Keith Ridgway - Animals

Cover

Title Page KEITH RIDGWAY Animals

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

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?