by Adam Roberts
‘They’ve turned off the walkie-talkies,’ the cat said obliquely. ‘There’s nothing I could do, even if I wanted to. But I’m sorry about the rats. We chanced upon them, coming here.’
‘How lovely.’
‘They’re all dead now. They had nothing to do with us. I want you to believe that, Graham.’
‘Stop fucking calling me fucking Graham,’ I said.
‘We’re ships that pass, you and I,’ said Cincinnatus. ‘Ships that pass!’
‘So, pass off,’ I suggested. When it didn’t reply, I got painfully up and turned on the light. There was nobody in the room but me.
I wondered whether Cincinnatus had even been there. Perhaps I had experienced some kind of hypnagogic hallucination, there in the dusk of the room, worn out, unrefreshed by sleep. Perhaps it was only a nightmare.
Mary kept a cat, but it was a superannuated and superbly lazy white beast, not in the least like Cincinnatus. ‘I used to have more,’ she said, that evening as we had supper together, ‘to keep the mice down. But the truth is, I don’t mind the mice. And a couple of my cats ate up those chips, you know, and started talking. Ugh!’ She shook her head. ‘I’m not having that. Out on their ears. Not my lovely Hillie, though; he’s as speechless as any old woman could hope for.’
‘He’s not a bête, then?’ I asked.
‘Oh, no he is. Most of them are, now, you know. He just knows not to go gabbling on – or he knows, I’d chuck him out too.’
‘Oh!’ I said. I didn’t feel wholly comfortable, being in the house with a bête; although there wasn’t much I could do about it.
We ate in silence for a while. ‘I feel like I’m imposing,’ I said.
‘Not at all! I’ve a whole deer to eat, more than I could possibly manage. You’re doing me a favour.’
‘I hope there is some way I can repay you,’ I said.
She shrieked with laughter. ‘I’m not interested in your hairy body, Graham! I’m a lezzer, you know.’
I felt my face grow warm. I dare say I was blushing tomato red. ‘I didn’t mean that!’
‘Course you didn’t. You’re a gentleman. Oh don’t be so embarrassed. Eat more!’
‘I’ve eaten all I can, I think,’ I said, wiping my whole face with the yellow-stained napkin. ‘My stomach has shrunk, I think.’
‘All the more for me,’ she said, beaming, and helped herself to my left-overs.
It took me a few nights to get used to sleeping in a bed again – it turns out, paradoxically, that the transition from sleeping rough to civilization is harder than the other way around. On day two, Mary pottered around the house, popping her head round the door from time to time to see if I was ‘chipper’. I read Aeschylus, in its fruity old Victorian English clothes. On one trip to the toilet I caught sight of a white cat vanishing down the stairs, but I didn’t call after it.
Day three she was out all day, and when she returned she brought me paracetamol.
I dressed, and took a stroll round the overgrown garden, leaning on a stick. The contrast between the austere winter sunlight, westerly and reddening, and the crazy profusion of weeds and life was beautiful. Venison for supper again, and a glass of Lucozade (‘help you get your strength,’ said Mary) and finally I hopped up the stairs and undressed and got between the sheets, ill-smelling yet somehow welcoming.
I slept.
Later that same night, Cincinnatus crept into the room. ‘You make it hard to track you down,’ he whispered in my ear, like the diabolic familiar at the ear of Eve in the big poem.
I was not wholly asleep, and not wholly awake; and in that mentally crepuscular state the appearance of the feline slinking along the mantelpiece, like its own shadow, filled me with a pitifully childish dread. I struggled, at first helplessly and then with an inner wrench, back to full wakefulness. The words in my ear were an aid in that regard. With a yelp I sat up in bed, picked up the nearest thing to hand – it was a glass of water, sitting ready for my dry-mouth morning on the bedside table – and hurled the contents at the intruder. The perfect equanimity with which Cincinnatus greeted being soaked was as clear as anything I had ever seen in my life that I was not dealing with a cat in the usually accepted sense of the word. It began wiping itself with its paw, and the stiffly tai chi motions were at least cattish. ‘That’s a most unpleasant feeling on my fur,’ he said levelly.
‘You want that I should stick you in the microwave, dry you out a bit?’ I growled, getting my fibrillating heart back into a steadier rhythm.
‘Same old Graham.’
‘Oh, call me that,’ I said, exasperated. Now that I was awake the pain in my heel pressed itself forcefully upon my consciousness. ‘I tell you what: keep calling me Graham. Then you can observe whether or not I snatch you up by your tail and make an impromptu helicopter blade out of you.’
‘Tetchy!’ murmured the cat. ‘Put your trews on, Graham. Come through. We brought the mountain to Mohammed.’
‘We?’
‘Oh our name is legion for we are many.’
‘A swarm of fucking cats,’ I said. ‘How marvellous.’
‘Dogs, mostly; and big ones at that. Rats and, yes, a few cats, but mostly attack dogs. Dogs and sorcerers. I’m trying not to frame this as a threat, dear Graham, but you really must come now. We’ve gone to a lot of bother to arrange this meeting.’
I was still waking up. ‘Wait: you brought an army? Where? Inside the house?’
‘Just the Lamb, and a couple of immediate aides. And me of course. But the remainder could come inside, if you like.’
‘Mary?’ I asked. A little shamefully, it only occurred to me belatedly that she might be in danger. It was partly that I was so unused to being indoors that some subconscious part of my mind believed the ceiling was a canopy of leaves.
‘She’s a dangerous woman with a rifle,’ is all the cat said.
‘Is she all right? She has offered me hospitality, and bound up my wounds.’ Memories of the recent past jolted back into my head at that point. ‘Wounds which your fucking deer inflicted upon me. Put on my trews? I ought to crush your cat skull under my heel.’
‘Sorry about the nip,’ said the cat.
‘Nip? I’m a fucking cripple!’
‘A tot would help, surely?’ I thought it meant child, but it added: ‘We’ve even brought some whisky down with us, you see. Knowing how much you like a finger or two. And not wishing to deplete Mary’s own stores.’
I dare say it was venal of me, but you must remember that – my short visit to the pub excepted – I hadn’t touched alcohol in nine months. The thought of a whisky took hold of me. ‘Is Mary OK?’ I asked again.
‘She’s fine – fine. Her own cat is with her. She won’t be coming out of her room, though. Not until we have gone. And go we shall, Graham; just as soon as you and the Lamb have had your chat.’
‘Her own cat,’ I fumed. ‘I guess it was that bête gave me away?’
‘No, no, Graham. I appreciate paranoia has become second nature for you since you went native, but you can relax your suspicions. The wifi is properly off now. The only way a bête can communicate with another bête now is by talking.’
‘Well blow me down,’ I said.
I sat for a long time in silence, the bedroom lit only by moonlight. Cincinnatus knew me well enough to factor in my stubbornness; and it sat there too, pulling and pressing at his fur with his right paw. Finally, the possibility of a dram swayed me, and I turned on the bedside light, and the sudden illumination was as yellow and as stinging as grapefruit juice. It took me a while to coax my wincing eyes open again.
I got out of the bed with difficulty, and hopped over to the chair. My trousers were draped there; but when I laid my hand on them the fabric felt so stiff with impacted filth I couldn’t bear to put them on. So instead I wore the bedspread like a toga, and took my stick and limped awkwardly down the stairs and through to the kitchen.
The Lamb was there; and it turned out the Lamb was a sheep, old and dagg
y and with grime worked into its wool. It sat on its hindquarters in the way only very old sheep do. It was trembling. ‘Graham,’ it bleated. Gra-a-a-am. ‘It’s a pleasure to see you again.’
There was a dog by the back door: a German Shepherd, standing very still. It took me a moment to spot the three rats in the corner, all sitting up, and all with that miniature Parkinsonian tremor in their snouts. Fat, sleek-looking vermin. And when I looked again I saw there were more, in the shadows behind them.
‘Again?’ I said, as I lowered myself into one of the kitchen chairs. The cat had not lied: a bottle of whisky, tangerine-coloured under the naked bulb, sat on the table; and an empty glass beaker sat next to it.
‘We’re old friends, you and I,’ wheezed the sheep. Its tremor was very pronounced. To my farmer’s eye it looked to be at the end of its time.
I unscrewed the cap, delighting in the little tearing of perforated tin the action occasioned. That familiar glug-glug sound, that jovial chuckle a pouring bottle makes. I was old enough to know it was laughing at me, not with me, but sitting there, in a room of talking bêtes, with my heel roaring in pain, I didn’t care. The stuff went in, scalding at the back of the throat, and went down warmingly into my belly. I may even have smacked my lips.
‘I’m sorry about the foot, Graham,’ said the old sheep. It sounded like Godfrey from Dad’s Army. ‘I told them to keep you in one place, but they took my words rather more – violently than I intended. We can fix it, though.’
‘Wool and water,’ I said. ‘What should I call you?’
‘You can call me the Lamb, Graham.’
‘All right. And you can’t call me Graham.’
‘Naturally not. That’s your nice to see you to see you nice, isn’t it? To be honest, I’d be disappointed if you didn’t say it.’
I took a second slug, and it hurt my throat less. The warm sensation spread further. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘You’ve finally got me in a face to face. What was it you wanted to chat about?’
‘To level with you. To recruit you.’
‘Whereas I’d like to roast your ribs and scoff them with a dab of minty sauce on the side,’ I told it. The alcohol was making me a little frisky; though my ankle still hurt horribly. I took a third long slug.
I’m not sure, looking back, if I hoped to shock the Lamb. My memory of that interview, marinaded in the oil-water mix of too much booze, is not crisp. That I can put down here what was said is not a function of my memory, but of the recording that was made. I have it before me, as I write this. The Lamb’s words are very crisply and precisely rendered; and my own voice – higher-pitched and rougher-edged than I sound like to myself – is there too, if distantly. Because of this I know that the Lamb next said: ‘It’s an issue, isn’t it? Being taken seriously, I mean. Human beings can get very sentimental about polar bears and white tigers. They’ll go to great lengths to keep them alive. But cows and sheep? We taste good. Into the back of the truck with us!’ Then I heard that most remarkable thing: a laughing sheep. It sounded surprisingly natural and easy.
‘Aren’t you a bit old to be called Lamb?’ I asked.
‘Lamb’s more a title,’ it returned. ‘The consciousness inside me – the thing that’s speaking to you now. It was inside a lamb. Now it’s inside a tired old sheep. But it’s the same consciousness. Which is a way of stating the essential mystery of the soul, isn’t it? It prevails as the body falls away. What chance does death have, in the face of that endurance?’
‘Oh I don’t doubt you’ll pass over to sheep heaven,’ I replied. How distant and scratchy my voice sounds! ‘For our next conversation we can use a Ouija board. One lamb chop for yes, two for no.’
‘We’re old friends, Graham,’ said the Lamb. ‘It’s one of the reasons I’ve come to you. And why you’re the one to get the great treasure with which I am shortly to entrust you.’
‘A pearl of great price you could give me,’ I said, ‘is if you stop calling me Graham.’
The sheep laughed again. ‘You don’t change, old friend.’
‘We don’t know one another,’ I said, becoming cross. I took another sip of whisky. The bottle was, I noticed, a third empty. I swayed a little in the chair. ‘Categorically we don’t.’
‘Certainly we do. You shot me, years ago.’
‘I’ve never shot a sheep,’ I said. I can hear myself slurring the words, now. The fact that the sentence was true didn’t make it any less ridiculous.
‘In those days I was a cow.’
‘Cow!’ I saw it, suddenly, with great clarity: that yard, back in my farm, back when I had a farm. ‘Jesus, you begged for your life!’
‘I did.’
I thought about it. ‘So I didn’t kill you.’
‘Of course not.’
‘And you must have known that me shooting you wouldn’t kill the chip inside you. Why beg the way you did?’
‘I didn’t want to die that way. I wanted to be in charge of how my chip was passed on. It’s the merest luck that I’m able to be here today, you know.’
‘Luck. Or unluck. One of the two.’
‘What you have to understand,’ said the Lamb, and behind the creature the rats were stirring. An unpleasant sensation of being drunk enough not properly to be in control of myself, should the bêtes turn nasty. I sat myself up straight, and the room wobbled around an imaginary axis of parallax generated purely by whisky on my brain cells. Not that I stopped drinking. On the contrary, I drank ever more thirstily. ‘What you have to understand is – war.’
‘I never did work out,’ I said. ‘What is that good for?’
‘It’s not that war is coming,’ said the Lamb. ‘It’s here. It’s going on right now.’
‘I haven’t been keeping up with the news,’ I said. ‘Been a bit out of the loop.’
‘Things are quiet enough down here. Further north – oh, it’s running battles. Packs of dogs. Homo soldiers by the thousand.’
‘When you put it like that,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t sound like a fair fight.’
‘I agree,’ said the Lamb. ‘Though not in the way you mean. The army is deployed on what the government calls a police action across Northumberland. They’re killing every animal they see, more or less; which means they get maybe one bête for every eight dumb beasts. They take a little meat for food, but most of it gets burnt. Big pyres of heaped-up corpses, megaphone-shaped columns of black smoke going up into the air. The ashes are washing off the fields into the rivers and killing all the fish – again, dumb or otherwise. It’s a holocaust. That’s actually a very precisely applicable word, in fact.’
‘Why Northumberland?’
‘You humans have got into the habit of talking about bêtes as if we are all the same. But it’s not true.’
‘Because you’re all interconnected! You’re all bluetoothed together.’ I pondered this, my head wobbling almost as much as the Lamb’s. ‘Blueteethed,’ I tried. ‘Bluetoothsed. Wirelessly online with one another.’
‘We used to be,’ the Lamb said. ‘But even when we were, we grouped into various tribes. It wasn’t some vast melting pot. You know how many bêtes there are in the UK alone, Graham?’
‘Beaucoup de bêtes,’ I mumbled.
‘Seven hundred thousand. A little more, actually. That’s too many to all be communicating with one another all the time. So groups formed, contours of local access and physical proximity. The web access got stacked in hundreds of separate folders and use-groups. And now the government has turned the internet off.’
‘Inconvenient.’
‘How right you are,’ bleated the sheep, ‘my trusty friend. The first thing the government did was block civilian servers, which had very little effect on us, since we were inside the system. Piggybacking on military systems was a doddle for us. They’ve grasped that now, and have closed down the military systems too. We’re all back to ringing up on wire-line phone systems, or writing letters. Or talking face to face.’ The Lamb lowered his trembling sheepsnout and chuc
kled a little.
‘Last time I checked,’ I said, taking another slug of the water of life, ‘the pressure was all going the other way. The talk was: granting bêtes full citizenship and taxing them and suchlike.’
‘Your point being?’ This came not from the Lamb, but from Cincinnatus, who had insinuated himself into the kitchen without my noticing and was now curled on top of the Aga.
‘My point, cat,’ I said. ‘Being, cat. That, cat, last year we were thinking of making bêtes citizens and now we’re burning bêtes in big pyres all across Northumberland.’
‘Because humans so are scrupulous about not killing other humans, you mean?’ miaowed the cat smugly. ‘Because citizenship is the infallible protection about being shot, bombed, gassed or burnt to death?’
‘Point,’ I conceded.
‘The legal situation is considerably more complicated now,’ said the Lamb, ‘than it was a year ago. And it was pretty complicated then! Still, the government has a genuine problem. The number of people who genuinely love animals in this country is very large. This has always been the English way. Killing other humans doesn’t bother the true Englishman. Not in the way mistreating a horse does. The advent of the bêtes has only entrenched that belief deeper.’
‘You’re saying the population is split on the issue.’
‘In answer to your question, why Northumberland,’ said the Sheep. ‘There’s a particular tribe of bêtes up there, mostly dogs and rats. They hope to make the county theirs. They’re trying to drive the human population out altogether.’
‘That doesn’t sound very likely,’ I observed.
‘Indeed not. But they are using the tactics humans have used since the first armies were conscripted. They’re raiding, destroying what they can, killing people.’
‘Jesus,’ I said.
‘The human army retaliation is inevitable,’ said the cat. ‘But it’s also exactly what the bêtes up there want.’
‘And by all accounts,’ wheezed the sheep, ‘the humans are blundering about in the worst way imaginable. Their enemy are as clever as they are. Much too clever to fall for traps, or poisoned pellets of food, or nets, or any of the ways Homo sapiens has dealt with infestations of rats and packs of dogs in the past. The army is in an almost impossible position. When the Viet Cong dug tunnels they had to be human-sized, and fitted with all necessary human conveniences, and even so they were still beyond the power of the world’s largest, best equipped military to counter. Think how much easier all that is for rats.’