Bullfighting (7 page)

—They're up in the attic, looking for droppings, she says when I phoned her the first time.—Nice enough fellas.

As calm as anything. It annoyed me a bit. The thing didn't get to her the same way it got to me. Mind you, to be fair to her, she never saw the fuckin' thing. And, to be fair to me, I did. Anyway, by the time I got home she was an expert on rats and mice. The world's foremost fuckin' expert. No, that's not fair.

Anyway.

—They're neophobic, she says after I said I'd go up the attic to see if the poison had been touched yet.—They're scared of anything new, she says, even though I could have worked it out myself.—So there's no point going up. They won't touch it for a few days, until they're used to it being there.

All I'd wanted to do was prove that I wasn't too scared to go up. I just wanted to do something useful, after running off to work earlier and leaving her flicking through the Golden Pages.

—Did they take the rat with them? I said.

—What rat? she says.

—The rat, I said.—The fuckin' rat I found this morning.

—Oh, she said.—No.

So that's what I did. I got rid of the rat. I went for a walk. With the black bag. No bother. I went looking for a skip. And there was one just up the road. So, into the skip with the fucker in the black bag. I shoved it down under some of the rubble, to make sure no kids pulled it out and started messing with it. I could feel it under the layers of plastic and I didn't mind a bit.

But that's not the point. The point is – I don't know, exactly. What I used to take for granted, I can't take for granted any more. I used to be able to walk across the floor here without giving it a moment's thought. And now I can't. I have to think about it. I have to prepare myself. I have to casually search the floor. I have to get down on my knees and check under the presses, knowing I'll find nothing. My mornings are ruined. It's as simple as that.

But there's more to it than that. It's the ‘what if' thing. That's the real point. What if it had been Sunday morning, early, and
Match of the Day
had been on. I'd have sat down to have a look because I hardly ever watch it on Saturday nights any more. It's hard to get worked up about millionaires half your age. Not that I begrudge them the money. Anyway, I'd have sat down and the little lad would have strolled on into the kitchen. It doesn't bear thinking about. But I've thought about nothing else. And it goes way beyond that. Everything. Fuckin' everything is
polluted
by it.

I wait up every night when the eldest goes out, till she comes home. And I was just getting used to it. I was capable of falling asleep before she came home. I'd wake up when I'd hear her key in the latch, but I'd be back in bed, not an embarrassment to her, before I'd hear her feet on the stairs. Now, Jesus. Last Saturday I sat on the stairs, in the dark. I know – like any normal father. But it isn't. It's desperate. I had to nail myself to the stairs to stop from going out to the street or driving to the disco, or whatever it's called – the club she said she was going to. It's not that I don't trust her. I don't. But I do, if that makes sense.

It makes perfect sense. I trust her. I'm happy,
was
happy to let her out, to have her own key and the rest of it. And I'm absolutely positive she abuses that trust. She drinks. I know. She might even be doing the Ecstasy and that. And, yeah, sex, I suppose. And I really don't mind because that's part of the package as well. Part of the contract, giving her a longer leash. And as long as she doesn't stroll into the house with a smell of drink on her and say, ‘Sorry I'm late, I was riding a chap with a car and a ponytail,' I don't mind. What isn't said didn't happen. She knows; we know. She's finding her feet. We're here if she needs us.

But
now
, fuck. I'm on the verge of giving out to her because she looks good. As if she's to blame for being an attractive young one, as if it's anything to blame anyone for. I was never like that. I was always proud of her, always. But now I'm terrified. I remember the first time we let her go down to the shops by herself. It was a real event, that day. She was so proud of herself, you know. She was just eight. I've always loved that, giving them the opportunity to be proud of themselves. If it was now though, I wouldn't let it happen.

Anyway.

She – my wife. Jackie. She's worried about me. Which is about the only thing going for me at the moment. It proves something – I don't know what. Love, I suppose. I see her looking at me and I want to shout at her to leave me alone but I'm grateful for it as well.

I don't know anything any more. I don't seem to. I'm getting pains in my chest. And my arms are stiff when I wake up. Numb. I remember in a film I saw when I was a kid,
The Birdman of Alcatraz
, the warden, your man from
The Streets of San Francisco
– not Michael Douglas, the other one. Your man with the nose. Karl something. He had a pain in his arm – Karl Malden – and Burt Lancaster, the birdman, knew that he was going to have a heart attack. I remember being fascinated by that, that a pain in your arm was a sign that there was something wrong with your heart. It was great. And my father, of course, he wanted to know if a pain in your arse meant you were going to have a brain haemorrhage. This was before he got the slippers. But anyway. What do two numb arms mean? Two heart attacks?

I don't give a fuck about anything any more. I really don't. I'm reading this one here.
Cold Mountain
by Charles Frazier. It's good, you know. It's very good. And I couldn't care less. I'm reading it because it's what I do. I'm just doing it. But I don't care. She used to like that about me, the opposite, you know. She always said it. My enthusiasm. She loved the way I listened to music. I leaned into it. I really listened. I never noticed, but she did. And it was the same with books, and everything really. There was once she made me read in bed, out loud, while she got on top of me, and I read right up to the second before I came. It wasn't easy, hanging on to the right page. It wasn't a hardback, thank Jesus.
The Slave
, by Isaac Bashevis Singer. What a book that was. I'd never read anything like it before. Or since. It made me regret that I wasn't a Jew, because of the way the main lad, Jacob, struggled to hold on to his Jewishness all through the book. He was the slave in the title. The peasants were trying to get him to eat pork, to do everything that was against his beliefs. She noticed how excited I was getting, sitting up in the bed, and she asked me what was so good about it. So I read her a bit. About a party up in the mountains. Poland, this was, four hundred years ago. Jacob was sent up there in the summer months to look after the cattle, find them grass among the rocks, and the only other people there with him were the village freaks, the products of brothers riding the sisters and the rest of it. Granted, the writer expressed it a bit better than I can, but you get my drift. So I read her a bit. I can't quote it exactly but they were all rolling around in the muck, grunting like pigs, barking like dogs, howling, pissing on the fire, hugging the trees, stretched out on the rocks, vomiting, screaming, roaring.

—It's just like our wedding, she said.—What's it about besides that bit?

—Well, it's a love story, I said.—It's fantastic.

—Find us a different bit, she said.

So I did. Where he describes Wanda, this peasant girl that Jacob loves. And that's when it happened. I got through a page and a half, which wasn't too bad because it was very small print and long paragraphs. Anyway, I came and she collapsed on me.

—Ah look it, I said.—I've lost me page.

She laughed and cried, you know the way, and kissed me.

—That's the one, she said, into my ear.

Meaning, she'd be pregnant. She took the book out from between us and looked at the cover, at the writer's name.

—We'll call him Isaac, if it's a boy, she said.

It wasn't anything, actually. Not that time. But that's how important it was to me, reading, music, even the job. I
loved
tiles. Holding them, lining them up. The word ‘grout'. Everything.

She gave me the job of naming the kids. She knew I'd give them names that meant something. That had a bit of magic in them. So the eldest is Sarah. That's the name Wanda changed her name to after she ran off with Jacob, in
The Slave
. She read the book last year, the eldest did, and I think she was pleased, even though it's very sad in places and Sarah has a hard time of it. She said nothing, but I think she liked it, the link there, you know. Then there's Oskar, from
The Tin Drum
. She wasn't too keen on him being named after a dwarf but I persuaded her that if our lad got up to half the things that Oskar does in the book then we'd never be bored. Then there's Mary, from
Strumpet City
. She's a great fighter, Mary in that book. And we thought we'd go for something a bit more Irish, even though it's not strictly an Irish name. But, anyway, she's Mary. And the little lad is Chili, after Chili Palmer in
Get Shorty
. He's actually named after me, Terence, because we knew he'd more than likely be the last and she said we should name him after me and my father. I didn't mind. I quite liked it, actually. Even though I've been reading books all my life and I've never come across a hero or even a baddie called Terence. But, anyway, we usually call him Chili. And that's Chili in the book, not John Travolta in the film, good and all as he was.

Anyway, the point is, I haven't always been the miserable poor shite you're looking at. And, really, it wasn't too bad until recently. I'm just so tired, you know. And then this thing.

How it happened was, we got up together one Saturday morning and found the kitchen flooded. Water all over the shop. But we couldn't see where it was coming from. I turned it off at the mains and we found it, the source of the leak. There's a rubber pipe that runs from the cold tap to a tap outside on the wall. A mouse had eaten into it. The plumber, a pal of mine, showed it to us when he was replacing it. The teeth marks.

—These things are supposed to be rodent-proof, he says.

—Tell that to the fuckin' mouse, she says.

And that was that, really. No real damage done. I got some poison, the blue stuff – I can't remember its name – and I put it up in the attic. And I got a couple of new traps for in here. No problem, end of story. Then I found your man and we realised that it was a rat all the time and he'd had the run of the house for God knows how long.

So. I suppose, on top of everything else, my tiredness, the rows with the eldest – I suppose I'm just getting old. The rat was the icing on the cake, so to speak. Not the first time I've seen a rat, of course. I see them all the time on the job, and when I was a kid we used to hunt them. But before, when I saw a rat, it was always doing the decent thing, running off in the opposite direction. This guy, though. Granted, he was dead. But how long had he been in the house? Mice stick to one little patch of the house, but not rats. They have the run of the place. He came into the kitchen here through a hole in the plaster, where it was drenched by the flooding and fell away from the wall. He died two feet from the hole. But what about before that? How did he get in before the plaster fell away? Down the stairs? It's shattering, thinking about it.

But.

Here it is. Here's why I'm here. I'm taking the house back. I'm repossessing it. I'm staying here like this until it becomes natural again. Until I'm actually reading, and not listening out for noise or remembering our dead pal on the floor every time I go over to the kettle.

I'm not guarding the house. I don't think that there are more rats inside. Or mice. And, to be honest with you, the mice are fuckin' welcome. I'll get in some extra cheese for them. No, I'm getting over that bit. That's only a matter of time. The rat's gone.

But. In a way, I
am
guarding the house. Not against a rat or rats or anything else that shouldn't be in the house. I'm guarding it against nature. The only reason life can go on in this house is because we managed to keep nature out. And it's the same with every house. And nature isn't lambs and bunnies and David Attenborough – that's only a tiny part of it. It's a lot rougher than that. Life is a fight between us – the humans, like – and nature. We've been winning but we haven't won. And we never will. The rats, for instance. They're under us. Three feet, about. A bit more, a bit less. They're under there. Fine. But give them a chance and they'll be back. They haven't lost and they never will. We need the walls and the foundations to keep them out, to let them know – because they're not thick – we're brighter than them and we're stronger than them. We have to mark off our space, the same as the other animals do.

And it's not just the animals. It's ourselves. We used to be cannibals. It's only natural, when you think about it. We're only meat. What could be more natural, for fuck sake? We probably taste quite good as well, the fitter, younger ones. But we sorted out the cannibalism years ago. It's not an issue any more, it's not a choice. Take the house away, though, take the farms and the roads and all the organisation that goes into human life and it will be a question of choice again. If nature gets the upper hand again, we'll soon be eating each other. Or, at the very least, we'll be deciding whether or not to. And then there's sex. We're only a couple of generations away from the poor freaks in
The Slave
. Brothers with sisters, fathers with daughters. It goes on anyway, sometimes. We all know that. It's disgusting, but we have to admit it. It's nothing new. I've always known it. Only, I've never had to think about it. And that's what the rat did when it decided to die on the floor over there.