Bête (32 page)

‘Your job is to preach the gospel to the Reading populace,’ I said. ‘Your job is to leave me the fuck alone.’

‘Despite your bad language,’
said Preacherman, ‘I will not abandon you.’

At this, I stopped, and turned to face him. ‘This is the one thing I want in my life. This is the only thing I want in my life. This is the woman I love. I can be with her again. Why would you want to stop me?’

‘It will drive you mad, my friend,’ he said. ‘These bêtes are devils. What promise they made you, they will break. Whatever you think
they will give you, it will only be betrayal.’

‘Hetheridge seems to think the treaty viable.’

‘He can only see the military side of things. He can’t see the larger danger here.
They
are not your kind.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘Graham,’ he said. ‘You have a duty to your kind. You have a duty to your
soul
. If I say you will lose your soul, should you go ahead with this, I’m not speaking
figuratively. Your land and your people need you. This woman, however much she meant to you, is dead. Don’t stab your land in the back for the sake of one woman – a woman not even alive.’

‘If I had to choose,’ I told him, ‘between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’

He digested this, and then grew visibly wroth at this.
‘But that’s nonsense!’

‘It’s Forster.’

‘I don’t care how many stars you give it,’ he returned. ‘It’s dangerous
nonsense
.’

‘Love is love, mate.’

‘Listen to yourself! Like it’s not possible for love to be good or evil, just as people are good or evil. You think Hitler didn’t love killing Jews? You think devils don’t love to torment the godly?’

‘Goodbye, Preach. If there
is to be peace – I mean, if the peace is going to work out – then perhaps we’ll meet again.’ I turned, and started plocking away again.

‘What about your duty, Graham?’ he called. ‘What about your duty to your land? What about your duty to your species?’

I loved poetry at school, and then, out of a kind of intellectual stubbornness, I refused to let it go, even though it was of less
than no use to the business of running a farm. I studied Latin, which was equally useless. My little red notebooks of poetry, scribbled in only at those moments when I was sure I was alone. As my kids grew older they became less inhibited about mocking me for my literary pretensions. For Albie it was just the fact of it: so violent-tempered and emotionally clumsy a fellow aspiring to write poetry
(of all things). Anger’s always been the point of poetry, though – check out the first word of mankind’s oldest poem,
The Iliad
, if you don’t believe me. Jen was more puzzled that I gave up publishing any of it, after the
Eclogues
. ‘What, not even online?’ No, not even online. I wasn’t aspiring to be Ted Hughes. I was trying to do something disinterested in a life that was, otherwise, all about
the financial return upon labour and land. That was all about paying school fees and scratching the money together for vet bills and boiler repairs. I was writing poetry for myself, not for others, because the others did not need convincing that there was something aesthetically valuable in ‘nature’. Most of the others took that as a post-Wordsworth given. Not me. I was hip-deep in the shit of it.
I wrestled it every day. Looking back, I think I was actually trying to persuade myself that there was beauty around me. That I did what I did for love, not merely out of a barren kind of duty. That I wasn’t simply going through the motions with my work, in my marriage, in my life. None of us wants to think that. Even if it is true.

I studied Latin.
Duty
is suffixed from
due
, which in turn
is the English derivative from Latin’s
debitum
, owed. Which is to say, duty is the state of being in debt. One’s duty, is what one owes. The difference is that duty in the sense we now understand the term is supposed to be
disinterested
, whereas debt as we now understand it (which is to say, now that usury has been struck from the list of appalling sins by the Western world) is precisely
interested
… interest is due upon debt: interest, we might say, is the duty of debt. This elision of meanings has unfortunate consequences. Really, we need to remove ‘duty’ from the semantic field of debt. For too many people duty is a tiresome concept, something ‘owed’ or ‘ought’ (hence we say: ‘I ought to do more about global warming, I ought to give more money to charity’). But the sorts of things you
owe now – the mortgage on your house, for instance – are things you are seeking only to rid yourself of. Duty, in the broadest sense, cannot be ‘discharged’; we can never be, and should not seek to be, in a position where all our ‘duty’ is paid off, and we can relapse into destructive selfishness. Duty is a freedom, not an obligation: a freedom from the tyranny of self, not a mortgaging of that
self to society as a whole. Duty is always a free choice, a flowing-out of the human from ourselves to others. Duty is a liberality.

‘You owe it to humanity,’ said Preacherman, calling louder now, because I had left him that much further behind. ‘I’m your friend, aren’t I? You owe it to me.’

‘You don’t understand owe,’ I shouted back, keeping my gaze on the road ahead. There were animals
dancing through the bushes, and sneaking through the places where the fences were falling into disrepair.

These memories live on, in me. I can see them, in my own head.

I left him behind, by dint of ignoring the pain in my leg and marching on faster and faster. But he caught up with me again. He was like a bad conscience. I couldn’t get rid of him.

‘Where are you going, anyway?’
he asked me, interspersing his stride with little trotty bursts of speed to keep up with me.

‘You know where I’m going,’ I said.

‘I know what Satan promised you – your woman, yeah? You’ll be reunited with her, even though she’s dead, correct? That’s a lie, Graham. Satan is the father of lies.’

‘I’m going anyway,’ I told him.

Preacherman was grinning at me. We were a good
way south of the village now, and the road ran through fields, with the edge of the forest on the horizon. The view was of the low hills and shallow valleys of the south of England. Walk far enough in that direction and you come to the coast, where channel waves crisp and fall, making the pebbles rattlesnake and the foam sink through the grid of them. A line of surf all around the magic island like
a slug’s silver trail, skirting East Anglia and Northumberland, hugging close about the crenulations of Scotland, a silver halo about the twin horns of Wales, close as a stocking on Wessex’s crinkly leg, and back along the long south coast.

Beasts peered from every hedgerow. Dogs gathered in a mass further down the lane. Maybe I was the only one who could see them.

‘I can’t let you,’
Jazon told me. ‘I’ll restrain you by main force, if I have to. Main force!’ He sucked his teeth, meditatively, and then said: ‘Wait. Is that hand force? Like the French for hand?’

‘I think so,’ I confirmed.

‘I thought maybe,’ Preacherman said, ‘it was, like, main as opposed to subsidiary force. I’m hardly going to restrain you with
subsidiary
force, now, am I!’

‘You’re not going
to restrain me at all, Jazon,’ I said.

‘You’re not strong, the way you were, Graham,’ he replied, sorrowfully. ‘You’re not a match for me. Maybe once upon a time, but look at you. You’re a snowman who’s been out in the sun, my friend.’

‘You’re a big man but you’re out of shape,’ I said, more to myself than to my companion. ‘With me it’s a full-time job. So—’

Dogs were running
alongside the road, and then doubling back, and running up again. I tried to count them, but the flow and sudden turns of the pack confused my eye, like a shark watching sardines.

‘And what?’ said Preacherman. ‘You can’t intimidate me. I’m your friend.’ He reached out and put a hand on my arm. ‘Come back to the town, Graham.’

I look back at this. Graham’s not my name.

Preacherman
was holding a gun in his right hand. ‘I’m a councilman now, Gray. An important person. Do you see this?’

‘It’s a gun,’ I said.

‘Good. Now, do you see
this
?’ With his left hand, he brought out a mobile phone. ‘It’s special. It’s plumbed into the military network. Mate, I don’t want to. You think I want to? I figure: shoot you in your bad leg, it won’t matter so much. It’s already bad,
isn’t it? Then one call and a chopper will be here in twenty minutes.’

‘A chopper? The bike?’

‘A helicopter.’

‘I didn’t know the Reading garrison was operating choppers. Aren’t they a bit expensive, this day and age?’

‘You don’t know the first thing, Graham,’ said Preacherman. ‘The nation’s future is at stake!’

I felt frustration, but tiredness too. ‘I don’t understand
why you want to stop me.’ I said. ‘I don’t get why it
matters
to you.’

Birds circled overhead.

‘Because you’re my friend,’ he said, in an imploring voice. It may be, if I think back, that he was reminding himself, not me, of this fact. What was he doing, anyway? Out in the middle of nowhere, with an angry old tramp swearing at him, and the beasts of the field gathering as a malign
congregation. ‘And besides,’ he added, getting closer to the truth. ‘You’re special to
them
. And if you’re special to them, then we can use you. Against them.’

More dogs spilled out through the hedgerow. The presence of these creatures finally impinged upon his perception. He stood up taller, slipped his special-issue phone back in his pocket, and pulled out a crucifix. ‘You keep back,’
he called out, in a clear voice. ‘You bêtes – all of you! Get ye behind me. Understand?’

‘Jaze, you’re making a fool of yourself.’

‘I know the devil when I see him!’

My leg twinged at this, as if prompting me. ‘You know I’ve got to deliver the Lamb back to—’

‘Deliver Satan, you mean!’ Jazon snapped.

‘—to his tribe. That’s what Hetheridge is expecting of me. That’s
how
the treaty is going to be actualized. The Lamb will, I guess, find himself a new home, and from there command his followers to walk the straight and narrow.’

‘I don’t want to use the gun, Graham,’ said Preacherman. Then, surprisingly, he proved himself as good as his word, and put the gun away in his pocket. ‘Make me nervous, firearms do. Supposed to beat it into a ploughshare, I am;
though it’d make a wee diddy little one. Turn the other cheek,
that’s
the karate
I’ve
been trained in. But you gotta understand …’

‘Wait a minute,’ I said. There was a dog at my side. A lithe, black Labrador, taller than my knees. It had peeled away from the hedgerow that ran alongside the road, or from its shadow. Sun low in sky. Suddenly here it was.

Preacherman waved the crucifix
at the dog. ‘The devil is a canine!’ he called. ‘The devil is an ass! The devil is a cow! The devil is—’

What you need to think is: maybe he was right.

‘Preach! Calm down’, I barked. The dog was silent. I almost slapped Jazon; he was on the edge of hysteria. ‘Wait. What do you mean?
Helicopters
?’

Jazon danced behind me, to put my body between him and the canine. He was still
flourishing his crucifix. ‘Hey! Hey!’

‘Jason: who has
helicopters
, that you can you summon them in twenty minutes with a phone call?’ I asked. ‘Twenty minutes is further off than Reading. Reading is five minutes by chopper.’

‘Graham. Hetheridge is making a
mistake
,’ he said.

‘So you waited until you were out of the town,’ I said. ‘Until we were beyond Hetheridge’s interference.’

‘We come to it at last,’ Preach said urgently. ‘The great war of our time. Don’t be on the wrong side, Graham! You think they care for us? They don’t need us, and so they will destroy us. Think of the future. God gave us dominion over the birds and the beasts. Who would want to up-end that hierarchy, except the devil? Think of where the country is going! More and more humans abandoning the
countryside, more and more squeezing into the cities. Abandoning the countryside to the bêtes! Leaving them in charge of all our farming! Why should we trust them? Who’s to say they won’t wait until the urban population reaches a maximum and then starve us, in our concrete citadels? Infect us with the sclery? Why wouldn’t they? How can we trust them? That’s the way of it. Trust me. Why won’t you
trust me? I’m your friend!’

‘You are my friend,’ I conceded.

‘You can’t,’ Preach said, waving his crucifix in the air for emphasis, ‘choose a dead woman over a living friend. That’s just – morbid, mate. And you
have
to choose! You’ve got to make a choice.’ He took a step towards me. The dog at my side stood perfectly still. Birds stirred the white air in a great circle overhead.

‘On the one hand,’ said Jazon, ‘you have me, your best friend. You have your country and your duty. You have humanity, your own kind – your daughter, your son, your grandkids. You have all their futures. On the other hand you have— Forgive me, Graham, for being brutal, but it’s the truth. On the other hand you have a woman’s corpse. And a whole pandemonium of canny beasts, the enemy of humanity.
What kind of a choice is that?’

‘It’s no choice at all,’ I said. But I didn’t mean what Jaze hoped I meant.

‘The land is divided against itself! Literally apartheided between country and city. Unless we fight back, we’ll be expelled from the green spaces for ever. This peace treaty is not the right call. I have friends in the military who disagree with Hetheridge. Come with me, Graham,
and take the Lamb to them. The Satan in your pocket – it could prove invaluable in the war! It could make the difference between winning and losing. Or would you turn traitor? Traitor to your own kind?’

Black dog. How does that guitar riff go?

‘I’ll be with her again,’ I said.

‘You’re no Romeo, Graham. I
know
you! I’ve known you years.’ He held his free hand out towards me. ‘If
you won’t come with me, at least give me the chip. The chip from your pocket. At least do that.’