by Rob Palk
‘Yeah, Marie mentioned that! She said it really freaked her out you saying she’d saved you. Like it was this great responsibility.’ She chuckled as though she couldn’t help herself. ‘Though she didn’t really take it on as a responsibility, did she? Like, I find looking after my niece a great responsibility but I don’t hide upstairs when she visits. Sorry. I’ll buy you a coffee if you like, although you’re probably jumpy as it is. God, I would be, marching into the woods to get my wife back. It’d take more than a coffee to set me straight. Jesus. Shall I sit next to you on the train?’
As we coursed past hills and fields, Kerry filled me in on the badger brigade. Mine was not the only faltering marriage. Brian had walked out on his wife and kids. And you know (Kerry said) she was the woman who got him off the gear, she’d stood by him all the way and now he only seemed to care about these animals. Irene’s husband had given her an ultimatum and they were currently estranged. A middle-aged guy in the camp had asked Kerry to ‘go into the woods with him’ while his wife was preparing the food. The cull was costing more than just woodland lives.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I get a kick out of romantic disasters. Not yours,’ she added. ‘Sorry. I’ll shut up.’ But I didn’t think she was sorry. She certainly didn’t shut up. ‘You have to admit it’s kind of funny though. Ending a marriage over badgers. Like disinheriting someone over an otter. Throwing your child on the streets cos he doesn’t like hedgehogs.’
I couldn’t really grasp why she was part of the protest. She stole my newspaper and tutted over injustice, but when it came to badgers she couldn’t help discussing her fellow protestors’ zeal with a sort of glee, as though she found tremendous pleasure in human strangeness. I wanted to remind her she wasn’t exactly an observer, she had pitched her tent with the rest of them. After a while she fell asleep, her breath making little yelps and whistles like a dog dreaming of green fields.
Twenty-Nine
We had the same cab driver as the time before, the time I’d been here with Marie. He didn’t seem to recognise me. He asked if Kerry and I were married. I told him we weren’t, perhaps a little too loud.
It was odd seeing the half-forgotten hedges and dry-stone walls, unchanged while I was so altered. At least in London the scenery changes at the same rate you do.
‘Going to propose myself, soon,’ the driver told us, with pride. I wished him success, said I hoped his girlfriend in the village would be pleased. ‘Doubt it,’ he said. ‘It’s not her I’m asking. Going for a Pole. Cultural differences, I reckon, they like a man like me. Got it all sorted, she’s coming in February to see if we fall in love and if we do I’ll pop her the question sometime in March.’
I told him I was married myself but we were temporarily separated. Kerry had covered the bottom half of her face with her hands but subdued snickers kept dodging through her fingers. She was bouncing on the seat, I saw, as if life held too much stimulus.
‘Hope it all works out for you,’ he said. ‘Terrible thing divorce. Mine was fifteen years ago and I only have to smell her perfume on the street and I’m straight back where I was. We split to stop from arguing but it never stops, not really. You just do it in your head. Here good for you?’ We stepped out onto a narrow lane enclosed by trees. God knows how Kerry knew it was the right spot, it looked identical to the rest. She bent back a branch and scuttled into the darkness, with me lumbering in pursuit, making twice as much noise as she did. We kept on through the trees until we picked up stewing smells, the sound of a car radio. ‘Here we are,’ she said and, moving quicker than I could keep up with, she swerved past a bush and onto a path.
At the bottom of this path we reached a glade. Although glade gives it an idyllic quality it didn’t really attempt. Glade suggests solitary deer, perhaps a couple of nymphs. This place was more mattress-y. There was a camper van, a cluster of ragged tents, a porta-loo and a makeshift kitchen area with an untended pot of soup. Kerry started putting her tent together, something I hadn’t done in years. I’d brought the right instructions but felt that using them in front of her would lower me in her eyes. I would sort the tent out later when it was dark and I was tired. That would be the best time. I asked her if she needed any help, which, thank god, she didn’t. I suspected this wasn’t even the most awkward I was going to feel all day.
As if to prove I was right about this, the camper van door opened and Marie stepped out followed by an enormous St Bernard, its face folded like a rose. She looked, oh dear, she did look well. She didn’t look as though she’d spent the last month drinking and crying and having unfortunate entanglements with witches. She looked like a woman who had found her right domain. As though living in a camper van and breakfasting on twigs were exactly what she needed to do.
It would, I thought, almost be a shame to drag her away from all this. I also, for a moment, doubted I could. She looked, for the first time, absolutely herself.
The dog galloped around, breathing meaty steam on us.
‘Stuart?’ Marie said, hurrying over. She was wearing a gypsyish get-up, which oughtn’t to have worked on her but sadly worked very well. ‘What is he doing here?’ She looked at Kerry for explanation as though Kerry was to blame for my turning up.
‘We were on the same train,’ said Kerry, investing a bland statement of fact with a surprising amount of guilty-sounding bullshit.
‘I’m coming to help out,’ I said.
‘He’s coming to help out,’ said Kerry and absented herself inside her tent. Her shadow was clearly visible, making her, as absent people go, extremely present throughout.
‘You’re coming to help out. Because that will definitely help, making everything difficult. I don’t get this Stuart. I know you don’t care about badgers. You’ve been pretty upfront about that. And I hate to be cruel but I left you. I left you. You can’t just turn up to places and expect things to all be normal.’
‘I suppose.’ This was going to be harder than I’d imagined. ‘I suppose I changed my mind. I believe in what you’re doing. I believe the cull was wrong. I do believe that. And I just thought if I could help in any way, I would.’
‘You’re half blind. You faint an awful lot. You think badgers are jumped up fucking weasels. I’m not sure how much help you’d be. Why don’t you go home?’
‘I’m more or less used to the sight. And I haven’t fainted in months. I’m trying to be supportive. Trying to help.’
‘You told Frank I was a drunk. I’m not a drunk at all. I don’t know where you got that. Just go home. Please go home.’
I asked her to give me a chance. She narrowed her eyes, like a jeweller faced with an especially shoddy fake. And, unexpectedly, she smiled. Her old smile, the one I’d missed. Before she could follow through with, say, a kind word, some sign of feeling, the van door opened again and Henry was there. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. His chest looked like a 1980s cartoon hero’s, panelled, segmented, hard, expanses of needless musculature, slabs in improbable places. I had no idea what you had to do to get a chest like that and, having done so, what use you’d have for it. You could waste an hour bouncing rocks off yourself but surely you’d get bored. What did she see in this man? While he had been working out or lifting donkeys over streams to stop their hooves from getting wet, I had been reading books. I had written an unpublishable novel! I was the Master.
I was the Master.
‘Noisy out here,’ said Henry. ‘Trying to do some work.’ He looked me up and down, as though he were revaluating his belief in the perfection of all nature. ‘Stuart,’ he said. He extended his hand to me in a way I was sure was supposed to be magnanimous. I paused for as long as I had courage then offered mine to him. Only a few bones broken in his grasp.
‘Listen,’ he said, steering me a few steps away so that Marie had to stand there pretending she couldn’t hear. ‘I know you don’t think much of me. But I know you do think a lot of Marie. In your way. We both want the best for her, right? And she’s got that now. I think we both have to respe
ct her decision, know what I’m saying.’
Well, it’s easy for you to respect her decision, isn’t it? Her decision seems to involve adopting your cause as her own and moving into your camper van. Be massively churlish of you not to respect that a little, wouldn’t it? Whereas I, spoilsport that I was, I found it more difficult. I reminded myself they still hadn’t yet had sex.
‘I agree,’ I said. ‘The best man won.’ I wondered if that was pushing it a bit far, but no, the oaf smiled shyly, as though I’d said what we’d all been thinking.
‘By saying that Stuart, you made yourself the best man.’
‘Just don’t ask me to actually be the best man. Ha!’
‘Mate, I’m an anarchist, we don’t believe in marriage.’
‘I can see that. Ha. Ha.’
‘Ha.’ Before I could jump back, he grabbed me in an embrace. It was like being set upon by a cathedral. I had time to gulp in his odour of bracken and incense, before he released me, gasping and cross. Marie tutted loudly and hopped back into the van.
‘Women, eh?’ he said. I couldn’t bring myself to smile at that one. Because she isn’t fucking women, Henry. She is Marie, and I see that, even if you, you big lummox, never will. My god, how much I hated him.
He hopped back in the van and from inside I could hear two voices, trying hard not to shout. I might as well try and put my tent up. Kerry had to climb from hers and help me, halfway through.
The soup was good, in a murky, lentil-heavy, spinachey sort of way. It was early evening but it had been dark for a few hours, a whale-black sky. We sat on stools or perched on the frosty ground, warming our hands on our bowls. From Henry’s van I could hear the sound of two voices singing, alongside some awful plucked instrument. The song seemed to be about badgers. Brian was explaining, lengthily, about the hidden reasons for the cull. Something to do with developers, something to do with Tesco’s. ‘Black and white, forever strong,’ came the song from Henry’s van. When the song finished, or at any rate, stopped, Marie and Henry came out and sauntered to our table, both of them glancing over as if they’d expected me gone. I felt caught out sitting next to Kerry. George, who I hadn’t thought was around, slunk out of one of the tents and came to stand on the edge of our group. He wasn’t wearing a coat despite the cold, not, I think, because he didn’t feel it himself, but because he enjoyed other people’s feeling discomfort on his behalf. He greeted me in a familiar way I was sure that everyone noticed. When he smiled, which wasn’t often, his teeth were speckled with green. Kerry kept talking too loudly and telling jokes and nobody except for me laughed. They were a mopey bunch right then, the Badger Patrol. Defeat and winter sapping their spirits, Stalingrad all over again.
Marie was livelier than the rest. Her subject was direct action. She was furious, flabbergasted, that the cull had not brought down the government. What was needed was something drastic, something real. ‘We should actually go for the farms,’ she said. I worried, but said nothing.
Henry started talking about Gandhi in a patient way, as though we might not have heard of him. He always spoke as if we were at a slightly lower reading level. I said violence got people nowhere – I was rewarded with a glare. Marie wasn’t adjusting to my presence. Kerry agreed with me, said she thought violence was counterproductive. Henry snorted, as though the word ‘counterproductive’ were an alienating and fancy bit of jargon. Kerry tore a crust of bread in two, with some force. I wondered if she had a bit of a crush on Henry. I found I disliked this idea.
After we were done, and were rinsing our bowls at the sink, I found myself next to Marie.
‘Henry,’ I said. ‘Why do you like him? He’s an arse. He has wristbands for causes. He plays the ukulele.’
‘Please leave that alone,’ she said. ‘Anyway, it’s a banjo.’
‘I’m here because I love you,’ I said. ‘I love you more than he’s had time to. You understand that, right?’
She flicked her fringe with one hand, looked at the ground. ‘It’s not that I don’t love you,’ she said. ‘It’s just that these things change. We’re different, Stu. Different sensibilities. And I’ve got to fight this cull now. This place, it feels like home.’
‘Marry me.’
‘I already did, Stuart.’
‘I haven’t got anything bigger to offer,’ I said.
Thirty
I got back late on Sunday. Alistair at the door. Malkin seemed to have taken against him in my absence, swiping his ankles on the stairs, snapping his feeding hands. ‘She’s being a menace,’ Alistair said. I told him she was a he and dropped my bags on the floor.
Raoul was home, in a muumuu, watching the flatscreen through thick scribbles of smoke. He had been in this position on Saturday when I left.
I sat and asked him how he was.
‘Meant to get some reading done this weekend. I’d gone and put it aside. I didn’t have any volunteering. Church this morning but that would be okay. I’d still have time to read.’ There were two books on the table, obscured by Rizla papers and clumps of tobacco. Something about the Wobblies and a book on the Latin American church. ‘Must have read about a page. And not a page of each.’
‘No way to live,’ I said. Raoul agreed, it wasn’t. He asked me about my weekend.
‘It was okay,’ I said. ‘We found a trap, in the woods. I was going to touch it but then Kerry, she’s one of the badger people, she said they’ve got paint on them or something, glow in the dark. It was all right. Managed not to bump into much. I’ve adjusted pretty well.’
‘You gonna get your wife back?’
‘That’s not why I’m doing this.’ But I thought, perhaps it was. I thought it wouldn’t take much to prove my love.
George started calling me up around once a day, so that I had to run out of the office and take it in the corridor with colleagues passing me by. He mumbled at me in his socky voice. He would pause for great lengths of time, so that I started feeling awkward on his behalf until I realised that he didn’t feel awkward, he was making me feel awkward and he knew it.
He would make cod philosophical remarks relating to his system of life, the ordered anarchy he believed in. Everyone knowing their place although no place greatly higher than another. Influencing others, flexing your strength against them, was evil without exception. Even the mildest impact on another was coercion, led to motorways and drone warfare, theme parks and modern medicine. He was tedious on this score. He told me he didn’t believe in bank accounts. Alternatively, he would revert back to the manners of a boy even younger, blowing raspberries or making spastic sounds, refusing to engage.
Mostly though he filled my head with my wife, as if it wasn’t already full enough. Rupa came past and winked at me, assuming I was talking to Marie. I wished she had been right.
I went out one night with the Lansdownes. I hadn’t seen them since Marie had denied my report about her drinking. I was nervous and to fill the silence I told them I had an agent at last. No thanks to you, Papa Lansdowne. He congratulated me, narrowing his eyes only slightly when I told them the name of the agency, the first I could remember. He thought I’d want to aim a little higher than that.
I stopped myself from lamping him with the chilli oil. Write one of your famously irascible reviews of that, old man.
We were in an Italian place in Primrose Hill. Busty serving-girls and waiters in skin-tight keks, happy to flirt with the ageing female diners. Posters of Fellini films on the walls, pepper mills out of a fertility cult, fatty foods and skinny customers. Frank and Judy across from me, still with all their lustre, looking well. Next to me an empty table mat, as though my wife were the Prophet and we’d saved her a seat just in case.
‘So everything is going well. Very well. Except.’ One wife, absent, saving badgers.
Frank put down the menu, scratched his famous fringe. ‘She won’t talk to us about anything except badgers. We try and ask her what she’s doing and all we get is facts about badgers, snippets of badger lore. Anything else,
it’s a blank. We ask her about you two, she says nothing, she hangs up. Stuart, are you quite all right? You’re drinking rather fast.’
I hadn’t really noticed but yes, it seems I had been draining my glass a bit. There was a blubbery lip stain on its rim. ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I’m fine because I know we can get through it. I know we’ll be all right. I’m not angry and I’m working on this. The signs are very encouraging.’
‘I did speak to her, Stuart,’ said Judy. ‘This morning. Her mind seemed very made up.’
I took a long sip then wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, leaving a cold kiss on my wrist.
‘She’s spoiling him, you see,’ said George. He pronounced the word ‘him’ as though it ought to be capitalised. ‘You should see how he’s changed.’ He was still part of the camp but George could tell the things that drove Him now were different. It used to be the animals and now it was all for her. Which was the wrong reason to do anything. You had to protect for the sake of it, not to impress anyone else.
And the violence! Not that there’d actually been any. Not that George would mind too much if there were. He thought that Owen Paterson, for example, probably wanted to die. Otherwise why invite attack? But it went against George’s system. Shooting someone, even Owen Paterson, was definitely coercive.
‘Are they really talking about shooting him?’ I said. I could hear his breath down the line and knew I was in for a pause and a half. Rustling and breathing and picking at his spots.
I didn’t like those breaths. They sometimes made me wonder.
‘That was an example,’ he said. ‘But the way they talk now. It’s always those bastards, those fuckers, they need to be taught a lesson. I mean, they probably can’t help being fuckers? It’s probably how they came out?’