Night of the Animals (9 page)

CUTHBERT HAD SEEN AN OTTER ONCE BEFORE IN
his life—or so he thought.

It happened more than eighty years before, on a scalding summer afternoon, in 1968. His family—Drystan, his mum and dad, and his maternal grandmother, Winefride, who lived with them—had driven from Birmingham to an area well west of the Black Country, not far from the Welsh Marches of Worcestershire, to visit a few elderly relatives on his father's side. It was Cuthbert and his older brother Drystan's first trip to a region their gran had told them strange tales about from their earliest years.

The visitors were first taking an early tea in their relatives' cottage, and everyone—the boys, their parents and Gran, the old Handley aunties and a great-uncle—crowded a dark sitting room. Cuthbert and Drystan were unable to sit. They kept begging to ramble off by themselves into the nearby Wyre Forest, a radiant remnant of primeval woodland near the ancient settlements of Wribbenhall and Bewdley town.

“Please, Mum, please, please, please, please, please, please, ple—”

“Enough!” scolded their mum.

Cuthbert was only six, still pronouncing his
l
's as
w
's, and Drystan eight, and they were city boys. Apart from the heavily trod Dartmouth Park and empty tins of Lyle's syrup, little that was green or gold grew any longer in their West Bromwich world of chemical dumps and football madness. Making matters worse, a new expressway had isolated West Brom from the park, a last salubrious leafy retreat that had been donated and laid out specifically for local factory workers a hundred years before.

“I'd like to see the deepest parts, you know, the sort of middle bits of that forest, I would. Can we have a look now?” asked Drystan. “Gran? What do—”

The boys' father, Henry Handley, interjected, “With all due respect to dear gran, she's not your gaffer, is she? Who pays for—”

But Drystan cut him off, saying boldly, “You should be better to Gran. She knows more than—”

“Huh,” his father said, with an odd, taut smile. He was a dumpy, freckled man with long woolly red hair combed to the side and, at the time, muttonchop sideburns. He was often both irritable and transparent, so when he said to his aunties with clenched, stifled fury and a forced Brummie
^*
twang, “A
www.
'E's a swait boy oo adores his gran,” it sounded as false as it did spiteful. They all knew he beat the boys regularly, especially the elder one; they often had puffy pink welts on their white legs and arms, still chubby with toddler-fat in Cuthbert's case.

Their grandmother didn't react to these edgy exchanges between her eldest grandson and son-in-law, who had developed a recent mutual loathing. She waited a few moments and quietly began explaining how it was best to avoid the forest's interior, which she still remembered well.

“Things thee'll want to forget—that'll be in the middle of the
Wyre,” his grandmother was saying, hamming it up for the boys but not without real unease. They needed a look at the world out of West Brom, but she also sensed the Wyre might be too much for them, especially little Cuddy. “It's a tricky place, boys, but it's lovely, too. But honestly, thee const
^*
get right lost.”

Cuthbert's mother, Mary Handley, sat cramped beside Henry on a black-leather settee that looked big and misplaced in the cottage, fingering her teacup and leaning forward with a stiff, mannered face, unwilling to relax. Husband and wife each maintained, in their own miserable ways, an illusion that all was diamond-glinted good fortune in the city. Having moved themselves from the Marches to Birmingham years ago, they had barely broached the lower middle class; they kept their own ire at this state of affairs tamed with purchases of chocolate and lager and a few overworn sports jackets and perfumes, jingoism, and an abiding unctuousness toward the rich. Neither had any use for forests.

“I'd like to see it cleared, meself, except if there's any,
loik,
swans in there,” said Henry. “There's loads of woodlands in Wales, and no one makes a tuppence off Wyre these days, do they? It's not like the old barking-peeling and tannin days, is it?”

Their gran, who was named Winefride after one of the local so-called miracle wells of the Marches, took a frank swallow of tea, trying to ignore the man's foolishness. Hundreds of species of birds inhabited Wyre, but no swans. She was a white-haired woman with a strong, square face; for the day trip, she'd worn a long pretty nylon dirndl skirt with gold acanthus-leaf designs and a gray Orlon sweater, both bought by catalog order from Kays.

“Of course,” said Henry, sitting up a bit on the settee, and smirking. “The politics of chopping anything down is all mardy
^*
these days. Even in Wales.”

Two plump rose-cheeked women of roughly the same vintage, the great-aunties, were scurrying in and out of the kitchen, bringing a pot of damson jam, triangles of toast, slices of Cox's Orange Pippins, and a Spode teapot.

“Bist sure thee'st stay near the big oaks, along the edges, and don't be too loud, and you'll see or hear a thing or two,” their gran said to the boys, ignoring her son-in-law's last comment. “But if errun of thee go loblolling in there, all tittery and tottery, no living thing will show itself. But the Boogles will!”

“Boogles,” gasped Cuthbert.

“I'll outrun any Boogles,” said Drystan.

“No you won't,” said Cuthbert. “You 'av to stay with me, Dryst. You're not doing a runner, roight?”

The boys had heard about Boogles, the “owd sprites,” many times from their gran, but they had never been close to a place where the creatures supposedly lived.

Still restive from the car ride, they had been roving the tiny sitting room. A gold-framed photo on a wall cabinet caught Cuthbert's eye, and he scrutinized it from inches away. It showed a young, burly soldier with a brisk, proud smile. He wore the same heavy wool tunic and puttees he saw in a photograph of his dead grandfather, but this soldier looked robustly healthy.

“That's your great-uncle Tom,” one of their aunties said. “'E used to keep a pet hob-lamb e'd let run around our kitchen. E'yunt come back from Ypres.”

“That's a man,” said Henry.

There was a brief silence, and Cuthbert's father looked down stiffly, out of respect. He gave his whiskers a scratch.

Despite their age difference, in their blue-striped T-shirts and matching khaki camp shorts, the boys might nearly have been mistaken for twins that day. Cuthbert was very tall for his age. Unlike other Handleys, their hair was as dark brown as cloves. They
both had high pale foreheads, long mahogany eyes, and small, delicate O mouths. The younger boy was only a little shorter than his brother, though he still possessed the round face and short jaw of a child.

“I'm not afraid of any Welsh forest,” said Drystan. Of the two, he exuded a particularly languid self-assurance and sweet inattention, with longer hair and a slightly more prominent chin. He'd been walking around since breakfast with untied shoes. His father's quick violence toward him and lack of warmth had wrought something darker and angrier in Drystan, combined with an intense but underfed intelligence. “I promise that I'll never go mad.”

Their mother, who had fairer hair but the same black-brown eyes, said, “If you don't stop your mithering,
we'll
all be mad! And it's not Wales. It's the Marches.”

Winefride put down her tea and sniffed at Mary. She said, whispering loudly enough for Cuthbert to hear, “Don't be such a cruel munch. They're just lambs.”

“Gran?” said Drystan. “I don't want to be any lamb. I want to be something clever—and brutal.” He grabbed his little brother and scrobbled his hair, then started tickling him under his arms. Cuthbert squealed with laughter. “Someone needs to herd this little lamb.”

“Dryst!” barked their father, in a severe tone that embarrassed everyone present. No one said a word for a few moments. Cuthbert's brother glared at their father with open contempt, shaking his head.

Since arriving from the city, the Handley parents had planted themselves in the murky sitting room of the great-aunties' home, a room that smelled of burned oats and damp flagstone in an eighteenth-century cottage with tiny casement windows. Their old uncle George Milburn slept in a chair.

Winefride, on the other hand, who often wore a sad expression
of declined pride, was as vivified by the trip to her “owd Wyre” as her daughter Mary seemed querulous. She looked nearly as anxious to get outside as her grandsons, and she kept tapping her foot and looking out the casement window. Her ongoing descriptions of the forest could not have been more potent to Cuthbert's ears. They seemed like the breathtaking words of some grizzled space mercenary in his
Dan Dare
comics, not of a rheumy old woman living in her son-in-law and daughter's cramped terrace house in West Brom.

“Madness!” Cuthbert said, with great delight, though he had no idea what the word meant.

“That's right,” said Winefride. “And it won't go away 'til the sun shines on both sides of the hedge.”

Drystan asked his brother, quite earnestly, “What hedge? How's that?”

Cuthbert said, “Saft head!
Whisten
, will you?”

The boys sidled up to their gran and cuddled in for stories.

“
NO, YO
'
DUNNA GO TOO KEERFUL INTO THE
Wyre,” their gran was saying. “But ye go, just the same. 'Tis almost time, too.”

She looked at her daughter, raising her eyebrows, and continued: “When I was a little badger-lass, we once found an owd broken baker's peel in there. We took it home to our dada to have it fixed. I remember him marveling, ‘Why's thar a baker's peel in the middle of the forest?' Well, babbies, my granddaddy, who had the Wonderments, as thee well know, well, 'a said there were
fairy
kitchens in Wyre, where fairies and their pet hares—hares that talked, yo'know—where thay ran their coal ovens.” She smiled more easily, her mouth softening, the wrinkles around her lips folding into milky pink ripples. “So once the peel was put right, we left it back in the forest, and the next day, we found in its spot the most perfect little cake we'd ever tasted, flavored with violets and juniper-berry glaze.”

The boys were rapt now, kneeling beside their gran, one of their little hands on each of her chunky thighs, sitting perfectly still. Since
their earliest childhood, their gran had told them various tales, notions, and advices she referred to collectively as the Wonderments. All along Welsh Marches, where Offa's Dyke once bullied the Welsh with Mercian royal might, a dwindling number of families bound “neither by rank nor nation,” as their gran put it, had for centuries quietly bequeathed the Wonderments, from granddad to granddaughter, then grandmother to grandson, and so on.

“And the fairy bakers make all kinds of little cakes so
tasty
and
noice
—well, thee dunna forget it if thee 'av one.”

The two aunties giggled, with bell-like happy notes, and the smaller, more vocal of the two, Bettina, said, “Er's good as gold, your gran—
you
two tiddlings, you listen. But don't let her wind you up. We've got good'n
noice
cakes here, too.”

“Oh, a little winding's in my binding,” said Winefride. “But your aunties' cooking is better than any fairy's.” She very lightly touched her grandson's nose with her fingertip. “Do your shoes, Drystan.” He slowly knelt down and tied his laces with long, sluggish movements. “Thee cosn't be foresting like that. And if thee fall down in Wyre, thee dars'na stop to get up. Thar're one or two ethers in that forest.”

“Snakes,” said Mary Handley, frowning. “Mum means snakes. Adders.” Cuthbert looked at Drystan with a big, gap-toothed grin.

“Can't believe our luck,” said Drystan, marveling, shaking his head. “Adders!”

Apart from Cuthbert's mother, the women were desperately pleased to be together—“like chicks in wool,” as Bettina commented, despite an awareness of Henry and Mary's vague air of censure. When they met, which was rare, their speech silvered and gilded into the singsong, jingly bells-and-bracelets dialects of the Marches.

“More tea?” asked Bettina, standing to walk back into the kitchen. “Here goes ding-dong for a dumpling then.”

Winefride chuckled. “Oh, Jack's alive,” she exclaimed. “We're having fun, aren't we?”

“Yeah, Gran,” said Cuthbert. “And we'll be awfully good in the wood—awfully.” The brothers grinned at each other, and Cuthbert gave Drystan a little punch on the arm.

“Yeah twice,” said Drystan.

“Whatever you do,” said their gran, “and there's no iffing or offing in this, thee'shot stay hitched by an invisible yoke.” She grabbed Drystan and sat him onto her lap, but he squirmed to get off, pedaling his legs. “Thee, little wildcat, bist sure thee'st listen and bist canny in thar, too. Thee oot hear voices, if thee'st lucky.” She kissed his ear and released him.

“What?” asked Cuthbert, quite emphatically. “What did you say, Gran?”

She nodded. “Yes, yes, yes. Sometimes, in Wyre, animals talk.” She tried not to look at Henry, who hated this sort of banter, and often let her know it. To him, it was an embarrassment, a sign of the peasant mentality. And he'd never had “a farthing rushlight worth of help from any Wonderment,” he would say to her.

“Wike
people
?” Cuthbert asked. “They talk wike people?”

“No, not quite.” She glanced at Henry, who was shaking his head at her sullenly. “It . . . rises inside thee.”

“Oh, it rises all right, does it?” mocked Henry, unable to contain himself. “Why do you fill these boys' noggins with this—blether?”

Winefride looked at her daughter with an expression verging on tears.

At the age of seventy-six, Winefride Wenlock wanted nothing more than to complete a task she felt assigned; like the green drake-flies who hover for a few hours in May on the Severn then drop dead, she felt she possessed just one sparkling last moment of life to finish telling, for the boys' sakes, a set of tales as old as the river. The Wonderments, as she instructed the boys, were more than a family
legacy; they flowed robustly, through the ages, sneaking beneath the Normans' noses, bursting forth from the clashing lost kingdoms and secret saints of Mercia and Arwystli and the coming of Christ to Britain. At least, that's what her grandfather had told her as he lay dying in the snowy winter of 1901. And he'd also told her something that nearly trampled her with a sense of duty, so much so that she effectively decided her sweet grandfather must have been a little mad himself: he claimed that she, Winefride Wenlock, was the very last carrier of the Wonderments, “as far as 'e knew.”

Winefride once related the whole conversation to the boys.

“‘T'others are all dead,' said my gran-da. ‘Our'n is the last family. After us, it's only animals and the saints as have it. And the animals will only speak to th'uns with the Wonderments.' But I said to him, ‘I canna be. I canna be.' I was quite panicked, you know? And he said, ‘Thee'ast heard the otters, right? From the forest and the river?' I said, ‘I dunna know.' ‘Well, that's a yes,' he said. Then he had cleared his throat, and he said, ‘He makes the night wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep, and the lions seek their meat, but he also makes Sun ariseth.' He was very ill, poor man. Something with his poor kidneys. And he told me this: ‘Look for a grandson. That's as'll have the Wonderments. Or 'e won't.'”

Cuthbert never recalled his gran, as she grew older, dashing around looking for tricky pixies or talking kingfishers. It wasn't like that, not at all. The Wonderments were deeper, palpable, more about feeling than sorcery. But she genuinely believed in her forebears' faith, even if she gave little credence to what her granddaddy had said about her own uniqueness; discounting it enabled her, it seemed, to bear its weight. As she aged, she could better shoulder psychic burdens, including her daughter's marriage to, as she often put it, “a gowkie
^*
miser born under a threepenny planet.” She felt the conviction of her ancestors as a warm jewel against her own
dark skin, a gleam to be preserved for Britain and indeed for the world. The Wonderments chose you.

Yet it wasn't automatic. The Wonderments apparently ended if a grandparent didn't instruct the grandchild in them, and many, said Winefride, had declined to do just that, for they wanted their grandchildren to fit into the modern world.

Yet somehow, in ugly West Bromich, five decades before the Property Revolts, before the big suicide cults, before the All-Indigent zones, and before King Henry IX, two sweet grandsons in the line were born. Since Winefride's other grandchildren were girls, and the Wonderments passed from gender to gender and only every other generation, Cuthbert and Drystan represented to her—as one of her serious flaws was a habit of jumping to direst conclusions—the last of the line. But for all England knew or cared, she might be right. Winefride determined soon after Drystan's birth that she would need to work around his facile mother and abusive father to make sure the boy understood his birthright.

Her own children, along with countless other Worcestershireans and Salopeans,
^*
had been tricked, as she saw it, by Birmingham's industry. All the Black Country and Birmingham and indeed much of the whole world lived in a state of fatal anomie, alienated from nature, and dependent on “machines,” as she called all technology.

“We was going after akerns,” she once told Cuthbert, “pounding 'em into flour whilst the hullocks—that's what we called people like your father—were clammed with hunger.” She whispered the next words: “Your mummy and daddy, they're rawny-boughs nowadays, as far as it goes. That's the hard truth. They canna go without their satellites and tellies and Norton bikes,” which was what she called all motorcycles. “But thee and I and Drystan, we can survive off the
trees,
canna we? We can always go back into the Wyre and up into the Marches and my hills of Clee.”

And survive Winefride had, with her green gleam. But never prospered. The truth was, even before her birth, the landscapes in and around Wyre had been chopped to bits by mining. “Despert chaps, young and owd,” as she called them, sometimes by the thousands at a time, used to vie to deform the very hilltops of Clee and all the Welsh Marches with nothing but hand tools. “They was bent on steekling the hills,” she said, “as if they hills 'ermselves were fattened little porkets for slaughter.” With the Depression, the mining economy had collapsed. She herself, by love and by poverty, was also in time driven off the Clees, like most of her cousins. Indeed, she would go no farther east than the Wyre—a matter of a few miles—until she was forced, as an old woman, by her own petty, city-loving, money-obsessed son-in-law.