Her heart tightened. Something was moving in both his pupils. With a feeling of vertigo, she squinted into the shiny black ovals, seeing with a pant that the other life that twitched in there, the thing leaning toward her in a hopeful, jealous, solicitous sort of way, was her own kneeling reflection. It was incredible how much of herself fitted in there. Within one narrow eye was a whole little Mary. Her right hand had instinctively advanced—it was what gave her the solicitous look—and before she sensed his move, Fox jerked his snout and snapped at her fingers.
She gasped, more in shock than in pain, for he had not closed his jaws completely. He had not wanted to hurt her, it was just a graze, he would never hurt her, he could hurt her if he wanted. It was only the trauma making her heave. She cupped her hands, and blood pooled in the upper palm. Two, maybe three fingers. She made to stand, meaning to go to the kitchen and take care of herself, but Fox dipped his snout and licked her hand. The surprise, the comfort, heat, nausea, made her sit back down, blow out sharp. More blood trickled into her hand, and he lapped that too.
“It’s OK,” she said. “It was an accident.” She was sure it was an accident. And in any case, the truth was … the truth was that she had no right to blame him. She shut her eyes. At the thought of New Year’s Day, her fingers began to throb, and despite the pain, and in memory of it, her hand curled again into a fist as she spooled back through their fight. Coffee streaming down the white paint. The crack of the mug. Mark hurling it at the bedroom wall instead of at her, a last-second swerve as reason gained the upper hand over anger. How she envied him that clever emotional feint, to muster control from shock, from the funny gurgling noise he’d made. To marshal the blood on his lip. It was Granny Joan’s ring that had done it. Made the cut. Mark who had made her snap. Mary’s hand slowly unclenched, and again Fox waggled his tongue into her palm as if she were holding out a bowl. It was very different. They hadn’t argued, she and Fox. She hadn’t made him, crushed him, pulled him apart limb by limb, boxed him in so he had nowhere else to go. It was only the exhilaration, the emotional exhaustion of having reached the end. She knew that, and in a funny way, the blood, in her hand, in his mouth, made them more kindred.
He gave a low bark that rose at the tail like a question. She had no idea what he was saying, so rather sadly she gave him the same bark back.
She left him in the lounge and went to run her fingers under cold water, but the pain made it feel hot, and her skin ached where the flow hit. Blood streamed into the sink. She needed to be sensible. Antiseptic, plasters. Fox would want her to take care of herself, especially in her possible condition, which was probably not a condition but anyhow seemed to create a new sense of responsibility to herself. It was really the possibility she was nurturing, the idea that she could. If she chose. And she had no idea if she would. She wrapped her injured hand in a tea towel and swung open the door to the cupboard under the sink—she was still getting used to how easy it was to do this—which made her think of Mark again. Mark checking on her, Mark punching through the letter box, Mark’s ridiculous child lock, Mark rearranging her cupboards, Mark’s ridiculous child lock …
She knelt on the lino with her stomach churning. All this time, there had been no lock. The poison sat in the cupboard, waiting for Fox to find it. Maybe it even smelt attractive to him. He could break the glass with his teeth … With her good hand, she began to shift bottles of washing-up liquid, carpet cleaner, ant killer, and scourers. Where had she put it? She moved more quickly. In panic she scooped the entire contents onto the lino and began to pick over them, splattering blood across canisters, packets, and spray guns. She checked in the cupboard, but the cupboard was empty. Slowly she replaced each item, waiting with a rising feeling of sickness to see the small vial she had somehow overlooked.
When there were only five things left on the floor, each so clear they left no scope for surprise or discovery, Mary gave a loud sob. Mark had taken it. Of course he had. He had gone through her cupboards. She knew that. But it hadn’t occurred to her that he would have been thorough enough to find the poison. “Oh God, what have I done?” she said aloud. She was desperate to tell someone, but it was the one thing she couldn’t share with Fox. What would he think of her then?
She was still sitting on the floor, bandaging her fingers, when he cleared his throat in the hall. “What’s up?” she said. He had a gift for knowing when she was feeling down. One ear hid low, the other needled up. His fur shaded on his back as the muscles rippled: he was moving decisively and stealthily, his shoulders dipped, his white chest sloping toward the floor. Every limb pronounced its potency. “What is it?” she asked, feeling foolish that the sight of him scared her. But he continued his muscular swagger to the back door. “Oh yes!” she said, trying to regain their celebratory tone. “You’re right. We’ve had our feast, and now … it’s time for the grand opening! I think I might put the rug outside so we can doze in the garden for a change.”
She drew back the bolt and gave the door a shove, expecting him to run outside. Instead he walked with a strange slow strut. His hips rolled thickly, giving him a broader appearance at the thighs, almost as if he wore chaps. She worried that the incident with her fingers had distressed him, so she followed him onto the patio and called out to ask if he felt OK. It was only when he failed to reply with any part of his body that she looked up and saw what he saw, that Mark had jumped from the top of the wall and landed in a puff of dust by the lime.
“I come in peace,” he said.
“And you can leave in peace,” she shouted, catching up with Fox, who had stopped in the middle of the lawn and was broadening his shoulders. “Go on, get out!”
“I am going,” he said. “It’s taken me the two and a half weeks since you dumped me to work it out, but that’s exactly what I’ve come to tell you. I’ve sublet the flat. I’m moving south of the river. See?” He gestured to his rucksack. “I just wanted to say goodbye.”
She nodded, feeling beside her for Fox. Not for the first time, she found herself wishing he had a collar. After today, it would be wise to order one. His back pulsed beneath her fingertips, and the beat calmed her.
“And also, Mary, I think I know you probably better than anyone else…”
She felt a growl form in her throat, and she balled her nose into a sneer.
“… and you definitely know me better than anyone…”
Her eyes narrowed.
“That’s why I’m here. I could have done this any day. You know that. But I didn’t. I wouldn’t have done it. Then this morning, when I saw through the letter box … Well, I realized how urgently you need help. I mean, look at you.”
“You’ve made a mistake,” she said, stroking the back of Fox’s neck. “I’ve got all the help I need. Now get out!”
“I blame myself,” he said. “For behaving like a jerk, for the way we broke up. But you can’t live like this. You just can’t. It’s … it’s madness. Look at you, Mary! You’re filthy! What have you done to your hand? You can’t live like … You can’t befriend a fucking fox! You need to see someone. You need to stop this. You need help. You need to listen to me. You won’t get better till you do.”
Need, need, need. His old trick. He started to walk toward her, his ankles disappearing in the long grass. It seemed incredible that he had mown it on his last visit, but the garden, like her, had outgrown him.
“Someone’s got to end it, Mary!”
“It’s nothing to do with you! You’re trespassing. You’re harassing me. You’re making out that you’re looking after me to disguise the fact that you’re a stalker!”
Mark took another few steps toward them, his arms outstretched warily.
“That’s far enough,” she said.
Beside her, Fox began to growl. His coat thickened, gleaming in the sun. He was big when she first saw him, but he had grown since then, and he shone with health and strength. He swiped his tail from his flank and held it high over his back. She could feel its load cutting
through the air behind her. His shoulders rocked powerfully as he strode forward.
“All right, all right,” Mark said, glancing nervously behind him to the wall. “Stop it, will you? Call it back!”
The truth was, Mary had no idea how to stop him. He was listening to a voice in his head that was not hers, his tail stiff, his paws certain. “I can’t,” she said, following behind, excited by the sight of Mark’s legs quickening their reversal, the panicked way he jabbed a foot in Fox’s direction, only for Fox to part his jaws before continuing to advance.
“Wait!” Mark said. He had reached the wall, but when he saw Fox still in pursuit, he pulled himself up and scrambled over. “OK,” he said, raising his hands in surrender. Fox stopped. It was one of the things she loved about him, that he was always ready to listen. He never lost his calm. “I’m out of here. Just let me say this. I did it for you, Mary. However much you hate me, I did it for you. And please, get some help. I know you don’t want me, and you don’t even want to hear it from me, but you really need to call someone. All right?”
“But you didn’t do it!” she cried. “We did it. We stopped you! We won!”
Mark gave her a pitying look and shook his head. “Mary … Mary…”
“If I see you here again, I’ll call the police,” she said. “And I will. I’m not scared of you anymore.” She felt riled by the scale of Mark’s self-deception. Did it for me, she thought. What rubbish. “You did nothing for me!” she yelled at his back. She wasn’t going to let him believe that he had been taking care of her all this time. “He has to make out that he’s responsible for me,” she said to Fox. She wanted to bury her face in his thick mantle of fur, but when she reached out a hand, he shrugged her off. He was listening beneath her words for the rustle and crunch of Mark’s footsteps.
Eventually, Mary registered the lowering of his tail, and she knew they were safe. “I think that really is the end,” she said when his ears still leant at the wall, though there was nothing more to be heard. “Let’s go inside. I need a hug.” A fly landed on his ear, and the ear flickered.
He tipped his snout at her, but his paws pointed at the back wall.
“What, now?” she said with a sigh. “Can’t you go out later? Please?” She cupped a hand under his muzzle and tried to lift him round to face the house, but he arched his neck and shook her off. “OK,” she said. “Just don’t be too long or I’ll worry.”
* * *
IT TOOK MARY a while to check the woods, and when she returned, she glanced into the garden and was pleasantly surprised to see Fox already home. “The traps have gone!” she called. She had hauled herself to the top of the wall with one hand. “They’ve given up. It’s over!” She steadied herself on the bricks, refastened the bandage around her bite, and began to lower herself. It was strange he hadn’t replied. When her feet found the ground, she looked up. His body was making a shape it had never made before. His back oddly humped. Then snapped back down like a broken bridge. “Are you OK?” she said, feeling her neck flush.
Nothing about the way he moved was right.
He circled the lawn with alarming slowness. His snout grazed the floor, as if an underground hand pulled him down on a short rope. She ran to him, but his muzzle stayed low, his ears stuck flat to his head. He was oblivious to the movement, the sound, the scent of her. She touched his back, hot and clammy, feeling for a wound. There was no wound. His fur slid matted beneath her palm.
“Oh God!” she cried. She needed—what? The blanket. Water. She needed things. Indoors. Blanket from the sofa, looped over her arm. His bowl. She ran back outside, water slopping over her sandals, squeak-squeaking as she went, and her heart leapt because his hind legs were trying to unfold. “Oh, well done, darling,” she said as he half stood. “That’s great you feel well enough. But be still. You need to save your strength.”
She tried to push him back down, but his snout was nailed to the ground, his ears fixed on something else, the belief in his own body that he could survive, or the iron claw in the earth that kept tugging him closer. She put the water in front of him, but he took no notice of the bowl or her. He was like a radio station that refused to tune, a fuzz of noise that would not unscramble. Try as she might, she could not hear his thoughts.
He lifted himself again, his shoulders low, his hind legs pushing up, and began to drag his body slowly forward. “Please rest!” she cried. At each step, his paws forgot whose turn it was and had to improvise their sequence. Round and round he went, just as that mouse she and Mark had caught years ago had gone round in the bucket. He was obeying orders from somewhere else, obeying the instinct of his hideous, circular patrol. Globules of spit slopped from his mouth, but he kept going. His body towed his heavy tail along the dusty lawn, muddying the white tip. He never refused the circle. It was as if a glass dome had been placed over him, and he could only hug its invisible walls.
“Why don’t you rest?” she pleaded, when at last the circle delivered him to her, but his heavy lids, his jaws aghast, told her not to trouble him with questions. The white bandanna of fur that covered his lower face was smeared with saliva and dribbles of egg yolk. “Drink!” she said in despair. “Here!” She pushed the water in front of him, and his muzzle bobbed in and out. It bobbed faster and faster, as if the sound of the liquid slapping his snout was making him even thirstier, and he was nodding urgently, saying yes yes yes into the bottom of the dish.
The water clammed up the hairs on his chin, its dribbles drawing dark rivulets down his beautiful white chest fur. “There, there,” she said, crawling toward him. “It’s only me. Mary.” With a pang, she realized it was the first time she had told him her name. “It’s a bit late for introductions, isn’t it?” she croaked through her tears. It was not what she had intended, and the slip, the stupid slip, seemed to overwrite all of the intimacy of the past few weeks with strangeness. She didn’t need a name any more than he did. She was happy being Female. “And you, you are just you. Fox with no name. I’m going to look after you,” she said. He made a sort of cackle. It was a noise of immense pain. She pitied him that he had to make it, and within the pity, she felt a fold of gratitude that he had come to her garden to make it. He had chosen to die at her side, and his choice validated everything the two of them had shared. She put her hand on the place where she thought his heart must be, and he keeled over in the long grass.
“Oh, darling,” she sobbed.
She lay next to him, and he made a hoarse groan as her hand felt for his heart. She tried to count the seconds between each beat, like counting between lightning and thunder to measure the distance of a storm. She was counting to learn how far off death was. But the beats were erratic, and there was no telling the number.
She was crying when she said, “I love you.” She kissed his snout and snuggled into him. His jaws closed lovingly around her ear, his teeth gently snagging her lobe. He was leaving her, turning off his thoughts, climbing back into whatever hidden world he had lived in before they met. He opened his jaws again, as if he would speak. But his tongue fell out sideways, and at least the grass was cool.
Mark did this. He took the poison. Did it for her, he said. Idiot Mary. She did this. She told Mark about the eggs, the hollow in the tree. She let him stay. If he hadn’t been in the house, he wouldn’t have found the vial. If she hadn’t bought it in the first place … “Forgive me,” she sobbed into the top of Fox’s head. “I am so sorry.” Her tears pasted his fur to her cheek.
He looked so pained. His spine juddered along every link of the chain. And then it started again at the top, as if every time he got the first few straight, the others knocked out of line, and he had to work over all the kinks. She leant on his spine to press it down to tell him to rest, and this time he stayed. His stomach sank into the grass, his legs stilled. He seemed to be shutting down limb by limb. She knelt at his head while he watched her out of one eye.
She had the sense that the range of his vision was narrowing, some vital channel bet
ween them closing. She wished she knew how to hurl herself into the shrinking gap and jam open the doors.
His eye snapped alert then, lucid amber outlined in ferocious black like a stained-glass window. The mist was gone, and his iris flared luminous and wild. “Oh, my love,” she said and leant forward, catching sight of the Mary in his pupil. He blinked and blinked and blinked, and she cried because he seemed to want to wipe her from the lens. She lost sight of herself then. Light burnt through his pupil, as if it had just seen prey and was about to jump. But his body stayed prone, socks still on the floor. Only the eye jumped. This time, the lid stayed open and she knew he was leaving.
She buried herself in his side, pulled the blanket over them both. “Don’t go. Or if you must go, take me with you,” she begged, and dry tears heaved out of her, gulping and gagging until their two bodies lay still.
When she finally drew down the lid to close his poor stare—she had to be brave because it kept springing open—it was with the desperate thought that she was finally switching him off, that this whole summer of theirs had come and gone in the blink of an eye.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Calm, calm. She had to stay calm. Think. The house phone—dead. Mobile in the bedroom drawer—dead. Grab the charger. Back to the hall. Mobile. Broadband. Landline. Plugged in a row. One, two, three, she flicked their switches. A hum of electricity tickled her fingertip. Something seemed to end—or was it begin?—right there in the pinprick vibration that needled her like a pulse. There was nothing she could do for him. A raucous cawing pecked into blue pieces the sky behind her kitchen. The crows were beaking the news from treetop to treetop, his death a squawk of black-winged gossip. He was not coming back.
How to Be Human Page 24
