Wildlife (22 page)

‘Seriously?' says Roger.

‘Yeah, so when we were in the bogs I knocked the other me out. I told her she was a skinny bitch and then I smashed her head against the tiled walls and locked her in a cubicle.'

‘Is she dead?'

‘I'm not sure, but she'll definitely miss the train.'

Anka and Roger laugh. Once they've finished laughing they find themselves knee-deep in the second silence of their relationship. The second silence is the most exciting of every relationship. It's during the second silence that both parties can really begin to imagine the happy things they're going to do together in the future. The second silence normally ends when both participants become tacitly aware that they are both thinking about the same thing. Normally, it's sex, but it could be something like having a kid, meeting
each other's parents or dancing together in a place not intended for dancing. On this occasion though, it's sex. Anka and Roger are both thinking deeply about the practicalities of lovemaking.

‘So,' says Roger softly, ‘I suppose this means we're not having a threesome.'

‘I'm afraid not.'

‘Don't kiss me, Anka. You'll be electrocuted.'

‘Shh. I won't.'

She isn't. Their lips are wet with rain. Their cheeks are cold and rough. The tips of their tongues touch and both realise they have forgotten so much about being alive. Neither has touched the tip of tongue in far too long.

IF THEY'RE GOING
to get to the party, then Joe, Sally and Beak must find a way into central London by this afternoon. But they've been stuck here for days, in the Travelodge. Joe and Beak eating trout from the bathroom floor while Sally constructs a nest from the bedlinen in the corner of the bedroom.

Meeting Life in Wow-Bang has only strengthened Joe's desire to win her back. He noticed a weariness in her graphic eyes. A weariness towards Janek Freeman and, also, a general weariness towards a world where people put dicks on their heads and talk loudly about how the future's coming and how, when it does, they're gonna have it wrapped around their fucking finger. He thinks he can win her back.

I'm hopeful, thinks Joe. My heart's wrapped in tinfoil, skewered on a spike with a beef tomato and a yellow pepper, but I still have hope for Life.

Joe can hear a whimpering coming from inside the nest of bed sheets. It is unlike Sally to whimper because Sally
is not a whimperer. She's a screamer or a laugher. Joe crawls slowly over to the nest, concerned, every finger bent double against the carpet like paws.

‘Sally?'

More whimpering. Joe is pulling bed sheets out of the pile with increasing speed, trying to spot Sally, one of her limbs or her little black eyes. Beak is peeking out from under the bed, miaowing in response to the deep and long burp that's suddenly coming from somewhere inside the nest.

‘There you are,' says Joe, pulling away one final sheet to reveal little Sally curled up tight with her hands round her throat. You wouldn't have thought it was possible for a baby to make such a deep sound.

‘What is it?' says Joe.

Sally is looking up at him with wide, black eyes. For the first time since he became her guardian, Joe notices fear in her strange gaze. This is serious. I've fucked up. I should have kept her in the north of England. Sally's little hands are trying to grip her neck but they are too inflexible, her fingers are too minute and weak. Her burp is getting worse. ‘Show me where it hurts,' Joe is saying, trying to unfold her tensed and curled-up limbs. There's a smell coming from Sally's mouth. It smells like dead animal. An abattoir at night. It stinks. Joe holds her in the Heimlich grip. Every time he heaves her little body the burp accelerates louder than ever from her mouth.

‘Come on, Sally!' shouts Joe. ‘Come on!'

The burp ends. Sally has stopped breathing. Joe lays her out on the tangled mess of white sheets. He places a hand on her tummy and feels that there is air trapped inside his child. She is inflating. Getting bigger and bigger because
her mouth is blocked by something. Joe pulls apart her baby lips and peers into the darkness of her throat. The smell is almost unbearable. A family cat dead in a summer dustbin. Joe holds his breath. He can just make out the object that is blocking Sally's windpipe, but he can't quite reach it with his fingers. ‘Breathe, Sally,' he pleads. ‘Please. Breathe.' But Sally is only silently expanding, getting ready to burst, her black eyes motionless with fright. ‘For Christ's sake, Sally, breathe!' She can't. The skin of her stomach is being stretched. There is too much air inside her. A yellow balloon blown up too much. Joe thrusts his fingers inside Sally's mouth and grabs hold of the object lodged deep in her throat.

He yanks it out, releasing a jet of dead air and a significant amount of black vomit. But at least Sally is breathing. She's still alive, gasping slightly, even smiling. Joe is staring down at the object in his fist, his own breathing refusing to steady.

Because it has hair, the object. Long hair sprouts from one end of it. It's heavy, too, perhaps three times as heavy as Beak. It's about six inches long and not very wide. It lies comfortably and unidentified across Joe's two palms. Lowering it onto the floor and, taking one of the bed sheets, he begins to wipe away the black residue that hides the area near to where the hair is sprouting. The object has eyes. Dead, misted-up eyes that, at some point, were surely made to stare at something too terrible for words. The eyes are surrounded by thin, wrinkled and perfectly yellow skin. It's a face. A head no bigger than a bread bun with a crooked nose, no bigger than a walnut, lips, cracked and light purple, ears, twisted shut. Joe rubs away more of the black residue. He finds a neck, the width of a pencil. He finds a torso;
a miniature ribcage wrapped in the same delicate yellow skin as the skull. He finds that the creature has empty breasts; that they fall like the folds that fasten envelopes. He finds a stomach that is empty. Completely barren. He discovers the bones of a miniature pelvis protruding, as snappable as matchsticks, from the object's groin. Finally, the legs of the creature fall, feetless, from its body like yellow stalactites of hardened wax. Joe places a thumb gently on the area of crumpled skin that surely shelters the creature's heart. He feels nothing. The tiny creature is dead. Maybe she was never alive. Just an old and haunted human doll.

‘So who is this, Sally?' asks Joe, holding the little creature upright so Sally can see. But Sally is still catching her breath among the stained bed sheets, sometimes crying, sometimes looking around the room with wide, curious eyes like babies often do. Joe strokes the small corpse lovingly with the palm of his hand. I'll call her Dolores. Dolly, for short. She can come with us to London.

Half an hour spent standing on the service-station slip road holding a sign saying ‘Central London' results in Joe Aspen sitting nervously on the back seat of a Mitsubishi people carrier. Apart from Joe, the people carrier is carrying people from the south of England, from Wokingham, to be precise, which is somewhere to the west of London. Joe settles nervously into his seat as the car pulls onto the motorway.

The travel seat is right beside him and luckily its occupants, all three of them, are behaving well; they are asleep or they are dead under the seat's canvas roof. Beyond the travel seat, a boy is sleeping. He's wearing a blue vest, despite the fact he's got very scrawny white arms. He's got
a fancy blond haircut, shaved on one side, longish on the other and spiked up Mohawk-style on top. The sleeping boy looks about twelve, Joe thinks.

In the driver's seat, in front of the sleeping boy, is the man responsible for picking Joe up, the boy's dad, Alan. Alan looks old enough to be the boy's grandfather. He has a lined brown face, muddy owl eyes and an incongruous red baseball cap on his head. Beside him, in the passenger seat, Alan has shovelled his wife Ann into place. Her body is smothered in multicoloured floral fabric and she does not speak. It might be that she can't speak.

‘How old is she?' barks Alan. In the rearview mirror, his eyes blink due to the force of his voice.

‘Nearly one year old,' guesses Joe.

‘Where's the mother?'

‘London,' Joe lies. ‘In fact, we're on our way to see her.'

The Mitsubishi speeds along the M1.

‘Is the cat sterilised? You shouldn't keep cats near babies, you know?'

‘She's fine,' Joe says, calmly.

‘What's that other thing?

‘This,' says Joe, taking Dolly from the travel seat. ‘This belonged to my mother, to Sally's grandma. It was her favourite doll. It's pretty gruesome, I know, but Sally, like my mother, has such affection for it.' Joe can feel the brittle bones and defunct organs underneath Dolly's skin. It's confusing. This whole period of life is confusing.

‘It's disgusting,' says Alan, bluntly. ‘What do you do for a living?'

‘I don't do anything,' says Joe. ‘I really don't.'

The ensuing silence wakes up the boy beside Joe. His eyes open and his hand reaches instinctively to his hair
which he flattens and spikes where it is appropriate to flatten and spike.

‘All right?' says the boy, his voice even more bendy, high-pitched and Southern than his dad's. His muscleless chest grows firm and twists inside his blue vest. ‘Has my dad been picking up strangers again?' says the boy, mid-yawn.

‘That's right,' says Joe, noticing that the boy looks older with his eyes open, maybe fourteen.

‘How old are you?' says the boy.

‘Twenty-four,' Joe replies.

‘If you're twenty-four,' says the boy, turning his body round so he can address Joe over the travel seat, ‘then why is your hair so white? And what's this?' The boy is shaking the travel seat. ‘You've already got a kid?'

‘When I was twenty-four,' say the eyes in the rear-view mirror, ‘I had two kids and I'd bought my first house.'

The boy groans at his dad's remark. ‘Whatever,' he says, offering Joe his hand. ‘My name's Sean. I was a mistake. Dad thought Mum was infertile.'

‘Sean,' say the eyes in the mirror, their voice full of warning.

‘I'm seventeen next month,' says Sean, changing the subject. ‘What sort of car do you drive?'

‘I don't drive,' says Joe. He can't believe that this shiny thing before him is nearly seventeen. He examines Sean. His trendy ‘OSAKA' vest. The cheap crucifix round his neck, the twenty-pound haircut that's not quite stylish, the three-quarter-length jeans and the Diesel sandals. This is what people are like, thinks Joe. At the end of the day, at the end of our days, when we die en masse, many of the corpses will resemble Sean.

‘So yeah, I'm getting a TT,' says Sean, ‘but I won't drive
it fast. If I had a shit car, I'd drive that fast, course I would, but driving a TT fast? No way, blood. I'll drive it like as slow as possible, past my mates, past the birds, you know?'

Joe realises that, in fact, he does not know. He realises that the life that he has led since he was sixteen has been a bizarre one. He has never once cruised past birds in a TT, whatever a TT is. He has been lost in thought. He fell in love with Life. He worked in the theatre a little, visited the Faroe Islands and currently wants to be a puffin nesting in a cliff. He stopped dyeing his hair. It turned white. No worries. Worries.

‘I'm also getting like a new stereo because the one the TT comes with is pretty whack. And like, probably gonna buy like drinks holders so, you know? And then going to college'll be cool cos I'll just like go in when I have to, in the TT, right?'

‘Sure.'

‘And this summer twenty of us are going to Spain so, like, you know. Feel like it's finally happening. Where you from?'

‘Manchester.'

‘No way. The North? You a United fan? You like fucking Oasis? Cos I don't see what all the fuss is about. I think I like Grime, you know? In the North, do you like get bored? I get so bored in Wokingham. There's nothing to do until like I can get the TT or like the Wild World starts. But then I also heard that Wokingham isn't gonna get the Wild World cos it's not big enough, like, not enough people.'

‘Right,' says Joe.

‘But the TT'll get me into London, which is cool for the Wild World. And like. Well, I'm sort of looking forward to
the change, cos like, I know I've only been here like sixteen years but anyone can see that's it's not that good, earth, I mean, you know, anyone can see that it could be better, and should be better, and like will be better with the Wild World and once I get the TT and I've passed my test, which is fine, cos Dad's been teaching me the basics, you know, ignition, gearbox, and yeah, when they had me Dad assumed Mum was infertile. Can you believe that? He didn't even like check with her that she was definitely infertile, but, then again, Mum doesn't speak because my brother got hit by a Nissan when he was like thirteen, like before I was born, so like if Dad had asked Mum whether she was fertile or not she wouldn't have replied probably, so it's no real surprise I'm here, really, if you think about it, because it's hard to make plans if one person refuses to speak, if you know what I mean, and so I've been here for nearly seventeen years and I can definitely see ways in which it could be better, not just in Wokingham but like the world in general, so, like, well, when I've got the TT, it'll be cool, things'll be much better, I reckon, I'll be able to like go into Reading and shit.'

Sean's expression suddenly changes.

‘Shit, man, have you done one? It smells like fucking dead sheep back here. Have you fucking let one off?'

‘It will be the baby,' says Alan, from the front. ‘That fucked-up baby with the eyes will have shat its pants.'

Sean starts shaking Joe, saying, ‘Your fucking baby has shat its pants and it smells like a fucking dead sheep.' Joe is thinking, God, I hate Southerners. Whiny Southerners who don't have a clue. He looks into the rear-view mirror, it's crammed full of angry eyes, shouting, ‘Sort your child out. You're a guest in my car. Sort out that fucking smell.'