How to Be Human

by Paula Cocozza

  Mary hurried across the park to the station, checking behind herself at every bend. The path snaked through the grass, and she had the impression she was being followed. Footsteps shadowed her, passed her, came at her. She kept looking over her shoulder, to the sides, and the bright grass rolled around like a green bowl turning in someone’s hands.

  * * *

  FOR THE FIRST time that week, Mary returned home to an empty garden. The fox must have got the message, she thought. She leant over to brush lime dust from the lounger, and as she did so, a slither of gold leather caught her eye in the long grass. The sandal was hot from lying in the sun. She turned it over, looking for teeth marks or saliva trails, but there was no sign it had been touched. Just something about it felt different, as luggage feels different, handled, when it’s collected from the carousel.

  Mary slithered her foot inside. Perhaps this was going to turn out OK. With one foot shod, the other bare, she walked down the garden and crossed the line of shade thrown down by the lime. She found the second shoe beside the shed. Having made her decision with the first, she slipped it on without a sniff. One foot hot, one foot cold.

  It was a bit of a scramble to get over the wall—she had to stand on a chair from the shed. But then she was in the woods, skirting a large nettle bed on her way to the hazel, sunlight dappling the floor. He had helped himself to her garden, so she was helping herself to his. The edge of the land disappeared into deep shade, and the bindweed that crept up the boundary had sprung its flat round blooms like torches. Mary felt conspicuous in their beams. She was making a lot of noise. Twigs broke under her feet. A nettle prickled her arm, and she cursed as it needled her in several discrete places, cursed again when her sandal scooped up leaf mulch. She hoped it was leaf mulch. She pushed a dead fern out of the way, and at last she was in a clearing barely six feet from the hazel. And this time she had the advantage: she had surprised him.

  He was lying down, facing away from her, but she had not surprised him. He had heard her the moment she clattered the chair out of the shed, knocking over the shears. His ears tapered toward her, his nose lifted, riffling through his index of neighbors: the pungent tom, the stale tobacco of the mastiff. Long before she first saw him in her garden, he had known her by the particular crosshatch of flavors that made up her scent. She smelt of warmed milk—three canteen lattes a day—cut with rose soap. But the precise muskiness, its fractional composition of old and fresh sweat, fragrance-free detergent, antiaging serum, the digestive breakdown of lunch break’s crayfish sandwich, associated gases on slow release within, and the dry-down chalkiness of another unused egg beginning its slow journey to waste, was something only he could grade.

  She hadn’t moved from the clearing, and he hadn’t turned to look. It would take her ages to cover the ground from the burnt fern that was crackling to where he lay. He had time to move. If she set off. She would not set off.

  He curled himself into a neat whirl like a breakfast pastry and tucked his brush under his snout; it was too hot for over.

  Mary was surprised, and a little disappointed, by his inattention. She cast around and saw, as she had suspected, the hole under the hazel. She had found what she had come for. There was nothing else to do. He wasn’t troubling her, and he wasn’t in her garden. In any case, there was nothing to rap on.

  He heard her leave with little interest but caught one new note. Overlaid on everything else, he could smell his own scent on her too.

  His scent. Was very rich. An endless supply.

  He drizzled it with his paws. He blew it

  from a notch in his tail. He packed it in

  his scats. His life in a footprint pressed

  midair. Sniff and show respect!

  Keeping the respect fresh was what he

  did day, night. Wherever he went. Wait.

  Wherever he went and wanted other

  creatures to know he went. He sprayed,

  wiped, released, squeezed, twisted,

  dropped. Amazing smell cloud. Dark

  made light. Wet made dry. Nothing like

  on earth. Each puff was the inside of his

  body turned outside in the world.

  The scent told the news. Here he was.

  Here he would come again.

  Again, again, again.

  Looping roads, crossing trails, scraping the

  belows of fences, splaying stalks of

  hedges, opening gaps. Under, over,

  through. Garden to garden. Posting news

  at all the stops. The mastiff’s fence. The

  egg tree. The dry hides humans peel off

  their feet. Good for chewing, jaw

  exercise. He could go on. He did go on.

  This whole plot was built on scent.

  Every day the edges needed rebuilding.

  Patching over. He had to track and

  re-track. Once the humans stayed in their

  pens. Now they roamed the woods.

  Males and Females. Messing with his

  scent map. Making him work harder just

  to own this place. But what a place!

  This place was the best of both.

  Wilderness in the middle. Human food

  dens round the edge.

  Strange fact. Humans never dig holes for

  food. Every human has a special

  stand-up knockdown store outside their

  main den. Sometimes two! They make

  them dark, improve the flavors. All the

  best stuff buried / not buried in there.

  Crazy. Just jump up. Forepaws on. Push

  over. Flap flaps. Out it all comes.

  Animal, fish, fruit, toys, bones. The sun

  grows it hot and squelch.

  This place could feed more than one. That

  was proven. Beautiful, slow, tasty Beetles.

  Did he mention the Beetles? Place was crawling with them.

  His land was growing. He was stretching out

  the edges into all these fenced human

  runs.

  Blackberries soon. But blackberries were such a sad thought.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Michelle stood at the door, beaming. Mary had assumed it would be Eric she saw first, but it was his wife who had raced to answer the bell and whose body now blocked the entrance, as if in two minds about whether to let Mary in. Michelle looked pale through her olive skin. Under her eyes were two gray half-moons, which shone a little limey from her dress: acid yellow and in need of a wash.

  “Wow! Look at you!” Michelle said, closing her hands around Mary’s forearms.

  It was hard to judge whether the gesture was cordial or deterrent, especially as Mary’s feet were still outside and Michelle’s were in the hall. “Wow!” Michelle said again. “You look amazing!”

  It was the first time they had seen each other in … however old Flora was. Three weeks? Four? Five? Mary tried to count back to that awful night when she had lain awake, listening to Michelle’s screams. She was still lying there unable to sleep when blue light flooded the bedroom and she realized an ambulance had come to take Michelle to hospital, rendering her entire wakeful night pointless. Since then, it was Eric, now raising a silent hand to Mary from further back in the hall, who was usually front of house.

  “Thanks!” Mary said to Michelle; she had finally released her arms. The navy dress did look good. In thirty-four years, this was the first time Mary had been asked to babysit, so she’d had no idea of the dress code. It had taken an hour to get ready, and all her discarded outfits lay heaped on the bed, waiting to be heaped on the floor. Michelle, on the other hand, looked awful. “I made an effort for the kids,” Mary said brightly.

  “They’re both asleep. For God’s sake, don’t disturb them.”

  “OK. I made an effort for the TV then! By the way,” Mary said, touching her own shoulder, “you’ve got a stain just here.”

  Michelle stared past Mary into the street, as if this information were
of no consequence. “Hurry up and come inside. Eric saw a fox prowling out there earlier. They’ve moved into the wasteland over the back. Here,” she said, looking at Mary’s feet. “Just leave your shoes in the hall. No bag? Not going out after? We won’t be late.”

  A hum was coming from the lounge. Mary slipped off her sandals and followed Michelle toward the noise. “I’ve got the fans on. Everything you need is here,” Michelle said. Mary suppressed a cough. The room was stifling. Arranged on a coffee table were a bottle of red wine, a plate of biscuits, and a page of notes. They had been written in slanting block capitals, so that regardless of the words, the message was clear: Written in haste by a very busy woman.

  “Flora’s had her feed,” Michelle continued. “She’s in the little room upstairs.”

  “Tough love,” Eric said, poking his head around the door. “Michelle likes them to sleep alone.”

  “We’ll be home by ten, in time for the next feed,” his wife said. “We’ve filled Tigger’s bowl, but he’ll come in when he’s hungry. Anyhow, you’ve got my mobile. We’re only going round the corner. Any problem, just ring.”

  “I will,” Mary said. “Relax. Enjoy yourselves.”

  She heard Eric pulling back the front door latch. “See you later, Mary,” he called. She heard Michelle hushing him. She waited for the door to shut and realized that it had done so only when she heard the soft click of the key outside. There was a little rip of jagged metal as one of them whipped out the blade. Few species as fast as a parent with a babysitter, she thought. Thank God they had gone, and she could relax, alone in the house. Well—alone in their house, with two sleeping children.

  It was strange, and a little thrilling, to be left unsupervised in her neighbor’s lounge. The place felt intimately familiar yet vividly disorienting. A sort of halfway house between indoors and out because Mary had gone out, but only for a night in. Somewhere new, but much like home. She felt as if she had stepped behind the mirror in her own living room and found herself in a peculiar reflection.

  She turned to get her bearings. Eric and Michelle’s lounge remained divided from the dining room, but otherwise the layouts of their houses were broadly symmetrical. Eric and Michelle’s sofa faced the wall of Mary’s living room. Their TV backed almost exactly onto her own screen, two intersecting rectangles. But while her wall was painted duck-egg blue, Eric and Michelle had papered over theirs with an exuberant pattern of floral vines and woodland creatures, wildlife gone rampant up a feature wall. The theme extended to the soft furnishings. Hares ran over a throw on the settee, on top of which the cushions had been stacked. Despite the presence of a new baby, the whole place seemed spotless. Mary shifted the cushions and was just lowering herself to sit when she jumped: knitted into one was a giant red fox face. She went to inspect the shelves instead. A blue porcelain owl caught her eye, inviting her to lift it. There was no price label. She put it back.

  Mary was as close to home as she could be without actually being home, but everything about the lounge unsettled her with its wrongness. She was barefoot, having obeyed Michelle’s request to leave her sandals in the hall, and the rug sprouted with unnerving furriness between her toes. Tick, tick, tick went the fan, as if its revolutions were also counting seconds. It harassed her, this clickety whirring which seemed to tell both time and heat. She pulled out the plug and felt herself relax a little as the blades clacked to a stop.

  The place badly needed some air.

  Mary began to unscrew the window lock. Wedging the heels of her hands under the sash, she thrust upward, inhaling as she did so a vaporous curl of Mark’s old cologne. Its sandalwood riff was growing on her. Three days running she had unstopped the bottle, watched the neck imprint her wrist with its wet rim. It reminded her of an illustration in a fairy tale she’d loved as a child, of a genie unfurling in the vapor of a lamp. Scary, but helpful. Both things at once. That’s what she liked about it. She pushed again at the window, but it wouldn’t budge, and then she saw that a second lock was holding it shut. She began to wonder if opening windows was forbidden in this house. Disuse had made the sash unwieldy, and when she unscrewed the next lock it gave a dismayed clatter at being pried from the sill.

  A siren sped down the main road in three swoops of sound. “That’s fine. That’s fine,” a voice said from the pavement, and she followed it to a man with braids. He was leaning against a tree, legs sloping, feet crossed, talking loudly into his phone. Mary had barely begun to listen to his conversation, when she lost his voice in the rumble of a police helicopter. It took several minutes for the windows to stop rattling. “’Zactly,” she heard the man with the braids say. It was soon after seven: too early for most. Or possibly too late. This afternoon, the park had been full of half-naked bodies. In this heat, they would still be there. Two girls stopped to perch on the front wall of the house opposite—Frank, was he called, the man who lived there? A magpie landed on one of the cables from the telephone pole, and Mary watched the cable bounce like a skipping rope. She made a mental note to close the window by half past nine, to be on the safe side.

  On the table Mary found the remote control and Michelle’s notes. She read them carefully, pleased to find that the children came with instructions. She flicked on the TV. Owing to stubbornness or tightness or intellectual superiority, Michelle and Eric appeared to have only five channels. There was no way she was going to watch a crappy talent show on a Saturday night: the ultimate humiliation of a single life. How she wished she had brought her book. Appraising the wall that joined their two houses, with its violently bulbous flowers, petals clasped against an imminent eruption, she calculated that it was approximately fifteen feet away—diagonally, as the crow flew. No, a crow couldn’t fly through walls. As the mouse crept.

  She knew that children should not be left alone in a house, and yet she could conceive of a reasonable argument in which there would be no harm in nipping home for a moment, since home was right next door. She felt herself unlikely to do this, but to test the feasibility of the idea, she slipped on her sandals and rummaged on the hall table for a set of house keys. When she found none, she returned to the lounge and slid her hand along the high marble mantelpiece, but discovered only a card that read Thank you for being a wonderful daughter, a button decorated with an anchor, and a triptych of photographs of Michelle and Eric on their wedding day. George, not yet old enough to walk, was wearing chinos, a waistcoat, and a white rose.

  The house was so tidy, there was nowhere else to look.

  “Let’s just think about this sensibly for a moment,” she said. Mary knew her book was beside her bed. She exchanged a look with the ceramic owl, silent witness. The round journey would take barely a minute. She would be no more absent than if she went to the toilet or than parents who lived in double-fronted houses must be every day of the week. There was one of those at the end of the road.

  At the front door, she set the latch and, stepping outside, carefully pulled on the knocker until the door was as close to closed as possible without necessitating a key for readmission. From outside it was impossible to tell that it wasn’t shut. She waited a moment in the shallow porch, felt the heat of the door on her back, which made her picture undressing later to find Eric and Michelle’s house number seared between her shoulder blades. The girls opposite had gone. Frank’s cat was in the window now, curtains hanging in folds behind him, as if he had sneaked out front after the auditorium had emptied.

  Mary stood on the threshold of her decision. If she was going to do this, she thought, speed would be the answer. But before she could assess the thought and evaluate how much speed would be required to permit the action, she was already halfway down the path, then cornering Eric’s hedge. Each time a foot struck the pavement, she counted. On six she was at her gate. She hit the door on ten. Quick with the key, and she was in. She left the house gaping behind her; it felt safer to keep two open doors between her and the children. She knew it was absurd to be so frantic. This was no different from wat
ching telly downstairs while the children slept—or from lying in the garden, as she had once seen Michelle do through the gaps in the old fence, while George was indoors.

  Upstairs Mary hunted for her paperback, which was not where she remembered. She pulled back the duvet and in panic turned upside down the pile of discarded clothes, listening for the thunk of discovery. She yanked open the drawer of her bedside table, sweeping its contents hopefully for the black-and-cream cover she knew so well, then slammed it shut, toppling over all the little bottles of lotion inside. Her cheek pressed the floor as she scanned the dust under the bed. Of course! Last night she had slept on Mark’s side. She leapt onto the bed, grabbed the book, sped down the stairs, out of the house, along the pavement. She had stopped counting a while back, but she had the sensation that barely three minutes had passed.

  Now that Eric and Michelle’s front door was in sight, Mary felt safe. But when she reached it, whether owing to the heat or just the self-determination that objects can sometimes seem to exercise, it had flexed slightly and sprung a little further ajar than she had left it. She stepped into the hall with the uneasy conviction that danger itself had been ushered inside. The walls vibrated with a sense of equivocal emptiness. Mary felt her absence as firmly as if it had made an impression on the space in her shape and waited there for her to share the house with it.

  “Hello?” she called, but of course there was no answer. Always jumping at things, she reproached herself. This was the life that awaited those who live alone. Paranoia, basically. After all, she had left her own door wide open while she ran to the bedroom, and that had been fine. She needed to get a grip. Michelle, bossily overseeing the removal of shoes in the hallway, came to mind, and Mary emulated the way she had closed the door. “Come in,” she told herself. “Leave your shoes in the hall.” It was calming to imitate someone else’s sensible behavior. Mary took off her sandals and lined them up next to George’s little trainers. Obviously she needed to check on the children. She was going to do that. In about one minute. Right after she checked the lounge.