“Oh. That. I know.” The gnat bite had stopped itching and started throbbing, as if an invader’s heart beat under her skin. She bit into the burger, but she didn’t feel like eating. Blood seeped into her mouth. All she could smell was beef. The insides of her nostrils were made of beef. Perhaps in some corner of the woods her fox was drawing his muzzle over his scent map, plotting her coordinates. Burger meets Boss. She was wearing Mark’s cologne again.
“I think I need a glass of water.” Mary gripped the table as she stood.
“I’ll come with you,” Neville said, pulling her out of the way of the guy in the hat. “Careful!” he shouted, and then to her: “Someone needs to tell those kids to stop drinking.”
On their way to the kitchen, they stepped over a few alliums that lay felled across the path. Their heads had cracked, spilling mauve petals onto the concrete, and mud was scattered over the pavers.
“More fox,” Neville groaned.
“You don’t know that,” she shot back. “It could be anything.”
He lifted the reedy stems of the alliums with the toe of his moccasin, flashing his chestnut instep. “This looks like something wants to dig under the house. It’s right by the air brick,” he said. “This place is riddled with holes. Foxes are anarchists, you know.”
“Really? They’ve never given me that impression.”
Neville looked amused. “Are you fond of foxes, Mary?”
She shrugged. “I’ve got no strong feelings either way.”
“Hmm. Cagey,” he said, laughing. “Very bad for the electrics. My friend had them under his house. Some nights impossible to hear the telly. Squawking and thumping and clouds of dust puffing up between the floorboards. The foxes owned the freehold. Once they’re in, you can’t get them out. They can demolish a whole house from beneath you. We’ll tell Eric about this one. After we’ve got your water.”
Last night, her fox … She kept calling him that, but sometimes she wondered if he was her fox or if she was his human. Anyway, he had left through the back door abruptly, as if he had been called away. One moment he was in the kitchen, the next his ears flicked, and he was gone. He certainly didn’t want to take over the house. Far from it. She wished he would stay longer, but he always had somewhere else to go, and she was trying to learn to accept the fact that he didn’t do goodbyes.
“What happened to your friend’s house? Did they leave?” she asked Neville.
Crows shook up out of the sycamores toward the western end of the woods, calamitous cawing, wings like black arrows jagging at the brambles below them. The same noise they made when they spotted him.
He was waking up.
He stretched forward his paws and curled his claws into the dust. He read the wind. He yawned a tall yawn. Cursed the crows for telling where he was. His stretch shook his shoulders and his back and wavered out his body at the tip of his tail. His hind paws walked to meet his forepaws; then he arched his back. The lid of a human food den slammed shut. His mouth wetted. The mastiff yelped, and the air convulsed with the tremors of meat on the wind.
“… destroyed. Caught, then destroyed,” Neville was saying. “The house had to be rewired. You grab your water. I’ll tell Eric about this one. Listen to that bloody mastiff! Those people don’t deserve a dog.”
* * *
MARY GOT HER water and got rid of Neville. For the first time since she had arrived, she stood in the garden alone. Mark was not at the table. He was not on the blanket, not among the groups dotted on the lawn. If he had left without saying hello or goodbye, if their encounter had amounted to nothing more than the brush of his leg hair on her calf, then what had she to show for turning up? Just a grease stain on her dress and a hangover before prime time. Every stage of the barbecue had been dictated by her bifold desire to evade Mark and to confront him. Now he was gone, she felt as if the whole sticky hot afternoon had been dripping and dripping until it had melted down to nothing.
“Aha! You look like you want a baby!” The redhead in the floral skirt was smiling at her, less pretty from the front. “Only kidding!” she said. “I need the loo.” She held out Flora. “Will you take her? I’ll swap her for a drink when I’m back.”
Mary settled the baby on the perch of her left arm. Her other hand went to Flora’s back, her ear inclined to the child’s head. Their bodies adopted the position easily, as if each had stored a memory of it. Mary breathed in, a warm, milky smell. “Do I look like I want a baby?” she asked, and Flora exhaled heavily in reply. It was such an adult sigh, a misplaced breath from her own body.
She walked into the shade of Neville’s fence—the strip had crept a third of the way across the lawn—humming and swaying her hips. She was singing into Flora’s fine, dark hair, lips moving in the dampness of her scalp. Farooq and Rachel were on the blanket. The redhead was spinning under the arm of the guy in the hat and, just a few feet away, his friend in a waistcoat was taking a piss in Michelle’s shrubbery. A glass smashed, and then another. Someone cheered. Mary wondered which one was Michelle’s brother. The redhead was kissing the guy in the fedora, his hands complacently cupping her buttocks. Tom had rejoined the blond woman, and a child was climbing onto his lap. Her fellow guests were transforming before her eyes into building blocks of family life, clicking into place as the day drew on. Had these couples been together when they arrived, and she had failed to see them as such?
“Just you and me,” she said into the soft spot on Flora’s crown. It pulsed against her lip. “And it’s lovely to see you again too,” she said. Then she whispered, “I’m seeing our friend Mr. Fox later.” A sudden cawing broke out of the trees a few houses down, and the sky became a raucous din of wing flap and yakking. Something had rattled the parliament of crows.
Mary kept humming. Flora wasn’t exactly company, but she did provide an occupation, something to hide rejection behind. A baby: a passport to socially acceptable solitude. Under the cherry tree with Flora, cuddling her, it did not hurt to have been deserted. She was standing in the place of loneliness, where loneliness should have been, but with something else instead. Intense heat glowed down her left side, hot as skin on skin, as if Flora’s body had dissolved the memory of clothes and was burnt onto her own.
Mary stared dreamily toward the end of the garden, where the gazebo drapes were shut. A breath touched her neck, near the ear where Flora nestled.
“You’re a natural.”
Mark blew the words at her, and she felt them tweak the wispy hairs that had come free of her ponytail. “She looks so peaceful asleep,” he said. “I had a go earlier but couldn’t get her off.”
Mary turned. “I was looking for you.”
“Were you?” Mark sounded pleased. He laid a hand on Flora’s head and with the other lifted a magnum. “Do you want a drink? I found Eric’s secret supply.”
The sun was still so high it was impossible to tell whether it was 4 p.m. or 7 p.m. Mary glanced at Mark’s wrist, but his watch was turned inward to his body, as though his time were a private matter. “I think I’ve had enough,” she said.
Mark breathed in deeply. “There is no way to put this without weirding you out, but you smell really familiar,” he said. “Sort of sandalwoody.”
The hairs on Mary’s neck stood and leant toward him, hundreds of fine probes inclined toward detection. Mark’s body had no discernible smell. No sweat, soap, alcohol. Even his follicles were a covert operation. He had shaved so thoroughly, it was impossible to see where a beard would grow, though he had worn one last winter. He was twirling the rings of his house keys around a finger. A blackbird cranked out an alarm, like one long squeak sliced into lots of smaller squeaks. Mary pictured her fox on his way to her. It was nearly time to go home to him.
“I was looking for you,” she said, “because I wanted to know why you were here, where you’ve come from…”
Mark laughed. “I think it’s safe to say I had a longer journey than you.”
“I get that,” she said irritably. “It
’s not a game, Mark. I want to know.”
“I came via the off-license, and it was probably a mile.” He sighed. “Look, Mary, if you want to know where my flat is, I can take you there now, or after this. I’d like you to see it. And I really want to talk to you. And not at our neighbors’ party.”
“My neighbors’ party,” she said. “That’s my house next door. And it’s my street. Unless you’ve secretly moved in.”
“Of course I haven’t.”
“Well, I’m busy this evening. So why don’t you get on with it and tell me where you’re living?”
“What, you want the information without any conversation? That’s kind of harsh,” he said, reaching again for the fringe that was no longer there. “Please. Just text me when you’re free, anytime, and I’ll come and pick you up. What about tomorrow?”
“I don’t know what I’m doing tomorrow.”
“Oh, cheers. I bet you do. You’re out tonight, you said. And by the way, I know you’re seeing someone. Michelle told me.”
Mary chewed the inside of her lip.
“You could have told me,” Mark said into her silence. “Do I know him?”
She sighed. “Look, maybe Monday. But don’t call for me. You’d better tell me where to come,” she said. “And try not to be evasive.”
“Me, evasive! You won’t say who you’re seeing. And you could come and look at my flat, but no, you’re ‘busy this evening,’” he said in a voice she understood to be an impression of her own. “Are you sure you’re not the evasive one? Now you’ve made it really difficult for me to ask you anything. I was trying to ask … Are you wearing my aftershave? I could have sworn I packed it, but I never found it in any of the boxes.”
She hated that word. It was cologne. The two things were different. “Certainly not,” she said. “Ah. So Eric has found Michelle!”
Mark gave a low whistle. “Doesn’t look good.” He bent to pick up his keys, and Mary was surprised to glimpse the little orange ribbon she had once tied around his house set. Sentimentality was not something she expected from him. “She wanted the perfect barbecue,” Eric said. “Wanted to show people she could still do it. I mean, look at this place.”
“Still do what?” Mary said. It was like the old days: side by side, heads leaning in so no one would overhear, finding in someone else’s misery a wisp of intimacy.
“Hold a party, I guess. Have a life. Eric’s worried. I got the impression she’s in a bad way.”
“I saw her earlier. She told me not to have children.” Mary kissed Flora’s head. “Sorry, darling. I didn’t mean that.” A wasp began looping figure-of-eights around Mary and Mark, joining them, dividing them.
Mark gave her a look. “I’m not going there. Anyway, you seem to be doing well. Didn’t I say you would?”
She ignored him and, looking down at Flora, caught sight of the three-headed shadow that poked over the shade of Neville’s fence. So this was how they would have looked. Grouped together like this, they could have been posing for a family photo. Their shadows were already a family. Woman holding baby, apparently doing a brilliant job. Baby blissfully sleeping, nowhere else she’d rather be. Man watching protectively. “You’re a gorgeous girl,” Mary said to Flora. For the first time, she felt what it would have felt like, the fruitful reorganization of life.
“Is she OK?” Mark asked.
Mary flapped at the wasp with the back of her hand. Of course, it wouldn’t have been like that with Mark. There was too much in the two of them that she had grown to fear. “I think so,” she said, “but what do I know? Maybe by letting her sleep I’m being the opposite of a good parent. At some point, she must be meant to eat.”
He smiled.
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
A squirrel clattered down the fence from the woods.
“Because you sound like you know what you’re doing, I guess. And because I’m not sure you’re going to be able to help with the food.” His eyes dropped to the breast that was free, that was not Flora’s pillow, rising and falling with her breath. Mary straightened her back, just as the wasp settled on her arm and began to walk, his head bent determinedly low. She was watching him climb the steep, tanned hill toward her shoulder when Mark flicked his fingers fast over her arm. She heard the sharp click of his nails on the wasp’s articulated body; saw the poor fellow hurled into the air, and then dip, his body a dark dot charting a seemingly inescapable plummet until the point where—and she knew how hard it must have been to do this—he gathered his strength, switched direction, and soared up, beautifully, heroically, converting the force of Mark’s swipe into his own power of flight.
“Sorry,” he said, straightening.
He smelt biscuity now.
Biscuity like her fox.
But he was nothing like her fox. She sniffed again while Mark’s hand guided Flora’s fine hair around her little ear. As his knuckle passed close to her face, Mary caught a clear, potent waft of musk, malt, damp earth, as if some smell had got up and started walking around them, in and out of their legs. She was unsure if she was seeing Mark or if she had suddenly unlocked his aroma, the flavors spliced with close-up glimpses of him, oddly angled fragments of his face and body: the heel of his hand coming down on Flora’s skull, the yellow bone-shine of his knuckles. It took her a moment to order all this information, to realize that she was watching Mark and breathing in someone else.
The last guest had arrived.
He was standing on her shed.
On his shed, in his garden. His muzzle prodded the sky for scent spirals of beef while his claws filed the shed roof, and he licked his lips. Loops of air were stringy with chicken / chicken smoking upwind.
Look—Who’s—Here. Mary mouthed the shapes of the words into Flora’s ear with each outward breath, too scared to sound them. He was statuesque up there. The shed commended him like a plinth. The sun, filtering through the outer branches of the lime, tipped his coat gold, gilt fibers on end, as if some unseen hand had stroked him backward. His snout was raised: flicking through his Rolodex of known scents. Was Mark in there, logged from some previous encounter on overlapping territories?
Of all the humans, Eric and Michelle were standing closest to him, but they were still arguing outside the gazebo. Their proximity to her fox reminded Mary that Eric had insisted she invite her new friend, and it was tempting to picture herself walking right up to them and making introductions. She suppressed a giggle. But she didn’t feel like laughing. She felt ashamed. The barbecue was gross: debris everywhere, drunken humans sprawled on blankets soppy with spilt beer. Uneaten hunks of burger pooling blood on the plates that littered the garden. The annoying young folk had slumped over the picnic table, apparently asleep, the worst behaved of them melted down to just a fedora on a plate. Her fox, in contrast, bolt upright on the asphalt roof, cultivated a posture of lofty detachment. But maybe he was not so much the final guest as the elusive host, evading the partygoers swirling around his land with the hospitality of Gatsby while he kept a low profile in some hidden quarter of his estate.
“Get out of here!” Michelle screamed, a ringing, throaty cry, like someone banging hard on a glass with a spoon. Mary watched heads turn, saw them all thinking: screaming at Eric?
“Hey! You! Yes, you, vermin up there! Get away from my garden!”
The fox sat down. “Move it!” she shouted.
Far from deterring him, the screaming appeared to interest him. He dipped his muzzle toward Michelle. He seemed to think that by paying full attention to her hysteria, he might understand it, and a desire to placate or help her motivated him. His ears strived upward, keen to please. He lifted a front paw—whether to ease some stiffness in his joints or out of embarrassment at Michelle’s display, Mary could not tell. It was not a salutation.
“This is our home! It doesn’t belong to you!” Michelle heaved through her shrieks.
Mary watched her fox stand. He declined to advance or withdraw, but only raised his tail so t
hat the tip pierced a drop of sunlight and glowed, a flare to catch her eye.
Mary turned her palm on Flora’s back in reply. He opened and shut his jaws, emitted one loud bark. The sound was a sharp “Wo,” like a question that could have been where, why, or when. Why are you here? maybe, or When will you be home? Mary realized it was the first time she had heard his voice. It was surprisingly deep. Eric had given up clapping and shooing, and wrapped his arms around Michelle instead; she shrank to fit inside his hold. Whether owing to the power of the spectacle or to the strange impasse of this particular hour of the day, the afternoon facing up to evening, no one else moved. Only George ran to his parents. Then the fedora lifted itself off the table.
Mary locked her eyes on the shed. She felt her own edges sharpen as her fox directed his muzzle to her, and his muscular shoulders heaved a query. “Here with this lot?”
“Jesus. The size of that monster!” Mark said beside her.
Simply by being in the same garden she felt implicated in Mark’s leering and Michelle’s grossly uncivilized behavior. But then her fox’s eyes engaged Mary, black holes from here, as hers must be to him, and he waved his brush—it was as wide as his thigh—in splendid salute. She guessed it had occurred to him too that they were standing together, Mary and him and Flora, just as they had been two weeks earlier, at the patio door.
Mary turned a little, to show him the baby. Flora had opened her eyes but made no fuss, and her calmness seemed to Mary proof of a certain kind of progress. She would not repeat the mistakes of her own childhood. She had begun to teach the little one something no one else would, quite unlike the suspicion of nature that had pervaded her upbringing, the injunction never to go near animals in the park, always to wear shoes in the garden. His wildness was a gift. She wanted never to forget the immense favor he did them, the kindness of reminding them that no matter how lonely the city became, you could open a window or a door or even just an eye and find a mass of life that listened back.
He shifted his paws and looked down at the loose asphalt of the roof with proprietorial anxiety.
How to Be Human Page 11
