When I Saw the Animal

by Cohen, Bernard;

  Oh yeah, the key – he would leave the key in a tin on the front veranda.

  Bye.

  Bye.

  Although I’m not always known for punctuality, I arrived with plenty of time to find two tins sitting there on the veranda. In these situations I sometimes play a sort of luck game with myself – if I could pick the correct tin, I’d be in for a good day. Left or right? Would he leave it further from the door (more secure) or nearer (the ol’ double bluff)? Guessed he’d play it straight. And yesss: my first choice of tin held a key.

  Maybe my brother had double-doubled – regarding security methods and bluffs, just how strategic was he? This brass key wouldn’t turn in the brass keyhole. Second tin, second key? Nope. The other tin was empty. I had been right. Logic and understanding of the human mind are two of my strengths. Therefore: one key, another door. I made my way down the side of the house. There had been no talk of back doors, I was almost sure. Through the glass sliding door I could see his newly purchased though unrenovated kitchen. The brass key didn’t fit this lock either – aluminium fitting, so not even a likely match – or perhaps it was a duplicate key and hadn’t been filed properly. Or checked. By him.

  The back door, though, was not locked. The house move must not be suiting my brother’s temperament, for him to overlook this. I slid the door open, stepped through and sat at the kitchen table to fiddle with my phone and wait. My brother’s laminated kitchen table must have deteriorated in the move, and was piled with plates and saucepans. Seemed as though his sense of order had deteriorated in the move too – that thought gave me unedifying satisfaction. My phone, on the other hand, had no satisfaction to offer. No emails had arrived. It was not my turn in any games. No one had interacted with any of my social media profiles.

  A weird gurgly, growly sound commenced somewhere further into the house. Intermittent and extremely annoying, this must be what prompted the call for the plumber. I stood and deposited the phone back in my pocket. What to do? Explore the house? Attend to the noise somehow? I had once bent a wire thingo inside the toilet cistern and this initiative had stopped a much milder hissy sound, but my plumbing skills were otherwise unrenowned. So forget it. Let him pay the plumber for piping.

  I sat down for a moment and stood up again. What to do in an unfamiliar house. Go through his stuff? Shuffle the paperwork? I was here to do my brother a favour, so these intrusive thoughts ought to be suppressed.

  The fridge. That ought to provide a distraction. I wondered if my photo was on his fridge. After all, I was the person he turned to when someone was needed to sit in a house for a morning. But there were no family pics at all – the fridge exterior was bare other than a couple of photos of acrobats clipped from a magazine, perhaps by my niece. One showed a trapeze artist, just released, smiling towards the camera; the second, two sequined women gesticulating in conversation, each balanced on the shoulders of a sequined man. Funny little thing, my niece.

  Standing before the fridge reminded me that I hadn’t eaten breakfast. I opened the fridge and lifted out a bottle of green juice, took a couple of swigs and replaced it. Toast might be the thing, but where was the bread?

  Growling of pipes ceased for a moment and was replaced by scratching. That surely can’t have been the plumbing. Rats – they were infested with rats. Ooh boy, he wouldn’t like that at all. I thought to leave him a note about it. He knew I’d previously had a rat issue, and occasionally referred to it when a context could be extended to contain rodentism, such as any mention of Norway or feral mammals. Given my experience and therefore acquired expertise, I reasoned that he might appreciate a recommendation for pest exterminators. I couldn’t see a notepad anywhere – this was something I’d have expected to see magnetised to his fridge. I tore off a strip of newspaper from the pile on the table and searched for a pen. The scratching stopped. For a moment there was silence. I checked my phone: 9.53. Where was this plumber? I should have asked for a contact number, or my brother should have thought to have provided it.

  Perhaps I could fix it after all, and get out of there. I picked my way along the hallway past a couple of piles of removalist’s boxes. The growling sound had restarted, but was now more of a quiet wailing. The scratching sounded more desperate than ever, and all the noise seemed to emanate from the bathroom door. I reached for the handle. As I gripped it, ready to twist it, a sudden thump hit. I jumped back. A single nail came straight through the door, very close to the handle. I thought for a second someone had hammered the nail through, which made no sense at all. And the nail was slightly curved, perhaps not metal. I must have frozen for a moment, my hand hovering close to the handle without taking it. The nail disappeared back the way it had come.

  At that very moment, I heard the plumber on the front veranda. Thank God! I withdrew my hand and backtracked around via the kitchen and veered left across the living room towards the front.

  Disquietingly, as I reached the front door the plumber pushed a key into the lock and was jiggling it this way and that. The door swung open. The plumber stood before me, wearing a long red coat and a top hat, and carrying a leather barbecue tool of some description. He looked more surprised than I felt.

  ‘What the coathook are you doing in my house?’ he said.

  ‘Why do you have a key to my brother’s house?’ I retorted. ‘Are you here to fix the plumbing or not?’

  The barbecue tool unravelled to reveal a horsewhip.

  ‘Whoa, whoa,’ I said. ‘Just give me a moment.’

  I was showing him my hands, in one of which I held my phone.

  ‘Just ringing my brother.’ I probably say ‘just’ a lot when uncomfortable.

  ‘I think you should leave now,’ said the plumber.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I said, holding up my hand like a traffic cop’s.

  ‘Where the bloody heck are you?’ answered my brother. ‘The plumber’s been waiting half an hour.’

  ‘At your place. And the plumber has just walked in this second wearing a red morning coat.’

  ‘A what?’ asked my brother.

  ‘I’m not the plumber,’ said the plumber, waving his barbecue-tool-cum-whip this way and that in an increasingly agitated manner.

  ‘And he says he’s not the plumber,’ I relayed.

  ‘Has he fixed it?’

  ‘He just walked in.’

  ‘This is my home, you imbecile.’

  ‘And he’s very rude. Did you know that?’

  ‘No, he’s lovely. Are you at 12 Mountain Street?’

  ‘12 Fountain Street, as you said.’

  ‘You are what? I did not!’

  I hung up on him. The phone rang immediately, but I ignored it.

  ‘Very sorry,’ I said to the not-the-plumber. ‘My brother made a mistake with his address.’

  ‘Someone made a mistake. You’re very lucky. Did you touch anything?’

  ‘No, I promise.’

  ‘Good.’

  I stepped around him and onto the veranda.

  ‘I hope you didn’t disturb the leopard,’ he said, as I anteloped my way down the path.

  Feverish

  I went looking for myself and there I was, in a small, darkened room.

  You’ve got to get out of here, I said to myself.

  I don’t got to do anything, I told myself right back. I was impatient because nothing had worked out at all so far.

  Come on, things will be better once you’re out. And you’ll have the chance to see yourself properly.

  Why would that be any better than not seeing myself properly or seeing myself improperly?

  We’re our own worst enemy.

  Kind of.

  What?

  There are several alternative enemies, so enemies but not worst.

  Aah. You coming?

  Not sure.

  What do you think the outcome will be he
re?

  We’ll do our best to stay alive.

  Yes, either way.

  Noiseless

  Disgorged out of that lawyer’s office onto the blinking street, Simeon applied the noise-cancelling headphones sforzando to his head. Something better fucking work around here, seeing as he’d just been the least effective fucking noise producer in the history of sound. He adjusted the headband – will these headphones cancel the words he had heard ten minutes previously? Well, will they? Fuck that lawyer. Fuck his oleaginous presentation. Fuck the fucking documentation. Simeon was standing still outside the narrow doorway. A bus lodged its scream into his parietal lobe, where the sound persisted a few bars longer than seemed possible. It shouldn’t have even got in there. Fuck that too. Simeon slapped the left-side earpad or earpiece or whatever it was called, but it didn’t cancel the world out – the bus shouted some gears at him and fucked off. Fuck. The fucking things had cost him two hundred and fifty dollars so should do their advertised job. Under-promise and over-deliver – or, if you were a fucking lawyer, receive promise, agree to it, steal fucking everything. He fiddled with the phone, pressing the Play/Pause button repeatedly. This too was a design fault as there should have been separate buttons. Or regions. Of course it was not a real button, just a set of screen coordinates some geeky kid had come up with. BUT WHO FUCKING CARES?

  He wrenched them off. For a moment, he might have thrown the whole assemblage onto the ground and stomped off. Somehow he stopped himself without the fury subsiding. Better to have thrown the lawyer onto the ground and stomped off – or stomped on the fucker, come to think of it – after the not-quite-apologetic crap the smarmy old fart had subjected him to. But he also knew it was right not to have done it, he didn’t need to be arrested on top of ripped off.

  The lawyer. He performed lawyerness with his entire being. Did he ever step out of it? Was he a lawyer when he got home to his studio-photographed children or his twenty-megapixel wife? Fuck.

  That’s the way the cookie crumbles, so, unfortunately, the lawyer had said in his over-articulated trochees, or perhaps he’d added a further condescending frame: That, my boy, is unfortunately the way et cetera. And followed it with further infuriating fake mollification: Though the cards might have fallen another way and given a different result, but we mere humans can’t argue with the forces of fate. Smile. Like a parody lawyer, what’s it called, the supercession of simulacra. Do actual lawyers actually exist anymore? Or only a kind of lawyer-shaped space emitting platitudes instead of cosmic signals. Smile. The lawyer’s name persisted on a card in the angry man’s pocket. For a few moments it was no longer in his memory, from which Simeon had cancelled it by force of will, but the erasure was somehow undone and the lawyer’s presence reasserted itself, that self-parodying image of lawyerness quoting Aristotle, ‘The wise man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of his circumstances.’ Smarmy smile. Smarle.

  Shit fuck. Fuck shit.

  No need for that, son. (Did he actually say ‘son’? Surely Simeon’s memory was embroidering – a stitch-up – but the recollection was lodged in his head.) I’m sorry for you. Once things have come to this they cannot be undone, the lawyer smiled, would that smile never be wiped? Simeon had felt his shoulders tense and his fists clench. He smiled too, a forced mirroring, with the thought of cancelling the fucking lawyer’s nose. He set his mouth and looked the lawyer in those yellowed Anglo-Saxon eyes. The lawyer blanched, seeing in return the flare in Simeon’s eyes, or imagining it. Simeon shifted slightly. We’re both dead if he steps forward, the lawyer thought, me first. One dead and white, the other dead and red. There was the button under his desk and he felt for it. Simeon wasn’t that big – he wasn’t, as it is said, built – but the lawyer added the certifiable fury in Simeon’s expression to the documentable facts that he looked taut and he looked up for trouble, and let the record show that his fists were so tight it was possible they could not be undone. The lawyer pressed his palm against the underside of the desk, three fingers now against the smooth curve of the button, but he didn’t press. Affidavit-ready but no affidavit. Okay. Self-control all around.

  Simeon subsided and watched the lawyer, whatever his fucking name was, ease back into his chair. Duress button, divined Simeon. Ha. Fucking shit. I might not have a total grip of myself, not always, but I can play him like a puppet, here we go, ha, now lean forward, hold there, one-two-three, and now relax. I can play him like a fucking ballet school. Bubble up, bubble up, you great empty sack, sink back now. Simeon loomed towards him slightly and saw the lawyer’s hand twitch forward again. Come on, show me your incisors again, is that a smile or saffron moonrise over the chinless night? In-out-in-out, rocked Simeon, timing it, syncopating the fucker. Ha fucking ha. Simeon rolled out a thinking face to prolong the sport. No one was saying anything – presumably the lawyer was charging someone by the increment. Eventually they played themselves out: Simeon switched back to fury-face and the amnesia-inducing lawyer said, Well if there’s nothing else. Fuck that, Simeon said, there’s plenty and you’ll be hearing, but they both already knew no one would hear anything, and Simeon slammed his fist on the desk for the hell of it and stomped down the stairs and onto M Street, turned left, stomped a further fifty metres and let out a yell that had pedestrians near him backing away.

  There in the street Simeon danced a couple of left jabs and a right uppercut. Are you English? Couldn’t you get a job in England? Did your accent precede or post-date the yellowness of your teeth?

  It was twilight out there by now, and a nearly full real moon emerged like a lawyer’s faked astonishment. Simeon considered telling someone what had happened and how the fuckers had ripped him off. There had been informal undertakings, gentlemen’s agreements. But who could he complain to as he’d fallen out with everyone he could think of, everyone who had once been trustworthy? Cut out of this and everything else since forever, and such potential all gone up, that’s life but you wouldn’t expect it from family.

  Don’t get paranoid here, he told himself. Don’t go building conspiracies from two people having similar stupid ideas. No need to assume a pancake just because someone says flour and someone says eggs. Breathe nicely. Everything that happens is just one thing.

  Yeah right. The world was full of people who didn’t believe that one. If flour and eggs meet up in a bowl, that’s not by chance. Life is the cumulative effect of intention as well as fortune.

  But anyway. He had to talk himself down, no good had come of shouting at Yellowtooth. Simeon had finally worked the headphones into the right position – curiously, he sarcasted to himself, it had taken finesse rather than force. This lawyer encounter went to demonstrate something, like maybe don’t get your hopes up just because someone swore themselves blue that they weren’t going to let you down, and number two on top of that, the problem of relying on yourself when you’re hopeless. Simeon felt the tension building again as he cycled through blaming others and self-blame. He went through in his mind everything which might have in the past calmed him, images from here and there in those childhood moments when he wasn’t completely miserable: sitting in a tree when a bird landed, swimming in a wave with a school of fish, walking somewhere unfamiliar and seeing a puppy. It took him about half a second to recognise the pattern – somewhere bland seeing something fluffy – and for that sense of self-loathing to grab his throat. Walking along this footpath now seemed a mistake. He should have come down those stairs from the lawyer’s office and kept on descending, he should have sunk into the ground. He was just walking, not going home or anywhere. He was too angry to notice his own grief. Either way. Jab-jab. Haymaker.

  Some stranger said, Whoa mate, you going okay there? Simeon dropped his hands, took a few quick steps, looked up.

  He’d somehow arrived in a familiar part of town, where he had been often a decade or two earlier. Hung out. He was conscious of his age. The city was crowded with fantastically
beautiful young people as though for deliberate contrast with the sense of his own decrepitude. His head didn’t feel right. He couldn’t remember the walk here. How much time had the fucking lawyer caused to disappear?

  Eat. Food. Drink. Poison. He should chew off his own arm. Fifty more metres. Pub. He followed a foully content couple through the door, adhering to some principle of aerodynamics, and found himself a place at the adjacent table. He pulled off the headphones. Whoa, noisy as fuck. Did someone say something? Did everyone?

  What? Simeon said. What?

  The couple ignored him, which was steadfast and easy as why the fuck would he be speaking to them rather than into the fucking air. A waitress came over and said to him, Are you going to order something because otherwise the table. He said, Yeah yeah, bring me something and shoved a credit card at her, which wasn’t how things worked here. Drinks at the counter and menu on that board up there, she said. She won the rudeness comp because of her competence. He was just winging it.

  He left the satchel on the table, What else can anyone take from me, ordered a beer. None of the brands seemed familiar. An ordinary beer, he said to the unsmiling, too-lovely-to-exist barperson. Okay. To eat? To drink, Simeon said, as repayment for no smile. No need to be that, said the vision, who Simeon realised was a bit blurry round the edges, and what was that all about?