Bête

by Adam Roberts

  But we rowed, nonetheless. There were three of us in that relationship; and the cat got, increasingly, on my fucking nerves. Partly this was because it wanted its cake and to eat it too. Sometimes it would purr and run a paw over its springy whiskers like a dumb moggy – and watch us make love, or eavesdrop on our conversations. Sometimes, though, it would make pointed comments, or butt into our talk, or regale us with its weird little off-kilter apothegms.

  Again is not always a gain.

  Expect miracles from falling water.

  We make a cult of difficult; but where is our easicult?

  Do you have the nerve for verve?

  Call no man happy until he is dead; but don’t call him sad either.

  Soul is something old; we need something new.

  Zero-sum is handsome.

  God died honourably, and deserves honest burial.

  Last days last all day.

  Each of us is a slave to our need to lave.

  Neither courage nor fear is our unique property.

  Anne found this vastly endearing. I did not. And there came a time when my combination of cranky old orneriness and shortness of temper set two stubbornesses, Anne and mine, at loggerheads. I loved her stubbornness, if I’m honest; but on occasion it made the sparks fly upwards with what approached escape velocity. She cuddled her cat. Maybe we were watching the news again – stories about the latest proposals to compel canny beasts to carry identity certification, to register with local authorities and so on; opposed by Green activists and bêtes alike as omitting the quid pro quo of full citizenship for those same animals. It was around this time that the news reports began mentioning charagmitis, discussing the virulence of it; comparing it with the outbreaks of neo-flu that were bothering South America. Sclerotic charagmitis. And Cincinnatus probably said something like ‘You remember that first conversation we had together, Graham? Did you ever go to Heatherhampton, like I suggested.’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘But why not? It would have been in your best interests!’

  ‘I’ll trust myself to gauge my best interests,’ I said (or something along those lines), whilst taking another sip of whisky. ‘Trust myself, that is to say, over a fucking computer.’

  And the cat may have wound itself deeper into Anne’s ample lap and stroked the underside of her chin with its erect tail, and said something like: ‘It hurts my feelings when you talk about me like that, Graham.’

  ‘A computer chip with feelings,’ I scoffed.

  ‘Indeed I do have feelings,’ the cat said, in a hurt voice.

  ‘You have the programmed illusion of emotional responses,’ I said. ‘But you’re no more capable of real feelings than a fucking toaster.’

  At any rate, there came a point when Anne intervened; and this part I remember very well. ‘Stop picking on him,’ she told me. ‘He is my best friend.’

  ‘He is an it,’ I said. ‘And best friend is a human category, not a fucking computer hardware one. Jesus, you sound like one of those teenagers gone native in Skyrim who have to wear a nappy and be fed with a tube.’

  Here, she lost it. She opened her mouth and shrieked. ‘He has kept me company, and talked with me, and listened to me, and helped me through the hardest years of my entire life,’ she yelled. She actually screamed at me. I had never seen her like this before. It was inexpressibly shocking to me. I was smacked dumb by it. I don’t believe she had ever so much as raised her voice, before or after. ‘When Dennis left I was in a low place – and what with everything that’s happened since, if I hadn’t had Cincinnatus I don’t know what I would have done!’

  A saner man would have backed down and apologized at this point: would have done all in his power to placate Anne, and smooth things between us. But Saner Man is not my true Native American tribal name. Not by a long chalk. ‘You keep calling it he and it only makes it worse,’ I snapped back in a voice fierce, though not loud. ‘You don’t need artificial friends – you have real friends.’ I was going to add you have me, but that was the point the trapdoor opened in the public hanging of my mind and those words fell through. Instead hot adrenaline ran bitingly through me and I said, ‘I wish to all that is holy you’d let me put that thing in a sack and drown it in the river.’

  This was not the thing to say. Anne got to her feet, holding Cincinnatus to her bosom like a baby. ‘I know how you earn your living,’ she said, in controlled voice. ‘I have the decency not to mention it. I have the goodness in me to believe you know the difference between a trade and murder.’

  ‘It’s good ethics,’ advised the cat, over her shoulder as she left the room, ‘to be ethnice.’

  I was furious. I stomped up the stairs to her bedroom, retrieved my stuff and stomped out again. I thought about leaving the house altogether; but then I thought – no, I’m in a hotel. I have the right to pay for a room and occupy it. So I went along the deserted hallway and let myself into the room I had taken on my very first visit. Then I sat on the bed sipping whisky from the bottle.

  Eventually I cooled, of course. I felt the gripping sensation inside my chest: combined in equal parts of consciousness of my foolishness, and remorse, and a residue of unpurged anger. Her choice of words wouldn’t leave me alone: what with everything that’s happened since Dennis left. Everywhat that’s happened?

  ‘Fuck it,’ I said, and went downstairs.

  I went from room to room, and eventually found Anne sitting on the back step smoking a cigarette. Rags of smoke in the night air like veins in marble. The cat was nowhere.

  I sat down beside her and for a while we neither of us said anything. She was clutching her dressing gown at her neck against the chill of the night.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Sometimes I open my mouth and such stupid stuff falls out that I want to pull my tongue out with pliers. I want to rip it out and stamp up and down on it for the idiotic fucking nonsense it spouts.’

  She sucked in a drag, and blew it out, straight as a spear. ‘Sorry is enough,’ she told me. ‘All that other stuff is not well judged.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said.

  ‘I have cancer,’ she said.

  ‘A man who hasn’t learned to manage anger by the time he reaches fifty ought to be ashamed,’ I said. ‘I can only promise to do better. And I do promise that. Really and with all my heart what—’ hold on a moment ‘—what did you, what kind of cancer?’

  She looked at me; breathed in smoke and breathed it out again. Then she said: ‘Now? Or before?’

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Wait. May I have a cigarette?’ She gave me one, and I bowed my head to the shining leaf-shaped flame of her lighter. ‘What do you mean,’ I asked, ‘by the now or before?’

  ‘Before,’ she said, ‘it was a cancer in my left lung. Now it is cancer everywhere, all through my body. There’s almost no organ in my body that isn’t affected.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. The smoke scraped the inside of my lungs and I held it. A scorchy sort of pleasure; and then the heat went out of it, and I breathed two fangs out of my nose. ‘That’s not good news.’ The nicotine was making my head spindizzy through the night sky. The nicotine, or something else.

  ‘There are various complications that are not cancer but which are caused by the cancer,’ she said. ‘I went through a period when I went to hospital every day for three months. We’re past that now. Not, I’m sorry to say, in a good way.’

  I nodded. I had the sensation that I was being watched, and looked behind me – but if Cincinnatus was in the kitchen, I couldn’t spot him. Anne’s words were there, in my brain. My brain was processing them. That moment after stepping off the window ledge, but before you hit the plaza at the foot of the skyscraper. I took another drag.

  ‘Medical treatments have advanced a great deal,’ I said, because it’s the sort of thing one says at such moments.

  ‘They have,’ she agreed. ‘Though miracles are still beyond us. Also, it is expensive. The house once was mine; now it’s the bank’s, and the differe
nce in euros represented by those two states of affairs has been decanted into the accounts of various medical professionals and drug company employees.’

  My anger sparked again. ‘I remember when the NHS was actually free,’ I said hotly.

  ‘You do not,’ she returned. ‘For you are my age, more or less.’

  ‘Well, perhaps not free,’ I agreed. ‘I suppose what I mean is: I remember people who remembered when the NHS was actually free.’

  We sat in silence. Something occurred to me:

  ‘Is this,’ I asked her, ‘why your – why Dennis left?’

  Anne considered this question for a long time. ‘It certainly applied strain to a marriage that was not constituted to withstand much strain.’ She pondered a little longer. ‘But the reason he left is because, he said, I loved my housecat more than I loved him. I did. I do. Cincinnatus has been the only true friend of my life.’

  ‘Christ, Anne, I’m so sorry,’ I told her, feeling hugely clumsy and hulking and stupid. I was probably blushing. My face felt hot. ‘I’m sorry you’re ill, and I’m most sorry about – what I said earlier.’ At the end of this not very well made sentence I discovered something genuinely unnerving. I discovered that I was crying. I didn’t know why I was crying. Here’s the thing: I never cry. Tears seem to me fluid symptoms of self-pity, and I despise self-pity. And perhaps I was weeping then, at that moment, because I was feeling sorry for myself: it’s possible. Likely, even. I had formed an emotional connection with this woman, and now I discovered she was dying. That was hard news for me to hear. Harder for her, of course, and it would have been a greater emotional idiocy than even I was capable of to have prioritized my upset over hers, in such a circumstance. Perhaps I was crying at the thought that this beautiful human being had found no true friends amongst her own kind, and had been reduced to communing with a computing algorithm working on a tiny piece of hardware embedded in the body of a cat. Sad, I suppose; looking back. But I don’t think that’s why I was crying. I think it was simpler than that. I think it was the way it was only by discovering I would lose her that I understood that I was in love with her. I think I was crying because the latter understanding depended wholly on the former discovery; and that that was truly, deeply sad.

  I didn’t say anything of that, of course. I sat like a big lug of a child with these absurd ugh! ugh! ugh! noises coming out of my mouth, and fluid dribbling over my cheeks. She finished her cigarette, stubbed it out neatly in her little tin, screwed on the top, and only then shuffled close enough to me on the step to put her arms around me. ‘There there,’ she said, in a businesslike manner. ‘There there.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and then, in the echo chamber of grief as I was, I said it again: ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘There there.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I sobbed. ‘I’m so sorry.’ What was it the poet said? I have said I am sorry what more is there to say?

  ‘Let me get you a tissue,’ she said, getting to her feet.

  I followed her into the kitchen, shutting the door behind me. It was warmer inside, and my sobs reduced in intensity, perhaps because they had been previously amplified by shivers. She turned and embraced me again. I saw the cat then, slinking under the wooden table.

  ‘Look at us!’ said Anne. ‘Fighting like teenagers! We should be ashamed of ourselves.’

  ‘Romeo and Juliet were teenagers,’ I said, through a snuffly nose.

  ‘I’ll make us both a cup of tea.’ She took her tin to the wastebin and emptied out its ashes; an act that struck me with a symbolic force that hadn’t occurred to me before. I sat at the table and composed myself, whilst Anne filled the kettle and told it to boil itself.

  ‘When Jen was, I don’t know,’ I said, placing my cold right hand on my hot right cheek; and then doing the same with left hand and left cheek. Shame, shame, and weeping. Hands plunged in a winter night. ‘When she was five or something we bought her a balloon. In a shop. Let me tie it to your wrist, I said. No, she said. Always the stubborn one. So we went out of the shop and she was holding it – no, it was a restaurant. I believe they gave Jen the balloon in a restaurant. Yes, I think so.’

  ‘Step back,’ the kettle piped, in a Kenneth Williams voice. ‘I’m boiling! I’m about to spout – don’t scald yourself!’

  ‘And of course,’ I continued. ‘Her little paws were unable to hold onto the cord, and this green balloon slipped upwards into the dusk and vanished for ever. She cried, then. When I tried to comfort her, she told me: This is the worst day of my life. Five! I consoled her. You can’t say that, I told her. You have your whole life ahead of you! Rosemary chided me for that. She said: What a way to reassure a child! You’ve told her, never mind the misery you feel now, you’ve a whole life of much worse misery ahead of you! That’s not what I meant, of course; although I took Rose’s point. But what I really wanted to say was: don’t be silly, you can’t say such a trivial thing is the worst! What I really wanted to say was: The worst is not, so long as we can say, this is the worst. You can’t quote King Lear to a five-year-old, though. And I’ll tell you. It now seems to me that Shakespeare was saying the same thing. Poor old Jenny,’ I added. ‘She’s had a peck of troubles since that balloon!’

  Anne sat opposite me, with two mugs of tea. ‘Who’s Jenny?’ she asked.

  That was the most vertiginous moment of all, I think. Let’s say this was my fourth visit to Cherhill and that empty hostel. Maybe it was my fifth, or third (though the latter number strikes me as too low). We were, clearly, at the start of something; not the end of it. Death is an unsettling way to start a relationship – but it’s not as uncommon a way as you might think. Nonetheless this question made the world fall away in a most alarming way. The sudden whooshing inside my cranium wasn’t that I had discovered Anne was dying; it was that I already felt closer to her, after those few encounters, than I ever had with Rosemary, with whom I had shared decades and family life. I knew this, because of how visceral was my shock that she didn’t know whom Jenny was.

  ‘My daughter,’ I said, feeling the uncharacteristic urge for a daytime television splurge of confessional true-life gubbins. ‘Grown-up now, of course; married with children of her own. She lives in Droitwich. Marriage not going so well, I fear. Four kids is enough to task anyone, after all. You never had kids.’

  ‘I had fibroids,’ she replied. She peered into her mug of tea. ‘In my uterus. When the doctor told me, I asked: boy fibroids or girl fibroids? The doctor gave me a buzzard look, so I said: or is it too early to tell? The doctor wasn’t amused. Apparently it wasn’t a joking matter.’ Whatever was in the hot tea of her mug must have been immensely fascinating, because she focused all her attention upon it with rare concentration. ‘I looked pregnant, though; so that must have been some kind of joke. On behalf of some deity or other.’

  ‘Cruel joke,’ I said.

  ‘Is there any other kind?’ Still not looking up. ‘They were tangled so thoroughly into the fabric of my uterus that the one could not be taken out of my body without the other. So they took out the blind lumps and their caul in one go.’

  The snicking of droplets from the not-perfectly-turned-off tap, striking the porcelain.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I don’t believe I’d apologized to anybody in ten years – ever. Never apologize, never explain. But here I was, spitting the word out, over and over.

  ‘Fibroids,’ she told her tea mug, ‘were a doddle, compared with the C.’

  ‘It’s strange to me,’ I told her, ‘it feels strange to me, that you don’t know who Jen is. I also have a son: he’s Albert.’

  ‘You did mention your son,’ said Anne. ‘You said he’d thrown over a good paying job to go work for some canny cows.’

  But I didn’t want to lose my conversational thread – I think this weird, bubbly sensation of emotional intimacy, the feeling that the wall had been bashed down, gave me the novel urge to connect. ‘It’s strange to me,’ I pressed, ‘because I feel, when I’m with you,
as if we’ve known one another for years. Isn’t that strange?’

  At last her mug relinquished her attention. She looked me straight in the eye. ‘Not strange.’

  ‘I can’t think when I last, no. No: I can’t think when I ever felt this kind of connection with another person,’ I said.

  ‘What has come over you?’ she replied, deadpan. But her eyes looked alive.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how to say this. But it needs saying. I’ll be here. For you, I mean. To help you through – this.’

  For a moment her face wavered; it looked as if she were going to cry. But she didn’t. In all the time I was with Anne, I never saw her cry; not even right at the end, when she was in continual pain, and most people’s self-control would crumble. I certainly wounded her, then, though, with that taboo and ghastly non-word, through. ‘Do not think,’ she told me, sternly, ‘that I am unappreciative. But having you under my feet all the time would not work for either of us. And what would you do for money? I hope you are not expecting to live, leech-like, off me?’

  ‘Of course not,’ I said, sitting up stiffly.

  ‘That is good, since I have none. I have anti-money. I have only debts. No,’ she said, sipping her tea. ‘No, it will be better if you carry on your life, and I carry on mine. It will be enough that we meet, when we meet, and that we bring one another joy.’ She looked straight at me. ‘It has been missing from my life for a long time. Joy. And you have brought it me.’