King of the Badgers

by Philip Hensher

  ‘I see,’ Billa said. She was determined not to be an old stick about these things. ‘I think I recognized him in someone on the Wolf Walk the other morning. Does he have a—’

  There was a sharp high noise very close at hand, outside the house, exactly like a dentist’s drill, amplified. Someone was drilling into the brick of the house.

  ‘Having work done?’ Sylvie said.

  ‘No, not at all,’ Billa said. ‘I wonder—what in the world—’

  They went to the window at the front of the house, and there, at the top of a grey steel ladder and effectively just by them, was a man in overalls and goggles, applying a drill to Billa’s brickwork. She rapped on the window; he stopped, and amiably smiled at her, raising the drill like a pistol, in some sort of greeting.

  ‘What on earth’s he doing?’ Sylvie said, but Billa had put down her coffee and was already hastening out. She followed her, down the stairs, along the flagstoned hallway and through the heavy front door. Outside, there was a van reading ‘Homeland Security’ in urgent, diagonal lettering, a lightning bolt to either side.

  ‘You’ve made a mistake,’ Billa shouted up at the man. ‘Stop immediately. There’s no work due to be done on this house.’

  ‘Can’t do that, I’m afraid,’ the workman said. ‘I’ll check again, if you like, but it’s definitely here we’re scheduled to put it up.’

  ‘Put what up?’ Sylvie shouted, but the workman had started up his drill again. ‘I said, put what up?’ He could not hear her above the whine and grunt of the drill. A small group of pensioners was gathering opposite, just by the Conservative Club; the same sort of people who always gather when some sort of disagreement seems likely to enliven a street. Sylvie took hold of the bottom of the ladder and gave it a gentle shake. It was enough to bring his attention back to them, and he switched his drill off.

  ‘Are you mental?’ he shouted. ‘You could have killed me, then.’

  ‘Like that?’ Sylvie said. ‘You must be joking. That wasn’t dangerous. This’ —she shook the bottom of the ladder somewhat harder— ‘is dangerous.’

  The man slid down the ladder very sharply. His mate—a fat spotty boy of eighteen or so, his arms folded and his jaws engaged about a piece of gum—emerged from the little van. ‘Are you mental?’ the workman said. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘That was exactly what I was going to ask you,’ Billa said crisply. ‘This is my house. What are you drilling into it for?’

  ‘You just tried to kill me,’ the man shouted.

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ Sylvie said. ‘I shook your ladder. Now, what are you drilling into my friend’s house for?’

  ‘I don’t have to talk to people who just tried to kill me,’ the workman said.

  ‘Ass right,’ the fat boy said.

  ‘Shut up, Brandon,’ the workman said. ‘I’m just here to do a job.’

  ‘Ass right,’ the fat boy said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Sylvie said. ‘As your friend says. We just want to know what the job is. You must have the wrong house. My friend doesn’t know anything about it.’

  ‘No mistake,’ the workman said, and from his overall pocket, he pulled out a letter with the heading of the Devon and Cornwall police service. He handed it over to Billa and Sylvie—his breath sweet-smelling with rot and uncleanness—and together, the three of them read it.

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ Billa said. ‘I never asked for a camera to be fixed onto my house.’

  ‘You don’t have to ask,’ the workman said. ‘The police decide where it needs to go, to keep watch over a town, and then they ask me to pop one up. They prob’ly should have notified you,’ he went on, in conciliating tones. ‘That’s bad, that is.’

  ‘Well, it’s not going up,’ Billa said. ‘I don’t want one.’

  ‘But it’s not your say, my love,’ the workman said. ‘It’s the police and the local community who decide together, and they’ve decided, they have, that they want a camera just here, because otherwise they wouldn’t get to see—well, I don’t know what they wouldn’t get to see, but we got our instructions.’

  ‘There’s a bloody camera just over there, there, on the Conservative Club,’ Sylvie said. ‘And there’s another one, look, twenty yards away, over Sam’s shop. There’s hundreds of the bloody things.’

  And then, quite suddenly, like someone dropping water into a supersaturated solution, and it turning quite at once from a damp solid into a liquid, or, as she put it to herself, like a person placing that final straw on the back of the camel, Billa saw what she had not noticed, had not thought of any significance: the fact that from one end of her town to the other, every fifteen metres, just out of reach of a leaping person, there was a camera.

  ‘I don’t want it,’ Billa said.

  ‘Well, it’s not up to you,’ the workman said.

  ‘I don’t want it,’ Billa said.

  ‘The local community has asked for it,’ the workman said. ‘And the police agreed with them. They should have notified you, though, as the owner of the property to which the aforesaid camera is proposed to be affixed. That’s bad, that is.’

  ‘I’m in the bloody local community,’ Sylvie said. ‘And nobody asked me whether I want any more cameras filming my arse as I go from one end of the Fore street to the other, and the answer would have been no, by the way.’

  ‘Ass right,’ the fat boy said, shifting his allegiance.

  ‘Yes,’ Billa said. She was uncomfortably aware of more people on the other side of the road, gawping in fascination; she would not turn to look at them, in case she recognized some of them, letting themselves down. ‘Yes, who exactly has asked for this?’

  ‘It’s the local community,’ the workman said. ‘I said, it’s the local community. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got to get on with this job. There’s another two today I’ve got to affix, in Cullompton, and Iddesleigh village square. And if,’ he said with dignity to Sylvie, ‘you would be so good as to restrain yourself from shaking the ladder and attempting to kill me in the course of my duties, I would be most grateful.’

  ‘Not on your life,’ Sylvie said. ‘We want to know who’s asked for this.’

  ‘Is there a problem, Billa?’ Sam said, leaving his shop over the road with the door open. He was wearing his blue and white cheesemonger’s apron.

  ‘Yes, is there some kind of problem?’ a man said, speaking to the workman rather than to Billa or Sylvie. He had a white, smoothed-down cap of hair, and a dark blue overcoat, an elegant pencil with a quizzical expression. It was John Calvin. ‘This is all in order, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sam, they’re putting up a CCTV camera on my front wall,’ Billa said. ‘No one told me. This gentleman just arrived and started drilling into my wall.’

  ‘And this lady,’ the workman said, pointing at Sylvie, ‘comes out, and she starts—’

  ‘That can’t be right,’ Sam said. ‘Surely. There must be some mistake.’

  ‘I don’t believe so,’ Calvin said, smiling faintly. ‘Neighbourhood Watch has been discussing these things, and we requested an extra camera or two. For security. There really has been a lot of trouble in Hanmouth. Well, Neighbourhood Watch discussed it, and then—’

  ‘I tried to join Neighbourhood Watch,’ Sam cried. ‘I got turned down. Come on, Calvin, who’s in your fucking awful Neighbourhood Watch group?’

  Calvin gave a smile—a general smile, aimed at no one in particular. ‘It’s all been discussed,’ he said. ‘I don’t think anyone will find anything to complain about. Apart from people who think they have a right to walk the street indecently dressed, of course.’

  ‘Oh, fuck off,’ Sam said. He walked over to the ladder, still leaning against the wall, and took it; he was a strong, compact man, and with a single gesture he threw it down into the road. It narrowly missed the front window of the Conservative Club, now filled with curious hangers-and-floggers.

  ‘Hey!’ the workman shouted.

  ‘It’s f
or all of our safety,’ Calvin said, quite unperturbed. ‘And if you have nothing to hide, you have absolutely nothing to fear. After all, Mrs Townsend,’ he gave an unspecific gesture in her direction, not quite a bow, more of a simper, ‘I know that your husband met a very sad end recently. Quite unnecessary. If somebody—some friendly person, watching out for all of our interests—had been able to take a look, now and then, at what was happening just here, at your front door, we probably could have got help to your husband, couldn’t we? It’s too late for him, of course, but, as Neighbourhood Watch were remarking—’

  ‘My husband died inside the house,’ Billa said, her tone low, but her voice carrying and decisive. ‘Are you proposing to place cameras inside our houses?’

  ‘No, no, of course not,’ Calvin said, laughing gently. ‘That would really be absurd. My meaning was only that, had Tom—Mr Townsend,’ he corrected himself, seeing something in Billa’s eyes, ‘known there was a camera outside, he could possibly have hauled himself out, attracted attention—’

  ‘What complete rubbish,’ Billa said. ‘Really, you can leave my husband out of all of this.’

  ‘And you—you can pick my ladder up,’ the workman said to Sam, who told him to fuck off. ‘That’s nice,’ he said to the fat boy. ‘Lovely manners people have round here in Hanmouth. Did you hear that? Fuck off, he told me to. That’s charming.’

  ‘This gentleman’s just going to finish the job he’s here to do,’ Calvin said, as if a compromise had now been reached, ‘and afterwards we can all sit down with a nice cup of tea, and talk about everything. How does that sound?’

  ‘I’m calling the police,’ Billa said. ‘I don’t believe you can just do this without asking first. And in the meantime, as my friend Sam says, you absolutely can fuck off.’ There was a small outbreak of excitement among the gawpers on the other side of the street: they hadn’t expected someone of Billa’s appearance, one of the gentry, to know or use the expression.

  ‘By all means call the police,’ Calvin said, with a smile and a streak of ice in his tone. Billa stopped; she looked at Calvin; he seemed genuinely relaxed about the attendance of the police, and in a second, she understood why. All her life she had believed that she could call the police: that, in the last resort, they would come and protect her and Tom against threats of violence and anarchy. Now she understood what the police were. She and Sylvie went inside and upstairs, and after a few minutes, they heard from the first-floor drawing room the clatter of a ladder being placed against the Queen Anne brick, and shortly after that the whine of a drill going into the soft red composite of the Queen Anne brick. In an hour, a white downward pointing camera was affixed to the wall. You could see its shape from Billa’s armchair.

  22.

  Greg Lucas hadn’t bothered to change the satnav, or switch it off, and all morning it had continued trying to direct him towards yesterday’s job. ‘Turn left at next junction,’ it said, and Greg drove the lorry straight on. ‘Continue in a straight line for five hundred metres,’ it said, and Greg turned directly right. It would fall silent for a few moments, recalibrating, and then, in its bright, womanly way, would just say, ‘Turn left in two hundred metres, then left again.’ Greg reached the little crossroads, and turned right, towards Hartswell village. He knew roughly where he was going.

  He liked some kind of noise in the cabin of the lorry; that was why he kept the satnav on without troubling to inform it of his real destination. Usually, too, he kept the radio on. Later, he was able to say that he had arrived exactly at twelve noon, not just because that was when he had arranged to come, but because as he was driving up the lane, The Ken Bruce Show was coming to an end, and Ken Bruce was handing over to Jeremy Vine. That was on Radio 2. Sometimes Greg liked Classic FM. There was no sloshing in the vessel at the back and, despite what people thought, no smell either—not that Classic FM or Ken Bruce would hide a smell. He liked to have the radio on, and today, the satnav woman patiently trying to correct him.

  He enjoyed his job. He never tried to disguise what it was he did for a living with an elaborate phrase. He did the rounds of most of Devon and parts of Somerset and Dorset, too, emptying domestic cesspits and septic tanks. It had never been worth anyone’s while running sewage outlets beyond the villages and towns, and hundreds of houses in this part of the world flushed their waste into a septic tank or cesspit, buried under the garden with just a discreet little drainage cover. It was a legal obligation to run water to these houses, Greg believed, but you couldn’t force a local authority to install a sewage pipe. The cesspit, or septic tank, was the most cost-effective solution. Most people in the country recognized this, and did not think of Greg as doing anything but offering a good professional service. Apart from the occasional joke directed at his children, he thought he was respected in the community. The white boiler-suit helped, tucked into his heavy socks and white rubber boots, and the white lorry, which the boys at the depot cleaned every other day to keep it sanitary-looking.

  Septic tanks needed to be emptied regularly, but not as often as a cesspit, which took everything. Septic tanks cleaned the water, and let it drain away into the surrounding land inoffensively. Many of Greg’s customers opted for an annual service, perhaps twice a year at most. For a small family or a couple, living alone, that would probably be sufficient. Though everything went into the cesspit—bathwater, water from the washing-machine and dishwasher, grey water as well as bodily waste and water from the lavatory—what remained to be taken away was nothing more than what Greg’s industry referred to as ‘sludge’. They were big tanks, designed to be forgotten about from one equinox to the next. Greg’s visits could be festive occasions, and he was often popular with the children of Devon, craning out of their kitchen windows, standing restrained in their back doors, or even being allowed to watch in the garden as he hoicked up the manhole cover and fastened the vacuuming pipe to the securely fastened airlock. They were fascinated by the thought that the poo and wee of their family had been stored up like a valuable commodity for months on end, just under the lawn where their chickens, perhaps, pecked heedlessly. Now the poo-man, as they often called him, had turned up with his lorry to suck it all up and drive off with a cheery mobile reservoir of shit. ‘And then what do you do with it?’ a little girl or boy could be relied upon to ask, but Greg always refused to answer that, asking them instead what they thought he did with it. Their eyes grew big; Greg sometimes thought what they would grow up thinking.

  Today’s visit was to a man whose family had lived there for years. He lived there alone now. His mother had died five years ago. Not many people knew him; he kept himself to himself, not an unusual habit in this part of the country, bordering on the great moor. Living on his own, he did not need to call Greg as often as others. Probably he had bachelor standards of cleanliness, too, which meant that the septic tank would fill up with the residues of bathwater and other grey water that much more slowly. Greg tended to come up once every year and a half, no more than that. It was dangerous to leave a septic tank unemptied, but sometimes on his eighteen-monthly visit to the little thatched-roof cottage, buried like a mushroom beneath the level of the lane that led nowhere, Greg had found that the tank was not yet full.

  Greg reversed from the lane into the semi-abandoned domestic garden beside and behind the house. ‘Turn left,’ the satnav woman said, without abandoning her calm composure in the face of Greg’s perversity, ‘and continue for three hundred yards.’ It was the way Greg had come; she seemed not to want him to come here at all. The customer was already out of the house, shutting the door behind him to keep the heat in. It had been a lovely summer, but now, in October, there was a definite nip of autumn in the air.

  ‘It’s been a bit longer than usual,’ the customer said. Greg looked at the invoice: Terry Strutte. He didn’t know why he hadn’t remembered a customer’s name when Lucas’s Septic Management had been dealing with him for so long, and his mother before him.

  ‘No,’ Greg said, hopping
down from the cab of the lorry and putting his heavy-duty gloves on. ‘It’s the same as it usually is. Just eighteen months since the last time, or a week short. We must have sent you a card reminding you.’

  ‘Well, there’s a problem,’ the customer said. ‘I don’t know why.’

  ‘Let’s have a look,’ Greg said, following the customer out to the back of the property. There were two main problems he had to deal with: one was the tank backing up and sending waste water back up the toilets in a house. That often happened in winter, and was pretty unpleasant. The other was seepage out of the service area, the manhole, leading to foul odours and worse. That could be dangerous. Fortunately, a customer tended to notice one of these things quickly, and wouldn’t let it run on for long. In this customer’s case, there was some seepage; Greg could smell it as soon as he had got out of the lorry.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ the customer said.

  ‘It’s full, it’s leaking,’ Greg said. ‘We’ll sort that out for you, no problem. The smell’ll go in time, once we’ve emptied the tank. I’d stay well clear of the garden for a couple of weeks, more if there’s no rain.’

  ‘I don’t come out here that much,’ the customer said. Greg could see that. There was the remains of a vegetable patch, the troughs still there, some things that might once have been vegetables—carrots, cabbages, the ruin of a single bean-row, a mass of potatoes—now running to seed and colonizing the lawn around. ‘It was my mum who liked gardening,’ he went on. ‘Grew half our food on the table, she did. I’m too busy, I am.’

  ‘It’s nice to sit out in the summer, though,’ Greg said. ‘You’ve got a good situation here, right on the moor. Nobody disturbs you, I reckon.’

  ‘Are you going to start now?’ the customer said.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ Greg said.

  The customer went inside, shutting the door carefully behind him. Greg unhooked the large pipe from the back of the lorry, and, whistling, took it to the service area. The ground about was really sodden, and the odour quite marked. He lifted up the manhole cover, and fastened the pipe to the outlet. There was definitely some overflow, and it must have been apparent for at least a week. He wondered why the tank had filled up so much more quickly than before, and why the customer hadn’t called immediately. He must have changed his habits in some way. With a bit of luck, though, the tank would be at fault and need replacing, a job that couldn’t be delayed. Lucas’s Septic Management would do all right through this recession they were talking about; it wasn’t a service that was delayed when money was short.