Another month passed, during which I did little but wait anxiously for any sign of the animals. In that time I went through the motions of researching my potential victim, just in case I was being watched. I discovered his whereabouts, his family circumstances and his habits.
He was a relatively young married man, with two small children. He lived in Shooter’s Hill and actually walked to work each day across Eltham Common to his company’s head office on Rochester Way. His morning walk was early—he began it at seven-thirty—and I saw possibilities in this walk should I ever have to carry out the deed.
Of course, I never expected to do that, but just when I thought I was rid of the nightmare, I once again found myself amongst those grotesque creatures in their city. This time they were not only without clothes, but on all fours. When I stood before the council, they were in a bare room, without furniture, and stood before me like a domestic farmyard group.
‘Have you killed him yet?’ whined the cat.
‘No,’ I moaned. ‘I cannot.’
‘You must,’ she screeched.
I found myself in a department store, walking around as if in a dream, staring at leather coats and handbags. An assistant asked me if I was all right. She took me to a staff room where they gave me a cup of tea and a biscuit. Eventually I made my way back to the street, but I felt sick inside.
This time I did not go to the psychiatrist. It had occurred to me that the attacks were becoming less surreal. That is to say the animal world was becoming more like the actual world with every visit. In the City of Beasts they now looked like animals and walked like animals. It was only in their speech that they became preternatural and even that was changing. I decided that the next time I visited them they would be in some meadow, surrounded by wildflowers and hedgerows, making animal noises. I felt no desperate urge to carry out their command, since here I could not be touched. All I had to do was keep making promises until they went away.
That was before I visited my nephew.
Peter, fourteen years of age, met me at the station and carried my bags to the taxi.
‘I’m glad you come to us, uncle,’ he said. ‘Mother was beginning to remark on how down you have sounded on the phone lately.’
His mother was my sister Alice.
‘How’s Toby?’ I asked, enquiring after the terrier I had bought him. ‘Still boisterous?’
‘Oh yes, you know how silly terriers can get, uncle.’
Toby met us at the garden gate and leapt up and down in the excited way that terriers do. I threw a chewed tennis ball for him, already sodden with saliva, mentally grimacing and wanting to wash my hands immediately. He brought it back instantly, putting it in front of me and looking up eagerly, yapping when I ignored the offer to continue the game.
Alice fed me and I went to bed early. I woke the next morning feeling remarkably refreshed. Alice and Peter had to go to town, to get Peter some shoes, and I was left sitting in a deck chair in the garden, soaking in the country ambience. I guessed Toby would be bothersome, but I actually did not see him until he came sidling round the corner of the cottage close to noon. He came round to the front of me and sat on the lawn, his head on one side, his mouth partly open. He was panting as if he had been running from a distant place.
I felt it best to ignore him and continued reading the paper which had been delivered shortly before.
After a while he was so quiet I thought he had gone away, but when I slowly lowered the newspaper, he was still there, staring up at me. There was such a look of malevolence on his canine features I started backwards and let out a little cry. He continued to glare at me, ferociously. Then just as Alice and Peter came in view, walking up the lane, he spoke.
‘When are you going to kill him?’ he growled, quietly.
My nightmare was beginning to materialise. The beasts were able to get at me in the real world. They were penetrating what I believed to be a safe haven—sanctuary—and I knew then that I would never be let alone until I did as I had been ordered to do. It was true, I had no choice. The council had known that from the start and had told me so.
That weekend, in the peaceful atmosphere of the cottage, I devised a scheme to murder the pharmaceutical manufacturer. I have always been a meticulous planner and I doubt anyone could have faulted my detail. I was to follow him one morning from his home to his office and on the way push him under a bus. It was a simple but I hoped effective plan.
A week later, in the early dawn, I stalked the victim from his house, tracking him across the common. While he was waiting to cross Rochester Way, busy even at that time of the morning, I bent down as if pretending to tie a loose shoelace and butted him hard in the back with my head. The blow sent him flying out into the traffic. He was hit first by one car, then another from the opposite direction.
Tossed into the air like a run-over rabbit, he landed almost at my feet again. His bloody face stared up at me with surprise on his features. It was certain he was dead.
I hurried away from the scene, hoping my part in his death had not been noticed. My suitcase was ready in a locker at the train station and I went there immediately. I caught a train to my sister’s house. Toby was there, waiting at the gate for me when I arrived at dusk. I looked him directly in the eye.
‘It’s done,’ I said.
He did not reply, but merely seemed eager for me to throw his damned ball for him. I did it to get rid of him while I entered the garden, actually feeling less revulsion for his toy than I had the first time. Later I caught him staring at me, as I moved around the house, in a quiet, understanding way.
Nothing happened for a few days. Then at dusk one evening I was trying to watch television, but was experiencing difficulty in focusing. I could hear the words plainly enough though and I recognised the voice of my politician friend. It seemed that he had been for a long time an executive on the board of a pharmaceuticals company. He was holding forth to the correspondent on the terrible circumstances of the death of the firm’s late chairman. My acquaintance said he was preparing to leave politics to become the new chairman of that company, to fill the void which the tragedy had left.
‘What a remarkable co-incidence,’ I said to Toby. ‘I had no idea of a connection there—had you?’
Toby refrained from answering me, possibly because there were other humans in the house, but I knew what he was thinking.
‘I expect,’ I said, ‘we might have to do something about the new chairman, too? And we mustn’t forget the psychiatrist. My sessions with him are supposed to be all strictly confidential, but really, he knows far too much...’
At midnight, just after the church clock had struck ten, I discovered the nature of my reward from the Council of Beasts. As I took off my shoes and socks I noticed that my feet had begun to shrink and harden. I stood up quickly and stared into the dressing-table mirror. The pupils of my eyes were no longer round, but were vertical ellipses. On top of my head two small bumps were beginning to poke through my scalp.
I turned to Toby, sitting in the doorway.
‘Maaaahhhh,’ I said to him. ‘Maaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh...’
Toby smiled.
THE FROG CHAUFFEUR
I share David Attenborough’s love of frogs, toads and natterjacks. In this age of genetic engineering I have written several versions of the following story, but this is the one I like best.
Isabel Fairfax woke by the large pond in her garden to find a beautiful young man asleep beside her. He was dandelion-haired and handsome, and completely naked. She marvelled at the way the droplets of water on his skin glistened with rainbow colours in the sunlight. Skin that was pale to the eye and firm to the touch. Beneath it were tight muscles, smooth as stepping stones across a stream. He had small hips, a flat stomach, slim strong shoulders and hard rounded buttocks with a shallow dimple in each.
Isabel wished she were twenty instead of forty as she carefully picked a piece of green pond weed from behind the youth’s ear and threw it back where it belong
ed.
‘Wake up, sleepy head,’ she said drowsily. ‘You’ve wandered into the wrong garden. You’re lying on my book of Tennyson’s poems and dampening the pages.’
It was surprising that the young man had decided to go swimming in her pond, in the nude, on this bright Sunday afternoon in June, but Isabel was broad-minded when it suited her. She was a spinster (a word she detested for its connotations of age) and almost a virgin (a word she rather liked for its undertones of youth) having only once yielded to a man who had loved her passionately for at least several minutes following a New Year’s Eve party. That was a long time ago, twenty years, but remained a treasured souvenir from that other country of which L.P. Hartley spoke.
Despite her best efforts to wake him the youth remained dozing in the late afternoon sun. Isabel remained with him on the lawn, dressed in her old-fashioned shirt-waister and broad-brimmed hat. She tried studying the wide pond’s yellow flags, waving in the breeze, then her quite grand 16th Century cottage at the end of the sweeping lawns, restored to a former ambiguity now that the beams had been stripped of black paint, but each time her eyes were drawn back to the wonderful creature whose drying arm rested on her lap.
Finally he woke, and smiled at her, stretching his arms and legs, revealing webs of skin between his fingers and toes. She rather liked this imperfection, which only reached as far as the lower finger joints in any case. It made him more human to her, less of a sun god. His eyes, she noted, were of the deepest green, the colour of a temperate ocean. He reached out to touch her cheek and she drew back.
‘Why, whatever is the matter?’ he asked her. ‘Do you not want me now that you see me?’
‘Want you?’ she asked, faintly. ‘For what?’
‘Why, for your lover, your man, your husband.’
She looked around her then, suspecting a joke. Some of her friends were perhaps teasing her? Or some television programme was happily making a fool out of an innocent woman in her own garden?
‘Where are you from?’ she asked, since she could think of nothing else to say. ‘Are you visiting the village?’
‘From there,’ he waved a hand generally over the garden, ‘and I want to live with you always.’
‘Do you have a name?’ she said, smiling at this game.
‘No, but you can give me one.’
‘We’ll think of one later. In the meantime, why not come up to the house for tea?’
And so they went into the cottage. She found for him a pair of shorts which Special-Friend Frank had left there on one of his occasional visits, and a T-shirt with SAVE THE TIGERS on the front. Then she made them Lapsang Suchong tea, with scones, blackcurrant jam and cream. Sometime before the flush of twilight had left the face of the sky, she found herself in bed with him.
His aromatic hair smelt of hay left baking in the sun as he gently entered her. Gradually he eased his hard pole into the crevice in the soft mossy bank between her thighs. She kissed his shoulders, licked his textured skin, which tasted faintly muddy. Later he used his own tongue, that long beautiful tongue, in a variety of wonderful ways which had her biting the pillow to prevent herself from screaming. Never had Isabel experienced such physical joy and she cared not whether it lasted an afternoon or an eternity.
He remained at the house, seemingly happy just to be in her company. If they ever did go out, it was in her little green car, which she taught him to drive. They would simply cruise the byways of the countryside, staying clear of towns, with him perched happily behind the wheel. She sat in the back, navigating for him, giving him instructions. He became, as well as her lover, her most reliable chauffeur.
Special-Friend Frank, who had never shown the slightest sexual interest in Isabel, suddenly after many years of sporadic stays, began brushing against her in the greenhouse, and accidentally pressing his elbow against one of her breasts while he read ‘Lochinvar’ to her. True to the contrary nature of men, now that someone else wanted her, Frank wanted her too. She might have lived to be a hundred and Special-Friend Frank would still have been visiting the cottage only to prune her plum trees and do her accounts.
‘Marry me?’ Frank murmured one day. ‘I’m an accountant—I earn lots of money.’
‘No,’ she replied, flatly.
‘Why?’ he asked, angrily. ‘Because of him? Because of that boy? Who is he anyway? Where did he come from? He doesn’t even have a name. I’ve been coming here for years, helping you with your tax returns, sorting out your plumbing, digging over the difficult bits of your garden. He’s done nothing for you.’
‘I don’t care,’ she said, lifting her chin defiantly. ‘He’s lovely. He’s loving. He’s love. He spends too long in the bathroom, but nobody’s perfect. I want him.’
Thus Isabel married the golden youth, who smiled all the way through the ceremony. The wedding took place at the little 11th Century minster, built by the Viking King Knut, on the hill above the river. The choir and altar boys wore scarlet cassocks, because it was a church connected with royalty. When it came to the part where the youth needed a name, he turned to Isabel.
‘I shall take your name and be known as Fairfax!’
‘And the given name?’ asked the vicar with a little cough.
‘Prince,’ said the youth without hesitation. ‘Prince Fairfax.’
‘No, that won’t do at all,’ Isabel chided, this offending her sense of taste. ‘You’re not a pop star, after all, you will be my husband. Some simple name would be best—John—John Fairfax.’
And so they were wed in the season of the daffodils. Isabel was viciously happy, snatching at every precious moment with her young sun prince and swallowing it whole. She had one, two, three children, just like that—two boys and a girl—and they were all very pretty babies. They sat in a row in the back of the car, while their father drove around the country lanes and their mother murmured instructions.
They lived, self-contained and blissfully happy, in the Tudor cottage. She would read to him poems under the lamplight and he would sit enwrapped by her low voice spilling out the words, staring up at the standard lamp. When she asked him why he was always looking at the lamp he told her that to him it was a kind of totem whose deistic duty it was to miraculously attract creatures like damselflies, or dragonflies, or even multi-hued moths.
‘Why, what a lovely thought, dear,’ she said. ‘But would you like to see such creatures flying in your room?’
‘Of course, they are the closest thing we have to pretty newts,’ he replied, enigmatically, ‘swimming around one’s head in the deepest part of the pond.’
It was in their fifth year that Isabel first discovered things were going wrong. She entered the dining-room of the cottage one day to find John with his face close to the bulls-eye window panes. She watched, fascinated, as he studied a fly while it buzzed, infuriated, in the corners of the window, wondering why there was this invisible wall in front of it. Then to her horror out shot John’s tongue and the insect was gone, down his throat. Afterwards he straightened and made a strange sound not unlike a burp.
‘John?’ she said, faintly. ‘Whatever are you doing?’
‘What?’ he spun round, looking guilty. ‘Why nothing, Isabel. Nothing at all. I was simply—peering through the glass, trying to see out into the garden.’
‘You ate that bluebottle!’
‘No, no, you’re mistaken, Isabel. Why should I do a thing like that?’
He sounded so sincere that she thought that perhaps she had been mistaken in what she had seen, that perhaps she had perceived something which had not actually taken place. It was in her nature to blame herself before others, for any error of judgement or observation. She stopped taking the ginseng tea, believing it responsible.
Yet, three weeks later, as they were walking around the garden after a shower of rain and she was chatting about how lovely the lilacs smelled, John absently reached out and picked a small snail from the leaf of a shrub. He popped it in his mouth, crunched and swallowed it, still lost i
n some reverie. She said nothing to him this time, but later while sitting in the summer house on her own, she began to recall the several strange habits of her husband.
There were those times when she had found him squatting in the corner of the room, apparently asleep. There was his obsession with cold baths. There was the eerie delight he took in drawing water lilies for their children, as if they were some kind of icon for future happiness. There was his dread of herons, his phobia of grass snakes, his intense dislike of French restaurants. Finally, there were those condemning webbed toes and fingers.
It was true he still liked to drive the car, but she was sure that came from some other hidden lake of his personality, some other well of his psyche.
Afraid, but wanting to know the truth, she found an encyclopaedia and read all it had to say about frogs. Everything was there, even the snails, which formed a part of the common frog’s diet. With increasing anxiety she decided to give John one last test. In order to put him off his guard one evening, she read him Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Garden’, knowing he loved the lines:
‘Annihilating all that’s made
‘To a green thought in a green shade.’
When he was safely locked in that dream world into which he slipped at times, she placed before him a dish of live garden slugs and earthworms. He ate them absently with apparent relish, not pausing to consider what kind of fare she had given him, and whether it was seemly for a youth to gobble such creatures. She knew then that he was from the pond, beside which she had first found him, damp and weed-strewn.
‘Never mind,’ Isabel told herself. ‘He’s my husband now and we can still live a good life.’
Nevertheless she read a version of The Frog Prince from a red book of Grimms’ tales published by Grosset & Dunlap of New York, one of a boxed set of two volumes, the other a green book of Andersen’s stories.
It told how the frog changed into a prince not with a kiss, but when the princess threw the frog violently against her bedroom wall, and how the faithful servant Henry had his heart bound with three iron bands to stop it breaking when his master had become an amphibian, and how those bands snapped as his heart swelled with joy when the princess married the handsome returned prince.
Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales Page 10