Bête (9 page)

Her chair scraped noisily on the floor. ‘They are really crossing the line,’ she said.

‘—Albie, and what we can—’

She wasn’t listening to me. ‘It’s because you’re here, Dad,’ she said, as she stomped through the door. ‘They’re acting up, the little buggers.’

I cross-hatched the lines on my mashed potato. There was an unmissable rebuke in that statement. So the following
day I made my excuses and left.

What my son told me

I hitchhiked across the ancient kingdom of England, my homeland, my beloved place, all the way to East Anglia. The farm where Albert was working was near a village called Peters­holt. Hitching took me longer than usual. The government was bringing in legislation to make hitch-hiking illegal, I was told by one driver. I don’t mind
picking you buggers up, but it’ll soon be against the law. Cambridge was the nearest I could get to this place by free rides, so I rode Shanks’s pony the remaining fifteen miles.

I hadn’t called ahead, but (looking back) I deduce that Jen did, because Albert wasn’t surprised to see me. He was hauling bales from a flatback and stowing them in a metal barn when I came round the corner of the
lane. ‘Hi, Dad,’ he called.

‘Albert,’ I said. We didn’t embrace. We had never been that kind of father-son. He hauled another bale, wiped his brow on his shoulder, and looked at me.

‘You could give me a hand,’ he pointed out.

‘Glad to,’ I replied, slightly testier in tone than I intended. ‘Provided the
pay rate
is fair.’

He scowled. ‘Suit yourself, Dad,’ he said, pulling
another bale. ‘You always do.’

So I stood and watched as he pulled all the bales off and stowed them. Finally he clambered awkwardly into the cab of the truck – clearly unused to dealing with the clumsiness of farm ordnance after so many years away – and drove it away. I waited. Eventually he came sauntering back round. ‘You want a cup of tea?’

‘I do.’

‘I’ll tell the boss I’m
taking a breaking.’

‘And what is your boss’s name?’

He looked at me as if checking whether I was joking or not, but didn’t answer. I followed him round the farm and across an uneven quarter-acre of grass and cowpats. On the far side of a gate was a yard, and in the yard three cows. ‘This is my dad,’ Albert told them, pulling the gate open.

‘Of course it is,’ said one of the cows.

‘Is it OK to take five?’ Albert said. ‘Make him a cup of tea; say hello; sort of thing.’

‘I’m feeling bloaty,’ said the second cow. ‘Please hook me up. After that you’re welcome to have a chinwag with your
old father
.’ The beast backed up, its udders swinging like a chandelier in an earthquake. I worked cows for two decades, but I never really got used to their udders – that weird goitre-swell
and rubber-glove-fingers combo. But Bert went meekly off with the creature into what I assumed was the milking shed. I stayed on the near side of the gate. ‘So,’ I said, conversationally. ‘This is your farm?’

‘Ours,’ said one of the cows, turning her big head to bring one eye to bear on me. ‘All legal and binding.’

‘How did you sign the lease?’ I asked. ‘Tie a pen to a hoof with a
rubberband?’

‘You’ve not been keeping up with the law,
Graham
,’ said the second cow. Of course they knew who I was. It dawned belatedly on me, standing there, that – like Anne’s cat – all these cows had read my piece. That they probably regarded me as a murderer. Awkward. But then again: fuck it.

‘A human
can
sign on our behalf,’ said the other cow. ‘It’s just as much within our rights
to hire a secretary as it is within yours. There are plenty of humans keen to help us. They feel …’ And the cow rolled his massy head in a great circle, searching for the word, or dissuading a fly from settling, one of the two.

‘Guilty,’ said the first cow. ‘Is how they feel.
Some
of them.’

‘Some,’ agreed the second cow, putting a deal of emphasis on the
m
.

‘To mmake ammends,’
said the first, and I began to suspect they were mocking me. Bovine mockery was not something liable to sweeten my mood.

‘People are happy to drink milk from canny cows, are they?’ I sneered. ‘They don’t think of such milk as a freaky fucking abomination?’

‘Ab-
hominid
, Graham?’ said Cow 1. ‘Hardly!’

‘It’s not wholly consistent of you, Graham,’ said Cow 2. ‘If you don’t believe
loquacious beasts are truly people then presumably you think we are no different to the same cows whose milk you stole—’

‘Ahe
mmm
!’ interjected Cow 1, jovially.

‘—for so many years! Contrariwise, if you find the thought of drinking the milk of a canny cow distasteful, perhaps you secretly
do
think of us as people.’

‘ “Contrariwise”?’ I said. ‘Fucking
seriously
?’

‘Would you
put a pregnant human woman in the milking machine, Graham?’

‘Would you
brand
a human woman, Graham?’

‘Ah, but would you shoot a woman in the
head
, Graham?’

I couldn’t stem the adrenaline come flushing up through my system. My teeth ground together. My eyesight went a little funny, as if focusing more intently. Had there been a weapon – a stick, say – to hand, I would have lashed
out. I contemplated swearing at them, but of course that would only have gratified them. ‘Guns,’ I said, concentrating to keep my voice level. ‘Of course, they’ve yet to build one that fits comfortably into the bovine cleft hoof. And til that day …’ With deliberate ostentation of gesture, I ran my clever fingers through my regrowing beard.

‘I believe what
Graham
is implying,’ said Cow 1
to Cow 2, ‘is that the prehensibility of human hands would prove more advantageous than the quickness of human wits – in the event of a conflict.’

‘Since human wits are no match for ours, when we put our heads together,’ Cow 2 replied, ‘
Graham
had better pray he is right in that.’

This was the point Albert came back and took me inside the farmhouse for a cup of tea. I unclenched on
my anger a little inside – this, at least, was a space into which the cows did not come; though I was still fuming. ‘Got anything stronger?’ I asked, as he filled the kettle.

‘Bit early in the day for booze, don’t you think?’

‘Coffee, then.’

He made two cups and sat across the table from me. For a while we sat in silence. Bert has never been a gabbler, and I was working to dampen
down my anger, internally. A woman put her head round the door. ‘Is the tractor fuelled, Albie?’ she asked.

‘Tikrita, meet my dad,’ he said.

‘Oh, hi. Tractor?’

‘I’m doing it next.’

‘Cool.’ She withdrew her head.

‘Girlfriend?’ I asked.

‘Comrade,’ Al said, and his face, momently, carried that
parents are so uncool
expression which children, no matter how old they
are, never quite lose. ‘There’s Jacob too – he’s having a nap upstairs, I think, after an early start.’

‘And the cows actually own the farm?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Did you sign the lease documentation for them?’

‘Dad, don’t be antediluvian. There are such things are electronic signatures, you know.’

‘The cows outside,’ I insisted, ‘said they had human secretaries.’

‘I think they might have been pulling your leg.’ His big, pale, moony face looked across at me.

I grunted. ‘They pulled my leg. I pulled theirs too, mind. And they’ve more legs than I.’

Nothing. Tumbleweed might as well have rolled between us.

‘So,’ I said, after a long pause. ‘And
all
of you working for no wage?’

‘Bed and board,’ said Albert. But defensively, and his
posture stiffened.

‘Look up
slavery
in a dictionary app,’ I said. ‘When you’ve a moment.’

‘A little rich for a human being to try and claim the moral high ground on the matter of slavery, don’t you think?’ he replied. ‘Given how we have treated the natural world for four hundred thousand years.’

‘So,’ I said, sitting back. ‘You’ll drive a tractor for these cows, since they’re
incapable of driving a tractor themselves. And that’ll make amends for humanity raping Mother Earth for all those millennia?’

Albert put the knuckle of his right thumb between his lips and chewed it, mildly. ‘I can only do what I can do, Dad,’ he said shortly. ‘But I can at least do that – or I guess I could do nothing. But doing nothing doesn’t sit well with my conscience. You know?’

‘You’re implying,’ I said, in a bristly voice, ‘that I am doing nothing?’

‘As ever, Dad, I’ve honestly no idea
what
you’re doing.’

This meeting wasn’t going as well as I might have liked. I imagined Jen sitting at the table with us; she would not be pleased. I tried – genuinely – to rein in my rage. But that’s not such an easy thing.

‘I’m your father,’ I said. ‘I’m concerned
for you. You had a good job – you left. It’s a fine thing to be concerned for the environment, and all. But you have to look out for yourself, too.’

‘Listen to you!’ Albert said, mildly enough. ‘You sound like you’re a hundred years old! The
environment
? Wake up, Dad.’

‘Working for
cows
?’ I retorted.

‘I might have thought you’d be pleased,’ he returned. ‘Going into the family
business.’

‘Get your own farm and I’ll dance a fucking jig in the driveway,’ I returned. My voice may have grown louder than was entirely compatible with pleasant conversational interchange. At any rate, Tikrita put her head round the doorway again. ‘All tickety-boo?’ she asked.

‘Sure,’ said Albert. ‘Dad was just leaving. Weren’t you, Dad?
Do
try not to shoot any of the owners in the
head on the way out, yeah?’

‘I think,’ I said, feeling the grip of The Stubborn tight upon my soul, ‘that I’ll sit here and finish my coffee before I go.’

‘Suit yourself,’ Bert said, getting up. ‘You always do.’

Alone in the kitchen I ran my gaze over the fixtures and fittings. Nothing was dirty, or tattered, but none of it was very expensive-looking either. There was a mackerel
pattern of grime on the glass of the windows. The late autumn light caught on cobwebs in the coign of wall and ceiling. Stone flags, with one rush mat in the middle of the floor. How old was this farmhouse? Centuries old. Hundreds of years of human occupation, useful business, and now it was the legal property of its livestock.

I went through to the hall. Beyond an open door I saw a room
filled with computing equipment – state-of-the-art stuff, spread and stacked across a big desk and plugged into a shock-break unit. It struck me as a lot of processing power for a small dairy farm, but I was too cross, and proud, to think more about it.

What Anne told me

Now I’m going to tell you what happened with Anne. During the time over which the following events unfolded – two
years, give or – I continued with the rhythm into which my life had fallen. There were no actual jobs to be had. To be precise, there
were
old-style jobs in the cities, whither most of the population had gone. I have, in my life, done time in the cities, and I found the experience exactly as carceral as the phrase
done time
implies. The extra crowds, and the general atmosphere of decaying general
economy, would not make the experience any more bearable. It wasn’t a resources problem, I think. The difficulty has always been: proliferation of people and kit as against the power to order, distribute and control that kit. Every chip added a new citizen to the population, but the majority of these hybrid creatures were cats, dogs – pets – and unproductive in terms of the larger economy.

Hell is other people counts double for city people.

At any rate, I continued my peripatetic life, butchering animals where I could, living more or less rough, circling back round to hot showers and a comfortable bed with Anne regularly enough. The honest truth is that, as gigs became harder to find, I became less assiduous about seeking work out.

I watched vogues come and go. Consortia
of animals hired teams of top-dollar lawyers to try and extend the legal rights of animals. A petition was presented to Parliament with a million human and nine hundred thousand bestial signatures upon it, the twelve-point charter. Nine hundred thousand! That must have been every single bête in the land. But they were always good at organizing themselves. Give them that. I don’t recall all
twelve points of the Great Animal Charter, but I know that the right to vote, to work, the right to welfare benefits and the creation of a set number of specifically animal MPs and MEPs was part of it. It was never going to happen, of course. I don’t suppose the animals believed it would pass; their intention was to provoke dissension amongst humanity.

Oh, there was plenty of that.

I didn’t follow all the ins and outs; but it wasn’t possible to avoid hearing about the larger debates. People kept talking and talking. I remember one winter evening when I stayed in a country pub – rooms were €40, but the landlady permitted people to sleep on the saloon benches for a fiver. She even provided clean blankets. Everybody was talking about the likelihood of animal MPs. Outside, the
winter threw hailstones at the windows like ballbearings; and the screen of the heater glowed orange. ‘The Emperor Nero made his horse a senator,’ said one old geezer with a dented face, stroking the cat in his lap – a dumb cat, I’m glad to say. The horse-senator was often invoked, back then. ‘That was Caligula,’ I corrected him. My pedantry displeased him and he scowled so hard it looked like he’d
accidentally jammed his toe in a live electrical socket. ‘People have affection for animals,’ said the landlady. ‘But these aren’t animals. They are cyborgs. If the news talked of cyborg MPs people wouldn’t be keen.’ The man with the dumb cat lifted his beer glass with his left hand and began a long disquisition on the way the adaptive AI had evolved over its use in animals, to meld with the animal
nature of the beasts. These canny bêtes were more than just phone-smart or computer-smart, he insisted; they were actually a new breed of animal-smart. I stopped listening.