Animal Lovers

by Rob Palk

  She was drinking some thick green concoction, whizzed up in the blender. Knocking back lots of these mixes seemed to be a sign you were on the right side of the badger argument. There was a whole culture I didn’t get here, of dietary restrictions and crying over animals.

  ‘Look, you know how it is with politics. I mean, my mum has some. But they are very specifically related to being a sixty-something woman who knows a lot about literature and appears on Radio 4. And Frank. Well. He’s like you. Everything’s funny. The whole point of life is to be funny. To be interesting and clever and to be very embarrassed if anyone says anything sincere. So I never tried. And he’s so huge, isn’t he? He’s large, both of them are. It’s difficult working out what you think when you grow up with that loud kind of certainty. Assuredness. And taking art as the only thing that matters when actually there’s life. So I ended up acting, partly because they’d be horrified if I didn’t want to be creative, but also cos it’s a chance to try on some different people and see if any of them fit. To work out who I was. You can’t put your name to anything if you don’t know what you think, don’t know what you are. And now I know.’

  ‘So why badgers?’

  ‘Animals. Beginning with badgers.’

  ‘Okay then. Why animals?’

  ‘It’s hard to explain. It just seems like the root of it all. The power thing. The way we dominate. And you go right down the . . . I don’t want to say food chain, but all the way through life people being awful and at the bottom there’s an animal being ill-treated. And they haven’t got a voice. That’s the most important thing. They haven’t got a voice.’

  ‘I was thinking,’ I said, ‘about Morrissey. How very articulate people can’t stand inarticulate suffering. Is this something like that? The way anti-abortion people, they’re physically disturbed by what happens there.’

  ‘There you go,’ she said. ‘Turning it into a joke.’ I told her it wasn’t a joke.

  ‘Is everything all right? With Marie, I mean? Is she okay do you think?’ Frank Lansdowne was standing next to me at the urinals at the Swiss Cottage Pizza Express. Making me, for the moment, incapable of pissing.

  ‘You saw her tonight,’ I said. ‘She looks well enough, doesn’t she?’

  ‘She might look well,’ said Frank. His own stream, triumphant, thrumming against the bowl. ‘But all this fuss about badgers. This, ah, sentimental approach. I agree with her of course. Seems an awful waste of time trying to shoot the fucking things. But her reaction, it seems disproportionate.’

  I could have hugged him, under different circumstances. I held back, not just because we were both at a urinal but also from suspicion. Marie’s comparing the two of us had made me wonder a bit.

  ‘It’s horrible,’ I said. Come on Mr Lansdowne. You’ve won awards. You are regularly accused of wisdom. Solve this.

  ‘It all seems to be terribly, what’s that phrase young people use? Binary. People don’t just get things wrong, people don’t just think differently. They are wicked, they are motivated by bloodlust, they must be fought. It’s babyish.’ The man was in his seventies. The gold jet arced from him, unceasing. ‘I worry,’ he said. ‘This sudden embrace of simplicity. The natural, the animal, the belief things would all be better if we’d never come out of the caves. It’s a retreat, it is. Into childishness. Rather as if getting married was this last leap into adulthood and she’s taken a fright and jumped back. You know I wasn’t always the most terrific dad at times.’

  I was standing at a urinal next to my wife’s father, one of my favourite authors. What if I went mad and looked at his penis? What if he only thought I was doing that? What if I screamed and then kissed him? I didn’t think I wanted to kiss him.

  My attitude to the Lansdownes tended to fluctuate. At first all of my dreams seemed realised in their lives. Coming from the northern suburbs, then spending dull years living in South London, they were my first taste of the intelligentsia, of the world of art I wanted. I’d sit out in their garden, watching chubby bumblebees lazily necking pollen, trying to spot Nicole Kidman, who was supposed to live in the house that backed onto the garden, with Marie stretched out in a bikini and insectoid sunglasses, reading the new Ali Smith, and over on the patio, Frank and Judy, boomer titans, opening another bottle, quoting Larkin at some visiting actor or other. Fuck Lancashire, I was home. That itself, a line from an early, chippy, Lansdowne book, when his vowels were still ironed down.

  But sometimes, about the second bottle, I’d start to change. The talk would begin to seem pat. The garden would look far too neat. It was all a little glib, wasn’t it, the Lansdowne scene? Had they actually read those towering stacks of first editions that hemmed in every room? Didn’t Frank sometimes write as if modernism was something that happened to other countries, with all those novels about adultery and divorce in Hampstead that said nothing about real life? His own Northern-ness, that gave salt to his first few books, hadn’t it become a little self-made-man, a little snorting? And wasn’t it easy for him to dismiss, in most of his essays, any attempts at altering the world, when his own world had so little need of alterations? I’d get tongue-tied and cross but never so cross as to refuse another drink. One time I’d had a little too much and back in our flat I had taken up Memory, My Mother, the collection of essays I used to love and I’d scanned it through different eyes. The wisdom that I’d fallen for seemed to come from a smug, high place, untested on everyday life. It was easy, wasn’t it, to scoldingly tease the hotheads when you were basking in a summer garden, your wife’s legs had had their own Spitting Image doll, you spent half your life on holiday and the other half on Radio 4? Well some of us would not be tempted. Some of us would stay true to a spartan literary virtue, would stay hungry, stay fierce. I was never going to finish my book.

  I wrote ‘silly old fool’ and ‘complacent sod’ in the margins of Memory, then felt guilty and hid it. He was a lovely and generous old man and I was an ungrateful young swine.

  Marie told me she had been crying on the Tube. I put my arms around her, held on tight. ‘This fucking cull. I just thought of the waste of it, the loss of all those lives.’ I didn’t say that they were only the lives of badgers. I wasn’t entirely thick. ‘This girl came up to me. Being friendly. Touched my arm. She said what’s up? Thinking I’d been dumped or lost a baby or something, you know. And I said it’s the badger cull. I’m upset about the cull.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She laughed. She laughed, right in my face. And then stepped away backwards, like I was going to pull out a weapon or explode. Can you believe that?’

  ‘I can believe that. I can believe that quite easily.’

  ‘It’s easy for you. I mean, you don’t care about anything. You care about sex.’

  ‘Love.’

  ‘You care about love, then, and books. But there’s so much more going on.’ I wondered if it was true I only cared about these things. Maybe the illness had closed off my horizons. Maybe there was more to life. I wished I knew what it was.

  ‘Marie, it is freezing. Why is the window open?’

  She was frowning down at her Mac, oblivious to the goose pimples on her arms. ‘I didn’t notice.’ She didn’t look up from the aquarium glow of her screen. ‘I’m trying to get people to sign up to a benefit gig for the badgers. Look at this fucking comedian. You’d think he’d be a shoe-in but . . .’

  ‘People choose their causes. Not everyone can care as much about this as you do. I’ve been thinking about your acting. I’ve been thinking you need to get back into that.’ I knelt on the sofa and slammed the window closed. It was ten on a November night and the room was a mausoleum.

  ‘People should care.’

  ‘There is shit in Malkin’s tray. Yes, that is definitely shit. How long has that been there?’

  She looked up, took her glasses off, squinted.

  ‘You’re doing the husband thing again. I miss Stuart. Not this Husband Guy. Stuart Brock.’

  ‘Block. You sa
id Brock.’

  ‘I didn’t. You are gaslighting me. This is insane.’

  She’d once shown me a drawing she’d done as a kid. A grotesque with lolling tongue, eyes bulging, thick stubble sprouting from his jowls. Labelled, by her fifteen-year-old self, ‘a husband?’ Had I turned into him?

  ‘I’m not trying to be a husband. I don’t want a nice little wife. I’m worried for you is all.’

  ‘You have this angry look about you sometimes.’

  ‘Do I? I don’t feel angry.’ She stood up, came over to me, circled my waist.

  ‘I’m angry too. About this cull, for a start. It’s okay to get cross. We’re only, I don’t want to say animals, but we are.’

  ‘I think it’s my brain thing,’ I said. The next morning she told me she was leaving, packed her bags and went.

  Twenty-Seven

  One night, before she’d been back to collect her things, I rummaged through them looking for clues. A diary revealed nothing. Appointments were listed, becoming increasingly badger-centred as they progressed. The day I proposed to her she had drawn, with her artist’s hand, a ring. There was nothing else to go on, until I found her play.

  Except looking at it, it wasn’t a play. A dramatic monologue then, although it wasn’t too dramatic. She’d been working on it a month – squinting, shoulders forward, green tea cooling on the table next to her – so there must have been more than this scrap. I imagined it performed. It would, of course, star Marie.

  The character was called Posie, which no one in real life was as far as I knew, but I sensed autobiography. It would be one of those small theatres, somewhere above a pub, two or three supportive grey-haired local art lovers and a smattering of friends in attendance. Frank and Judy on the front row. The lights would dim until there was only the light on the stage. Marie would stand. Talking in the over-timed thespian way, slathering the words’ quiet music with actorly overdubs. No, I loved that she was an actor. I read the script:

  I saw it the other day, said Posie-Marie. I saw the truth of Wilbur. (The audience stop coughing and start fidgeting. They worry about the time, about going to the loo. A monologue, then, about relationships, and will she scream at some point and how awkward is that going to be? And who, I think, is Wilbur?) I saw and I can’t forget it. (Posie looks around as if wondering whether to confide. Drawing the audience in). You spend so long knowing someone, loving someone, then you find out who they are. And everything changes.

  I had the afternoon off, Posie said. Wilbur was at the office. He hates his job, says he’s only doing it while he writes. Thing is I’m not so sure he much likes writing either. He certainly likes the idea of it. I had the afternoon off and it was hot and I’d had a doze. And I decided I wanted a snack. A chocolate biscuit, I thought. Wilbur has them, he’s a huge snacker. (I touched my stomach, aggrieved). We watch TV, in the evenings, and he’ll be next to me on the sofa, grazing away. I had to think where he kept the biscuits. He’s a hoarder, he squirrels things. I remembered. They were on the top shelf of one of the kitchen cupboards. I should say, Wilbur is tall.

  We’d bought some plastic chairs, she said, from the pound shop on our street. Plastic stools, baby-coloured, pink and blue. I grabbed the nearest one to me, one of the pink ones, it was. I stepped up carefully onto it. Making sure I didn’t lose balance. And I reached for the highest shelf. They were in a tin, an old blue box of Cadbury’s Roses. My mistake was not jumping down with the tin at once. My mistake was opening the box from on-top of the chair.

  I had a KitKat in one hand, the open tin in the other. There was a moment when I heard a splitting sound, the sound of tearing plastic. And then I fell through the chair. One leg had gone right through it. KitKats and Wagon Wheels and blood across the floor. I heard the door opening and I thought thank god, he’s here, because I needed someone to cry at, someone to clean my wounds. And he came in and he’s standing there and I see this look on his face. Just for a second. But it lasts a lot longer than that. He looks at the KitKats and he looks at my torn leg, with the ruby streaking down it. He looks at my crying face and the sweets and the empty tin in my hand, so that I look like I’ve been designed to scare children from eating between meals. I feel clumsy and stupid and I need him to support me so much. And instead, I get this look.

  Just for a moment. This absolute withering, what should I call it, anger. Undeliberate, too. If it was conscious it might not have been so bad. This was from somewhere deeper, this animal sort of sneer. The last time I’d seen him look without controlling it, a look from the back of himself, was when we first got together. Only that was a different sort of look.

  I think I stopped loving him then.

  The script ended there.

  I sat in the cold flat. I know how fiction works. I know this wasn’t verbatim. But that didn’t stop me raging about how untrue it was. Because I remembered that day. It was a few months after my stroke, in the period of flatness I had. And yes, I’d been confronted by a massacre in a sweetshop and Marie howling in tears. But there had been no anger. There hadn’t been any contempt. I was being abandoned because of a misinterpreted facial expression. There was an injustice in this. There wasn’t anything lurking back there, hiding inside my psyche. I was a good and supportive man.

  Calm down, breathe deep. A cause of exit so flimsy could easily be addressed. I would show her who I really was. I would show her she had me wrong. I would certainly win her back.

  Twenty-Eight

  My interactions with the badger folk had been limited since Marie left.

  There had been a flurry of accusatory emails in the immediate aftermath of her going. Where the fuck is my wife sort of thing. I hate badgers, sort of thing, verminous plague beasts, sort of thing. Lugubrious old Irene, from the patrol, was the only one to respond. She had dropped out of direct badger action on account of her bad leg. Her days were spent in tweeting anti-farming slogans, knitting badger jumpers. She told me Marie was ‘a good warrier 4 the badgers’ and if I loved her to set her free.

  My response had been intemperate.

  On the whole, I thought it best if I just turned up in the woods. I knew that they were out there most of the time. I hadn’t fainted since I’d moved in with Alistair and Raoul, and my health seemed to be looking up. I was sure I could explain myself well enough, how I’d mulled things over and seen the cause came first, how I knew my duty was to stop the cull, no matter how awkward it was. I was pretty sure I could say all that and, if it wasn’t going to be believable, it would sound sincere enough. I didn’t even tell George about it, from a vague fear he would be unable to avoid prepping Henry. The boy had added me on Facebook and was forever sending me forlorn messages asking me when I was going to shape up and take back my wife. I felt sorry for him, sorry and repelled. He seemed to take a morbid interest in the possibility of Henry and Marie sleeping together, an event, he warned me, that could take place at any time.

  ‘She’s not doing anything yet,’ he said. ‘It’s complicated, she says. We have to stop this happening.’ It was odd how much he cared, Oedipus Wretch.

  I got to Paddington on Saturday morning after a hard week of taking calls about pets. Pets and, increasingly, badgers. I had to explain we only dealt with household animals and for this I was accused of being corrupt, a shill for big farmer. Rupa would pull faces at me over the desk.

  I breakfasted outside the Pret just across from the platforms, a newly purchased mini-tent folded in a similarly spanking rucksack. It would soon be Christmas again. It wasn’t how I’d envisaged my first married Christmas. But then, the last one had been spent in hospital. I was getting good at adapting to unfortunate circumstances.

  At the next table was a young woman I recognised. Dyed yellow-green hair under an absurd orange tea cosy hat, shiny leggings of oil-slick black and a bell-shaped navy coat. It was Kerry from the badger crew. I lifted my newspaper high. My bluffing was not as I’d hoped. She clocked me in an instant, showed puzzlement, excitement and embarrassment in swi
ft succession, remembered too late that I was a Person to be Sympathised With, stood up and hurried over. We hugged. Half way through doing so I remembered I’d only met her once and all this hugging was probably a bit much. She sat across from me and cocked her head.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘What gives?’ She raised an eyebrow for a second then arranged her face into a neutrality her eyes didn’t match.

  ‘We’re probably on the same train,’ I told her. ‘Thought I’d help with the badgers.’

  ‘That’s a coincidence. With Marie being out there and all.’ She smiled. I was being laughed at by a badger person. ‘Don’t listen to me, I’m not in charge of good ideas. But I’d say this wasn’t your best. Do you mind nipping outside while I smoke? S’freezing out there but we’ve got an hour to kill.’

  I finished my cup and followed her, explaining that really I just cared an awful lot about badgers and that everything else paled into etc. but somehow I couldn’t go through with it. She didn’t have the sort of face you could lie to.

  ‘God, but that girl loves badgers,’ she said. ‘I mean I like ’em. A bit. Fair play. But she, she. Well she really likes badgers. Here, you know about her and Henry?’

  I said I did, but that wasn’t the issue. She did something with her eyes that made me guilty.

  ‘Your funeral,’ she said, giving the words a horribly specific tone, as if she knew where it would be held and the order of the service. ‘Hey, things have really changed there. They’ve all gone over to the sabs. Well Mags is still stomping with the patrol I guess but Henry and Marie and Brian, they’re all camping out most of the time. You might find it all a bit hard core.’

  ‘I don’t know why everyone assumes I hate things being hard core,’ I said. We stood in the sunless street and I cupped her face while she lit her cigarette. ‘I like hard-core things. I nearly died a year ago. I might still actually die. I’m the most hard-core person I know.’