58. The Kingfisher’s Post
(Brandenburg, Germany)
I’m swimming slowly across one of the many lakes outside Berlin. Leaving the bustle of the swimming spot behind me, I am entering a still, mirrored space. With eyes just above the surface, I’m given the perspective of a pond-skater – an insect riding on the water’s lip. Hypnotized by the rhythm, I seem to be levitating in the thin line between sky and water. The tiny trees on the far shore are wobbling upside down, just beyond my nose.
Very gradually, I am nearing the other side, heading towards a wooden post that is sticking out of the shallow water. At the last moment, meters away from me, the top of the pole bursts away in a blaze of electric blue. Doubled in her reflection, the shimmering, turquoise blur flashes into the thick, green undergrowth of the far shore. And disappears.
57. The Dark Eyes of the Seal
(Isle of Ouessant, France)
In a secluded inlet, protected from the waves, a dark shape bobs in the swell. A seal’s head. Indistinguishable from a fisherman’s buoy, until she dips back beneath the waves. Another head nearer. Or maybe the same seal scoping me out. She throws her head back and yawns a long, bored yawn. Her nose pointing and twitching upwards, as she floats effortlessly with her body high out of the water.
Clambering awkwardly across the rocks, I flop myself through the water’s flickering surface. My torso is grabbed by the shock of ocean chill. Gradually though, the systems inside me calm themselves, and accept the water’s embrace. My breathing slows and my tissues begin to relax into a new floating world. I slip through, and down into a silent garden of billowing weeds. The emergency pain of immersion becomes fireworks of tingles that glitter across my skin. I dive amongst a weightless forest.
There is a discredited theory which speculates that humans are descended from semi-aquatic apes. Hairless monkeys that made their living wading through the fertile waters of ancient bays. That we slowly became upright as we strained to hold our heads above water. The theory reasons that our babies arrive with a waxy covering like seal-pups because our ancestors were once born into saltwater. That the reason we can intentionally hold our breath (unlike most mammals) and that our kidneys can efficiently expel salt, is because the ocean was once the medium that we called home.
Her dark, liquid eyes blink at me from off across the waves. I wonder to myself why seals returned to the water. Why they left our adventure of crawling out across the dry land. Why they abandoned our struggle with gravity and slipped their bodies back into the supporting water. Discarding their limbs, resting their necks. Maybe they decided enough is enough – that they never wanted a dry throat, or dry eyes again. Never wanted to feel the urgency of thirst. Seals and whales decided to go back to the fish. To return to the amniotic fluid of the ocean. But too late. The bear-like thing that flopped itself back into the sea had already lost its ability to breathe water. Seals can only impersonate fish (beautifully) for the length of one long breath. But eventually they must rise to the surface to fill their lungs, or to give birth to their pups. Whales have refined their drag act still further – mastering the art of raising their air-breathing calves entirely within the ocean. Mammalian milk swirling out into the salty waters as their babies suckle in the deep.
Her head disappears back beneath the surface again.
56. The Flapping of the Gannet
(Sauðárkrókur, Iceland)
I’m walking along a remote beach on Iceland’s Arctic coast. Scattered along the hightide-mark are the bodies of many former beings, all half-buried in the fine black sand. The
feathered remains of puffins, with their rainbow beaks still intact. The desiccated and curled bodies of former starfish. An empty-eyed, and grinning fish-head, its trailing spine picked clean into a jagged line of white. The empty, pink cases of departed crabs.
A deceased gannet lies half in the water, half-buried in sand. As the waves lap against the dark shore, the water flaps her wings forward, and then back – in a slow echo of flight.
Soft living things like me. Dancing in and out of existence against the longer, deeper rhythms of this churning planet. Creatures becoming buried in the sand. On their way back down into the folds of the Earth. Bodies beginning a slow change into stone.
55. The Descending Birds
(Berlin, Germany)
Flumpf.
Flumpf.
Flumpf.
Their wings slice the morning into great chunks of shimmering air. Three enormous shapes dropping out of the sky. Glowing impossibly white as they toboggan their way down a thick shaft of sunlight. Aiming their necks along the cold, steaming canal.
Ducks look up – muttering and rustling feathers, feigning indifference to the radiance of these ungainly gods.
As they come in to land, I can hear and feel the leading edge of their feathers ripping the air – just a couple of meters in front of me.
54. The Mouse’s Expression
(Berlin, Germany)
On the table next to me is a mouse. She is calmly resting on her haunches, cleaning her whiskers. Her black eye watches me as I take my seat. Also at her table is a man – enjoying a coffee in the spring sunshine. Both resting, watching the world go by.
The mouse is sitting in a wire box – it slowly dawns on me that this is a humane-capture trap. Both the mouse and the man seem to be totally at ease. Perhaps this is a small break in the journey from a domestic kitchen to the strip of green undergrowth down by the canal (that lies at the end of this street).
In some circles, anthropomorphism is viewed as a kind of sin. Attributing human emotions or characteristics to a mere animal is seen as a sign of sentimental weakness or fuzzy thinking. But perhaps that underestimates Earthlings’ capacity for empathy. Misunderstands how closely related we all are to our fellow ‘planetmates’.
The man, the mouse, and myself are all ‘animal’. To try to understand the perspective of the mouse, I can only extrapolate out from my own animal experience of this sun-filled day in spring. It’s perhaps harder to imagine living within the exoskeleton of an ant – with a segmented body and six ceramic legs. But rodents are kissing cousins of the apes. On the tangled paths of evolution, we are direct neighbours. A mouse and a human share 97% of their working DNA (whereas with dogs we share only 84%). I guess this is why humans use rodents to test their drugs and cosmetics. And perhaps also why mice seem to find it so easy to hack the systems of our cities, our buildings and our kitchens.
As I read this situation, both creatures seem to accept this small pause. From her bearing, the mouse exudes a ‘bored’ resignation. Waiting in the sun.
53. The Wasp’s Sting
(Berlin, Germany)
It’s a hot, still day at the very end of summer. We’re next to a lake on the outskirts of Berlin – resting in the shade of Berlin’s ‘Grunewald’ forest. I’m longing to submerge my overheating body into the cool waters of the ancient lake. But while wriggling out of my shirt, I feel a sudden stab of pain in my side.
Reflexes jerk my head around to glimpse a wasp drunkenly buzzing free from the white flesh that has momentarily enfolded her. She is old and confused. A Yellow Jacket worker lost on a mission at the end of her swarm’s life. In her panic, as soft walls squeezed her brittle body, she’s twisted herself around to insert her sting beneath my skin. With a clenching of her abdomen, she has injected her fluids inside me.
A liquid, golden pain is spreading out from the point just below my armpit where her tiny dagger has entered me. I am with my daughter, and I try not to make a fuss, but I want to howl. As the wasp’s venom spreads further, though, the burning point of pain is slowly softening. A warm, shimmering otherness is seeping through my tissues and across my ribs.
The clear waters of the lake cool my throbbing flesh and leave a heady, almost delicious insect weirdness in my left-hand side.
52. The Stare of the Moray Eel
(Elba, Italy)
Snorkelling with my daughter. Pointing and gesticulating at the strange and wonderful beings all around us, thrilled by her excitement with this new, silent world.
But now she’s grabbing my shoulder and pointing at something I haven’t seen. On a rock, three meters away, is a slash of orange-spotted muscle. Writhing itself around to face us, the eel is lifting her flame-marbled head. Two intense black pupils, outlined with yellow, stare at us in outrage. She is opening her hooked mouth – a terrifying grin of comic-book teeth leers at us. Erect like a cobra, twisting in the swell. Instinctively we both back away whilst trying to still face the leopard-skinned eel.
The threat to her world now retreating, the eel slithers herself away. Vanishing into the gaps between her rocks.
51. The Path of the Ant
(Brandenburg/Berlin, Germany)
I now have a fresh tattoo on my left arm. A long twisting line of dots that runs from my wrist to my shoulder. The dark spots have been inserted beneath my surface, and each is now surrounded by a red welt of raised skin.
Yesterday, in the forests of Brandenburg, my daughter used a leaf to carefully place a large wood ant near my wrist. As the ant wandered along my arm, a friend traced her path with a felt-tip pen. The nib (about the size of the ant herself) followed discreetly behind the insect as she made her way along my limb. A small journey. A halting, tentative procession. Her every wander and decision traced faithfully into a black line across a landscape of me.
Earlier this morning a local tattooist translated the felt-tip trace into a permanent, dotted tattoo. Their electric needle buried ink where it will now remain, and the angry swelling along my arm is my body’s reaction to this alien pigment. The reddening of my flesh is the iron-oxide in my blood now pooling around these intrusions.
The fluid in an ant’s body, though, is a light blue-green, as insects use copper instead of iron to pull down molecules of oxygen from the air.
I wonder:
If my wood-ant chose to get a tattoo, would her surface react with a delicate, pale green?
50. The Thirst of the Manatee
(Florida, USA)
Hosing down the small boat at the end of the day, a shape looms up out of the turquoise depths. The tap water running off the deck is sluicing down into the salty waters of the dock, and a pair of rubbery, soft lips comes guzzling up along the stream of fresh water. Two small, sleepy eyes break the surface and wince in the light.
Manatees evolved from a land creature that returned to the sea. They make their living in the salty mangroves of the tropics, but every few weeks they need to seek out a source of fresh water to rehydrate and balance out the salt in their mammalian bodies. I aim the jet from the hose directly into her open mouth and she gulps down the delicious freshwater with an urgent thirst. Chugging happily from the flow, she floats lazily in the warm waters. In the sunlight, I can see that the length of her blubbery body is gashed with a network of old scars – souvenirs from encounters with propellers out in the shallow waters of the Florida Bay.
49. The Multitude of Worms
(Wadi Rum, Jordan)
I’ll spare the details, but I have (or had) thousands of creatures living inside me.
I know that to live, humans have trillions of bacteria, fungi, and other microscopic creatures living in their guts. Or, to be precise, 39 trillion single-celled beings that have their home somewhere beneath my bellybutton. Several planets’ worth of creatures that help me digest my food.
But ‘me’ is worryingly hard to define. Am ‘I’ the loose assemblage of 30 trillion human cells that make up ‘my’ body? Or am I also the 39 trillion microbes that subtly influence my behaviour and help regulate my immune system? A system whose function is specifically to decide what is ‘me’ and what is ‘not me’. A system that is being constantly lobbied and swayed by the wishes of 39 trillion ‘aliens’.
It turns out that ‘I’ am a delusion – not a ‘he’, but a ‘they’. This is a strange and queasy thought, but these kindred beings are thankfully invisible to my eye, and therefore reassuringly abstract. It’s easy to forget or ignore my plurality – hidden away in the darkness of my insides.
Wriggling on the sand of the Jordanian desert, though, are thousands of tiny, but very visible, white threads. Generations of writhing beings that have been happily living in a continent called ‘Simon’.
48. The Elegance of Cows
(Togo)
I am in the back of the pick-up, where the cool air from the air-conditioning doesn’t quite reach, and the shocks from the road seem less cushioned by the truck’s aged suspension. Abdoulaye drives the old Toyota expertly, negotiating his way between the small buses stuffed full with people and sheep. Trucks strapped high with cargo judder by – tilting at scary angles like drunks on their way home.
Our progress is occasionally halted by the crossing of nonchalant animals. Cattle with long, dignified faces and a slow, catwalk gait. When Abdoulaye honks his horn, they turn their heads and look with eyes full of pity and disdain – almost oblivious to us and the flocks of mopeds buzzing around them.
47. The Passiveness of the Lamb
(Burkina Faso)
Everywhere, thin plastic bags are snagged on stems and rocks. They flutter like huge flocks of tatty birds that have settled across the land. Sun-bleached, dusty colours: grey, light blue, faded red, but mostly commonly, a ghostly white.
Street-dogs, street-pigs, street-vultures and, in the smaller villages, street-cows. All roaming amongst the detritus, turning things over, looking for scraps. A bunch of kids kick sections of a discarded watermelon towards a happy cow.
Honda 50cc mopeds weave along the bigger roads – some bumping past with big furry shapes strapped on at the back. Webs of rope and string of different colours knit together a brown tangle of legs and snouts. Hairy bundles of sheep.
It’s only when one of the snouts poking out of a bundle starts to bleat – that I realise they are all actually alive. Moped after moped slaloms through the dust and potholes, with brown planets of fur strapped onto their racks. Utterly passive bundles of resignation, except for this one angry lamb, unhappy with its lot in life.
46. The Swifts of Winter
(Timimoun, Algeria)
Above the palm trees of the oasis, a swift swoops low over the rooftops. The bird screeches and traces the same looping lines as she drew above my Berlin balcony back in August. A yearly commute for better insects.
45. The Small Dog, the Grey Parrot, & the Lonely Human
(New York, USA)
Alone in New York to install an exhibition, I have been offered the chance to house-sit a flat in Williamsburg. All I have to do is look after a small dog and an aging Grey Parrot, and in return I can luxuriate in an architect’s enormous white home. I have been sleeping on a makeshift mezzanine in the dusty gallery, and so I gladly accept this unexpected promotion.
As kids, me and my brother had blue and yellow budgerigars, and I’ve since become good with dogs. So, I thought I was qualified. The Jack Russell seemed a little nervous when the owner showed me around, and the parrot just rocked in her cage – but I was confident I would be able to win their trust.
A series of keys activate various bars, levers, and catches, behind the architect’s steel-lined door. Finally, it swings open to reveal an expanse of polished concrete, and in the middle distance the white and brown Jack Russell staring intently at an intruder. I pause. Then make the friendly side-of-the-mouth double-click – a universal inter-species greeting meaning: “Hey you, what’s up…” At the small clack from my mouth, the Jack Russell barks, jumps backwards on four straight legs, spins on landing (toenails scabbling against the shiny surface), and shoots off behind the sofa. The parrot eyes me through the bars of her large cage. I move cautiously through the flat with my bags. The parrot’s head revolves – keeping one of her surveillance eyes trained on my every move.
The days go past.
The dog watches me fill his bowls from a distance and when he’s desperate enough, he’ll allow me to snap on his lead for a short walk. But apart from this one unpleasant act, he stays at least a dog-lead distance away from me. The parrot watches me – always. Her delicate, white-lined eye tracks my movements – creating a detailed inventory in her mysterious avian mind. I’m making myself muesli with assorted nuts and think she might like one. I gingerly move a walnut piece towards her cage. She doesn’t react – but she also doesn’t move away. I very slowly manoeuvre the morsel through the bars of her cage towards her, held between my finger and thumb. A screeching stab of feathers and noise. Looking down, I see my quickly retracted finger has dripped a splat of blood onto the polished floor.
My days installing the exhibition pass quickly.
Back in the flat, I fulfil my servant’s duties but leave my charges to their distrustful solitude.
My last night in New York and I head out into a series of interesting bars I’ve spotted in the rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood. I meet people, I dance, I speak my quaint British English, and as I stumble homewards in the small hours, I pass a shuttered bar called ‘Black Betty’. In my happy state I start to sing: “Whoa… Black Betty (Bam-ba-lam)…”. And I’m still singing this forgotten song as I enter the flat: “Whooah, Black Betty (Bam-ba-lam), Black Betty had a child (Bam-ba-lam)…”. The parrot is eying me with what I take to be disdain: “…the damn thing gone wild (Bam-ba-lam)…”. The dog is watching me nervously. But I don’t care.
“Whooahhh Black Betty…”.
There is something about the exact cadence and pitch of the “Whooahhhhh…” that seems to trigger the parrot. She is watching me intently, and as the chorus comes round, she throws back her head and croaks out her own: “Whhaaarrrr”. I’m gob-smacked but delighted. I sing louder and at each drawn out: “Whooahhhhhh…” I’m now joined by the parrot’s metallic: “Whhaaarrrr”.
The Jack Russell has crept closer and is staring upwards. First at the bird, then at the ape, then at the bird again. I can’t know, or even begin to guess, what thoughts are going through his canine mind, but to me he seems to think: “Fuck it…”, sits down, throws back his sleek, little head – and howls. A tiny, long-lost cousin of the wolf, howling in the night to a distant pack. A strange barber-shop-trio has come together in an enormous Williamsburg loft. Three lonely species united by a song of exactly the right pitch.
44. The Octopus’ Garden
(Biševo, Croatia)
Paddling about for hours with my face below the surface – immersed in a parallel universe of water. Small fish glinting through the wobbling sunbeams. Ripples of light losing their way down into the deepening blue. Silver bodies flick past me – darting away in unison from my rubbery white fingers.
Lower down, lurking in the cooler blues, larger fish glide by in threes or fours. Moving silently through the restless patterns that sparkle across the boulders and sand. Unblinking eyes glance upwards into their watery sky. Shrinking back at the approaching shadow of my dirigible self.
At the edge of an open space, where the pale sand meets a shelf of rock, something irregular catches my eye. A curious array of shiny, broken things: pieces of iridescent shell, polished pebbles, a red crab’s claw, a shiny bottle top. A wrecking yard, or a small museum. Objects all of a size, haphazard and yet organized. All placed on the sand. I float just above the little field of objects, and I wonder.
As I float, I feel a large eye watching me out of a dark shadow at the base of the rockface. I try not to move apart from drifting with the swell. I hang in the sky and wait. Slowly, a creature extrudes herself fluidly from a hole. One, three, eight arms flow out into the water like smoke. A body without fixed coordinates or dimensions. A ‘becoming’ rather than a ‘being’. A deep eye on a backwards face studies me curiously from another universe. A delicate ‘Water-ling’ wondering about an alien floating in her sky.
43. Carter and the Fridge
(Berlin, Germany)
Carter was smart and infinitely trainable due to his Sheepdog genes. My partner occupied Carter’s restless brain by teaching him to bring their slippers, and not to be outdone, I trained Carter with my sandals. After a few days of practice, when I shouted, ‘Birkenstocks…!’, Carter would scurry off to the hall and reappear with his slobby grin wrapped around my sandals.
A perfectly behaved pack member – a committed team-player, except for one major failing. Every year Berliners see in the New Year with an anarchic street battle of fireworks, rockets, and bangers. In the aimless days between Christmas and New Year, explosions start to punctuate the long winter evenings. They gradually build in chaotic ambition towards an orgy of pyromaniac lust. Huge air-bombs explode outside our fourth-floor flat and rattle the glass in our ancient window frames.
At the first explosion, Carter would lose all control and sense. He would descend into an absolute, body-shaking fear. Salivating, panting, hyperventilating panic. The dark pupils of his eyes set within white circles of adrenaline.
As the gods of sulphur raged outside, Carter would attempt to burrow, scratch, or chew his way out of any room, or into any cupboard, or under any sofa that he could find. He could never be left alone when there was the risk of an explosion. Even when you were present, there would be little you could do to control or subdue the insane and terrified monster that he’d become. One night, after hours of soothing and holding his collar, I opened the fridge for a cool beer, and Carter attempted to get in – to squeeze his furry mass between the lettuce and carrots.
But now he is gone.
All that is left are the deep scratches in the corners of our wooden floors, the gouge-marks in the paint on the inside of the front door where his splayed toenails scraped desperately downwards. Or the teeth marks left in the bedroom door where he tried to chew his way through.
Years later, when a firework explodes, I still flinch.
42. The Heads in the Surf
(North Atlantic)
In the night, whilst I’m asleep, the containership slips into the gulf of the St. Lawrence River. Passing into the lee of Anticosti Island, the wind drops and the ocean swell calms. After more hours of steaming up the immense waterway, the sea is very gradually giving way to river, but the shores are still distant smudges of green.
Heads begin to appear in the water – blinking at the ship before slipping back under the surface. There are flashes of fins as creatures roll through the water – seen in the distance or suddenly appearing under the prow. A fellow passenger deciphers these glimpses as seals, dolphins, and Minke whales. A little further on, she explains that the pack of twenty or so slow-moving, white shadows are a pod of passing Beluga whales. I can’t see beneath the surface of the waves, but it must be like Piccadilly Circus down there.
41. The Bird and the Wind
(North Atlantic)
There is a small bird that flies around the containership. Dusty coloured like a sparrow or warbler. An accidental stowaway. Something fragile from the land. We are now out in the ocean, but she is still flitting between the oily cables and railings. She seems to understand that she must stay with the ship. It’s a calm day, and at the moment when she flies from perch to perch, she is still faster than the air.
What will happen when the weather changes?
I imagine the bird blown by the gales – flying further and further over the surf searching for the metal island in vain.
40. Carter and the Stairs
(Berlin, Germany)
At each landing, Carter waits. Breathes. Sniffs the doors. Looks up.
Pauses.
Waiting until he finds the strength in his legs for the next flight of stairs. With a lunge at the first step, his momentum carries him up the wooden hill and through the pain in his joints until he reaches the next level.
And waits…
Four storeys (eight flights) and then a patch of warm floorboards. Until it’s time to heave himself upright again. Time to remind us that he still needs to eat.
39. The Mouthparts of the Tick
(Brandenburg, Germany)
Lying on a cloth, spread out on the banks of a small lake. A secluded, soft place deep in the green woods of Brandenburg. Away from Berlin, and far enough from roads or houses that the only eyes all around belong to the birds and the insects.
Our lake-soft skin dries quickly in the still afternoon air. Wrapped in each other’s presence. As naked as the ants that at times are wandering over my legs. Bits of me variously, and obliviously, stretch off into the woodlands’ tangled understory.
Later that night, under electric light, my woodland friend finds a tiny black point behind my knee. A dot as big as this .
A tick had waited, perhaps months, for a warm mammal to stray near to her leaf. By the heat radiating from my skin, by the scent of my sweat drifting in the air, by the tremors sensed through her leaf, she senses my nearing presence. At the brush of my skin, she chooses her moment, and jumps.
Negotiating the landscape of my leg. Feeling her way carefully up the curve of my calf. Onwards, through a forest of follicles, till she finds a secluded, soft place out of the light. Satisfied that she won’t be disturbed, she inserts her mouthparts through my epidermis, till she can suck the sweet juices of my inside. Filling her swelling body like an inflating blimp. A full stop, becoming a poppyseed, on its way to becoming a blackcurrant. A swelling sack of stolen me.
My woodland companion knows about ticks and twists the minuscule body carefully clockwise between two fingernails. The tick is supposed to let go with her mouthparts, but she doesn’t.
Years later, I am left with bits of her mouth still embedded behind my knee. A small “tattoo” beneath a spot of rough skin. A keepsake from a moment deep in a Brandenburg forest.
38. The Road-sense of the Moose
(Sodankylä, Finland)
Above the Arctic Circle the countryside is flat and empty. I haven’t talked to anybody for two days. I have a small hire car and a Finnish CD from a petrol station. Hundreds of kilometres of roads lie behind me – banked with copper trees and the occasional strolling reindeer.
Near my new lodgings is a red-neck bar that I’ve been considering for three days now – trying to get the courage to open the door. There is nothing here except a gas station and the endless pine and birch trees. I finally opt for the company of humans rather than trees and spend a night in phrase-book-Finnish and beery gestures.
I’m driving back to my room along the pencil-straight roads. Through the half-light of an Arctic night. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch a crashing of trees and undergrowth. My leg automatically pounds the brake pedal. The flimsy car slides, just as a huge shape slices across my bonnet. The car squeals to a stop.
As you get nearer to the poles, you are spinning increasingly slower. In London the surface of the Earth is rotating through space at 656 mph. Here the speed of the spinning globe is much, much less. The moose is gone. Everything is still. Just the forest, an endless road to the Russian border and the low streaming clouds. My leg is locked rigid against the brake pedal – trembling like a whippet. In the silence of a stalled car, in an infinite forest, near the still centre of the planet, I’m left with the frozen afterimage of a pair of terrified eyes beneath a head full of aerial-antlers.
37. Carter and the Stick
(Berlin, Germany)
The park is now covered with a glass sheet of ice. Months ago, the first snow fell. It lay there week after week as the snowstorms came and went. Gradually, the surface became harder and glassier until eventually, I can no longer walk up the steep path to see the view out over Berlin. When I try, I slide backwards like a cartoon.
Carter is confused. When we moved to Berlin and he first encountered freezing snow, he tried to keep his paws off the strange substance – choosing three legs to stand on, so the fourth could escape the cold surface. Mostly though he resents falling over. When we try to play stick, his brakes no longer work. He sails past the quarry and slides backwards – clawing at the surface in vain.
But there is a patch beneath the trees that remains unpolished enough to run on. I throw a stick that is too straight and sharp. Carter scrambles madly in the direction I threw it but there is a sound above him as the stick hits a branch. He stops and looks directly up, just as the stick is dropping vertically down. Without a thought in his dog’s head, he opens his elegant jaws to catch the prey. Half of the stick disappears down his throat.
In the middle distance I can see Carter frozen in a ‘howling-at-the-moon’ stance. The stick is held vertically in the air like a sword swallower playing to the crowd. A strange, strangled howl is coming weakly from his throat. Like no noise a dog has ever made. Running, I reach him and pull the branch out of his gullet.
Like something used to stir a pot of paint, the end of the stick is covered in a mucusy, red syrup. I put it down, and both of us stare at the object, incredulous. Carter stands still – but gradually recovers from the shock of a stick that fought back. I can’t see any sign of damage down his throat, so we walk back to the flat. After a few hours, he seems to be back to his old self.
In the morning, he seems subdued, but I have to go out. When I return later that day something is wrong. For the first time in seven years there is no dog at the door. I search the flat, and in the furthest corner, I find a breathing hump of hair – unable to raise its head. We find an emergency vet and drive through the snow in panic. The vet uses a strange set of ratchets that locate onto Carter’s canine teeth to prise open his jaws. The vet’s hand disappears down his throat, and Carter once more makes the strange, strangled howl. Behind the dog’s tonsils the doctor locates the hole. A length of the vet’s little finger slides inside Carter’s new orifice.
36. The Bloodlust of the Mosquito Mother
(Brandenburg, Germany)
It has turned 6pm and, as always, my lungs are pulsing out gas. CO₂ is wafting out all around me, and diffusing into the still air of ‘Spreewald’ (the web of swampy waterways about an hour outside Berlin).
The light is already failing, and the only sound now is the steady splash of our paddles hitting the brown water. That, and maybe a faint background whine from a myriad wings taking flight.
In the gas-scope senses of the mosquitoes, the four plumes of CO₂ swirling behind our canoes are like buzzing, red neon signs: “This way for FRESH BLOOD”. From the foliage all around us, clouds of tiny bodies are tasting the delicious gasses drifting in the air. Waves of insects are salivating their way up the gradients of our gas trails. We’re hopelessly late and in the fading orange light I can see a throbbing smoke of bodies descending. I’ve covered as much as I can, but the soft skin of my face and hands is still bare.
There is nothing to do now but paddle. We have to move forward through the heavy water, towards the safety of our car. Swatting is hopeless as that would mean letting go of my paddle. I try to ignore the tiny shape alighting on the back of my hand. She and her sisters are landing like soft rain now. All hungry for the blood they need to make eggs. I think I can feel her drinking tube sliding into my sundowner flesh. I am a bag of sweet, ferrous fluids. A means for a mother to produce her offspring.
35. The Rodent’s Demise
(Munster, Germany)
I join two friends in Münster to look at sculpture in the landscape. We hire bicycles and ride along canals, rivers, and lakes. I am leading because I understand the foreign rules. Something runs out of a bush as I approach. A creature stops before my front wheel, but I swerve to miss it. I hear Lisa’s bicycle behind me crunch the gravel, but her wheels also miss the confused ball of fear.
James is tall and mostly silent. He ponders the small things in life from a height I can only imagine. He makes soft jokes that only register once the moment has passed – leaving the laughter unspoken, silent in the air.
Behind me, there is a cry. In the distance, there is a tall man at a loss for words. I turn my bike around and when I reach the bush, James is now bent over looking at a tiny mouse. Both of them frozen in mid-action. I pick up the still-warm body by its tail and drop it in the undergrowth. Looking up at James, I realize that I should have laid it down more gently.
34. Carter and the Lakes
(Brandenburg, Germany)
Although I miss the infinity of the sea, swimming in the lakes outside Berlin is also a special pleasure. The perfect stillness of the water is almost unnerving. Carter and I ruin the mirrored surface as we crash our way in. I pick out a tree on the distant shore, and we slowly make our way across the open water towards it.
Twenty minutes later, we are two small dots in the middle of a reflected sky – Carter swimming elegant rings around my slow progress.
33. The Truculence of Crows
(Berlin, Germany)
The ‘Nebelkrähe’ (literally: ‘fog-crows’ in German) are flying beneath the low Berlin clouds – returning to their rookery next to the ‘Palast der Republik,’ the old East German parliament. The creaking black mob moves across the sky with stiff strokes of their ragged wings. You see the birds everywhere in Berlin – hopping, surly silhouettes against the snow. London crows are black-suited and shy, whereas the crows of Berlin have grey, sooty backs. They seem bolder than their London counterparts; they stop to look at you and hunch their foggy shoulders. Tipping their heads to one side to fix you with a dark eye – waiting for their moment.
The Palast der Republik is being demolished. The futuristic GDR building is being levelled to make way for a replica of a lost Prussian palace. The socialist future turned out to be riddled
with asbestos, and now it’s being replaced with the past. The rookery in the long line of plane trees has outlived communism, and probably much more besides. The grumbling, bickering crows are settling down for the night.
31. Carter and the Hare
(Biggar, Scotland)
Carter almost qualifies as a ‘Lurcher’ – a poacher’s dog that crosses the speed and bloodlust of a Greyhound, with the trainable nous of a Collie. ‘Almost’ because Carter’s dad was a Lurcher, but his mum was a purebred sheepdog – leaving him with a quarter too much Collie.
We’re visiting friends in Scotland who have real Lurchers. Sleek, ribby running machines who lounge in their baskets till it’s time to go out.
They take us up into the high, open hills of their farm – to flush out hares. The two Lurchers are suddenly jittery at the scent of something on the wind. Carter has no idea but is excited by the others dogs’ arousal. The three hounds explode off across the landscape, after something one of them has seen. A shape bolts out of the undergrowth almost under Carter’s nose. Carter gives chase, and he is gaining on the frantic blur.
And then Carter runs excitedly alongside a creature running for her life. Carter is enjoying the race, but clearly has no clue in his head about what is expected. The quarry escapes, and Carter returns with his broad, doggy grin. And a stick.
32. The Indifference of Elephant Seals
(South Georgia, Antarctic Ocean)
There is something unsettling about the wildlife here. Occasionally a King Penguin, bored with the commotion among her colleagues on the beach, waddles over to inspect
the strange, upright mammal at the edge of her sand. Curious, and completely lacking in fear. And the snorting elephant seals, flopped in piles between the boulders, simply stare at me with their sad, watering eyes. I can walk right up to their massive, blubber bodies and if I touch the folds of their strange skin, they only crane their rubbery necks around. It can be dangerous being amongst them, but only out of their disinterest. Elephant seals can easily squish a human whilst flumping their bulk to the sea, or when pursuing an argument with a neighbour.
I am used to wildlife that disappears the instant it becomes aware of a human presence. I have only known landscapes that have been remodelled by Homo sapiens. Worlds in which wild creatures only survive through their fear of people. Close animal presence is something that I’ve rarely felt (other than pets, or future-food). I’ve only encountered the intimate smell and touch of large, wild bodies at the sides of country roads. The squished bulk of a badger lying on the tarmac. A deer with her eyes and mouth frozen on impact with metal. A rabbit’s sleek coat sticky with her drying blood.
Here though, in this world of ice, I appear to be utterly irrelevant. This landscape has not been arranged for the maximum benefit of humans. Its inhabitants are oblivious to the despotic ways of bald monkeys.
30. The Speed of Mouse
(Ramsgate, England)
‘Mouse’ is built for speed – sinews, pulleys, and bones gliding across the sand with the grace of a sine wave unfurling through space. My dog, Carter, is slightly slower but stronger. The dogs are now chasing an empty plastic bottle thrown out into the surf. Carter times his run precisely to jump the five-foot waves, his paws bashing through the collapsing white crests. As the wave subsides, Carter’s head reappears, slicing his way through the smooth grey water behind.
As they race, time and distance collapse. It’s hard to imagine being able to become a grey dot in the distance in so little time. The two dogs weave patterns across the sand – the joy of speed sparkling in their eyes. Standing, watching – I feel like a lumbering bulk in comparison. I am transfixed by canine velocity.
The spell is broken by the rising tide. The beach has disappeared, and the two dog leads are nowhere to be seen.
29. The Thirst of the Hummingbird
(Karpathos, Greece)
We swim to a little island, a hundred meters or so off the shore. A secret garden. A space for two lovers.
A hummingbird moth is hovering around us. For all the world like her avian namesake – visiting flower after flower. Hanging in the air. Her wings, a faint blur.
Convergent evolution: an insect impersonating a bird that it has never seen. Over millennia, both species have morphed towards parallel designs. Matching solutions being found for the sustenance of their tender bodies. Like guests arriving at a party wearing the same dress.
Nearby me, she is pushing her long ‘nose’ into the folds of petals, tickling her way between stamen and stigma. Seeking the hidden sweetness that the plant is so garishly advertising.
Probing and hovering. Sucking the syrup of nectar. A fake bird, thirsty for sugar. A horny plant yearning for pollination.
28. Carter and the Sticks
(London, England)
The days now begin by taking Carter out. As soon as we enter the park, my job is to find a stick. Although there are lots of trees, the demand for throw-able objects outstrips supply. Sometimes it takes me minutes of searching before I find one heavy enough. Below a certain size, Carter merely looks at the object and refuses to pick it up.
The game begins. I lean back to throw the stick as far as I can, and Carter races off in the direction he thinks that I will throw it. Sometimes, I can fool him, but he’s become very astute to the small differences between a false build-up and a real one.
Although I try to stop him, Carter can’t resist crunching the stick a few times between his powerful teeth. As the game progresses, the stick gradually becomes smaller. Carter looks mystified when the stick has joined the ranks of the ‘too-small-to-chase,’ and the game is over.
27. The Crying of the Cats
(Essaouira, Morocco)
A medieval labyrinth perched on rocks at the edge of the wild Atlantic surf. To reach our rooms, we must leave the bustle of the main thoroughfares and navigate deep into a maze of alleyways – that grow tighter, and darker, and stiller. Our tiny, damp flat is built into the city’s walls – with waves crashing below our windows and a salty spray that howls over the ancient battlements above us.
Returning to our lodgings one night, a chorus of thin miaows echoes along the passageways. The final twist of our path reveals a cardboard box left in a far corner. Peering down into the carton, we see a writhing knot of small bodies – upturned faces, like a nest of agitated fledglings.
At night, we can still hear their tiny cries in the wind.
By the second day, the cries are growing fainter.
The wind moans, the waves crash, and as we wheel our suitcases away across the ancient flagstones, the box is silent.
26. The Dogs in the Box
(Devon, England)
Visiting the parents of a friend in Devon, we open the back door to the farmhouse to see a cardboard box shuddering on the floor. The shallow carton is full to the brim with squirming sausages of dog – nearly blind and squeaking. For two days, we are spellbound by the fragile, almost-dogs – two days being nuzzled, chewed, and peed on. By the end of our stay, one of the squirming blobs has seduced us.
Three months later, we return to Devon with a small collar and a new dog lead. We leave with a hairy body that will now become woven into our lives.
25. The Termite’s Towers
(Otjiruze, Namibia)
Squeezed into a couple of beaten-up Volkswagen vans, we head up through the rocky mountains that surround the capital, Windhoek. It’s hot and dusty, and I’m so tired from two days of travelling, that I battle to keep my eyes open. The journey dissolves into half-seen glimpses: baboons by the side of the road, donkey carts, cattle being driven, huge clouds of dust kicked up by the occasional car. Long straight roads that unroll across the dry, scraggy bush to the distant horizon. I drift in and out of sleep.
Hours later, the road having long since become a bumpy track, we arrive at the collection of buildings of the farm where we will stay, and where we are supposed to make art for the next two weeks. It looks a bit like a cowboy ranch from a ‘70s TV series. A flat landscape, with a windmill-water-pump, herds of cattle, and an avenue of cactuses leading up to a formal gate. I spend the first few days wandering about, taking photographs, feeling out of context. I explore the surroundings and glimpse odd bits of wildlife skulking through the tall grass. I try to figure out how to make art here.
Every fifty meters or so, sticking out of the ground like middle fingers, are these deep red termite hills. They stand anywhere between two and five meters high, with a strange brooding presence – especially in the last light when they stand convincingly like slightly hunched people. I’m becoming fascinated by them. You never actually see the termites, but in a landscape that seems so empty (at least of people), they make a strange counterpoint: hundreds upon thousands of miniature citadels, their inhabitants ‘blindly’ going about their business.
I learn from a Namibian artist that you can tell your direction from the leaning of these
earthen columns. Apparently, the unseen termites harvest wood from the landscape as food for their subterranean farms of fungus. The adobe structures above ground are actually elaborate cooling towers – built to ventilate the hundreds of meters of tunnels and galleries that spread out below ground. In the southern hemisphere, the sun is in the northern sky, and so the towers all lean slightly in this direction. A collective, distributed ‘architect’ has tilted all these towers by exactly nineteen degrees northwards (the angle of the midday sun in the blazing sky). Blind engineers precisely measuring angles to reduce the surface area being scorched by the sun’s fiercest rays. A subterranean intelligence. An ancient ‘mind’ that dominates the parched landscape with its Mesozoic-era strategies.
24. The Breath of the Dragonfly
(Reading, England)
The university lies at the very edge of town: a green-field campus studded with modernist buildings – ‘Chemistry’, ‘Pharmacy’, ‘Philosophy’. All nestling amongst landscaped lawns, lakes, and stands of autumnal trees.
My first few days at the art school, and I’m eating my lunch alone on the grassy bank of one of the ponds. As I read and munch in the late-summer sun, an iridescent dragonfly is slowly helicoptering her way around the small lake. Buzzing low across the surface as she patrols the rushes that grow along the water’s edge. Engrossed in my book and sandwich, I lose track of her meanderings.
A shimmering shape alights on the back of my hand, sparkling in the sunlight through blues and greens as she stills herself. A light breeze rustles the leaves. I hold my breath.
Poised on tripod legs, her gimbal head swivels and tilts – scanning her enormous compound eyes across her territory. Four delicate, stained-glass wings are held immobile in the air. A flexing and smacking of her mouthparts, and then she is still again. Still except for her ‘breathing’. Her long body dilates outwards like a ribcage – pulling throbs of air down into her bulk. Pulsing like the chest of a small child out of breath.
Gathering her strength in the sun.
Till she flicks away into the air again, to resume her systematic hunt.
23. Jonah’s Leg
(London, England)
There is a lump on Jonah’s back leg. The vet tells us that it is malignant and that we have a choice to make. If we leave it, he might live another six months. Or, as the lump is attached to the bone, the only other course of action is to remove the leg. As the vet drags the confused hound towards the back of the surgery, Jonah strains his neck around to look back at us.
When we return, the nurse opens the door and a three-legged creature hops madly towards us, dragging the vet behind him. His breathing is furious and fast, and his two black eyes are huge and staring – set within rings of white terror and confusion.
22. The Demise of the Tropical Frogs
(London, England)
As ever, we pack in chaotic panic. As the taxi arrives, I rush around the house switching off plugs, lights, and heaters – everything that could be turned off.
A week in New York – the most beautiful, and the most vertical city I have seen.
Our taxi back travels through the rows of small, terraced housing and drops us off in front of our house. My partner unlocks the door, walks into the living room, and screams.
In the tropical fish tank, there is a miniature version of the end-of-the-world grown cold. The small guppies float on the surface with their eyes white and glazed. The speckled catfish lies on her side in the gravel – wedged between two rocks. The bulbous-eyed goldfish rests her overgrown head in a corner and the two tropical frogs float upright. Their extended back legs, with their long, webbed feet, lightly touch the gravel floor. And their small forearms stretch upwards towards the water’s still, cold surface.
21. Jonah and the Sofa
(London, England)
A standoff.
Jonah’s teeth are bared – his lips curled back. A low growl is coming from deep down in his broad, canine chest. His white daggers of teeth are jagging the air between us. I’ve grabbed a chair and thrust it in front of me – the chair’s back legs unsteadily level with Jonah’s fangs.
A meter shrinks and grows between us – the growls rising and falling with the distance.
My new partner’s dog is a mixed-up mutt of Greyhound and Staffordshire Bull Terrier. Abandoned by an owner who couldn’t cope, rescued from a dog home, and now sharing his territory with a new housemate, and rival. Jonah is smart, powerful, and troubled. I often have more time in the mornings, and I love finally sharing my life with a dog. We play stick in the overgrown cemetery or walk together along the derelict canal. It’s a rough area, and at times I secretly relish having a furry thug on my side.
But Jonah is no one’s pet.
When we leave the house in the morning there is a growing list of chores to be completed as he sits on the bottom step and stares at us with his black, unfathomable eyes. The dining chairs must be arranged on the sofa to keep his hairy body off the cushions. The fridge has a rubber bungee to keep it closed because Jonah has taught himself to open it. The rubbish must be put outside. The shopping bags must never be left on the floor even if they only contain cans. If we have erred, there will be a scene of chaos when we return. The shopping spread all across the kitchen floor. Tins of tomatoes left intact, but cans of dog food transformed into mangled and twisted remains. Over the hours he is left alone, Jonah will have sunk his teeth through the can’s metal hundreds of times until he is able to suck out the sloppy, brown contents.
A dispute over the sofa has escalated into violence. Two challengers facing off – their standing in the pack being calibrated. My legs are shaking, and my heart is racing. I think we’re both terrified, but edging backwards, I’m clearly losing this accidental test.
20. The Donkey and the Shirt
(Oxfordshire, England)
Growing up, we used to have geese in the field next to the terrace, but they had to go. In the summer, the paying guests who came at the weekend would sit on the low wall and, whilst they were chatting, long grey necks would slink across their plates and steal their salad. When challenged, they would hiss and flap and aim their necks with the righteous indignation of thieves. We ate the geese, and now there is a donkey.
The donkey doesn’t do anything but look – standing still a few meters off.
I’m down from London for the weekend. When it’s time to go, I can’t find my new red shirt. Retracing my steps, I remember the hot lunch on the terrace and my shirt lying on the wall. Glancing into the field I see a snatch of red fabric. As I explore, I find more and more shreds of my new red shirt – none of them bigger than a handkerchief and none in the same location. The donkey is still standing in the field. Looking.
19. The Badger’s Behind
(Oxfordshire, England)
Nearing the age of escape, I now have a driving licence and negotiated access to my dad’s old minivan. Threading the nighttime lanes of Oxfordshire, we can now weave the woodland pubs of the Chiltern Hills into a web of foolhardy pleasure. When the isolated taverns have finally closed their doors and the vehicles have dispersed back into the night, it’s just me in my father’s tatty car, careering back down the empty forest lanes.
As a child I was always fascinated with the badger sets around our farm. Chains of dark holes that were almost big enough to allow my small body to scrabble down into the soft, brown earth. An impulse and a thought that terrified me with its strangeness: the idea of facing the wild smell of an advancing badger in the nighttime of their earthy kingdom. I regularly left sticks over the entrances to their sets, and in the mornings, they were invariably gone. But I never caught a glimpse of the creatures themselves (other than the mangled roadkill that we occasionally sped past in my parents’ cars).
My headlights illuminate the route through the forest. A twisting tunnel formed by the single-track road set between high earth-banks and a tangle of branches that merge overhead. As I take a corner, a dark shape drops down into my path. Luckily, I have already slowed for the sharp bend, and I have time to brake hard before hitting her.
Spotlit in my headlights, the rear end of a low, grey creature is frantically galloping her bulk ahead of me. Trapped in the gully of the lane, and blinded by fear, she runs directly along the road itself. I follow her bounding bottom until she finally reaches a gap in the banks. Her black and white stripes dash off into the sanctuary of the dark woods.
18. The Lambs’ Wool
(Oxfordshire, England)
A new girl moves to our village. I’m told by tormentors that she fancies me, but naturally I disbelieve them. Time passes and I still refuse to trust the intermediaries, but on the 14th of February I discover a card that has been delivered by hand.
We arrange to meet in the woods that lie between our two houses. Snow still covers the spaces between trees.
We kiss.
The feel of somebody else’s lips is extraordinary. Sliding along a tongue, past my own teeth and into the alien geography of someone else’s mouth is the most adrenalin filled journey of my life. Dentistry felt in reverse – from the outside in. My tongue sliding behind her teeth and moving over places where moments ago her voice was playing. Two tongues searching a space where ‘me’ and ‘not-me’ is becoming confused. The smoothness of white porcelain, the textured swellings of tongue. Breathing is negotiated through nostrils squished against cheeks. We are both as quiet as possible. I can hear or feel the faint sigh of her breath against my cheek.
How long has this been happening?
In the distance I can faintly hear my toes complaining. Submerged in the snow, the pain signals sent from my feet have finally made themselves heard above the clamour of my brain.
The next morning the world is different, but my toes are red and swollen with chilblains. As a small child, this affliction was a feature of every winter. To soothe the pain, my mother would pluck the lambswool snagged on our barbed-wire fences, and wrap it around my toes. The unwashed wool still smelt and felt like lamb, but its lanolin oils warmed and calmed my angry digits.
The next evening after school, I walk to the other end of the village. My heart is stuttering, and my toes are secretly wriggling in oily wool.
17. The Screaming of the Pigs
(Oxfordshire, England)
The next farm, just over the hill, has changed. Low, corrugated arches of pigsties dot the bare, muddy landscape like an army encampment. When the wind comes from the south, the air is now heavy with the smell of anxious shit. When it rains, a dark slurry runs down into the lanes, and the lumbering, comical shapes that we sometimes glimpse are covered in waste.
There is a day when the wind brings the stench again. But this time it comes with a sound like hundreds of saw blades scraping across tin. A wild, wrenching orchestra of screams that swirls towards us through the undergrowth and trees.
16. The Rabbit and the Magazine
(Oxfordshire, England)
Unlike my village, Woodcote has a bus stop and a bench – which has become the centre of our local nightlife. As I’m walking the three miles back along the A4074, I find a damp, badly printed magazine in a lay-by. The images of entangled women and men are so confusing and so exciting that I’m not sure what to do with my find. Before I enter the gates of my farm, I remember the rabbit holes behind the uprooted tree and push the folded magazine down into the warm, dry earth.
When I return later, I reach as far as I can into the rabbit’s hole, but the magazine is gone.
15. The Smell of Sheep-dip
(Oxfordshire, England)
In the late spring we would help my father roundup our shabby flock of sheep. Herding them down from the fields and into a funnel of gates that would crush the flock tighter and tighter together. A heaving, oily wave of sheep backs crammed between an alleyway of metal bars.
At the mouth of the funnel my father would grab one sheep at a time by the wool and pull them out through a small gate.
An old ewe, released from the gate, dashes forward along the narrow corridor. But she meets a long, metal trough set into the ground – filled to the brim with a dark, evil-smelling liquid and bounded by fences on each side. All the ewes and yearlings would attempt to jump this liquid barrier, but all would land somewhere near the middle with a brown, toxic splash. Hands from the side push the old ewe under with long poles, and she disappears beneath the dark surface. The white of her nose breaks the surface, but she is pushed down once again. Eventually she clambers unsteadily out along the sloping far end of the trough – rivulets of chemical sluice off her heavy fleece and run back into the trench as she flees.
The acrid smell of the sheep-dip trails after her into the open, green field.
14. The Mole and the Shotgun
(Oxfordshire, England)
My father is at war with the moles. An ex-military man, I think he enjoys keeping a double-barrelled shotgun in his office. A strange magical presence, that is not to be touched and has never, to my knowledge, been moved, let alone fired.
The little mounds of brown earth have been steadily extending their range. Moving down from the fields and now encroaching onto the lawn. Somewhere below the grass, a mole has been busily enlarging her earthworks. Silent and unseen. Feeling her way through the earth with the stealth of a resistance fighter. Sensitive to the tiny tremors of approaching worms, and the earthquakes of human feet. Alert to the scent of beetles and the slime of slugs, all seeping down through the loam. Unseen, except for the scattergun pimpling of the neatly mown lawn.
The only actual mole I have seen was a dead one, mysteriously lying beside a path. A black velvet sausage with two shovel hands sticking out from her sides and tiny, almost invisible black eyes.
Scooping away the crumbly earth from molehills on either side of the lawn, my father’s hands reveal the small entrances to the mole’s network of tunnels. He lights the fuse of a special firework and rams it down into one of these openings, then packs the earth back down to reseal the tunnel. We walk to the other side of the lawn and my dad trains his shotgun on the remaining open mole hole.
I’m terrified and excited to hear the blast of this gun.
After several long minutes, a faint stream of toxic smoke does start to emerge from the tunnel’s entrance. But no mole is flushed out. Nothing staggers into the sights of my father’s shotgun. The mole’s entrenchments are perhaps more extensive, or subtle, than my father had imagined.
13. The Frogs’ Lust
(Oxfordshire, England)
Floating in the pond, there is a strange knot of breathing bodies. Frog-like but undecipherable. A mass of arms clenching bellies, upon more bellies, grasping more flesh. Back legs flailing like coronal ejections from a sun. A death star of living frog-flesh. Slowly turning over in the brownish water.
I’ve already learned that when there is a hint of spring in the air, I begin to find interesting things in the pond. The smaller male frogs, riding like jockeys on the backs of the larger females. Tiny arms clasped around bloated female bodies. Male froggy ‘hands’ locking across wet, balloon-like flesh.
But this multi-legged ball of frogs is something different. Something inexplicable. I try to pry one of the outer frogs away from the gulping mass, but he struggles and grips tighter to the frogs below. The slimy mass is throbbing with yearning croaks. I sense this is something that belongs to a world I know nothing about. A world of the future.
12. Bruna’s Belly
(Oxfordshire, England)
In the cold, early mornings, I would sometimes have to join the milking. Half asleep, I’d help to wheel the clanking churns over the frost-brittle grass, and up the track to the cowshed. My father named all the cows after Italian women, or maybe lovers:
“Brunaaaa…”
“Stellaaaa…”
“Mariaaaa…”
In the distance, large brown shapes would heave themselves into gentle motion, and then gracefully sway their bellies down the hillside. Inside the cowshed, the Jersey cows would eagerly allow their necks to be chained so they could reach down into the hay trough. A munching, grinding, and slurping of last year’s sweet, dusty grass. Gulps swallowed greedily down into their baroque and mysterious stomachs.
Perched on a low stool, leaning into their milky mass, we would begin.
Milking is a long process, with a drowsy rhythm. Full-to-bursting udders, each with four soft teats. My thumbs and forefingers encircle the necks of two pink nipples – full and slightly dribbling. Thumbs press against forefingers – closing off the milk below in the teat. Gently but firmly pulling downwards, whilst clenching middle finger, then ring finger, then pinky. Ahead of my closing fist, a strong jet of steaming milk squirts out to hit the ringing silver bucket. Frothing down into a gathering whiteness.
Squeeze, and down.
Squeeze, and down.
A shuffling of hooves, a shifting of bovine mass.
Squeeze, and down.
Squeeze, and down.
There’s a place between a cow’s enormous belly and the muscles of her thigh. A warm triangular hollow where you can rest your sleepy head and hide from the cold air.
Squeeze, and down.
Nuzzling into the warm, milky hide.
Squeeze, and down.
A rumbling by my ear. Deep inside Bruna’s vast belly, last year’s dusty sunlight is transforming into winter’s creamy milk.
11. The Slow-Worm’s Tail
(Oxfordshire, England)
A dry rustling under the leaves. A glimpse of liquid skin, slinking between the roots. We’ve seen slow-worms before, but never been this close. She’s curled in the cleft of a knobbly tree root. A sleek corn-yellow head. Two tiny dark beads of eyes staring back at us. A lizard that discarded its legs to become a surrogate snake.
She’s motionless. Tensed.
I move my hand slowly closer. And closer. Another inch, and suddenly she flicks into motion. My hand grabs for her glistening body. Milliseconds of writhing confusion. A frantic, glinting thing in my fist. One snake drops to the ground and flashes away through the undergrowth. In my hand another snake is still twisting madly between my fingers. A possessed ‘S’, flipping itself frantically inside and out. But this is only half a snake. The flexing muscle-worm ends abruptly in a salami-wound of flesh. No liquid, but blood-red. A tail that has lost its mind. A limb distracting a predator, to allow its host to flee.
I drop the automaton in horror, and it writhes maniacally amongst the leaves. Twisting over and over in a blind, unwinding ecstasy.
10. The Lamb’s Tail
(Oxfordshire, England)
I grew up around sheep in the rolling hills that lie to the west of London. I was born in ‘Room 10’ of a post-war commune – a utopian experiment in communal living housed in a rundown gothic mansion with a small farm attached. Both the house and the farm were run by a group of eccentric and confused idealists looking for a better way to live. My earliest memories are of helping my parents in the spring with the lambing. Carrying the fresh, still-wet lambs back to the barn from the early-morning fields. The cruel tool that snapped a bright orange ring onto their skinny tails. The same tails that we would later find disembodied, lying amongst the nettles of summer.
And on a Sunday, when paying guests arrived, we would sometimes get to eat one of the lambs.
9. The Bee’s Sting
(Oxfordshire, England)
Barefoot on the grass, my sister steps on something, and starts to scream. Collapsing onto the lawn, she clutches her foot and sobs in pain. Inspecting her big toe, I find a tiny sac of glistening tissue connected to a spike in her skin. The thing is wet and pulsing. A disembodied organ pumping poison into my sister’s toe: a sting and venom sac, ripped from the body of a now-dying honeybee.
I want to help, but I’m also fascinated by this tiny bit of alien – flexing itself in my sister’s foot. I attempt to remove the minuscule organ, but my body is the wrong scale. Held between my enormous thumb and finger, all I achieve is to squeeze the tiny sac and inject a rush of venom into my sister’s toe. Against the background of my sister’s screams, I watch as a greenish liquid radiates out from the sting and speeds away into the flesh and veins of my sister’s foot.
8. The Shetland Pony’s Revenge
(Oxfordshire, England)
In a field near the next village, there is a Shetland pony. Fascinated by her scale, I put my hand through the fence to stroke her. The pony locks her teeth around my arm. I scream and pull, but the pony is determined. Her teeth sink deeper into my flesh. My dad arrives, but still the monster won’t let go.
Sometimes I hate my father. He can scare me, and when he comes back from London the hairs of his moustache are rough on the skin of my cheek. Sometimes, though, he is a hero. He blocks the nostrils of the malevolent beast. To breathe, the pony must loosen her grip, and I slip free.
7. The Fly’s Path
(Oxfordshire, England)
Delirious in bed with a fever, the walls of my room expanding and contracting, and above me a single fly drawing a zigzag path through the air. A faint drone of her wings. Each circuit she makes is a series of buzz-straight lines that end in sudden, tight turns. A jagged, ancient symbol being carefully transcribed into the hot, still air. I can’t do anything but watch and sweat, whilst my bed is marked out with an invisible rune.
6. Bilbo’s Eyes
(Oxfordshire, England)
I have a white rabbit called Bilbo, named after the small hero from Tolkien’s The Hobbit. I love him deeply and neglectfully. On the green at the back of the house, Bilbo has a chicken-wire enclosure that can be shifted once in a while to offer the hungry rabbit new growths of dandelions and grass (after he has close-cropped the current rectangle down to its roots). This is supplemented (when I remember) with old vegetables from the kitchen: bendy carrots, limp lettuce, and tired cabbage leaves.
It’s hard to interact with a rabbit. Bilbo doesn’t really do much except eat and twitch his light grey nose. His dark eyes stare back impassively, and it’s impossible to tell whether Bilbo is happy, scared, or hungry. Or even if he knows that he is: Bilbo, a surrogate Hobbit with a Hobbit’s hairy feet. Really, I wanted a dog – but I’ll take what I can get. Bilbo can’t fetch sticks, but I can hold him close, and his warm fur is so soft against my face.
Something is wrong with Bilbo’s eyes.
They start to bulge and turn milky. His body is shrinking back to ribs and bones, except where it’s growing outwards in strange lumps and pustules. His once-implacable eyes are now weeping streams of grey fluid. Squeezing out of his tiny skull.
Myxomatosis. A word that doesn’t belong to floppy, white rabbits. Its cruel, scientific syllables sit like alien metal in my mouth. Myx-o-ma-to-sis. A disease deliberately brought by humans to ‘control’ the surges of alien rabbits – close-cropping their way across Australia and Northern Europe.
I want to hug the fading Bilbo, but I’m scared of his eyes. My father deals with the problem in his cold, scientific way. In the night whilst I’m asleep.
5. The Crow’s Child
(Oxfordshire, England)
Crash-landed under the beech trees, we find an ugly little mutant. She’s still alive, but helpless. Grey, wrinkled skin; swollen eyes slightly twitching under puffy, closed lids. A beak rimmed with indecent red. A premature fledgling evicted by a nestmate.
We pick up the hatchling and are only vaguely aware of a croaking commotion somewhere above our heads. A flapping, screeching shape tumbles violently down out of the canopy above us. A black umbrella hysterically flapping itself into our terrified faces. We drop our discovery and run back to the house without stopping.
4. The Tadpole’s Limbs
(Oxfordshire, England)
The ornamental pond fills with pillows of frogspawn. The black dots begin to wriggle in their capsules, and small aliens emerge in black swarms of activity. Little buds appear at the rear of their bodies and become two back legs. Their tails begin to shrink, and as their front legs take shape, the space-creatures have mutated into proto-frogs. Perfect but tiny.
I’m playing with some of the froglets, and I’ve found them a boat – a flat-topped half-log heavy enough to glide through the water when I give it a push. Several frogs are sitting on the deck, and there is one dangling off the front – looking back at me. She clings to the prow with her hind legs still in the water as the boat sails across the small pond. The log hits the vertical stone side with a thud.
The frog at the prow has lost a leg. There doesn’t seem to be any blood, and the frog’s face looks exactly the same as it did before, but where there was once a limb, there is now a tiny stump.
I run away.
3. The Hooting of Monkeys
(Oxfordshire, England)
Watching the monkeys in London Zoo, I’m fascinated by the speed with which they swing through their cage. How one hand reaches into space for a rung as the other lets go behind. How they momentarily float through air – screeching with excitement or fear.
The chase stops, and I realise that I’m alone. Just cages of different animals and one small human – left in the grey winter light. All I can do is stay here with the monkeys – hooting and laughing on the other side of the bars.
2. Charlie’s Freedom
(Oxfordshire, England)
We build a nest for Charlie on the mantelpiece, but he refuses to sit in our den. The pale-blue bird flies up to the curtain rail, and I am shocked to see that he remembers how to fly. I scramble onto the windowsill, but Charlie flies off around the room – hitting the walls, the posters, the ceiling – before slipping elegantly past me and through the half-open window. Out into a pale-blue sky.
1. The Warmth of Fur
(Oxfordshire, England)
Golden light surrounds me as I push my face into her doggy fur. My small arms are trying to encircle her torso, and I’m giggling wildly as she sways me backwards and forwards with her warm bulk.
I’m not sure that I’ve learned the correct word for ‘dog’ yet, but I know she’s one of the most exciting and softest things that I’ve met on this planet so far.