Animal Lovers

by Rob Palk

  ‘If she says anything about hurting anyone, you tell me straight away.’

  He made no promises. I thought I heard him chuckle. Behind him I could hear the wood sounds, twigs and birds and wind.

  ‘The problem is this Henry Ralph. You should never have left him in your house. We get rid of Henry, then Marie will be back to normal.’

  The Lansdownes looked at one another, a conspiratorial glance. A glance to say oh gosh, this is what we feared. I could sense myself starting to sweat. I had begun to dwell a lot on Henry. The mystery of his power. ‘He’s a terrible human being. But her feelings are still with me.’

  ‘Henry is not the brightest and the best,’ said Frank. ‘But she does seem very keen on him.’

  ‘They’re shacked up half the time in his van. They’ve got this enormous dog. But I’m making sure she’s okay. I’m going there every weekend.’

  I was hoping for the tears to enter Frank Lansdowne’s eyes, for the self-reproach to begin. Rightly so, I felt. Too many soft toys and treats had got Marie acquainted early with anthropomorphism and the inevitability of her will. They should be beating themselves up. They should stand in Benito’s and scourge themselves, begging for forgiveness.

  Only, this time both of them just looked at me with vulture-ish concern.

  ‘We’re rather worried about you, Stuart. Marie said all that stuff about her being in a mess was absolutely untrue. Looked me in the eye. I have to say, she sounded very convincing. She explained her feelings about this cull and asked us to trust her, you know. She didn’t sound insane. Misguided, perhaps, but she seems to know what she’s about. All this hanging round the camp, I’m not sure where it will get you.’

  ‘You’re shaking, Stuart,’ said Judy. ‘Your hands are shaking.’

  I held the end of my fork vertically against the surface of the table and tried to steady myself. I was furious, was the truth.

  ‘You aren’t taking too much time off?’ said Frank. ‘We’d hate for this to become some sort of awful downward spiral. I mean, you haven’t got a lot to fall back on if you lose your job.’

  No, I thought, no I haven’t. And I had called in sick that morning.

  ‘She talks about you,’ said George. One time, in the woods when Henry had gone for supplies, Marie and George went walking through the trees. I could see her in her hat and her thick red gloves.

  George had brought me up first. Granted permission to reminisce, she had bored his head off on me. The life we’d had together, the future that we’d shared.

  I liked this. I didn’t ask him what she’d said; I could fill it in myself. The first date in the Foyles cafe, worrying about whether a drink-free date would work. Her calling Judy to tell her she wouldn’t come home that night and my surprise at their first name familiarity. Watching her in rehearsals, her hand tapping the air as she summoned up lines, struggled through her role. The stacks of shoes and books and dresses filling our flat, the first time either of us had lived with a partner before. Walks through Hackney Marshes on an autumn Sunday morn. I was sure she had mentioned all that. But I wasn’t about to check.

  ‘You have to stop it happening,’ he said. ‘You have to get her back.’

  I wondered why he cared. Actually, I didn’t. I knew love when I saw it. I knew it and knew there was hope. I told him I would try.

  ‘We have to pull together,’ I said, my voice rising across the table. I lobbed a smile at the Lansdownes but the smile went unreturned. ‘She’s your daughter, you should do something.’

  ‘I do think your focus should be on yourself, Stuart.’

  I picked up the glass and spilt wine over my plate. I told them I was fine.

  ‘This is derogation,’ I said. ‘You have a duty to put her straight. Listen, I’m scared she’s going to do something crazy. Hurt someone. I’ve seen how angry this makes her. Farmers and girls who wear fur. I would hate for her to do something, to suddenly explode. How do you think terrorists start?’

  ‘They don’t start with badgers, Stuart. You’ve gone awfully pale and you aren’t making much sense.’

  ‘I’ll sink without her,’ I said. ‘What if she blows something up? For the badgers? What if she shoots Owen Paterson?’

  ‘I’m sure the prime minister will be very grateful,’ said Frank. I searched him for signs of paternal guilt. There was nothing but urbanity there, urbanity and this awful misapplied concern.

  ‘It’s her you should be worried about, not me.’ I swallowed a wine-drowned tube of pasta, creased my face in disgust.

  ‘All we’re saying is, slow down, Stuart,’ he said. ‘Judy and I, we care for you a lot. You’re our son-in-law. At least, you are for now. We don’t want you doing anything foolish. Hanging around the badger camp like a love-struck shepherd, trying to woo her back – it’s unhelpful. You don’t seem altogether well. And what about your health, your eyesight?’

  ‘My health is doing all right. I get around okay. There’s this girl Kerry in the camp, she walks on the right side of me, making sure I don’t trip up.’

  I looked at all the diners, in their colourful scarves and off-duty pastels. Frank started on about his new book. I would resist it, this lurch into normality. They thought they could just carry on without me but they couldn’t. I was going to get her back. My name is Stuart Block, I wanted to shout, and I will not be denied.

  All this time the camp was growing colder, people were dropping out. Someone had painted a giant cross-eyed badger on an old white sheet and strung it on a pole. It wobbled in the breeze and we took pride in it, our amateurishness, our defiant lack of skill. We started the habit of saluting it as we passed. Henry used to sit under it, with his eyes glazed, communing with its spirit.

  I was proving myself. Every weekend, of soaked boots and dripping branches, I was showing her my love.

  ‘It’s good that you are coming here,’ said George. ‘But you really need to do more. She’s still here. Every night she’s in his van. He isn’t acting the same. She’s still sleeping on his floor but it’s only a matter of time.’

  ‘You forget he is not my concern.’ I was trying my best not to think of him.

  ‘He’s her concern. She was your wife a few months ago,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t that bother you?’

  ‘You’re, what, twelve? What do you fucking know? I’m being patient. Understanding. I’m trying to be there when she needs me.’

  ‘You think I’m funny for him, don’t you?’ I told him I didn’t much care. ‘It isn’t like that at all. It’s more, I know how he can be. And he isn’t like that right now. Following her around. It just isn’t how he’s supposed to be.’

  I didn’t want to hear about Henry. I didn’t want to hear how he should be.

  I decided to purchase a badger. I could smuggle the animal in with me, produce it at a fortuitous moment and claim full responsibility for its rescue. A baby one would be fine. Sedated to stop it escaping. But the more I looked into the matter, the more I saw a world of men with bad jackets and stubby heads, gathering in rooms. Cockfighters, poachers, baiters. The anti-sabs, the paramilitary wing of species dominance. Dogging without the sex. Posing in car parks, their boots full of bloodied fur. Brutalise a brute, then home to hunch over the video footage, swap files of your favourite cruelty, drink over your kills. I didn’t want to meet any of these men. Besides, badgers were pricey. The guy that I was talking to wanted £1,000 upfront, before I’d even met the badger. I didn’t want to go bankrupt and get a skunk.

  She called me on Boxing Day. Asked me how Christmas had been. I told her I’d gone home, escaping Alistair’s cooking, feeling guilty for dragging my parents through this gloom. I pictured her lying on the bed in her childhood room, legs up in the air as she pulled off her socks.

  Marie’s Christmas hadn’t been much better than mine. ‘I told them, I don’t want to see meat, I don’t want to smell it. Frank’s glugging sherry from early on, popping out to smoke. I have to sit there with this poor dead bird on the table, dripping
grease in front of my nose. Sausages strung all over it, them licking their lips. I took some of the veg but I couldn’t swallow it, not with that poor creature lying there. Then the presents came and you won’t believe what he bought Judy?’

  ‘Some ham. A herd of cows.’

  ‘A fur coat! Of all the things. I can just about laugh at it now. Now I can. Just about. But then, I was just . . . He says the coat is vintage, nothing has been harmed in your lifetime to make this coat. She isn’t even embarrassed. Hops up and tries it on! Whirling around the place like she’s Zsa Zsa Gabor and Frank making his sort of comments about it, how he does.’

  I could imagine. I had been surprised, on an early visit, to see Frank and Judy necking against the fridge. They were proud to reject all notions of the appropriate.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I shouldn’t say this but it made me wish you were there. Could have done with someone finding it funny, to stop me finding it awful.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Hey, at least we saved money on presents this year.’

  She laughed like I hadn’t heard her laughing in a while. ‘You can be funny,’ she said.

  ‘Do you think we’ll ever . . .? You know. Will we ever?’

  ‘Let’s deal with the cull first,’ she said. Later on she texted me saying she felt she’d given me the wrong idea.

  ‘You know, you don’t seem that angry,’ said Alistair. ‘When Lucy left me I was furious for months.’

  I thought about that. He was right. I wasn’t an angry man. This was one reason Marie’s stupid ‘play’ had upset me: it wasn’t the truth of who I was. Frustrated, perhaps. A little stressed. A smidgeon of terror, of suffering. But anger? It seemed so aggressive, so thwarted. I was learning, perhaps, from the anarchists.

  Another thing about anger: it seemed such a male response, an animal response. You could say that about all of divorce, in fact. It was something angry men with kids went through. They’d tussle over who was the better parent, be envious of anything like new love. They’d live in Guildford. Bury themselves in work after the split. Make fools of themselves on feral and manly forums, cultivate peeves. Hug one another in the woods. Write lachrymose blogs about mental illness and fatherhood. Kick about on a Sunday morning. Or they’d meet someone new and she would be called Sheila and she would not love them but would be glad they were good with the kids and didn’t lose their temper like Gary had. Most of all though, they’d be angry.

  Of course, there were also Americans. American authors of the unreconstructed school, with their five marriages and their alimony and highballs. They got divorced with a certain style. But they were male and angry too.

  Herzog, I said, the book I was reading in hospital? He nearly kills someone at the end and all over a divorce. This is where anger gets you. I wasn’t going to be like that. No, I wasn’t going to get angry. I wasn’t going to get divorced. I was going to retreat from this humiliating maleness. And win back Marie, if I could. Fuck this maleness, this animal anger. I was a good, an unsexist man. There was no delight in it, this maleness, nothing but cramped and furious lives. There was no beauty in it! I had come from a house with potpourri! Would anyone in this house, I asked him, even think about potpourri?

  Over on the patch of grass, a cat stalked, a rat drooped between its jaws.

  The next day, there was a bowl of potpourri on the table next to the filter papers and the Red Stripe can Alistair used for an ashtray.

  Thirty-One

  One Saturday, at two in the morning, we came across the police. I’d never had as many interactions with the constabulary as this year. There were four of them this time, with a van parked a little way off. They were not, they told us, about to let us through. Marie and Henry and Kerry and George and I. We stood and faced them, trying to appear both peaceable and scary. I was struggling to remember the legal tips we’d all been given. Could you refuse to give them your name? Were you allowed to take photographs? Not that I wanted to. I had a feeling the scene would stick without photography.

  Henry knew what to do. He stood tall – taller than usual – and said they couldn’t deny us entry to the path. We were citizens exercising our rights and they had no reason to obstruct us. One of the policemen smirked. He was young, I thought, maybe Kerry’s age. A zitty face with feline cheeks. It was possible the smirk was power, strutting, showing its stuff. I am sure that’s what Marie saw in it. But it could have been something else. Awkwardness, embarrassment. The feeling of having a beautiful woman across from you, vocally hating your guts.

  Marie caught it, his shamefaced snicker, and she hissed.

  ‘You have to let us through,’ she said. ‘We are here to peacefully protest.’

  ‘Shoot going on,’ said another policeman. Older than the other, saggy, with the look of a man who would rather be in bed. ‘We can’t let you through.’

  George tittered. I can only assume at the prospect of trouble. He was a palaver junky, a bother-connoisseur. Although it could have just been nerves. Marie started trying to appeal to the officers’ consciences. I didn’t think that would work. She told them innocent animals were being murdered back there. That they were standing watch, while evil was performed.

  ‘Wouldn’t know about that,’ said the older policeman. A few of them chuckled. This might well have been arrogance, I suppose. Marie stood before them and she trembled. If any of those police had been able to picture the curses she silently rained on them they’d have had nightmares for years. The youngest one looked down at his size twelves.

  We were interrupted by the sound of a nearby shot. A muffled phut, a whizz and then, almost at the same time – almost, it felt, before it – the yelp as bullet met flesh. Something between a bark and a human cry. After that, a genuine human cry, as Marie let out her horror at it all. From somewhere in the woods there came an answering cheer. Marie was crying. I wanted to rush, to put my arms around her, but Henry got there first. He whispered and she shook her head, before pressing it to his chest. Oh Christ, he was being a comfort. If this badger getting shot resulted in them fucking I was definitely against it.

  ‘Oi,’ came a voice from the woods. A torchlight hit our eyes, approaching at a canter. Behind it stood a man. He didn’t look very evil. He wasn’t especially bloated, his mouth wasn’t what you’d call cruel. Neither sybarite nor sadist. He looked, instead, like a harried antiques dealer, powdery and flustered. ‘You the protestors?’

  Henry told him we were. He seemed to be our spokesman. Marie was in tears and nobody would have listened to me or George. Henry was, I hate to say, plausible. He had an aura and I didn’t. Of course, I was only pretending to be a protestor. That might have been why.

  ‘Bloody sick of the lot of you,’ said the man who carried the torch. He didn’t look to have a gun. His tone was apologetic, as if his need to have a pop at us went against his inclinations. ‘You think you understand all this.’

  ‘We understand, Sir,’ said Henry, ‘that killing defenceless creatures is wrong. We also understand that this cull doesn’t make sense. You’re spreading the badgers around.’ He gestured as though he were spreading peanut butter. He was the worst person in the world, I thought.

  ‘You think that you love animals?’ said the man. ‘You think you’re the only ones? I tell you what I love – my cows. You think they’re just big lumps of money to me? You ever seen a cow with TB? You think that’s a pretty sight? Phlegm rattling away and the ribs poking through? It’s a horrible thing, that is. And that’s my living as well. That’s a whole herd gone, that is. I have a bad year, it doesn’t just impact on me. That’s my workers, the shops. That’s the whole community buggered. I don’t see you crying about that. I don’t see you raising a fuss about my family, because we aren’t covered in fur and you couldn’t stick us on a bloody tea towel. My wife’s nearing a breakdown. Someone scratched her car the other day, right into it with a key. Murderer across the paintwork. She’s never murdered a thing. Cries her heart out when the herd reaches their time. Cl
oses her eyes in the cop shows. All of a sudden, murderer. While you lot, you don’t mind watching a whole way of life get murdered, so long as your bloody badgers don’t get disturbed. I’m talking to you. You think I enjoy it? Think I do this for fun? You think I got nothing better to do in the middle of the night? I’m here cos there’s no other option.’ He stopped and glared sheepishly at us, as though expecting a round of applause. The police there to protect him looked more embarrassed than before. ‘I’m sick of it,’ he added, in a bleat. Tears pouring down his face. ‘Sick of it.’ His shoulders shook. He looked obscene, as though he’d started undressing or doing something filthy to one of his cows. Even Henry had nothing to say.

  Part of me wanted to hop past the police and give the old guy a hug, were it not for our Official Enemy status and something grotesque in his vulnerability. I looked at Marie’s face and saw anger and deep contempt for this man, who could go from killing a badger to this excess of self-pity, who could weep for the cows he breeds for the abattoir. I looked at Marie carefully and I knew what I had to do.

  ‘You’re a fucking disgrace,’ I said. ‘You make me sick. I hope your whole farm goes under.’ A policeman told me less of that, the farmer swore and sloped off, my conscience called me a million awful things. But Marie smiled up at me and I saw I’d got it right. She’d be sleeping on the floor after all.

  ‘God I hate those police,’ she said.

  ‘Fucking pigs,’ said Henry. ‘Did you see the way they looked at the ladies?’ I hadn’t. ‘Must kill them that the best ones are on our side of the fence.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. I caught Kerry looking at us and I blushed and looked away.

  Kerry sat on a well-polished log, scrubbing her boots, knocking off bricks of solid mud from their leather sides. She called me over. ‘How’s it going, mister?’ I told her very well. ‘Don’t know whether you deserve a medal or a slap,’ she said.