Talk to the Tail

by Tom Cox

  Setting a Pissident

  To urinate in a completely new and innovative place, instigating a trend for such action among your fellow felines. Born leaders but also kind of snotty, cats who set a pissident know that their originality comes at a price, and, upon seeing others follow lamely in their wake, can often be heard to mutter comments like ‘Here come the mindless vultures, picking over the corpse of my brilliance’ and ‘Now I know how The Beatles must have felt when they heard the Marmalade’s cover of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”.’

  Waking up with Wood

  To emerge, bleary eyed, from a nap and find a twig stuck to your tail that you didn’t remember being there when you fell asleep.

  Bewilderness

  ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I’m at the airport now, and I’m not feeling very good. I’ll be on the plane soon, so I just wanted to say how much I love you, in case, well, you know, this is it – because I just have a feeling it might be.’

  I clicked my mobile phone shut. It was a shame, I thought to myself, that the last time Dee would ever hear my voice would be via the medium of BT’s 1571 answering service, but at least I had told her how I felt. It was important to express oneself, and many others who’d perished had not got the chance to. Feeling reassured, but not remotely calmed, by this, I felt nervously for the small plastic bottle of pills in my jacket pocket for the three hundredth time in the last hour, and headed back across Nairobi airport’s departure lounge towards Zed, the photographer from Jack magazine.

  ‘I think I might head back,’ I told him.

  ‘What? To the toilet? Again?’ said Zed.

  ‘No, I mean back back. Through customs.’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

  ‘Well, you know, I’m not sure how confident I am about doing this. I thought I might try to hire a car, go back that way instead.’

  ‘Are you serious? You know how big Africa is, right?’

  By the time I reached my mid-twenties, I had established a considerable pedigree as a bad traveller. Nonetheless, my trip to Kenya in the summer of 2002 was a new frontier even for someone as chronically poor at going on holiday as me: a work trip that I had ended up on by accident.

  All the details were correct: I’d got the right plane, ended up in the right destination, met the appropriate people, and had not at any point in the process been mistaken for a different, globetrotting-adept Tom Cox, but that I was there at all surprised nobody as much as me.

  I’d not so much been sent to Nairobi as bludgeoned there with flattery by an editor called James Brown, best known for founding the men’s magazine Loaded in the early 1990s. Brown had just launched his new publication, Jack – a kind of Loaded for grown-ups, with the emphasis more on great outdoors adventure than nudity – and had telephoned me to offer me work after reading my first book.

  ‘It’s bloody brilliant!’ he’d enthused. ‘You could be our star feature writer.’ I’d heard about Brown before, and witnessed fellow writers’ and photographers’ impersonations of him. They always seemed to make his voice more high-pitched than it really was, and you could see why: because of his zest for life. When you thought back to something he’d told you, there was a tendency to furnish it with an extra squeak.

  Soon, I would get used to the capriciousness of Brown’s enthusiasm. He was the kind of man who would phone you one day, out of the blue, and shout, ‘I want you to go and learn falconry. It’s going to be fucking wicked!’ and then forget all about it the following morning. After I’d come back from Kenya – by plane – everyone I’d told about how I’d almost fled from the airport and driven a hire car back through Africa and Europe had thought I was barking mad, apart from Brown. ‘Oh, bloody hell, why didn’t you do it?’ he’d said. ‘It would have been fucking brilliant! A proper gonzo adventure! We could have run it as a serial!’ A few months later, he would send me to participate in an erotic drawing class for another Jack feature, then, after seeing my rude, rudimentary sketches, call me, virtually foaming at the mouth, from his mobile phone, explaining that he was about to recommend that his friend, the well-known art dealer Jay Jopling, exhibit them in his gallery, White Cube.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ I said. ‘Of course you are.’ But he insisted they were ‘fucking brilliant’ and ‘like the work of a child savant’. I heard nothing else for a week, then cautiously mentioned the subject to him again.

  ‘Oh yeah, them,’ he’d said, and immediately changed the subject to his latest wild idea: something to do with releasing a lion into Trafalgar Square, as I remember.

  However, in July 2002, all I knew was that Brown had a refreshingly unguarded passion for his job like that of nobody I’d ever worked for. Previously, if I’d kept a newspaper or magazine editor on the phone for more than four minutes, I’d worried that I was taking up far too much of the time of someone much more important than me. But Brown kept me on the phone for three quarters of an hour, talking about the Safari Rally, in which cars whizzed through the Kenyan countryside past lions and giraffes, and about his vision for Jack. ‘Do you like cars?’ he asked. ‘Of course you do!’ he continued before I had chance to admit that my interest in them didn’t really get much more involved than enjoying early 70s cinema car chases featuring Ford Mustangs and Dodge Challengers. ‘Everyone likes cars!’ Somewhere in the midst of this dust storm of commissioning zeal, Brown had also mentioned that I would probably get the chance to meet a cheetah. At which point, I became quite a lot more interested.

  There was just one hitch. Four years earlier, I had been on a plane that had been struck by lightning over the English Channel on the way back from Pisa. I am told by more experienced flyers that this happens relatively frequently and is generally not a great cause for concern, but I wouldn’t have believed it at the time. When the lightning hit, a large blue flash had whizzed around the inside of the plane, many of the passengers had screamed, and there was speculation afterwards that the plane had dropped in the region of a thousand feet before righting itself. Back on terra firma, I made a decision: I had cheated aeronautical death, and I would not give it the chance to get its own back at a later date.

  It’s not that I didn’t know the statistics about how rare aeroplane crashes were; I just knew that I didn’t want to be in an aeroplane, thinking about having an aeroplane crash. To me, hearing the words ‘I’m afraid it’s terminal’ with a number after them from a kindly person redirecting you at an airport was barely less ominous than hearing them as a stand-alone sentence in a hospital.

  I was aware that ultimately the greater control I felt I had when I was travelling in a car or a train or a boat was an illusion, but it was an illusion that I cherished. Besides that, flying contradicted a fundamental belief of mine that it was against the laws of nature for any human to rise more than twenty storeys above ground level. Not long before I spoke to Brown, I’d been up to the first platform of the Eiffel Tower, and only just restrained myself from falling into a protective, terrified crawl in front of more insouciant sightseers. With this in mind, it is a tribute to his persuasive powers that during the course of our phone call he reduced my stance on flying from ‘Never again!’ to ‘Maybe again, if someone carries on being complimentary about my work and talking about leopards for long enough!’

  ‘Look at me,’ boasted Brown. ‘I’ve been up in fighter jets and skydived, and I’m all right. Take some valium. You’ll be fine.’

  Following Brown’s advice, I did take some valium in the departure lounge at Heathrow. It calmed me down, but not enough to prevent me from leaving the first of two ‘last goodbye’ messages on the voicemail of Dee’s mobile phone shortly before take-off. I then took some more valium, just to be sure. I noticed just a slight lessening of the certainty that my limbs would shortly be spread across the Alps in small pieces, but mostly I just wanted to go for a wee a lot. I tried to watch a couple of rom-coms on the screen in front of me and reread the same page of my book forty times, never taking a word of it in, then finally settled on a form of e
ntertainment I found far more riveting than either: the virtual flight map, on which passengers could watch the plane move in barely perceptible increments across Europe and Africa. For me, this was more viscerally stimulating than the most explosive Bruce Willis movie. For the next eleven hours my eyes never left it, with the exception of the moments when I rushed to the bathroom, at one point knocking over the curry of Zed, Jack’s photographer, in the process.

  Having touched down in Nairobi and ventured out into its surrounding countryside, one of the first things to strike me was the special kind of dark it was subject to. It wasn’t exactly that it was darker than the dark you found in rural England, just that it was more businesslike about getting down to it. They say that in Kenya, in July, they simply don’t do dusk. ‘But how can that be?’ you think upon being first told this. ‘It’s not like part of the globe spins more quickly here than anywhere else, is it?’ But then you experience it for yourself, and you realise the sun plummets to earth there at a different rate. It’s like being part of a three-dimensional screen wipe. One moment the picture is there in front of your eyes: a heat haze, the dust cloud of a distant speeding car, a scattering of acacia trees, a couple of ostriches, the distant shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro. The next moment, it’s eliminated by a blanket of black, the giant sleeping bag of the world abruptly zipped up in front of your face.

  When you’re part of a top rally crew, it’s doubly important to pack up quickly when dark falls, since it won’t be long before the hyenas and lions come down from the hills. As Paul, the gruff Yorkshireman responsible for leading the Subaru team for the 2002 Safari Rally, told me, there were also the Maasai tribesmen to contend with, who had been known to pilfer parts of the cars as souvenirs. ‘You have to remember these people don’t understand modern life,’ he said. ‘They don’t have a mortgage or a pension plan.’ He pointed this out as if he viewed it as a shortcoming: something they needed to think about, if they were going to stop faffing about and get ahead in the world.

  Not being part of a top rally crew myself, and being much more keen on observing hyenas and lions than rally, I couldn’t say I had a vested interest in getting tidied up quickly. Actually, I might have been tempted to slow the process down by hiding a front coilover or a couple of torsion mounts belonging to one of the cars, had I been a bit braver, or had the faintest idea what they were. As for the Maasai, I’d been wandering around the test course for the Subaru team for a couple of days, and I’d met quite a few of them. All had been extremely personable, and surprisingly knowledgable about Subaru’s stars. The most memorable included Jonathan and David, two twentysomethings with stretched earlobes and shukas who said that during the Safari they thought nothing of walking thirty miles to find out the results, and the patrician Father John, who enthused to me about the handbrake action of Subaru’s best-known driver, Tommi Makinen. These men were additionally notable for each pulling behind them cows bearing a remarkable resemblance to the jazz musician and raconteur George Melly.

  Sadly, the Maasai’s enthusiasm for foreign culture did not appear to be reciprocated by the members of the rally team, to most of whom they seemed invisible at best and a nuisance at worst. Only Stuart, a half-deaf Welshman responsible for technical work on the cars, talked of the Maasai fondly, recalling the time a few years earlier when, twenty miles from the nearest village, as night raced out of the sky, he was forced to push a tyre truck out of black cotton mud and felt an ice-cold hand on his shoulder.

  ‘I turned around and staring me in the face was this great massive Maasai done up in the full Adam Ant outfit!’ he remembered. ‘War paint, the lot. He just looked at me and said, “Would you like a hand, old chap?”’ I liked Stuart instantly, which was lucky, since later that day, he would be responsible for my safety, driving me along everyday roads back to Nairobi at speeds of almost 200kph in the Subaru Impreza WRC2002 normally driven by Petter Solberg.

  ‘You’re not going to go quite that fast, are you?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yup.’ He flicked a mosquito off his arm, and I sensed the insect served as a metaphor for my question. ‘The only way these things are designed to be driven is flat.’

  ‘Flat’ was what the Subaru team said when they meant ‘flat out’. As I was learning, in the fast-moving world of rally, cutting out one minuscule word could make the crucial difference between victory and defeat.

  I didn’t wish to appear fussy, but I couldn’t help raising another issue that was weighing heavily on my mind. ‘But aren’t you worried we might hit a cow?’ I said.

  ‘I wouldn’t worry,’ he said, pointing to the car. ‘These things can stop on a sixpence.’

  But I hadn’t seen any sixpences on the route from Nairobi, just Maasai, livestock, spluttering 1970s Toyotas, and a series of terrifying spikes in the road, installed every couple of miles as a primeval speed deterrent. I also knew that, despite what Stuart had said, cows in fact were a concern, since, when I’d mentioned them to Tommi Makinen, he’d called them an ‘obvious danger’.

  I’d looked at Makinen in sympathy at the time, thinking how gut-wrenching it would be to be responsible for the death of such an innocent, big-eyed creature: the terrible flashbacks and inevitable months of emotional limping that would follow.

  ‘Yep,’ Makinen had then added. ‘They can do some serious damage to a car.’

  There are a couple of things people tend to be surprised at when I tell them about my trip to Africa. One is that when I was finally in the rally car, I was far more scared about the prospect of flying home than I was about hurtling along an ordinary road, with little visibility, at almost two hundred kilometres per hour. The other is that when I arrived at the test run site the morning after the flight, one of the first things I decided to do was chase two ostriches.

  The ostriches in question were pecking away on the plains about a mile away from where the Subaru team worked on the cars. By this point, I’d already watched Solberg’s first test run. It had been a brief, spectacular sight: the car shooting away into the hills in a cloud of dust, and disappearing until only the distant, angry wasp sound of its engine remained. The eternally seven-year-old, Scalextric-playing part of me had experienced a small tingle up the spine, but in the end, what I was watching was a fast car, and like other fast cars, its wheels moved, it made a noise, then it wasn’t there any more. For me, this made the excitement of the experience limited. What was less limited was the excitement that behind any bush could be lurking creatures I’d only ever before seen at the zoo and on wildlife documentaries.

  Not long after I returned from Kenya, I watched one of those documentaries, in which the narrator pointed out that ‘ostriches can lash out and kill a cheetah with a deadly kick’. Strangely, this had not occurred to me while I was looking at some ostriches in the flesh, and trying to persuade them to be my friends. Perhaps it was that I was still under the sway of the valium, which, while not particularly great at stopping a person from worrying about being swallowed up in a fireball of burning metal, was evidently fantastic at stopping them from worrying about being trampled into human risotto by a big, sod-off bird foot. I can also say that, while the two ostriches might have stood their ground in the face of a cheetah attack, they were absolutely petrified of me. Each time I picked up my pace and gained on them, they moved a little further away, until, finally, feeling a bit like a swimmer lost in the rhythm of the waves who suddenly looks back at the shore and can’t remember which part of the beach he left his towel on, I gave up the ghost and turned back.

  This began a pattern that would continue for the next three and a half days: brief bursts of animation from the rally crew, followed by long periods of waiting around, in which I tried to amuse myself by venturing off, sometimes accompanied by Zed, but mostly alone, in search of wildlife. Back in the United Kingdom, I’d been cautious enough about heading through a gently disreputable area of Norwich at night, but out here, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by tribesman and large, hungry animals, I felt unconcerned
. Managing the impossible feat of surviving 4,238 miles at a height at which no human should rightly travel had made me briefly invincible. After that, nothing could touch me.

  On the second day, having tracked what I thought was a warthog but was actually an undersized mule, I found myself alone, in a clearing, with a lone dark figure walking towards me, holding a spear in one hand and a black rectangular object in the other. Had he skewered me, taken my wallet, and left me for dead, neither Zed nor the Subaru team would have been able to hear me scream. Preoccupied with their front coilovers and torsion mounts, it would only have been three or four hours later, at night’s violent, decisive fall, that they would have remembered that guy in the corduroy flares who seemed so indifferent to the cars and weirdly interested in the animals. By then, it would have been too dark for the helicopter to find me.

  As it was, the figure – another Maasai – greeted me with a handshake.

  ‘Subaru?’ he asked, showing me a mouth full of well-meaning teeth.

  I nodded yes, even though I had an instinct to disassociate myself from the brand. I could have told him that, had he come to Norfolk, and been cut up by one of the county’s many Impreza drivers on the stretch of the A11 yet to be transformed into a dual carriageway, his rose-tinted vision of the vehicle would soon be muddied, but what kind of crucifier of fun would that have made me?