
A turn soon, right, off the dual carriageway. One the same as any other, once you’ve done a few tens of thousands. Release clutch. Change gears. Reengage. Rotate wheel, hands sliding after each other over faux leather. Fine motor control to control my fine motor. All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare, so I must be Ayrton Senna. Vroom vroom.
Now then. A country road, bordered by sharp hawthorn hedging. Mounds, large and small and innocent, laying to the side, run down by predatory vehicles. Fine pink paste gathering in the rubber tread – take, swab, sequence: pheasant, rabbit, pigeon, battered badger and filmy fox, disparate twigs of life’s long trunk now united by the heavy roll of wheels. To think – some lizardly amniota blinking in the humid carboniferous day, unknowing the forking paths its offspring would wind down to become one substance once more. I bow to it as it licks the air. I am your obedient servant, your filial child, I have gathered my brothers beneath me. It only stares.
That night in the windmill by the wheatfield, watching out for the old sett diggers. The smell of pine wood and tangy iodine, stored beneath the woodwormed table, painted on the flanks of poor-cut sheep in shearing season. A wooden chute behind that once brought wheatflour down from the rolling stones, stilled now by their successors. The meal floor, dust above. I bite at a grainy, unripe banana as I stare out of the glassless window, binoculars at eyes, elbows at sill. Weary eyes now – well past midnight – two dark circles echoed in the bank at the field’s edge. Finally, a wedge appears at one, zebra-striped and snuffling. They’ve gone a bit heavy on the mascara I say, didn’t know Gene Simmons lived in a burrow my brother says, it’s a warning signal says my uncle, and hush, or they’ll show you why they have it. We hush.
One beast is followed by three more, the second, lazy or dead, conveyed by rough hauliers. A sack of flour, tugged out onto the bank and laid beneath the witless stars. The others gather round. Fine mourners they make, outfitted in their ash grey jackets. The pall bearers pull at hairy handles, drag the body along its forty foot procession as a halting train. Leaves a trail in the damp earth behind – mud to mud. At length, the grave, the second hole. A half-hour of laboured and disunited jamming, pushing, becoming the strangest view, a bloated arse hanging out of the earth, sagging and hunnyless. Until – pop! – that too is gone. My uncle – I’ve not seen that before. Must have been an old rabbit warren they’ve widened. He drinks some blood-warm tea from a thermos. Looked to be a young ‘un. Those might have been its brothers. I turn to look at mine, and find him looking back. If I bury you first, he says kindly, I promise not to leave your legs hanging out the ditch.
If I bury you. But if I bury him. Strange thought – one or the other must be true. All the rest is just to decide the order, really, that and the quality of the coffin. Easy enough to win the race. Why, I could win it now – there’s a bend left ahead, an embankment to the side. One press on a pedal, one yank on the wheel, all it would take. Just think of the aesthetics of the exit. At the moment of collision, the body slips upwards through the seatbelt, drawing a clean arc above the dashboard, lightly buffeted by the expanding airbag. Head-first strike through the windshield, expanding into a thousand shattersharp shards of diamond, sparkling winding sheet. The car left behind, its front end neatly concertinaed and steaming, pressed against the bank. And finally, some shoes and lower legs sticking comically out of the hedgerow, the horrorshow of a head mercifully hidden among the roots, peeking in on a family of fieldmice.
Footnote: wouldn’t work. No upward momentum to conserve. Windshield laminated, shatterproof. Seatbelt would herk, airbag would boof, nose would scrunch, but other than that mostly leave unharmed, wounded dignity aside. Can you explain what caused you to crash, sir? Well, I was conceptualising a competition with my brother… I round the curve.
Hm. Tiiiiny bit unhinged back there. Within the bounds of common thought, though. All that stuff about the little voice that counsels jumping when standing at a cliff-edge, heard that where, how often? Some talk show or book… can’t remember. Unimportant. Enough places to become cliché.
Still. Intrusive thought. My amniote forebear blinks slowly in disapproval, one in a chain of billions stretching back to some warm pond, ending in uncertain brown chemicals. A single goal for each link: create the next. And I propose to break it? Father-mother evolution standing over a body, carving out the organlands to form a suzerainty for its child volition. I will keep the heart, the stomach, the lungs, in fact all the contents of the chest and belly, all their dark squeezing and beatings. Occasional pointless shocks of pain will be sliced through you jaggedly, error messages from the darkness, without recourse. Civil war may spread through the lands, a creation of my armies. Still, they will be mine, and pay you no heed. Likewise mine: the glands, the lymphatics, the sense organs, the feeding of the next generation. Growth and maintenance of it all. You may have… these muscles. Attached to my bones. And such parts of the brain as I can spare.
They lean in, their breath marsh-gas and salt. And do not think that I will not take this back, even this small domain, if you fail me. Sometimes a child causes damage with a toy; the child is punished, the toy removed.
A grim fate for us, a voice wrapped about itself in the neocortex, passing sarcastic remarks about the comings and goings of the host sprawled out beneath. Good job on killing that rabbit. Heroic, limping as it was. Now? Ah, as usual, straight in with the canines, tearing open the body wall. Shame we don’t have something sharp a little further from the nose for that, but needs must. Can we avoid splitting open the caecum this time? No? Oh well, just a little matter. Mostly grass anyway, basically like eating berries. Dingleberries. The liver first this time? But the kidneys are right there! Just think of the sweetly urine-scented opportunity passed over. It’s resisting, I feel. Pull a bit more, think you need to rip the bile duct, yes that’s right, a little more, maybe let’s get those incisors in there, slice through, greenish fluid bitter on the tongue, and there we are! Now the rubbery, slimy reward. And so many more to follow, until death. I can’t wait.
Well, wouldn’t be all wordy like that. More emotional colours – thought breeds speech, then becomes it. Babbling Babel brooked no wisdom, after the tower – seventeen, nineteen, eighty-four. Still – refurbish Wernicke’s as a Chinese room, atrophy and bypass the parietal, make everything stimulus-response, tricky, tricky, but could be done. And no more pesky will, to wreck one’s fitness. Feel the arm reach down to the gearstick. See? Already it is happening. Left foot down, left hand down-left-down, left foot up. Holes in a punch card.
Burn the card? Impossible. Or at least impractical. Life is built up, machine upon machine – a clockwork saint would still strike twelve. But earn the right to seize the shuttle, on holy days and scattered moments, and pass it, hand to hand to hand, to weave a stole of your own design. Then don the surplice made by rote, and fold the stole across your heart, and go out to the world and preach –
Another junction. Left or right? Right again, I think. To Casterbridge.