Bête (29 page)

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I feel weird asking. Man, I feel weird just being here. I think they chose me because they know I hate bêtes. I guess they reckon I’d be more listened to than some tree hugger.’

Jazon brought out his cell phone.

‘Those still work?’
I said. ‘I thought they turned off the wifi, to stop the bêtes from linking to one another.’

‘There’s a firewalled and protected in-system, here, obviously,’ Jazon replied, his pomposity returning to him. ‘Obviously I’m in on
that
. I’m a very important townsman. Your regular phone wouldn’t work, no. Unless it’s got a wire.’ He tapped the screen and waited. ‘Hello? Yes, yes, me, yes. Look,
I’m having a chat with an old pal of mine, and
he
says he has a message from our hairy friends.’ A long pause. ‘I think so. It’s real. It’s a real overture.’ He looked at me. ‘I think so.’ The phone went back in his pocket. ‘They’re sending a car.’

‘A car, eh? How exciting.’

We sat for a while, in silence. ‘I’d like another beer,’ Jazon said. ‘But I’d better not. Don’t want to breathe
beery breath all over the bigwigs. Graham?’

I felt a strange elation within me. It occurred to me that I’d got past the tricky bit. ‘Yeah?’

‘Why, though?’

‘What?’

‘Why are you doing it, though? I can see the bêtes think you’re a good choice. Only Nixon can go to China, after all.’

‘That’s weird,’ I said. ‘That’s exactly the phrase they used.’

‘No, I mean – what’s
in it for you?’

‘The greater good and a peaceful countryside not reasons enough?’

‘C’mon.’

It was the elation, I think, that encouraged me to tell him. ‘All right: I’ll tell you. The cat is called Cincinnatus. So, the cat is a fucking cat, but the chip in its head is called Cincinnatus. And it lived with Anne for many years. It has precise, digitally crisp memories of Anne. It
has years’ worth of those memories. If I broker peace talks between us and then, Cincinnatus will give me its memories of Anne.’

‘I see,’ said Preacherman, nodding slowly. ‘And which one is Anne, again?’

‘Fuck, Jazon. Who
died
. All right? The one I fell in love with. All right?’

After a while, Preacherman said. ‘How?’

I knew he meant:
How will the cat give you its memories
of this woman
? So I said: ‘I eat it. It gives itself up to me, and I eat it. That’s “how”.’

It was hard to see whether he was pondering deeply the enormity of what I had told him, or whether he was staring at the tabletop with powerful intensity only on account of being drunk as a skunk.

Eventually, though, he spoke. ‘Bad idea, my friend,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘Bad idea. There
are—’ And he caught my eye. ‘Mental health implications, you know.’

‘Of course I know.’

‘But more than that – it’s blasphemy. It’s blasphemous, Gray. You’re deliberately
infecting
yourself with demons.’

‘Not everybody has the same religious views that you do.’

‘You may not believe in God, Graham,’ he said, sitting up straighter. ‘But he believes in you! You may not believe
in devils, but they definitely believe in you. You don’t want them in your head, whether you believe or not.’

I couldn’t think of anything to say to this that would connect with Jazon on this level, so I let it go. In a little while his phone buzzed in his pocket. ‘They’re here,’ he said.

We went outside, and I was surprised to find that it was dusk. More time had passed than
I had thought.

The sky overhead was sealed with walnut-coloured clouds, and the horizon glowed tomato-orange and gleaming in the west. The crowds milling through the centre of town showed no signs of diminishing. I followed Preacherman a little way, through the milling crowds, under the concrete railway bridge and along a lay-by to where a blocky, six-wheeled vehicle was waiting. One of
the rear doors opened, and I stepped inside. ‘Please be sure to fasten your seatbelt,’ said the door. ‘Even when a passenger is seated in the rear of a car, collisions can have serious consequences!’

‘The day I take advice from a fucking door,’ I said. But there was a uniformed soldier sitting in the back – a woman – and I aborted the rest of my sentiment. The door didn’t care one way or
the other, of course. I stowed my stick on the floor, and fastened the belt. Preacherman climbed in beside me.

‘I’m Graham Penhaligon,’ I said. ‘How do you do?’

‘We’ll be at HQ in a few minutes, Mr Penhaligon,’ she replied.

And the car whoomphed into motion, and I was pressed into the upholstery. We moved along as smoothly as a hovercraft.

‘Been a long time since I was
in a car,’ I said, to nobody in particular. ‘In fact, it’s been so long since I had ridden in anything other than a tractor, I feel like a millionaire.’

The indicators clacked like death-watch beetles. We pulled out onto the main road. It was a smooth ride. Somebody (it may have been Albie) once showed me a graph of automobile usage plotted across last century and this. It’s a perfect inverted
U. It used to be a common complaint about the government that it should have put in place a nationwide disposal programme for all the obsolete petrol cars when their fuel became first more expensive than whisky, and then more expensive, weight for weight, than silver. But there only so many crushers in the country, and only eccentrics went to the bother of ripping out the engine and replacing
it with a leccy – as expensive as buying a new one, and you end up driving a rust cage. And then the culture shifted away from cars as forcefully as it had originally shifted towards them. Rich people bought them; some companies supplied them to their staff; a family might take out a second mortgage to run one. But most people found they could do without them. Freight suffered, but the economy
was contracting savagely before the lack of transport fluidity kicked in anyway. And there were the zeppelins.

We drove along a dual carriageway. The windows were tinted, but I could see the shadowy intimation of the world outside through them: the occasional bus; a few trucks; one or two cars. But people were everywhere, alongside the road, camped in tents on the central reservation. Then
the deathwatch ticking began again, and the car swerved to the left and climbed an exit ramp. A sharp left, and suddenly we were advancing at less than walking pace down a road crowded with folk. Then we stopped, our way blocked by the crowd. For such a colossus of a car, its horn sounded ridiculously weak: tinny and far off. I would have expected something carried by Joshua’s army at Jericho.
Instead it peeped and parped. We sat for a long time.

The soldier sighed, unholstered her sidearm and climbed out of the car. The hefty door opened, swung back, but did not shut completely. Through the gap I saw people coming and going.

‘It would have been quicker just to walk,’ I said to Preacherman.

He nodded slowly. Then he said: ‘I’m sorry to hear about your woman, Gray.
That’s sad.’

I wasn’t expecting that. ‘Thanks,’ I said, awkwardly.

‘Eating the brain of her pet cat is not going to bring her back, though,’ he said. I glanced at him. He looked very grave. ‘It’s necromancy, Gray, pure and simple. Don’t do it. I beg you. I urge you.’

‘I’ll take your urge,’ I replied, looking away, ‘under advisement.’

‘Seriously, Gray. You don’t want to
taunt God. God is not taunted. Tauntees never prosper. Blasphemy.’

‘Blasphemy,’ I said absently. ‘Blasphe-you.’

The soldier climbed back inside again. ‘Not long now,’ she said, belting up. We sat there for another five or more minutes – a very long subjective stretch of time. Finally the car shuddered and started forward; stopped, waited, moved a little further forward.

My heel
was hurting.

Eventually we pulled into a courtyard, and got out again. More guards; with rifles this time. The sky overhead was the colour of red brick. Two spotlights fitted to the wall of the blocky building ahead drew a Venn diagram in light on the courtyard ground. I plocked over concrete with my walking stick and followed the soldier and Preacherman inside. A draughty entrance hall,
marble floor, beige walls. I was invited to take a chair, and was glad to take a load off. We were offered coffee, an offer I enthusiastically accepted. We sat and waited.

Preacherman did not seem to be in a talkative mood, and I was content to let him stew. He may not have been pondering my prospective blasphemy; he may only have been digesting his beer.

The casing of the overhead
light was spotty, inside the plastic, with the carcasses of old flies. All four corners of the high ceiling were curtained with the fine-weave gauze of ancient spiderwebs.

Eventually a junior officer came to fetch us. ‘You all right going upstairs with that stick?’ he asked me, in a voice plumped with the peculiar smugness of the very posh. ‘It’s just that the elevator is on the fritz.’

‘I can walk,’ I replied. ‘Unless you fancy giving me a fucking piggy back, lard-face.’

He handled this question after the effortless manner of his class, by simply pretending I hadn’t spoken. ‘Splendid!’ We went up three double flights of stairs and along another corridor before we were ushered into the presence of Major General Hetheridge.

He was standing, not sitting, behind
a desk; and the room was large and busy. A dozen people were occupied at computer terminals. ‘So, you’re the diplomat!’ Hetheridge boomed, striding over to me. He offered me his hand, and I shook it.

‘I’m Graham Penhaligon,’ I said.

‘I know who you are,’ the Major General replied. ‘I
googled
you.’

‘I thought the authorities had turned off the internet,’ I said.

‘I
am
the
authorities!’ he said, and showed me his thirty-two white teeth. ‘Actually, we have our own internet, in here.’

‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ I said ‘I’ve been a little out of things.’

‘Living like a wild animal in the woods!’ Hetheridge boomed. ‘I’ve heard. What
we
did was download the internet, prior to the outage. Who knew you could do such a thing? But there you have it. Our own private double-you, double-you, double-you. We couldn’t run things without it. Harrison? A chair, for Mr Penhaligon!’

A subaltern brought me a chair, and I sat down. Major General Hetheridge
did not sit. ‘So shall we crack on, Graham? Or do you want to expend further time and energy on chit and chat?’

I took a breath and plunged in. ‘The bêtes south of Reading – over, um, I don’t know how large a geographical area. They constitute one loosely affiliated tribe. Not all of them, I think. But most of them.’

‘We know all about the bêtes south of Reading, my man,’ said Hetheridge.
‘Go on.’

‘Well, I spoke to their leader. Which is to say, he spoke to me. He sought me out.’

‘The Lamb, you mean?’

I glanced over at Preacherman, and saw that he was looking very intently at me. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s the fucker.’

‘Why would he seek out
you
, of all human beings, Graham?’ asked Hetheridge. ‘You don’t mind me calling you Graham, do you, Graham?’

I met
the feller’s gaze. His eyes were small and – if you’ll excuse the cliché – twinkly. I can’t think of a better word. But his face was large and red and the texture of his skin was coarse. The hair on his uncovered head was close-cropped, black, bristly. The longer I stared at him, in all his human status and authority, the more I was struck by his resemblance to an animal. Except for his eyes. His
eyes had a positively chip-like liveliness to them.

‘Mind?’ I said. ‘I’m
perfectly
mindful.’

Hetheridge didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he smiled at me. ‘You’re a canny one,’ he said. ‘A touch slippery. A tad angry, I think. I
like
that in a man, though. Fighting spirit. All right: so –
Mr
Penhaligon? And what: the bêtes came to you because they know there are eight hundred
thousand human-quisling bête-lovers and environmentalists and third-agers who wouldn’t get past my front door, even if they stood at the threshold and screamed they had personal authority to negotiate on behalf of the Pope of All Bêtes himself. But you – I watched your film. You shot that cow in the head. It begged most piteously for its life, and you lifted your pistol in cold blood. Shot it dead.
I’ve a whole army under my authority currently engaged in doing that. You’re one of my kind.’

‘A sadly neglected military strategist,’ I said. ‘That Michael Hutchence.’

‘You’ve got past my door. And that’s – a thing! That truly is. But you’ll have to
spell
it out for me, Penhaligon, in words of one syllable, because I’m a gruff military man and don’t understand such nuances.’

‘Fuck off,’ I said mildly.

He smiled broadly. ‘In
dulge
me, Penny. Explain to me the leverage.’

I wouldn’t have thought that anybody could have found a way of addressing me more capable of annoying me than calling me ‘Graham’; but by abbreviating my surname in this fashion, the Major General had chanced upon one. I swallowed my anger.

‘No peace talks without leverage, eh?’

‘Real world, Penny,
real
world. Or would you prefer a discussion about the ontology of consciousness?’

‘I’m the messenger, nothing more than that,’ I said. ‘My guess is: the leverage is the sclery. My
guess
is the Lamb wants to trade that against securities for his people. But I don’t know, I’ve been out of the loop. You tell me. Has it been a problem, down here?’

‘Oh we’ve certainly
had deaths from sclerotic charagmitis. Quite a few, actually.’

‘But I’m assuming not an epidemic, right? I’m guessing the Lamb is holding back whatever he has by way of minions, whichever vector he has decided will best deliver the germ – insects, maybe. Rats, cats, fucking wombats, I don’t know. But I’d guess he
has
them, and I’d guess he’s holding them in reserve until he’s had a chance
to chat with you.’

‘Leverage,’ said Hetheridge, nodding.

‘The sclery would go through a town this crowded in a week. You’d be piling the corpses in pyramids high as Egypt, and burning them with white phosphor to get rid of them.’