Bête

by Adam Roberts

  I existed.

  After a while there would be some indefinable change in my bones, and I’d feel the urge to roam. I would wake, and drink from the stream, and eat whatever I had. Then I’d zip up my proofjacket and stalk away. I would explore.

  Increasingly what I found was – empty houses. Farmhouses, retirement crofts, short rows of ’70s brick-and-concrete houses dropped into the countryside at the end of a dirt lane. They’d been occupied once upon a time, but were no longer. Sometimes that once upon was evidently a recent time. I would knock ostentatiously upon the door, and when there was no answer I’d force entry, one way or another, and take what was to be taken. Tins; dried good; anything edible.

  Finding food was the main event of my life. I scrounged what I could. I tried setting. One day I caught a fish. I was having no luck with my line, and wasn’t nearly young or quick-reacting enough to simply pluck one from the stream; but I found some old netting in the shed of an abandoned house, and using a piece of that I bagged a trout. I threw it onto the grass, and for a while it did its impression of an epileptic. Then it just lay there, its gills still opening and closing like lips, peering at me with one eye. That eye: greased and glassed into its socket, round as the moon, or the sun in eclipse. Catching it felt like an achievement. I was hungry. I considered how best to cook it. I had noticed some aluminium foil in one of the houses I periodically visited, but didn’t want to go and fetch it (a combination of ‘couldn’t be bothered’ and ‘didn’t want to leave the fish and certainly didn’t fancy schlepping it with me’). So in the end I caked it with mud from the river’s edge, left the lump to dry in the sun, and finally baked the whole thing on the fire. This worked well enough, although the clay ball didn’t break cleanly after I levered it out with two sticks. I ended up using a fork to lever out chunks of cooked flesh from the shards, and ingested a certain amount of dirt with my meal. On the other hand, clean dirt is no poison, and the fish flesh was delicious.

  For all I know it was a talking fish. It didn’t say anything to me, though. It promised me no wishes.

  At dawn, the birds grow agitated, singing and hallooing and making all their bother, flying through the sky and circling about. I heard it every day, as I had when I had been a farmer. The difference was that when I was a farmer I was always busy with something, and the dawn chorus was only a kind of background noise. Now I bent my whole attention upon it. I was struck, as I never had been before, how like human weeping bird cries are. The dawn chorus would descant like a figure composed by an alien Bach, flirting with recognizable harmony, but always breaking free of the too patterned or too regular to soar and swoop.

  Then, the sun would swim above the horizon, and the birds would calm down again; settle back into the trees. I sat and watched, perched on my own bough like a bird. Nothing happened for a very long time. Eventually: movement. Two deer flitted past – one, then the other. Dumb beasts, I think. Hooves kicking briefly amongst the bright green ferns, and then gone, leaving the ferns to shake out their last few trembles and be still.

  Clouds came, and the air darkened. It grew slowly colder for a long time, and then there was a sudden thickening of the pressure, a sharper drop in temperature, and I knew the rain was about to come. I adjusted my coat, and pulled out the hood, but otherwise I didn’t move. The rain fell with a clatter that was smoothed by persistence into something more rhythmically melodic, a large scale hushing or shushing. Cords of water, thick as stethoscope rubber. Dark as any grey was ever dark.

  After a while the rain passed on, and the forest gave itself over to dripping and the sun came back out. I climbed higher in the tree, wet as I was. From my new vantage I could look west, as the landscape rolled down, and see the rainclouds moving in that direction. The rain fell as if the skies were feeling amongst the trees for something – reaching into the broad hollow, and then a little later pressing in amongst the foliage of the distant hill. I closed my eyes to the warmth of the sun on my face. A bird began singing the same little two-note ditty over and over, like a rusty wheel being forced to turn.

  I wandered again. Packed up all my gear and shouldered the pack. Tramped away. The Wanderer is an Old English type, from Anglo-Saxon to Status Quo. There was a small valley, meshed with foliage. A tarmac road ran into it, but this was half overgrown – another year and the forest would swallow it completely.

  The ferns slobbered dew on me as I tramped through; my trousers were soaking wet in minutes.

  Sunset, and I unrolled my little tent and fussed about fixing it to a likely tree. I was hungry, but had nothing to eat, and was too lazy to seek something out. It was dark, now, anyway. I thought about listening for the ledzep rustle in the hedgerow, pounce on a hedgehog, kill the creature, roll it in mud, start a fire, cook the whole thing until the mud sphere snapped and then dig out the hot flesh with a stick (I did this several times during my sojourn). But not that night. I couldn’t be bothered. Hunger is not so bad. That’s a secret our gormandizing culture has forgotten: there are worse feelings than feeling hungry. I had, for instance, a worse feeling curled in my chest; and hunger was better and hunger kept my mind off the worse feeling. Sometimes I would mentally stray, as if by accident, into a memory of Anne and then I would feel a grief like fury twisting inside me, and I would scowl. I would not cry, though. Instead I would punch the trunk of the tree I was in until my knuckles bled and swelled. Sometimes my mind would, blissfully, empty. Kenosis.

  And there’s the moon! Hello, moon. Goodnight, moon. I used to see the moon as something manmade: a headlight, or a pitted manhole cover, or a seal imprinted upon the day sky. But increasingly I came to see it as something natural – as something organic, alive, a creature. A fish. A snail. An eye. A ghost.

  In the morning my stomach began with the stabbing pains, and finally I was motivated sufficiently actually to seek out some food. I ate a few mushrooms and chewed some grass to quell the pangs, and put a net in a nearby stream. No doing. So I collected as many snails as I could and, painstakingly, broke their shells and extracted the molluscs, and washed them as thoroughly as possible. It’s a good idea to salt snails before you cook them (not for too long, though, or they’ll dissolve into sludge) to take away some of the bitterness; but I had no salt. So instead I spent a long time building a fire out of dew-damp materials. I had a little metal flask, and filled that with stream water and put the snails inside, and let the whole thing heat up on the fire until the water frothed and spat out of the neck at the top. Then I tipped the contents on the grass and picked up the morsels one by one. Rubbery canapés, about as filling as half a dozen peanuts, but better than nothing.

  It was autumn now, and the weather was turning colder. Then it took a turn back towards warm, and I spent a week or so by the river. It was not really deep enough to swim in, and there was something slimy and maw-like about its bed, but I went in anyway. I didn’t bother taking off my clothes. It was something to stretch myself out in the stream, and roll from the front to the back. When I clambered back out the cloth felt like wet mud against my skin. The trick to drying them was to take off as much as possible and walk around.

  In the silence I thought often of Anne. No: that’s not right. Anne reared up in my mind this time or that, and then for long intense periods I thought of her, and sifted all my memories of her. But sometimes I thought of nothing at all, like a dumb beast. But I missed her with a savage intensity that did not abate, whether I was thinking specifically of her or not. I yearned to see her ghost, and sometimes persuaded myself that her spirit would visit me – in the woods, by moonlight; or in my dreams. But I never dreamt of her. Not then. Later, I did; after I came out of the forest, and did all the other things that followed – I’ll get to those shortly. Then, sometimes, I would have sharp, almost guilty dreams of being with her, of making love with her, of her opening the window in some imaginary dream palace and climbing through. But that didn’t happen in the forest. That didn’t happen in the immediate aftermath of her death. The truth is,
dreams are in the gift of the subconscious; and the idiom of the subconscious is truth. It is particularly good, the subconscious, on those truths we don’t want to acknowledge to ourselves. And the truth of Anne, the truth I didn’t want to face, was her absence. The truth was not her ghost, but precisely the lack of her ghost. My dreams registered that malign nothingness.

  Here’s the thing: I missed her, but it was more than that. Naturally I was angry with her. Not for dying – I don’t think I blamed her for that. I was angry with her because she loved her cat more than she loved me. I think she did love me. She loved her cat for longer; she invested emotionally in her cat more completely, she was more at ease with her cat and more intimate (in every way but one) with her cat, and I knew in my bones that had she been forced to choose, she would have taken the cat over me. I’m sure she would have earnestly hoped that she never did have to choose, but still. To finish second to a feline: it’s an affront. And it made me angry in a way that had no meaningful outlet, and that festered, and all I could think was: it’s not so unusual, is it. Millions of people in this, our pet-loving nation, genuinely love their pets. It’s love, and love is better than its lack. But in my withered Grinch-y heart I suppose I felt that love is a finite resource, and the zero-sum consequence of so much love being lavished on animals was that there was less for angry, red-haired, middle-aged men.

  Then the anger would settle, like sediment in a glass of water. And all thoughts would be cleansed out of my mind, and I would breathe more easily.

  The slow writhe of bindweed growing. I sat in the same place for so long I almost saw it stretch itself up.

  Early morning, and the sunlight coming through the trees. One Euclid spider had drawn an ideal line, sun-whitewashed between two branches. It snagged more than its fair share of the light. Threaded with baubles of dew.

  Most nights I didn’t dream at all. When I did dream I usually dreamt weirdly. Once I dreamt that a wolf lectured to a whole lecture hall of wolves. The wolf was wearing clothes – something actual bêtes never bothered with, and for that reason I knew it was a dream. But I listened anyway, curious as to what the creature would say. It pronounced the words like Richard Burton, or John Hurt, or Tash Saval – I mean, it spoke richly, potently and with a clarity of diction quite beyond any actual bête-wolf. So I listened: ‘My brother, my comrade,’ the wolf declared, gesturing towards a powerpoint slide of Red Riding Hood questioning her long-snouted, hairy grandmother. ‘Our brother, our comrade – he achieves more than any wolf has! He learns human speech, and dresses himself in human dress, all under his own power. True he eats a few people: for that is his nature – but only a few! See how great his restraint! And in return humanity slaughters him as soon as they realize what he has achieved. It is a fable, comrades, of human fear in the face of change. For make no mistake: my brother, my comrade, was the first of many. Soon wolves will be able to speak and wield tools. What will you do then, human?’

  I woke up and lay for a while feeling sad, somehow. When I poked my head out of the tent a squirrel was watching me, perched on a branch a few metres away, its tail curved like a scorpion’s.

  Then the last of the autumn warmth went away, and the weather turned markedly colder. The forest grew softer-edged with mist. The black tree trunks shiny as liquorish, wet as morning bathroom mirrors. The foliage, very slowly, blushed. Drifts of satsuma-coloured leaves covered the ground.

  On one occasion I wrapped myself up against the cold and dozed. It was afternoon when I slept and darkling when I woke, and I thought to myself: is it dusk, or is this an eclipse?

  A philosophical problem presented itself to me. I said I loved Anne. If so, how could my love parlay itself into such a mess of resentment and bitterness and anger and envy? Surely those aren’t the colours love reveals when shone through the prism of grief? Oh yes, said the wolf from my dream, somewhere at the back of my head. Did you not realize? Love is possession. It’s a possession of which death has thwarted you, and the emotions you identify are the natural residuum of that.

  The orange-red of the leaves, everywhere around me. Maybe Red Riding Hood’s shawl was red with those colours. Maybe that’s how she figured, in that story: as nature, as the year turning. But when I shut my eyes I saw Anne bent over the bathroom sink, coughing and coughing, in her latter days; and the red was the saliva-textures stuff dribbling down the plughole.

  Then there was a week when I had a series of horribly vivid nightmares. In one I woke, frantic, somehow believing that Anne was wandering about the forest, disoriented by her cancer treatment, alone and scared. I struggled out of my sleeping bag, and out of my tent, and half-climbed, half-fell down to the forest floor before I remember she was dead. That was a hard awakening. Still, I resolved not to cry. I decided then and there that there is no point in crying unless somebody can see you. Even the individual, alone in their bedroom, weeping over a broken heart – they are actually only weeping for the theatrical benefit of the action, to show the one who hurt them that they are hurt, even if the one who hurt them exists only in the weeper’s mind’s eye. But Anne wasn’t watching. If she had been watching I wouldn’t have needed to weep, and the fact that she wasn’t watching removed the audience that merited such a performance. I had accepted Anne’s death as absolute, and that took away those human performances into which we are socialized. Children cry all the time, because they always have the suitably appreciative audience of their parents. Adults cry less, because their secret souls have begun to realize that nobody is watching. I was perfectly alone, and I did not cry.

  I continued having nightmares, though. The next night I was nineteen again, and my father was still alive. He did not order me to take a summer job in the Haverskil abattoir. We discussed it like rational adults; he and I, sitting opposite one another across the wooden kitchen table. But there was never any question of my not taking the job, so in that sense there was an element of compulsion. But I was a farmer’s son, and was destined to be a farmer myself; and part of our business was the slaughter of cattle. Working in a commercial slaughterhouse would teach me much about this bloody business – teach me the very inhumanity of factory slaughter that our own organic farm sold itself on the grounds of avoiding – and also it would give me life experience, and also it would earn me money. The only way I could have said no would have been to renounce all thoughts of being a farmer myself, and that was never going to happen. So I worked for four months at Haverskil; I got up at dawn with my father and left him on the farm, and drove myself the forty miles or so through deserted roads, and clocked on. I did all the jobs, from cleaning the toilets and scrubbing gore off the rubber overalls and boots, to actually killing the beasts. Pressing the bolt-gun to the optimum place, just below the creature’s horns, and pulling the trigger. Most of the cows were placid: blinking, drooling grass-reeky drool-like cretins – this was before the first chips were developed, back in the day when all beasts were dumb. I would press the muzzle against the huge skull, and sometimes I would be struck by the otherness and oddity of this living being I was about to terminate – it really wasn’t paying me its attention. Something else was going on in its cow brain, distracting it from the here and now, something that had nothing to do with human words, or human music, or cavernous sheds built by humans out of concrete breeze blocks and corrugated iron. What was it? I don’t know what. Squeeze the trigger. Apply a gentle pressure, don’t snatch or yank it. Whoomp.

  Sometimes the bolt would go across like it was slotting into its proper place, and the animal’s brains would be scrambled in an instant, and the whole weight of the thing would drop onto its spindly front knees, as if kneeling in prayer. Occasionally the bolt didn’t go in clean. On one occasion, I remember, the shot only enraged the cow – perhaps it was angled wrong, went into the bone rather than the brain. At any rate the cow instantly became a kicking, jolting buckaroo spirit of fury. It took four of us to throw a chain around its horns and pull its head to the concrete before we could get another shot in
.

  Then the hooks through the rear hooves, and the big red button, on its dangling plastic pressure pad, to activate the winch. To watch so massy a creature hauled upside down towards the ceiling impressed me at first, although very soon it became perfectly ordinary and unremarkable. The living creature was dead, and then a worker – some days, me – kitted out like a trawlerman, would step up and poke a sharp hook-blade into the beast, under its ribs, and pull it up to the scrotum, and unleash a half-ton of hot guts and blood. For an instant it would be in free fall, a black-red slick, glinting in the light. Then it would slam against the concrete with a noise like a zep-sized water balloon thrown at the wall.

  Stone-footed cattle, being herded into the main hall over gangways.

  It was deep autumn now. There was a fortnight without any rain at all, and I had to start hiking over to a row of abandoned houses to replenish my water supply from their external taps – some, though not all, of which were still plumbed in. The red leaves browned and blackened and went dry as scabs. Then it rained a whole day and a night, and the rustling paperbin of the forest sogged and mulched.

  Once I didn’t eat for three days, and passed into a near-shaman state.

  Then I killed a deer in a positively Palaeolithic manner, by bashing its head with a rock. It was sick, I think – an unwell animal. It came through the trees with half a dozen other deer. I didn’t hear them speak to one another, so they may have been dumb. I don’t know, though; maybe they were all bêtes, just not very talkative ones. The others trotted away, but this one got its forehoof snagged into a hole in the ground: not a trap I had set, just a natural declivity camouflaged by the leaves. The deer’s leg went into this little pit to the knee and in struggling to extricate itself it wrenched something in the leg, because after that it limped on. I followed it.

  In caveman times, we humans used to hunt animals simply by following them. We would jog after the animal without pause, continuously, driving it on until it dropped dead of exhaustion. We like to think of ourselves as fragile, and of the natural world as populated by gigantic tigers and bears and eagles large enough to snatch a cow in their crooked claws. But the reality is the other way around. We’re tougher than other animals. We’re top predator. I followed, and the deer kept giving me anxious over-the-shoulder glances, and hobbled on. I think if it had been a bête it would have tried to reason with me. The fact that it didn’t attempt that reassures me, some. At any rate, it could not rejoin its fellows.