Wild Weekend Page 6

  Oliver felt drunk, and cold, and stiff, and unhappy, and tired, but in this soup of misery he could also identify anxiety. He staggered out with a flashlight and found that he had company. A pale but cheerful face appeared, with a snout and floppy ears, and a mouth full of young potatoes. Another face loomed into his beam, then another, then many more. In his toxic potato field, there were pigs. Colin Burton’s pigs. Hundreds of them, rooting around in the earth and snarfing down every potato they found.

  ‘Stop!’ Oliver bellowed into the misty gloom. ‘Stop! Stop, you stupid animals! You can’t eat that. You’ll all be poisoned. Stop it! Get back!’ He ran forward, waving his arms, tripped and fell face first in a patch of mud. The pigs, startled, lumbered around, flashing their ample pink buttocks, then trotted rapidly away, all in different directions.

  Oliver got up and ran around after them for a while, then realised that his task was hopeless. Colin was too deeply and drunkenly asleep to hear the telephone, so Oliver felt he had done all he could, and decided to deal with his neighbour in the light of day.

  Strangely, the pigs did not die. It was two days before they were all rounded up, in which time they ate almost all the vegetation remaining on Oliver’s spread, and none of them suffered any ill effects at all. In fact, they had fattened very nicely.

  ‘Pigs’ll eat anything,’ Colin Burton affirmed with pride, speaking through a mouthful of Salmon and Cauliflower Gratinee. ‘There’s nothing’ll harm a pig. Why d’you think I raise’em?’

  ‘The pig is a natural detoxification plant,’ Lucy Vinny informed him. ‘Unbelievable digestive enzymes. At college we did experiments dissolving all sorts of things. Even safety pins.’

  ‘The pig’s cleansing capacity was well known to our ancestors,’ Florian lectured him. ‘The legend is that Ireland was infested with poisonous snakes until St Patrick introduced pigs, which ate them all.’

  ‘What do you think, Jimmy?’ Oliver asked his neighbour.

  ‘About Ireland?’

  ‘About pigs.’

  ‘My dad always said you couldn’t go wrong with pigs.’

  This time, Oliver heard him, in the larger sense.

  ‘You could consider high-welfare pork,’ admitted the woman from The Fieldcare Agency when he telephoned to run past her the idea of raising pigs. ‘Free-range, antibiotic free. That is the kind of premium-price product for which there is still a market.’

  ‘Good,’ said Oliver. ‘That’s it then. Problem solved. Why didn’t you say so in the first place?’

  ‘Our remit is to help the agricultural industry diversify.’

  ‘I’m not an industry, I’m a farmer.’

  And so Florian filled out a new sheaf of forms and seven Beccles Black Backs, six sows and a boar, arrived at Saxwold New Farm to save their owner’s bacon. Over the winter, he got particularly fond of the smallest of them. She had two spots around her eyes, like a panda in negative, and as she chomped her way through his stunted crops she seemed to have a smile on her snout. When he came out with the feed bucket, she almost danced over to greet him. He had to call her Miss Piggy.

  Six sows, of course, would not take him very far on the road back to solvency, but the tragedy of the lambs was the saddest experience of Oliver’s life to date, and it had taught him caution. He steeled himself to make a budget and then, to get him through his first winter, he measured out a half-acre plot around the ruined farmhouse, and put it up for auction.

  Sweeney, as the tabloids would later name him, was born in a very good area. His family home was a disused drain hole under a mound of brambles on a vacant lot at the back of a rotting old corner shop in the poshest part of Fulham, where the human inhabitants were utterly puritanical about sell-by dates. Every household put out a banquet in bin bags every week. Some of the residents actually put out food for the foxes as well. Sweeney’s father, a third generation urban fox, had laid claim to the drain hole for the past two years. Sweeney’s mother was his second mate.

  The living was superb. Beside the domestic bin bags, there was refuse put out by the French restaurant and the gastro-pub, numerous well-fattened cats and puppies, occasional hamsters, gerbils and rabbits, hundreds of very slow pigeons and the sandwiches thrown away by schoolchildren. If they braved the traffic on the nearby high street, Sweeney’s family could also count on kebabs, dropped on the street by people who were too drunk to eat them, and curries, regurgitated by the people who were too drunk to know they were too drunk to keep them down. Until he got the mange, Sweeney’s father was relatively sleek. So, until she started feeding her cubs, was his mother.

  Sweeney was one of seven. Todd, his brother, was first. Then brother number two. Then a sister. Then Sweeney himself, two more sisters, and a final brother who didn’t look too clever. Their mother licked them, nestled her brush around them against the damp and cold and lay still to let them feed. Their father brought in a portion of Kashmiri Chicken, on the bone. This was in the spring.

  In summer, the foxes taught their cubs how to hunt, taking them with them on their nightly patrol along the bin bags. Live food, of course, was more fun to hunt and could be the best eating, but it was hard to find a good kill. Pigeons in the park roosted out of reach during prime hunting time at night. Rats were plentiful by the railway line, but their taste was vile and they carried disease. Cats were good, especially young ones. Every telegraph pole on their street carried a home-made appeal poster for a missing kitten.

  One night in the park they found a dying human, a huge carcass, lying on its back, limbs jerking in the final moments of life. The entire family gorged themselves all night. The cubs never forgot that feast, the taste of the soft, warm flesh and the sweet red blood.

  As the temperature fell in autumn, the adult foxes began to scrap with their offspring and finally drove them out of their own territory and out into the world to find their own living. Sweeney and his siblings ran along the grey streets and the gloomy gardens, disputing the hunting with cats and the carrion with magpies as they searched for their own territory.

  The youngest brother, still the smallest, froze to death in the first frost of winter. Brother number two was run over by a car. One of the sisters got gastroenteritis and died. Come January, the remaining sisters got to the open space by a railway line, where they found themselves mates.

  Sweeney, being an animal fatally lacking in independent drive, followed his brother westwards. For a few nights they tried to move in on the yard of a factory where airline meals were prepared, but five foxes already based there fought them off. They tried the grounds of a tennis club, but the security guards had dogs.

  When Sweeney and his brother made their big mistake, they were not particularly hungry. They too had succumbed to the mange, which itched like hell and made them tear out their own fur in lumps, but they were getting regular meals. They had found themselves reasonable homes in a public park, Todd in the prime site under the roots of a sizeable tree, Sweeney in a space under a shed.

  In the daytime, a few humans came in and out of the shed and a lot of young ones played around it. In the evening, the shed was abandoned but soon plates of food appeared outside, put down by the humans. Pappy stuff, no fun to chew, but it kept the ribs lined. So the brothers were pampered. In fact, they got gung-ho, and started to come out in the twilight, certain of finding the food and determined to get it before any cats did. Let alone the pitiful hedgehogs whom the play-space workers actually intended to feed.

  The foxes were not hungry at all, just attuned, with their black-and-white vision, to a certain kind of movement, the spasms of a life in danger, the struggles of prey that was already wounded, of which they had an instinctive memory, enhanced by their experience of the dying man in the park. Twitching limbs promised a feast. Slinking from under the tree roots at the end of a day, Todd’s eye was caught by just such a movement. The leg of a juvenile human, sticking out of some covering, flailing irresistibly.

  It was so small, so young, so tender! It was goin
g to be so delicious! Todd seized the prey in an instant and pulled it safely out of sight under the shed. The noise of his attack at once woke Sweeney in his lair, and they managed a few good mouthfuls before screaming humans found them and beat them back. They fled to Todd’s hole under the tree, lay low for a couple of hours, then emerged again, hoping to find that at least something remained of their great kill.

  The park at night was normally dark and undisturbed, except for a few male humans who would try to mate with each other under cover of the shrubs. That night, to the foxes’alarm, a large number of humans arrived, bringing vehicles and strong lights with them. Suddenly there seemed to be a pack of them in the park, howling and barking and brandishing weapons.

  Panicked by the noises and lights, Sweeney and Todd streaked for cover. Their earths, they found, had been blocked with rubbish. Todd was netted by the public lavatories. Sweeney, making for the railway line, dared a clean run across the bowling green and was cornered in the subway, where he went down to a tranquilliser dart.

  The fox brothers found themselves in cages, in a container that stank of dogs and cats, which, from the shuddering, swaying and roaring, seemed to be moving.

  3. The Smell of Real Money

  ‘I never thought you’d go in for pigs,’ said Bel Hardcastle, Oliver’s mother. She gave a sad sigh and put an apple crumble in front of him. It was a Sunday and he was visiting her in her pretty little house in the south London suburb of Putney. ‘Such rude-looking animals, I always think. And the smell. And the flies. Garrick! Don’t do that. You’ll get your nose burnt.’

  Garrick, a golden Labrador who was still far below the age of discretion, had thrust his muzzle under her arm and was yearning in the direction of the crumble.

  ‘Like them or not, pigs are the only thing I can farm until my soil recovers,’ said Oliver firmly. ‘Get down, Garrick. Bad dog.’

  ‘He’s not a bad dog, he’s just hungry,’ said Bel.

  ‘He’s not hungry, he’s begging,’ said Oliver.

  ‘I suppose you could say you’ve made a right pig’s ear of your farm,’ cackled Oliver’s stepsister Toni, who was, at that point, sixteen, with a bullet on a chain around her neck. ‘Shut up, Toni,’ said Oliver, picking up a spoon and getting stuck into the crumble. ‘Anyway, the smell won’t bother you here in London. Get down, Garrick.’

  Bel Hardcastle passed her son the cream. ‘Oh well, I suppose needs must when the devil drives,’ she said, letting her voice tail helplessly away to dissolve the threatened sibling confrontation.

  Bel Hardcastle liked old sayings. She liked everything old: old buildings, old furniture, old paint colours, old films on the TV on Sunday afternoons, old values and old photographs. She liked classic cars and vintage champagne, if somebody else was buying it, and old shoes that didn’t pinch her toes.

  At one point, with time on her hands between husbands, she had embroidered an old poem on an old piece of linen:

  Grow lovely growing old

  So many fine things do

  Laces and ivory and gold

  And silk need not be new

  There is healing in old trees

  Old streets a glamour hold

  If all of these, then why not we

  Grow lovely growing old?

  When he was a boy, this embroidery had worried her son Oliver. He found something creepy about the butterflies and roses which his mother had scattered around the blue cross-stitch lettering. The wobbly line of the final question mark irritated him. The whole damn artefact symbolised everything about her that annoyed him.

  Oliver had grown up with his mother and her various husbands in various flats in London. She liked old husbands, too, and they tended to prefer convenient mansion flats which were a short taxi ride from their offices. Nevertheless, Bel Hardcastle had always considered that her heart was in the country, because everything good and right and traditional about English life had its roots there. She believed this more passionately because her own roots were in Warsaw, where her Christian-born father and her Jewish-born mother had married in 1938, to the outrage of both their families. They fled to London only a few days before Hitler’s army crossed the border.

  Her parents brought Bel up to blend in, at which she had excelled. Urban as her homes were, with their narrow windows, fitted carpets and clanking radiators, she decorated them with historic English chintzes. Her furniture looked as if it had been inherited from a family who could trace their ancestry back to the Wars of the Roses, although she had bought it all at an auction in Chelsea. She got so good at it that it decorating in the English style became her profession.

  Bel considered herself a countrywoman by proxy. She had lived in London all her life, but she read Country Life in the bath and Country Living at the hairdresser. She always kept a Labrador and had walked them in Kensington Gardens, Parson’s Green and Putney Common, wearing green Wellington boots. While planting her summer window boxes, she fantasised about a country garden with hundred-year-old topiary and herbaceous borders. She listened to The Archers on the radio every evening, and again to the Sunday omnibus edition, and every time the announcer said, ‘An everyday story of country folk,’ she felt a glow of pleasure in her hard-won security.

  Bel had been slightly startled when her son announced that he wanted to be a farmer, but since his planned career path promised to solve the essential difficulty with farming, which was the problem of poverty, she approved of it. Oliver really should have seen the next move coming.

  ‘I’m not looking forward to pigs at the bottom of my garden,’ she said.

  Oliver generously ignored his mother’s remark. She was getting a bit dotty, after all.

  ‘It takes at least three years to get approved organic status for land that’s been used for commercial farming,’ he lectured his stepsister.

  ‘You didn’t know that before you took off, did you?’ Toni said, watching with disdain as he ate.

  ‘Of course I did,’ he lied with a dismissive frown.

  ‘Pigs will just root up my roses,’ Bel persisted. Nobody took any notice.

  ‘Anyway, I’ve sold the ruin,’ Oliver continued. ‘Went to auction on Wednesday. Telephone bid from London, cash on the nail. So that and the pigs should see me through until I get my organic certificate.’

  ‘I know you’ve sold your ruin,’ his mother informed them.

  ‘You can’t know,’ said Oliver, with annoyance. ‘How can you know. I only knew myself yesterday.’

  ‘I know because I’ve bought it,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve what?’ Oliver’s fork stopped halfway to his mouth.

  ‘I’ve bought the ruin. The farmhouse.’ Content now that the conversation was going along the lines she had imagined, Bel gave herself a second helping of crumble.

  ‘You have?’

  ‘Yes. I have.’

  ‘What do you want to do a stupid thing like that for?’ demanded Toni, voicing her stepbrother’s thoughts to perfection.

  ‘Because it’s time we moved out of London,’ said Bel. ‘My heart has always been in the country.’

  ‘Yeah, well mine hasn’t,’ Toni said, her voice rising in panic. ‘You can move wherever you want. I’m staying here.’

  ‘You can’t stay here because I’ve sold this house too.’ Bel sounded dangerously reasonable. ‘And earlier than I planned to, because of you, Toni. I’ve just got to get you out of London before it’s too late.’

  ‘Well, it’s too late already and thanks for asking me,’ Toni sneered, rising from the table in blind rage and treading on the dog, who yelped histrionically and ran into the hall. ‘You can forget this stupid idea right now. I’m not going anywhere.’

  And she followed the dog, and slammed the door.

  ‘Have you thought about this?’ Oliver asked, trying not to sound as dismayed as he felt. He could get out of the situation. It wasn’t a done deal, it was his mother. He could just make her take the money back. Keep it in the family.

  ‘Of cours
e I’ve thought about it,’ Bel said calmly, pouring more cream than she wanted to give herself strength. ‘I knew you needed the money, and I knew you were having trouble selling the house. Well, it isn’t a house, is it? It’s just a heap of stones. I don’t want to crowd you or anything, but I just can’t take the risk with your sister any more.’

  ‘Stepsister,’ he said.

  His mother ignored him. She lowered her voice and widened her eyes to hint at the unimaginable evils that might befall a girl in the metropolis. ‘She’s had a ring put in her tummy button, Oliver.’

  ‘Oh, keep up, Mum.’ He was almost unkind. ‘They all do that. It doesn’t mean anything. She’d be a freak if she wasn’t running along with her peer group at her age.’

  ‘I can’t keep vodka in the house,’ Bel continued. ‘She and her friends, they drink the most appalling amount. It’s every weekend. They get ill. You know.’

  ‘They’re just asserting their right to behaviour formerly considered masculine,’ her son informed her. ‘It’s only a phase. I’m sure all this binge-drinking and violence will be completely passé in a generation or two.’

  Bel Hardcastle shuddered. She was a gentle woman and the mere word ‘violence’made her feel anxious. ‘A generation or two! That’ll be much too late. She needs a man’s influence in her life, even if it’s only yours.’

  ‘Cheers, Mum,’ said Oliver.

  ‘I’ve found things in her room,’ she went on.

  ‘What things?’

  His mother got up and fetched her handbag. From it she produced a small plastic envelope containing a piece of card printed with symbols. ‘It’s drugs, isn’t it?’ she asked him.

  ‘Er …’ It was a while since Oliver had actually done any drugs himself, and fashions changed. Still, small sparkling chips of crystal, rather like downmarket diamonds, didn’t seem to be making the right fashion statement for an intoxicant. ‘I think they’re some kind of makeup,’ he guessed. ‘They stick them on their eyebrows when they go clubbing.’