How to Be Human

by Paula Cocozza

  At the back of the house, she drew the blinds. Then she quickly showered and fetched her navy dress. He had seen it before, but that was actually a nice thought. She put it on and, for the first time in a fortnight, checked herself in the mirror. How thin she looked! As she stood there, the discovery hit her twice, the second time because she realized what a bad state she had been in not to have noticed sooner. Well, that was all about to change, she thought, picturing the fridge and tightening the waist tie behind her back. The action produced a crackle in one of the pockets, and, when she investigated, she found a thin stiff leaf, the color of autumn. It took Mary a moment to remember how it had got there, that she had picked it up from her bedroom floor the night she’d left her house open, and she smiled at the memory of that evening, the babysitting, the airy way her home had smelt when she walked inside. It cheered her to think that the two of them had a history, as well as a future.

  It was half past five when she went down to the kitchen and flicked the heat under a pan with a knob of butter. She sliced onions as finely as crisps, according to the recipe in her Basic Italian Cooking, and let them soften. She grated Parmesan, chopped ham, then began to crack the eggs. At number eight, she hovered over the bowl, suddenly uncertain that the recipe would work on this scale. It was perfectly normal to be nervous, she soothed herself. This was the first time she had cooked for him. She cracked the last five eggs into the slop of yellow blobs. He would want for nothing.

  An odor of buttery onions began to seep from the edges of the pan lid. The late sun streaming through the back window gave the steam the appearance of a thin cloud as it wafted its news out of the door and into the garden. Mary stepped back to take in the room’s productive haze, and the notes of a made-up tune came to her. She started to sing. Something strange was happening. The place was beginning to feel like home.

  She had no way to tell him what time to arrive, but she knew he would come. In the lounge she puzzled over the table, unsure how far to go. Finally, she set down Granny Joan’s place mats. They were printed with pictures of grouse, which she figured he would appreciate. She lit Mark’s candle on the mantelpiece and deliberated over cutlery before laying two places, mainly for symmetry. And then the alarm sounded, summoning her to the oven, just as a movement in the window caught her eye, and she saw that he had already arrived and was watching the house from the shed, no doubt smelling—

  EGGS! his tail said, as it swirled in the air.

  She stepped onto the patio at the same time as he snapped into a run, and in a second they stood before each other. “Darling! You came!” she whispered—she did not want Eric or Michelle to hear. “I knew you would! And this time, I’m not letting you go.”

  She skipped into the kitchen. “Dinner’s almost ready. I was just letting it stand.” His right ear flickered, detecting the new brightness in her voice, but he faltered on the step, his tail an upward curve. Mary tightened her ponytail, tipped her head to show him the dark yes inside her ears, but he still delayed. His hesitation bewildered her. At last she gave a relieved chuckle. “Ah, don’t worry about him! He’s gone. And he’s not coming back.”

  Fox trotted inside, and she closed the door behind him.

  “How hungry are you?” Mary asked as she halved the omelet and slid the smaller piece onto her own plate. The splintering sound she heard was the scratch of his forepaws on the worktop, gouging the pine while his ears stiffened into points. This was why kitchens had breakfast bars, she thought. To make cooking sociable. “It’s frittata,” she told him. “Like omelet, but more special.” A feeling of immense emotional prosperity surged in her as she walked down the hall with the plates, his claws click-clacking at her heels.

  EGGS.

  “We’re in here,” she said. But when she entered the lounge, perhaps because she wanted to put herself in his place, a new worry hit her. The room smelt overpoweringly of chemical lemon and the musty blowback of the vacuum. She rested the plates on Granny Joan’s mats and went to raise the sash, unlocking the safety catch in order to lift it right up. The warped pane whisked a few dried leaves into its vortex, and she gasped. “Oh no! Sorry, Mr. Spider.” His web clung to the frame in sticky strings. “Can you mend it?” The poor fellow had lived there for weeks.

  She turned to Fox, who stood sentry-like in the middle of the rug. “I’ll bring some water.”

  The door sloped closed behind her and softly rebounded as if it had heard an enemy and jumped back.

  He followed the movement with his muzzle, but it fizzed with astringent vapor. The sound of water in another part of the cave bent back his EGGS ear. He tried to take in the new EGGS information while nosing for old. The den was different. He whiskered the fleece on the sofa, swept a crease with his tongue for the papery wings of a clothes moth, a Beetle leg. The matted old sheep fleece he used to. Here. A trace. He rubbed his body in the place to make his stale tracks fresh tracks.

  Mary came in with the water.

  “Oh good, you found the blanket,” she said. “I hoped that would make you feel at home.” She toed the hen doorstop back into place and smiled as he cocked his head at it. “I hate that thing. I was going to chuck it out, but then I remembered how much you liked it. Now, as Granny Joan used to say, Mia casa es tu casa. You know. Everything is the same as before. Only better. Relax.” He stepped toward the foot of the table, the leg of the chair. “All those legs. What creature is this, eh?” she said. He waited uncertainly. Watching him wasn’t going to put him at ease, so she stepped onto her own chair with both feet, then lowered herself into a crouch, a kneel, and finally sat. The thicker fur of his brow scrunched a little, but the demonstration served its purpose because in a leap he was on the chair where Mark had sat the night before, circling furiously, his claws tapping at the wooden seat as if they were punching in some sort of entry code. When he finally landed his brush, he opened his mouth, and his tongue fell on the table.

  He probed the plate, the knife, the fork with his muzzle. She had expected him to dive straight in, but all the stainless steel seemed to inhibit him. “That’s just for decoration,” she explained, seeing now what idiocy it was to have put out cutlery. She pushed her own aside and grabbed the omelet with both hands. “Buon appetito,” she said, biting off a chunk. “Mmm. Seven out of ten. It could have done with more cheese, but it’s not bad. Not bad at all!”

  She rolled her eyes as Eric shouted next door. “Someone’s in trouble,” she said, feeling smug. Fox’s snout drummed the rim of the plate on the wood, banging and clattering and shoving it around as if he were teasing prey. Finally, he tilted his head, opened his jaws, and clacked his fangs against the china. She reached over, meaning to slide the omelet onto the table, but he shook the plate so vigorously that the china crashed one way and the omelet flew the other, and this time he pounced. His tongue scooped, and he jerked his head to toss the frittata further back into his mouth. Several smaller lumps broke off and fell to the table, and he washed them into his jaws with his tongue. He was already licking his lips while Mary took her second bite. She broke her own dinner in two and pushed the larger piece across the table. It vanished in seconds. Then he sat there, his beautiful white chest rising and falling, calmly waiting for her to finish, making no attempt to rush her or to get down, and she thought again how polite, how well brought up, he was.

  “I wish I knew more about you,” she said.

  Silence.

  “Where you grew up, your family…”

  He bent an ear to her while his muzzle examined the space in front of him for overlooked morsels.

  Well, what could he say? That he was one of several boys, the eldest, largest, and his mother’s favorite. That he was first to learn to hunt and did all he could to help her with the chores. The fact was, Mary knew what sort of child he had been because she saw what sort of an adult he was. She edged her hand toward him. He watched its slow approach across the table with swaying muzzle, ears tapered to his head, claws extended. At last Mary’s fingers t
weaked the soft hairs that broke over his toes. His claws retracted, a gesture of invitation which she answered by lowering her fingers until the full weight of her hand lay on his paw. He did not flinch even as she squeezed.

  * * *

  WHEN MARY RETURNED from taking out the plates, Fox—the name had grown on her and now sounded appropriate and respectful rather than abrupt—stood at the back window with his forepaws on the sill. A shaft of late sun lit the top of his head, edging the summit of his ears in soft gold. “That’s where I first saw you,” she said, going to join him. “Do you remember?” His outline that day blazed in her memory in russet ink. She had been so scared of him, not understanding, as she did now, that if she shared her world with him, her world would grow. For weeks she had wondered what he had come for, but tonight, standing beside him, alive to each nervous leaf, the tireless chit-chat of the wrens in the laurel, everything seemed so clear. The messenger and the message were the same thing. He had brought her comfort, company, happiness, an imaginable future. He was a kind of faith, and the answer, like that fox-face sign in her old school maths book was just because.

  He flopped his tongue onto the sash cord and scooped up the spider. “Oh no! Was that really necessary?” she cried. After all those eggs, he surely could have done without a spider. “Look, let’s make ourselves comfortable,” she suggested. She led the way to the lounge end of the room, closed the wooden shutters, patted the sofa. “I promise I won’t go on about him all night, but I’ve got to tell you what happened with Mark.” By the time she reached the part where she ordered her ex-boyfriend to leave, admittedly slightly more dramatic in the re-telling than in real life, Fox jumped onto the cushion next to her, his eyes flecked with encouragement, a hint of musk beginning to bloom.

  “Anyway, that’s it now,” she concluded. “He can’t come back. I’ve changed the locks. And I’m thinking of building up the back wall.”

  Fox raised his muzzle quizzically, so she said, “Oh no, I’d never make it too high for you. But…” she felt her eyes widen in excitement, “I want it high enough to keep him out. I’ve told him it’s over, but like I said, he is still living behind us.” Fox nodded and, lowering himself into the sofa, stretched a foreleg in her direction. His muzzle stooped to rest upon it, and he looked at her along the line of his snout.

  “Listen. You don’t need to go anywhere else. You can have whatever you want,” she told him. “Anything you want to eat, anytime. Just tell me when you’re hungry and…” She gasped and jumped to her feet. “What an idiot! I forgot your pudding!”

  “It’s shop bought,” she apologized as she carried in the apple pie. But he didn’t seem to care. The idea had come from that documentary she and Mark had seen, in which people fed foxes jam sandwiches and fairy cakes. In every other regard, her relationship with him was unlike anything she had seen in the program. Those people were delusional. What the two of them had, in contrast, was real. Food was a necessity, not motivation or reward. Was it reasonable to look at other households, other balanced human relationships, and say, well, he or she comes home each night just for food? Of course not. Humans who lived together often ate together. It was a practicality of any shared life. Besides, when he arrived today, he had no idea she was cooking for him. He ate half the pie, then pushed the rest down the back of the sofa with his snout.

  “You’re quiet,” she said after a while.

  He made no answer, and she felt herself redden. She had never asked anything like this before, of anyone, and her mouth began to dry with nerves. She cleared her throat. “So there’s a conversation we need to have,” she ventured. God, that was the kind of thing Mark would say! Well, she refused to feel self-conscious for using the word “conversation.” It bewildered her that some humans were embarrassed to talk to animals. She had once seen a famous environmental campaigner interviewed on TV, and he had confessed to resisting the urge to talk to sheep. It was the resistance rather than the urge which she found stupefying. Such shame was madness.

  Fox nudged his muzzle up and down his shin, which meant she should continue.

  “Remember I told you there would be traps in the woods?” she started. “Well, as you may have seen, they are all over the place. I have no idea how dangerous they are to you. Whether you spot them a mile off and avoid them. The thing is, I deactivated them this morning, but the fox man—or Mark or Eric—will reset them. It’s impossible to keep an eye on them all day. I can’t guarantee your safety out there. Besides, sooner or later, they’ll know it’s me and resort to something more … extreme.”

  He was still listening.

  “So this is my idea.” She took a deep breath. “Are you ready?”

  He gave something like a nod.

  “Move in with me.”

  Both ears leant back, and he made a series of quick blinks, not proper blinks, but a flickering of eyelids.

  “It is soon,” she said. “I’m sorry to be brutal about it, but it’s a matter of life or death. Ignore it. That’s Eric filling the bin,” she tutted, as he fussed an ear at the clanking of chains outside. She waited for an answer, but Fox hooked his snout over his tail, so she could see the murmurings of his nostrils, and began to lower his eyelids. It was barely ten o’clock. Poor guy was tired with the effort of avoiding the traps, the emotional weight of the evening. She understood that, but it troubled her, this quietness. There were occasions when she could hear his thoughts as clear as day, and others when she longed to hear them, but he may as well have been switched to mute. With a sinking feeling, it occurred to Mary that the closeness of his thoughts to hers might depend on her own sense of their proximity at any given time. For all that they were embarking on a serious advancement of their relationship, she felt foiled by his remoteness. In her worst moments she wondered whether it wasn’t her need powering him. But she reminded herself that these were only the doubts of a sensitive person’s firm belief.

  She left him where he lay and went to fetch the airbed. She had inflated it in the spare room, imagining he would sleep there. But now that it was growing dark, she saw the impossibility of going to bed in the usual way herself: he was sure to wake at some point and wonder where he was. So she heaved the mattress on its side. Clinging to it with her arms spread wide, she dragged it to the landing. At each bump down the stairs, it cuffed her nose, so that by the time she squashed the thing through the lounge doorway, sweat pooled under her arms. She glanced at the sofa and was pleased to see that her housemate had tidied himself into a spiral and entered a deeper, more comfortable phase of rest. She lowered the airbed quietly to the floor beside him.

  Mary knew that these moments, when he slept during her waking hours, were crucial to the plan’s success. She had no idea what time he usually ate, and she wanted to be ready. No one could bait him on a full stomach. She thrust a pork fillet into the oven, half a dozen chicken thighs, a handful of burgers. Even though she was the one cooking, she had the funny sensation that he was looking after her. She honestly couldn’t remember when she had ever felt so … domesticated. Afterward, she rummaged in the understairs cupboard and found a large sheet of cardboard, which she tore into mats. She hoped he would use them as toilets, and she planned to communicate this delicate matter to him when he woke. She performed a few other administrative necessities—unplugged the broadband and landline, switched off her mobile and put it in a drawer—before turning to her own bedtime routine.

  How strange all her regular jobs felt. To brush her teeth. To undress. To pull her nightie over her head. These usually thoughtless tasks struck her as immensely bizarre now they were carried out while Fox slept in the house. She performed each slowly, to prolong the sensation of strangeness. Were these rituals really all necessary? she wondered.

  When she headed downstairs to the airbed, she walked right into his burnt licorice aroma, as tangible as if he had popped up a tent inside her lounge. A sigh of relief escaped her lips because she knew then that he wanted to be here, that he was making the place his
. She sat beside him on the sofa, laid her hand on his head. Immediately his ears began to fret at her palm with sharp flicks. His mouth parted, allowing her to wipe a dribble from his lower jaw with the hem of her nightie. She stroked his head, and the gap between his jaws widened to release a small, unconscious chirp. How silly she had been to worry that he was quiet. In silence, such intimacy. She straightened the fingers of her right hand and tapped the tips on the points of his teeth. He didn’t seem to mind, so she fed them slowly into his mouth, dabbing them along his throbbing tongue while his sharp jags made their way down her fingers to her palm. He panted slightly in his sleep, but his jaws stayed open. “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” she said. She waited, to see if he would contradict her, but his mouth did not close. Because it was the truth.

  * * *

  FOR THE NEXT few days, Mary and Fox lived a fitful life divided into small segments of repetitive activities. They napped, they rested, they ate, they sat and chatted, and, mostly, they watched—each other, the gilt wings of the clothes moths, rich from all Mary’s jumpers, and sometimes the world left to them through the streak of day between the shutters. Any negligible movement was breaking news for them. Each time Mary shook her duvet, Fox leapt to snap at specks of falling dust. When she scraped balls of hair from her brush, she flicked them to the floor and let him chase them, skittering over the boards till he caught her hair in his claws.

  So what if the sheets of cardboard proved hit and miss? She had done worse things for love than clear up someone’s mess. As for chewing through electrics and other scaremongering, there was no such danger. He was considerate, sociable, and civilized. Although he disliked TV, occasionally she read to him. And often they listened to Flora crying through the duck-egg wall.