Being a Beast (15 page)

Then, still blind, deaf and anosmic, I started to follow the foxes. Eventually they took my collar between their teeth and swam with me to four islands. On those islands my senses functioned. I could feel and describe things there. The rest of the Atlantean world of the East End remained submerged. If I'd stayed longer and persevered with the foxes, they might have shown me more islands, or perhaps even dived down with me, or raised the rest of Atlantis so that I could buy and taste beer in it, or run over its hills and feel it under my feet.

I never got anywhere other than the islands, and never really understood what made the East End tick. Perhaps the genius loci lies deep in the troughs between my islands, forever out of my reach. Yet in describing my islands to myself I mapped an archipelago, and an archipelago has a taste of its own: it can be a nation of which one can be fond.

I wanted most of all to feel fond. I was so tired of resenting. If I'd thought that fondness for a place was different from understanding the foxes that inhabit the place, I'd have wanted the fondness more than the understanding. But the conviction that they weren't different had grown with every sniff and crawl and bin-bag raid.

It wasn't that I experienced
something
on the islands that was better than anaesthesia elsewhere but not as good as normal experience. Not at all. I became convinced that the foxes saw, smelt and heard the real thing, and that on the islands to which they took me I was experiencing the real thing too. The foxes gave me their eyes, ears, noses and feet. But only on the islands.

The foxes were the real East Enders. They inhabited the place in a way that, without their help, I could not, and in a way that reflected what the place itself was. I lived there in a way that reflected me, or my view of the place. I walked round with a mirror in front of me, describing myself into a notebook and calling it nature writing.

If you look into a fox's eyes, you get no reflection of yourself. They have vertical pupils, which deny gratification to the human narcissist. Now jump to the other side of the fox's eye and look out through it at a pool of vomited curry, or a hedgehog, or a stream of four-by-fours on the school run. You'll similarly get no reflection of yourself. You'll see the things themselves, or a better approximation to the things than you'd get with your own drearily self-referential eyes. Eyes are meant to be sensory receptors. In the fox's head they are. We make them cognitive, and ruin them. This is not because a fox has less consciousness and hence there is less to intrude between its retina and its mental model of that hedgehog, but because its consciousness is less contaminated with toxic self and presumption.

None of the fox islands was visible from more than two feet above the ground. One could be seen only with the nose.

These are the islands:

Island 1

There are lots of shops that sell everything, deep into the night. They smell of ghee, soap, cardamom, coriander and lighter fuel. The owners never ever die or get excited. In an alleyway beside one of these there was a pile of crates, stamped with customs ink from Barbados, Bangladesh and some little piles of Pacific rock. It was soft, sweet, damp and alcoholic under the crates. I floated on a raft of fermenting fruit. The wasps were too pissed to sting me when I rolled on them.

I lay on my belly, because foxes normally do. There was a wall a couple of feet ahead of me. Damp had edged up the first foot. The rest of the wall, which climbed up to the billowing net-curtain sails of a taxi firm's masthead, was dry as toast, and as interesting. But next to the ground there was writhing wonderment: silver slug tracery; trundling woodlice, swimming through air as baby trilobites rowed through the Cambrian soup; centipedes armoured in bronze plates, snaking like a file of legionnaires with shields over their heads towards a tower of hairy Goths; lichens flowering the way that scabs would flower if William Morris directed skin healing; moss like armpit hair.

A crack in a box from Lesotho half-framed a bathroom window, and the woman in the bathroom was lovely and the man was not. Why would she stay? But that was not a fox thought. If I lowered my head there was a cauliflower, green with mould and bonny as a horse chestnut in May.

There were worms in the raft; fat, pickled worms with thick saddles like the thick wedding rings of the emphatically faithful. A fox would have sucked them through its teeth like spaghetti: each is worth 2½ calories – 1/240 of the 600-calorie-per-day requirement of an adult fox. Although most foxes eat some earthworms, it seems that some are worm specialists, to judge by the soil and worm chaetae in their dung. It's a safe, lazy way to earn a living: like being a probate lawyer.

Island 2

In the park there's a place where concrete meets tarmac. The concrete has broken where the winter has hardened water into wedges. There's a lush tree of cracks. Flash floods, invisible to us but tumultuous wild water to greenfly, have filled the cracks with soil, full of ascarid eggs from unbagged dog shit near the playground. Wind, shoveled by the wing mirrors of cement lorries and white vans, has seeded the soil with grass and bravely straggling ragwort whose ancestors probably killed a horse or two in Kent.

If you walk on this boundary with bare feet, you'll know that the concrete is as hard and sharply pitted as a cheese grater. It doesn't welcome anything. The sun leaves it as fast as it can go. The tarmac, though, is warm and spongy, even in the cold. When it's hot it sends up tar tendrils to grab your feet. They leave tattoos, like black thread veins, on your soles.

Foxes have absurdly sensitive feet. These city foxes, used to pounding the roads for eight hours a night, have pads that feel like velvet which has had milk poured over it and then been put in the oven overnight to get a fragile crust. Their feet, like their faces, extend beyond the fur line: there are small, stiff hairs on the carpus which are buried in a buzzing hive of nerves. When the biologist Huw Lloyd lightly touched these hairs on a young fox sleeping in front of his fire, the fox, without waking, snatched back its foot. Those hairs are stroked lustfully by the grass in any country wilder than a well-managed sports field. Imagine your nostrils being shafted enjoyably with face-high thistles as you walk. That's a fox's progress through a spring wood.

It seems a bit much. They really don't need to be so good. Clumping, club-footed ungulates, their nerve endings locked up in horn boxes, dance perfectly satisfactorily over rough ground and along mountain ledges. You'd expect natural selection to be more parsimonious in dispensing its favours to foxes.

Island 3

We think of small trees as going straight up from the ground and then getting wider like mushrooms or narrower like carrots. They don't. Even the slenderest tree has a big, wide underground life. The parts up in the light are just kitchens for making food.

If you lie on the ground you'll eventually know this. I watched one tree for about three hours before noticing. It had sloping shoulders, hinting at a pale body beneath the paving.

The tree had prised up the stiff skin of the yard and then, tired, slumped on to the fence, pulled down by the weight of its head as a drunk's head is pulled on to a table by the weight of a head full of beer. Ants, beetles and earwigs, each in their own rigidly observed carriageways, poured over the shoulders – streams of iridescent water with legs. They were going to eat dead stuff, or live stuff: it's always one or the other. The boundary between the two isn't very clear.

I couldn't gallop between trees on my hands and knees in the East End. There aren't enough trees. But I've done it as best I can in plenty of other places. The real fox's-eye view of trees is when you're sledging fast downhill through woodland. Foxes have, like most predators, frontally positioned eyes. They'd have had more or less the same view of the beetles as I had, but I'd have been able to identify the tree species at a running speed sooner than the foxes. For them the trees would have been dark columns that would have come at them with that lurching, not-quite-anticipatable violence that you know best when you're driving one of those fake motorbikes in an amusement arcade. Computer simulation of driving or riding doesn't feel like driving or riding, but it's useful for making you feel like a fox.

I tried to run like a fox at the tree in the yard. I skinned my knees, and the woman in the house next door pulled back her curtain and asked nervously if I was all right.

Island 4

I turned over an old slice of pizza with my nose. It was lying in a backyard. I don't know how it had escaped the rats and the birds and the foxes. It had lasted long enough to have soaked up the weather of a couple of weeks. There had been no rain for a week, but it was damp. There was a luxurious green fur over the pepperoni. There were human tooth marks on one side, and the fur was thinner there: presumably the streptococci of which human kisses are a concentrated solution compete viciously with the mould. The underside was a metro system, its tunnels already packed, like a rush hour station, with jostling weevils. Black beetles (which I always think are too downright mechanical to need food – which is a demand of flesh) were there directing the crowds.

But it was the smell that got me. There were physical smell strata in the slice: at the top there was still metallic tomato and the fat of unhappy pigs, shaken up with spores (which don't smell at all of death, though they should). At the bottom there was pasty, yeasty creepingness. The tomato and the metro were separated by about an inch (it was a deep-pan pizza) and a fortnight. But – and this was the point – I got them both in a single sniffing millisecond.

Smell telescopes and packages history. The pizza was a trivial example. Sniff a lump of Precambrian schist and you might get a couple of billion years of sensation delivered all at once to your neurological door. The sensation, in that case, will be faint: most of the scent molecules will have been reassigned to other bodies and structures, and those that remain are wrapped tightly in a sort of archaic cling film.

As a fox trots down the Bethnal Green Road, it takes with every breath an instantaneous transect through the past five or fifty or five hundred years. And it lives in those years, rather than on the tarmac and between the bins. Time, squashed tightly by olfaction, is the fox's real geography.

The piece of pizza wasn't substantial enough to be an island itself. It was a signpost – a floating piece of fresh wood that said that an island wasn't far off. The island from which it came was a tree stump, crumbling and spongy, next to a ruptured bin bag. Like litmus, it had soaked up the run-off from the bag, and like litmus it declared the real nature of the bag and the bag's ancestors. The declaration was in the smell, and the nature was historical and anthropological and commercial and depraved and careless and anxious and just about all the other adjectives there are.
And I got it all at once.

I think it had been a lime tree, but its own name had been chewed by the rain and the wasps and washed out by curry bleeding from the bag. Because it was porous, it was a safe and capacious bank of the memory of things. Perhaps it was planted a century ago, for no reason that the planners would have been able to explain: there wasn't language then for motives like ‘feeding the wild heart beating inside the black jacket'. And it died about half a century later, when its varicose roots were hacked up because they made next door's yard too interesting.

When it died, it started to accumulate scent. When it was alive it had mostly smelt of itself.

I moved the bag and slept by the tree for a couple of nights, with my nose in one of its armpits.

That nose went through three stages. First, it smelt an old tree and moulded the scent into the shape of a cadaver. Then the nose laid out the scent and (it's a big, sharp nose) began to dissect. It cut out a slice of diesel, perhaps from the mid-1970s, and put that in a bowl for later inspection. Then the nose went back, picked up a length of storm, blown in from Russia at the time of the Suez Crisis, and laid it alongside. With those out of the way, it speeded up: last month's menstrual blood, a brave crack at cheering up a nursery, an overambitious and unpopular attempt at a Vietnamese culinary classic, some evidently successful attempts at safe sex. And beans. So many beans. All laid out in the bowl.

The nose roved round the bowl from item to item, proud of its dissection.

And then, very slowly, it began to know that it is murder to dissect. It reassembled the pieces. It got again what it had got in the first, unexamined sniff: the whole bowl at once; a century in a moment.

That, I think, is how a fox does it. But it inhabits a much longer period in a moment than I can, and inhabits that period far more fully. Yes, it focuses on the things it's particularly interested in, as I lock on to one alluring picture in a new gallery. But it sweeps the millennia in an instant, as my eye sweeps the gallery. From the millennia the fox alights on last week's chops or the last minute's vole, but the scan is complete.

Only noses can travel in time quite like this. Our eyes and ears travel too, but we don't recognise it, because light and sound are fast. We see the light from stars that are centuries old, and the light is mixed on the palette of our retina with light that is tiny fractions of a nanosecond old from the nearby chip shop. We use the mixture to paint a picture of the world that we call reality. In fact, reality's a cocktail of sometimes radically different times, shaken and profoundly stirred by the Self.

So those were my islands: a fruit raft, the edge of some concrete, a tree and a stump. Foxes took me there.

As a matter of mere aesthetics I preferred the fox view to my view from the bus or from my study. It was prettier and much more interesting. As a matter of cartography I came to think that the fox view of the East End was more accurate than mine: it took into account more information. It saw both more minutely and more widely. It saw the hairs on ants' legs and, in a moment-to-moment orgy of olfactory holism, everything that had been spilt, ejaculated, cooked and grown since the creation of the world. So there.