Bête (19 page)

‘You could be there tomorrow, Graham. Day after at the latest. Harp and carp, Graham! Come along with us.’

‘I’ll suggest a deal,’ I said. ‘You don’t herd
me across country to speak to some sheep about fuck knows what, and
I’ll
promise not to tie you in a gunny sack with a breeze block and chuck you in the river.’

‘Graham!’ a disappointed miaow.

‘I’m off,’ I said, shouldering my sack – heavier than usual, with all the extra water. ‘Au revoir. But not if I
voir
you first.’

The next thing that happened was: the whole world hinged
about like drunkenness itself and smacked me hard on the side of the face. The wet-leaf-covered floor had become a wall, and I was slammed against that wall as if a particularly aggressive member of the poe lice had come to arrest me. Only then did I feel a dagger-like pain my ankle. Fight or flight jabbed me hard in the adrenal gland, and I scrabbled to stand up. No sooner was I upright than I fell
over again. I could not compute why I couldn’t get up. The pain in my ankle – my left ankle – intensified, and suddenly all I could think about was how much my foot hurt. I rolled on my back, slipping from the straps of my backpack, and sat up. ‘Christ!’ I called out. ‘What the Christ?’

What had happened was this: a deer, unnoticed by me, had padded on its silent hooves over the wet ground
at my back, and put its head down, and bitten clean through the tendon of my left ankle.

‘Apologies,’ squeaked the cat. ‘But we would prefer you not to go gallivanting, Graham. We’d like you to stay right here for a while. If peace-be-upon-him won’t go to the mountain, then the mountain must come to peace-be-upon-him, I suppose.’

As if on cue, the deer all turned and trotted away.
Cincinnatus stood up as his mount started, and dug his claws into the bête’s pelt. ‘Stay there my friend,’ he miaowed at me, and he moved away. ‘We’ll be back in a day or two.’

‘This isn’t the sort of stuff normally covered by the rubric of friendship,’ I yelled.

I was alone.

I pulled myself over to the tree and sat with my back against the trunk. Pulling my knee out and laying
my injured foot against the ground, I examined the damage done. There is an artery running into the foot, and this had not been nicked, which was the good part. The bad part was the tendon had whippingly withdrawn deep into my body, like the cord on a vacuum cleaner when you press the rewind button. I could not move my foot. It hurt like heartbreak. For a while I swore, in a gasping voice. Then
I tried yelling swearwords at the sky. That helped.

The rain stopped.

I stood up, with great effort, using the tree to lever myself up by main force. I essayed a brief half-hopping walk across to my pack. My left foot was bent up at a weird angle in towards the shin, and putting weight on the heel made the cut howl. So I trit-trotted across in iambic rhythm, de-dum, de-dum, de-dum.
The pack contained nothing so fancy as a first-aid kit, but I needed something to staunch the flow of blood. I used my knife to cut a bandage from my spare shirt and I tied it as well as I could. I was cold. I was thirsty too, which is not a good sign – the point where the body has lost so much blood as to make it thirsty is the point where the body has lost too much blood. There didn’t seem to be
too much actual blood on the forest floor, but perhaps the rain had washed that away. Or maybe I was thirsty because I was still a little hungover.

Wait here, the cat had said. Fuck that.

I got to my feet a second time and hip-hopped across to another tree. I needed a crutch. After a little searching I found a suitable branch on the floor, with a Y-shape at one end and a sturdy enough
stem. It was slippery-wet, and my hand found the stalk hard to grip on to, but it was better than nothing. My heel was a continuous, unforgiving pain.

Putting my pack on my back made the pain worse, but I wasn’t going to leave it behind. It was everything I owned. So I hung it off my right shoulder, and tucked the makeshift crutch under my left, and started hopping away.

The rain didn’t
let up all morning, and my grip kept slipping on the crutch. Half an hour into my walk I had to stop. I was exhausted, in pain, starving and wet to the skin. I slopped down in the wet mulch at the foot of another tree and stared into space, panting. I had yet to decide where I was going, although I had a good reason for postponing the decision – namely, I had nowhere
to
go. Acknowledging that
would do nothing to incentivize my progress, and since I needed to get away I didn’t want to do anything to discourage myself. Movement and rain had dislodged my bandage. I wrung it out as best as I could and retied it. The bleeding seemed to have stopped. ‘Right, Graham,’ I told myself, speaking aloud. ‘It is time to get going.
On y va
.’

I fell asleep.

I don’t believe I slept for
very long. Pain, shock and injury take the body strangely, sometimes; and evidently something in me felt the need to shut down. It wasn’t my choice.

When I woke, the rain had stopped, and chutes of sunlight had been excavated between the trees. The red leaves dripped all around me with xylophone musicality. My ankle raged, sore and savage.

I got up on my good foot, shouldered my sack
and resumed my Long John Silver progress.

Living in the woods for so many months had given me some sense of how the cardinal points of the compass related to the monotonous environment, but I was in an unfamiliar bit of the forest, and in pain, and I had no idea in which direction I was moving. Here was an abandoned fridge, on its back with its door broken off, filled with muddy water like
a cattle trough. There was a stack of old plastic chairs, of the sort you might find in a café. Here an elm was growing inside the bole of a hollow, dead oak. I stomped squelchily along for a while before I noticed a bush studded with blackberries, and stopped to eat as many as I could. They were squashy and over-ripe, but I was ravenous. Fruit on an empty stomach is not filling, but the berries
were better than nothing. I cleared away leaves and dug a hole with my knife, scooped the muddy water out with my billycan and watched the indentation refill with clean water – the miraculous self-filtering properties of soil. After a long drink I sat with my back to a tree trunk and daydreamed about bacon and eggs. I fell asleep again.

I woke with a gripe in my stomach, but it was nothing
compared to the pain in my heel. The rain had stopped; only the echo of rain in the air as the forest dripped. Through the branches above I could see clouds in a hurry.

A pile of leaves to my right trembled. If there’s a rustle in your hedgerow don’t be alarmed now. Unless – and I can’t stress this too forcefully – the rustle resolves itself into a black rat the size of a cat with a looping
tail like one of Medusa’s dreadlocks.

‘Jesus Christmas and fuck,’ I shouted. The rat pounced, and landed on my shoulder. I fell over onto my side, slapping at the thing, trying to land a blow. It jumped off me. Nimble bugger.

I grabbed my crutch and made a swipe at it, but I was slow and clumsy. It was neither of those things.

It leapt at me a second time, and aimed for my throat.
Its teeth were visible. Since I instinctively yanked my shoulders up and chin down it didn’t get at the tender flesh it was aiming for, instead taking a ratty bite from my lower cheek. My beard saved me, and the thing fell away in a roll. My hand went to my pack almost without my realizing it. The rat was crouching on the forest floor directly in front of me, inkdrop eyes watching intently.
I had my knife out, and was aiming its point at my attacker.

The sunlight came out and everything in the woodland glowed. Then it went away again, and everything greyed.

Only then did I noticed the second rat: sitting on the pile of leaves. In its little black baby claw it was holding what looked like, but of course was not, a cigarette lighter. The bête was filming the attack.

‘Home movies?’ I said. ‘Really?’ My cheek winced as I spoke.

The first rat – the one who had bitten me – spoke. ‘I followed you all the way, Graham,’ it told me, in its absurd pinky-perky squeak. ‘The Lamb wants to make peace. But
that’s
not the way.’

‘You’re all in this together,’ I replied, holding the knife steady and feeling with my free hand for the sore spot on my face. ‘You’re
all one skynet supercomputer group mind.’

‘That’s
never
been true,’ squealed the rat with the digital camera. ‘It’s even less true now that the wifi’s gone.’

‘We’ve always had factions, Graham,’ said the first rat, high-pitched. ‘Connectivity is so patchy now that we’ve more or less given up on that.
Your
kind has at last realized the danger, and scorched-earth the internet. Too late,
though! It’s every bête for himself now, my friend. And the tribe to which I belong thinks the best idea is to exterminate – all – the – brutes.’

‘Exterminate the
brutes
?’

‘Bri-i-its,’ the rat squealed crossly. ‘Brits!’

‘You’ll forgive me,’ I said. ‘It’s quite hard following what you are saying. Your voice is like nails being dragged down a blackboard. If I understand you correctly,
you’re saying the tribe of rats wants all humankind dead?’

The rat with the camera snickered at this. ‘Rats!’ it squeaked disdainfully, in a voice absolutely indistinguishable from the other one’s. ‘We’re not allied by
species
, you wide wanker.’

‘Charming,’ I said.

‘Cat follows the Lamb,’ said the first rat. ‘
We
don’t. Lamb wants to negotiate with words. We prefer to impose terms
with our teeth. You really think you’re going to hold us all off with that one little knife, Graham?’

‘Lamb wants you as a pet,’ said the second rat. ‘
We
want you as a snack. We’re more honest, at least.’

‘I’m tough and stringy,’ I advised them. ‘You’d be better off snacking on something tastier. A cow’s head, maybe?’

The first rat sprang right at me. I cried out (I don’t remember
doing this, but I’ve seen the footage) and slashed vaguely with the knife. At the time I thought the knife had knocked my attacker aside, but in fact the credit was not to me. That
snap!
I heard was not my spine breaking.

The second rat vanished. That’s where the footage ends.

The next thing that happened was that a human being strolled over. ‘Good morning!’ A breezy, female voice.
‘You all right?’

‘Mustn’t grumble,’ I replied.

‘Excellent. I’m Mary.’ She was wrapped up in an enormous rust-coloured cape, the hood over her face.

‘Graham,’ I said. ‘Excuse me for not getting up. I’m afraid I’ve hurt my foot.’

‘You poor fellow,’ she said. She pulled her hood back to reveal a large, baggy face – a woman somewhere in her sixties, I would have said. Her hair
was paper white and tied severely back. There was a mole on her chin like a reset button. She had a long, curiously shaped handbag slung over her shoulder. Except that it wasn’t a handbag: it was a rifle, wrapped in black plastic (an old bin bag, I later discovered) to stop the water getting at it.

‘You shot that rat,’ I observed.

‘Friend of yours, was it?’

‘By no means.’

‘Didn’t think so. Friends don’t usually bite friends on the cheek, you see.’

I put my hand to my face. ‘My beard saved the worst of it, I think. There was a second rat, filming the whole thing.’

‘Really?’ she said. ‘How queer.’

‘As a clockwork orange,’ I agreed. ‘It was a bête, you know. A loquacious rat.’

‘I know what a bête is, Graham,’ she said. She rummaged amongst
the wet leaves and pulled the rat up by its tail. ‘They say shoot it arse-to-snout,’ she said. ‘But that’s hardly necessary, I think.’ Carefully, she laid the rat corpse down. Then she hoiked her gun round with a movement of astonishing rapid gracefulness, aimed and shot. The bête’s head cracked open.

‘I only mention it because, you know. It’s against the law. I mean, isn’t it? Killing them?
I’ve been a little out of the loop.’

‘Of course it
is
technically illegal, still,’ Mary said airily. ‘But in for a penny.’

She pointed behind her. A deer hung by its back legs from a branch a hundred yards away. Its head hung by the visible lego of its spine; throat cut wide enough to drain the blood. I knew all about that kind of work, and this had been well done.

‘But I’m not
sure anybody’s really interested in enforcing those laws now,’ Mary was saying. ‘Got bigger Stephens to fry!’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Sorry – it’s an expression my old girl used to use.
Fish
to fry, I should have said. What I mean is: things have moved on. Somebody was telling me about a new Geneva Convention, but it’s clear to me what the onus ought to be on. On what,’ she said, ‘the onus ought
to
be
. Really,’ she added, in a confiding tone, ‘we should burn it. The chip thingie is so small – like a housefly maggot. Hard to spot by the naked eye you know. And you need to destroy it, or some other animal will eat it up. But it’s too damp for a fire out here! And I’m not taking a dead rat home with me. So, hey, so ho. Hey-ho! Your foot looks sore – what?’

‘A deer bit it.’ I nodded
in the direction of her carrion. ‘Possibly even
that
deer.’

‘Everything seems to be biting you! Golly you’re a regular
feast
for our forest friends. No offence, my dear fellow, but you don’t look so toothsome to me.’

‘If you need help butchering that animal, Mary,’ I said, ‘then it so happens I have the skill.’

‘I can butcher it just fine myself thank you, young man,’ she said.
‘Though I
could
do with some help mending my freezer. The motor keeps cutting out. Get up in the morning to find the food spoiling. I may have to start salting my meat soon.’

‘I can look at it, I suppose,’ I said. ‘Though I can’t promise anything.’

‘Would you,’ she said, with sudden intensity, leaning towards me, ‘like a cup of
tea
?’

‘Haven’t had tea in a year,’ I said. ‘Which
is my ill-mannered way of saying: yes thank you.’