Animals

KEITH RIDGWAY

Animals

Contents

Cover

Title Page

The Mouse

Rachel and Michael

The Swimming Pool

The Spider

K

David

The Park

Slugs

The Terrorist’s Daughter

The Holy City

Author’s Note

About the Author

Praise

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

The Mouse

All of this happened about a week ago. There had been rain, on and off, and I was worried about dreams. Not my dreams in particular, but all of our dreams. I’m not talking about aspirations or anything. I mean our actual dreams – dreams we have when we fall asleep. I think there’s something wrong with them.

Before that, though, I have to tell you about what I saw on the morning of the first day, the Friday. I saw a dead mouse. I saw other things as well, and I’ll come to them, but chiefly, at the beginning, I saw the mouse. If anything is at the beginning then that is. I’m actually tempted to start somewhere else – with Catherine Anderson, for example (yes, the Catherine Anderson), or with BOX and all that Australia nonsense, or even with my friend David and his tiny writing. But none of that makes much sense really unless I tell you about what happened with K; and what happened with K doesn’t make any sense at all until I tell you about the mouse (and may not make much sense even then), and lunch with Michael, and a little bit about Rachel, and the thing about the strange rain. And the swimming pool, obviously. So I have to start with the mouse. Which is not ideal, because it’s not exactly what you’d call very exciting, in itself, even though, the more I think about it, the more it sums up everything else; and in a way, if I was brave, and if my bravery was confident of your bravery, I should just tell you about the mouse and leave it at that. Because, you know, the rest of it is just human. But none of us are brave any more.

I left my umbrella at home. I left it standing upright in the thick glass vase on the floor of our hall, leaning against K’s umbrella – two tall question marks asking me if I was sure. There had been constant showers for days – some of them quite heavy. Fat black clouds scuttled over the grey sky as fast as birds, bringing cold bursts of rain that drenched people, took them by surprise – because before they happened they were hard to imagine, and because we never learn. But I thought that this day looked a little brighter. I usually watch the weather forecast on the television in the mornings. But on the Friday I slept late – in fact, I was barely out of bed – and I had just had a chance to bathe and get dressed before it was time to leave the flat. So I decided that an umbrella wasn’t needed. I opened the front door and saw a strip of blue sky torn through the grey, and I decided I didn’t need an umbrella and I stepped out into the world as it is.

Our neighbourhood is generally sedate but can get a little agitated sometimes, and then you can feel a minor disturbance in the air, as if you’ve walked into a room where people have just stopped talking about you. I felt it that morning. There were some kids walking up the road towards me – about three or four of them, white and black and sullen, school age but not interested, obviously, in that, and they just looked like they were up to something – some kind of kiddie evil. I watched them carefully. Sometimes they can play that ancient joke of pushing one of their friends into a passing stranger, and I hate that – I never know which kid to be angry with, or how angry I should be. But these ones hushed their talk and parted for me as I passed through them. I glanced back and saw one of them spit, and two of the others glanced back at me, twisting themselves round in their hoodies and their low jeans with their boxers showing. They’re harmless really, though they’d hate to hear it said. They have their swagger ready-made for them in some East Asian sweat shop, and they wear it with the label showing. They are fully owned.

As I turned away though, and looked where I was going, there was a sudden flurry of activity behind me, where the boys were, which sounded like they had scattered, voice-lessly, all limbs and splitting up, like they were a flock of pigeons disturbed. I spun round and sure enough, they had disappeared. I was startled and stopped in my tracks, and my eyes ran over the street looking for some sign of them because it seemed uncanny that they could have vanished so completely, so quickly. I thought I saw the shape of a shoulder, a hooded head, slip behind a wall on my left. There’s a small lane there which leads to a road which runs parallel to ours. But I saw nothing else. I thought it strange. I stayed where I was for a minute or so, looking around, patting my bag and my pocket where my wallet was. I couldn’t figure it out. Perhaps I had hesitated for longer than I’d realised before turning. Perhaps I’d been nervous about what the noise had meant, fearing that they were running towards me and not away from me. But surely that would have caused me to turn even sooner – so that I could be certain. So that I’d know as soon as possible what I was up against. Or, if I’d thought that I was going to be attacked in some way, surely I’d have started running myself, without turning round at all. We have instincts after all – flight or fight. I think I tend towards flight, although, to be honest, I’ve never been particularly tested in that way. But I hadn’t even considered running when I heard the noise. Maybe a third instinct had kicked in – that of pretending that nothing is happening for as long as is humanly possible, thinking that ignorance might be a shield. I shrugged and went on.

I nodded hello at a woman from across the road who was making her way home with the shopping, and I had a long look at two separate elderly men who waited at the bus stop, ignoring everything but the corner from where the bus would come, when it came. I stood with them for a while, and looked at my watch, and decided to risk going into Eric’s.

There is actually no one in Eric’s called Eric, as far as I can make out, although the very pleasant Turkish man who runs it seems happy to answer to the name. Sometimes there is also a woman who I assume is his wife, and sometimes a son, who I have also heard being called Eric, though he doesn’t seem to like it very much. They stock groceries and newspapers and sweets, and some general small-scale DIY stuff like nails and screws and hammers and other tools, and watering cans and ropes and drain unblockers and sink plungers and bulbs and batteries and smoke alarms and mouse traps. Eric’s is the first port of call for the entire neighbourhood when some small domestic crisis hits. It can be annoying sometimes when you go in just to get a newspaper or some milk and you have to wait while Eric whose name is not Eric rummages around for an ancient fuse for a customer whose dinner depends on it. When I went in this time, I thought I’d been unlucky. Eric whose name is not Eric was standing at the back of the shop with a large woman I didn’t recognise. They were looking at mousetraps – an old-fashioned one with a spring-loaded neck-breaking bar, and a more modern one, involving an adhesive-floored box.

—They get stuck, you see, not-Eric was saying. Stuck there, they cannot move.

—And it’s alive?

—They’re trapped. They die of a heart attack or something. Who can know? They just die.

—And how do you get it out?

—You don’t get it out, you just throw the box away. No problem.

—Oh, I don’t know. Seems a bit cruel, doesn’t it?

She was laughing a little uneasily and looked at me. I smiled. Luckily, Mrs Eric who is not Mrs Eric appeared out of the back room and took for my newspaper and bottle of mineral water.

—The other snaps their neck, it’s not cruel?

—Well, it’s quick at least. Which one is cheaper?

—The more cruel is the cheaper. It’s always the way.

On the bus, I read, and drank my water and forgot entirely about mice and the vanishing boys. I read lazily, yawning, and glanced at the rooftops and the arches and at the signs that line the routes here, and at the teeth of scaffold and at the wires. It was all a blur. I made sense of nothing, but I was content I think. I have a smallish life. It doesn’t need much. There were seven different stories on the front page. Nothing specific seemed to be occurring anywhere.

The bus went quickly and I got off in the centre, a couple of stops early, thinking that it was nice, I could walk, I could get some fresh air and look in the windows and think about things. I wanted to draw a quick sketch. I rummaged in my bag and found my sketchbook and my pen, and standing where I was, on some street somewhere near the centre, about ten minutes’ walk from where I was going, I drew a rough cartoon of a daffodil running through a field of children, knocking off their heads. I frowned at it for a moment, wondering if maybe it wasn’t an idea at all, but a memory of something I’d seen before. Oh well. One thing follows another. It was when I put away the sketchbook and the pen, and turned to cross the road, my head down watching my hands fiddle with the bag, that I saw it.

I saw a dead mouse. Guttered, up dead against the kerb. A silky little thing, like a purse. Shut down, remarkably unruffled, thoroughly dead. There wasn’t even the slightest hesitation. I did not think, There is a mouse, oh, it’s dead. I thought, There is a dead mouse. He lay on his side, with his belly exposed towards me, and his limbs, with their little feet, stretched out from either end. He was a grey brown. With the underside lighter. You’d think, against the ground, the belly would be black with dirt. They are probably clean little things, in their world. Proud little cleansers. His eyes were closed. His mouth slightly open, with the smallest hint of a tooth. His claws at prayer, almost clasped together, above his head. The way he lay, I fancied he had fallen off the footpath. I could see no injury. I could see no blemish on his body at all. From what I know. I say he. I could see no genitalia. I was not aware of any genitalia in what I was seeing. But he was furry around the end regions. I found it hard to see, to tell. I peered at the thing. A stretched tiny creature, inexplicably ended, at the side of the road.

I thought of course, though not with any great focus, of the woman in Eric’s looking for a mousetrap. It was a minor little coincidence. I noted it and paid it the deference I thought it was due (not very much) and put it out of my head.

I wanted to prod it with my umbrella. An instinct in my arm, a twitch, so that I actually looked down at my side, as if for an umbrella, as if there was a chance that one of them, either K’s or mine, might have come with me, might have attached itself somehow, out of wisdom and the never-ending question. I had no umbrella. I had not brought one. I stood and stared down. I crouched a little. The thing was crying out to be prodded.

I rummaged in my bag for something to touch it with. This small thing. Small dead creature. Just a touch. A little poke. Just to see. Just to feel. But in my bag there was nothing of any use. A novel, an address book, a half-empty bottle of water, half an apple in a tissue, a hat against cold, a glasses case, with sunglasses inside, my telephone, my camera, my sketchbook, my pen. I could see immediately of course how I might proceed: the pen. But I had only the one pen with me – and using a pen is what I do, it’s my role, I’m an illustrator and cartoonist, it’s what I do for a living, and I like to be able to sketch at any time and in any place – and I wasn’t that keen on using my pen on the mouse. Not really. So. I sought other options. I could take out the sunglasses, extend an arm, touch it like that. But I was afraid, frankly. Afraid of spillage. Of guts and ooze. I was afraid of what the touch would leave me with. And even if there was no obvious detritus left clinging to my glasses, I was not sure that I would want to wrap that arm around my ear, once I knew that it had prodded a dead mouse. The water bottle then. I could throw it away. But it was one of those wide-mouthed things, built to latch on to our own mouths, and it was too wide and bulky and awkward. I was sure it wouldn’t communicate to me anything of what I was after. What I was after was the body sense, the heft of it. The weight and the resistance. Things, I think, like that. So I would use the pen. I mean, I could buy another, if I really, suddenly, desperately needed to sketch something. Take the pen and poke the mouse and throw the pen away. Simply leave it there on the ground – a bewilderment for whoever came after. It would look, what, like the mouse had been hit from above by a falling pen. Maybe. Or that it had carried its pen as far it could before its miniature heart gave out. That the writing had killed it in the end. Some such thoughts might go through some kind of mind when I was gone. That’s what I thought.

I could touch the mouse with the pen and then leave the pen by the mouse’s side. I put the pen in my hand. It was a nice pen, new or newish. It would be a shame. But I needed to know. I needed to touch the corpse. I needed to know the level of quiver and give, the degree of rigidity; the liquidity, possibly, of the innards. I took the pen in my hand. Which end? It was a rollerblade. No, excuse me, a rollerball. With a decent rubberised grip mid-shaft which would plainly be useless. I would be on one end of this pen, and the mouse on the distant other. One poke. One prod. That’s all. I decided on the butt end. I would hold to the rear. Clutch the base of it, the arse of it. Cap on or cap off? There was a danger I thought that if I used, as it were, the sharp end – the nib, or the ball in this case – that I would puncture something. That I would puncture the mouse. That there would be a barely discernible hiss of gaseous escape; an emission of mousey … life, followed in all likelihood by ooze – watery pink animal blood from grey string veins. About a mouthful in all, of bile and suppurations. I didn’t want that. And there was the remoter danger too (I looked around, the street was fairly quiet) of an explosion. Of a simple hideous pop. It didn’t look swollen, but how many dead mice have I seen? I would leave the cap on.

I gripped the pen with my thumb and first two fingers. Right hand. Was there enough sensation there? Should I use the left for the sake of novelty? For the superior sensation from the lesser used limb? No. There was risk that the inexperienced left hand would over-poke or over-prod, and a resultant increased possibility of puncture or pop. Oh, I was just being stupid now. I thought of calling K. I put it off.

I crouched, my coat skirting the ground, tenting my legs. My ribs rested on my thighs. My left hand held my bag beyond harm. My right hand went out. I was closer to it now, of course. Its claws were stretched up above its head. Yawning. Its forearms. Forelimbs. Why are we so unclear on the body parts of other creatures? Of how to name them. As if we’re a little embarrassed to let them have the same things we have. Arms. Hands. Feet. Belly. It looked like it … I can’t call him it. It’s him. I thought of him as a him, I still do. I could see nothing to confirm it, even this close, but I thought of him as him. I don’t know why. His arms stretched up over his head. His hands close to clasping. He looked like he’d surrendered, or been swimming. Perhaps he had been caught in a flood in the gutter. A sudden deluge, taking him and bringing him here, as helpless as a paper boat, choked in his little lungs and unable to hold. Or perhaps he had simply surrendered. Given up. Abandoned the fight. His belly was pathetic. It was open to anything. He lay there like a puppy waiting to be tickled, or a lamb waiting to be slaughtered, and either way he didn’t know and he didn’t care and he was better off in not knowing and not caring and in generally not being. Something stilled around me. I don’t know what I mean. I think I mean the city came to a halt. Which it didn’t. But I lost it for a moment. Lost the city and the city’s noise, and the world, and the world’s sorry items. Something got in the way. Just for a second. Something got in the way of my curiosity for details, facts, experiences. Something minutely sad. Something small and terribly strange. That pause in living. Sadness, I think it is. Sadness. All right.

I thought of calling K. I put it off.

I extended my pen. I sent it on its way, across that patch of air, that polluted patch. And all my sudden sadness went with it, expanded with it, pushed out from me like sound, and I wondered if I could carry on.

It did quiver to the touch. And seemed to shrink. Its small extended limbs seemed to come in, to try to close, to try to cover its vulnerable front. It was as if a shadow briefly crossed its dream. Its uncontaminated dream. A slight disturbance in its sleep. A breeze rippled something that was closed, and lifted, for a second, an opening of sorts. A memory of something. A dim recall in the dirty street. It was nothing, was it? I prodded a dead mouse with my pen. There in the street. I crouched and touched its corpse. I felt a small resistance. Give and no give and give – a weak bundle of death on the end of my pen. I could have flicked it in the air with barely an effort. It was nothing. Nothing. It should have been nothing. It should have been utterly nothing.

But since that, all of this.

I tried once more. What was I trying for? I poked it again. Perhaps a little harder. Or perhaps a little softer, overcompensating against the risks run by attempting to go a little harder. There was the same small contraction, protective-looking, awful really, and the return then, the relax, like a last breath breathed again. It looked like it had looked when I’d found it. Let it be. Leave it in peace. I imagined I saw a tiny indentation left in its belly by the tip of my capped pen. I paused again. The world paused again. I felt something shift inside me, a worrisome realignment.

I thought of calling K. I put it off.

There was certainly an indentation. There certainly was. A pockmark in the shape of a pen cap. It seemed to shimmer like a morning puddle on the pale flesh. It was a sort of greyish shadow. I looked at the pen, and saw, much to my weird guilt, that there had indeed been some kind of small secretion. A minutely cluttered sheen of moisture clung to the smoothness of the plastic like a grimy sweat. It caught the light, and I could even see a tiny bead of it roll around the shaft, in and out of the almost microscopic debris of what must have been the first symptoms of rot. And I thought I could detect a mild smell to go with it. A sort of warm sweet sickness, very light, but present, like a childish bad breath. I remembered measles and chicken-pox. My mouth dried.

I laid the pen on the ground.

There must have been more than that. That’s what I think now. I think that I don’t have enough detail, and the detail I have is the wrong kind of detail – that it misses the point. Because although there was seepage and although there was a smell, these things did not, at the time, get in the way of the feeling I had that this was a very interesting and, in some obscure way, meaningful encounter. So the corpse was a bit yucky. So what? It was a corpse after all. It was not nearly so repugnant as it was striking. But it’s difficult now, if I’m honest, to say whether I genuinely thought that it was striking, or whether I just wanted it to be striking. Perhaps the significance comes later. Perhaps it wasn’t there then. But I think it was. I really do think it was.

So I think about the face. The face of the mouse. Its eyes and nostril nose and its mouth and its teeth and its whiskers. What were all of them doing while I prodded its belly? I don’t know. I can’t remember. Did I even look? I mean, I only poked him twice, and my eyes have only so many things they can look at. But you’d imagine, would you not, that the face would be the obvious thing to monitor? We have that instinct. We look at faces. Do mice have faces? Something about that word ‘mice’ worries me. It is unlike what it describes. It has been corrupted and diminished by cartoons, and by its pronunciation as ‘meece’ in some of those cartoons. And the idea of mice faces, as well, is ruined somewhat by cartoons. Even now, trying to remember the face, I am interfered with by features entirely unmouselike but forever associated with mice because of the consistent use to which mice have been put in the last one hundred or so years. Mouse as Everyman. Cute resourceful little fellow with a twitchy whiskered nose and a spunky sense of humour. Why? I have never drawn mice. Never. They’re a devalued currency really, in terms of illustration. I draw all sorts of other creatures, but not mice. I’ve never liked them anyway. Crouching in the street poking this dead one was the closest I have ever willingly been to a mouse. That I know of. Something about their speed, their size, their ability to infiltrate, their capacity for turning up anywhere, at any time, has always half terrified me. I do mean half terrified. Because I feel the start of full terror but close it off quickly, with the thought that it’s only a mouse, it’s only a little mouse, mice are harmless, they’re not like rats. If rats did not exist would we feel the same about mice? I don’t think so. They are blurred things. Uneasy little shapes that flash by, on our periphery, on the sidelines, like a scratch on the surface of the eye, like fat black clouds across the grey sky. They cling to skirting boards and kerbs and edges. They come looking for the food we drop without noticing – the crumbs that fall from us daily, the rain of our chewing and our fumbling and our bad-mannered lives. They know something about us that we don’t fully comprehend. Mice is the wrong word for them.

When I try to remember his face now I get a composite of memory and Disney and fear, and the backwards assignation of things that hadn’t happened yet. There’s a childish scrunch to it, a sort of eek-a-mouse fright. I see the mouth, and a glint of inner whites and pinks, God, and the nose, which is really no more than two wet nostril holes in the grey fur, at the point of the whiskered snout. The eyes must have been closed. Either that or I have blanked them out. Either that or something else. It all goes forward, leans out, presses out ahead of the body. They are pointed little creatures – missiles, arrowheads. No wonder they move at such speed. He looked like a child that had bitten something bitter. Something horrid and yuck. Perhaps he was poisoned? Perhaps they lay some toxin down here on the streets. Or perhaps just one of our idle by-products did for it. Some accidental spillage or fume.

—It’s me.

—Yes.

—I saw a dead mouse.

—Did you eat the apple?

—I ate half of it.

—All right. That’s a start. I suppose.

—I saw, I see, I’m looking at a dead mouse.

—Oh shit.

—No, no, I’m not at home. I’m out on the street. In town I mean.

—Oh, OK.

—It’s just lying here, in the gutter.

—Right. Are you sure it’s dead?

—Yes.

—You don’t want to attempt some CPR? Call an ambulance?

—I can’t figure out how it died.

—Old age maybe.

—Do mice die of old age?