King of the Badgers

by Philip Hensher

  Billa would not know that it was Hettie who had knocked her over, but she would forgive her when she saw how difficult it had been for Hettie to make this confession. She would clutch her to her chest and perhaps they would both cry a little bit. So as Hettie walked around, she lifted her head up and scanned the people, looking for Billa.

  It was dark outside, and Kenyon and Miranda were talking about money downstairs—they were talking about how rich they were, from what Hettie could overhear. She quietly walked downstairs, looked into the kitchen, and there was nothing but bags from Sainsbury’s sitting on the work surface. Dinner would still be some time away. She had come downstairs intending to get her apéritif and sit with her parents, making sophisticated conversation, but Kenyon and Miranda talking about how rich they were made her feel a little bit sick. She decided to go out. As silently as she could, she went through the hallway, picking up her Puffa jacket, lifting up the latch and stepping out. She closed the door behind her, and then, all at once, there was a dog at her knees. She recognized it: it was Stanley, the dog of those two old gays. Hettie knew where they lived; she decided to take him back.

  That was more of a task than she had anticipated. Stanley, she knew, liked to sit and watch anything. He had probably been there staring in at the window, or looking at their chickens over the road. If someone came to investigate him, he would leave his post to sniff at them, but would usually return afterwards to his post of observation. He showed every sign of doing that now. Hettie seized his collar—he was a surprisingly big dog—and started to haul him behind her. The weight of him, the solidity and bone of his head and jaw, resisted her efforts. In a moment he would sit down, and then she would have to give up and leave him there. She supposed he would find his way home eventually.

  But all of a sudden, Stanley’s attention was taken by something in the middle distance, and he stopped trying to turn himself into an obstinate dead weight on the pavement. It was a somebody, rather than a something; and, as it came under the street lamp, Hettie saw that the person Stanley was trotting towards was Billa Townsend, the General’s wife. Hettie followed Stanley. This, she thought, was her moment.

  ‘I know this wretched dog,’ Billa said, jabbing at him with her parrot-headed umbrella. ‘Hello, Hettie. It’s Stanley, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, I think it must be,’ Hettie said. ‘Anyway, he knows who you are.’

  ‘And I should hope so, too,’ Billa said. ‘He shouldn’t be out like this. I dare say Sam will be getting worried. Are you in a hurry?’

  ‘No,’ Hettie said. One of her rules was that she never admitted to a grown-up when she was on an expedition of discovery and thought; never said when she had just left the house with no particular end in mind. Inspiration struck. ‘I was just going out to the Co-op to get some butter and milk. My mum’s run out.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ Billa said. ‘I’ve got nothing so purposeful to do. I was just going to go for a small walk before my dinner. I tell you what—I don’t suppose it will take five minutes—why don’t we take Stanley back to Sam and Harry’s? It’s just up the road here.’

  ‘OK,’ Hettie said. Stanley seemed much more willing to follow Billa than her. That seemed unfair.

  ‘What a bad, bad, bad dog,’ Billa said encouragingly. ‘Aren’t you just?’

  Hettie’s courage was high now, and before Billa could say anything else, she said, ‘I’m really sorry about your husband.’

  ‘Oh,’ Billa said.

  ‘Dying like that,’ Hettie said to explain. ‘It must have been a terrible shock to you and I hope you’re feeling much better now.’

  ‘Well…’ Billa said. ‘Thank you. I think. It was … it was a great shock.’

  ‘But the thing is, I’ve got to tell you, I’ve got something I need to get off my chest, and I hope you’ll understand,’ Hettie said. ‘I feel terrible about it, I really do. You see, I think it was really my fault, mine and that Michael’s.’

  ‘Hettie, I really don’t think—’

  ‘I’ve got to explain,’ Hettie said, and did so; how she and Michael had, without meaning to, knocked Billa over and not stopped to pick her up; how it must have meant that she couldn’t do stuff around the house, and the General— ‘Brigadier,’ Billa corrected mildly—had had to make an attempt with the ironing-board, and—

  Hettie came to a stop. They were half lit by the orange glow of a streetlamp; Billa’s hairy capable old face looked no more cross than usual. The orange light had made a strange colour out of her usual green gilet and fisherman’s jumper underneath.

  ‘Well, you have been worrying, I can see,’ Billa said. ‘But it wasn’t like that, it really wasn’t. My husband always did the ironing, whether I was fit or not. It was his task around the house. So he wouldn’t have been struggling with anything he hadn’t struggled with a hundred times before. Mind you, it was very bad of you to knock me over and run away like that.’

  ‘I know,’ Hettie said humbly. ‘I’m sorry.’ She couldn’t wait to tell Michael it was all all right and it was the General’s—the Brigadier’s—fault and no one else’s.

  ‘And here comes Sam,’ Billa said. ‘Were you looking for this reprobate?’

  Sam came down the lane. When he came into the light, he was in a leather jacket, an elaborately decorative lead in his hand. He shook his head reprovingly. ‘He just took himself off for a walk,’ he said. ‘Your mother phoned, Hettie, to get me to come and fetch him. I suppose he would have come back sooner or later.’

  Sam bent down, and fastened the lead to Stanley’s collar. He turned homewards, but decisively, unarguably, Stanley sat down where he was and began to make a high-pitched noise of complaint.

  ‘Oh, God,’ Sam said.

  ‘I don’t think he wants to go home,’ Billa said. ‘I think you’re interrupting his walk.’

  ‘Well, that’s just too bad,’ Sam said. He tugged again, and Stanley, an immovable object, remained just where he was. ‘There’s nothing for it,’ Sam said. ‘I’m just going to have to take him on his walk.’

  ‘Where does he go?’ Hettie said.

  ‘He likes to go down to the end of the Wolf Walk and back again,’ Sam said. ‘He’s not completely stupid—he wants to go to the very end and then turn back again. I know—he’s just been in that direction.’

  ‘Where they were putting up a camera today,’ Hettie said.

  ‘No,’ Billa said. ‘That was a week or two ago—it was on my house.’

  ‘No, it was at the end of the Wolf Walk,’ Hettie said. ‘Me and Michael—’ she shrugged, as if in response to a comment ‘—we were down there today, this afternoon. And it WAS cold! But we didn’t mind. We were on the bench of the dead girl—’

  ‘Tracy Wood,’ Billa said, and the three of them smiled.

  ‘That’s right—and a van came and parked at the other end of the Wolf Walk. And I could see, they WERE cross, because first they had to get all the stuff out of the van, then they had to huff and puff, carrying it all that way—it’s a hundred and seventy steps—they couldn’t get any nearer. And then when they’d got their stuff down by Tracy Wood’s bench, one of them stayed by it, and the other one had to go back three times to fetch his ladder and his tools and something else they forgot.’

  ‘There’s nothing down there worth filming,’ Sam said. ‘Or only sticklebacks or something. How ridiculous. What on earth are they doing, putting up a camera there?’

  ‘They’ve gone stark staring mad,’ Billa said.

  ‘Who’s gone mad?’ Hettie said. ‘No, but they said, because we asked them, they said they wouldn’t leave their stuff unattended, they said, in this town. They said there was people who were mad around, who would probably throw it all in the estuary if they weren’t there to watch over it. They meant us, but they couldn’t say so because it would be rude. And we wouldn’t have thrown it in the estuary, because Michael said he wanted to see them putting up a camera on the wall and, anyway, we’d have had to go past them on the way back. Afte
r we’d thrown everything in. So we didn’t.’

  ‘That’s you they’re talking about,’ Sam said to Billa.

  ‘What nonsense,’ Billa said. ‘What on earth says that they can put up a camera on top of my house, and a camera at the end of the Wolf Walk where nobody goes? I want to see this with my own eyes.’

  ‘It’s that John Calvin, I bet,’ Sam said. ‘Let’s go and give him a piece of—no, let’s not. I know what he’d say.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ Billa said.

  Together, the three of them set off, Stanley sniffing at everything in his path. As they went down the Strand, they could hear voices calling within the houses for each other: Jack, they shouted, or Come here, or Have you seen this. As they walked, they looked through the windows of the Lovells’ house, John Gordon’s as he laid down his cello and called for his wife, the Kenyons’, with Hettie’s parents sitting, each in their own armchair with a drink in hand, past Helena Grosjean’s white-slatted beehive and her orderly house, past the abstract-expressionist hedge-fund trader, past the off-duty newsreader’s; and he, like all the others, was watching the news. Hettie and Sam and Billa walked past all these houses, either glimpsing a sequential fragment of the news or seeing an interior blue television glow, and heard the inhabitants of the Strand calling out to each other in their houses to grab their attention. On each television screen, glimpsed through each window, was the same thing: a girl’s face, the photograph of the kidnapped girl which had been everywhere earlier this year, and then the mother in handcuffs, a field, a police van besieged by photographers, hammering vigilantes, the mother and her man, white-faced, on a stage with policemen; and then a house in the country, a ramshackle falling-down house, thatched and squat. As they walked down the street, Hettie and Sam and Billa looked with interest at each glimpse of the story, unfolding on twenty television screens through the window. They would not stop to gawp through a window, and it came to them in flashes. And then, through one window, a girl, stepping out cautiously into a crowd, or so it seemed, a girl pale, thin and luminous, only about eight, her hair scraped back into a bun, her eyes transmitted on the forty-two-inch screens of the Strand, huge, glowing, full, as she came out of her captivity, of a pained understanding of what light was like.

  ‘They’ve found that little girl,’ Sam said.

  ‘The mother must be in prison,’ Billa said. ‘I don’t know how—’

  ‘Awaiting trial,’ Sam said, and they discussed the finding of China, her likely future, her permanent separation from her parents and siblings all the way down the Strand, and onto the Wolf Walk.

  At night, though the Wolf Walk was lovely, nobody came here. There was a single, warm, romantic light halfway down it, casting into the night and the shadows. The curve of the Walk was perceptible, and underneath, on the apron of mud, a colony of fat stones revealed themselves, as the three of them walked by, as sleeping ducks, each raising its head with a bewildered muted bark, before ruffling its feathers and settling its head again under its wing. There was no one else on the Walk. From the mid-point, under the lamp, the new camera was visible: a white box, pointing downwards.

  ‘There it is,’ said Sam. ‘What on earth are they doing putting one up here?’

  ‘Well, the workmen said that someone had once thrown a bench into the mud from here,’ Hettie said. ‘And they’d never found out who had done it, but now they wouldn’t do it. And Michael and me, we’d been—’

  ‘Kissing,’ Billa supplied. ‘Don’t be so shocked. We’ve seen most things and even heard of kissing.’

  ‘Yes, we’d been kissing, but of course we didn’t want to go on, there on Tracy Wood’s bench with a camera on top of us. You don’t know who’s going to be looking at you! And we’d only come here because our usual place—you know, we’ve got a usual place we go, I can’t tell you where, it’s secret—but the usual place, it had been taken over by a lot of people with binoculars, that’s the only reason we’d come here to the Wolf Walk. Look, there it is.’

  They were underneath the camera. The wall there was only six feet high, and the camera had been awkwardly affixed, and surely ineffectively. From there, nothing much could be seen, unless the criminals actually sat down on Tracy Wood’s bench to carry out their wickedness.

  ‘So Michael said to the man it was an intrusion, that we come out here to get a bit of peace and quiet, and he said, the man, after he’d put up the camera, he said, “I know the sort of a bit of peace and quiet you’ve come here for,” and they laughed, they laughed at us, and his mate, he was a fat man, he said, “That’s right,” and then one of them, I don’t know which one of them it was, they said, “If you’ve nothing to hide you’ve nothing to be frightened of.” But when they’d gone, and the little red light came on to show it was filming, me and Michael didn’t want to go on doing what we were doing. Michael said the moment had gone, really.’

  ‘Well, of course it had,’ Billa said. ‘This is down to John Calvin and his Neighbourhood Watch.’

  ‘I don’t believe in Neighbourhood Watch,’ Sam said, and he reached up and poked the camera. ‘I don’t believe there’s anyone there at all. Look, you can move it.’

  He gave it a firm shove, and the camera did move two or three inches, pointing now towards the castle. It must have been designed to be placed out of reach of the observed populace, and the workmen had been doing their best with an unsatisfactory place for the CCTV. ‘That’s better,’ Sam said.

  ‘They’re awfully tinny little things, really, aren’t they?’ Billa said calmly. ‘Not made to last at all.’ With her parrot-headed umbrella, she gave it a firm knock on its side; it rattled like cheap tin. She gave another knock, and now you could see the dent in the side.

  ‘You’ll get into trouble,’ Hettie said. ‘It can’t see you, but they’ll be able to tell from your voice who’s done that. You don’t want to do that, Mrs Townsend.’

  ‘These things don’t have any kind of sound equipment,’ Billa said. ‘It’s just a digital camera.’

  She moved round to the front, and peered into the dark lens; it was a dark view into emptiness, into the dead recording eye. She took a step back and, with a sharp rap with the beak of her parrot-headed umbrella, shivered the glass. ‘There you are,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ Hettie said. ‘I can’t believe you just did that.’

  ‘Want a go?’ Billa said, and handed her umbrella to Hettie. Hettie took it disbelievingly and, from one side—not wanting, perhaps, her face to be filmed in the last moments of the camera’s life—she rapped on the lens. At first she rapped timidly, then more strongly, then gave the lens a good whack or two. It was shattered; fragments of glass on the pavement. ‘It’s quite easy,’ Billa observed. ‘I think I’m going to have a go at the wretched one on my house. I don’t see why I should put up with that one, either.’

  ‘There’s one on my shop,’ Sam said. ‘I’ll be doing something about that, first thing tomorrow morning. And look—look how bad the workmanship is. It’s hardly fixed on the wall at all.’

  He pulled at the base of the camera, which came away from the old wall, its cement and brick, quite easily. He tugged again, and the cables at its base yielded, tearing out of the camera’s box. Panting, he held the dead, dented and smashed camera in both hands.

  ‘It’s a bit heavier than it looks,’ he said. ‘And it’s got my fingerprints all over it. It needs to go into the estuary, don’t you think?’

  Hettie and Billa agreed; and with two or three good heaves, Sam sent it on an arc over the mud. It landed in the central stream of the estuary with a great splash and a gloop. There it would lodge in the mud; the flow would quickly bury it, and wipe away any mark of who had disposed of it.

  With a quiet, burglarish demeanour, hardly speaking, the three of them made their way home. Stanley, who had been waiting patiently while they smashed up the camera, seemed like a reluctant and disapproving governess. ‘Goodnight,’ Billa and Sam said to Hettie, and ‘Goodnight’ again to Mirand
a, as she opened the door, wondering where on earth Hettie had got to; ‘Goodnight,’ Billa said to Sam, as he turned up his little road, his shoulders glittering with ground glass; and she went on another three hundred yards to her house. There was nobody about at all; the curtains of the town were drawn, the streets quiet and undisturbed. Underneath an observing black eye and its red blink, she let herself into her house. She had no idea who would be watching her return. They had made no difference, she knew; indeed, they might have shown that this town needed to be watched, from one end to the other. In a few days, the camera on the Wolf Walk would be replaced. Billa thought she would heat up a gifted lasagne, and might even enjoy a glass out of one of Tom’s best, or at any rate one of his dustiest bottles of wine.

  26.

  The clocks had changed a month ago. It was already dark when the doorbell went on a Saturday night. Stanley had occupied his absolutely central position on the sofa, his head and ears on its brink, watching Doctor Who with apparently total absorption and comprehension. In his right side, Sam’s stockinged feet; Harry’s stockinged feet pushed into Stanley’s left. Stanley had had his patiently endured bath, as he did every other Saturday—he didn’t seem to take much pleasure in it, but he put up with the process. Sam and Harry took enough enjoyment in it for three, splashing around the white double bath, switching on the Jacuzzi tap to startle Stanley, making izzi, oozi, duzzi noises and whisking up the dog shampoo into great wet meringues before rinsing him off and drying him with his special, marmalade-coloured, Stanley-coloured towel. And now Stanley smelt, if not exactly sweet, pleasantly doggy rather than frankly suppurating. From time to time, Sam passed Harry a bowl of olives, of cheesy puffs, of dry-roasted nuts. The snacks lived on the right arm of the sofa, with Sam’s Negroni, and Sam was in charge of them; the remote controls for stereo, television and DVD sat on the left arm, with Harry’s Whisky Sour. As the cheesy puffs in particular passed over Stanley’s head, his expression raised itself upwards, rather as if deploring the snack than begging for one. If Harry was in the kitchen, Sam would sneak Stanley one: when Sam was refilling his Negroni, Harry would do exactly the same thing. Both believed that the other did not know. Stanley did not let on, as he snapped up the illicit cheesy treat.