Animal Lovers

by Rob Palk

  It felt, she said, as though the revolution were close. That it would only take people to listen, honestly listen, to these brave and smart young people and the rest was sure to follow. There’d been a few doubting noises in her head, murmurs of disquiet, but she’d quelled them. The way the boys did so much of the talking. The way so many of the people she met there seemed to be not just unhappy, as she was, not just furious, like her, but actively damaged, stutterers with manky teeth, boys whose rage seemed to spray, untargeted, over the world like so much spit. She’d worried about this, in a protective way. About seeing these people, these good young people, fail and lose their hopes.

  Neal though, who back then was better read than her, who could back up all his impulses with a quote from someone dead, Neal was cynical and said so. He voiced all her buried objections in the most annoying way. She was trying so hard to believe in this and all he could do was doubt. ‘I’m being a constructive critic,’ he said, after hours spent belittling the camp. ‘We can’t just switch off our brains because we’re a part of something.’

  For the first time, she hated him. They’d gone to a meeting in a hot tent, smelling of tarpaulin and feet. Everyone in there seemed to agree with everyone else, although some people only wanted to talk about their own particular obsessions. There was a scuffed-looking German guy who kept putting his hand up and talking about his ex-landlord, who he said had contacts in high places. He was obviously unwell but nobody could say that and there was no one to steer the conversation away from him until this other guy spoke up.

  She didn’t need to describe him. I could see him, his eyes twinkling with compassionate enthusiasm, his gentle mastery. The size of him. He prickled Neal, this guy. (I found myself, for the first time, liking Neal.)

  ‘It was such a challenge to him,’ she said. ‘He had to criticise, just to show this guy.’ Neal was standing, when there was no need to, and he had his hand in his jacket pocket, as though addressing a jury. Telling them they needed a strategy, they needed to be serious. Not as encouragement, even if he thought it was, but to crush them. Sitting next to him she felt herself tainted by his cynicism and the implied agreement of her silence. What was worse, she did agree, at least in part. The problem wasn’t what he said so much as his motives for saying it, his need to score off this older, wiser guy.

  When Neal was done the newcomer responded and not in the same spirit at all. He understood all Neal’s objections. He agreed with most of them. He was reasonable, cajoling him with kindness. He left Neal looking utterly destroyed, she said, and the worst thing was she found herself enjoying it. She could feel herself silently cheering as this guy left her boyfriend speechless.

  Outside the tent Neal had raged. ‘You enjoyed that,’ he kept saying. ‘That fucking old hippy.’ She’d told him it wasn’t okay to brand people like that. He told her he was going home and that was when she’d done it. The cruellest act of her life. She’d stayed. Visiting meetings, listening to talks. She’d found herself speaking freely, surprising herself with the things she said, ideas she hadn’t been sure of. Not having to check all her opinions by his. She’d made new friends, yarned over the veg stew with a woman from Cardiff who had quit her call centre job to come and live on site and a thin unpublished essayist who kept drunkenly bringing up Gramsci.

  She’d started drinking. There was a dangerous hubbub of excitement in her, as if she knew that to stop surfing this enthusiasm would be the start of guilt and regret. She had to keep talking. And towards the end of the night the big guy, the older guy, had approached her once again. Full of concern. Asked after her boyfriend. Could tell he’d maybe trodden on his toes a bit back there. She’d said, ‘he’s not my boyfriend,’ before she’d had time to think.

  I didn’t ask her what happened in Henry’s tent. I mean, I knew, didn’t I? And I knew I wasn’t angry about it any more. I couldn’t quite grasp why I’d been angry at all.

  ‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘we talked for most of the night. That’s kind of the rule in these places. You chat about capitalism for three hours and then when you’re done you can bone. I got the whole history of his involvement in social movements and you know what? He never once mentioned animals. Didn’t mention them at all.’ She had gone home the next day, back to Neal. They had a lot more relationship left. But every day she thought about the man from the camp.

  From guilt, I said. Just guilt. But Kerry, it wasn’t your fault. You were drunk, of course, and so young.

  ‘It was guilt,’ she said. ‘But it wasn’t just guilt.’

  You liked him, I said. She said yes.

  The next time she had seen him was last year. She’d gone onto the badger camp, just as a one-off, the same as she’d go to every climate, poverty, peace meeting she had time for. She knew the arguments about badgers, was convinced that the cull wouldn’t work and believed, in a vague way, that cruelty and dominance over animals bled into cruelty and dominance over nature, over women and the poor, over children and weaker lands. She was happy to do her bit. Still, she knew that, as someone who couldn’t go a week without red meat, she was not a convincing participant. The issue summoned no song in her. She attended, but out of duty.

  She’d gone on the patrol. Margaret was running it and there were a few others who had trickled away from the group by the time I came along. Last to join them, striding across the tarmac, he came. Henry. And all of those feelings, the ones she’d just about accepted as dead, turned out to have been hibernating. There he was, swaggering towards her, with this moonstruck blond kid scampering after him. It took him a moment to recognise her. That or his acting was great. God but she wanted him, god but she felt guilty all over, although Neal had long since gone. The same thrill, the same fear, as all of her restrictions slipped away. He’d approached her, as they patrolled, saying it was good to see her again, sounding her out for another visit. He’d upgraded to a camper van, at least. She wanted so much to say yes. She was sorry but she did. Only this time she said no. Something held her back.

  Maybe the way this teenage boy clung after him, nodding along to Henry’s every pious observation, as though he were Socrates with just a dash of Buddha. No, it wasn’t that. She wasn’t going to judge George, she understood their appeal, these adults who hadn’t buckled, who kept the strength and certainty of adolescence against every pressure there was. The problem, ‘and this sounds mad now but it’s true,’ the problem was his love of animals. Remember, they’d spent a long night talking. Not just talking, I thought, but didn’t say. Capitalism, neoliberalism, imperialism, every bloody -ism, and not a word about animals. Yet now they were his passion. He worked at a sanctuary. He had been part of the sabs movement, had liberated battery hens and mended broken paws. He was something of an amateur naturalist.

  It all screamed fake to her. More than that, it screamed ‘cop’.

  ‘A cop?’ I said. ‘Come on.’

  ‘I don’t know. There’s no proof. I don’t have any proof.’

  ‘You cheated and you feel strange about it and now he has to be a cop. He’s a sleazy old ratbag. Isn’t that enough? He has to be a cop?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was reading a lot about it. The guy who infiltrated the climate people. The ones in the eighties, who were sleeping with all these protestors. Lying to them. Maybe it all got blurred. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.’ She sighed, long and heavy.

  Henry please man. Henry policeman.

  She went to George first. Regretted it straight away. Asking leading questions, pestering him. Did he think that it was possible? He was rattled. He was furious. She thought he was going to choke. She’d never warmed to him and maybe she was imagining, but George seemed to get worse after this. He’d never been a sunny presence, but now he seemed to exaggerate himself; the deliberate mumbling, the clothes, the nonsense that he’d spout. She was scared she had broken the boy. She spent a while assuming he’d go straight to Henry, braced herself for a confrontation that never came. Which made her think, well,
maybe it was true. Maybe George was too scared of it being true to ever risk finding out.

  She realised she was spending all her spare time at the badger camp, not because of the badgers but because of her obsession with working it out, as if one day he would let his guard down and say ‘’ello ’ello ’ello’ or pull out a truncheon. But he never slipped at all.

  Around this time Marie and I showed up.

  ‘A hunch,’ I said. ‘That’s all you’ve got.’

  ‘Pretty much. But it was like I couldn’t get off it. And to watch Marie falling in love with him, see her buying his whole back story, well, I tried to hint he wasn’t all that but she wasn’t open to arguments. It was why I was rooting for you, at first, until – well, you know how that changed.’

  ‘I don’t believe any of this. Just because he was focused more on animals?’

  ‘I spoke to someone at the Met. Technically this stuff isn’t supposed to happen at all any more but he reckoned it still does. But he didn’t know any Henry.’

  ‘I’m sure there isn’t anything to know. Do you still love him?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘I was mad at him and hurt and I needed to know the truth. And the reason I’m telling you, I decided it was getting too much. I realised it doesn’t matter, not now I have you. So I’m leaving it be. We can both walk away from it, go for something new. I never found anything anyway. Right now, all I’ve got is the name,’ she said.

  She told me that undercover policemen worked under stolen names. Dead kids mostly. Born in the same year, didn’t make it to puberty, bingo, a resurrection as an anarchist. ‘I looked up records, wasted so much time but . . .’ She thumbed down her phone and I knew what she was going to show me, knew where in East London it was, and despite this it still took me a moment to register, the headstone with 1971–72 as the dates and the beloved passed-on baby: Henry Ralph.

  Fifty-One

  ‘I’ll fucking kill him,’ I said.

  I scared myself in saying it. The words were unwilled atavisms, they came from a murky, ancestral place where people owned other people and honour still existed. It wasn’t a cosy place or one where I’d last very long. At the same time I felt dizzy, whirling and sea-sick. I was still sitting down but I grabbed the bench. I was very aware of my eyesight. Of how it would stop me fighting.

  ‘You won’t kill him,’ she said. ‘You won’t do anything at all. This might all just be rubbish. It was a stupid obsession, something I fixated on. And what good would it do?’

  ‘He’s sleeping with my wife,’ I said. ‘He’s sleeping with my wife and lying about who he is.’

  ‘She’s not your wife,’ said Kerry. ‘Any more.’

  I agreed with her. I had to.

  ‘We need to forget about this,’ she said. ‘Even if it is true what can we do?’

  What was George’s system? Non-interference. I wasn’t convinced. We started walking back, holding hands, and all the time I was thinking this was the last time I’d be doing this, the last time spent with Kerry, the last time I’d be walking, guiltless, with her.

  We got back to the restaurant, almost without my noticing. I was several steps removed from everything around me, thinking instead of his hands upon my wife, thinking of myself standing over him.

  How did you murder people now? I didn’t have a weapon.

  I wasn’t going to murder him. I would have to hurt him though. Was hurting him enough? Was hurting a guy like that even possible?

  There were knives back at the flat. It was getting late. We went down into the sweltering basement. A moon-faced young man with an acoustic guitar was trilling and growling wordlessly.

  I was surprised at the size of the audience. Alistair was in a corner talking to four women in summer dresses. He had a big, frazzled grin on his face. About half of his make-up had gone, the third eye still staring.

  ‘My god, Stu,’ said Rupa, appearing in front of us. ‘You missed Alistair’s poem.’

  ‘Oh,’ I managed to say.

  ‘You never told me he was good. I mean, really really good. He sat in a corner scribbling these last-minute revisions, changing the whole thing around, and then he went to the front and it was just . . . I’ve never heard anything like it. He said it all, really he did. It was like watching a birth.’

  I tried to work out if she was joking. It didn’t seem she was. Normally this would have been the worst news I’d heard all day. Alistair was talented. Only fucking poetry, but still, an actual talent. Rupa knew her stuff, as well. Maybe she fancied him. As if that was any comfort.

  It was a good job I was barely there.

  ‘Shall I go the bar?’ I said. Kerry looked at me in a nervous way I knew I would see over and over.

  ‘I think I should go,’ she said.

  ‘No, let me go. What will you two have?’ Kerry said a gin and tonic and Rupa told me she was fine.

  Instead of going to the bar, I went upstairs, squeezed through the queuing crowd and left the restaurant. I needed another fag but I also wanted to keep my head as clear as I could. It already seemed to be spinning. It already seemed to be squeezed.

  Should I go back to mine and get the knife? I was already pushed for time. And I knew all the knives would be filthy. I wasn’t going to turn up and stab him with a knife covered in cake.

  I walked to the nearest train station, past bright lit expensive restaurants and bright lit expensive people, people who would never set off to Bristol intent on getting jailed. I went down a cobbled side street to the station. Pop-up bars and diners had sprouted all around, with tables outside them full of friends and couples, clutching buzzers that would rattle to announce their food. They all of them looked so happy.

  At the station I patted my pockets till I found my Oyster card. I ran up the stairs to the platform three at a time and stood at the end, in the breeze. I didn’t want to be near the group of girls passing a bottle from hand to hand, the vicarly man in glasses trying to read, the boys with their W. G. Grace beards and buttoned up collars. My eyelid was twitching. I looked at my phone and it was already full of missed calls.

  Oh Kerry, my darling, goodbye. I supposed I could still go back and join her, pretend that she’d said nothing. If I couldn’t get on a train, that was what I’d do. Chance would decide for me, as I didn’t seem to have much ability of my own.

  No, I had to do this. The train approached and I got in and stayed standing.

  I was going to rescue Marie. I could not have her deceived.

  The train decided to wait for five minutes between stops. I tried hard not to look crazy, not to fidget or swear. Anger was surging through me, righteous anger, anger I could ride. I wanted very much to talk to someone but there was no one that I could. A middle-aged black woman in a heavy purple coat was trying to say something to me. Something concerned, I think. I must have looked unhinged.

  Come on, come on, you stupid train. Everyone travelling with me was young, horribly so, tanned limbs and statement beards, pack laughter and talk. I was at a great distance from them. Although I could still go back to Kerry and my flatmates, drinking in the restaurant. If they were still there and not hunting for me all around.

  We started moving again. I would get the Tube to Paddington. It was now ten fifteen. I could get there in half an hour or so and catch the last train to Bristol. I walked down the escalator, down into the Tube. There was a group of men in shirt sleeves, smelling of a day’s drinking, blocking up the route. I shouted ‘move’ at them at the top of my voice and they peered at me as if they were surprised I could speak at all. The one at the furthest end edged out of my way. I rushed down the rest of the stairs and zigzagged through the crowd to the right platform, elbowing whoever got in my path. ‘I’m blind,’ I shouted, if anyone complained. I must have bumped into a few.

  There was a two-minute wait for the next train. I wondered if I should just dive under it when it came. I could stage it as a trip, a stumble, so that the driver wouldn’t feel any guilt. How would it affect
my fellow commuters? The ones nearest would be horrified, I supposed, although it would give them a story to tell. The further people got from my squashed remains the crosser they would be. Screams turning into tuts as they travelled along the line. I didn’t think I could do it. There’d be comforts even in prison. I could get on with my book. It was best to stay alive as long as possible. There was so much to like about life.

  The train rushed in and I could imagine it slamming into me, the crash against my skull like a brain haemorrhage, only coming from outside. I was sweating worse than Alistair had been an hour and a lifetime ago. Maybe I was turning into a genius as well. I crammed myself into the carriage and closed my eyes.

  When I got to Paddington station there was a small crowd lazily staring at the changing times-display, with sleepy, beery faces. I hurried over and, shutting my bad eye, I looked along the display. There was a train to Bristol in fifteen minutes. The decision was not mine to make, not any more. Although there was still a chance I might not get a ticket.

  I looked at my phone and it was full of texts from Alistair, Rupa and, most of all, from Kerry. It was best I didn’t read them. I walked to the ticket office and found myself near the front of the queue, just behind someone with a long list of questions to ask. I stared at the back of their head, imagining my brain problems spreading, transmitting to them, picturing them falling, clutching at their skull, while I smiled, stepped over and got my tickets fast. Eventually the poor customer, not knowing they had a death sentence, went strolling, puzzled, away and I stood before the cashier.

  ‘One way to Bristol please,’ I said. ‘Actually, make it a return.’ It cost a shocking amount. Still, if t’were done and all that.

  I would probably go on the lam, rather than turn myself in. Although they were bound to catch me eventually and it wouldn’t do me any favours to be evading justice. Maybe the jury would look kindly on me. I needed medical treatment and there was the whole matter of my sight. I wouldn’t last long on the run. Oh god, I would miss my books.