King of the Badgers

by Philip Hensher

  She left the toast and the half-finished coffee where it was, an archipelago of crumbs, a brushstroke of jam across the pages of the Guardian. With the back of her hand, she made a cleaning gesture at her face, then, in an unhurried way, went into the downstairs bathroom. Tony reached for the newspaper, shaking it, removing the jam-smeared health pages and going on to the environmental reports. Uninhibited noises as of battle, deep in the throat, the sounds of solids and water beating against each other, came from behind the white iron-riveted door. When Tony had lived here a little longer, he hoped to start to suggest that Sylvie use the upstairs bathroom for her morning shit, at least while other people were still finishing their breakfast, and not leave the door open afterwards. She emerged in time, went upstairs, descended with an unironed blouse on, hardly more presentable than what she had been wearing, then went to the coat-rack. ‘What’s the weather like?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tony said. ‘I’ve not been outside this morning.’

  ‘Who fetched the paper?’ she said.

  ‘No one did,’ Tony said. ‘It’s yesterday’s. I was going to get today’s when I went out.’

  ‘I thought it sounded familiar, all that about the undetectable disease,’ Sylvie said.

  Billa was putting on her coat, then changed her mind as she was halfway to the door, turned, took it off her, put it back on the hook in the hallway. The flagged hallway of her house was dark, hung with eighteenth-century watercolours, the fat trees like green powder puffs over heated cows at the river. The walls of the house were solid and thick, and the heavy front door had a fanlight that had needed painting for half a dozen years. The day fell through the thin, watery old glass, bubbled and warped, and cast a thin, vaporous shape on the dark flagstones. It was not hot within the house—the walls were half a yard thick, and the windows shuttered against the day. Neither heat nor noise penetrated her house, but from old practice Billa knew as she stood in her hallway whether it was hot outside, whether the streets were full of the chatter of unfamiliar folk. Without quite knowing what she was reading, she turned about and left her coat on the peg, feeling the heat of the day, and knowing that her town had lost the rubberneckers of the day before. She thought she might drop in on Kitty, buy a nice quarter of Sharpham rustic at Sam’s, see what was up and what today’s topic might be; might try to track down a P.D. James the Brigadier hadn’t read in the charity shops and Frank Cohen Books. He liked his P.D. James, the Brigadier, was good at not letting on about the solution if Billa read it after him, or only to the extent of saying ‘Have you got to the retired monk? Keep an eye on the retired monk. Not all he seems.’

  ‘Do you want anything?’ Billa called. ‘Got everything you need?’

  ‘Almost everything, my darling,’ the Brigadier said. ‘Important things to do. Vital things to discover. Endless novelties to propagate, I dare say. The gawping populace, full of scandal, dying to pass it on. Not for me. There’s half an hour left of Jeremy Kyle to enjoy.’

  ‘Now, now,’ Billa said. ‘Not just gossip, you know. Important things to buy. We’re out of Cif.’

  ‘Doesn’t Mrs Carcrash look after that side of things?’ the Brig said, coming out of the drawing room. ‘It seems an ill-managed sort of affair. She’s the one who revels in using the beastly stuff, I believe. So she knows when it’s in need of replacement, and why she can’t just pick the stuff up herself for a minor premium and then fleece us of the readies…’

  ‘I’m sure there’s a very reasonable explanation,’ Billa said. ‘It’s a lovely day. I do hope you’re not going to stuff away inside watching the problems of degenerates on the telly screen the whole day.’

  ‘Not the whole day, my darling,’ the Brigadier said, and Billa went out, shutting the Suffolk pink door behind her.

  ‘Bloody queers, bloody poofs, bloody,’ Hettie said, ‘bumming bum-bandits, bloody fucking fudge-packers, they think they can talk to anyone like that,’ she went on, muttering under her breath.

  ‘Bloody faggots,’ Michael said, but more decisively. Outside the post office they stood looking at the cards advertising dog-walkers, cleaners, pianos and canteens of cutlery for sale, and here and there a card from a forlorn town-dweller asking for property to rent, and property for sale. A mother with two children, one in a pushchair, one dragging its heels along the pavement, negotiated Hettie and Michael.

  ‘That’s American,’ Hettie said. ‘Bloody faggots. It doesn’t make any sense, saying a person is a small bundle of minced meat that you could eat with peas. Why would you say that? It’s stupid. Over here, we don’t say faggot.’

  ‘Fags,’ Michael said, growling.

  ‘That’s even more stupid, saying a homosexual queer person is like a cigarette—that makes no sense, it’s really stupid. Here in Britain we don’t say “fag” or “faggot”. A person might say, “Can I bum a fag?” and there wouldn’t be any untoward implication that he wanted to push his penis into the back-bottom of a man, it wouldn’t mean that at all. Don’t you understand proper English?’

  ‘Yeah, we speak English.’

  ‘We don’t say those things. We speak English properly and we say fudge-packer, arse-bandit, cock-jockey, uphill-gardener, turd-burglar, shirt-lifter—we say shirt-lifter, too. Do you get that, they’re called shirt-lifters because they lift the shirt, behind, you know, and then, boom! In they go, that Sam and his boyfriend, his old boyfriend, they put down their cheese and then they’re at it like turd-burglars. Can you imagine them? Going at it? Shitstabbers, that’s another good one, because, you know.’

  Michael shook his head. Hettie’s precise pronunciation, her excited and strangulated sentences were directed not at him, he understood, but at the trickle of people going in and out of the post office. It was not clear to Michael what the post office did in Hanmouth: were the people in this town constantly sending things to their friends and relations? There were always people going in and out of the post office. What could they be doing all that time? Was there some other purpose to this business behind the stationery, the calendars at the front, the glass-shielded clerks at the back? He didn’t know.

  ‘It’s boring here,’ Hettie said. ‘Don’t you think it’s boring here? If I lived in America I’d never want to leave it. New York, Chicago, LA, DC, SF, LV.’

  ‘What’s LV?’

  ‘Don’t you know anything, that’s Las Vegas, it’s what people call it. Everyone calls it that. No, they don’t, I was kidding you, I was having a laugh. I just made that up. Imagine if you said, “I’m going to LV.” You wouldn’t know what a person was talking about—you’d think they’d gone mental and doo-lally in the head, you would!’

  ‘It’s not all excitement all the time,’ Michael said. He considered that he was entitled to give Hettie the impression that he lived in an exciting country. His parents’ view that America might not be considered by everyone in the world the best country imaginable seemed to Michael a curious, wilful, mistaken opinion. It was not so much patriotism as plain recognition of the facts that led him to tell Hettie about the excitement of his life. But in reality, the town he and his family lived in, with its sawmills, the central square and the courthouse clock, the diner and the Wal-Mart just out of town, was not so very different from Hanmouth, apart from the flags outside every commercial building and most private houses.

  ‘I’m bored now,’ Hettie said. ‘Look at that weirdo.’

  In the middle of the road, exactly between the sweetshop-cum-video-rental and the cheese shop, a man was squatting on his haunches; he was wearing a black polo-neck sweater and black jeans, a pair of sunglasses in his tousled hair. He was holding a camera to his face, taking a photo of the high street from a low angle. ‘Stupid idiot,’ Hettie said. ‘If a car came up behind him, whoosh, it’d knock him over and run him down. If one hooted, even, to get him to move out of his way. Come on.’

  Hettie ran away, skipping a little, and Michael followed; he had a nervous tight way of running, his elbows and knees held togeth
er like a wooden puppet’s. ‘Let’s get him,’ Hettie yelled. ‘You go to the right—’ and the man was confusedly standing, half balancing. Hettie gave him a little push, nothing more, as she ran past him, sending him flying into Michael, who gave him a good shove. It sent the man sprawling in the middle of the street, a crack as his camera hit the tarmac.

  ‘Did you see that?’ Hettie called. ‘Did you see? That was brilliant.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ Michael yelled. Hettie could not know that he was enjoying the English word; it was just her ordinary word, and an acquisition of vocabulary for him. Only that morning, at breakfast, he had told his mother that the toast was smashing. ‘Brilliant,’ Michael called again, but he had overtaken Hettie and had to turn his head, and somehow, without knowing how, a woman, some old woman was there where there had been no old woman before, and he didn’t know how, he was cannoning into her, and Hettie, who must have seen, who was just cannoning into him for the fun of it, was ramming into his back and pushing him and the old woman over, her voice the scream of a gull, making a noise only somewhat like laughter. Then the old woman was on the ground, and they were running away. No one had seen them. The old woman couldn’t have been sure anyone in particular had knocked her over. In five minutes they were past Hettie’s house, to the end of the Strand, and to the far end of the Wolf Walk, where the pavement curved round like an underlining of the estuary, the line of the sea, the hills and the sky, and fat-chested wading birds picked their way across the pimpled mud like mad, minatory headmasters. They plumped themselves down on a bench, puffing in and out, then making a parody of puffing in and out; Hettie pretended to choke and die, rolling off the bench and doing a good impersonation of someone suffocating. Finally, she got up and sat back down again.

  ‘It’s not funny, though,’ she said. ‘It’s not. Someone might of got hurt. Did you think of that?’

  ‘That was that old woman,’ Michael said. ‘That old woman that time.’

  ‘It was the general’s wife,’ Hettie said. ‘It was Billa.’

  ‘It was biller?’

  ‘She calls herself Billa,’ Hettie said. ‘I don’t know what it’s short for. It doesn’t seem to be a name at all. Perhaps she’s a man and she’s called Billiam. William. It wasn’t your fault.’

  Michael paused. He was wondering about where the birds wading went to the bathroom, whether they had a special place, or whether they just went wherever they happened to be, even if they were going to wade through it afterwards, and even put their spoon-ended beak in the same stuff, all mixed up with mud and anything. You couldn’t tell.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Michael said.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t my fault either,’ Hettie said, outraged. ‘It was her fault for just standing there in the middle of the road. People sometimes they have places they need to be in a hurry and someone like Billa, she’s the general’s wife, sometimes she doesn’t understand that, not one bit.’

  ‘No one comes down here,’ Michael said, when some time had passed. The day was tranquil beyond the ceremonies of town and river, rising forgetfully into the blue sky. ‘I’ve never seen anyone down here.’

  It wasn’t true, not quite; but it was something that suited this moment, and so Michael said it. They both sat there; a kraarque, kraarque of a bird overhead, the miniature splashes of the estuary between tides, the distant humming grind of a petrol-driven boat heading north to the Bristol Channel and the open sea.

  ‘I really love you, Michael,’ Hettie said. ‘I really, really do.’

  Michael sat exactly as he was, and in a moment, Hettie’s trembling hand crept from his elbow to his neck, cupping the back of his head in her palm. He waited, calmly; she did not seem to be expecting him to say anything in response.

  ‘I love you so much,’ Hettie said, in the end. ‘I’ve never loved anyone as much, never, ever. Michael, I love you. I’d even show you my hatpin, Michael, I would.’

  16.

  Harry and Sam rushed to the door, and in the street, people had turned and returned to the figure lying on the kerb. ‘I’m quite all right,’ she was saying. ‘It was just that I got knocked somewhat by, by—’

  It was Billa, her stockings torn and her skirt riding indelicately upwards. Her hair was knocked sideways somehow, and she looked dazed and old. ‘I’m quite all right,’ she said, but to nobody in particular. Around her the four or five Samaritans looked doubtful, unsure: Hanmouth figures, all of them, more or less recognizable. ‘Don’t move,’ the woman from the flats was saying, in an authoritative way.

  ‘Billa, come in and have a cup of tea before you go on your way,’ Sam said.

  ‘Oh, Sam, thank you,’ Billa said.

  ‘Don’t move,’ the woman said—it was Catherine, Sam remembered. ‘I was a nurse—you shouldn’t move until the ambulance gets here. Has anyone called for an ambulance?’

  ‘Oh, nonsense,’ Billa said, but her voice was tremulous, weak and old. ‘There’s nothing at all the matter with me.’

  ‘Better safe than sorry,’ Catherine was saying, running her hands expertly over Billa’s legs and hips, impersonally and without hesitation; testing and pressing quickly and, at the same time, tidying Billa’s disarray up a little. ‘Any pain at all? Here—here—here?’

  ‘Well, it was a nasty bang,’ Billa said. ‘I came a cropper, I really did, head over heels. I can’t think what happened. I’ve always had weak ankles. I’m often just folding up like a pack of, a pack of…’

  ‘Let me fetch you something,’ a woman said, in an unironed blouse, crumpled and, though clean, stained with unerasable stains. ‘I’ll get you a cushion—may I? Tony,’ speaking now to her companion, an unlikely man for her, neat, with cropped white hair and a slightly defeated manner, ‘Tony, don’t just stand there.’

  ‘I’m really quite all right,’ Billa said. ‘I’m most awfully grateful to you all. It is kind, but I promise you, I’m quite undamaged. It was just my ankles, my wretched ankles—they’ve always let me down at the worst possible moment.’

  She gestured downwards, and it could be seen that her right ankle was already swelling. A sprain could be terribly bad, someone remarked, as painful as a break, in fact.

  ‘It’s so easy to fall over nothing, isn’t it?’ Billa said. ‘There was nothing underfoot at all, either.’

  ‘Actually,’ Harry said. ‘I think it was a pair of kids. Running hell for leather. They knocked you over.’

  ‘Christ—in Hanmouth,’ the woman said. ‘You can’t believe it.’

  ‘Did you see who they were?’ Harry said, turning to Sam.

  ‘No,’ Sam said. ‘I don’t believe I did.’

  He looked down the road, and there was nobody but John Calvin, looking with great interest into a shop window, four doors down, pretending nothing had happened, and that if it had, he hadn’t seen anything. It was a shame that the window he happened to be by was only the Sea Rescue charity shop, and he seemed to be examining a display of baby’s bootees.

  ‘Now,’ Billa said, seizing Catherine’s arm and hoicking herself upwards, ‘just a quick cup of sweet tea, if you don’t mind, Sam, and then I’ll get myself home. I think I’ll give my constitutional a miss, if that’s any reassurance to you. Don’t you worry yourself about me.’

  Sam and Harry between them carried Billa, protesting her good health all the while, into the shop; there was a white-painted wicker chair for customers to sit in while they chose between curd cheeses, and Billa was placed solidly in it. ‘What a palaver,’ Catherine said cheerfully, following Sam into the little galley kitchen. ‘I don’t think there’s anything broken, but it’s probably best to call an ambulance.’

  ‘I don’t think Billa would let you,’ Sam said. ‘She knows best. I don’t suppose she’d hesitate if she felt she’d really been damaged. Let’s see how she feels after a cup of tea.’

  ‘Do you think she would like to come to our little party on Saturday?’ Catherine said. ‘You remember, we’re having a party on Saturday? I do hope y
ou and your friend can come—you’re very welcome.’

  ‘Harry, you mean? That is a shame—Harry, I was just saying to Catherine, it’s a great shame, she’s having a party on Saturday, and we’ve just this second said we’re having a couple of old friends round for dinner. I am sorry.’

  ‘So am I,’ Harry said, in the doorway to the kitchen, clearly wondering who Catherine was. ‘But we do have some friends coming for dinner. Nothing very smart, but I don’t think we can cancel it now.’

  ‘What a shame,’ Catherine said. ‘It’s an early-evening drink, I don’t suppose that makes a difference? Six to eight? And our son is coming, he’s here for the weekend, with his new friend, an Italian, he tells us. It would be nice to introduce them to—to—to some new friends and neighbours. A very early party? You would only have to drop in, and it’s just over the road. We live in Woodlands, the block on the Strand, you know, top floor, six to eight on Saturday.’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ Harry said. ‘It would have been nice, but I know what Sam is like when we’re having people round for dinner. He’s in a state of the utmost panic from four o’clock onwards. It’s absurd, and they’re very old friends who wouldn’t mind if we did the vacuuming or not, but there it is. You wouldn’t want him as your guest when he’s expecting guests himself.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure that’s not true,’ Catherine said. ‘Well, if you change your minds—we’re only over the road, it would be a pleasure to see you, even if just for ten minutes when you find the table’s been set and everything’s in the oven, and you don’t quite know what to do with yourselves… Shall I make the tea?’

  In the shop itself, the hippieish woman, whose name had turned out to be Sylvie, was settled with her friend Tony; one of the Brigadier’s cronies and his wife, a pillar of the amateur dramatics, had seen Billa placed squarely in the chair, her torn stockinged legs set firmly apart. There was quite a gathering as Billa explained again that she had fallen over nothing at all, that she couldn’t understand it. The Brigadier’s crony could be heard saying that he would run over the road to fetch Tom in a moment; Sylvie was telling the pillar of the am-dram that she had seen a pair of children knocking Billa over and running away, and that someone else had seen exactly the same thing. ‘What’s up, Billa?’ said a voice from the open doorway. ‘Always the centre of excitement, aren’t you?’ It could have been Kitty, or it could have been someone else entirely. Conversation divided, multiplied, chattered, and from the kitchen Sam observed one of them, with an ‘oof’, picking up a cow-shaped cheese dish and turning it over to see if there was a price on it. There was no cloud, he remarked inwardly; somebody would buy something; and Catherine, as she was passing round cups and mugs of tea to all and sundry, was inviting them all at the same time to her Saturday party.