by Rob Palk
I would have to get out of the tent. She made a whimpering sound and put her hand next to my chest. I would have to somehow get out from under her leg without waking her up. Her leg had the unexpected heaviness slim legs always seem to have. The sounds that she was making weren’t a help.
Things were becoming sore. I tried to physically remove myself, in infinitesimal steps. She was moaning, actually moaning. I was in danger of having an accident. I stretched out my free hand and put on my glasses. She was fast asleep, uncovered, dreaming of something she looked to be enjoying. She rolled a little to one side. Now was my chance. I leapt up in what I hoped was a graceful way, slipped out of the tent and into my shoes, I jumped a couple of steps and there was Henry.
He was standing right across from us, peeing against a tree, the evidence of his animal superiority in his hands. In both his hands. He didn’t break from pissing but grinned over at me and nodded. When he heard Kerry asking me what was up, a broad smile of victory lit his face. Shaking, he strode over, not bothering to put himself away.
‘Aw mate,’ he said. ‘Aw mate. You’ve gone and done it now.’ He strode back to his camper van, wiping his hands on his shirt. Once he was inside I ran over across the dewy grass and waited at the door. I heard voices from inside, Henry’s patient drone without the words.
I raised my hand to knock but didn’t do it. There was nothing to be said. I made my way, avoiding guy ropes, back to Kerry. To be fair to her, she apologised a lot. She apologised through her giggles, while I moaned into my hands.
‘Henry,’ came the voice. ‘Please.’ Great. The man got everywhere. It must have been ten in the morning and Kerry was calling his name. ‘Henry, please man.’ She was fast asleep. What was the bastard doing to her? She knocked off a little more of her sleeping bag and I tried my best not to look. ‘You. Met. Henry. Please.’ She sounded distressed. ‘Henry please,’ she said. The man had some dreadful power over women. He was even invading their dreams. I put my hand on her shoulder, touched her skin.
‘You were having a nightmare,’ I said. ‘You kept saying Henry’s name.’ She frowned and rubbed her eyes.
‘What makes you so sure it was a nightmare?’ she said. And, seeing my crestfallen face, ‘Kidding. I think he’s a berk.’
We tried to go back to sleep, as far apart as possible.
Thirty-Eight
Breakfast around the camp fire. Brian lolloped over, looking as though sleep had made him even more haggard and tired. He took a bowl of beans, had a forkful, then smoked a cigarette instead, as if it was the last before his execution.
Henry hopped from the van, all a-swagger, and made his way towards us. You would think a forest would be good for hiding in but no place presented itself. He arrived, raised one slab of a hand in a Tonto gesture and sat himself down on a stump, making it look more comfortable than it surely could have been.
‘Marie not joining us,’ he said. He gave a performative yawn. ‘She’s still in bed. Might go back myself in a bit.’ Drummed out a tribal rhythm on one be-denimed thigh. His smile was that of a happily deflowered teenage boy, itching to brag.
He was bluffing, I thought, he was bluffing.
‘Tell you what, Stu,’ he said. ‘She’s definitely worth the wait.’
I could feel the blood crowding my cheeks, a whirring in my ears. I kept quiet.
‘I don’t mind admitting, I thought she might go back to you,’ he went on. ‘But last night, it seemed to make her mind up. It’s nice that you’ve accepted it, moved on, you know. And Kerry, she’s a nice girl.’
‘I really don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Not saying she’s not had her problems. Has her peculiarities. You gotta take good care of her, Stu.’
I stood up, enjoying the temporary advantage this gave me. I hoped he wouldn’t stand up too, and ruin it.
‘Thank you for the warning,’ I said. ‘I shall certainly bear it in mind.’ It didn’t sound as sardonic as I wanted.
I went back to the tent to get my rucksack and call the cab. Kerry was still asleep. I called up the taxi and asked him to meet me on the path.
As I left, I thought about knocking on the camper van, begging one last time. But something held me back. As long as I didn’t knock on the door then reality could be delayed, just for a while. I looked over at the badger pole, as it wafted in the cold. Back at the table Henry was laughing at something. I think for a moment he actually beat his chest.
I would have to think very hard. Perhaps try again with the Lansdownes, see if they might help. I raised my fist to knock but once again I didn’t. It was time to go home.
Raoul was in the front room watching MTV with a guilty look on his face. Alistair was barging around announcing plans and future glories. The place was filthy but it was home, my only home. I went up to my room and lay on the bed. I was alone.
My marriage was over. I wasn’t sure how I felt. I felt horrible. I felt loosed. I put my finger under Malkin’s chin, feeling the cotton-soft biscuit-coloured fur of his throat. I gulped up the smell of the basil plant on the window sill. It had grown to a size where it cast a leafy shadow over my narrow book-stuffed room.
I was going to be alone.
The phone rang. It was Frank Lansdowne. I told him my marriage was over.
‘Pedantic old fool,’ he said. ‘Pompous middle-class nonsense. Smug complacency.’
I had no idea what he was talking about, until I had every idea. I knew where my defaced copy of Memory, My Mother had gone. The one he had signed and given me himself. Marie had taken it with her and now it had been found.
‘We’ve been nothing but good and supportive,’ he said. ‘We’ve done nothing for you but kindness, nothing but good. And yet you write these awful things. Lazy caricatures, jibes. Accepting our generosity then going home to deface my work. A signed first edition, too. I always knew she’d made a mistake with you.’ He hung up.
I wondered if this was justice. I decided it probably was.
Thirty-Nine
I spent the first month crying, facing up to facts. I lost weight. At work I struggled not to sound short with the pet moaners who called in, bewailing their missing cats, their cancerous dogs. I had lost my love and was destabilised. I’d come back from the office and hide out in my room, away from Alistair’s awful confidence, Raoul’s solicitous care. Until the sun arrived and something unwound in me. The past few months I had been walking like a robot butler. A coward approaching the scaffold, shuffling, arms pinned to his sides in self-protection.
Malkin lay flat on the picnic table out on the balcony, basking in the sun. I looked at the unsmudged sky. Marie had emailed a few weeks earlier, telling me to apply for the divorce papers. She told me she had examined her feelings and that she was in love with Henry and the cause of animal liberation. She was sorry but that was it. The cull was on hiatus and the protestors had gone on to other wildlife campaigns. There had been serious flooding in Gloucestershire. I heard Frank Lansdowne on Radio 4. He said the government would have saved themselves a lot of trouble if they’d waited for the badgers to drown.
Rupa and I had gone out for a drink the night before. ‘Things aren’t really that bad, Stuart. I mean, for goodness’ sake, there are other problems out there. At least Marie is looking outward, trying to improve things. This is navel gazing, Stuart. You need to get involved in the world. Come to yoga with me.’
‘I’m not convinced that yoga is the model of engagement I need.’ I didn’t know how she squared yoga with her antipathy to bullshit. She had finally split with the philoprogenitive librarian after he bought a romper suit for her birthday. A child’s one, I should stress. I had offered my support but she had laughed and told me I wouldn’t be much use and to save my efforts for myself. Raoul, meanwhile, was deep into volunteering. His evenings were spent in homeless shelters, weekends helping at food banks. It all seemed tied in with god or maybe he needed god to justify his natural kindness, stop himself from taking the credit.
&
nbsp; Alistair was mostly in the front room, curtains drawn. He had a deep hostility towards daylight. Most days he would watch imported box sets, smoking and dozing off. At night he would cook his awful meals, open a bottle of wine and tell us about himself. Things were going well with Su. ‘I expect we’ll leave London once it’s started. Maybe even share a place. Personally though, I’m all for separate flats. I expect I’ll have sold my first book by then. Or the consultancy will have taken off. I wonder if she’ll want kids. I reckon we’ll adopt some. When I’m fifty.’ I asked him when he was next seeing her. ‘Oh we don’t have these sorts of calendric arrangements that other couples have,’ he said. ‘We don’t need to be tied to meetings, we’re not business partners. We have an understanding.’ He refilled his glass, hid behind it.
I went to work and managed to do as little as possible without getting sacked. If it was still bright after five I went to the lido and tried to enjoy the heat and coolness on my skin, the sight of the women bathers, lips pursed in involuntary scowls from the glare of the afternoon sun. I cooked meals I hadn’t cooked for Marie. I scoured dating apps until I realised I only wanted to talk about what had happened.
Alistair was scornful. ‘You can’t fall in love with a pixel,’ he said. ‘You can’t download someone’s smell.’ I said you didn’t actually go on the date with the app.
One night I went to the pub alone and ordered a symbolic mixed grill. I was fed up of pretending to care about animals. It only felt symbolic until it arrived. Then it felt all too real. Bacon and liver, sausages and steak. I struggled through each greasy forkful and woke up that night covered in sweat.
I was starting to get better. Some days I felt mostly fine. There would be an election the next year with every chance of a more badger-friendly administration being formed. I thought a lot about Henry. I couldn’t help myself. That idiot and my wife. The curious power he had.
Most days I called up the hospital and hassled them about the date of my final op. They always reacted with surprise, as though I had breached some hidden point of etiquette. I had to insist that they dealt with me. It had been a long while since I’d fainted but this shouldn’t let them off.
Then, one afternoon, Kerry added me on Facebook.
Forty
I looked at a few of her pictures before saying hello. An embarrassment of marches, banners held high, her fingertips whiting from the strain. Animals and the dispossessed, feminism and pickets. I had to go pretty far to find any beach ones. Just as I’d managed to find some decent poolside snaps, she messaged me herself. She felt bad about that night inside her tent. The other badger people had been weird about it. Marie hadn’t spoken to her since and they had always got on pretty well. I probably didn’t want to hear about Marie, she said. I said she was probably right. She wanted to meet up. She wanted to talk to me. I spent a while messing with my hair in front of the mirror.
She lived around the corner from a high street in East London that was enjoying its moment of glory. It wasn’t far from where Marie and I had lived. I sat outside a delicatessen slash cafe, sipping lemonade from a foil-capped can. Gay couples sauntered in luminous white tee shirts and creaseless pastel shorts. Women with suntans and denim cut-offs. Young men with the beards of Victorian evangelists, sweating in too many layers or wearing tee shirts cut down low to expose chests thick with eddies of black hair. Kerry arrived wearing a navy-blue dress. She wore no make-up or wore make-up that made it look like she wore no make-up. Her hair had grown out since the camp. She sat down, elbow on the table, puckish grin on her face. ‘Stu,’ she said.
‘Hello again.’
‘Thought we should probably chat.’ She started rolling a cigarette, the shreds wedging under her nails.
‘We might as well.’ A waitress came out and took our orders. I ordered something with meat, checking first if that was okay.
‘I do eat meat, you know,’ she said, when the waitress had gone. ‘I mean, I know I probably shouldn’t. Environment and all. Only when I tried going vegan I was weary as hell, must have looked like somebody’s ghost. So I thought, I’ll eat meat for the energy and use some of that energy to campaign against eating meat. I also—’ she smiled again, this time in a conspiratorial way, as though she sought indulgence ‘—really fucking love meat.’
‘Nothing wrong with hypocrisy,’ I said. ‘I don’t trust people who are consistent.’
‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘That’s interesting.’ I knew that when clever people said something was ‘interesting’ that could also mean stupid or racist. ‘So you’re basically just saying that goodness makes you uncomfortable. If someone, some person, isn’t a complex kind of a muddle, you don’t trust them, because they’ve won, there’s nothing you can use on them.’
We sat and ate in silence, chased balsamic around our plates with curls of lettuce, tried not to look at each other. Kerry ate fast, head down, like someone rushing through an exam. When she’d finished, she frowned at her plate as though it had let her down. I spent a good time tearing the foil from the lemonade.
‘So you sort of helped end my marriage.’ She avoided meeting my eyes.
‘Hoo.’ She tapped the table. ‘I think it was probably over already, wasn’t it? I am sorry, though. I deliberately didn’t want anything to happen. I was trying to go to sleep. I did, I do sort of like you. I’d started to. You seemed so lost. Sucker for the thwarted, really, I am. But I didn’t want any of that to happen.’
‘It’s done,’ I said. She looked relieved and I smiled. I wasn’t very good at looking stern.
‘So I thought we could maybe hang out. Properly, I mean. To be honest, I don’t really have time for anyone at the moment. Anyone. Anything. I’ve got, like, four or five different meetings to go to every week. Still I thought that we probably should. I got the impression you wanted to, in the tent.’
I thought for a time about this. A new thing. An opportunity for joy in life. I had sort of stopped hoping for this.
‘I think so,’ I said. ‘You’re very beautiful.’ She nodded. I hadn’t known that before this point but now I was sure that she was.
‘Well, you are quite handsome. I should probably say that now.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. I hadn’t felt so for a while.
‘I nearly said you were beautiful. I should have said that. Would that have sounded weird? Like, you might have been insulted.’
‘I wouldn’t have been insulted,’ I said. The meat would smell, I realised, garlicky and nauseating. I swigged at my lemonade. She bounced on her chair a bit, not, I thought, from nerves, but from her usual excess of spirits.
‘I’ve been single about a year,’ she said. I told her I had been alone a while myself.
‘Well yeah,’ she said. ‘I spend my time getting involved with things. I feel kind of useless if I don’t.’ She grinned, apologetic. ‘Devote myself to public works. I thought it might be nice to get to know someone.’
‘I’m fine with that.’
‘I am taking quite a long time to suggest a simple thing,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You are.’
We went into a school playground that at weekends was a car boot sale, that was, in turn, slowly becoming an organic market. Wholesome young women sold bank-breaking homemade jams next to an avuncular old man selling David Icke pamphlets and anti-bankster flotsam. Kerry stopped to look at this, frowning when she spotted the Icke. This was good. We moved on until we came to a rolling patch of parkland with a pathway winding through. ‘It’s weird this, getting to know someone. Doing couple stuff. God, I expect it’s weirder for you. I mean, you’re married and everything. You’re married! This is adultery for you. And I’m a mistress.’ She laughed for a long time at this as though marriage were automatically funny. I was starting to think this myself.
By a tree, we stopped and kissed. It had been a very long time. Actually, since the witch. This was different from that. She tasted of something other than not-Marie.
‘Slow down there, mister.
You get this look on your face when you’re kissing,’ she said. ‘Like a starving wolf. Avid, is the word I’m looking for.’
She lived in an apartment block, across the road from a church. There were books everywhere. Polemics, theory, reportage. No novels that I could see. A poster above the bed demanded ‘Full Communism Now’, next to a picture of One Direction. The bed was a fat blue mattress on the floor, thick with needless cushions and pillows. ‘My flatmate’s away a few months. Singapore. He works in the city.’ She mimed vomiting. ‘Is something funny?’
‘I didn’t say anything.’ I lifted a tin money box in the shape of a Brechtian capitalist, rubbed a coat of dust off its top hat.
‘Okay.’ She sat on the bed, her knees under her chin. ‘I bet you think I’m being a right bitch there? Well, look, I spent ages saying just cos he works in the city, doesn’t mean he’s a dick. Like, any evidence he was all right, I was jumping at it. I really wanted to have my prejudice smashed, you know. But he’s such a knob.’
She popped out to the bathroom. I opened a note book and saw neat and curvy writing on every page. I had time to see the underlined name ‘Henry’ before she came back. She didn’t seem to notice I’d seen the book.
‘You’re really into being an activist, then?’ I asked. She stood in the doorway and shrugged. As though everyone worth talking to was.
When she undressed her body was solid, moon coloured. I took my clothes off, trying not to feel self-conscious. She asked me to go down on her and I bowed like a dog at its water, my knees scraping on the carpet, cock bobbing against the edge of the mattress. There was an awkward fuss about condoms. I kept pressing my mouth to parts of her, registering each incident of her body. I was sweating, bruised. She kept laughing in a way I couldn’t get used to. She said she could tell I was excited. We lay next to each other, panting, sweat rising over us.
