by Michel Faber
Sandra didn’t reply. She was already making her way along the line of the barricade, no longer expecting the cat to be revealed entire, but straining for a fugitive glimpse of gleaming eyes, striped flank, twitching tail. Already she could imagine, inside the snug-fitting lid of a Loch Eye Pottery sugar-bowl, a tiny painting of a cat’s face, staring out as if from a hole, hidden there to surprise the customer. Did any of her staff have the skill to paint such an image? Alison might have, if she hadn’t minxed herself out of a job.
Sandra snatched up a lone birch twig from the ground, briskly denuded it by tearing off its sprigs and leaves, and poked it into the nearest rabbithole. A few steps farther on, she poked it into the next, and the next, each time testing how far the stick would go. Most of the passages were narrow, too narrow to fit a large feline; some of them had been collapsed by erosion or were clogged, like dead arteries, with ossified debris.
‘Hey, I just remembered I didn’t lock the car,’ said Neil, when they’d moved fifty yards or so from where they’d begun.
‘Forget the car for a minute, can’t you?’ she said. ‘This thing’s still alive, I know it.’
He squared his shoulders, preparing to argue the point, but there was a hint of pleading in her eyes, a flustered lick of her lips, letting him know she didn’t want to fight. He smiled, let his shoulders fall.
‘I hope you don’t have your heart set on having it stuffed, ‘he sighed. ‘If it’s badly mangled … ‘
‘It’s going to be fine,’ she insisted, pressing onwards, stick in hand, Neil following on.
Only a few moments later, her hunch was proved right. A rabbithole she’d poked her stick into emitted a dull scrabbling noise, and Neil, six feet behind her, was startled to see the furry tip of a big striped tail trembling out of the nearest hole to him. He uttered an involuntary shout, causing the creature to jerk back inside with a puff of loose soil. Neil and Sandra, a man’s span apart, realised they were standing at opposite ends of a horizontal tunnel through the curved embankment, a simple sinus in the soil.
Without a word, Sandra lowered herself to the ground and squatted in front of her aperture. Neil did the same at his.
It was late afternoon by now, almost dusk. They were too low down now to see the road, but they knew it was unlit and potentially dangerous. The sun was disappearing behind trees, casting a flickering glow over the fields. All around Neil and Sandra, the picture quality of the world was being adjusted as if by contrast and brightness knobs on God’s remote control: the sharper contours of grass and scarred earth were sharpened further, almost luminescent, while the duller stretches were retreating into darkness.
‘The car …’ said Neil.
‘Forget the car,’ hissed Sandra through clenched teeth. She leaned closer to the hole in the embankment, squinting into its horribly pregnant shaft.
‘Your trousers …’ he warned her softly, as she shuffled forwards on her knees across the dirt.
‘I can see its eyes,’ she said. ‘It’s frightened.’ Neil watched her settle onto all fours, her palms balancing gingerly on the ground. Her bosom was pressed between her arms, bulging forward, a soft glow of cashmere in the twilight. He suddenly wanted her more intensely than he’d wanted her for years; he felt like mounting her here and now in the field.
‘Of course it’s bloody frightened,’ he said. ‘But what can we do?’
‘I’ll poke the stick in,’ she said. ‘That’ll make it move backwards, towards your end. Once its tail pokes out, you grab it and pull.’
He snorted in disbelief. Trust her to leave that part to him … Raise the finance for the pottery, give the troublesome employees the sack, grab the wildcat by the tail: Neil’ll fix it!
‘What if it tears me to shreds?’
She groaned in exasperation.
‘We ran over its legs! It’s just dragging its hindquarters back and forth.’
‘So you say.’ But he kneeled forward, bracing himself. The sound of the animal’s anxious breathing was having a weird effect on him, as if it were a drug he’d sniffed into his bloodstream. Imagining himself a broken animal trapped in a claustrophobic shaft, he was almost intoxicated with pity. Or not quite pity, more a craving for the thing to be all right, despite what had happened.
Sandra inserted the stick carefully, almost tenderly, into the hole. On her face was an expression of intent curiosity, an ardent childlike wish for the desired outcome. Her lips were parted, her eyes half-closed.
From inside the tunnel came a fierce hiss and the sound of scrabbling. But no sign of the animal at Neil’s end: no hide nor hair, so to speak. Sandra leaned further into the hole, her arm disappearing inside it, her cheek brushing against the earth, her hair mingling with the rough grass.
‘I need a longer stick,’ she breathed.
‘Well, find one,’ he urged her, his voice shaking with anticipation. ‘You’re liable to get your fingers bitten off.’
She withdrew her arm. Her sleeve was covered in soil, dark brown against the luxurious yellow. She glanced all around, but didn’t get up off her knees.
‘I can’t see anything better than what I’ve got,’ she said, studiously examining the end of her stick as if for blood or saliva. ‘And I’m not leaving this hole.’
For another few minutes they squatted there, while the world grew darker all around them. Their eyes were well adjusted to the fading light, and they could still see each other and, of course, the holes in the embankment, perfectly well. But the rest of the environs — the empty field behind them, the long lampless road, the treetops of the hidden forest — was inexorably merging with the deepening mauve of the evening sky.
‘The car’s parking lights aren’t on,’ said Neil.
Sandra turned her face to him, stared directly into his eyes through the gathering chill of dusk. Her left cheek was smeared with dirt, her white teeth were bare.
‘Forget — the fucking — car.’ Her tone was savage but her diction was crystal.
She turned away from him and started to claw at the edges of the hole with her fingers.
‘Dig,’ she said.
He watched her, mesmerised. Her red fingernails were replaced by grimy black ones. Damp earth flurried over her trousers.
‘Dig, you bastard,’ she hissed.
He dug at his own hole. There were skiing gloves in the boot of the car, which would’ve made the task more comfortable, not to mention more efficient, but he knew better than to suggest this. Instead, he jabbed at the soil with his fingers, fumbling for purchase on larger clumps and stones, grunting with effort. It was penance, he knew; a more potent offering than denials and red roses.
They worked doggedly as the light was extinguished all around them. They burrowed in rhythm, panted in unison, swaying on their knees. Their flushed, contorted faces looked bone-pale under the rise of a colossal moon. From inside the earth before them, an anxious, inhuman moan made itself heard, growing steadily louder and more despairing.
At last, when they’d excavated so much soil that there was only about a metre of tunnel left undisclosed, the moment came. The wildcat’s striped tail, bristling electrically, convulsed into view, and Neil grabbed it in his filthy hands and yanked. A grotesquely loud shriek of terror registered on him first, then the fact that bestial teeth were clamped into his fist – as though a mallet had slammed a bunch of iron nails right through his flesh. The massive creature was a squirming chaos of fur and muscle on the end of his arm, its claws ripping at his thighs and elbows as it flailed through the air.
Unthinkingly, he ran towards Sandra and, even as he released his hold, she lunged at the creature herself, arms thrust forward in a fearless, angry embrace. For a split-second she had it clutched tight to her – it might, in that instant, have been an ordinary cat after all – but then its huge yellow eyes blazed with fury, and in an eruption of brute force it clawed its way up her breast, onto her face. Its crushed hind limbs swung crazily as it clung to her head for a nightmarish instant, th
en it tumbled down her back and hit the ground. With a slithering of skewed bone, it heaved itself away, hyperventilating, into the darkness.
‘Don’t stop! Don’t stop!’ shrieked Sandra, as Neil fell back in horror at the damage to his hands, the blood running down her face. ‘Useless fucking coward!’
A deep claw-gouge from forehead to brow to cheek –missing her eye by a miracle – was bubbling and spattering blood all over her chest and shoulders. Yet she ignored it, and instead whirled around and stumbled into the gloom, hunching down like some sort of primate, her arms swinging low through the air, brushing the inky vegetation.
Suddenly there was a screech, not of a living being this time, but of tyres on a road surface – a short, surreally musical screech, and then a loud crash of metal on metal.
‘Jesus Christ, the car … !’ barked Neil.
‘Come on!’ yelled Sandra, still pursuing her prey.
‘But don’t you understand—?’
‘I understand everything!’ she raged, fetching up a stick –a much larger and heavier stick than before. ‘Whatever’s happened has happened. Who gives a fuck? It’s over! It’s over!’
Cudgel dangling from her fist, she pushed on into the darkness, her hunched form a piebald pelt of yellow and black. He wanted to follow her, to restrain her, to enfold her in his arms, to carry her home, but he was half-blinded by the pain in his hand, a nauseous mixture of numbness and agony, a greasy mess of bloody fingers. He heard his own voice grunting and whimpering as he strained to get his legs to move, but he just stood there shivering on the churned earth.
He knew this was all lunacy now, that they couldn’t hope to save this creature, this half-crushed, fear-crazed demon of pure instinct. But it seemed his wife understood this too, and that it didn’t make any difference. She was swinging the stick into the undergrowth, not in a tentative, exploratory way, but with all her might. Earth and grass exploded into the air, gobs of raw clay flying around like flesh, as she flailed viciously, over and over, her weapon now clutched in both black fists.
‘I see its eyes!’ she kept screaming, hoarse with feral longing as the whole countryside was falling into blackness around her and all the tiny stars came out of Heaven to bear witness. ‘I see its eyes!’
THE SMALLNESS OF THE ACTION
One Wednesday morning, in a moment of carelessness, Christine dropped her baby on the floor and broke him. She was lifting him from his cot to the changing table, and he just sort of slipped out of her hands.
The house was carpeted, but only very thinly over solid concrete. There was no mistaking the snap of bone as the heavy little body hit the floor: a collision of two hard objects disguised in soft covering. The more brittle of the two caved in.
Christine bent down at once and picked her baby up again. The total time he had spent asserting his freedom, making his own way through the challenges of space and gravity, couldn’t have been more than a second. Yet, in that single clock tick, he had managed to become unstuck.
At least he was not dead. As she lifted him up, he was crying furiously — shrieking, really. Who knows, maybe he wasn’t seriously injured: he often shrieked, after all. Shrieking was his way of telling her that he wasn’t asleep. That was all he ever had to tell her, ever.
Flinching from the ferocity of the noise, Christine laid her baby on the changing table and checked him for damage. It was immediately obvious what had happened. There was no blood, but one of her baby’s arms swivelled loosely inside its jumpsuit sleeve, like a sausage in a stocking. Christine could tell, even at a glance, that there was no longer any connection at the shoulder.
While she was wondering what to do next, she unfastened the press-studs on the crotch of the jumpsuit and exposed the soiled nappy. Her baby’s legs, kicking convulsively, were obviously unbroken – which must mean that his back was OK as well. His voice was louder than ever, as if the accident had triggered a growth spurt in his vocal cords.
Christine changed her baby’s nappy, as she’d done countless times before. She washed and powdered the flesh carefully, as if it might be needed for some special meal or artistic creation, then wrapped it up again, out of sight. Dodging her baby’s kicks, she wrestled his tiny legs back into the jumpsuit. Outside, the sun emerged from behind a cloud and beamed in on both of them through the bay window. A bright vista of suburbia stretched from her street’s gentle incline all the way to infinity. No event of any dramatic importance could possibly happen here. All the contents, both human and architectural, of this little corner of the universe were fixed firmly in place.
Christine lifted her baby off the changing table and back into his cot. She arranged the loose, floppy arm neatly by his side so that it resembled the other one. She arranged the pale blue blanket over his squirming body and tucked it gently up to his spittly chin. Every time he kicked the blanket away she replaced it, while the window-shaped rectangle of sunlight inched across the floor almost imperceptibly and motes of dust loitered in the overbreathed air.
After a long time the baby stopped shrieking, then his noise subsided to a gulping, gasping yawn. His face began to unswell, gradually losing its resemblance to a punnet of squashed tomato and settling back into an image of a human infant. But for his ugliness and the drool on his perpetually inflamed chin, he might almost be a baby from the cover of a baby magazine. Almost.
Looking at him sometimes, she couldn’t actually see him as an infant at all. He seemed unconvincing as a new arrival to the world. There was a darkness in his brow, a slyness in his eyes, a set to his mouth, which made him look like he was a man already, as if her womb had been some kind of public bar where he’d already spent half a lifetime sipping beer, swapping grievances with his mates, and staring at women’s breasts.
Christine sat down gingerly in the softest armchair, easing herself into it for fear of making the pains from her still-unhealed episiotomy worse. It had been several months now since she’d been cut open, and the wound was refusing to go away. Bending down so recklessly to pick up her fallen baby had really yanked at the scars. She took a deep breath, held it for a long time, and let it go. Then she settled in, next to the cot and the changing table, and watched the sun move across the carpet for the rest of the day.
At twilight, her husband came home.
‘How’s my little man, then?’ he said.
‘He’s fine,’ Christine replied.
‘Have a good day, then?’
‘Me?’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ he said.
As always, she felt like shoving him into a chair, standing over him, and telling him exactly what her day had been like. She wanted to let him know that her day had been an outrage, a mockery, an insult. All those minutes joined end to end, yet endless; an eternity of useless minutes spent either waiting for nothing to happen, or of waiting for something to stop; of longing for someone else’s sleep (never your own) to go on and on, of being bored and anxious knowing it wouldn’t. She wanted to rail against all the hands-on fussery, the brainless drudgery, the interminable succession of soft interventions, pathetically small triumphs erased by repetition, washed away by piss and tears and lukewarm water, all to achieve an illusion of normality. Every morning at 8:15, her husband would leave her alone in the house with an infant gurgling in a bed of clean fluffy cotton; at 5:45 he would return and find her alone in the house with an infant gurgling in a bed of clean fluffy cotton; nothing, apparently, had happened. She had, apparently, lain around the house like a trusted pet, luxuriating in the quiet and the central heating. No one could begin to understand the violence that was done to her mind and spirit every day, the way her soul was tenderised by a thousand hammer blows delivered with instinctive accuracy and force by a furious little fist.
‘Fine thanks,’ she said.
He switched on the television and, before the picture even materialised, walked away to the kitchen to make them both a cup of tea. He had a few minutes to kill, waiting for a domestic soap opera to finish and for the news
to begin.
‘Here you are, love,’ he said, handing her a steaming mug as the strident music announced the roundup of the day’s important events.
News no longer made sense to Christine. She wondered whether it made any sense to anybody really, beyond giving them something to discuss at work. A glimpse of a man in a grey suit, strenuously denying the ‘findings’ of a ‘commission’. What commission? What findings? What man? In a moment he was gone, replaced by some new war in a faraway country. What country? What war?
‘Shhh,’ her husband would say, if she ever asked. ‘I’ve missed some.’
Numb, she would leave the battleground to its soldiers and journalists, and prepare dinner. She vaguely wished to be sympathetic to the people suffering in the war, but everyone who appeared on camera seemed so wonderfully free to her, so alive; not one of them was confined to a baby’s cot-side, unavailable to comment on important matters. They gesticulated angrily at the camera, stating their opinions with passion, and the world listened. These war people were exotic creatures, like cheetahs or antelopes, filmed in the wild. Even when covered with blood, stumbling down a bombed street, they inhabited a wider and airier sphere than hers.
A baby’s explosive cry sped through the house and found her where she stood in the kitchen. It impacted against its natural target, her brain, for what must have been the thousandth time.
By chance (for he rarely touched their baby) her husband had made some overture to the infant during an advertisement. In doing so, he evidently nudged the baby’s broken shoulder, well-swaddled though it was in the bedding, and the infant began to scream, as suddenly and loudly as a car alarm.
Christine pulled a bubbling saucepan off the flame, covered it with a lid, and hurried out of the kitchen to the front room.
‘I just tickled him,’ her husband protested, helpless by the crib, his hands twitching at his sides.
‘It’s all right,’ she reassured him, displacing him at the epicentre of trouble. ‘He’s … touchy just now.’