She was confused – did the others know what had happened after all? – until she realised that he meant the brown lump.
—Are you two really from a vicarage? asked Becky.—It’s like something out of a book.
—We can’t offer the respectability that Hilary’s used to, Neil said.—She’ll have to slum it here for a few days.
Hilary could see that Neil was the centre of all the others’ attention. At least he had not joined in when the others were fluttering and fussing about their work; he had smiled to himself, licking the edges of little pieces of white paper and sticking them together as if none of it bothered him. He had an air as if he saw through the sham of it all, as if he came from a place where the university didn’t count for much: she could see how this had power over the others. He didn’t say much but when he spoke it was with a deliberate debunking roughness that made the others abject, ashamed even of the feel in their mouths of their own nice eager voices.
Becky told Neil flirtatiously that he would have to be on his best behaviour, while Hilary was staying.—No swearing, she said.—’Cause I can see she’s a nice girl.
—Fuck, he said.—I hadn’t thought of that. Fuck that.
Hilary thought of the farm boys at home, who called sexual words when she and Sheila had to walk past them in their school uniform. She had always thought, however much it tortured her, that they had an obscure right to do it because of their work. In the winter mornings from the school bus you could see the frozen mists rising up out of the flat colourless fields, and figures bent double with sacks across their shoulders, picking Brussels sprouts, or sugar beeting. But Neil was here, wasn’t he, at university? He’d crossed over to their side, the lucky side. Whatever she thought of her life, she knew it was on the lucky side, so long as she wasn’t picking Brussels sprouts or meat-packing.
No one had said anything since she arrived about where Hilary was to sleep. Sheila was supposed to have booked a guest room for her at Manor Hall, but of course she couldn’t go there now. When she couldn’t hold herself upright at the kitchen table any longer she climbed upstairs to ask what she should do, but Sheila was asleep, breathing evenly and deeply. Her forehead was cool. Hilary kept all her clothes on and wrapped herself in an old quilt that Sheila had kicked off; she curled up to sleep on the floor beside the bed. At some point in the night she woke, frozen rigid and harrowed by a bitter draught blowing up through the bare floorboards; she climbed into the bed beside Sheila who snorted and heaved over. Under the duvet and all the blankets it smelled of sweat and blood, but it was warm. When she woke again it was morning and the sun was shining.
—Look at the patterns, Sheila said.
She was propped up calmly on one elbow on the pillow, and seemed returned into her usual careful self-possession. Hilary noticed for the first time that the room was painted yellow; the sun struck through the tall uncurtained windows and projected swimming squares of light on to the walls, dancing with the movements of the twiggy tops of trees which must be growing in a garden outside.
—Are you all right? she asked.
Sheila ignored the question as if there had never been anything wrong.
—How did you get on with everybody last night?
—We went to a pub.
—Oh, which one? She interrogated Hilary until she was satisfied that it must have been the Beaufort.—We often go there, she said enthusiastically.—It’s got a great atmosphere, it’s really local.
—When I told them we lived in a vicarage, Hilary said,—one of them asked if we were Catholics.
—That’s so funny. I bet I know who that was. What did you think of Neil?
Hilary was cautious.—Is he from the north?
—Birmingham, you idiot. Couldn’t you tell? Such a pure Brummie accent.
—He wasn’t awfully friendly.
Sheila smiled secretively.—He doesn’t do that sort of small talk. His dad works as a toolsetter at Lucas’s, the engineering company. No one in his family has been to university before. His parents don’t have money, compared to most of the students here. He gets pretty impatient with people, you know, who just take their privilege for granted.
Hilary felt like a child beside her sister. What had happened yesterday marked Sheila as initiated into the adult world, apart from her, as clearly as if she was signed with blood on her forehead. She supposed it must be the unknown of sexual intercourse which could transform things in this way that children couldn’t see: Neil’s self-importance into power, for instance. At the same time as she was in awe of her sister’s difference, Hilary also felt a stubborn virgin pride. She didn’t want ever to be undone out of her scepticism, or seduced into grown-up credulous susceptibility.
—But doesn’t he think that we’re poor, too? she asked fiercely.—Have you told him? Does he have any idea?
—It’s different, said Sheila with finality.—It’s just different.
When Hilary drove in the summer with her father in the Bedford van, to pick up Sheila and all her things at the end of her first year, she was waiting for them of course at Manor Hall, as if there had never been any other place, any squat whose kitchen was painted with giant mushrooms. Hilary understood that she was not ever to mention what had happened there, not even when she and Sheila were alone. Because they never wore the memory out by speaking of it, the place persisted vividly in her imagination.
She had stayed on in that house for almost a week: she had arrived on Monday and her return ticket was for Saturday. Sheila rested for the first couple of days, sleeping a lot, and Hilary went out on her own, exploring, going round the shops. On Sheila’s instructions she took several carrier bags of bloody sheets and towels to the launderette, where she sat reading Virginia Woolf while the washing boiled. There seemed to be a lot of hours to pass, because she didn’t want to spend too much time in Sheila’s room; she shrank from the possibility of getting in the way between Sheila and Neil. A couple of times she went to the cinema in the afternoon by herself. They all went out to pubs every evening and she got used to drinking beer, although she didn’t get to like it. While the others joked and drank and smoked she sat in a silence that must have looked gawky and immature, so that she was sure Sheila despaired of her, although Sheila must also surely have known that she found the conversation impossible to join because it was so tepid and disappointing, gossip mostly about people she’d never met. Sheila, who had been aloof and not popular at school, seemed to be working hard to make these people like her. She made herself brighter and funnier and smaller than her real self, Hilary thought. She surrounded Neil in particular with such efforts of admiration, prompting him and encouraging him and attributing ideas to him, while he smiled in lazy amusement, rolling up his eternal cigarettes. At least they weren’t all over each other, they didn’t cling together in public. Hilary even feared for Neil, thinking that he shouldn’t trust her sister, he should wonder what dark undertow might follow after such a glittering bright flood.
By the end of the week Sheila was well enough to go to lectures again, and on the Saturday she came to the bus station to see Hilary off. She insisted on carrying Hilary’s suitcase, which swung in her hand as light as if there was nothing in it, now that their father’s old dictionaries of classical mythology had been unloaded.
—I didn’t feel anything, you know, Sheila said as they walked, as if she was picking up on some discussion they had only broken off a few moments before, although in fact they hadn’t talked once, since it was over, about what had happened to her.—I mean, apart from physically. Just like a tummy upset. That’s all it was: a nuisance.
—All right, if you say so.
For the first time Sheila talked about her studies. She had to write an essay on the Oresteia which she said was all about the sex war, female avenging Furies and male reason.
—The gods are disgusted at you, she said gleefully.—Apollo to the Furies. Apoptustoi theosis. Never let your filth touch anything in my sacred shrine.
Wh
en Hilary was in her seat in the coach, Sheila stayed hanging around outside the window although Hilary signed to her to go, there was no need to wait. They laughed at one another through the glass, helpless to communicate: for the first time they were in tune together as they used to be. Sheila mouthed something and Hilary mimed elaborately: frowned, shook her head, shrugged her shoulders. She couldn’t understand. Sheila put her face close to the glass and cupped her hands round her mouth, shouting. She was wearing a woollen knitted hat with knitted flowers, pulled down over her ears.
—Give my love to everybody!
Hilary saw that all of a sudden her sister didn’t want her to go. She was seized then by an impulse to struggle off the coach, to stay and fight, as if Sheila had after all been abducted by a Bluebeard: she felt focused as a crusader in her opposition to Neil. She even half turned round in her seat, as if to get out. But there was a man in the seat beside her, she would have had to ask him to move, he was settled behind his newspaper. The moment and the possibility passed. The coach reversed, the sisters waved frantically, and then Sheila was gone and Hilary subsided into her solitude, keeping her face averted from the man who had seen too much of her excitement, and whose newspaper anyway would make her sick if she accidentally read any of the headlines.
Above the city buildings the sky was blue and pale with light, drawn across by thin skeins of transparent cloud. Beyond the outskirts of the city everything was bursting with the spring growth which was further on over here than in the east. The tips of the hedgerows and the trees, if they hadn’t yet come into leaf, gave off a red haze where the twigs swelled and shone. It seemed extraordinary to Hilary that her life must at some point soon change as completely and abruptly as Sheila’s had, so that everything familiar would be left behind. She sat with bubbles of excitement rising in her chest. The scruffy undistinguished countryside outside the coach window seemed to her beautiful. It desolated her to think that when she was dead she wouldn’t be able to see it: cows, green hummocky fields, suburban cottages of weathered brick, a country factory with smashed windows, an excited spatter of birds thrown up from a tree. Then she started to see these things as if she was dead already, and they were persisting after her, and she had been allowed back, and must take in everything hungrily while she had the chance, every least tiny detail.
ADAM MAREK
The 40-Litre Monkey
I once met a man with a forty-litre monkey. He measured all his animals by volume. His Dalmatian was small, only eighteen litres, but his cat, a Prussian Blue, was huge – five litres, when most cats are three. He owned a pet shop just off Portobello Road. I needed a new pet for my girlfriend because our last two had just killed each other.
‘The ideal pet,’ the owner told me, ‘is twelve litres. That makes them easy enough to pick up, but substantial enough for romping without risk of injury. What did you have?’
‘A gecko,’ I replied. ‘I guess he was about half a pint.’
‘You use imperial?’ The man smirked and gestured towards a large vivarium in the corner. ‘Iguana,’ he said. ‘Six litres, and still growing.’
‘Oh right,’ I said. ‘I also had a cat. She must have been four litres, maybe more.’
‘Are you sure?’ he asked. ‘Was she a long hair, because they look big, but when you dunk them they’re small, like skinny rats.’
‘She was a short hair,’ I said.
‘How old?’
‘Four.’
‘That volume would have dropped anyway, unless you mixed tripe with her food. Did you do that?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘She ate tuna fish.’
‘No pet ever got voluminous eating tuna,’ he smiled, almost sympathetic.
‘What’s the biggest thing you’ve got?’ I asked.
‘That would have to be my forty-litre monkey,’ he smiled.
‘May I see it?’
‘You doubt my veracity?’
‘Not at all. Is it a secret monkey?’
‘No, he’s not a secret monkey. I’ve shown him in South America, Russia, and most of Western Europe.’
‘What sort of monkey is it?’
‘He is a baboon,’ he said, raising his eyebrows.
‘A baboon? What do they usually scale in at?’
‘Twenty-three litres.’
‘How did yours get so big?’
‘I won’t tell you. Have you any idea how many thirty-litre monkeys I got through before I hit on the right combination?’
I shrugged my shoulders. The man rubbed his brow between his thumb and forefinger, as if wondering why he was even talking to me, the owner of a dead half-pint gecko. I was getting claustrophobic and started to leave, when he grabbed my arm and said, ‘Would you like to see my monkey?’
I nodded that I would. He locked the front door and led me up a narrow staircase. Names were written on every step, and alongside, a volume: Edgar 29 litres; Wallace 32 litres; Merian 34 litres. Also on every step were paper bags of feed, books and files, stacked up against the wall, so that I had to put each foot directly in front of the other to walk up, and I kept catching my ankle with the edge of my heel.
‘So how did your pets die, anyway?’ the man asked.
‘The cat managed to slide the door of the gecko’s tank open. She tried to eat him whole, and he stuck in her throat.’
‘Hmph,’ the man laughed.
The man took me to a door, which was covered in stickers of various animal organisations I’d never heard of: Big Possums of Australasia, American Tiny Titans. The door had a keypad, which he shielded with one hand as he punched the code with the other. A pungent stench of meat and straw and bleach poured out of the room, and I heard a soft sucking noise, like air drawn into a broken vacuum, but I may have imagined this.
Being in the room felt like being suffocated in an armpit. Something was shuffling about in a cage in the corner, grunting softly. The perimeter of the room was like the staircase, with books, files and bags of dried foodstuffs piled up the walls. The floor was covered in black linoleum, and the section in front of the door was rough with thousands of scratches. Opposite the door was an archway, which led into a bright bathroom. He had a huge glass tank in there with units of measurement running up the sides and extra marks and comments written in marker pen.
‘He’s over there,’ the man said. ‘Stay here, and I’ll let him out.’
‘Does he bite?’ I asked.
‘Not any more.’
The man took a key from his back pocket, which was attached to a chain and belt loop. The lock undid with a satisfying click. He opened the cage door a little and crouched in front. He whispered something to the baboon, but I couldn’t hear what he said. He nodded his head, as if receiving a response from the monkey, then moved back, staying in his crouched position.
The bad air in the room was making me feel sick.
‘Why is it so dark in here?’ I asked.
‘Light makes him too active. He burns off all that volume when the light’s on,’ he replied.
The man stayed crouched down, and began to bob his backside up and down, as if he were rubbing an itch up against a tree. He patted the floor with his hands, staring all the while into the cage.
A shape shuffled out. I’d never seen a regular-size baboon, so had no point of reference for his size, but he was big, big and greasy.
‘Why is his fur all slicked down like that?’ I asked.
‘Vaseline,’ the man replied. ‘Baboon hair is slightly absorbent. If he soaks up water that makes less volume.’
‘So you grease him up to make him waterproof?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that legal?’
The man looked at me like I was an idiot.
The baboon came further out of the cage. The man put something in his own mouth. The baboon shifted back nervously at first, but then skipped in and took the food from his lips. He looked at me while he ate. His face seemed to be saying, ‘I know I look ridiculous, but if you say anything, I’ll pull you
r arm off.’
‘What’s his name?’ I asked.
‘Don’t speak so loudly,’ he whisper-spat. ‘He’s called Cooper.’
‘So what’s next,’ I asked. ‘A fifty-litre monkey?’
‘You can’t get a baboon that size. Not without steroids.’
‘Do they make monkey steroids?’
‘Are you mocking me?’ The man stood up. The baboon raised his arms and hooted. The man squatted down again and bowed his head, looking back at me and suggesting I do the same.
I squatted down. The smell became worse. It hung near the floor like a fog.
‘Do many people do this, grow big monkeys, I mean?’
‘Not many. In this country anyway.’
‘How many would you say there are around the world?’
‘It’s hard to say,’ the man said. ‘Not everyone competes, but there are about sixty regulars I guess.’
‘And is this a record monkey?’
‘By half a litre.’
‘So have you got like an arch rival? An enemy monkey grower?’ I couldn’t help smiling when I said this. The man seemed to be having a crisis. He didn’t know whether to be angry, or to be excited. I think this must have been the first time anyone had wanted to see his monkey.
‘There’s a guy from Thailand. He claimed he had a forty-three litre monkey, but he’d put putty in its armpits and stuffed golfballs up its bum.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘It’s quite common. They’re a lot stricter about it now though.’
The baboon settled close to the man and allowed him to stroke its greasy head.
‘Who’s they?’ I asked. ‘Is there some kind of governing body?’
‘Yes, the BMG.’
‘What’s that stand for, the Big Monkey Group?’ I laughed.
‘Yes. They’re a part of the Big Animal Group. People compete with almost every animal you could think of. I specialise in baboons, but I dabble in cats and guinea pigs too. They’re cheaper to transport long distance, and they take less time to grow.’
I was glad that it was dark because my eyes were watering.
The Penguin Book of the British Short Story Page 82