Talk to the Tail

by Tom Cox

  As the only child of two teachers, I was accustomed to finding ways to amuse myself in big, semi-deserted 200-year-old buildings. Having quickly exhausted the infotainment potential of Mr Chester’s Big Trak and Miss Davies’ budgerigars at Claremont, the primary school where I studied and my mum taught English as a Second Language, I’d learned to use my imagination to get myself through the hour between the school bell and my mum’s home-time. But, wandering the corridors at Farnley, there was always something new to be discovered – a hitherto unknown chamber containing a selection of dusty marsupials or the cob-webbed paraphernalia of a 1930s shop window. Kept in walnut boxes, these items were borrowed only once in a blue moon.

  As I wandered the corridors of Farnley, I usually avoided Ben The Taxidermist’s room, though I would occasionally peek through the open doorway. The smell of viscera and formaldehyde was overpowering, and I was scared of Ben’s eagle owl, Fred, who would sit on Ben’s shoulder as he worked, gazing down sternly yet approvingly as Ben hollowed out the thorax of a stoat or squirrel. When I’d first been introduced to him, Ben had placed Fred briefly on my shoulder, but I’d sensed Fred wasn’t strictly up for it, and my dad had actually had to hold my shoulder in place, what with Fred being the size of my entire nine-year-old torso.

  Fred went everywhere with Ben, including, occasionally, to some of my dad’s supply teaching jobs, where Ben would occasionally give talks to children about his work with animals. After half a decade, my dad had learned that supply teaching was a bite-or-be-bitten world, and the stuffed beasts he brought to his classes from Farnley proved an invaluable distraction: by being Stuffed Animal Guy, he could avoid being Persecuted Supply Teacher Guy. Most of my dad’s regular schools got used to seeing an inanimate fox or baby capybara in the corner of their staffroom, though the Deputy Headmistress of one was perturbed to notice the large, dead owl on the table next to her, only for Fred to very slowly swivel his head in her direction and offer her a single, ominous blink.

  My dad once reported that Ben’s mum had cleaned out the freezer and found his childhood guinea pig, Tootles – who had, it should be added, died of natural causes – and Ben, who’d forgotten all about him, had cried for a whole afternoon.

  ‘When Fred dies, will Ben stuff him?’ I asked my dad.

  ‘PROBABLY. IT WILL BE KIND OF A TRIBUTE.’

  ‘But he won’t stuff him before he’s dead, will he?’

  ‘NO. OF COURSE NOT.’

  ‘But if he likes animals so much, why does he like it when they’re dead?’

  ‘I’M NOT SURE. ASK YOUR MUM. NOW, I’VE GOT TO FINISH PAINTING THIS GOAT, SO CAN WE TALK ABOUT IT LATER?’

  Despite what my dad had assured me, it did turn out that Ben’s interest in taxidermy wasn’t strictly limited to dead creatures. I found this out one day upon coming home from school and discovering my dad crouched in front of the living room coffee table, upon which sat a hard white blob about the size of a builder’s fist.

  ‘AH SAY, TOM, COME ’ERE AND SEE THIS,’ said my dad.

  ‘What is it?’ I said.

  ‘SSSSHHHHH!’ said my dad. ‘YOU’VE GOT TO BE REALLY QUIET OR YOU’LL WAKE HIM.’

  I could now see that the white blob had legs and eyeholes. ‘Is that a toad?’ I asked.

  ‘YES. HE’S GOT HIS PROTECTIVE WINTER COATING ON. PICK HIM UP IF YOU LIKE, BUT BE VERY CAREFUL BECAUSE IF HE GETS DISTURBED HE WILL GET ANGRY AND BREAK OUT OF IT. LIKE THE INCREDIBLE HULK DOES. THEN HE WILL PROBABLY BITE YOU.’

  After I had picked up the white blob and ascertained that it contained only air, not amphibian, the full story emerged. That morning, a bored Ben had ventured out into the woods behind Farnley House and chloroformed a toad and taken it back to his workroom. He’d then covered it in dental putty, being careful to leave a breathing hole, and allowed the putty to set for the next few hours. At the end of the day, he’d been back to the woods, cut the dried putty, and released the toad, who’d staggered off into the woods like the drugged hostage of unexpectedly kindly terrorists. The casing had then been resealed and loaned to my dad for the evening.

  If Malcolm, the frequently sozzled, sexagenarian art collector whose job it was to oversee Farnley, was aware of his workforce’s antics, he did not show it. Nobody ever got to the bottom of who it was that ham-fistedly altered the sign at the bottom of the drive which said ‘Farnley House: Educational Resource Centre’ to make it say ‘Ed’s Occasional Racehorse Centre’ but it was a full month before anybody was concerned enough to change it back.

  In the foyer of Farnley hung a giant painting of a nude youth by the artist Albert Wainwright. For ten days in a row, my dad painstakingly painted and cut out a different theme of underwear, including thongs, Speedos and some masterfully designed Hawaiian boxer shorts, and stuck it over the youth’s crotch area. When Malcolm arrived in the morning, my dad and Zeppelin would hide out on the balcony above and watch his reaction, which normally involved staring quizzically at the picture for around thirty seconds, as if trying to work out exactly what was different about it, then moving on. Neither did Malcolm ever seem quite aware of the litter of baby hedgehogs brought in by Ben, which often made short work of the cheese sandwich leftovers in Farnley’s staffroom.

  Eventually, my dad’s role was expanded at Farnley to include overseeing many of the educational items that were sent out to schools. Every so often, he’d receive a call asking for an authentic eighteenth-century musket or a duck-billed platypus, but on the whole the pace remained sluggish.

  By this point, our house had become a temporary home for many of the animals that my dad did not feel were getting the respect they deserved at Farnley. Strangely, it has taken me over two decades to realise there’s anything remotely odd about having a polar bear guarding your entrance hall, and with this realisation comes the inevitable cavalcade of other questions. How exactly did my dad fit it into the boot of a Morris Marina? When Paul Abbott’s mum phoned up my mum to say he couldn’t stay over at my house any more, was it really just because Paul was ‘having trouble sleeping without the light on in a foreign house’ or was there more to it than that? When Paul closed his eyes, was he experiencing a generic fear of the dark, or was he specifically thinking about the giant claws and enormous, toothy muzzle just a few feet below him?

  The polar bear was actually a little too demented-looking, a bit wonky around the chops, to genuinely strike fear into the heart of most visitors. More black-fanged and impressive was the baby alligator that slept at the end of my bed throughout the summer of 1985, and briefly made me the most popular boy in my school year. After Darren Kestembaum stayed over and I placed it on his chest facing him while he was asleep, a rumour developed in Mr Highland’s class that I actually owned a real alligator. While I never went so far as to confirm this, neither did I quite discourage it.

  Sadly, by the time most of the class began to invite themselves over, the alligator had gone to stay with Zeppelin, and, subsequently, his grandma, who was reportedly using it as a draught excluder. However, I think my new friends found some consolation for its absence in my dad interrupting our rice pudding to bring in a stuffed ocelot and announce, ‘THIS IS TIBBLES: I GOT HIM FROM THE RSPCA RECENTLY. HE’S GOT A BIT OF A BAD TEMPER BUT HE’S OKAY ONCE YOU GET TO KNOW HIM.’

  When Farnley closed, the collection moved to smaller premises, and many of its animals came up for grabs. In the end, after careful consideration, the polar bear chose to cohabit with Farnley’s janitor, a bachelor called Eric who lived in a one-bedroom flat near Nottingham city centre and, it must be assumed, was not subject to a large amount of lady callers. The ocelot went to Zeppelin, who had already taken to keeping it on the back shelf of his Mark 1 Ford Capri, often accompanied by a marmot, putting him a level up from fellow East Midlands playboys who settled for fluffy dice and a pine-scented air freshener.

  The tawny owl, fox and African mole rat my dad brought home all put in their time as domestic sentries, educational devices and practical-joke props over
the next few years, but history does not record where their afterlife journeys came to an end, or if they still continue, elsewhere, against the odds. Had I not turned into an adolescent, and temporarily lost my fascination with the natural world, I probably would have paid more attention.

  ‘Oh, that old thing?’ my mum will say now, as I ask her about the mole rat. ‘I don’t know. One of its legs fell off in the end, though. I remember that much. I think I took it to the antiques fair with me one time and my friend Sandra bought it off me. Or no, maybe that was the fox.’

  In the end, the sole Farnley refugee to survive my teenage years was not a wild animal at all, but a West Highland terrier. I’d named it Rags, after the electronic dog in the Woody Allen film Sleeper, which, as an eleven-year-old, I’d adored. Our Rags had none of the perky, waggy-tailed charm of its namesake, and his off-white fur was less than strokable, but every summer he would sit in our front window, sometimes for up to four weeks, obediently guarding our home while we were on our annual holiday. To my know ledge, nobody called the RSPCA on us, though we did return from Italy in 1988 to find our neighbours, Dennis and Roma, standing at our front gate looking pale and worried. Having already had to report the death of my goldfish that summer, which had long ago gone to live in their pond, my heart bleeds to think of the emotional steeling they must have done before giving us the tragic news that our pet dog had ‘not moved’ for an entire fortnight.

  Rags survived several house moves in the late 80s and early 90s, and made it to the cottage near Ockwold. It was in our third summer here that, undaunted by age and the physical effects of frequently getting the crud beaten out of him by Monty, he embarked on his most heroic and selfless adventure yet.

  There wasn’t a lot of traffic on the narrow lane outside the cottage, but what there was would not be out of place in a wacky, computer-based racing game: a mixture of horses, stock cars heading to the racetrack two miles away, tractors, combine harvesters, stolen Ford Escorts and police cars. Not all of these sights raised a smile, but one that did was the weekly trundle of a mobility scooter, driven by an obese disabled lady, upon whose roof travelled a proud-looking Jack Russell.

  I have no idea where the lady in the mobility scooter lived, nor where she travelled to every Tuesday, but she seemed very determined about it. She always rode along in the centre of the lane, her bespectacled face a mask of belligerence, and she and her Jack Russell appeared unfazed on the occasions when a farm vehicle or local boy-racer was being held up behind her. Sometimes, up to four vehicles could be seen queuing up in her slipstream. My bedroom and my dad’s workroom faced the lane, and we would often stop work to watch these processions, although on the occasion she had her accident we were on the other side of the house in the garden.

  ‘FOOKTIVANO! WAS THAT YOU?’ my dad asked me, switching off his hedge clippers.

  ‘Was what me?’ I said.

  ‘THAT FOOKIN MASSIVE SQUAWKING NOISE YOU MADE. LIKE ONE OF THE MONTY PYTHON WOMEN.’

  ‘I haven’t done that for years.’

  ‘Ceaaaaaakkkwwww!’

  ‘THERE IT WAS AGAIN. SEE WHAT I MEAN? JUST LIKE THE WOMAN IN THE SPAM SKETCH.’

  ‘Yeah. But it wasn’t me. Did you see my lips move?’

  My dad and I hurried down the garden, in the direction of the cawing sound, through the gate and into the downhill track leading to the Pattens’ farmhouse.

  Simultaneously, we spotted the wheel sticking up out of the ditch, twenty yards down the track. The scooter was wedged fast, and its occupant was wedged even faster inside the scooter, still making the cawing sound. Perhaps, initially, the noise had been more like ‘Heeelp!’ but, as she’d spent longer there, and hope of human assistance had dimmed, it had degenerated into something more desperate, a last-ditch appeal from a ditch to any benevolent crows who happened to be passing.

  Getting the scooter back upright, with its driver – whom it now emerged was called Beryl – still inside it, meant my dad and I getting into the ditch and heaving, red-faced, with all our strength. A grunt or two could have helped, but both of us remained near silent as we pushed, aware of how such a noise might, in the circumstances, seem tactless, given Beryl’s physique. I was enormously relieved to see the scooter back upright – not just because Beryl was unhurt, but because we’d managed our rescue operation without me having to resort to my dad’s original suggestion of getting help from Frank, the fox-hater next door, who disturbed me, and probably would have brought his gun, just on the off chance that there was something with a snout involved that needed putting out of its misery.

  ‘Ceaaaaaakkkwwww! I don’t know what happened,’ said Beryl. ‘I was pootling along, and I just lost control, and it ran away from me down the hill.’

  As we ascertained that the scooter was still working, my dad asked her if she needed any help getting home.

  ‘No, no, I’ll be fine, ceaaaaaakkkwwww!’ said Beryl, whose return to vertical life strangely did not seem to have diminished her enthusiasm for making crow-like Monty Python woman noises.

  ‘I SEE YOU DRIVING DOWN HERE A LOT,’ said my dad. ‘WITH YOUR DOG, UP THERE ON THE ROOF. HE LOOKS LIKE HE ENJOYS IT.’

  ‘Oh yes, my Billy. He’s up there now.’ Beryl pointed to the top of the mobility vehicle.

  My dad and I exchanged a nervous glance, and scanned the roof, which was incontrovertibly dog-free.

  ‘OOH, ER . . . RIGHT. ARE YOU SURE?’ my dad asked Beryl.

  I felt my heart sink somewhere south of my shins. We had been far too smug and hasty. How could we not have remembered the Jack Russell during our rescue operation? Had he been flipped over the hedge into the field? Was his inert form still lying in the ditch, half crushed? Perhaps I would need to get Frank and his gun after all.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Beryl. ‘Up there, in heaven. He’ll be happy now. I had him put to sleep last week, poor little chap.’

  Naturally, neither of us wanted to be seen as treating the death of Billy as good news, but I’m sure our relief must have been palpable, as it drained into our faces.

  To further throw us off balance, Beryl added: ‘You’ve still got your little fella, though, haven’t you? I’ve seen him in your window. Lovely little frizzy white thing. Such a good boy, always on the lookout for you. Not like Billy. He never could sit still.’

  My dad is no Jedi Master at thinking before he speaks, but in this instance he paused sensibly. I could see him asking himself the question: would it be helpful in any way to confront this woman, who recently lost what was quite possibly her only friend, who had barely finished wiping her tears away after the most traumatic of mornings, with more death and suffering?

  ‘OH, YOU MEAN RAGS?’ said my dad. ‘HE’S FINE. THAT DOG JUST KEEPS GOING ON AND ON.’

  For the next six months, Beryl continued to drive down the lane and, as she did, Rags was always sure to offer her his stoical greeting. Sometimes, for authenticity’s sake, my dad or I would move him to a different window or add a cushion as a prop. One day Beryl drove by and I picked Rags up and made him wave to her. She didn’t seem to suspect anything, but I sensed I was living a little close to the edge, thus refrained from a repeat performance. Rags’ leg joint felt slightly brittle, and, as much as I liked playing practical jokes in my early twenties, I had no particular desire to put the fear of God into old ladies by waggling disembodied canine limbs at them.

  By this point, one too many beatings from Monty’s infamous back paws had taken their toll on Rags’ coat, and his gums were beginning to come apart, revealing a congealed, sawdust-like substance. I considered taking him to be reupholstered, but, ultimately, what kind of person would that have made me? It was one thing being someone who owned a stuffed dog, but it was another thing entirely being someone who knew where to get that stuffed dog fixed up.

  Rags made it through one more move, to my mum and dad’s current house, on the Nottinghamshire–Lincolnshire border. The village of Kalterton is extremely rural, surrounded by water meadow
s and farms, but you’re more likely to see a Range Rover on the nearby lane than a stolen car. My dad has never been asked to shoot anything by a neighbour or had to block in an escaped stallion with his car. The village did used to be home to a very sweet Shetland pony called Gladys who was permitted by her owners to wander around the lanes at will, but she was very well-mannered and, unlike a couple of the Shetlands once looked after by the Pattens, never wandered into anyone’s kitchen uninvited and pilfered their cat food.

  Monty died many years ago and the last family cat, Daisy, succumbed to cancer in 2007. The long-eared bat and grasshopper warbler were never stuffed in the end, hence did not survive the relocation. In 2004, my mum telephoned me to say that Egatha, her veteran bantam hen, had finally expired, following many false alarm ‘sleep deaths’. This was sad, but also confusing, as I’d been under the impression Egatha had in fact died in 1997. ‘Well, yes, she did,’ admitted my mum. ‘But I decided to change Snowshoes’ name to Egatha towards the end. I think, on balance, she preferred it.’

  As for Rags, I’d like to think that I was there to officially mark his departure, but the truth is I didn’t actually notice he wasn’t around any more until many weeks after he moved on. One day in 2007, after not giving him a thought for many parental visits, I simply turned round in the living room and suddenly sensed a fusty absence. I do think my mum was a little harsh taking him to the recycling centre with that week’s garden waste, but I’m also forced to ask myself what I might have done in the same situation. Burial and cremation somehow wouldn’t have quite seemed right, I doubt any museum or eBay buyer would have accepted him in his final, moth-eaten state, and as esoteric as many of my mum’s friends are in their tastes for retro curios, I don’t think any would have found a place for him on their stalls at the local antique market.