Natural History

by Neil Cross

  And now it was Friday night, very late in November. Nearly 10 p.m., and Charlie was behind the bar. His only customers were a gaggle of reps, single-room occupiers.

  Charlie loathed them for their paunches, their moustaches, their cheap suits and wrinkled socks; he felt corrupted by the braying lewdness of their desire.

  And when Chris McNeil walked in, feline and fluid, Charlie was halfway to their corner table, balancing a circle of pints and whisky chasers on a dented tray.

  Seeing her, smelling her, sent a spasm of shock through him. He had to correct his balance or risk losing the tray—and how great that would look, standing there drenched in slopped John Smiths, with a corner table full of piggish old fuckers ridiculing him in their cigarette voices.

  Chris McNeil walked to the bar, arching an eyebrow as she cruised past.

  Charlie plonked down the beers, one by one.

  The reps had gotten to purring and tittering because a woman had entered the bar; a woman alone. These men, in their shiny-arsed suits, with shrivelled purple fruit between their hairy thighs, pretending themselves animals of sex.

  By the time Charlie got to the bar, the tray held at his side, she was on a stool, lighting a cigarette.

  He said, ‘Hello again,’ and put down the tray. ‘What can I get you?’

  She tilted her head, half a degree. ‘Who’s that lot?’

  ‘Reps.’

  She blew smoke. ‘Then I’ll make it a quick one.’

  He wanted to protect her from their polluting insinuations. She saw him glance at them; the hatred in it. Seeing that opened her face, and she seemed younger and sadder. Her face, in that moment, was the most naked thing he had ever seen.

  She said, ‘You get used to it.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have to.’

  He muttered it, but she must have heard okay, because she reached out and touched the back of his hand. He withdrew it, sharply.

  It hung between them for a while. Her opened-up, naked face. His desire to protect her. Her fingertip heat fading on the back of his hand.

  She said, ‘It’s nice to see you again.’

  He got a clean glass and began to prepare a gin and tonic. He worked, hands shaking.

  ‘So, what brings you back?’

  ‘The monthly call.’

  ‘I thought maybe you’d find a better hotel.’

  ‘I like this one.’

  His heart made a noise again. There was an eruption of braying hilarity from the reps.

  She raised an eyebrow; Charlie raised two. They were conspirators. She had touched his hand.

  She waited until the uproar had died down. And then she said, ‘We’ll get no peace this evening.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘So. Are you working tomorrow?’

  He shook his head. No.

  She stubbed out her cigarette.

  ‘All right. Why don’t I see you then?’

  He was in Minehead early. It was growing cold and he shivered in his jacket. He went for a walk along the sea wall and sat down there for a bit, watching the boats bob and the gulls dive-bomb the water. He could smell rotting seaweed and salt and vinegar.

  He waited for a long time and wished he’d brought a book. He looked at his watch. Seven minutes had passed.

  He went to an amusement arcade—almost deserted, the cabinets flashing and whooping madly in the emptiness—and spent a few minutes deciding what to play. He found a big, old Tekken cabinet and pumped in some money. And then he wondered what Chris McNeil might think if—according to some horrible, inevitable coincidence—she should happen past and see him, bashing buttons, slamming weight on one foot then the other.

  He blushed with mortification and skulked away from the arcade, Tekken still soliciting him from the corner.

  Returning to the sea wall, he sat and waited and it grew fully dark and even colder and the gulls were points of white light on the black low tide, and she was late.

  He heard footsteps behind him.

  She was huddled deep into her coat and had her chin tucked between her shoulders. ‘Hello,’ she said.

  Then her position changed. She fossicked in her handbag, looking for cigarettes, and he felt the moment receding. Already he was nostalgic for it: it seemed to mark the end of something.

  She offered him a cigarette. He took one. Accepted a light, bowing to the flame, brushing his fringe to one side.

  ‘So.’ She crooked an elbow and he slipped his arm through hers. And that would have been enough; that shock of contact, prolonged, even through several layers of fabric.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  She showed him her car keys, folded up in her hand. Then asked, ‘How old are you, exactly?’

  ‘Eighteen.’

  ‘Eighteen,’ she said. ‘Eighteen.’

  They walked to her car—a black Golf—which chirruped and flashed, and they got inside, and closed the doors with a heavy, night-time sound.

  Inside, it smelled of new car and perfume and perhaps an undercurrent of long-ago cigarettes. He looked at her hand on the gear stick: the flexing tendons, the red nail on the thumb. The shape of her knee. The weird intimacy of her ankles, naked beneath the hems of her trousers. The seat belt, separating her breasts. The fine silver chain.

  He looked at his jeans, his Converse. Strobing in the sodium light.

  They drove past the salt flats. No lights. Just the water, cold silver on the near horizon.

  The restaurant was less than half-full. They sat near the window, where they could watch people and cars and buses come and go. He pushed food round his plate and sipped Sauvignon Blanc.

  She didn’t say much, except that she was glad of his company.

  She hated eating alone. Never got used to it. You always got funny looks.

  ‘Men,’ she said.

  There were laughter-lines at the corner of her eyes and mouth. They were inexpressibly sexy.

  When the plate was taken away she lit a cigarette. Offered him one. A light.

  He dug out his wallet and opened it, and she chuckled, not unkindly, and touched the back of his hand again. ‘My treat.’

  As she signed the bill, she kept the cigarette in the corner of her mouth, looked at him from under her fringe, and said, ‘I’ll claim you on expenses. Entertainment.’

  He’d taken the next day off, just in case—so she offered to drop him home; she knew the way to Innsmouth, but after that he directed her through the lightless back road, past farmland and woodland.

  His heart beat feverish and thin. But she didn’t pull over, as he had been fearing and hoping she might, until they reached the house.

  Then she yanked up the handbrake and the car was silent and they sat there in the dark.

  She said, ‘Well, thanks again. For looking after me.’

  She leaned over. He held his breath. She kissed his cheek. Her lips were cold warm on him: the blood beneath the lipstick.

  He opened the door. He walked slowly because he could feel her eyes on him and it robbed the strength from his legs.

  Her car made a three-point turn in the narrow road then pulled away; the red lights diminishing.

  Charlie dug around for his keys, found them and went inside.

  When he got back to work in the morning, she was gone.

  The nearest decent library was in Barnstaple, thirty miles down the coast.

  Patrick woke, still propped up in the kitchen chair, still wrapped in a blanket, having decided in his sleep to go there. Immediately, he couldn’t wait. He shrugged off the blanket. It was a decision; better than waiting night after night at the open window, shivering and doubting what he’d seen, all those weeks ago. And it was better than praying for the cat to return—just once—to feast on the old ewe and prove him sane.

  He called Harriet at home
and made vague, muttering intimations of a domestic problem, exploiting her awareness of Jane’s absence, his two teenage children. And he dropped Jo early at Nately’s. Then he drove south to Barnstaple.

  It felt good to be back in a library, hunting—his stomach growling, light-headed, because he’d forgotten to eat. It made him feel like a reporter again, the kind of reporter he had wanted to be. It was an adventure.

  He swept through blurring microfiche, but still it took half a morning, searching local archives, to find the first mention of what he wanted. Seeing it for the first time, he wanted to cackle in triumph, like an old witch. But he gritted his teeth and counted down to slow his heart, then began the cross-referencing, the digging up and tracking­ down, taking books from shelves, accessing national-newspaper­ archives. He scribbled notes in long-unused, always-familiar shorthand­ on a spiral-bound notebook, bought fresh that morning.

  Then, mid-afternoon, by now queasy with hunger, he took the notebook to a nearby café. Breaking off to shovel lunch down himself with a fork, he began to compile his notes, to work them into an order.

  And when that was done, he scrawled the notes in longhand, and allowed himself wonder, with a self-satisfied smirk and a full belly, if all those nights at the window, watching the sheep survive, had been wasted after all.

  In 1976, the last Labour Government had passed the Dangerous Wild Animals Act, which controlled the private ownership of, among other things, big cats.

  It had long been rumoured that, rather than surrender their darlings to the ignominy of a public zoo, or death, the decadent wealthy who kept such creatures—the pop stars, the actors, the junkie aristos—preferred to set them free, to fend for themselves.

  This had never actually been proven. But, in 1983, a farmer down in South Molton—Eric Ley—lost a hundred sheep, all of them to throat injuries.

  It was the Daily Express that first named this predator ‘the Beast of Exmoor’. It offered a reward for its capture.

  No luck.

  Then, in 1989, following the loss of more livestock, the Royal Marines were sent in. Plenty of them saw the beast, or said they did—but always briefly, without sufficient time to execute a decent shot; none were fired. Eventually, the livestock attacks died off again, but only until the Marines were sent home—by which time the government had designated the Beast a myth, a hallucination, a hoax.

  Such sightings were not confined to North Devon. Alien Big Cats had been spotted all over the United Kingdom. In 1980, a Scottish farmer trapped a lynx. He called it Felicity; it died in captivity.

  Someone else—on the Isle of Wight—shot a leopard. He’d imagined a fox must be responsible for the death of so many ducks and chickens. Seeing what he’d killed, he kept silent for months, fearing that he’d harmed a protected species.

  Patrick snorted, joyously, at the poor sap’s folly.

  And then he transcribed the notes which told him that, of all the big cats, leopards were the most adaptable. They were common, especially in dense forest. And, of course, they had once been popular with private collectors. This was particularly true of melanistic leopards, often known as black panthers. Very chic, a black panther. Very showbiz. Very Jackie Collins. In the right decade, in the right context.

  Leopards were most active at dawn and dusk. But they would hunt in the day, too.

  Patrick had been right to be cautious, and right to be scared.

  In the late 1970s, a lynx had been captured in Barnstaple itself—not far, in fact, from where Patrick had just eaten a belated breakfast.

  He thought of the beast in the woods—the hot, slinking predator who did not belong there—and he was overjoyed not, after all, to be mad.

  11

  FROM JANE’S NOTEBOOKS

  The Colonel Ebeya arrived. It is a disintegrating hulk, the rusting corpse of a cyclopean water beetle. A horde of barges and pirogues is fastened to it: they float and meander like rotting lilies. They’re loaded up with flesh to sell: fish, pork, crocodile, and fruit.

  Every surface throngs, hums, with life, human and animal: the Ebeya is home to 4,000 people: merchants, children, soldiers, prostitutes.

  The four of us—the five of us—share one cabin during the voyage, for safety.

  The heat and humidity are unendurable. Elephantine roaches scamper the riveted walls. Mick and Richard share a terrified, girlish loathing for them. And there are rats. I hate rats.

  We forced open the porthole window, but there’s no relief—just the wide, flat river, like milky coffee, fog drifting along its surface, and the far, far banks and the forest on either side, green-black, broken only by low villages.

  We have become sick and silent, like prisoners.

  We feed the bonobo on fruit bought from the visiting pirogues, but every day it grows weaker. It clings to me now in constant mortal fear.

  Dave wants to get shots of the decks out there, but Richard won’t allow it. There are too many people, too much uncertainty, for Dave to go swanning around with a valuable camera mounted on his shoulder like a parrot.

  My sickness is made worse by my knowledge of the fearless rats in the bathroom. I have to take someone with me when I shit—Camra Dave or Sound Mick or Richard hold my hand as I squat and the liquid squirts out of me in bursts and spasms.

  In my turn, I hunt out the roaches, which like to mass in the gap between mattress and slimy bulkhead wall. These are big creatures, and fast. I kill as many as I can.

  In the evening, the torchlight attracts insects in their multitudes and we sit in a queasy snowglobe of flickering moths, Camra Dave and Sound Mick and Richard and me and the sick bonobo, which they have come to despise, and it seems that there is nowhere else on the planet; that everything—cups of tea in china cups, clean socks, Marks & Spencers—has been a feverish dream.

  After five long, long days, docking at Mbandandaka was barely a relief. The mash of bodies, moving in different directions, not moving at all. The soldiers with whips, the shouting, the blaring, the sun.

  City Express Airline is due to fly to Kinshasa in two days.

  The others checked into a hotel. I stayed behind to argue, pay extra, sign documents which claim to permit the bonobo on the short flight. I said, ‘No, I’m not smuggling. It’s dying.’

  I cradle the bonobo. I talk to her and she responds to me. I stroke her hair. She luxuriates in it.

  She holds my finger.

  Usually, Mr Nately perched on the edge of the desk—a typical teacher’s­ place. Sometimes he sat there most of the afternoon, drinking tea; he talked, and sometimes Jo responded. But right now, he was staring at the window, watching fractal clouds surge past.

  Jo sat in silence, unable to concentrate. Now and again she glanced at him. And at some point her lack of activity, like a clock that stops ticking, must have alerted him to a change in the atmosphere because he blinked and looked at her and said, ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Looking up so sharply, he’d spilled tea. And now, irritated, he brushed at the wet spots on his thigh.

  ‘Sir, are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine, yes.’ Then, unknotting his tie, he admitted: ‘Actually, I am a tiny bit tired.’

  ‘Are you feeling sick? Should I go home?’ She didn’t want to.

  Nately stretched his tie like a garrotte, men began to wrap it round his hand.

  ‘Really, I’m fine.’

  ‘Have you been staying up to watch Hale Bopp?’

  He smiled—caught out—and Jo felt all right again. She felt herself relax.

  ‘I’ve been interested in its progress, yes. The curse of the internet talkboard.’

  That made sense. It’s what Jo would be doing, too—if she had a telescope in her garden, and access to the internet. She thought how strange it was that this man, who had few real friends (if any), and who seldom left his house (if a
t all), was part of a community that girdled the globe like the lace of fat round a kidney.

  He talked to people in Japan, South America. Lots of people in the United States—even someone at an Antarctic research station.

  She said, ‘Can I see them—the talkboards?’

  He set the tightly-curled tie on the table and scratched at the crown of his head. A tuft of hair stood up. Curled up, the end of the tie came loose, like a snake’s head.

  ‘It’s Hale Bopp,’ she said. ‘It’s educational.’

  Nately kicked his legs, thinking. Then he launched himself off the desk and landed flat on his feet. He clapped his hands, then rubbed them together.

  ‘Let me make a cup of coffee and we’ll have a look. Five minutes. Then back to work.’

  He booted up and logged on and showed Jo a list of the talk-boards he visited. Most of them were soberly named, like www2.jpl.nasa.gov/comet, but there were others like FREAK SPACE! and DEVIANT SCIENCE and HAVOC ANALOG. ‘What’s that?’ She pointed to HAVOC ANALOG.

  ‘Light relief,’ he said. ‘A bunch of people who should know better, talking about things that don’t exist.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, right now, something called the SLO.’

  ‘The SLO?’

  Nately sang The X-Files theme tune. ‘The Saturn-Like Object.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A week or two ago, November the fourteenth, a man in Houston, an amateur astronomer, took a CCD photograph of the comet. And in the image, it seems to be accompanied by something. A UFO, apparently.’

  He showed her the greyscale image. It revealed a bright spot, slightly pixelated, surrounded by a diffuse corona—that was the comet. Up and to the right was a second, smaller and sharper point of light. It had a ring around it.

  ‘A giant flying saucer, shaped like Saturn,’ said Nately. ‘According to the photographer, it followed the comet for more than an hour. That night, he went on some freaky radio show to talk about it. The national media picked up on it, and then all hell broke loose.’