Wildlife (10 page)

Roger watches as the comments gather at the foot of his blog, like the small shallow breaths that precede death. Someone simply writes ‘Genius!' Someone else asks, ‘What's with the gay poetry?' Others ask what the truth is. Others enquire as to whether El Rogerio is planning to describe his suicide over the web. If he is, then could he be clearer? Internet suicides work really well, the teenagers say, but only when the process is documented simply, not poetically. Yeah?

(Fuck off.)

Roger leaves his computer. He takes the anal cream from his bed and applies it in the bathroom. When he'd ordered it, he thought he might have piles. Because of all the time he spends sitting down and typing. But no, his bottom hurts because it was preparing to crap a motherboard.

The cream helps a bit. Though his fingertips are black when they come back from applying it. Roger returns to the main room and is surprised to find that he's reluctant to blog. Normally he does so without thinking. But he doesn't have the will at this moment. He can't summon words from where words get summoned from. He considers watching his DVD of
South Pacific
. A guilty pleasure but a great musical. The pain is too great. His feelings too bad.

Eventually he forces three sleeping pills down his dry throat and takes a seat on the blue sofa in front of the television. He watches a celebrity singing contest on BBC1. One by one the unheard-ofs come out to sing. They try to entertain with funny faces and unserious dance moves. They sing songs from the past six decades. Roger watches each performance carefully. People love people. In a way. Roger sighs. Towards the end of the
programme, he picks up his telephone and registers a vote for a former football player. A black centre forward from the 1990s who'd made a decent fist of ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?'. When a recorded voice tells him that his vote has been counted Roger hangs up and begins to wait patiently for the results.

JOE ASPEN WAKES
to the sound of screaming. His duvet is pulled over his head. He moves it down a little and stares across the bedroom. The turquoise curtain is shaking frantically, causing the hoops that connect it to the curtain rail to rattle. He tries to go back to sleep. Joe always tries to go back to sleep. But before he can succeed, baby Sally has pulled the curtain clean off the wall and her screams have become muffled.

Joe gets up. He always gets up. He pulls the thick curtain from off Sally's thrashing little body and takes the child in his arms. She stops crying the moment he points her head over his right shoulder and, with his forearm under her warm bottom, begins to rock her gently.

‘There there,' says Joe, staring from the window down onto a dusky Wilmslow Road. Five men in brown boots and luminous jackets walk south to Fallowfield. They're pursued by long, tilting shadows. ‘There there.'

The digital clock tells 16:45 in lines of red light.

Joe walks across the room. He stands with his back to
the full-length mirror so that Sally can stare at her reflection over his shoulder. He's been doing this since the day Sally was given to him. He figured that as a human, or as a would-be human, Sally should get to know herself.

Joe waits while the baby stares at itself. He stares at his bedroom, marvelling at the dismal stillness. We pretend time passes, thinks Joe. We meet up with people and stir time into life, like milk into coffee. Really, let's be honest, nothing is happening here.

The incident with the bold Wild World guy in the Rolling Stones T-shirt seems like a dream to Joe. But he's rationalised it: I need love. I loved Life Moberg but she left me. I loved her shit till it was pissed from the porcelain. Nowadays I love Sally. One day I'll drop dead. Loveless.

In a twist of something, maybe fate or irony, Sally never shits. Joe changes her nappy each morning like adults change their underwear – for the sheer humane hell of it. Sally never pisses either. Joe's been filling her with black milk for a few days and has witnessed no evidence of waste disposal. In a twist of something else, probably normality, he has now stopped pissing in the sink and begun using his toilet as before. He pees and poos in it then gives it a flush, like he did before Life abandoned him.

Since Sally was given to him, Joe's been trying Life on her mobile every day. He figures an event like being entrusted with a baby warrants a phone call. She never answers but yesterday the answering machine message changed to,
Hey, this is Life's phone. You can find me in Wow-Bang. Weekdays. 10pm. The Real Arms. Ciao.

Most non-Italians shouldn't say ‘Ciao'. But Life gets away with it because she's perfect. Every word is hers.

Joe returns to the bed and puts Sally into her feeding
position, cradled horizontally on his lap. He takes a bottle from his bedside table and presses the teat into Sally's little mouth. There is still no colour in her eyes. She glugs the black milk. Black eyes wide and fixed on Joe.

‘There you go,' says Joe. ‘My little puffin.'

This week Joe has eaten nothing but rainbow trout. He buys them whole and fresh from Rusholme Fish Market and eats them off the floor with his fingers till just the face and the skeleton remain. He has not been needed at work since Asa Gunn retired. He spends his days crawling around the flat with Sally, hunting spiders and hiding in small places.

When Sally's drunk enough she begins to overflow. Black milk begins to stream down her cute little chin and onto her podgy body. Joe removes the bottle's teat from her mouth and raises his arms, allowing Sally to scurry from his lap, leap off the bed and begin crawling in fast circles around the bedroom floor.

Earlier today, Joe made the decision to track Life down. He and Sally had found a pair of her knickers while they were busy building a nest inside the airing cupboard. They were bright blue, the knickers. Sally tried to incorporate them into the nest but Joe snatched them back, barking, turning from Sally and entwining the blue silk around his fingers with his shoulders hunched. He sniffed the knickers, sobbing a little. We're really alive, he thought. I want to plant these knickers at the back of my throat. I want to grip my heart with them. Push them inside my body as far as they will go. But he didn't. He put them into his pocket and curled up beside Sally in their nest of yellow, insulating foam.

‘We'll find her, eh, Sally?' he whispered. ‘You don't really mind travelling south, do you?'

Sally didn't seem to. She followed Joe out of the airing cupboard and watched him eat uncooked rainbow trout from off the kitchen floor. It tasted salty. He bent down at it and pulled at the oily flesh with his teeth. When he'd finished he cleaned his mouth with the knickers and said to Sally, ‘I'm in love, Sally. Do you know? I'm madly in love.'

The two of them leave for London after Sally's feed. Around six. Outside the night has crushed the day to nothing but quarter-light and cold wind. With his rucksack on his back, Joe walks through the neon of Rusholme, Sally's travel seat hanging from his right arm. The air smells of Indian food and exhaust fumes.

At the bus stop a fat, drunk, white woman bends over Sally with buckets of enthusiasm tipping and emptying from her eyes. Joe watches as her face drains quickly of colour like strawberry milkshake up a straw. The woman turns to him. Transparent.

‘My child has an illness,' Joe says, looking over the woman's shoulder at the flashing orange indicator of the bus. ‘It's nothing for you to worry about.'

Joe entertains Sally on the journey into town. He plays peekaboo. He pretends to nibble at her chubby arms and presses her pretty nose like it's a button. ‘Bleep,' he says.

As they walk from Piccadilly Gardens to Chorlton Street bus station, Joe's attention is drawn by a miaowing coming from a dustbin. Placing Sally down on the pavement, he reaches inside the bin and grips a delicate ribcage covered in soft fur.

‘We'll call him Beak,' Joe says to Sally, removing a kitten from the dustbin, taking a small crown of chewing gum from its head and then stroking it under its chin with one
finger. Joe brings the kitten's small grey face near to Sally's. Sally looks at it with those totally black eyes of hers, eventually giggling when Beak performs a cute miaow.

‘The three of us,' says Joe. ‘No more pretending. Let's get Life back.'

The Megabus heaves itself round the bends of central Manchester. Posters glimmer in the dark tunnels like ghosts pleading for DJs and fun. Joe, Sally and Beak share the back seat of the upper deck. By the time the bus joins the M6 just south of Tatton Park, they have the upper deck to themselves. A black couple, the woman pregnant, have retreated downstairs, frowning towards the back seat as they descended the steps. Three veiled Muslim girls followed soon after, lips muttering complaints behind their black face cloths. Through the windows, the orange lights scroll like brushstrokes of fire. And beyond the light, northern England, moonlight and moon shadow.

None of our three notice the brightly lit blue sign. ‘Birmingham, 59 miles. The South.' No. None of our three notice because of the fun. The thrill of the quest. Sally shrieks and crawls under seats. Beak scratches at the dusty upholstery, sharpening his young claws. Joe is crouched at the very back of the bus, staring down the filthy aisle. He pictures Life. Such fun to imagine happiness.

‘We're coming,' he whispers, beating his arms a little, then smiling and tweeting for joy.

IN A TERRIBLE
bar with Anka Kudolski, people are speaking, loudly.

‘People will still sing, I just know they will,' says a cameraman with pinhole eyes. ‘
Get your tits out,
' he sings. ‘
Get your tits out, get your tits out for the lads!
People will still sing that,' the cameraman confirms, suddenly talking quite seriously. ‘Even in the Wild World. Don't look so gloomy.'

When Anka had asked to be taken out to lunch she had hoped for somewhere nicer than this. Wetherspoons. An enormous Wetherspoons on Deansgate. A dump. A crap dump. A quite crap life.

Anka stares at the vegetarian lasagne that has fallen asleep on her plate. It hasn't been cooked so much as stared at moodily by a thin yellow chef with warm cheese eyes. I wouldn't eat it if I were dying, she decides, throwing her cutlery onto the table as the director, a forty-something with an aimless nose and white skin like the inside of an orange peel, begins to sing.

‘
Oh Manchester is wonderful
.' The cameraman joins in, putting an arm round the director, his smelly mouth surrounded by rusted lips. ‘
Oh Manchester is wonderful. It's full of tits, fanny and United. Oh Manchester is wonderful
.'

Earlier on, the shoot had begun with Anka stripping to her underwear in a cramped room above a vegetarian cafe on Thomas Street. ‘Cracking bones,' said the director, before he pressed Play on a CD player, crossed his arms and said, ‘I fucking love Kylie. Now let's see some dancing.'

Anka did her best to sway and look sexy. She licked her finger and gyrated a little. But, in truth, she felt like shit. She had hoped that stripping like this might feel a little like performance art, and initially, as she removed her bra in four sexy stages, she had told herself that this was so: I'm an artist. This is arty. I'm Warhol, Kruger, Manet, Magritte. When did I last see myself eat? Anka started to panic. She grew frantic and started dancing wildly and at a faster tempo than the music. I'm Warhol, Kruger, Manet, Magritte. When did I last see myself eat? In the end she must have fainted.

She must have fainted because she remembers opening her eyes and seeing the cameraman and the director peering down at her as she lay on the floor. ‘Don't worry,' the director was saying. ‘Don't worry, we got what we needed, don't worry, they'll spunk early because it was very sexy. Up you get now. Let's go get that pub lunch, shall we?'

Anka leaves the cameraman, the director and the lasagne in Wetherspoons. She walks across Exchange Square, near to Selfridges.

Where is it that we go to think? In this wide and meticulously gardened roundabout of history, I mean, which turn-off leads to the quiet wasteland? Where is thought possible? The coffee shop? Too much choosy bollocks and rules. The urban parks? Too much posing and sandwich sex. The library? Too tense. Home? Too depressing. Cinema? Shite. Pub? Distracting. Anywhere else? Too much one-on-one, chill-out, kick-back and kill-yourself conversations, confessions of a constructed mind; talk so dull it could bore the tits off womankind, leaving bras empty and leaving future-man groping and sucking at boobless air. I can't think, thinks Anka. Was I really just filmed in the nude? Yes. In which case I'm in trouble. The facts of life are aliens but cannot be ignored. I touched my tits with a licked finger. A camera captured my nipples. I fainted.

Anka walks past Sinclair's Oyster Bar with its brown sea of outside seating. Men and women grip beers in plastic glasses, grip too hard causing the foam head to spill onto their wrists. Anka passes a line of voguishly lonely designer boutiques, pressed like shiny self-help manuals into what was once the world's Corn Exchange. The sky is blue. She arrives at Manchester Cathedral, which winces when Americans compare it to Canterbury.

In the cathedral porch a man holds a trowel and talks to himself. He says, ‘So anyway,' then lifts his trowel in a sort of benevolent threat as Anka pulls on the door handle.

During the Blitz the cathedral's north end was bombed. Every pane of glass got shattered. Trust the Germans. The south end of the cathedral is authentic.
Ancient. Anka enters and stares at the blackened columns, stretched like dead tendons from the stone floor to the stone ceiling. The cathedral is full of people, bent down, faces closed in prayer.

‘And, at this time, we ask Our Lord for support,' says the reverend, in his pulpit. ‘We ask him to protect the armed forces in Basra and in Afghanistan. Above all, we reject false prophets, we reject the idle tongues that talk of the coming of . . . sexual freaks or dickheads, and yet we ask Our Lord solemnly and openly for His love and His compassion, and for His fashion wisdom when the Wild World comes.'