by Rob Palk
‘Well,’ she said, after standing there a few moments more, ‘you all have a good night.’
‘Thank you Officer, we intend to.’ Margaret’s grin was now slightly bigger than her head.
The policewoman gave a curt nod, and mooched, if the law can mooch, off in the other direction. As soon as she was far enough away – but not, I should say, out of earshot – we collectively exhaled, unstiffened our buttocks and let off a few phrases of contempt.
‘Oink,’ said Henry. ‘Oink.’ He chuckled at himself. ‘Well handled Mags.’ Mags? I didn’t fancy anyone else’s chances if they called her that. ‘Give the bastards nothing. It’ll only go straight back to the cullers.’
Marie tutted with genuine anger. A deep awareness of injustice seemed to have been born in her. She had woken me up the other night in a panic. ‘Do you think my parents are Tories?’
I had told her I didn’t think so, but that it was possible to be a Tory and still be nice. Her dad had been involved in the whole Czech dissent thing in the seventies and eighties and maybe viewed utopia warily. There was always space for context.
She hadn’t seemed convinced.
Twenty-Three
The sky was dusking over as we crocodiled out of the village and onto the lanes. Marie raced ahead next to Margaret and Henry. Face flushed, eyes shining, enjoying her moment of usefulness. Kerry was just behind me, up near the front but holding herself separate. Further back Brian whistled, ambling in zigzags along the lane, hands in the pockets of his threadbare baggy jeans. The kid George slouched along, back arched. Irene lagged, wheezing, at the rear. The garlic and peat smells of a country night blended with Marie’s familiar perfume. Or maybe it was Kerry’s. I liked it, whoever’s it was. There were raised slopes of grass enclosing the lane and over them we sensed cows, lowing (whatever that meant), breathing steam, blissfully unaware they were the prime cause of this cull.
‘Stile everyone,’ shouted Margaret. I supposed she was probably right. Only it was taller and more Aztec-looking than I usually pictured a stile to be, crowned with barbed wire, positioned on top of the steeper of two grass verges. Henry led the way. He barely had to strain, darting over as though he were running upstairs. The rest of us puffed after him, with me somehow at the back, behind even the more zaftig of the badger folk. My glasses weighed down on my ears. ‘I’m not really all that well,’ I said, to anyone who might be listening. ‘I had a thing, a while ago and now I’m not all that . . .’ I dropped over the stile and landed slap on the soles of my feet. Henry patted me on the back in a manly way I tried not to let buck me up.
‘Thing is, Steve.’
‘Stuart.’
‘Stu. Thing is, Stu, we all have our off days. I tell you I broke my leg once? Right before the glorious twelfth. Day they murder all them grouses. Still found my way down there. Sometimes you got to put your own shit aside. Can you do that?’ I looked up at him. He had, I had to admit, quite wonderful ice-blue eyes, the same sort of blue as Marie’s. So blue they were hard to look into. He gripped me in a hug. It was like being clutched by a musky robot.
‘I’ll do my best,’ I said. He smiled a rich, warm smile. I decided to get my own back by doing slightly worse than my best. Not so anyone would notice but enough to retain self-respect.
We fell silent, stomped on, through hillocky cow-pat strewn fields. The sky was purpling over. A cow lazed across the grass to us, velvet-snouted, mascara-lidded. Justifiably unconcerned by the deeds of perplexing bipeds. Margaret shooed it away as though she held it responsible for the cull. We trudged forward, as it darkened overhead, feet stumbling over tufts of grass, clambering over inhumanly proportioned moss-slimed stiles. I began to notice my sight deficit again, as we wandered in the night. We crossed field after field, starting to light our torches, not seeing any badgers. Margaret and Henry made naturalist noises, throaty acknowledgements of some invisible clue, but I didn’t think they’d seen anything. There was a rich dungy smell and the grass was beginning to stiffen with the cold. I popped a mint in my mouth and tried to enjoy myself. It was good to be out in the country, whatever the reasons for being there.
‘A fence.’ It certainly was. More barbed wire, although thankfully it didn’t look electrified. ‘Do we stop here?’ I whispered to Marie and she laughed as though I were joking. Brian volunteered to crawl under and scout around. His employers knew he had been ‘naughty’ back in the day and turned a blind eye to his activities now. I wondered what form his naughtiness had taken. Something well short of murder, I expect. Marie was up now too, and at the front, announcing she would go scouting as well. Henry decided he was going over too, followed by Kerry and before long the whole damn crowd of us were scuttling onto our stomachs and scraping across the soil. Henry lifted the bottom cord of wire up so that we could inch our way under it, the barbs just scraping the backs of our coats. The ground was damper than I’d expected. Dew and bird-spit, the soil releasing its secrets. When we had all crawled under, Henry flicked his fringe and leapt right over the fence, a nonchalant smirk on his face and we oohed and aahed him as though he were a firework.
‘Well done Henry,’ said Marie and he winked at her in a way I wasn’t sure about. No one winked in this day and age. He’d be calling her ‘Missy’ or ‘Sugar tits’ next.
George, the little blond kid, glared at this, as though it affronted him. He saw that I had seen him and he gave me the strangest smirk, somewhere between a fellow sufferer and a sadist. I stepped back. There was something creepy about George.
The next moment we were off, ducking and stumbling through the fenced-off woods, branches brushing our faces, hands clutching at leaves. We were outlaws, herbivorous Robin Hoods.
My glasses wobbled on my nose, my arm kept colliding with trees. My eyesight wasn’t helping.
Brian was alongside me, keeping up a monologue as we clambered on, his tone avuncular and angry at the same time. ‘Terrible sight the other day, Stu. We found a load of traps. Humane ones they call ‘em. Contradiction in terms if you ask me. Two badgers in there, half starved. And we’d had the bad weather and one trap had been positioned right in the rain so the thing was half drowned as well. Course we got them to the vet but we lost one in the end.’ While he prattled on I saw Marie at the front with Henry, lost in conversation, George just behind keeping his eye on them. I tried to make out what they were saying, under Brian’s relentless drone. ‘We made sure those traps got lost anyway.’ Marie laughed so much it echoed and no one bothered to shush her.
‘Sett ahead,’ coughed Margaret. We all tried to look thrilled. The rest of them probably were thrilled. ‘Grab yourselves a stick.’ A stick? I looked around and every one of them had a branch at the ready, deposited there by some helpful woodland sprite. Henry had a huge one which he graciously snapped, handing a third to Marie. I had nothing. When I thought no one was looking, I yanked a branch from a tree.
‘What do we want a stick for?’ I said. Marie turned away from Henry and smiled at me, in the way she had when I told her I was no use with chopsticks. A sort of fond amazement.
‘For the nuts. The cullers come and leave nuts outside the setts. The badgers stick their heads out and they get them. So we sweep them all away.’ It was a practical solution. ‘Did you break that off a tree? You really shouldn’t have done that.’
‘Sett’ was the cry from the front. Everyone craned their necks to see a snug looking hole in the ground. It was bigger than I imagined and it had a kind of storybook quality, something homely but unreal. A childhood kind of comfort. Margaret gave the order and we all swept our sticks across the soil, dust shooting to shin height.
‘Poor sods’ll starve,’ whispered Brian. ‘Too scared to come out and eat. It’s this bloody government, isn’t it?’ I considered which end of him to shove my stick in, but chose a saintly forbearance.
When we were done strafing the ground and the rest of the gang were on their way, Marie and Henry were still stood by the sett. I came and looked over her shoulders
. I couldn’t see over his.
‘Amazing,’ she said. It was kind of amazing. I tried my best to feel reverent. I hoped that, eventually, I would.
‘Makes you want to say a quick prayer to the badger god, doesn’t it?’ said Marie.
‘Times like this you could almost stop believing in the badger god,’ I said.
Marie raced off with Henry after the group.
Twenty-Four
Brian was onto the subject of foxes. Apparently the main grievance of a typical badger, outside of marauding yokels, was the fox. The swisher and more cunning animal has a habit of using nearby badger setts as impromptu motels, diving down to fornicate loudly while the occupants are trying to sleep. For an animal (Brian said) with an essentially small-c conservative nature this is a cause of some distress.
We were out of the woods by now and onto another field. The sky was blue-black, speckled with stars. Margaret had told us all to switch off our torches. She sounded as though this were urgent. I kept close to Marie and Henry, hoping I wouldn’t stumble. My sight deficit had become more noticeable in this unfamiliar dark. To our left we could see car headlights buzzing along distant spot-lit roads. We tried not to make any noise. A phut sound came from some trees up on the hills to our right, followed by a high-pitched yelp. We all stood still. Except for Marie, who was shaking.
‘Red light over there,’ whispered Kerry. She made it sound vaguely poetic. She seemed to have that quality.
We all peered until we saw them. Pinpoint crimson will-o’-the-wisps, wobbling through the trees. ‘LED lights,’ she said. ‘From the guns.’
‘I wish I could shoot them,’ said Marie.
‘Yeah,’ said Henry.
‘I don’t think they deserve to be shot,’ I said. ‘From their point of view they’re doing the right thing.’
Kerry stifled a laugh.
‘Always gets me,’ said Henry. His voice was full throated, tear-choked, a soulful oaken barrel. ‘That sound. Always makes me . . .’ He covered his eyes with his hand.
‘It might have been a car backfiring,’ I said. ‘You never know. Or maybe it was a badger, but a badger getting away.’
Henry didn’t look convinced. ‘Might be time to make a call, Brian.’
Pizza? I wondered. Drugs?
‘He’s calling the sabs,’ said Marie. Brian sloped off with his back to us, speaking in what I guessed was a kind of code.
I was hazy on the legality of sabs. Just so long as I didn’t have to meet them, I supposed they were okay. Marie seemed thrilled. She had been swotting up on the hard-core animal activists and had what I felt was a romanticised view of them. I found them pretty scary. They would peg me as non-committal. Marie, I expected they’d like.
We wound up on a narrow country road. Snaking forward, torches dim. A bark from Margaret and we flattened ourselves against the verge, in time for a Range Rover to zoom past. The window was down and the driver looking out at us. He was screaming a Viking bellow of hostility, a war whoop. It didn’t seem like high spirits: he hated us. He hated us because we were stopping him shooting at badgers. And we weren’t even stopping him much. Next to me I could sense Kerry freezing and I automatically reached out to grab her wrist. She gently took it away.
‘You get used to it,’ said Henry. He was reassuring. He was far too reassuring.
A few hours later I was sitting in a cold patch of wood with Marie, Brian and Kerry, guarding a badger’s sett. I wished I could crawl in there to hide myself from the cold. Brian kept on talking, of unspecified prior naughtiness, his intense affection for animals, his feel for the sacredness of life. Kerry stomped around rubbing her gloves together, taking them off to roll fags, occasionally interrupting Brian with an affectionate bit of sarcasm. I wondered if there was or had ever been something between them, but dismissed this as unlikely. She didn’t seem the sort to warm to bores. She was far too lively for that. Although Marie sat listening, rapt. I just squinted at the sett, wondering if anything was inside there and if so what it was like. About two in the morning I realised I’d been sitting for more than an hour and my feet were going dead. I stood up, a little too quickly, and the blackness went right over me, as the torch dropped from my hands.
Twenty-Five
‘Did I?’ Collapse again? I knew I had. I was in bed and couldn’t remember how I got there. I ran an interior check on myself, to see if it was serious. It wasn’t, I decided. It was the sort of collapse I had to live with, not to die from. Inevitable faints, which should lessen as I healed.
‘Yes.’
‘Keeps happening, doesn’t it?’ We were back at the bed and breakfast. I had nothing on but my boxers. Somebody must have undressed me. Marie was wedged in next to me in a broderie anglaise top. The Sunday paper had been delivered and she was scouring it for reports on the cull. There were print-out PDFs of badger research on the sheets. I picked one up. The probable effects of dispersing sick, scared badgers around the countryside, creating perturbation, a badger-nakba, a diaspora of coughing peaky mammals.
‘Did you get me back on your own?’
‘No. A few of the others helped.’
‘Were they all here when you undressed me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Even?’
‘Yes. Even Kerry. I have to say I didn’t warm to her much. I couldn’t work her out. She seems very protest-y. Very motivated by being on the right side. But she can be sort of flippant about it. As though it’s just one of her things.’
‘It possibly is just one of her things. Anyway, I liked her.’
‘Obviously you liked her.’ I wondered why this was obvious. ‘I did say we’d keep in touch when we’re back in London. I want to keep in touch with them all, it’s like a family, isn’t it, all on the same side?’
‘Doesn’t sound like much like a family.’
My head felt as though I’d been drinking. My mouth felt papery and sore. I found a bottle of water and drained it. The doctors had warned me recovery would take a while. And already I felt better, if you ignored the times I didn’t. As long as I underwent no sudden and traumatic shocks I would probably be all right. I would probably be fine.
Twenty-Six
To have someone think you the best. To have four years of them telling you, reminding you, that you are their favourite man. And this person, doing the reminding, to be someone so extraordinary. Who was going to be a great actress someday, who had grown up among PEN dinners and BBC interviews and had sat on Melvyn Bragg’s knee at the age of four, who could do things on a yoga mat that insulted gravity, who had a face as right as maths. Someone who burned with empathy, someone who could not stand to co-exist with suffering. Losing this was no easy thing.
Before I moved, there were evenings I’d be on the bus from work, see the lights on in our waterlogged flat and think she must have come back. But it had only been me forgetting to switch them off in the morning, half asleep and careless.
In the weeks leading up to her going, we didn’t talk about anything that wasn’t badgers. ‘I met with Kerry today,’ she said. ‘I said I thought I might go on hunger strike. For the badgers.’
‘I hope Kerry told you this was mental.’
‘She said she didn’t think it would work. Don’t ask me if I’m okay.’
‘You know I am going to ask you that.’
‘Well, don’t. I’m sorry I found something I care about that isn’t just sitting at home, reading books and drinking tea. And complaining about everything.’
‘I care about a lot of things. I just think going on hunger strike is a bad idea. I can’t think of it as a good idea in any way. Do you think the badgers will notice? Do you think the fucking farmers, the government, will notice? I’ll tell you who will notice. I will notice is who will notice. I will notice and I will suffer and no one who can do anything about this cull will give the slightest shit what you do.’
‘You’d like it if I lost weight anyway.’ There wasn’t an answer to that. She didn’t have much weight t
o lose.
‘Oh god, that dickhead Paterson’s on again.’
‘Who? Oh, him. Oh yeah.’
‘Christ, I hate him so much. You know, I think I’d kill him. I really would.’
‘We’ve got a vote. You don’t need to go around killing people.’
Owen Paterson was the minister in charge of the cull. Marie hated him. It was a hatred that had to be fed. A hatred that had to scour news websites for interviews and clips, a hatred that went far enough to attend a debate on fisheries just to bring up the cull. Kerry, who’d gone with her, persuaded her not to lob the two fat tomatoes in her handbag at the fatter ministerial face. I felt this was wise of Kerry.
‘You are dwelling on this. You are letting it take over. Why don’t we go away for a weekend? Or longer? Paris or somewhere. Berlin.’
‘You don’t get it, do you? I’m going back to Gloucester on the weekends. You really don’t get it at all.’
‘I do not want you to spend so much time there. I miss you. I want you back here.’ I had stopped attending the camp, pleading bad eyes and the risk of fainting.
‘Is this you being a husband? You just put on a Husband voice.’
I went over to the fridge. There was just enough wine in it to carry us through this talk. ‘I did not put on a husband voice.’
‘You definitely did, you put on a husband voice. It was deeper than your normal one. Like, Hello, I’m a husband.’ She laughed and for a moment she was mine again, and we were both of us together.
‘I just miss you when you go away, that’s all.’
‘It’s not like I don’t miss you. It’s just this is so much bigger. I have to stop this happening.’
I asked her why now and why badgers. She’d never campaigned on anything before. Her passions had always been arty. It was why we’d fallen in love, this shared need to create.