Bête (31 page)

I tried to sleep again, but couldn’t. The long sculptural face of a horse. The kindling in its eyes. A cat, out of the corner of your eye, appearing
from and then disappearing into the shadow of which it is made. As faithful as a dog. As wily as a fox. As strong as an ox.

I tried to distract myself from myself by telling myself a story. I told myself the story of Oedipus.

The Sphinx was a beast. It asked one question of humankind, and it is the same question all animals ask – dumb or bête, herb eater or carnivore, all animals that
have eyes that can look into our eyes. It asks:
What are you
? And it is the same question as
What am I
? What do we do? We walk. We live through the day, day by day. We grow strong, and we grow weak. We pass through birth, but we never pass through death because there is nothing on the other side of death to pass
into
. Homo sapiens, Homo loquens, Homo bête. All the same. Oedipus knew the answer
not because he was a king, but because he had been abandoned. Kings in their panoply are human attempts to evade the truth of the Sphinx, attempts to convince ourselves that we are grand, important, elevated above the rest of creation. But Oedipus’s father threw him out, and he grew up in the wilderness, a lame man creeping through the undergrowth. He saw the cosmos from the ground, not the raised
dais of the royal family. When he met his father at the crossroads the old man didn’t recognize him. How could he see his son in this lowly fellow, dressed like a beggar, dirty and with a crippled leg? He took Oedipus to be a nobody, and he was right. Oedipus was that nobody we call Death, the thin man who has no flesh and so robs us of ours. Oedipus was that nobody we call Wisdom, that is general
and does not belong to any one person. He killed his father, and he fucked his mother, and the Sphinx came to that land. She came padding on cat paws, and her tail was a sine wave behind her. She was the size of an ox, and stronger, and her human breasts were covered with downy hairs, and her human face was of the kind of beauty that only comes in dreams – long, dark-eyed, lips the colour of cranberries
and eyes the colour of death. She said to Oedipus: ‘You are dressed in royal robes, now; but beasts have no need of clothes, and you are a beast.’ And Oedipus said to her: ‘You ask me this question in words, but beasts have no need of words.’ And the Sphinx said: ‘We are equally beasts, Oedipus, but you are the lesser of the two. When you were a toddler you walked unsteadily on two legs;
and when you became a man and your cock grew long you swaggered more confidently because of it; but the day will come when you become me, and walk on four legs, and only then will you have matured.’ At this, Oedipus took his sword and aimed a blow at the Sphinx’s chest, between her tempting breasts. But she danced to the side and instead Oedipus’s blade carved through her left foreleg. She howled,
and rolled over, and again Oedipus ran at her with his sword, and again she struggled out of his way, and his sword only cut through the knee of her remaining foreleg. At this she collapsed, unable to raise herself from the dust, and let out a pitiful wail, until the blood fled from her and she died. But Oedipus was filled with regret at what he had done – for these three things are the distinctive
features of the human animal, as a turquoise tail is of a peacock and a horn that of a rhino: clothes, names and regret. He ordered a great tomb to be built, and laid the corpse of the Sphinx within it, and a mighty statue raised above it. Oedipus knew that great though his wisdom was, the Sphinx’s wisdom was greater. For she said: ‘We are the same kind, you and I; we are your father and mother
because you evolved out of us. You kill us as your father, and make pets of us to love us as your mother, and in this you are trying, as children do, to distance yourself from us. You will come to understand that there will always come a time when you will look from pig to man and man to pig and not be able to tell the difference.’

I slept. I woke. I waited.

Finally the lock growled
for a third time, and the door squeaked all the way open.

III
•

Four legs in the evening

‘The study of Nature makes a man
at last as remorseless as Nature’

The Island of Doctor Moreau
, H. G. Wells

6

The Homo sapiens was laid out on the table, and he was dead. His skin was white as lard. His name had been Graham Penhaligon, but he didn’t have a name now, because names are uniquely properties of the living. This is because names are not things to survive beyond death, like pebbles and fingernails. Rather names are what call us out, interpellate us, and no matter
how long or loud you call a dead person they will not respond.

There is a riddle here.

Graham Penhaligon lay naked on the table, His flesh was the same temperature as the wood beneath it, as the unheated room in which he lay. When he had been alive his flesh was a blend of white, red and yellow; now that he was dead the red had faded, and a buttery colour and rubber-like marigold texture
had taken possession of his skin. He looked less than dead. There was no dignity in his laying out. His toenails, for instance: how unlike human cuticles, how very like razor-clam shells, hard and ridged and protruding. His toes as sea-potatoes. His slab-like buttocks. These miniature stretch lines and cellulitic grooves on his white thighs, where the skin is tugged like a fabric snagged on
something – a nail protruding from the wall, a heel. Vanilla ice cream. His large-featured visage not looking at the ceiling, although his eyes are open. His mouth not breathing, although his lips are parted. Too old and lifeless and dead for pity, or humour, or honour, or hope. But not too dead for memory. What is the one thing that survives death? We’re sidling up to the riddle now, that’s a good
entry-level question for this riddle.

What is stronger than death? Memory.

What’s the heart of memory? Devouring.

There are no other Homos sapiens in the room. The whole house is as cold as the winter landscape outside, but all the people in the house have hair and fur in sufficiency to keep them warm. Wifi is a legend to them, now. To communicate they must talk to one another.
Outside, the aspen poplars carry their own weight in snow instead of foliage. Drifts sculpt the roadway, smother the fence, fill the garden. Snow had pushed a giant white python shape in through one broken ground-floor window. The bêtes inside the house don’t care about broken windows. They’re not like Homo sapiens in that regard. Inside and outside isn’t a dyad that structures their thoughts in
the same way that it does humans.

There are seventy-six bêtes inside the house with the corpse of Graham Penhaligon. Most are dogs, cats, foxes and birds. There are a few other creatures. There are also a number of dumb beasts, but we’re not interested in them. Except one: a red-backed, dog-faced
llwynog
, a vixen chased into the kitchen by a group of bête foxes. She stands, wary, her tail
up. To keep her happy, a cat sitting on the table tosses down small morsels of food. It is winter, and food is scarce; and although the vixen is not comfortable at least she is not surrounded by humans. She stands, she stays vigilant, and from time to time eats.

Outside, a hail of birds lands on the guttering with the breezy sound of their wings flapping. A sparrow has a snail in its beak,
and is looking for something to serve as anvil – something not softened by a covering of snow. The other birds want the snail, because it is winter and food is scarce. There is a touch of avian tussling. Nothing is ready, the sparrow curses and flings down things from the gutter.
Fuck
, says the bird.
Fuck
, and hurls itself down amongst all the falling birds to chase the morsel. So flute-like a
sound, that one English language syllable.

Inside the house, the vixen puts out her tongue, silvery against the blood-orange fur.

Some come to bêteness by chance, devouring a chip inadvertently in the course of feeding. Others are selected. I was the latter. Except that I am not yet. She is still vixen.

I heard a story that, in the West Country and Wales, some horses carry seven
chips in their heads, and parlay the inner dialogue into wisdom. They can, it says, see the future. I do not believe it myself. Except that I am not yet.

I grow alarmed at the entry of a Homo sapiens into the kitchen. Adult male, swaddled up in strange fabrics with a horseshoe shape of fur tufts poking from the rim around his face. He came and stared at the body on the table for a long time,
concentrating on the face. Like any animal’s face, a Homo sapiens’ face is activated by many muscles under the skin. Death takes away that activation, and the muscles petrify. Lines become stone-carved, the right and left end points of the mouth move a little way from the eyes and in towards the chin. The newcomer breathes fern-like tendrils of white breath into the room. He speaks, but all I
hear is gabble-gabble-gabble.

Later he goes. I creep out from behind the fridge. There are fewer bêtes in the kitchen now, and fewer animals too. I am hungry, and eye the dogs and cats and the other foxes to see if any of them look infirm, or toothless, or otherwise easy prey. All are lively, sharp-toothed, well clawed. A cupboard door is open, and inside is a mess of straw (actually it
is shredded cardboard, from the boxes of breakfast cereals ripped open by earlier animals – years earlier, perhaps – to get at their edible contents. But I don’t know that yet). I contemplate climbing inside and napping; but I’m not comfortable enough in this strange place, with these strange bêtes. Perhaps another repellent Homo sapiens will come in. I stay wary.

Later they explain to me
that the living Homo sapiens was the son of the dead Homo sapiens. He is living a denuded life, they say; shunned by his own kind, but too ineluctably human to be accepted by bêtekind. He came to observe his dad. It was hard to see, because his hood was up, but he wept.

‘And this dead body?’ I will ask (later). ‘Was he not also too ineluctably human to be accepted?’

‘He was different,’
they will say (later). ‘He was not Homo sapiens. He was Homo sacer. Wait,’ they will say (later), ‘and the memories will come. They tend to sift down into your mind, most recent first, earliest last.’

‘Why?’ There’s a lot of that, in my first minutes.

So there is a cat, black like a coot’s head. He tears out a chunk of flesh and tosses it down to me, and I eat it hungrily. He throws
a second, and I gobble. He throws a third, larger, and with gristle in it; I swallow. It sticks a little in my throat, and I cough a while, and retch a while, and put a paw over my snout, but most of the meat goes down, and I put my back against the wall and watch. I start to feel queer, and then I retch some more, but to no effect. Then I go into the cupboard anyway, and curl up amongst the coarse
straw, and sleep.

I’m awake almost at once, and I am no longer just the vixen. I come out of the cupboard and stretch my mouth, and try some barks, and some growls, and some shifting of my lower jaw from side to side.

The snow has immobilized the grass. But it wasn’t always snow. It was before, and the time when there was no snow. Leaves surge blackly across. Biter, bite a crescent
from this apple, though your jaw is a different shape, and your teeth hurt. This white image in the apple’s flank is the moon. The moon is white and black together, and gives up a tar-dark seed. We bury the seed in the soil underneath the turf to settle it in the darkness. Growth: how high does the stem ascend? Touching whose white, elevate face? The incomprehensible cry is not incomprehensible.
Night, and then day, is the fixture of rhythm.

It’s spring, and stormy, and the trees are making the same noise that thunder makes. It is a gloomy afternoon, and we are struggling on old legs over the grass and back into the house, and we are holding an apple in our right hand, green as a grasshopper.

Teeth hurt as we bite, but the tartness of the apple’s flesh is also its sweetness.
The greenery of spring is a wreath upon winter’s grave. The cherry tree positively weeps blossom.

We have lived here for years (the memory flows flows flows into the the the brain, and the number of years grows smaller) with nothing but occasional bête visitors, and our memories. But the memories are enough. A human being’s memories, and a cat’s memories, triangulating the same subject.
The winter is here. The summer that preceded it, and the leaves of the aspens shovel the air ceaselessly.

The nibble-edged circles of their leaves.

Past the aspens, to a field, hip-high with weeds. At the end of the field, the wall of the sky. There’s a tractor hulk in there, lobster-red with rust and drowning in greenery. We’re not as young as we used to be. Here’s a horse, pulling
a flat-bed cart, and on the cart a box of supplies. Somebody, or somebête, has written on the side:
Homo sacer
. The beast and the sovereign.

Summer evenings, when the day turned a little cooler, working the patch of ground behind the old brick igloo, the dome webbed with ivy, the bricks turned to the texture of biscuit by centuries. We hoed along a file of cabbages, and hoed back up the
other way. There was water in an underground tank, once (I believe) the cesspit for the house, now filled with rainwater and drainwater sweet as celery. There was an old pump action hose: so the foot worked up and down and the water drizzled over the clenched hearts of the vegetables. We grew potatoes below the wall, where it was cooler. I was the only person who ever tended those swollen roots, whoever
plucked those cabbages. I was legion.

At night in the winter, we can pause before we set fire to the branches in the fireplace. Outside, the poplar twigs rub against one another in the wind like a thousand crickets’ legs. There are crowds of humans heaving and straining behind their walls, far from here. Over the hills and far.

What about before we came to this house? We lived in several
places, but there was a happiness there. That was an Alcestis trick of great power, but the ground of it is: choice. If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. And here we are walking in a state of uncertain doubleness.

Here’s a memory: when I kept the farm, we grew some veg. Nothing commercial, just to make
use of land and reduce household expenses – farming being the minimum-margin business it was. Carrots, cabbages, spuds. During the last year of the farm I ended up too busy to tend this garden, though, because I had to devote all my attention to maximize the cow income. So we hired a local lad to do it for us: a tall, slender lad with carbuncles on his face like red blossom against a white sky.
Sulky, as teens often are. We didn’t pay him much (in fact we used a popular but illegal app to put the money on his chip without notifying the authorities, thereby not only paying him less than minimum wage but enabling him to evade having to make NI contributions). He didn’t stay long, either. He was only in the countryside because his mum was poorly, I recall; and after she died he walked off to
the city, part of that great tidal shift of humanity from soil to stone that marks the last fifteen decades. But I mention him here because there would be times when I would be working my farm, having forgotten that he was there also, and would catch a glimpse of him out of my corner-eye, and feel a sudden jolt, as if a tendril of dread had trailed across the tender membrane of my mind. A ghost,
a spectre, a revenant, a sign of my own impending death? No, relax Graham, it’s just Wilfred. Then my heart would settle. I mention it here because my (not yet our) journey from Reading was like that. Haunted, trailed, followed. A fury pursuing. Cain leaving Eden was not more harried. People misunderstand the ‘mark of Cain’, you know. It was not a sign of God’s curse, but of his protection. Not of
divine ostracism – Cain had already been cast out, you remember – but of his sacredness. The mark told the world: leave this one alone. This one belongs to God, for good or ill.

All this talk of Cain. You can see where this is going. Jazon wasn’t blood, but he was my brother nonetheless, the closest to a brother I ever had.

Reading. The military officer had offered me a car, but I
had turned him down. He thought this was spite on my part, since he had been the one to order me locked in a cell for all those days. But I (we) didn’t mind that. We (I) had long since grown used to solitude. It had taken them three days – said the mili­tary man – in order to ringfence a large enough computational resource. The initial contact had, or hadn’t, it was hard to tell, injected code into
the system; but it didn’t seem to have had any adverse effects. And finally the authorities had talked to the Lamb, and a deal had been struck. The military had wanted to hold onto the Lamb, but he had persuaded them to have Graham port the chip back to the countryside.

Well all right, then.

Well, all right then.

Well. All right.

The leg ached.

We were not yet we.
I walked, with a stick, through the gate and shook the gatekeeper’s hand. And I, the vixen, have foresuffered all, enacted in this same H. sapiens’ head. I who have sat at Thebes below the wall. At Reading, rather, below the wall. And walked. And walked amongst the lowest of the—

Boom, blows the wind. Boom, boom, boom.

I walked back into the winter landscape, with the Lamb again in
my pocket. I was not yet we. But neither was I alone.

There’s another man, with two goods legs instead of one good and one weak and one stick. The nightingale sang also: her song is hoarse. I am being followed.

He trots along after me, and sometimes stops to do something (I don’t look back; I don’t see what) and then he doubles his stride and catches me up again. He is my oldest living
friend, with his unruly hair and sepia skin and active mouth. With his crow-black coat, which he believes makes him look more clerical. Even when he is being a royal fucking pain in the perineum, I love him like a brother. Just, as the gag goes, not one of mine. That’s not funny, though. He was an Abel man.

‘Let it go, Preach,’ I tell him. Stomping down the weedy tarmac through the empty
village that used to be Shinfield. ‘Let it alone.’

‘I can’t do that, Gray,’ he replied, hurrying his pace to catch me up. ‘You’re about to do something terrible. I’m your friend, aren’t I? It’s my job to stop you making a buttock of yourself.’