn’t going to explain what it was. “No need for that now, is there?” she said. “Look, it was a mistake, that was all. I was scared. I listened to Eric. And the Mark in my head. He’s gone now.”

  Red appeared, as he always did, to agree.

  She scooped up the packaging, but her hand wavered over the bin. Maybe the bin was a bad idea. What if the glass broke, and the powder leaked into the bag, and what if he knocked over the trash can and licked it up … In fact, it would be dangerous to dispose of it anywhere in the neighborhood. Her house and garden were the center of his territory, but she had no idea how far it ranged nor where she would have to dump this to be sure he was safe. She trembled as she checked that the cap was secure. Then she buried the vial in the cupboard under the sink. The previous owners had fitted a child lock on the door for their grandchildren, which Mark had pointedly refused to remove, and it amused Mary to think that she was repurposing his harassment, that his family planning would now keep the poison out of harm’s way.

  “Eric’s visit has certainly put a different complexion on the barbecue,” she said. “Did you hear him say I could bring you too?”

  The fox cocked an ear, and she smiled.

  He came when he heard. The click that

  meant drink! The open that meant food!

  Through the snug in the fence, into this

  human run. The grass so long. Anything

  could hide among. Butterflies spun out

  and jerked his snout. Squalling bees. He

  sprayed and squeezed till his odor

  flowered in the long and humming.

  He slunk his stomach to the floor, and

  the grass dusted his shoulders. The air

  fuzzed with pollen and mites. He liked to

  creep through here. Then. Grass stopped.

  Tread on stone. Near the human den.

  The male carrying a puddle.

  Sausage sausage egg egg. Water slopping

  his snout. Such a thirst. He drank,

  looked around. Waited. Watching the

  male. Sometimes the male brought again.

  Something to bury for later.

  Would the male bring? Bring! He

  said this by staring at the male and

  tweaking one ear. But the male sat at the

  edge of his den, looking back.

  He didn’t do begging. He had seen the

  mastiff do that. He sat. He began to

  wash. Watching the male. The male

  watching. It often went like this.

  Strange sort of fight, no touch. Next the

  male would fetch something, hold it out.

  There! He waited, then. He heard his

  feet. Pads, on the stone. Each step,

  his choice. Human male held more food.

  Taking food back, back, back into his

  den. Less experienced foxes would walk

  right in. But even though he had done

  this before. He waited. Took steps slow.

  Paused. Took steps. Paused. Took the

  food. Left.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  When Mary stepped outside on Saturday morning, the sky was full of small planes. Vapor trails scored the blue, then fuzzed and faded. Her own garden, her neighbors’ gardens, the woods—they were all one swath of green to the humans up there. They would know nothing of the yapped commands coming from the other side of the fence, the frantic bustle and cries and scraping of furniture and testing of electrics as Eric and Michelle raced to complete their preparations, all of which made it so hard for Mary to decide which would be worse: to listen to the barbecue or to go to it.

  A couple of hours later, she fortified herself with a final glance at her fox’s favorite places and, on a whim, darted to the lawn, her apple-green sundress fluttering, to shake out the picnic blanket. She was unsure whether he would prefer to wait there or in the shade of the patio, but now he would know to make himself at home. The party would not detain her for long, and when she returned he would be waiting, she thought, smoothing out the rug’s creases.

  Her neighbors’ hall was as gloomy as a church when she stepped in, with that unvisited dimness which the insides of buildings muster on bright afternoons. Tom with the sandy-gold hair—who had answered the door—laid his hand on Mary’s shoulder. “Vroom, vroom,” he said, steering her down the narrow hall. Her feet felt their way toward the back door, a blaze of light that smudged and yellowed at the edges like a camera flash. In the kitchen, Tom made a braking sound. Bottles crowded the worktops, throwing sunny green splodges onto the ceiling. “Here,” he said, handing her a glass. “You’re going to need this. There’s not so much of the good stuff.” He waited while she drank, then poured more, his shirt falling forward to show the hairs on his navel, which were darker gold. “Ready?” he asked.

  Mary nodded. She felt disingenuous allowing Tom to believe she needed a guide—she knew the layout of the place as well as its owners—but she was relieved to follow him. Since Eric had dropped by last night, she had gone to bed, got up, got ready, all in a kind of reverberating hope. She hoped Mark would come. She hoped he would not. She hoped he was here now; then he would see her with this Tom. She stepped through the blazing doorway.

  Mary felt herself to be stalking the brink of some tremendous informational gain. Instead of wondering where Mark was, what he was doing, here was a chance to watch the answers. At first, their troubling encounter on the street corner had left her wondering if Mark had really changed. But slowly over the past fortnight that question had spawned a second, more unsettling one. Had she changed enough? After months of stateless gloom, she was slowly beginning to take charge of herself, to find her shape. Since Red—not Red, Sunset, maybe?—had come into her life, she had felt her strength increase. What he had given her, and she was slowly learning to exercise, was a fresh and powerful perspective.

  Today she was going to discover what Mark was up to, and she was going to do so from the happy vantage point of a new relationship. In the early evening, she would go home to Sunset. The more she thought about his name, the less sure
she was of it. Never mind. It was a comfort to picture the time later when the two of them would relax together in the lounge and make sense of the day.

  “What are you smiling at?” Tom asked.

  “This place!” she said quickly. “Looks amazing!” Crocheted bunting hung from shrub to shrub, and a sweet scent of jasmine wafted over in drifts: from the tea lights, extravagantly lit in midafternoon, or the white flowering shrub that had been trained along wires on Eric and Michelle’s side of the hideous orange fence. But now Mary saw that Eric and Michelle’s side of the bright orange fence was not bright orange. It had been stained tasteful jet, so the small shiny leaves of jasmine gleamed upon it like gems on a jeweler’s black velvet cloth. People clustered in threes and fours on the lawn, barely a dozen in all. There was no Mark.

  Mary followed Tom across the patio with the growing sensation that she had traveled much further than next door. Eric and Michelle’s garden was a different country. The flower beds were edged with little cliff faces of mud, cut with a sharp blade into a clipped lawn. Even the dirt knew how to behave. The fence erased all sense of her own property, which in some ways was a relief. She didn’t want to be the shabby neighbor any more than she wanted to be the uptight one. “I can’t imagine my place ever looking like this,” she said with genuine bewilderment to Tom.

  Despite her neighbors’ claims to be fighting an infestation of foxes, it seemed implausible to Mary that any wild thing had lived or would want to live here. Thinking that thought was enough to evoke a picture of him, and he flicked his tail across the sunlit amber field behind her eyelids. Careful, she cautioned herself, opening her eyes for a quick check. This was hardly the place. Sometimes she thought of him, and then, as if her thoughts were a summons, he appeared.

  “Mmm. Or ever being sufficiently arsed to make it look like this,” Tom said.

  “Is there going to be a wedding?” Mary said, cheerfully pointing to the gazebo at the end of the garden, a sort of miniature marquee.

  “Just a renewal of vows,” he said. “They want to replace the ‘Till death us do part’ bit, which isn’t really working, with something a bit more modern. ‘Till we tear each other apart’ maybe. How does that sound?”

  She spluttered her laugh into a mouthful of insurgent bubbles. “That doesn’t scan,” she quipped. The talking-to-humans thing was going better than she had imagined. She smiled again because that thought sounded back to front but was nonetheless true. Her voice was finding its way out, unimpeded by the little pause that habitually overruled it when she lived with Mark, in which she doubted whether what she had to say really was better said than thought. She felt brighter than she had done in weeks. Her new relationship was releasing her confidence. Someone—and not to be bigheaded about it, but someone with a large pool of humans at his disposal—had chosen her.

  “Ah. Here comes Eric,” Tom said loudly. Her new friend shifted gears easily: impressive, to have located geniality so smoothly after disloyalty.

  “Mary, you came! And I see you’ve met Tom,” Eric said. “Sorry about him.”

  She laughed. “You should be. I can’t believe you’ve got him on the door.”

  Eric was looking around. “Where’s your new man then?”

  “He couldn’t make it, I’m afraid,” she said, feeling a prickling in her cheek.

  “Meanie! I was hoping we’d get to meet him.”

  Mary laughed. “I’m sure you’ll see him soon enough. Hello, Flora, and how are you today?”

  The baby’s heavily upholstered bottom hung over the edge of Eric’s arm, which disappeared like a ventriloquist’s under the frilly yellow valance of Flora’s dress. She appeared smaller than a life-size doll. Mary reached out and stroked the baby’s knuckles and in triumph watched her finger vanish inside Flora’s quick fist. “What’s up, Flora?” she said, trying to wag her finger. Flora held on, and Mary had the feeling, from the baby’s secretive look, that the squeeze was a little message slipped into her hand. She was probably asking to get the hell out of here. Mary’s mother had once told her that an infant’s grip is so strong, you could hang a baby by its hands on the washing line and it would stay there for hours. She looked around. Presumably a washing line would spoil the vista.

  “Here, Tom, take Flora, will you? I’m going to show Mary the new barbecue.”

  “Christ, she doesn’t want to see your new barbecue. Do you, Mary?”

  “Actually, I’ve come all this way especially. Flora, I’ll see you later,” she said, wiggling her finger free. “You’ve promised me a cuddle.”

  * * *

  ERIC RATTLED HIS fork up and down the bars of the grill, silver and black in the sun, and gleaming menacingly like a giant orthodontic brace. “Guess how big the cooking surface is?” he said, squinting at her.

  “You tell me.”

  “Oh, come on, humor me!”

  “Four feet?”

  “Eight hundred and thirty-four square inches! Official capacity is twenty-four burgers and/or chicken breasts, but I reckon I can get more on than that. How many burgers do you think the average adult eats at a barbecue?”

  Mary glanced up at the open doors of the dining room, where she and Flora had stood last weekend. She looked toward the back fence, where her fox had started his run, and imagined him galloping through the gazebo, pulling down the manicured nonsense of the garden, bunting and fairy lights tangling in his wake. She mentally closed the doors on this image of him.

  “One? Two?” Eric was saying.

  “Er. Three?”

  “Really? They’re quite big.”

  That would never happen, by the way, with the gazebo. He was incredibly civilized. Every tiny movement was governed by immense self-control. She looked again at the patio doors. If Mark arrived—if, if, she kept reminding herself—she would almost certainly see him before he saw her. But the house gaped blankly. She was able to glimpse inside only as far as the strange bulldog lamp on the sideboard. Just a dark shape, a shadow guard dog.

  Eric lowered his voice. “Hey, while it’s just us? I’m so glad you came.” He gave her hand a sweaty squeeze. “I’m sorry about Mark. I hope that’s not why your new man didn’t come…?”

  “It’s fine,” she said.

  “I was walking back from the station—”

  “Eric. It’s fine.”

  “I’d had such a long day at work. The truth is, as soon as I’m on the train, I’m already dreading putting my key in the lock. Every night someone’s crying—”

  “Oh really? I’m sorry to hear—”

  “That was all going through my head. Who will it be tonight? I didn’t even see him till I heard him say my name. He probably won’t come. And if he does, you probably won’t even know he’s here. I don’t even know if he’s here.”

  He wasn’t there.

  Mary glanced again at the two doorways, saw Neville step into the garden.

  “All right, mate,” Eric said. “I was just showing Mary the new barbecue station.”

  Neville pressed his beer bottle against his cheek and caught her eye. “Impressive bit of kit, that. Tell me, Eric—did you find Tigger?”

  “Nope. George is gutted. Tiggy’s his best mate.”

  “He’ll turn up. They do that, cats. Disappear for a few days, then wander back as if nothing’s happened. The garden looks great, by the way. I like your little pavilion. What goes on in there, then?”

  “Ha! You’d have to ask Michelle. The gazebo’s her baby. Talking of which—where is Michelle?” he said, looking around.

  Behind Mary the garden was filling with people. Tom was chatting to a pregnant woman, who was holding Flora. There was George, pushing a toy truck around the lawn. But no Michelle. Along the left side of the garden, Neville’s fence made a narrow strip of shade, and Mary’s eye followed the line between green grass and black down to the rear wall, where it bisected a new figure.

  He was standing in front of Eric and Michelle’s gate to the woods, almost exactly straddling the
line so that his left side was in bright sunlight, his right disappearing in deep shade. From the way one foot stepped forward, it occurred to Mary that she was witnessing Mark’s arrival. Had he come through the house, and she’d missed him? Or was it possible that instead of knocking at the front door like every other guest, he had slipped in through the back gate? No, Michelle would definitely keep that bolted.

  Mary’s stomach was a furnace. Heat rose to her throat. She sucked down champagne to quell it and heard Eric faintly from within the swill of extinguishing foam.

  “I don’t s’pose you’ve seen Michelle, have you, Mary?”

  Panic gave the wine an aftertaste that was sharply mineral, a lick of a rusty blade.

  “Mary? Are you OK there?”

  “Er. No. Sorry. I ha-haven’t seen her,” she choked. She looked again at the back wall, meaning to overlay the outline of Mark in her head onto the real thing. But the shape in front of the gate had gone.

  “Can’t be far,” Neville said.

  Mary had to find a way out of this corner. She ran her eyes around the periphery of the garden, and a bird called helpfully from the top of Neville’s copper beech, its strange song like the continual clinking of marbles in a bag. There was Mark, in the thick of the party now, next to a woman in a floral skirt. Impossible to tell what they were saying. Only, from the tilt of their heads, that they were saying something. Red hair hung in waves down the woman’s back: one of those people you need see only from behind to know they are pretty.

  “Hey, Rachel!” Eric called to the pregnant woman. “Have you seen Michelle?”

  “Nope. Me and Tom have found a giant fox hole though.”

  The mention of her fox tugged at a muscle in Mary’s cheek, and she tried to restrain the twitch. Her underarms moistened with the thrill of guarding an intimacy that no one else knew, and her heart gave a silent applause to his bravery, his refusal to be intimidated by Michelle.

  “Oh, Christ! Another one?” Eric raked his hair, and the sweatiness of his roots made it stand on end, in a look of continual shock.