by Guy Kennaway
‘She’s being friendly,’ Cary said.
Locket snuggled into William’s lap, carefully feeling for his penis through his trousers, the way a midwife expertly feels to see which way a baby lies in the womb. She purred to relax William.
‘Aaaah,’ said Cary. ‘Look, she likes you. Isn’t she beautiful?’
Locket surreptitiously unsheathed her claws. She then pricked them through William’s woollen trousers, through his cotton underpants and into his penis. She felt the pop as they pierced the skin of his member.
William smacked Locket’s head, Cary shouted, and Locket ducked her head, closed her eyes and locked her claws tighter into the giving flesh of William’s flaccid cock. William jumped up, yelping, and leapt around doing pelvic thrusts. After a last, sharp squeeze, Locket released, dropped onto the ground and fled to safety under Cary’s bureau.
‘That frigging cat – it hates me, and I tell you what, I hate it!’ William shouted, limping out.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To check for damage.’
‘She was just playing,’ Cary said, but sniggered when William was out of earshot.
Locket came out and climbed silkily back onto the sofa.
‘You are a very naughty girl,’ said Cary, with a mischievous smile that warmed Locket’s heart.
The room regained its earlier calm.
‘It’s so much nicer without him, isn’t it?’ Locket purred.
‘Let’s hope he leaves us alone,’ Cary said.
The house without William was a fantasy that Locket often returned to. Just her, Cary and the flimsy green share portfolio which calmed Cary’s nerves and made her strokes so soft.
‘It’s best with just you and me, isn’t it?’ Cary whispered, smiling at Locket.
That was to Locket a direct command. Cary was telling her what had to be done: get rid of William. Cary couldn’t do it. Her hands had to remain clean. Thus far she had been so careful to remain detached from the … from the thing. The Banger thing. The – purr it so softly – murderrrrrr. And of course Cary couldn’t act now; it could implicate her. It was Locket’s job, as her friend, her best friend, her only friend, to help her, to get the job finished.
Locket thought about life without William; she closed her eyes and let the pleasure reverberate through her. She pictured herself asleep in bed with Cary – something William forbade. And of course once William was gone they could get rid of Jam. Shut him up, once and for all. Have him put down. Purrrrfect.
But Locket couldn’t do it on her own. She needed someone to dig in the secret place, that only she and William knew about. She thought about who could do that, and the answer came sweetly to her.
20
The Human Flap
LOCKET REFERRED TO her cat flap as the front door and called the front door the human flap. That evening she slithered through this egress and trod carefully towards Jam’s kennel. She liked to pass through the bars to annoy Jam, who was imprisoned by them. It made her feel good.
‘What do you want?’ Jam said. He was lying on the concrete floor, his chin on his paws.
‘I’ve got some information for you and your friends,’ Locket said. ‘I heard you were after clues, after evidence.’
‘What?’ said Jam, not moving.
‘I know where the evidence is. The evidence you need to send William away, for a very long time.’
‘Where?’
‘It’s buried behind the greenhouse. William dug a hole and hid it.’
She threaded her way back though the bar, shivered, and disappeared into the house, returning to the warm imprint she had left in the velvet cushion on Cary’s sofa.
‘Hello,’ said Cary.
‘It’s done,’ said Locket. ‘I did it for us.’
In the courtyard kennel Jam raised his head, arched his back and shouted.
‘Mummy! Tosca! Spot! Mummy! Tosca! Spot! Mummeeeee!’
His sharp barks bounced off the brickwork of the courtyard, and echoed into the black square of sky.
At 1.30 a.m. the back door opened and Cary, daubed in face cream and clutching a silk dressing gown to her bony frame, came to the kennel and screamed through the bars: ‘Will you damn well shut up. Shut up! Shut up! You are driving me maaad!’
When she was back in the house Jam pointed his chin upwards and howled again, ‘Toscaaaa! Spot! Mummy! Come here! Help! Help! Help! Yelp! Yelp! Help!’ At 2.15 a.m. the back door flew open again, and this time Cary had a velvet monogrammed slipper in her hand. She drew back the bolt on the kennel, kicked over the water bowl, grabbed Jam’s neck and beat him around the head and the body until he was bludgeoned into silence.
But as soon as Cary was back inside he howled again. ‘Help! Help! Yelp! Yelp!’
His desperate calls floated over the lawn, caught in gusts of breeze and drifted into the woods, but the woods could not help. They heard but could only bear witness to Jam’s cries.
On the land of Llanrisant there still stood a remnant of the ancient forest that once covered the whole estate. There was a crippled oak, covered in boils, split with age, now in its dotage and being bullied by a gang of young ash and birch that were slowly blocking its light. Another double centenarian lived in the middle of a field, but had once been deep in the forest. Magnificent and symmetrical, it resembled a giant Brussels sprout when seen from the heather moor at the other end of the estate. It was through its motionless branches that Jam’s faint barking passed as the first grey light of dawn appeared.
During the First World War, some of the forest at Llanrisant was clear-felled in the national emergency, to make pit props for coal mines. By the end of hostilities hundreds of acres were stripped bare of woodland. Oofy often said that although England had a duty to hurl back the Hun, was it really worth the horrific cost? He hadn’t been referring to the twelve million dead, but to his six decimated pheasant drives. ‘Maybe it would have been better to make peace with the Kaiser and sacrifice France, rather than the shoot,’ he said to his keeper as they walked amongst the stumps and torn earth.
The trees that Oofy replanted in the twenties were now the basis of the shoot at Llanrisant. He sited the new woods with the single thought in mind of how they would shoot in a hundred years. He took into account the land’s subtle contours, its prevailing winds, frost pockets and water sources. His planning had been immaculate, and these fifteen drives now offered the finest birds in Europe. Between the wars there had been a fashion to plant coniferous forestry, which Oofy had been briefly seduced by. Dark squares, rhomboids and triangles of spruce and fir were brutally plastered onto the landscape of Wales and Scotland; Banger had carefully removed and replanted these compartments, blurring their edges and softening their colour with mixed planting.
Banger’s concern had always been with the underwood, which didn’t flourish in the desiccated gloom of a dense plantation of spruce. It was the tangled thicket, with its shelter and teeming insect life that kept pheasants safe and nourished. Banger’s mission with the shoot at Llanrisant had been to support a natural population of pheasants, and crop the weakest with the gun. He would have liked to have dispensed with the pens and artificial feeding entirely, but since it was not lawful to decimate the vermin and raptors, that had not been possible. The pheasants needed protection from animal rights legislation. Banger had always known the number of birds that wintered and bred at Llanrisant, just as he always knew the number that were shot. He was equally proud of both figures. But the whole enterprise was built on the woods that Oofy planted, and which now stood listening to Jam’s yelping.
Banger had grown up among his father’s trees and knew many individually. He had had his favourites and his familiars, and even ones that he disliked. An ash tree on the edge of Spiney Top had a rowan tree growing inside its hollow trunk. You could look through a hole at its base and see the vigorous rowan sapling getting stronger each year, preparing to split apart and kill the old ash. In the summer the branches and leaves intermingled, but
the trees were actually enemies, locked in a combat for space, light and water. Banger’s favourite tree had been the ancient beech that stood on the lawn in front of the house, its trunk the width of a car, its branches weighed down to the lawn, and whose little glossy leaves gave a copper glow to some of the rooms on the south-facing side of the house all summer. It had some ancient graffiti cut into its bark, like scars on a warrior, that told of a time long ago when the house was derelict and lads and lovers would come up to the Hall and sit under the tree.
William was not interested in the underwood, he wasn’t much interested in the canopy; like Barry Brown, he saw the woods as something you had to sweep birds through for form’s sake, towards the Guns. William was not interested in taking a crop of old birds from a natural population. He was hell-bent on genocide.
We cannot tell if the trees knew of Banger’s death or mourned it. When one of them died, crashing over in a storm out of earth loosened by a drought, or had a limb torn off in a fall of late snow, Banger had always marked the moment in his own way, with a peremptory nod in the direction of the imploring arms of the root plate or the stretched sinews of a broken limb, and put the funeral arrangements in hand. This meant two men, a pick-up truck, a chain saw and splitting axe. A big tree might take three days to reduce to the chunks that were piled into Banger’s woodshed, which he had burned in basketfuls on the herring-bone fire, knowing, as he placed another log on the orange embers, exactly from what tree it came. As its smoke twisted up the chimney he had thought of the precise tree in its summer glory and winter silhouette, and had paid it respect and thanked it for its final gift – the warmth he could feel on his face.
On that November morning it wasn’t the keening moan of a buzz saw that wailed through the woods, but the baying of a dog, whose barks floated through the bare branches, over the outstretched trees, down the valley, across the river, and as far as the neighbouring farm, where, in a mildewed static caravan emblazoned with the words Pemberley Sovereign, a group of friends finally heard it.
21
The Pemberley Sovereign
THE POLITICAL SYSTEM of choice for dogs was the dictatorship. Not an oligarchy, like wolves, nor anarchy, like rats, but a reich, and the firmer the better. They felt secure under a dictator, and the smaller the better. Tosca, being a Dachshund, was ideally suited to the role, and ruled over the Pemberley Sovereign from the terrifying height of five inches. Victoria was the titular head of state, but wielded no power, and was little more than Tosca’s puppet. She used to divide titbits carefully into three and lay them in front of Tosca, Spot and Sunshine, saying ‘There’s a treat for each of you’, but when her back was turned Tosca, like any decent dictator, confiscated the meat and ate it all herself.
Spot liked the way the humans were all snuggled up with the dogs in the Pemberley Sovereign. He appreciated the rich smell of armpit that hung thickly around Tom in its airless atmosphere. Sunshine was less certain about the static; she had trouble climbing up to its front door; it made her anxious that Victoria would have her put down, but she needn’t have worried: Victoria made a box for her to step onto. Tosca loathed the Pemberley, on grounds of taste. She was as out of place as a silk cushion in a prison cell, and turned up her sharp nose at its translucent orange curtains, clashing tartan cushions and speckled Formica.
‘It’s actually quite comfortable, when you get used to it,’ Victoria said to Tom. He glared at her.
‘I’m writing a book,’ he said, ‘it’s called All the Times You Were Wrong and All the Times I was Right. This place is shit. Like my life.’
The change in their circumstances had meant that Tom had been taken out of his expensive boarding school in Cheshire and sent to the local secondary. He dropped the dirge of complaint about being at an all-boy boarding school, and picked up one about being removed from an all-boy boarding school. In a futile attempt to put a smile on his taut, angry face, Victoria got Sky, so he could watch his favourite programmes. While Tom was at school, the dogs and Victoria watched The Horse and Country channel, a low-budget operation that screened endless three-day events, old Monty Roberts’ masterclasses and dog shows interspersed with adverts for fertiliser and wormers.
‘It’s so common,’ Tosca said to Sunshine, ‘watching daytime TV in a caravan. I feel like a Rotty, or a Pit Bull. I need oak-panelling, stone floors, log fires and silk curtains. This is not my natural habitat.’
Victoria said, ‘We’re only here until I get my money through.’
Her large investment in William’s High Altitude Gold Award Unit Trust had gone wrong, and was being held in escrow until the courts sorted it out.
‘We’re never going to see that money again,’ Tom said.
‘Don’t be silly. It just takes time with lawyers.’
‘I’m too highly strung for this atmosphere,’ Tosca told Sunshine, who looked loosely strung, lying for hours with her hairy chin on her paws, doing nothing but moulting.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ Sunshine asked, without moving her head. ‘It’s warm and dry. We’ve got Victoria and Tom.’
Tom liked to watch American shows, particularly ‘CSI Miami’ and ‘CSI New York’; on his seventeenth birthday Victoria gave him the boxset of ‘Bones’. Sunshine liked the sound of that. Her teeth were too bad to gnaw at real bones now; all she could do was try to lick the marrow out of one that Tosca left lying under the Pemberley, but mainly she just had to lie and listen to Tosca and Spot crunching and cracking.
Sunshine wondered what was in the boxset, hoping it would be episode after episode of close-ups of various juicy cuts of meat: a veal chop with beef hanging from it, a huge oily ox femur, or a cooked pheasant carcass. When Tom played the DVD, it was a disappointment, though she lay beside him on the couch, her chin on her paws, one eye on the screen, just in case it ever lived up to its name.
‘I hate the way everything in here looks like something it’s not,’ Tosca said to nobody in particular one day. It was sunny outside but a cool wind beat at their aluminium shell, lightly rocking the caravan. ‘The metal trim is plastic, the woollen upholstery is nylon, the wooden ceiling is plyboard, the coal fire is gas, the sofa is really a bed. It’s masquerading as a home but it’s just a tin box on two tiny wheels. Not that we can move it, according to Tom. Victoria has to pump the lavatory, the front door flaps open, and there’s no security – she has to hide her jewellery in the chicken coop. When they put the heating on it gets stifling in about twenty minutes and when they turn it off, freezing in about three. It’s not good enough. We have to move.’ She looked at Victoria, stirring in her bed, where she had retreated to for the afternoon. ‘And now this – that looks suspiciously like depression to me,’ Tosca said, staring at the big woman.
Victoria swung her feet off the bed, rocked against the tartan cushions and stood up in her hooped socks. Sunshine opened an eye. Victoria reached for her coat and keys. Spot leapt up and down on his back legs.
‘Sit down, you numbskull,’ snapped Tosca. ‘It’s not a walk, it’s the school run.’
‘But she’s got her coat.’
‘And she’s got her car keys,’ said Tosca. ‘And what does that mean?’
‘Car,’ said Spot.
‘Which means no walk, you runt.’
Victoria sat heavily on the door step, and reached under the Pemberley for her boots. With a grunt she pulled them on and stood up.
‘Walk! Walk! Walk!’ shouted Spot.
‘We’re picking Tom up from school. How thick are you? Sit down, or I’ll do it again,’ Tosca said.
Spot knew what that meant, and sat down. Tosca would pee on the floor of the caravan while Victoria and Tom were out, resulting in Spot, who was only recently house-trained, getting his nose rubbed in it.
Victoria shook the keys and let the dogs pour out. The last of a fall of snow had nearly melted, and only a few lumps of stuff that looked like grey sponge cake hung around on the swollen and soft ground.
Sunshine padded slowly to the b
ack of the Lanny, and stood waiting for Victoria.
‘Can you hear that?’ Tosca asked.
Sunshine turned her head.
‘Jam’s yelling his head off again. He was at it all day and all night,’ Tosca said.
‘Probably got his head caught in the bars,’ Tosca said.
‘Something’s wrong,’ said Sunshine. ‘We’d better go up and see him.’
Victoria opened the Lanny door and hooked her arm under Sunshine’s belly to lift and tip her into the vehicle, her claws scratching at the metal.
Victoria climbed in up front. Banger’s old Land Rover still bore the marks of his ownership. She had meant to give it a good clean, but hadn’t got round to it. Mud and dog spume obscured the windows; the sidepockets were wedged with papers and maps, the footwells jammed with of old papers, odd boots, bits of wire and tools and pipes. Sponge stuffing spewed from the upholstery on each of the three front seats, and teeth marks scarred the dashboard. A carapace of grime obscured the dials and stuck to the steering wheel. Banger had slashed through the seat belt with a knife when one day it annoyed him. He had abided by little of the Highway Code, and came from the generation that considered drinking and driving not a crime but a challenge. He had often hammered down the lanes around Llanrisant pissed, swerving round pheasants and mounting the verge to flatten a rabbit. He was proud of the Lanny’s many dents, scrapes and missing trim, as if they were the scars won in battles he fought against petty traffic regulations, in the greater war he waged against anyone who attempted to make his life wholesome and safe.
At the school gates they waited, steaming up the car nicely. Tom got in wearing a beanie down to his eyebrows. He sniffed twice. ‘This stinks, this car. Radio One,’ and he switched it over.
When they pulled up at Bryn’s, Tom intoned ‘Home sweet home’ in a way that made Victoria say, ‘As soon as I get my money back from William, we’ll buy a little place and move.’
‘When’s that going to be?’ Tom asked.