Playing for the Ashes

  But I can’t. One time I would have done, but I seem to have lost the part of me that could leap from out of nowhere, snarling and trying to wound.

  He’s watching me. He knows that I know. One word from me and we can have the discussion he has no doubt promised Amanda that we’ll have. “I’ll tell her about us,” he probably whispers when they’ve finished and their bodies are slick with that blend of loving each other and sweat. “I’ll tell her. I will.” He kisses her neck, her cheek, her mouth. Her leg shifts and locks round his. He says, “Amanda,” or “Mandy,” against her mouth in place of a kiss. They doze.

  No. I won’t think of them like that. I won’t think of them at all. Chris has a right to his life, just as I’ve had a right to mine. And I broke enough of the organisation’s rules myself while I was an active member.

  Once I proved myself physically to Chris’s satisfaction—running, climbing, jumping, sliding, slithering, and doing whatever else he commanded—I began to attend the open meetings of the educational branch of ARM. These were held in churches, schools, and community centres where antivivisectionists from half a dozen organisations pressed information upon the local citizenry. Through this means, I came to know the hows and the whats of animal research: what Boots was doing in Thurgarton, what factory farms are like, how many mongrels at Laundry Farm were alleged to be stolen pets, the neurotic behaviour of caged minks in Halifax, the number of biological suppliers who breed animals for labs. I became familiar with the moral and ethical arguments on both sides of the issue. I read what I was given. I listened to what was said.

  I wanted to be part of an assault unit from the first. I’d like to claim that one look at Beans the morning he arrived at the barge was enough to win me over to the cause. But the truth is that I wanted to be part of an assault unit not because I believed so passionately in saving the animals but because of Chris. What I wanted from him. What I wanted to demonstrate about myself to him. Oh, I didn’t admit that, naturally. I told myself that I wanted to be in a unit because the activities surrounding the animals’ liberation seemed to be filled with tension, with the terror of being caught in the act, and—most importantly—with an unbelievable heady exhilaration when an assault was carried off without a hitch. I’d been off the streets for some months at this point. I felt restless, in need of a decent dose of the sort of excitement provided by the unknown, by danger and a hair’s-breadth escape from danger. Taking part in an assault seemed just the ticket.

  The assault units consisted of specialists and runners. The specialists paved the way—infiltrating the target weeks in advance, filching documents, photographing the subjects, mapping out the environment, discovering alarm systems and ultimately deactivating them for the runners. The runners carried out the actual assault at night, led by a captain whose word was law.

  Chris never made an error. He met with his specialists, he met with the governing core of ARM, he met with his runners. One group never saw the other. He was the liaison among us all.

  My first assault with the unit took place nearly a year after Chris and I met. I wanted it sooner, but he wouldn’t allow me to short circuit the process that everyone else went through. So I worked my way up through the organisation and I kept my sights set on battering through what I believed were Chris’s defences against me. No doubt you see how ignoble I was.

  My first assault was made upon a study of spinal cord injuries taking place in a red-brick university two hours from London where Chris had had a specialist in place for seven weeks. We arrived in four cars and a mini-van, and while the sentries moved forward to eliminate the security lights, the rest of us crouched in the shelter of a yew hedge and listened to Chris’s final instructions.

  Our primary goal was the animals, he told us. Our secondary goal was the research. Liberate the first. Destroy the second. But only move on to the secondary goal if and when the first was achieved. Take all animals. The decision would be made later as to which of them could be kept.

  “Kept?” I whispered. “Chris, aren’t we here to save them all? We aren’t going to return any of them, are we?”

  He ignored me and pulled down his ski mask. The moment the security lights blinked off, he said, “Now,” and sent in the first wave of the unit: the liberators.

  I can still see them, head-to-toe black figures moving in the darkness like dancers. They glided across the courtyard, using the deeper shadows of the trees for protection. We lost sight of them as they bled round the side of the building. Chris held a torch beam on his watch while a girl called Karen shielded the light with her hands.

  Two minutes went by. I watched the building. A pinpoint of light made an eyeblink from a ground-floor window. “They’re in,” I said.

  “Now,” Chris said.

  I was in the unit’s second wave: the transporters. Equipped with carriers, we dashed across the courtyard, low to the ground. By the time we reached the building, two of the windows were open. Hands reached for us, pulled us inside. It was someone’s office, filled with the shapes of books, folders, a word processor and printer, graphs on the walls, charts. We slipped out of it and into a corridor. A light winked once to our left. The liberators were already in the lab.

  The only sounds were our breathing, the snap of cages being opened, the weak cry of the kittens. Torches flicked on and off, just enough to verify that an animal was in a cage. The liberators shifted cats and kittens. The transporters darted back to the open window with the cardboard carriers. And the receivers—the final wave of the unit—raced silently with the carriers back to the cars and the mini-van. The entire operation was designed to take less than ten minutes.

  Chris came in last. He carried the paint, the sand, and the honey. As the transporters melted back into the night, joining the receivers at the cars, he and the liberators destroyed the research. They allowed themselves two minutes among the papers, the graphs, the computers, and the files. When time was up, they slid back out the window and dashed across the courtyard. The window was closed behind them, locked as it had been before. While we waited at the edge of the courtyard—sheltered again by the hedge—the sentries materialised round the side of the building. They slipped into the deeper darkness near the trees. They moved from shadow to shadow until they rejoined us.

  “Quarter of an hour,” Chris whispered. “Too slow.”

  He jerked his head and we followed him between the buildings and back to the cars. The receivers had already put the animals in Chris’s mini-van and gone on their way.

  “Tuesday night,” Chris said in a low voice. “Practical manoeuvres.” He climbed into the van. He peeled off his mask. I followed. We waited until the remaining cars drove off in different directions. Chris started the van. We headed southwest.

  “Great, great, great,” I said. I leaned over. I pulled Chris towards me. I kissed him. He righted himself and kept his eyes on the road. “That was great. That was something. God! Did you see us? Did you see us? We were flaming invincible.” I laughed and clapped my hands. “When do we do it again? Chris, answer. When do we do it again?”

  He didn’t reply. He stepped down hard on the accelerator. The mini-van zoomed forward. Behind us, the cardboard carriers slid back a few inches. Several kittens mewed.

  “What’re we going to do with them? Chris, answer. What’re we going to do with them? We can’t keep them all. Chris, you aren’t planning to keep them all, are you?”

  He glanced at me. He looked back at the road. The lights from the dashboard made his face appear yellow. A roadsign for the M20 loomed in the headlamps. He guided the van to the left towards the motorway.

  “Have you homes lined up already? Are we going to deliver them this morning, like the milk? Oh, but let’s keep one. She’ll be a souvenir. I’ll call her Break-in.”

  He winced. He looked like something was pinching him behind his eyes.

  I said, “Did you get hurt? Did you cut yourself? Did you hurt your hands? Shall I drive? I’ll drive. Chris, pull over. Let me d
rive.”

  He stepped harder on the accelerator. I watched the needle on the speedometer creep higher. The kittens cried.

  I twisted in my seat and pulled one of the carriers towards me, saying, “Okay, you. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  Chris said, “Livie.”

  “Who are you? What’s your name? Are you glad to be out of that nasty old place?”

  Chris said, “Livie.”

  But I already had the top open and I was scooping the little ball of fur into my hand. I could see the kitten was a tabby, grey-brown and white with overlarge ears and eyes. I said, “Oh, you’re a sweet one,” and rested the kitten on my lap. He mewled. His little claws caught at my leggings. He began to crawl towards my knees.

  Chris said, “Put him back,” just at the moment that I noticed the kitten’s back legs. They dangled, useless and twisted, behind him. His tail hung limp. A long thin incision ran along his spine, held together by blood-crusted metal sutures. Towards his shoulders the incision oozed pus that matted against the fur.

  I felt myself recoil. “Shit!” I said.

  Chris said, “Put him back in the carrier.”

  “I…What’s he…What’s been done…?”

  “They’ve broken his spinal cord. Put him back.”

  I couldn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to touch him. I pressed my head against the back of the seat.

  “Take him off me,” I said. “Chris. Please.”

  “What did you think? What in hell did you think?”

  I squeezed my eyes closed. I felt the tiny claws against my skin. I saw the kitten against the back of my eyelids. They burned. My face burned. The kitten mewled. I felt his small head brush my hand.

  “I’m going to be sick,” I said.

  Chris swerved into a layby. He got out, slammed the door, came round to my side. He yanked my door open. I heard him curse.

  He scooped the kitten off me and pulled me out of the van. He said, “What’d you think this was? A game? What’d you think this was, for God’s sake?”

  His voice was high and tight. The sound of it rather than what he said made me open my eyes. He looked like I felt: punched in the gullet. He cradled the kitten against his chest.

  “Come here,” he said. He walked to the rear of the van. “I said come here.”

  “Don’t make me—”

  “Goddamn it. Come here, Livie. Now.”

  He flung the rear door open. He began to tear at the carriers’ tops. “Look,” he said. “Livie. Come here. I’m telling you to look.”

  “I don’t need to see.”

  “We’ve got broken spinal cords.”

  “Don’t.”

  “We’ve got open brains.”

  “No.”

  “We’ve got skull-mounted plugs and—”

  “Chris!”

  “—electrodes sutured into muscles.”

  “Please.”

  “No. Look. Look.” And then his voice broke. And he leaned his forehead against the van. And he started to cry.

  I watched. I couldn’t move to him. I heard his weeping and the cries of the animals blend together. I could think of nothing but being at least a hundred miles away from this narrow layby in the darkness with a cool breeze blowing from the distant channel. His shoulders quaked. I took a step towards him. I knew in that instant that there was no redemption if I did not look. At the half-shaven and thoroughly broken bodies, the shrivelled limbs, the swelling and the sutures, the clots of dried blood.

  I went hot then cold. I thought about my words. I considered all the things I didn’t know. I turned away. I said, “Here, Chris. Give him to me.” I loosened Chris’s fingers, took the kitten, and held him cradled in my hands. I put him back in his carrier. I closed the tops of the others. I shut the van door and grasped Chris’s arm. “Here,” I said and led him to the passenger’s seat.

  When we were both inside, I said, “Where’s Max waiting for us?” because I now knew what he’d kept to himself throughout planning the assault, throughout carrying it off. “Chris,” I asked again, “where’re we to meet Max?”

  So we put them down, those kittens and cats, one by one. Max administered the injections. Chris and I held them. We held them against our chests so that the last thing each little animal felt was a human heart beating steadily against him.

  When we were finished, Max gripped my shoulder. “Not the initiation you were expecting, was it?”

  I shook my head numbly. I laid the final little body in the box that Max had ready for the purpose.

  “Well done, girlie,” Max said.

  Chris turned and went out into the early morning. It was just before dawn, the moment when the sky hasn’t decided between darkness and light, so both exist simultaneously. To the west the sky was shrouded, dove grey. To the east, it was feathered with rose-edged clouds.

  Chris was standing next to the mini-van, his hand on its roof curled into a fist. He watched the dawn.

  I said, “Why do people do what they do?”

  He shook his head blindly. He got into the van. On the way back to Little Venice, I held his hand. I wanted to comfort him. I wanted to make things right.

  When we got back to the barge, Toast and Beans met us at the door. They whimpered and rustled round our legs.

  “They want a run,” I said. “Shall I take them?”

  Chris nodded. He threw his rucksack into a chair and headed for his room. I heard his door close.

  I took the dogs out and we loped and gambolled along the canal. They chased a ball, tussling with each other and growling, racing to drop the ball at my feet then dashing ahead with a happy yelp to fetch it again. When they’d had enough and the morning was beginning to stir with school children and commuters on their way to work, we wandered back to the barge. It was dark inside, so I opened the shutters in the workroom. I fed and watered the dogs. I crept quietly along the passageway and paused outside the door to Chris’s room. I tapped against it. He didn’t answer. I tried the knob and went in.

  He was lying on the bed. He’d taken off his jacket and his shoes, but he still wore the rest of his clothes: black jeans, black pullover, black socks with a hole at the heel of the right one. He wasn’t asleep. Rather he was gazing, unblinking, at a photograph that stood among the books on his bookshelf. I’d seen it before. Chris and his brother at five and eight years old. They were kneeling in the muck and grinning happily, their arms slung over the neck of a baby donkey. Chris was dressed as Sir Galahad. His brother was dressed like Robin Hood.

  I tipped my knee against the edge of the bed. I put my hand on his leg.

  He said, “Odd.”

  “What?”

  “That. I was supposed to become a barrister as well. Like Jeffrey. Have I told you?”

  “Only that he’s a barrister. Not the other.”

  “Jeff’s got ulcers. I didn’t want them. I want to make change, I told him, and this isn’t the way to go about it. Change happens from working within the system, he said. I thought he was wrong. But I was.”

  “You weren’t.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  I sat on the edge of the bed. “You weren’t wrong,” I said. “Look how you’ve changed me.”

  “People change themselves.”

  “Not always. Not now.”

  I lay next to him, my head sharing his pillow, my face close to his. His eyelids dropped. I touched my fingers to them. I traced his sandy lashes. I grazed the pockmarks that peppered his cheekbones.

  “Chris,” I whispered.

  Other than closing his eyes, he hadn’t moved. “Hmm?”

  “Nothing.”

  Have you ever wanted someone so much that you ache between the legs? That’s what it was like. My heart beat just like it always beat. My breathing didn’t alter. But I was throbbing and sore. I felt the need for him burn like a hot ring pressing into my body.

  I knew what to do: where to place my hands, how to move, when to loosen his clothes and rid my
self of my own. I knew how to arouse him. I knew exactly what he would like. I knew how best to make him forget.

  OLIVIA

  The ache climbed my body like a white-hot shaft. And I had the power to obliterate the pain. All I needed to do was go back to the past. Be a young swan floating on the Serpentine, be a cloud in the sky, be a doe in the forest, be a pony running wild in the wind of Dartmoor. Be anything that allowed me to perform without feeling. Make any one of the hundred moves I’d once indifferently made for money, and the ache would dissolve with Chris’s surrender.

  I did nothing. I lay on his bed and I watched him sleep. By the time the pain climbed my body to arrive in my throat, I’d admitted the worst to myself about love.

  I hated him at first. I hated what he had brought me to. I hated the woman he had proven to me that I could become.

  I swore then that I’d eradicate emotion, and I began the process by taking on every bloke I could find. I had them in cars, in squats, in underground stations, in parks, in pub toilets, and on the barge. I made them bark like dogs. I made them sweat and weep. I made them beg. I watched them crawl. I heard them gasp and howl. Chris never reacted. He never said a word, until I began to go to work on the blokes who were part of our assault unit.

  They were such easy pickings. Sensitive to begin with, they felt the excitement of a successful assault as much as I did. They received the suggestion of a post-assault celebration like the innocents they were. They said initially, “But we’re not supposed to…” and “Actually, it’s my understanding that outside the structure of the organisation’s regular activities, we aren’t allowed…” and “Gosh, we can’t, Livie. We gave our word. About getting involved.” To which I said, “Pooh. Who’s going to know? I’m not going to tell anyone. Are you?” To which they replied, with a heavy blush climbing their peach-skin cheeks, “I wouldn’t tell. Of course not. I’m not that sort.” To which I said in all wide-eyed innocence, “What sort? I’m only talking about having a drink together.” To which they would stammer, “Of course. I didn’t mean…I wouldn’t presume to think…”

  I took them to the barge, these blokes. They said, “Livie, we can’t. At least not here. If Chris finds out, we’re finished.” I said, “You let me worry about Christopher,” and I closed the door behind us. “Or don’t you want to?” I said. I locked my fingers round the buckles of their belts and pulled them forward. I lifted my mouth to theirs. “Or don’t you want to?” I asked and insinuated my fingers into their jeans. “Well?” I said against their mouths as I hooked one arm round their waists. “Do you or don’t you? Better make up your mind.”