Animal Lovers

by Rob Palk

  One day, badger activists picketed my office, after our press team refused to give a comment on the cull. There was a suggestion we were in cahoots with the farming industry and no amount of insisting we specialised in pets could dispel this common belief. I’d started emphasising the first word of Pet Concern whenever I answered the phone, until Rupa advised me to stop. And then they were on the doorstep, cardboard placards with red-inked numbers of the badger dead, photos of heaped badger corpses. I looked for anyone I recognised. (I looked for Marie, for my wife.) But there was no one, although at least half of the protesters were wearing badger masks.

  Someone threw a toy badger at me as I left. It looked exactly like the one I’d bought Marie when she’d started paying attention to the cull. I looked to see who’d thrown it but so many of them were wearing badger masks. And badger toys were all very similar.

  There was one protester, face hidden behind a paper badger mask, who might have been Marie. I waved at this protester but she didn’t wave back and the crowd was too thick to get through.

  My Family Court forms were returned to me. I’d missed out some vital sections. I told Kerry about this and she looked sad and troubled as though I were getting them wrong on purpose. Then she said there was no rush, that she understood it was hard for me. I told her it was a genuine mistake.

  ‘You still love her, don’t you? I can tell you’re still kind of angry.’

  I held onto her, told her this was crazy. I kissed her nose, avoiding the stud.

  In the evenings I tried writing a new book, going to the local Idea Store, trying to ignore the name and the smell from the cafe, sitting amid the Language Students and the noisy kids, the women-less men killing time. But life was starting to feel more important than work. I saw Kerry as often as I could, tried to forget about Henry and her. I called the hospital regularly, badgering them for my next op. My local NHS had decided not to pay for it. This did not make me feel all too valued. The man on the end of the phone line assured me this was a technicality. That eventually someone would pay. I reminded them that I could technically drop dead, but I worried they were hoping for that.

  An email arrived from Marie. I’d been mostly not thinking about her although her acting career had restarted in my dreams, the no-nudity clause gone from her contract. I was trying to get used to how little I saw of her. The email said she wasn’t feeling too wonderful, that the first set of divorce forms had made it all seem so real. More, she said, than our getting married itself. Otherwise she was good. She’d been on another protest, outside a store, Kooples, who still used real fur in their hoods. She’d joined her local vegan society. She didn’t mention Kerry or Henry at all. She did mention her parents. Judy had managed to cope with the end of her daughter’s marriage by deleting it from the historical record, barely ever discussing it. Frank was working on a new poetry collection. As for the badger brigade, she told me Brian was taking the end of the protests badly, had started drinking again. Only Margaret Clifton remained the same, stomping over the grass in her stoutest boots, unchangeable as the hills. Marie ended the message by asking if I could recommend some good books.

  I thought about not responding but eventually I sent her some recommendations. I sent her the list and then another message saying, ‘You ruined my life.’

  She didn’t respond to either.

  Forty-Six

  It was a bright spring day and I’d booked some time off work, so I decided to brave the church. The old church, no longer sacred ground, where we’d been married the year before. I didn’t tell anyone I was going. I walked over to Canonbury, enjoying the sun, philosophically determined to be unphased by what I saw. I hoped no one else was getting married that day. I hoped that the place wasn’t cursed.

  It was empty when I arrived but the door was left unlocked. I stepped in, awaiting epiphany. Some rush of sorrow or joy. Only nothing seemed to come. I went and stood on the spot where I’d waited for her, closed my eyes and pictured her appearing. She looked scared, the way I remembered, overwhelmed with the solemnity. Led to the sacrifice. No, this was rubbish. I’d looked at the photos, more than once. There were no clues at all on her face. I sat and scraped the dusty wooden floorboards with one shoe. There didn’t seem much point in hanging around.

  After loitering round the church, I went on a cemetery walk. I was feeling a little bleak and wanted to surround myself with comforting gloom. I went down to Upper Street and bought a London guidebook. I would visit as many graveyards as I could. I might, I reasoned, stop in the odd pub too. I could see myself enjoying a day like this. I couldn’t trust someone who didn’t like old graveyards. The worn inscriptions, the youthful ends of the dead, the ground firm, ballasted. A sweet and secret day. Only in the last graveyard I went to, a regimented expanse in East London, I saw someone I didn’t expect: I saw Kerry.

  I couldn’t swear it was her at this distance. What’s more, I’d just been thinking about her, which can lead to this sort of confusion. How I hadn’t heard from her all day and how this was unusual. How things had got better lately, how the strange mistrust I’d had for her was a leftover from Marie, how there was no need to transfer it. How appealing the thought of a new life with her had become, to shrug off the past and start anew. And just as I had thought this, I’d spotted her, on the far end of the plot.

  I had to stop and squint, missing my eyesight. How could I be sure? She was only a shape in the distance after all, but it was her shape, her outline, the form I was starting to love. Her walk, her trotting pace, eager to explore. She was wearing something I was sure I’d seen her in, a dark blue dress with a lighter blue pinafore shape on the front. So was she visiting her dead? Or was she like me, a grief tourist, enjoying the melancholia? I wanted to call her name but I didn’t want to shout, this being a place of rest, but also from the fear I was intruding on a private rite. We were far from either of our homes. I felt, as well, that my excursion was naturally a part of my earlier visit to the old church, that I couldn’t explain the one without the other. She was standing before a grave and lifting her phone. Was she photographing the headstone? It couldn’t be her. But it certainly looked like it was.

  There was a way to settle this. I pulled out my own phone and found her in my recent calls. I pressed my thumb on her name. The woman in the distance glanced at the blue wafer in her hand, put it in her pocket and started to head off. My call went through to answerphone. It was definitely her.

  I followed, hurrying as much as seemed compatible with respect. I reached the aisle down the middle of the row of headstones but by then she was almost at the old black gate that led out onto the street. I rushed forward, getting tsk-ed at by a kneeling man in a suit, clutching one limp flower in soily hands. I smiled an apology, tried to measure my steps. Cursing in a whisper. When I got to the gate I looked down the high street at the chicken shops and nail bars and I couldn’t see Kerry at all.

  All I could do was go back, hoping to at least investigate the row of graves, find the one she’d been to. It was probably a relative, some old uncle she’d never mentioned. A private grief she’d saved for someone else. Listen to me, envying a dead man. Having got to roughly the spot I found I wasn’t sure on the row. I walked up and down a couple, angrily reading the stones, but I couldn’t see any that matched hers. And who even knew it was a relative of hers, or, if it was, if they shared her name?

  I tried calling again but got no answer. I didn’t know what I’d say if I got through to her. So instead I found a bus back to Hackney.

  That night an old fear kept me from sleeping. It was Henry, who had taken one love from me and could easily take another. Ridiculous when spoken, but then night fears always are.

  Forty-Seven

  I worried, a bit, about Alistair. He didn’t seem to be eating. Or, sleeping much, for that. He was parked in our front room, typewriter on the sticky table in front of him, working on his epic Rage poem. He’d booked a room to perform it, a basement under a Vietnamese restaurant. He tal
ked about this event as though it would surely mark his triumph. Except now when he said it, I’d see panic in his eyes. I asked him about Su. This didn’t seem to placate him. He babbled. ‘She’ll be there,’ he said. ‘At the reading. She’ll definitely be there. It’s going well.’

  ‘You seen her at all recently?’ I knew he hadn’t; I asked him for the fun of being cruel. He gave me a look suggestive of deep patience.

  ‘I don’t need to see her,’ he said. ‘We have an understanding.’ He scratched some words hard on a scrap of paper, the tip of his tongue poking out. I said nothing. ‘We don’t need to be in each other’s pockets like you and Kerry. We’re like . . .’ He scribbled out the words, whatever they’d been. ‘We’re like twin fucking stars or planets is what we’re like. Separate but in orbit. We don’t need fucking face time.’ He lit a cigarette.

  ‘You smoking regular cigs now?’ I said.

  ‘Only now and again.’

  I padded upstairs to Raoul’s room. He was in there, sat at his desk, taking notes from a book by Karl Polanyi. There was a cross on the wall and a picture of Taylor Swift, but otherwise only a single bed and a small shelf of theological texts. A musty smell, but somehow cleaner than the rest of the house. I sat down on the bed.

  ‘Thinking of becoming a priest,’ said Raoul. He was writing by hand, with a fountain pen, neatly looping.

  ‘Wow,’ I said. And, ‘Good.’

  ‘Don’t know if I actually will. I fall down on the celibacy but it’s not like it would change much.’

  I liked it in this room. I liked the order, the sense of routine, things folded and put in place in accordance with some system. I briefly thought it would be good to be a priest. Not for me, but for Raoul. But then it seemed such a bleak prospect. ‘Thing is with celibacy, it’s like suicide. Once you go for it, you’ve gone for it, haven’t you? As though things will never change.’

  ‘I dunno. I’m thirty-four. Don’t see things suddenly changing any day soon.’ This seemed more morose than I’d hoped for from Raoul. I tended to go in his room in search of uplift, as though he were doing missionary work among us.

  ‘Alistair’s event soon. He seems a bit distracted.’ Raoul put down his pen.

  ‘All that stuff he tells us. ‘Bout how he’s going to be this great figure. And his fiancée. He works hard to believe in all that. Really hard. Takes some effort that stuff. Faith always does.’

  I left him to his note-taking. I’d hoped he’d have been perkier.

  Forty-Eight

  It was a Saturday. I hooked out my earplugs with a forefinger, stretched out on the bed and savoured the morning sun upon my sheets. I swigged at my water, soothing my night-dry throat. I had it back again, just for a second. The feeling I’d gained and lost after the stroke. Lying there in bed, I had it again, the sense that everything in the room, the books leaning on my wall, the sunlight dancing on the papers scattered round, the posters of 1930s films and Malkin rumbling in joy next to my face, were right, were meant to be happening. Everything was good. I found that I was laughing. I found that things were right with me once more.

  My door opened and George stepped in.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ He looked peaky even by his standards: his eyes set deep in his cupid’s face giving him a disturbing wizened look, a prematurely knowledgeable child; his summer uniform of sweat-smelling winter coat, jeans baggy to the point of being harem pants, a jumper and a woolly hat; scabs across his fingers as though he’d spent the last few days in punching walls. I saw what I should have seen earlier – the kid wasn’t well, not at all.

  ‘Your flatmate let me in,’ he said. ‘The bald one. He was going just as I arrived. I told him you’d asked me over.’ He dropped onto the bed, putting as much force into his narrow buttocks as he could.

  ‘Kind of you,’ I said.

  ‘He gave me a flyer for tonight.’ Alistair’s big reading, the public debut of his poem. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be back in Bristol by then,’ said George. ‘I’m not really into that stuff? It’s dirty, showing yourself like that.’

  ‘It’s not going to work,’ I said. George did a decent job of looking perplexedly innocent. ‘Whatever it is you’re planning.’

  ‘S’making a social call,’ he said.

  ‘It’s never just a social call.’ He made a sound like two balloons rubbing together. ‘Well, you’re honestly wasting your time. You got me on the wrong day. I’m happy. I’m really happy.’

  George straightened himself as well as he could and tried his best to look innocent. He was very bad at it.

  ‘I’ve given up on Marie,’ I said. ‘It was never going to work. As far as I can tell she’s doing okay now, doing her bit for wildlife. You’re just going to have to accept it. I did.’ He wriggled like hooked bait. I could almost feel sorry for him.

  ‘You’re just giving up,’ he said. His voice started to crack. ‘You’re all . . . none of you believe in it, none of you keep it going.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I’ll show you.’ Covering myself with the duvet I crawled over the bed to the chest of drawers, riffling through my papers until I found the forms. ‘See this?’ I said. ‘Divorce papers. I’ve kept on putting them off. But they only need a signature.’ I looked over the forms, checking, as carefully as I could, that I’d put everything in place. My elbow up in the air in case George should grab and snatch them. He was twitching, knuckling his eyes. I had filled it all except for the bottom, where a space awaited my name. I grabbed and shook a pen, scribbled it down.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, pulling on jogging bottoms. ‘We’re going for a walk.’

  Outside it was glaring and hot, an August day. I rushed down the concrete concourse across our block, heading towards the street. George raced, huffing, behind me, slowed down by his stupid get-up, yelling at me to wait. The post box was just at the corner. I reached it and held off for him, the envelope in my hand. He was panting now, not bothering to hide his anger. His face had turned the colour of sunburn.

  ‘Wait for it,’ I said, holding the forms to the slot. George stood, asthma-breathed, the sun hurting his eyes.

  ‘Don’t fucking post that! You won’t be able to go back to her. Henry.’

  ‘I’m going to post it. Soz.’

  ‘You could still make it all work out,’ he said, clutching at his side. I tickled the envelope against the slot, teasing.

  ‘And . . . Sent.’ The letter gone, landing soft onto the others. I was going to be divorced. As bureaucratic exercises went it was on the significant side.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ he said.

  I’m sorry to say that I laughed. I should have known better how it felt to lose your hopes.

  ‘Why not, George? You should do it yourself, you know. Get a mental divorce from the both of them. Go and do your own thing. No point waiting for other people. I’m going back to the flat.’

  ‘You’re a bastard,’ said George.

  I started walking away from him, hoping he wouldn’t follow. He didn’t move at all at first, as though my posting the forms had stunned him. Then his tread started behind me, quickening in pace. I flinched as he got nearer, as though he might jump up and hit me.

  ‘I’m not going to yours,’ he said. ‘I give up. I’m giving up on all of you.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. I wondered what on earth would happen to him, this jobless intense little person. It was hard to imagine any kind of development for his life.

  ‘Wait,’ he shouted. ‘Wait. Why don’t you just ask her? Ask your girlfriend what’s going on? Ask her about Henry. Cos she knows all about it.’ He turned and ran away from me, faster than you’d think.

  Forty-Nine

  The flat was empty. Only it wasn’t the leisurely emptiness of a happy day indoors. It was the emptiness of anticipation.

  It must be nonsense. George was a stirrer, the sort of person who can’t walk past a pond without lobbing in a stone. His words might mean nothing at all. Against this though, there
was all I knew about Henry. Who’d had no qualms about sleeping with my wife. Maybe Kerry wasn’t his past. Maybe she was his future? I could see him picking Kerry as a post-Marie refreshment, an after-dinner mint when he’d had enough of the main course. And what about all the evidence on her side? She’d spoken his name in her sleep. Henry, please man. She’d jumped at the sight of him at that protest. Even her skulking around graveyards began to seem suspect. What was the fucking girl up to?

  I tried to stop myself thinking. Paced the floor, stroked the cat, poured out a glass of wine. I considered writing but my brain wouldn’t shift from accusation. Was there not, it asked me, something quite weird about Kerry? Who, it reasoned, is really that fucking selfless? Every evening, every day, a cause to further, an underdog to defend. Who in the world has the time? Apart from Raoul. But then, he’s bribing his god, reserving the best seats in heaven for himself.

  No, Kerry was too good to be true. There was something self-involved about her trying to be a saint. I worked in the charity sector. I’d seen how it went. Convince yourself – convince others – that what you do is good. Before too long the definition of good becomes whatever it is you do. You give yourself a multitude of breaks. See: Marie with her devotion to fluffy creatures, not caring at all about the damage she’d left behind. If you want to meet a bastard, scratch a saint.