SSC (2001) The Dog Catcher (26 page)

‘Tell
the truth, you like hearing about it.’

‘No
way, man, I’m being social servicin’ is all …’ he tried a pause but couldn’t
hold it, his impatience getting in the way, ‘… so get on with it.’

‘Oh
alright.’ I gave in as I always did. ‘What you have to remember about Kenya,’ I
said, ‘was that while the rest of the British Empire was settled by those from
all classes, more of those in Kenya came from the upper classes. They were
famous before the war for the life they led.’

Eagerly
he asked, ‘What sort of life?’

‘Drink,
fast cars, hunting, extra-marital affairs, sexual perversion.

‘Brilliant
… and nice weather too, innit?’

‘Yes
and nice weather too. I don’t know why but somehow I always had the feeling the
way the settlers carried on led to the Mau Mau uprising, after all it didn’t
happen like that anywhere else in Africa, sort of brought it on themselves, a
price to pay for their decadence …’

‘Why,
they was just enjoyin’ theirselves.’

‘Maybe.
The whole thing’s almost forgotten about now … odd, really, when you think
about it. The Mau Mau starts out as a bloody insurrection and ends up as a hat.’

‘A hat,
what about a hat?’

‘Nothing,
sorry … You should have seen the settlers’ houses, ridiculous Cheshire wooden
villas they were, set in acres of flame trees. In 1953 the Africans rose up.
They called themselves the Mau Mau. I remember in my first week there, we were
called to a farm. A family named Barlow … the son was in the yard … they’d
hacked him with pangas …’

‘That’s
like a machete, right?’

‘Right,
yes, like a machete. He glistened, the son … like that sauce they put on
spare ribs at the Chinese takeaway … purple and deep red … His parents were
in the house … all over the house. And the thing was really that they’d got
the wrong people, if that was their concern. Mrs Barlow was pregnant, ran a
clinic for the Kikkuyu women and children, Mr Barlow was a model employer, had
no intention of evicting the small native farmers which had started the whole
thing … the son spoke Kikkuyu, the family had built lovely cottages for their
workers. On the next farm over was a complete bastard called Magruder, he’d
taken many a black woman and raped them, drove them all off his land, got very
rich. They never touched him. He’s still there now. I think he’s in the
government.’

‘Them’s
the breaks.’

‘I don’t
know. It wasn’t like the Mau Mau didn’t know what the Barlows were like,
because we found out that it was their head boy who had organised the whole
thing, he’d been with the Barlows twenty years, they’d paid for his son to go
to university in Leeds. But all over, domestic servants were at the front of it
all. You know Graham Greene was Out there at that time, we used to have a drink
together sometimes at Rahman’s and he said that it was as if Jeeves had taken
to the Jungle. Even worse, Jeeves had taken a blood oath to kill Bertie
Wooster.’ I could see Bateman was wondering who and what I was talking about.

‘I
couldn’t hold the chaps back. My sergeant shot the head boy and his wife and
his son … A lot of that sort of thing went on, I should really have put them
all on a charge but that would have made me terribly unpopular with my men.

‘They
would’ve fragged ya like they did in Vietnam.’

‘I’m
not sure there’s a lot of that in the British army. There was a terrible panic
amongst the white settlers but you know during the whole thing only thirty-two
whites died; as somebody said, that’s fewer than the number of Europeans killed
in traffic accidents in Nairobi during the emergency. We, on the other hand,
the settlers and the British army and our loyal native police, killed thousands
of Kenyans and they, the Mau Mau, killed thousands of each other.’

Bateman,
becoming bored with my historical contextualising, steered me towards
hardware: he loved talking about guns and he bought all those rap records where
gangstas sang lovingly about their ‘nines’. ‘Course you still had the old .303
Lee Enfield rifles then, didn’t you? And the 9mm sten guns and the .303 Bren
guns for squad support. And they had …?’

‘Apart
from what little they stole off the native police, the Mau Mau made their guns
themselves from odd bits of iron piping, door bolts, rubber bands and bits of
wire. Often, of course, these guns would blow up in their faces. I only once
was in a thing you could call a firefight…’

‘You
were in a firefight? Wow I bet a firefight separates the men from the boys,’
said Bateman.

‘A
firefight certainly separates the men from their heads,’ I said.

‘Wow,
you saw a guy’s head shot off?’

‘Not
literally, I was being poetic. A lot of the fellows thought they’d shot a whole
load of the Mau Mau but when we looked they’d all shot themselves: when your
gun blows up the injuries are obviously facial.’ Then an idea came to me.

‘Bateman,
I was wondering if you and Suki would like to come to my house for dinner on
Saturday night, I’m … er, having a young friend to stay from London and erm
… well, if you’d like to come to dinner—’

‘Sure,
man, why not? What time?’

‘Eight?’

‘Great,
give me a chance to wear my new dress.’

I didn’t want to appear as
if I was trying too hard, as if I had thought of nothing else except her visit
the whole six days, so I wore an old Donegal tweed sports jacket, with one of
the original Pringle pullovers underneath, brown moleskin trousers, a good
leather belt, soft rust-coloured cotton shirt, a dark-green knitted tie, Argyle
socks, and my second-best dark-brown Lobb brogues.

I
waited with my Honda Melody in the car park of Banbury Station. She was one of
the first out from the three o’clock London train with her bouncing walk that
made her black hair bob up and down. She had on a black leather jacket,
turquoise T-shirt with a sparkling abstract design on the chest, and tight blue
faded Wrangler jeans. Over her shoulders she had a backpack shaped like a pair
of silver angel’s wings and on her arm she had brought her own crash helmet
from London.

Angel’s
wings not being the most space-efficient shape for a backpack she had had to
put some of her spare clothes in the crash helmet. A lot of the ease we had with
each other the weekend before had evaporated for the moment, still she kissed
me quickly on the lips and I tried not to look as she transferred lacy red silk
bra and pants underwear from her crash helmet into the little plastic box on
the back of my scooter. Then we puffed the nine miles to Lyttleton Strachey,
her arms wrapped tight around me, the brave little machine wheezing under the
weight of two people for the first time since I had owned it.

I had
washed all the bed linen in the spare room and re-made the single bed, I had
had to leave the windows open for three days to drive out the musty unused
smell. When I had first come to this place I had still entertained ideas of
friends coming out to stay with me. I had thought Larkin might come. Though I
didn’t know him that well we corresponded quite regularly and I think we were
friends. For example in our letters we would use forbidden words as close
friends do, words unusable even forty years ago, like ‘coon’ and ‘sambo’:

I
thought we were doing this in a spirit of flaunting, between friends, the rules
of liberal decency but now, in retrospect, I am not so sure about Larkin. I
think he might have meant it. Anyway he never came.

At the
end of our ride Mercy put her underwear back in the crash helmet and I showed
her up to the spare room and told her where the bathroom was.

All the day before I had
been cleaning my little house, I polished the good Fifties furniture with real
wax furniture polish, silicon-based sprays like Mr Sheen are no good for fine
furniture. What I was proudest of in my house were the paintings. I had known
most of the important artists of the post-war period; this had taken no effort
on my part, one simply bumped into them, in those days there simply weren’t
that many places to go. By and by most everybody would come to the Stork Club,
the Kensington Arts or The Mirabelle, in the other party would be someone from
school or university or the army and an introduction would be made. In the
dining room was a small Patrick Caulfield, in the living room I had several
Henry Moore drawings and, in pride of place over the mantelpiece, a small
Graham Sutherland oil painting. These I ran over with a feather duster and
wiped the frames with a fine cloth slightly dampened, careful not to touch the
precious surface of the paintings.

And all
that morning I had been cooking and baking. Since all but me were vegetarians I
had made a dinner of cream of spinach soup with steamed turnip tops, broccoli
quiche, asparagus risotto, cauliflower cheese and a mixed salad. To drink I had
got Sam to buy me two bottles of Bordeaux and two bottles of Sancerre from D’agneau
et Fils in the Place Gambetta, Calais.

Bateman
brought round a litre bottle of vodka he had shoplifted from the off licence in
Middleton Cheney plus a gift for Mercy: to supplement his dole money Suki and he
made small figures from bits of wire, nuts and bolts that they then covered in
a black rubbery coating and which they sold, quite successfully, from a stall
in the market at Northampton. They gave Mercy the figure of a cat arching its
back and spitting, with its fur sticking up on end. ‘Wow,’ she exclaimed
looking at it from every angle, ‘this is brilliant, just like my Adrian. I’ll
put it on the mantelpiece in front of that painting, so I can look at it while
we talk.’

‘So,
Mercy,’ said Suki, ‘how do you like our village?’

‘Well,
I haven’t seen much of it but it seems lovely. Really pretty and quiet and
that.’

Said
Bateman, ‘You won’t see anybody all day in the outside and all the nature and
that around on the hills, trees and so on, makes you feel really calm and
centred, know what I mean?’

‘Cows
and such.’

Mercy
said, ‘London’s so cold, I bet everybody’s really friendly here.’

‘Oh
yeah we all look out for each other, everybody knows what’s goin’ on with
everybody else.’

‘And
safe.’

‘You
don’t need to lock your door.’

‘Well
you do, but if you didn’t you’d probably be OK if it was only for a couple of
hours.’

After
dinner we walked through the silent village to the noisy pub. The Young Farmers
were holding a disco in the village hall next door, the DJ was playing an old
Nineties hip-hop tune ‘Like A Playa’ by L.A. Gangz, the Notorious B.I.G. Remix
I thought. On the door were stationed three or four beefy farmers’ sons and
daughters; they kept baseball bats tucked behind the door jamb but in easy
reach just in case any drugged-up gangs came out from the estates of Daventry
or Northampton. The beefy boys rather hoped they would come out, cherishing the
opportunity to break a few working-class skulls. The same old story of town
versus country, aristocrat versus prole, the General Strike of 1926 played out
to the soundtrack of DaCompton Ghettoz.

Suddenly
one of the farmers’ boys on the door gave a violent jerk then fell to the
ground, all life gone from his body. His fellows gathered round, three or four
trying to dial the emergency services on their mobiles at the same time and
jamming the signal. The ambulance would take an hour to get here anyway, it
being Saturday night and them all being in play and the nearest available being
in the next county but one.

‘What’s
going on?’ I said to Bateman.

‘Ah
somebody’s been pushing semi-fatal smack in Northampton, the scientists are
baffled, they don’t know what’s wrong with it, possibly something to do with
anthrax they ain’t sure … be that he took I spect.’

The car
park of the pub was full of BMWs and Audis, Range Rovers and Mercedes; we had
to slip in single file between them to get to the front door, the mud on their
sides smearing our clothes.

Inside
it was if all the noise that had been banned from the rest of the village was
let loose in here.

The
lads were at the bar, Marty Spen, Paul Crouch, Miles Godmanchester, Ronny Raul.
I don’t know why in my mind I called them ‘The Lads’, they are all middle-aged
men, all involved in some way or other, as everybody seemed to be in the
village, in making the world a worse place.

As I’ve
said before Miles Godmanchester was employed at Daventry Life Sciences,
mutilating animals for the cosmetics industry, though I had heard him maintain
at the bar in the pub that his work had saved the lives of many ‘sick little
kiddies’. Marty Spen was supposed to keep it quiet but he was an engineer for a
French arms firm whose UK base was in a long gold building, cloistered in a
boskey, wooded valley to the east of Oxford. Their main product was the ‘Bunuel’
ground-to-air missile. Marty Spen was always off to visit some dreadful regime,
Turkey or Indonesia, to help them more efficiently strafe their own populace.
Such peregrination was not unusual; in any village pub round this way half the
customers would be just back from the other side of the globe and half had
never been anywhere at all and would need hypnotherapy before they even
considered visiting nearby Northampton. And you couldn’t guess which was which either.
Some yokel straight out of Thomas Hardy might be heard to say in the pub, ‘Oiv jarst
been instarllin an ethernet modarl intranet system in that thar Yokahama, I
bought I a DV camera at the airport …’ Marty Spen and his wife spent their
holidays every year in Saudi Arabia, guests of a grateful government. Paul
Crouch had something to do with tobacco promoting Formula One cars and Ronny
Raul was a food scientist at US Abstract Foods Corporation on the Banbury ring
road, whose factory would fill the air for miles around with the smell of
whatever they were concocting that day, nutmeg and cinnamon, coffee and
cardamon, saffron and chocolate, the smells of the Damascus souk amongst the tilting
roadsigns and squashed-flat rabbit corpses of the A316.