Hunting Unicorns

by Bella Pollen

  ‘So what ploughed? Don’t know which crop. Mud with weeds looks like. Well stand by. Who? Oh he’s here, is he? Where?’

  ‘Excuse me?’ Rory says.

  ‘Got him. Yes. Now.’ The policeman turns to face him. ‘You’re the gentleman my superior spoke to earlier?’

  Rory nods.

  ‘I see,’ the policeman says. His colleague stares out over the field across which the MSD are now tramping, arms linked like Morris dancers.

  ‘Let me see if I have this correct, sir,’ the first policeman says. ‘This thing that has caused a multiple pile up on the motorway – this creature that has wasted four hours of police time, not to mention head-butted two members of the emergency services, belongs to your clients and is moreover being kept in their grounds for its milk?’

  ‘Well yes,’ Rory concedes, ‘although not so much milk apparently, more … er…’ he breaks off. The men in the field have started running. Rory and the policemen stare mesmerized as the large shaggy head of an American buffalo careers into view over the ridge. Panicked, the men split as the creature gallops through their ranks and charges towards the mangled hedge. Its pursuers, abandoning all attempts to maintain their line, resort to chasing after it in ragged chaos.

  ‘As I was saying, not so much milk,’ Rory says and does some brutal coughing. ‘Cheese. Mozzarella cheese to be more accurate.’ He can already visualize the headlines. Saintly widowed mother mauled by buffalo, Siamese twins brain damaged by single kick. Handicapped busload of refugees … Christ. He does a quick spot check. No bodies, no ambulances, and so far, thank the Lord, no press. Damage by the creature should be covered by Bevan’s third party insurance, in the unlikely event of it being paid up to date.

  The second policeman is looking sceptical. ‘Is mozzarella cheese not traditionally made from the milk of the water buffalo rather than the American buffalo, sir?’

  Rory digests this. Quite honestly he has never considered whether mozzarella came from an American buffalo, a giraffe or was grown on trees.

  ‘I’m sure that is technically correct, yes,’ he says carefully. He looks into the faces of the two men and gives up.

  ‘The thing is … it’s actually rather hard to explain.’ The expression on both policemen’s’ faces remains politely enquiring. ‘My clients, themselves, are also … a little hard to explain.’

  ‘And your clients would be, sir?’ The second policeman who we shall now refer to as PC Fuckface, gazes at Rory with a faux deferentialism that makes Rory want to punch him in the kidneys.

  ‘Alistair and Audrey Bevan,’ Rory says. Thinking that by not giving their full name there is a chance, a tiny, insignificant, one-in-a-million chance that these two bastard pigs won’t inform the press. A chance that next week will not have to be spent fending off journalists, that he will not tomorrow read the dread headlines in the Sun, but a chance that promptly dies a death with the knowing looks the police are busy exchanging. The first policeman carefully puts his pencil and notebook away. PC Fuckface itches a leg with his baton. ‘That would be the Earl and Countess of Bevan, would it, sir?’

  Rory is impotently furious at the large bold font of ‘sir’, but he’s again diverted by the noise of thundering hooves. The buffalo, looking more pleased with itself than it has any right to, appears over the hedge. The policemen take a step back. The creature gazes down as if contemplating the wisdom of such a long jump – but it’s a pause too long. There’s a crack. The buffalo looks round in mild surprise and more than a little reproach at the emergency services, whose ranks have now swelled to twenty men, one of whom is hastily reloading his stun gun.

  ‘As I was saying, sir,’ says PC Fuckface. ‘If the Earl and Countess are unable to keep their … er … little business ventures under control, they are very likely, next time, to find themselves behind bars.’

  There’s a screech of tyres as two vans side swerve the bollards. The press have arrived. Rory watches with loathing as men jump out trailing wires, cabling and a video camera which they point at the bank with feverish excitement. And now we can see why. A late-middle-aged lady in gumboots and tweed skirt has appeared on the scene. Positioning herself between the stun gun and the buffalo she calmly slips a leash over its head then leads the newly docile creature off over the ploughed fields. Rory turns back to the police. ‘Do me a favour,’ he says wearily, ‘why don’t you just arrest them now.’

  maggie

  When I was born the doctor’s big joke was to tell my parents that I looked like a savage. My eyes were black, my face purple. Oh yes, the midwife had agreed, I’d come out whooping and hollering, all but carrying a tomahawk. The midwives were prone to laughing at the doctor’s jokes because they thought he was pretty cute. My parents just thought he was a bigot. My colouring came as no surprise to them. My mother’s great grandmother was Native American, a Kiowa who married a farmer from Oklahoma and with my sticking out cheekbones and black hair, I had obviously inherited her blood. As a child I loved to show off about my maternal ancestors, less interested in my father’s more pedestrian Irish roots. When everyone else was hooked on Eloise and Stuart Little, my mother was busy reading me Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. At school I argued the case for the Indians like the whole of their race depended on me.

  I guess I should explain. As a child I was subjected to a degree of political conditioning. If I told you I had seedless grapes snatched from my hands because exploited Mexicans had been forced to pick them you might get the picture.

  No weekend was complete without a protest outside City Hall and I went to my first anti-Vietnam march on Dad’s shoulders, a sort of variation on a take-your-daughter-to-work day. Our photograph ended up in the New York Post. The next afternoon when a friend came over to play she asked me what a draft-dodging hippy was. My mother was incensed and quoted from Art Buchwald’s column in the Washington Post. ‘Do you realize,’ she said, ‘that with the amount of money required to kill each Vietcong, you could fly him first class to America, buy him a Cadillac, a membership to the most expensive country club in Connecticut – you could turn him into a bona fide capitalist and it would still be cheaper.’ OK so that may not be entirely accurate paraphrasing, but I was only four years old at the time.

  ‘Doesn’t matter what you do with your life,’ Mom finished up, ‘so long as you make a difference.’

  I was thinking about this as I walked into the Cadogan Hotel following my appointment at the locations agency. The truth was I was pretty pissed. I stood on the squared-stone floor of the lobby looking around for Wolf and Dwight, watching the receptionists behind the front desk swipe credit cards and deal with enquiries. It was a nice hotel, friendly and welcoming with heavy curtains and deep fabric covered chairs. The clientele were mostly tourists, American from the look of them, sixty/seventy-year-old ladies holding Burberry umbrellas and booklets of theatre reviews, their short grey hair under baseball caps. It was all very white and polite, all very comfortable. I didn’t want comfortable. I wanted to chase stories that meant something, it was like Jay said – I was happy in the trenches with my Uzi. Instead I’d been sent to cover a goddamn tea party.

  Dwight and Wolf weren’t in the lobby, or the breakfast room. When I rapped against their door upstairs, I heard the sound of joint snoring and felt better. I knew every peak and trough of that particular concerto. Dwight and Wolf were my crew, my crack team. I’d been on assignment with them both many times and Wolf in particular had become a real friend. We first met while I was working on the film for my degree. Political corruption was the subject of choice and it was, as I bored anyone foolish enough to listen, going to be so lid-blowing that American politics would reform itself overnight. Somehow I’d been granted permission to follow a New York senator with a dubious reputation, filming him going about his business, fly on the wall style. After two days trailing him from the Oak Bar to the Rackets Club to the Plaza, he finally had to attend some trifling matter of government in his office but this meeting had only just begun wh
en the building was stormed by a ABC news team headed up by the infamous Philip Grigson. Grigson was a reporter I’d always admired but he turned out to be a real asshole, ordering both his crew and me around in an overloud voice. Some story had obviously broken but whatever it turned out to be, I was as determined to get it as he was. Things soon got ugly. Philip kept shoving huge furry microphones into my shot, trying to queer my pitch. I put enormous radio mikes on everybody in the room claiming them as mine. It was pretty academic because as soon as the senator’s press aide arrived the whole lot of us were thrown out, but it was my wire that was pinned to the senator’s righteous bosom and I prayed he’d fall for the oldest trick in the book, forget he was miked up.

  And hallelujah he did.

  Philip, his crew, my ‘sound recordist’, a friend from college and I were all hanging around outside the office. I was trying to act cool, my lens pointed carelessly at the floor, because as long as I was getting sound, and I was – it didn’t matter what I had on film. I could run it over footage of a duck marrying a Great Dane in a Mormon ceremony if that’s what it took, but Philip’s enormous cameraman, taking up most of the bench next to me noticed my red record button was lit up. ‘Hey,’ he said accusingly.

  Philip stopped pacing the corridor and looked up suspiciously. My heart was in my mouth. The senator was being accused of a gross misuse of funds, but if this giant exposed me, I would definitely be thrown out of the building. The cameraman looked at Philip, then back to me. ‘Your lens could do with a polish,’ he said and passed me a cloth which I used to cover the record button just as Philip walked over.

  It was his voice that really made me notice him. Wolf has a beautiful voice, like oil running over pebbles. I don’t know what his parents were thinking calling him Wolf, he should be named Bear. Even with the curve at the top of his back, the cameraman’s permanent stoop, he’s six foot three and broad with it. He doesn’t walk so much as lumber.

  Later that week, I bought him a coffee. He told me he disliked Philip intensely but was too lazy or, I thought privately, too stoned to do anything about it. When I went to work for Newsline, I tracked him down.

  The noise inside the crew’s bedroom reached a crescendo. Wolf might have a beautiful voice, but he had a real ugly snore. I decided to leave the boys to sleep, they were jet lagged and besides, now we had an extra day in hand. The door opened opposite and a breakfast trolley was pushed out. I was just snitching a piece of leftover toast when it opened again and this time a man in a towelling robe deposited a handful of eggy Kleenex onto the dirty plates.

  ‘Morning,’ I said, embarrassed to be caught.

  The man sighed deeply, dug into the pocket of his robe and stretched across the trolley.

  ‘Oh.’ I looked down at the couple of pound coins in my hand. ‘Thanks a lot.’ As he shut the door hurriedly, I looked down at my T-shirt and army trousers. If I was going to infiltrate the upper classes, I really had to get myself a more subtle uniform.

  daniel

  If you were fortunate enough to be given a helicopter tour of some of England’s more green and pleasant lands, chances are you’d be impressed by the approach to the Bevan Estate. Flying deep into the county of Yorkshire you eventually dip into a valley whose stone- and bracken-covered hills mark the boundary of the grounds. Descending over woods and parklands you can follow the curves of the river until you eventually spot the house, built in the seventeenth century from stone quarried locally. With its annexes, wings and turrets, you might suppose you were about to land on one of England’s statelier homes run by an immense hierarchy of staff. Circling the north-east side of the house you might also imagine that one of the more eccentric members of the family, perhaps nursing a passion for hybrid architecture, had whimsically added a folly of darker stone – or was it some kind of unusual walled garden? By now you might conceivably be confused by the morass of greenery in the centre of this folly, and as you draw in closer you might question why much of its stonework seems to be missing, why corners don’t meet in the traditional manner and why height levels are so worryingly haphazard.

  Possibly it would have struck you by now that something was terribly wrong. What you’ve been admiring is not a folly at all, but an integral part of the house, the east wing. Except its roof has caved in, while its smoke-blackened walls have crumbled and pigeons, constantly circling its perimeter, spend their days depositing guano on anything that remains between them and the ground. In short the place is a ruin.

  Rory, however, approaches Bevan via the more conventional route of its drive. Despite slowing to the sign-posted 5 miles per hour at the pillared entrance, the next couple of miles must be negotiated with extreme caution. Numerous switchbacks are layered with stones so lethal you might be forgiven for thinking they had been hand sharpened to render maximum damage to tyres. Gaping potholes are filled with muddied rainwater and just when you feel it is safe to speed up to a whopping 6 miles an hour your exhaust is nobbled by random sleeping policeman built to discourage local drivers from practising their rally racing skills using Bevan as a short cut from the railway station to the village of Skimpton.

  As he draws up to the house Rory notices some recent state-of-the-art repairs. Guttering, eroded to splitting point has been spliced together with twine and wire. An old wooden tennis racquet has been nailed over the drains to catch leaves. Alistair and Audrey Bevan, roused by the noise of wheels on gravel, hurry out. Alistair is a bluff man of seventy-five dressed in corduroys and a checked Vyella shirt which carries the faintest smell of mothballs. Audrey wears her usual uniform of tweedy skirt covered by a sleeveless padded jacket, zipped up over a long sleeved version of the same garment. Alistair is also wearing a padded jacket, but his is new, ordered as a nod to modern times from a farming catalogue to which he subscribes. They are accompanied by a vast grey setter, all tangled hair and elastic strings of saliva, which bounds down the steps in front of them.

  ‘Get down, Lurch,’ Rory thunders as the dog makes its leap. Setters are a neurotic breed, attracted to the person who pays them the least attention, so Lurch merely slobbers a little more industriously before throwing himself into a grateful heap on top of Rory’s boots.

  ‘Mrs Emery claims Lurch has been worrying the sheep,’ Audrey says. ‘She had the nerve to ring up and get quite snippy on the phone but Lurch has never been interested in sheep.’

  ‘Besides he was locked in the outside room all day,’ Alistair says. ‘Bloody woman, must have been somebody else’s dog.’

  ‘Or maybe it was somebody else’s buffalo,’ Rory says.

  Alistair takes off his glasses and wipes them on his cardigan. Audrey examines the mud on her gardening gloves.

  ‘Don’t you think it might have been sensible,’ Rory says, ‘after the oyster bed fiasco, following the surprise failure of the stone-polishing business, to run the Genius of Mozzarella by me first?’

  ‘We didn’t want to bother you, Robert,’ Audrey pats his arm, ‘You have enough on your plate already,’ she adds soothingly.

  ‘Would have all been perfectly fine,’ Alistair says, ‘it’s just that we failed to take one or two little extra expenses into consideration.’

  ‘This stuff came out of its nose,’ Audrey explains, ‘bright green, absolutely beastly, we could see he wasn’t at all well, poor old thing.’

  ‘Then what with the vet’s bills, the general anaesthetic…’ but Alistair, catching the expression on Rory’s face, loses momentum.

  ‘You see, Robert,’ Audrey says confidingly, ‘buffalo are not really indigenous to the north of England you know.’

  Rory feels the familiar quicksand of nonsense sucking at his feet.

  ‘You are aware that mozzarella comes from the water buffalo and not the American buffalo, aren’t you?’ he says.

  This trump card leaves them silenced.

  Rory presses his advantage. ‘Well what arrangements have you made to get rid of it?’

  ‘Get rid of it?’ Alistair says astonish
ed.

  ‘Well yes, surely—’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Robert,’ Alistair says testily, ‘Your mother’s grown far too fond of it.’

  * * *

  Alistair and Audrey would do rather well in prison Rory muses as he wanders up the path to the church. There’s something about the ingenuous that makes them indestructible. A favourite story about our mother proves this point. Before getting married she’d travelled to Boston to see friends. At the airport she’d taken a taxi as instructed but discovered halfway through the journey that she’d misplaced her purse. The driver unceremoniously abandoned her in Bonfire of the Vanities territory – and there she’d stood, a white woman with her sensible shoes, headscarf and neatly strapped luggage, waiting patiently for help to come along – which it soon did in the form of a purple limousine bursting with Puerto Ricans, flick knives wedged between their teeth …

  ‘You los’, baby?’ they’d drawled. ‘You wanna lift?’

  ‘How thoughtful of you,’ Audrey said.

  She furnished them with her friends’ address and the car sped off. History doesn’t relate as to the conversation en route, though I’ve always had this vision of her, in an identical though possibly shorter skirt than today, squashed between the sweaty vests of her rescuers, uttering such gems as, ‘You seem like a nice young man,’ and ‘What do you do for a living?’