How to Be Human

by Paula Cocozza

  She needed an emergency vet. Or a fox rescuer. There was such a person. She’d found his website once. She cocked an ear to the lino, longing to hear the skitter of Fox’s paws. But she knew. This plugging in, recharging, phoning was just one thing after another thing which would change nothing, and the realization nurtured her with a furtive, creeping elation. The broadband blinked open its green eyes. It must be the shock, she thought, making my feelings do the opposite of what they should. The landline woke with an amplified buzz. The message indicator on the base unit began to flash a red 0. Its faint whir stirred her irresistibly. She felt … it was hard to believe what she felt. An overwhelming readiness. Her house was coming out of hibernation.

  She stood watching all this, waiting for the battery bar on either phone to show enough charge to make a call. It was not unpleasant to wait. The last couple of weeks had been so … intense. She listened to the click and crackle, thinking.

  He left me.

  He left me yes. Because. He knew that he could.

  It was the reciprocation of her faith in him.

  A movement on her mobile drew her eye. The start-up animation had begun to play, a green world slowly turning. She pictured Fox on her lawn, the shape of him under Granny Joan’s blanket. The hump of his haunches, the slope of his shoulders, as large in death as in life. The fabric had peaked over one pricked ear; listening to the last. She had drawn the rug right over him and then on second thought turned it back a fraction to leave his muzzle poking free—for air. It was a silly superstition, and she sobbed again to remember it. Who was she fooling? She just hadn’t had the courage to cover him completely.

  The base unit beeped, and Mary was glad of the interruption. She had the sense that not only the phone but something in her was being productively reset. As if to confirm this sensation, the red 0 flipped to 1, and she realized she was smiling. Maybe this was just a normal human reaction to grief—other than Granny Joan she had no experience of death—but she felt slightly embarrassed by how upbeat she felt. She willed poor Fox to mind, and this time the memory of his body under the blanket seemed to pulsate with fresh meaning.

  Their shared life, the whole summer, played before her eyes. He had brought her everything he could bring. Boxers, nappies, glove, egg, shoe, rag doll, Flora, a loving relationship, a house full of hope, appetite, health … And finally, she could see this now, he had brought her himself. His body, out there in the garden, his ultimate gift. She thrilled at the discovery, just as the phone made another loud beep, and the red 1 leapt to 4, 5, 6, 7, slowly up to 9, then 12, 15. Mary watched in amazement as the answering machine loaded. It was oddly lifelike the way it jumped: 19, 20, 22. When the display finally settled at 27, she burst out laughing. It was the shock that made her. She didn’t mind who the messages were from, or even if they were from the same few people. It was an extraordinary abundance of care.

  She thought of her mother at the peephole, wondered how many were from her. Maybe even her dad. Saba, Charlotte … A welcome-home party seemed to begin right here in her hall.

  With a start, she realized she had waited long enough for the battery indicator to light up. “Oh, Fox, I’m sorry!” she cried, kneeling to her mobile. A few weeks ago she had visited the rescue website, and now she waited for it to reload. The man answered on the third ring. He was based in Essex. If the traffic was kind, he’d be there inside an hour. Mary eyed the back door. She knew she should keep him company, but she didn’t have the strength to go outside and sit with Fox. It was not for want of love. She just couldn’t bear to face his lifeless body.

  For a while she stood in the bathroom and watched the water fall into the basin till her unbandaged hand cupped and took the water to her face. Some old habit made her look up at the mirror, and she gaped, saw the fright arrive in the savage woman’s eyes. It was her and not her. She dropped her head and splashed more quickly. Washing soaked her dress, so she whisked it off and climbed into the tub beneath the shower. When she was done, she put on clean shorts and top, pulled her wet hair into a ponytail, and ran to the front door. With a surge of energy, she leapt at the loose end of packing tape and ripped it from the frame with a loud unzipping. Round and round the door she went. Five times. Then she balled up the giant, sticky brown snake on the floor and cracked back the bolts. Sunlight flooded over her, poured into the house, prompting an involuntary yawn, which made her feel again that she was waking up. She stepped onto her path, sensing the strangeness of being out front. The trees in the street had grown thick and green. The front of Frank’s house opposite was a mass of hollyhocks. The dry air tingled with clarity: houses, windows, trees, every leaf hardened at the edges into crisp focus. She felt as if she had backed out of a dead end and was now facing the right way, approaching her home and all that it held with fresh hope.

  An elderly woman was walking on the other side of the road, no one she knew, and Mary lifted a hand to wave. It was that sort of day.

  * * *

  THE RESCUE GUY pulled up. His window was wound down, and when Mary leant in to introduce herself she caught thick plumes of fox. It perturbed her that she found it indistinguishable from Fox’s scent. Had she really known him as well as she could?

  When the man climbed out, she tried not to look at his gloves or the burlap sacks folded over his arm. “He’s in the back garden,” she said. “Straight down the hall and out the kitchen. If it’s all right with you, I’ll wait here. I, I don’t think I can watch.” The edges of her mouth began to crimp, and she bit her lip. She didn’t want to cry in front of this—Ethan, the website had said, though he hadn’t introduced himself, and she didn’t want to know.

  She watched him go inside, then waited beside the palm in her little front garden, trying to distract herself with ideas of how she might spend the evening. A bath with rose oil, some TV—Fox hated TV—a takeout. It would do her good to have a break from cooking. Then there were all the messages to listen to or save. She jiggled the mobile in her pocket. A surprisingly pleasant evening began to unfold. At the sound of footsteps in the hall, she spun away from the path, shielding her eyes.

  “Hold on!” the man called over. “I haven’t got him yet. Can you come and show me where he is?”

  “Well, it’s pretty obvious,” she said, trying not to sound rude. Now she would have to endure the torment of seeing poor Fox again.

  She reached the patio first, intending to steer the rescue man in the right direction, then leave him to it. She looked around. The grass was still yellowing, the trees still green, the shed still standing. The garden was bafflingly the same as it was an hour before, in all regards except one. Fox was gone.

  “Where is he?” she said to the man accusingly.

  She was staring at the place on the lawn where he had lain, where they had lain together. But there was only Granny Joan’s blanket, almost entirely flat, as if he had slipped out with minimum disturbance. Mary grabbed the near corner and whipped it in the air, half expecting to see an escape hatch carved into the lawn, but there was only dusty grass in a swirl of his scent. She dropped to her knees. Her hands ran over the earth, feeling for something, a sign, anything. A dribble, blood, vomit, scat, water, a clump of wounded turf. She didn’t care what. Any tangible proof. Her fingers dug into the cracks in the hard earth.

  “He was here, was he?” the rescue guy asked tentatively. “What, on the blanket?”

  The man’s long shadow lay on the grass in front of her, and she saw it scratch its head. “I covered him with it when he died,” she said. She knew what he was thinking. That she was one of those lonely types who rang random rescue services just to have a visitor. No, she told herself. She could prove this was real. The house was full of Fox. What about Mark? Could he have taken him? He hated to leave a mess. But he wouldn’t dare. Not so soon. Not after she had threatened to call the police.

  The rescue guy was saying something, but Mary didn’t hear what. She blinked, dizzy with the jolt of discovery. The garden spun around her. She fe
lt misplaced, as if she herself had fallen through a trapdoor in the bottom of the world she knew and landed with a bump—where? This place looked the same but made her strange. Fox gone. Some weird bloke she’d never seen before, waggling on. She was unsure if she had escaped something or landed in a bigger trap. A procession of ants carrying boulders of food swerved her giant hand, and the perspective disoriented her. The garden was tipping up, the fences swaying, and she felt as if she too were a tiny creature, being lifted for inspection on a yellowing baize. She had watched him die. An hour couldn’t change that.

  “Are you OK?” The voice of the fox guy drifted down to where she kneeled.

  Mary tried to turn toward him, but the movement accelerated the spinning. “I realize this sounds weird,” she said, putting her good hand to her head. “But he definitely was dead, and he definitely isn’t here now, and I don’t know how to explain it. I am trying to grieve for him, and it is so much … so much harder if he’s gone.” She opened her mouth to speak again, and a loud sob came. “You see, I knew him. I really knew him. We are, were … friends. He loved being with me. He slept indoors.”

  The man crouched beside her and poked around in the grass. Mary’s spirits lifted at the strong whiff of fox, before she realized it was coming off him. “Nah. Nothing strange about that,” he said. “Little guy been coming to you for months, has he?”

  “Not little. He was huge. But yes,” she nodded. So what if “months” was an exaggeration? Some relationships moved faster than others.

  The shed door swung open, and they both stared at it a moment, waiting for him to walk out. But it was only the wind getting up. That made the man, Ethan, laugh. She wished he would stop. There was nothing funny about it. She was staring in the face of an unmitigated tragedy.

  “He’s one smart guy,” Ethan said, fetching the blanket and shaking off the grassy bits. He folded it carefully and handed it to Mary as if she were the next of kin taking receipt of the deceased’s belongings. “He totally duped you.”

  “He did not! He was dead,” she said. “I know he was. I shut his eyes for him. I’m not imagining it. As it happens, they were pretty hard to close.” The heel of her hand went quickly to her own eye, to catch the tear. “And don’t say ‘duped.’” That wasn’t his character! He had no need. He had everything he wanted. He was free to come and go. How could he be ill one minute, then get up and leave the next? There’s nothing he needed to leave for.”

  “Come on,” Ethan said gently. “Let’s stand up, shall we?” She was only half-listening as he rattled on about how foxes were brilliant at playing dead. Did it to escape prey or catch birds, and if she wanted, he could show her on YouTube. It seemed unbelievable. It made no sense to Mary that he had wanted to escape. Her mind flitted to the occasions during the siege when he had stood pleadingly at the door. But she had explained, and he had understood. She still couldn’t see that he might be alive and not be here. His disappearance, if that was what it was, felt so much more finite than death. In her grief, she had been able to console herself with the thought that he had given his life to free her. Barely an hour earlier, while she stood in the hall waiting for the phone to reboot, she had felt herself magically cured. But his disappearance stripped away all consolation. She was bereft, and he was more dead than before.

  “But there was no prey to escape,” she said, shrugging. By that point, Mark had gone. They were alone. Just Mary and … him. She felt less certain than ever what to call him. Fox sounded wrong. It was too intimate now. With this one act, he had cast their entire relationship into doubt. She wondered again whether she had really known him. She eyed the grass, looking for a flatter patch, the imprint of his body. But the bastard had not even left her that.

  “Cheer up. This is good news,” Ethan said. “He’s had a happier ending than you thought.”

  This? A happy ending? “I don’t think so,” she said, trying to keep the hurt and fury out of her voice. Far from feeling pleased that he had somehow cheated death, she grieved at the thought that he had cheated her. Sweat trickled down her chest and stomach. She was drenched with disillusion. Mortification that he had abandoned her. That it took this “Ethan” to explain what had happened. Only his dead body here on the grass would soothe her, would prove that he had loved her, had chosen her, that they had enjoyed not only a shared life but a shared understanding of what that life meant. Mary stood and looked around the garden with a dawning disenchantment. His vanishing act had undone everything. To think she had called him, affectionately, an escape artist. It was the cheapest trick. So much for bringing her gifts. He had taken it all. Didn’t he know it was impossible to leave without changing what was left? She gave a little shiver, for now what she felt was a cold and comprehensive dispossession.

  Even in her turmoil she knew better than to say any of this to the rescue guy, who was discreetly looking at his watch.

  “Well, there are other possibilities,” she said, seizing at a hopeful thought. What if he hadn’t wanted to deceive her? What if instead he’d tried to spare her the horror of dealing with his death? She pictured him, in a final act of consideration, dragging his carcass just beyond her garden. “Suppose you’re right and he is alive,” she said. “If he managed to get up, he couldn’t have gone far. God, why didn’t I think of that? I just sat outside waiting for you. If we find him and need to put him out of his misery, have you got something for that? If not, we could use a spade.”

  “Whoa there,” the man said. He had stood up and was picking ants off his cargo shorts. “You were in shock. That’s why you waited. You kept him warm. Left him water. You did all the right things. Maybe,” he lifted a finger, “maybe you gave him the space to realize he could survive. Maybe your water saved him. Look. Now that I’m here I may as well have a quick scout about. And don’t worry, if we find him and he’s dying, I’ll know what to do.”

  They walked down the garden. He whistled as they leant over the back wall. “Paradise! These woods are basically what a fox would design for his dream home. A perfect example of self-willed land in action.”

  Mary gave a rueful snort. “I always thought of it as woods. But it’s a bit of a dump really. People chuck rubbish, furniture, any old crap out here.”

  “Still. It’s pretty amazing for the city. A wilderness right next to civilization. You’re basically living on the line between the two. No wonder he loved you. I’m guessing you saw loads of them, right?”

  “Just him,” she said. There was always, only, him.

  “Really? It’s a pretty massive territory for one fox,” Ethan said doubtfully.

  “You go that way and I’ll go this,” she said, suddenly anxious to be alone. She directed Ethan to the western end, the end where she had never seen … the fox. It gave her no consolation to take back his name. It was just another loss. As an afterthought, she called, “You’ll know him if you see him. He has a white rib on his left foreleg.”

  When Ethan was out of sight, Mary fetched the spade from the shed. It was the perfect hour for finding foxes, when the day begins to lower its lids, and the air rearranges itself for the onset of evening.

  She reached the clearing in moments, but this time the empty space seemed to expose her. A bramble rustled, and her heart leapt. She eyed the scrubby undergrowth, feeling unguarded in her back and flanks. The fox’s chewy tar smell thickened in her nostrils. Was he hiding in the bush? She banged the spade on the ground to rouse him, gasping at the loud flapping that rose from the bramble: incredible how much noise one blackbird could make. At the edge of her vision, something moved minimally, and Mary turned to see a snail pivot on a twig seesaw. He must have sensed her looking at him because he shrank back into his leopard-print shell. Surely leopard was the wrong pattern for a snail, but perhaps he had been one once, before a spell was cast.

  Just then the leaves began to shake, and the rustling swelled from one end of the wasteland to the other, as if all the trees were filling their lungs and blowing out together. And
then the branches stilled. When Mary looked down, the blackbird was eating the end of a worm, while the worm’s front half seized its moment and slid under leaves.

  She started to walk again. It seemed that everything was running away from her. The undergrowth teemed with creatures crawling, creeping, pattering out of her path. She was unsure if it would be worse to see or not see the fox. He was lost to her, so the worst had already happened. Actually, no, there was something worse … To find him out here with someone else. “Please, no,” she murmured. She was thinking about what Ethan had said, about how they feigned death in order to attack, so she made her journey through the fern tunnel toward his other den with mounting nerves.

  It was the sense that she was being watched that made her turn, half expecting to see Ethan behind her, with his raggy conservationist’s beard. But there he was. Well, now. Was it him? He was appraising her as if she were a stranger, with that generic triangulated stare she had herself doodled all those weeks ago in the margin of Michelle’s babysitting notes. His upper body rose out of the brambles fifteen feet away, his ears stiffly peaked, pinched along their creases. There was his powerful white chest. The commanding, if wary, expression. He appeared unharmed, though his lower half was obscured by thorny branches, and Mary realized with a crumple of relief that there was no hope of seeing or not seeing the white rib on his shin. Maybe it was owing to his distance or the fact that he was substantially obscured or just her disappointment making her think so, but he looked a shade shorter.