Bête

by Adam Roberts

  I followed it for maybe half an hour, and then I stopped and hid behind a tree. The deer limped on a little way, and then lay down and began licking its hurt leg. I found a suitable rock and padded, as quietly as I could. The creature saw me coming, but didn’t get up. Instead it lifted its slipper-shaped nose and its Bambi eyes. Given the obvious differences between human eyes and animal eyes, and how much human expressiveness depends upon the proportion of white on display, it was a disarmingly human look. It looked up at me, as if I had come to make the pain go away. I brought out the rock, and the expression changed. The deer stirred, trying to rise, and I threw the stone down onto its head. The first blow rolled its neck against the ground, so I picked up my weapon and picked my spot and hit down, hard. I saw the bane of death enter the bloodstream, and the eyes lose whatever it is they lose when life evaporates. I’ve killed a lot of animals in my time, but never one like that.

  It took me a while to drag the carcass back to my tent. I hung it from a tree eight hundred yards from where I slept, and cut the throat; but it was long dead, and the blood came out only sluggishly. Then I did what I could to cut the best meat from the thing with my knife. I lacked the proper tools – I had relinquished all my butchery kit when Anne had died, and carried only a single blade into the woodland. But it was better than a Palaeolithic flint. I made a fire and started cooking two fillets of thigh until it started raining and the fire went out. Even though I was very hungry, I waited until the rain stopped, and then everted my damp firestack to get at the drier stuff inside, and relit it. It smoked and spat and cackled like a witch, but eventually it got going again, and I held the two fillets over the hottest part on their sticks. The smell tickled some pleasure centre in my brain that I had forgotten I had. Just anticipating eating was a pure, physical joy. When the meat was ready I had to exercise deliberate, self-conscious restraint to prevent myself gobbling both steaks straight down. They were delicious.

  So I stayed for a week or so in and about my tent, drinking rainwater, cutting slices of increasingly game meat from my kill, and eating it bien cuit or rare, depending on how cooperative the elements were in terms of my fire. I felt no desire to go anywhere else.

  Hunger is a very simple tyranny. Recently generations have arisen that never experience it – never properly experience it, I mean. You have not lived with a belly so empty that the back of your belly button (that inner little knot of hardness just under the skin of the navel) touches your spine. You have never lived such that you have not known not only where your next meal is coming from but if there is even going to be a next meal. I cannot exactly recommend it, but it certainly simplifies things, and that might be counted an advantage. Of course, it does so by bleaching away all the refinements that adorn human life. When I was a teenager I had baited my father with the closest I came to adolescent rebellion: that I would not carry on with the farm but would instead go to university (no!) and study English literature (no! no!) and write poetry like Hughes and Heaney (who?). Of these shuddering blasphemies I had actually committed only the latter, and then only in privately hoarded notebooks. But I had a thousand poems by heart, and this is what I discovered. When I was properly hungry they all vanished out of my head. I had all the leisure time I could have desired, and often I experienced an acute sensation of boredom, but nothing at all from my former pretentions to civilization remained with me. There was only hunger, and the anxiety that that hunger would never be assuaged. It expanded, like insulating foam, inside my skull until everything else was pushed out. When I used my imagination it was only to conjure memories of food. I dreamt of food. I fantasized about food. And after I killed that deer, I had a week of luxury of almost lascivious intensity – because for a whole week I didn’t have to worry where my next meal was coming from.

  Eventually the carcass rotted too far to be edible. It attracted dogs from the first day I butchered it. Suspended by its rear hooves yards above the forest floor there was little the dogs could do except leap and snap at its lifeless snout, but I had to scare the dumb mutts away with shouts and a stick. Each time I did so they came back with a larger pack, and every augmentation made them less fearful. It was too late in the year, and too cold, for flies to be a problem; and the occasional crow tugging to unravel the knitted thread of muscle flesh could be encouraged to depart with a thrown pebble. But putrefaction could not be held at bay, and eventually I cut the thing down and let the dogs tussle over the remains, whilst I sat in my tree with a pointed stick, watching them.

  Many mornings I would wake to find the forest floor flooded with mist; and I would poke my head out of my tent and look down, imagining I was in the gondolier of some balloon floating above the clouds.

  I go to Wokingham

  Then for a time I became restless. I took advantage of one dry morning to pack everything up and yomp north-west. The meat had reminded me how enjoyable it was to have a full belly, and I had the vague plan of going to the nearest town – Wokingham – and obtaining supplies. There was still some money on my chip; and I was ready to go through the bins if I needed to. As I walked, the clouds inked themselves in, and soon a light rain started.

  I hiked through drizzle that made the carpeting leaves slippy. The weight of my backpack meant that I fell over a couple of times; but by the same token I fell onto beds of wet leaves and did not hurt myself. Only birds observed my comedy pratfalls, and since they said nothing to me they were either not bêtes or else so deeply unimpressed they felt they had nothing to add.

  I crossed several deserted roads, and eventually reached the place where the trees gave way to back gardens, and so on through the small ring of suburbs and up to Wokingham high street, which is shaped like a diviner’s twig.

  The shops were all boarded up, and there was nobody about. There were many cars, parked along the narrow roads; but all of the windscreens were plastered by POLICE AWARE notices, and every chassis was layered with the make-up foundation of months of dirt. One, parked outside what had once been a Costa, even had a rusting clamp fitted to its front wheel: an artefact from a previous age.

  I made my way along the street, stopping at shops to peer through the chinks in the boarding, or the lattice of the metal shutters, to see if there were any cans, or dried goods, or other comestibles inside that might make a break-in worth attempting. I saw a lot of empty cells: dusty and dim. Carpets showed tan lines where units had once stood. I saw little autumnal heaps of paper and envelopes piled on the inside of glass doors. A ghost town where even the ghosts had given up and moved on.

  I explored side roads. Some of the houses were still being maintained – or, at least, had been being maintained until recently; but most were already displaying inevitable symptoms of ongoing dilapidation. I essayed a few of these, and broke in at the back of a couple; but the owners had cleared out anything edible before departing. In one the burglar alarm had been set, and a strange voice boomed out of the ceiling: ‘You have been captured on video! These images are being transferred to the authorities! You are an intruder!’ I looked about for a camera, but not noticing one gave the middle finger to the air in general. Only as I clambered out through the back door did I twig whose voice had been sampled for the alarm – which was still going on behind me (‘We’re on to you! Proceed to the nearest police station with all haste!’). Patrick Stewart, of blessed memory.

  I heard a few voices, but none of them were human. The machine at a pedestrian crossing spoke to me. I broke into a shop and checked out the supplies of bread makers and kettles and microwaves on the shelves, and a few even had enough battery power to chirp ‘Buy me! Buy me!’ in my direction. But it was food I was looking for, and there didn’t seem to be any.

  I walked all the way up to the railway station, thinking there might at least be a vending machine there; but the whole site was closed, and wire fences erected to stop people from approaching the building. My mood soured. Coming into town had been a bust; a waste of time and energy.

  Coming back along t
he road into town I met a man. He greeted me from a distance by shouting ‘Mucca! Mucca!’ at the top of his voice. When I got closer I could see the suspicion on his face. ‘What’s your game?’

  ‘I’m a tourist,’ I said, gruffly, unused to speaking aloud. My voice sounded monstrously unfamiliar in my own head. Was that me, John Wayne? Is this you?

  The other fellow was twitchy. ‘What do you mean tourist? Pulling your leg, you mean.’

  We stopped, a yard from one another, and observed one another warily. He had a skinchin beard and a pale, oval bald patch in the middle of his black hair. There was something not right about his eyes.

  ‘Visit Wokingham in the picturesque autumn,’ I growled. ‘The land flows with milk and honey and oh how welcoming the natives.’

  ‘Graham,’ he said.

  ‘Do I know you?’ I asked, crossly. I didn’t know him.

  ‘I didn’t know you were called Graham!’ he replied. ‘Didn’t bother to find out, sorry about the old woman, it’s a saveloy and the kindness would be remarkable.’ He was picking up speed. ‘There’s nobody here. You come to visit someone? You came in by train? He didn’t come by train, you fucker-witter, the station’s decommissioned. Cunt! I know that! Scary sclery. Sclery.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m nightwatchmen. Appointed by the town council to look after things until, you know. We get off the war footing and back to normality, cunt! – and they all come back.’

  ‘Where did they all go?’ I asked.

  ‘Bracknell, some; Reading, more. Others went otherswise. He doesn’t believe you Benjamin Robert Haydon, standing on the shoulders of gigantic giants. Anywayup, I’m still here. There’s no money. You can’t mug me. Hold no bolt-gun to my temples, cunny, cunny. When Graham was actoring, Rome – stop! Enough, or too much! Or one much, or no much, or minus. Minus.’

  Over the months alone my brain had grown unused to thinking in the abstract way civilized human brains think: possibilities, counterfactuals, imaginative empathy. But my time in the forest had certainly brought out the core brute way of thinking – by which I mean, I was finely attuned to anything that might impinge upon my personal survival. Animals in the wild are all paranoid, after all, all the time, and for good cause. And I had become an animal in the wild.

  So it was that the truth of this strange man flashed up in my head: he was a human being with a human’s thinking brain, but he had also been fitted, for whatever reason, with a bête chip, like a canny cow or a talking dog. As to why a human being would think it a good idea to get such a thing implanted inside him, I have no idea. Curiosity might be a motive; or some misplaced sense of Green-human solidarity with bêtes everywhere. Or maybe it had happened accidentally – perhaps even he had been punished with it. It’s hard to see that even the most devout environmentalist would voluntarily seek out schizophrenia after this manner.

  Yes, I know what you’re thinking: the irony. Fuck that.

  I took a step back. He had not recognized me; his chip had recognized me. Plugged into the internet, it was talking with other chips – in the heads of cats and rats and dogs and hogs. This was not a situation I was happy with.

  His face flinched. I took another step back, and eyed his blue jacket. Its pockets were bulging; but with what? Was there a weapon in there? I glanced at the surroundings. There was precious little cover, unless I could break into one of the houses.

  ‘Where’s your chip actually located?’ I asked. ‘Inside the brain? Some of them are just in at the back of the throat, roof of the mouth, that sort of area – isn’t that right? They put out filaments into the relevant centres of the brain. You want that I put my fist hard into your throat?’

  ‘Oh, Graham,’ said the man. ‘You’re scaring Benjamin Robert Haydon.’

  ‘Words cannot begin to express the vehemence of my regret,’ I said, backing away. ‘Are you keeping him here?’

  ‘He’s not the only one,’ said Benjamin Robert Haydon, and with a shoulder jerk that made his hands bounce up, ‘not the fucking snow patrol. In the lee of the scare. I’ll be master in my own house, thank you very much. Master-mistress of my parse, parse, passion.’ He rubbed his face vigorously. Then he stood still as a statue and said: ‘It’s more of a challenge, certainly, than a cow.’

  An unpleasant sensation, something crawling and uneasy, was inside my skull. Did I not like this. ‘An experiment?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh Benjamin Robert Haydon was only too keen to have the chip,’ said Benjamin Robert Haydon. ‘And that’s the question, though, isn’t it, Graham? Would you feel any compunction about putting the bolt-gun to his head?’ I turned on my heel and marched as fast as my hunger and my heavy pack permitted, away from that person. ‘Tell me in what the difference inheres,’ he called after. ‘Tell me why it’s different, Graham.’

  They knew I was there, which meant I needed to be somewhere else. I heard footsteps, and Benjamin Robert Haydon was trotting after me. But then he stopped, and grappled with his own head with both arms, putting his elbows in front of his face. Then he let his arms hang loose at his side. I had stopped my retreat, to observe this strange display, but I picked up the pace again sharpish. The last thing he said to me was: ‘You should have gone to see the Lamb when the cat told you! Now it’s too late! It’s war, Graham! War!’

  I moved quickly through the suburbs. When I felt I was far enough from the centre I even gave over some time to searching a few of the houses on the way out. I found a packet of bourbon biscuits, some dry pasta and a tin of catfood. So the raid wasn’t a complete waste of time.

  I go to a house

  I found another spot in the woods, and pitched my tent again. The only animals I saw for a long time were dumb. At least, as best as I could tell.

  The weather turned colder still, and – for the first time – I began to think seriously about rejoining civilization. Day turned to night and back to day, and I asked myself when had I last felt warm? I wrapped everything I had about me but still couldn’t stop shivering. Shivers passed up my body from legs to neck in waves, like a fever. Freezing clouds shook their flour sieves over the trees. A chill deposit of white accumulated on the forest floor at a compound interest.

  I watched flakes of snow land in one of the open bowls I was using to catch rainwater: the first few dissolved in the water, but soon they lay themselves as gently on the surface as lilypads, and spread themselves into star-shaped crystals. Soon enough all the branches had thin white ropes carefully laid across their tops, and the red-brown leaves on the ground were spotted and foxed with white.

  Food wholly filled my thoughts. If I tried to think of anything else, my brain shoved thought back to food. Nothing else mattered.

  I went foraging and hunting and felt ravenous all the time. The layer of ice over the top of one of the forest ponds reminded me of the fat in a pork pie; and the black tube of a fallen tree trunk made me think of chocolate logs at Christmas. At one point I became convinced that there was a slice of cured ham simply lying on the forest floor. I picked it up with trembling gloved hands, and wiped the snow from it. A leaf, of course; perhaps slightly pinker than the rest but very obviously a leaf. I was stumbling about in a hallucinatory daze. You’re wondering why I put myself through it; why I didn’t just go back to the comforts of real life. I can only reply: haven’t you been paying attention?

  I had more or less resolved to give up the forest and return to humanity when the weather warmed. Not that it got warm, exactly; but it stopped snowing and I stopped shivering, and managed to catch three fish in one day. Some of my strength returned to me.

  One morning was unusually misty. I walked the forest, my legs cloaked in invisibility, just a torso bobbing along the top of the clouds. My foot fell away beneath me and I was sliding down on my arse before I realized that what I had taken to be the hushing of wind in the trees was actually the noise of the stream. The water was painfully cold, and put tongues up inside both my trouser legs to my thigh. I stomped home in a bad
mood.

  Then the late autumnal sun came out and warmed the mist away, and I dried, and lay on a bough feeling more at peace. This was a turning point, of sorts.

  I packed up my stuff and walked off.

  After a day’s walk I slept in a tree, and got up again before sunrise and walked on.

  I came upon a cottage, an hour or two after dawn: the sun low in the sky. I was very hungry.

  The back door was old chipboard, and the corner where it fitted into the door jamb was scrabbled away near the ground. Canny beasts might have done that, though they’d be more likely to pick the lock, or break a window; so I figured dumb beasts. And I figured the owner hadn’t mended the door, so they must have vacated. Like any other beast of the field, I wondered if there was valuable stuff inside there, so I went over, and pulled at the broken corner of the door with main strength. It wasn’t too hard to break it up to the lock, and since the key was in the hole on the inside I soon had it open.

  Inside was dim, and smelled of fusty old nothing. There was a tang to the air as well, something vaguely chemical and tart, but only faintly so. The back door gave me access to a small room containing an off-white washing machine, circa 1950-something, and all the paraphernalia needful for the cleaning of clothes. There were shelves with white cardboard boxes foaming at the mouth with powdery white, and a spotty green clothes basket propped in the corner. Everything looked tatty and old, excepting only a new pack of rainbow plastic clothes pegs, still in rank and file, biting a rectangle of cardboard. After months of nothing but natural hues there’s something really inexpressibly shocking about the brightness of new coloured plastic. Only the green of fresh spring leaves can match it for intensity and texture.