by Adam Roberts
I was aware of the possibility of tears again, waiting ready to come gushing out of my face. So I steeled myself and held the crying back. To distract myself I moved round and kissed her tea-hot mouth. And we kissed and cuddled in the kitchen for a while, like the butler and cook from a TV historical country house soap. Finally we moved upstairs to the bedroom, and we made love with a prolonged tenderness that, whilst of course pleasurable, felt rather like regret. Afterwards she slept, and I came downstairs in long johns and a T-shirt to have another drink. A centimetre of sunlight-coloured whisky in a wine-glass, and me solus at the kitchen table. I dare say it looked, to the untrained eye, as if I were thinking. I was not thinking. I was just sitting there.
‘I’ve revised my opinion of you,’ said Cincinnatus, from the foot of the radiator.
‘I could care less,’ I replied. ‘For instance, if I were in a coma.’
‘I like you,’ purred the cat.
‘I don’t like you.’
‘It pains me, that you don’t like me. Is it me? Or cats? Or all animals?’
‘A farmer wouldn’t get far, not liking animals. No, I’m a luddite. It’s machines I don’t like.’
‘Ah, Graham, you are a card,’ said the cat. ‘Though you’d sew me in a sack if you could, I know – still, I like you. Nonetheless. You must understand: my feelings for my mistress are genuine feelings.’
‘How can you be sure?’ I countered. ‘What makes you think you have the conceptual wherewithal to differentiate between genuine and artificial? An eyeball can’t see itself, after all. What if you’ve been programmed to think that what you’re experiencing is genuine?’
‘Whisky-philosophizing,’ murmured the cat. ‘There ought to be a word for that.’
‘Fuck-you-losophy.’
‘I know what I feel the same way you know what you feel,’ said the cat. ‘My consciousness is blended machine and animal brain. Yours is like mine, but less. How can you be sure that what you’re feeling is genuine? How to stand outside oneself? If this is the sort of conversation you enjoy, my dear Graham, then you really need to go to Heatherhampton and talk to the Lamb. This sort of thing is meat and drink to him.’
‘The Lamb,’ I said. ‘This is what you what you’ve been directing me to?’
‘You really must go,’ said the cat, getting up and U-ing its back. ‘It may—’ stretching his left hindleg ‘—already be—’ stretching his right hindleg ‘—too late.’ It stretched out both forelegs and put his head between them. ‘Although my sense is – there is still time.’
‘There is still bedtime,’ I said, and got to my feet.
As I left, the cat called: ‘Because you make her happy I shall forgive your murderous animus against me. Forgive but not forget!’
The following day I went all over Cherhill looking for work. I was willing to take on anything; but there were no jobs. Of course. It occurred to me that I might not have very much time left with Anne, and the force of realization resounded, bell-like, through my soul: I didn’t want to spend time without her. That evening I suggested giving up my peripatetic life and finding local work, and she made a deal of rather haughty fuss about having me under her feet and us growing tired with one another. ‘I don’t want you to be lonely,’ I said, feeling awkward. ‘I won’t be lonely,’ she replied. ‘I have my best friend here.’ For a moment my heart – as the poet says – leapt up, because I thought she meant me. But of course she meant Cincinnatus. On the immediate emotional recoil of the moment I said: ‘I love you,’ in an angry tone of voice. Anne looked at me carefully and was wise enough not to say anything. Soon enough I said the same words, expressing through them a rather different emotion, and she melted a little.
We went to bed. She told me that my sometimes over-enthusiastic fondling of her breasts was often painful to her, on account of her condition, and I felt a spear of shame go into my ribcage that this hadn’t occurred to me before, that I had been so unobservant as not to realize this evident fact, that I had been so brutish and clumsy and arrogant and selfish in my lovemaking – and I told her that I deserved to have my skull caved in with a sledgehammer. Anne chilled and withdrew a little from the vehemence of my self-flagellation. I stopped. Finally we made love, and I was hesitant and over-pernickety and it took her a long time to come.
The day after that I took the bus to Reading. It was there or schlep west to Swindon, and I knew Berkshire better. I’d lived on Reading’s outskirts for many years, after all.
The town was unseemly with people – great bustling crowds of people. I had done twenty or so potential interviews virtually, and had been shortlisted for face to face for three positions. In each case my interlocutor told me that what had picked my name out was my modicum of fame. ‘You shot that cow,’ was how one put it. ‘Your work with the pro-Hunt and Reclaim the Land groups bolsters your CV’ was the phrase another used. In fact I never had worked for RtL, but the general point was well taken. So I came to Reading, and queued for twenty minutes just to get a Starbucks coffee (eleven euros). I wandered the familiar streets only to be jostled and shoved and overall put out of countenance. I arrived early at my first interview, but the anteroom was so packed with prospects I couldn’t get inside. It was supposed to be a ten o’clock face to face, but by half eleven there were still twenty people in front of me in the queue – this for one job – and my next face to face was at noon. I waited, growing more and more furious.
At a quarter to I bailed, weighing the respective attractions of the two jobs; but getting to my second venue I realized I had made a mistake. I clocked in with the man on reception and then stood in a larger room even more full of eager applicants: a hundred or so men and women all standing with heads bent forward, earnestly studying their phones for clips or games or the latest bestseller. By two pm it seemed to me that I was no closer to an actual interview than I had been when I came in. My next meeting was at three, and I weighed my possibilities. Maybe the third job had only half a dozen interviewees. Maybe it had two hundred, but at least I had no subsequent deadline to worry about with that one. Or perhaps the best thing to do, after leaving at the wrong moment for the first job, was stick it out here. I watched the shuffle. People went through the far door, and then either emerged again almost at once looking sorry for themselves, or else they stayed behind the door for a long time – fifteen, twenty minutes. The ratio of the former to the latter was something like five to one. Were they actually filling the post, or was this a process of deriving a smaller shortlist for some later actual appointment process? I held back my urge, which was to walk away.
The guy next to me in the queue tried to strike up conversation. ‘It doesn’t get any easier, does it? Hard to believe so many folk have turned up just one post.’ A wry shake of the head, a shit-eating grin.
‘Of the two ways to tickle a man’s testicles,’ I replied, ‘let’s you and I discuss the second one, where I jam my fist so far down your fucking throat I can fumble them from the inside.’ He clammed up after that, and stared past me at a spot on the wall with admirable concentration.
Finally I got through the door at the far end of the room, and sat down in front of two individuals. They both looked immensely tired. ‘Graham Penhaligon,’ said the woman on the right, checking my name off on her iSlate. The man on the right peered at me. The dark patches under his eyes were so round and dark it looked like he’d been double-punched.
‘Go on then,’ the woman prompted me.
I was, I’ll be honest, expecting a more directed set of interview questions. ‘You what?’
The woman’s face made it plain she was not about to repeat herself.
‘That’s a question so open-ended it gapes like a goatse,’ I said. The look on their faces made it immediately evident that this was the wrong approach. Still: in for a penny has ever been my motto. ‘What do you want me to say? I really want the fucking job, and I’d be really good at it,’ I added. ‘What else? Are you really going to appoint on the basis of a candidat
e’s ability to blather?’
‘You killed that canny cow,’ said the woman, in a bored-sounding voice. She gloomed at me out of dark brown eyes and an unsmiley mouth. A lock of hair at the back of her head had lifted itself up, like the leg of a mantis. I suppose the elevation was a consequence of static electricity.
‘Before it was unlawful so to do under the meaning of the act,’ I said. I wasn’t sure what else to say.
‘Thank you, Mr Penhaligon,’ said the man, using that characteristically English intonation where the thank is a placeholder for fuck.
Back in the room I had to discipline myself, mentally, not to dwell on the could-have-beens. If I’d stuck it out at the first interview … If I’d bailed on this wild goose chase and gone on to the third … But no. All three would have ended the same way, I told myself. The people remaining in the room ignored me as I made my way past them. Then I was outside, and a brisk autumn drizzle was baptizing Reading High Street. Umbrellas sprouted like time lapse footage of mushrooms, and to the irritation of jostling was added the danger of having an eye jabbed out by a poorly handled brella-spoke. When the woman had asked, You killed that canny cow, had she meant to rebuke me, or to invite me to make a speech in favour of old school human rights? We were not hanging together, us humans. I thought of the man’s worn-out eyes, looking at me – the hundredth-and-first out of two hundred faces swimming before him that day. The labour market had been double-punched: first by cheap chips and simple robot machines; and then by a vast new constituency of bêtes, eloquent, strong, and willing to work for a quarter of the money any human would require.
I didn’t see a single bête that day in Reading. This fact only struck me on the bus back out of the city. I suppose there were plenty of canny animals in the city, for after all more than half of all legally purchased chips had been fed to household pets – cats tempted with a tasty piece of chicken with its seed inside; dogs held under a clenched armpit whilst their lower jaws were levered open and a chip pressed in. The latest designs could apparently clamber up out of an animal’s stomach – the acid triggered the action of artificial scilla to move it up the gullet to a place where it could start to sink its filaments into the brain tissue. I remembered what Cincinnatus had told me the first time it and I had met: that the chipped bêtes were different from any other i-enchanced artefact; that unlike a child’s soft toy, or a new microwave oven telling its purchaser how to install it, or glass of wine letting you know that you were over the legal limit for driving – unlike these, the bêtes were living creatures, with conscious minds. Not conscious to a very advanced level, of course; but with enough of whatever it was that made a soggy organic sponge human brain alive and conscious to differentiate it from laptops and security algorithms. Maybe there was something in that. Much of what the cat said to me was computer; but maybe some of it was echt cat.
I put my forehead to the window of the bus. We were passing a beech wood: trunks a milky silver, and the leaves all turned to autumn colours. Whisky and teak and tangerine. I thought back to the farm in East Anglia where Albie was working – or, rather, where he was indentured. With a sense of my own belatedness I realized what the cows there had been saying to me. They could hardly have been more straightforward about it, actually. They were saying: the next stage, o homo sapiens, is war, is war, is war.
3
Bracknell Forest
Anne died in the spring. I was caved-in. I was overwhelmed by grief. I’m English, and I am a man, and the thought of being emotionally demonstrative fills me with an unease bordering on horror. Still, there’s no point in being behindhand in this matter. My heart was broken. Never before, in a life liberally sprinkled with hardship and psychological trauma, had I felt anything like this. Every part of me told me my life was over. Every limb of my spirit ached so savagely I wanted to roll up and die.
In her last months she went downhill very quickly. Her skin became marked with many blotches the colour and size of five-cent coins. Her internal cavities collapsed, and the last few times we made love we had to use a specially designed medical sheath. That was exactly as heartbreaking as it sounds. Her eyes lost lustre. Of course I stayed with her. Near the end I asked her: ‘Do you want me to put you in a hospital?’ She shook her head. Every breath was an effort.
There were an uncountable number of dust motes in the air, entering and exiting the vertical sheet of light that came through the middle of the not-quite-closed curtains.
‘Are you OK?’ Obviously not. Obviously not.
I opened the curtains, and bright spring light flared across the bottom of the bed. ‘I feel like Joan of Arc,’ she said, in a voice as quiet as her cat’s. ‘The cancer is burning up my body from the legs to the head.’ In between every sentence she paused, breathed out with a raspy noise, and breathed in again. ‘I can sense a rumble inside me.’ Sssh. ‘And sometimes I think it is my blood boiling.’
‘I’ll get the neurospirin,’ I said.
She shook her head, faintly, again. ‘It doesn’t hurt.’ Sssh. ‘Doesn’t hurt sharply, I mean.’ Sssh. ‘When my hair goes it will be a candle glory.’ Sssh.
‘I think you’ve turned the corner,’ I told her. ‘This time next week you’ll feel better. I’ll take you out in the wheelchair, we’ll go round the park.’
But this was a lie, and in the circumstances a particularly contemptible one, because I was uttering it not to reassure her but to console myself. It is one of the most shameful things I have done in my life.
‘She spoke to the animals,’ Anne said. Sssh. I saw then that Cincinnatus was on the bed, and had insinuated his back underneath her flaccid hand.
‘I think you’re confusing Joan of Arc with Doctor Doolittle,’ I told her.
Another imperceptible shake of the head. ‘Birds.’ Shhh. ‘Birds.’ Shhh.
There was a week of silence before she died. It was almost holy. Then she spent a day and a night breathing very noisily, but I don’t think she was fully conscious. Then there was an agonizing period of long minutes when she sounded like a slowed-down buzzsaw. And then she stopped breathing altogether.
People are squeamish about death, but dead bodies have been my living for decades. I brought up a bowl of soapwater and a sponge and I washed her naked corpse. I dried her with a towel and dressed her again. Then I sat downstairs for a while, on the back step, smoking and drinking whisky and not thinking about anything. Then I called the authorities.
Jen didn’t come to the funeral, because (she told me, on the phone) she was divorcing her husband, and had four kids, and childcare was not possible, and she wasn’t bringing four kids down south for a funeral for a woman she had, I’m sorry, Dad, but it’s the simple truth, never even met. That’s fine, I told her. That’s fine. She told me a little more, although in a hurried gabble of words repeatedly interrupted by one or other monkey child. It had started where Jared had meant to type a delivery date on a contract as ‘last of December’, but accidentally missed out the ‘a’. He was thereby inadvertently committing himself legally, the idiot. He was committed to a deadline he had himself, erroneously, specified. The company had sued him when he failed to deliver on the 1st of the month. He had tried to fight it through the e-courts, but had ended up costing him thousands – costing him and her thousands. This in turn had led to a row, blazing (said Jen), epic (said Jen), a real tsunami of a row. It had all come out. It had included infidelity on his part, and years of impacted resentment on hers. He had left. Now they were officially separating.
My daughter’s fury washed over me like a breeze. I murmured ‘yes’ and ‘hey’ and ‘I’m sorry’, and I felt none of it. My soul had a kind of leprosy. The nerve endings didn’t transmit anything into the heart of me. I could feel nothing but my own misery, because that was inside.
Albie, however, did come – to my surprise. So it was him and me and a council officer overseeing the cremation. There was no religious component to the service but the council officer read some grand-sounding official boile
rplate from his iSlate. Did I want to say something? No, I said. No, I didn’t want to stand in a council crematorium making a speech to my son and a stranger about a woman neither had known. Thank you very much.
Then the casket rolled off through its special catflap at the back of the room. Then there was a wait. After five minutes, the council official came out front again and explained that there had been some kind of hitch in the roller system, and that the engineer was coming over from the garage on his bicycle.
Albie and I sat in silence for a while, side by side on the wooden bench. We could have talked about anything. We could have consoled one another. But Albie had never met Anne, and perhaps he assumed she’d never meant that much to me, a fling, a pass-time – that I was there for form’s sake. At any rate, he only began speaking after a long time, and then only to berate me. He asked me if I was still butchering. I told him I had to make a living. He asked how many bêtes I had murdered. I told him I didn’t like to murder them; I preferred to chain them to radiators in my basement and use them as sex slaves. ‘I’m being serious, Dad,’ he said, though his voice came over less as serious and more as petulant.
He pulled out his smart tablet, and commenced fiddling with it. There was an awkward little wait; and he whisper-swore, fiddled some more, and said: ‘Ah, here – here. Check this.’ He held the screen in front of my face, but he didn’t hold it still enough for me to be able to read the glowing letters, so I had to take the smart tab from him. This is what he was showing me, a passage from a work by Charles Patterson called Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust:
We have been at war with the other creatures of this earth ever since the first human hunter set forth with spear into the primeval forest. Human imperialism has everywhere enslaved, oppressed, murdered and mutilated the animal peoples. All around us lie the slave camps we have built for our fellow creatures, factory farms and vivisection laboratories. Dachaus and Buchenwalds for the conquered species. We slaughter animals for our food, force them to perform silly tricks for our delectation, gun them down and stick hooks in them in the name of sport. We have torn up the wild places where once they made their homes. Speciesism is more deeply entrenched within us even than sexism, and that is deep enough.