There was only one victim of this honeymoon period. On returning to the lounge from another long stint at the oven, Mary found the hen doorstop on its side, the gingham split open and the floor rolling with hundreds of tiny polystyrene beans. “I see,” she said simply. Fox stretched his jaws in reply; a few of the white beads had stuck to his tongue. He swilled them down and she smiled. The last traces of Mark were vanishing.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It was into this paradise that the outside world stole. Fox and Mary were reading together on the airbed when the first rap came. Few visitors knocked at Mary’s door, and those who did so tended to knock on her neighbors’ doors as well. Charity workers, men selling dishcloths, touts for window cleaning or God. She slipped into the hall, shutting Fox in the lounge, and crept to the peephole. The man faced her squarely through the glass. He was much younger than she had previously thought; his head was not bald but shaved. She suppressed a derisory snort because apart from his youth, he was a cliché of death. He was wearing the black vest and gloves again. Even the 4 × 4 she could see in the street—she assumed it was his—had black tinted windows. Evidently, he luxuriated in the deathliness of his profession, because embroidered on the flap of his breast pocket were a paw print and the words Fox Fixer—Pest Assassin.
He knocked again and smiled, readying himself to make a good impression. Actually, he made poor viewing. Mary watched him remove a glove, scratch at a rash on his neck, check his watch, put away his smile. Why did he think she would help him? He had no power to act on her behalf. He wanted to impose his vision of city life on others, that was all. Mary waited for him to leave. Shortly afterward she heard Eric and Michelle’s door close and guessed he had gone to report his findings.
She knew she needed to prepare for the likelihood that the Fox Fixer’s visit was only the beginning. All it would take was for someone to peep into the hall when Fox happened to be there, and the two of them would be discovered. She found a large knob of Blu-Tack in a kitchen drawer and dotted balls of it around the letter box. The flap held even when she tried to open it, but as a precaution she sealed the top with packing tape. The activity calmed her, so she kept unwinding the tape, round and round the entire door frame, until the reel was empty.
It was hard to sleep after that. Maybe sensing her restive mood, Fox lay awake too. They had discovered that he liked to watch her play Patience, his snout following the flip of cards on the mattress. So now she reached for the deck to help them settle. Sleep came fitfully. Twice he woke her for food, and when she was finally dropping off, another knock roused her. This time her name in Eric’s voice came muffled into the house. She dragged the duvet over her head.
Was it the next day or the same day when the black 4 × 4 pulled up again? Fox heard it first and sprang to the crack between the shutters. Then came the sputter of the Fox Fixer’s two-way radio up their path. The relentless pressure and harassment were beginning to take their toll, and Mary burst into tears. “This is a siege!” she cried, hanging on to Fox to stop him going to the door. “Why won’t they just leave us alone?”
She buried her face in the fur on his flank. It amazed her, how much of society’s organized censure it was possible to provoke simply by living quietly in their own home. She knew she needed to rest. Yet the onerous cooking schedule, worry over how long she could make the provisions last, and, above all, concern about a new behavior she detected in Fox, which was a kind of listless aloofness, made it difficult to rest for any length of time. “This world really doesn’t understand wildness, does it?” she said, stroking the white rib on his shin. “Society wants us all shut up in our hutches.” On the other side of the wall, someone was moving around in Tangle Wood, and Fox’s right ear twitched at the sound. Don’t worry, the ear said, I’m not going there again, and with a twinge of horror Mary realized that these days she never heard Mr. Farnworth’s dog. Roxy indeed! Had he really called Fox that? What an insult—when Fox’s body and demeanor and size were so comprehensively masculine.
* * *
NOW THEIR LIVES broke into smaller segments. The napping, resting, eating, idling, and watching could be snapped at any moment by the rap of an unwanted visitor. Once, the Fox Fixer trespassed in their garden to hammer on the kitchen door. They watched him through the gap between the rear shutters. Another time, he dropped off an assistant, who sat on the little wall by their front door for hours, waiting for Mary to surface. The postman knocked, then the postman and Neville. Their persecutors trailed their slowing engines, starting engines, crackling radios, and crepey soles through Mary’s sleepy ear. Every car that stopped in the street felt ominous. In the pop-pop of an exhaust she heard gunshots. When the police helicopter hung over the house, shaking its walls, she imagined a giant drill descending from its belly and coiling into her roof. Why was everyone so predatory? And how long could she and Fox stay stuck in this burrow? One dark sleep she was woken by a scraping sound and leapt from the mattress convinced that the police were digging through the air vent to winkle them out. Not even Fox could reassure her: her eyes went to the sofa, then under the table, where he spent happy hours shredding the gingham hen, but she was alone in the lounge.
With her heart in her mouth, Mary darted to the hall, only to find that Fox and the noise were one and the same. He was on his hind legs, clawing at the back door; these days she kept it bolted. Twirls of peeled paint lay on the lino, and she gave a great sigh. It was not relief she felt; it was only more fear. Persevere, she told herself. Fox would adapt. The path to freedom for both of them depended on Mary holding her nerve until it was safe to venture outside. She rested her hands beside his paws on the door and began to claw her fingers at it too, to show him that she was also desperate to taste fresh air, but her frenzied scraping only made him more agitated. He curled back his lips and showed his teeth: if she didn’t know him better, she would have found the gesture threatening. “We are more than halfway there,” she promised, picturing the emptying fridge and freezer. Oh, how she hoped they were more than halfway there.
He gave a bark, and she felt suddenly stricken that his noise, if it escalated, would give them away. A bark could be passed off as a dog. But what if he bayed or unleashed one of those bloodthirsty screams that foxes are said to make? He had never done that because he was happy. What if she kept him inside and he became unhappy? “Just a few suns and moons,” she told him. “That’s all.” But the truth was she had no idea how long they would be holed up. She resolved to ration her share of the food.
* * *
TIREDNESS HIT HER in the form of a delirium. One light-time when she stole to the peephole in reply to a knock, there in the glass, wearing a tailored jacket and a neat, gray bob, was her own mother. Mary stared through the tiny round window. The street, fanned behind her improbable visitor, started to rock. Her knees quavered and she put a hand on the door to stem her sudden queasiness. The sickness was a kind of cabin fever, she decided, the result of being trapped inside. She was stuck on the lower deck with only this minuscule porthole to the outside while the world hammered at her door. No wonder her stomach rolled and spun with the turbulence. She fixed her eye on her mother, hoping that a single point of focus would stop the motion sickness. The marvel was that her mother did not call or speak, not even to say Mary’s name, which made Mary doubt that her mother was really there.
Tears spilled from her eyes and rolled down her nose, her cheeks, her chin, her neck, dissolving her mother’s edges into a watery, navy splodge. With her wet eye stuck to the glass, Mary heard herself sniffle. It was a child’s cry, a sorrowful little chirrup, the kind that heralds a long chain of similar chirrups, usually as the coda to a sustained hysteria when there are no words and hurt alone blurts small, pitiful hiccups. But this cry spurred no others. It came once, and Mary, trembling at the discovery, saw that once was all it took. She had done it! She had found the cry that expressed a need beyond tiredness or hunger, and her mother had listened. She knew this because her mother’s
hand was stretching toward her, growing larger and larger in the fish-eye. In a kind of ecstasy Mary shut her eyes and bowed her head, waiting to feel her mother’s fingers close softly on her hair and begin to stroke. The rap of the knocker shattered her. Mary lifted her forehead from the juddering door and wiped her face fiercely with the back of her hand. Looking down, she saw that the top of her own navy dress—these days she lived in it—was sodden. It astounded her that she could weep a whole well with scarcely a murmur, but it did not occur to her for even a second to open the door. She went to curl up with Fox. She looped her arms around his tail, tucked her toes beneath his chest. His scent wrapped around her like a second skin, and when at last she woke, she went back to the peephole, her face itching with dried tears, and her mother had gone.
Dig in, Mary thought. We have to dig in. By now she had lost all track of days and told the time by sound. Once when the street was too quiet to be Saturday and too busy to be Sunday, the lounge sash began to rattle ferociously. Mary and Fox were sitting on the floor, eating—a chicken breast for her, three for him—but Fox jumped to the window, and Mary followed, unfastening the shutters far enough to glimpse the removal truck parked outside Michelle and Eric’s. She had to grip the shutters firmly to stop Fox planting himself in full view of her neighbors. He seemed desperate to drink in the outside world.
“But the sign still says For Sale,” she whimpered, and he pushed his head hard against her side. “They must have rented somewhere.” Through the gap, they watched as two men and Eric went in and out of the house. Furniture scraped over floorboards, bashed into the back of their blue wall. Out came the sofa, the enormous refrigerator, and, she saw with a wince, Flora’s cot.
When Fox heard her sigh, he dropped the firm underside of his muzzle to her hand. “All is not lost,” she said. “They took everything, but they couldn’t take you. Only you can take you.”
A little later Eric emerged from the house with George. His wife followed, holding Flora. Mary raised a hand to the dark mop of hair that tasseled Michelle’s shoulder. It occurred to her, then, that she too could be pregnant. Maybe because she had just eaten, her stomach made a small yelp, and she felt a flutter of shock. To think she might have taken that from Mark without him even knowing. She looked at Fox to see what he would make of this thought. Was it too soon? It didn’t feel too soon. With her hand on her stomach, she watched her neighbors’ final preparations. The business of putting the children in the car seemed to take forever. When the door shut, Michelle and Eric stood apart, looking back at the house.
Mary laid her other hand on Fox’s head and said, “I think we might be in the clear.” When she said “we,” she let herself think, just for a moment, that they might be three.
* * *
SHE IGNORED THE next knock, ignored the way Fox leapt off the sofa, his fur elongating and thickening, as if he wore a winter coat. She had thought he was getting used to the sounds of the house, even the interruptions, but he stood at the closed shutters, making a deep, throaty growl. Mary watched him from the sofa. Eight, nine, ten? sleeps had passed since Michelle and Eric moved out, but she slept in fits and starts, several times a day. At some point, her neighbors had canceled the milkman, and the soft electric whir of his float no longer heralded morning. Only the emptying fridge warned her that time was stretching further from the day Mark had left.
There was no second knock, and Mary turned another page. “Come and sit down,” she said to Fox. She was on the sofa with her feet up, which she now tried to do between each nap. “I want to show you this.” They had been looking at A History of Western Art. He liked to watch the pages flick, and then to slam a paw on anything interesting. “Ssshhh. Just ignore it,” she told his wavering ears. She cared for nothing the postman could bring.
The painting open on her lap was by Constable, and she was curious to see Fox’s reaction to the country scene. “You have cousins who live in places like this,” she started, tilting the book to show him, for he had stuck where he was by the window. Then she faltered. She had not heard the postman leave. Fox gave a low guttural rumble. The black inside his ears widened. Mary wriggled to the edge of the sofa, just as footsteps slowed to a silence on the other side of the window. She reached out a hand to Fox’s shoulder, trusting him to keep still, to let nothing of their lives leak through the sliver of light between the shutters. The glass in the lower sash flinched slightly as if absorbing pressure. Why didn’t the postman knock again?
Even in her exhaustion, Mary felt elated when the gate eventually clicked shut, and she knew she had survived another scare. Sure, the nocturnal cooking sessions were taking their toll, but their enemies were weakening. “We can live like this,” she rallied Fox, who had slumped beneath the table again. She felt perky. She had already had to loosen the tie on her dress. The scratches on her arms had healed. “We are making it work!” she told him. In her good moments, she believed it. In her worst, she feared she had shut them both in a trap, larger and more comfortable than the ones in the woods, but a trap just the same. Around her forehead and the back of her skull the sense of enclosure tightened.
She fell asleep and dreamt that she was at the zoo, on the animals’ side of the glass. The keepers kept studying her oddly, as if she didn’t belong. Whereas the weird thing was, the keepers were the ones who looked out of place. The parrots were chatting to her, and she sat in the shade of a tree, eating nuts while monkeys tidied her hair. All kinds of animals shared one big enclosure, but she felt no fear until the keeper’s shadow darkened the glass. She cowered in her hideout, pulled a low branch over her face, and then the keeper with an almighty crash punched his fist through her letter box, breaking the seal of the Blu-Tack and tape, as he yelled her name. “Mary! Mary! I know you’re there! Mary! I’m coming in!”
She screwed her eyelids tightly against Mark’s shouts. “That’s what he thinks,” she whispered, thrilling as she heard the key jam against the new lock. Her conspiratorial tone must have sounded like permission to Fox because he lifted his shoulders and drew his tail from his haunch like a dagger. Mary pressed a hand to the place where a collar would be and felt the back of his neck thrum with a throaty growl. From the way he snapped his jaws over his shoulder, she supposed that he was desperate to run at Mark.
“Mary! Open up! You’re not answering the phone. You taped up the letter box! For God’s sake. Just tell me you’re safe!” Mark must have held the whole door by the knocker, because the walls reverberated as he shook it. In the silence that followed, Mary heard him wipe his sweaty hands on his shorts, then let out a heavy sigh. Quietly and methodically—method, she knew, being his way of defusing himself—he dried his hands again and slipped the key into the lock. It slithered in but would not turn.
She had got rid of Michelle and Eric, and with them, she assumed, the Fox Fixer. But how was she going to get rid of Mark?
It was a moment of brilliant invention when she realized that the way to break this deadlock was to embrace the event she had been trying to avoid. All this time she had hidden Fox from Mark, when really she needed to show Mark that she had moved on. She turned to Fox with a grin. “Are you ready to go public?”
The second she lifted her hand from his neck, he bolted. His claws spilled across the floor. From the threshold between the lounge and the hall, Mary watched his rolling haunches obliterate the eyes that stared through the letter box. “There you are, Mary! Thank God for … What the—?” The letter box slapped shut and cut Mark off, and moments later her fox crashed his forepaws against the door, chewing Mark’s shouts with his bark. When at last he hushed, Mary waited to hear Mark speak, but there was only pure, triumphant silence. She walked to the peephole, and the street was blank.
“We did it!” she cried, throwing her arms around Fox. “We did it! The siege is over!”
* * *
MARY TOOK OUT all the sausages that were left in the fridge. A dark, acrid smell arose when she peeled back the plastic wrapper. She checked the expi
ration label, but the numbers meant nothing to her. Well, he was happy feeding from people’s bins, she reasoned, so the sausages would be fine. “Let’s eat at the table again,” she said. “A celebration feast!” He stood beside her, his tongue lolling on the worktop while she prepared the food. She loved the way the counter had flaked where he scraped it; each time she came out here she found a fresh scattering of sawdust or peeled paint from the door. As the kitchen began to fill with rank steam, Mary darted out of the room. She had one more job to do. She paused on the half-landing: the place felt pleasantly unfamiliar, and it dawned on her that this was the first time since Fox moved in that she had been upstairs. In her bedroom she tipped up the cologne and shook the last drops onto her wrists. The bottle was empty.
* * *
“MICHELLE AND ERIC are gone. Mark has gone,” she sang to Fox. He had eaten five sausages, two venison burgers, a raw egg, and she was now feeding him blackberries; he had a special fondness for them. “It’s over. It’s finally over.” He licked the purple stains on her palm, and she thought his face looked sad. “Oh no, I mean the hiding,” she said. “Not us, silly!” She opened the shutters at the front of the house and let in the light. The room speckled thickly with glittery dust, as if they lived inside a souvenir globe and had just been given a good shake. Mary lifted the rear sash, and air rushed in. The house sang with the voices of the day, the birds and the clapping of laurel leaves; children’s cries volleyed from gardens down the street. It occurred to her as she re-took her seat that the summer holidays could have started; maybe this was how they sounded, in a family. She brimmed with hope.
Fox must have been thinking the same because when she turned to tell him how she felt, she realized, from the way his head cocked a quarter turn, that he already knew. He was looking down at her, and she met his gaze. Really stared into his eyes. She raised herself to her knees. His gleaming pupils distended as she peered in. She loved looking at him like this. There was always something about him she could not reach. She leant forward, until the whiskers that sprouted over one eye tickled her forehead, and her face warmed with his breath. It was like nearing the edge of a hole, she thought, staring at those dark slits, a place you want to know but can’t go to. You think you’re getting closer, but really it’s the hole that’s getting bigger. She had that hole in her too. It was OK. To be part of something you couldn’t understand. To be unknown yourself.
How to Be Human Page 23
