A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (12 page)

Around that time she went to the zoo. It was their horns that fascinated her. They were all silky, as if they’d been covered with some posh material from a smart shop. They looked like branches in some forest where nobody had trodden for centuries; soft, sheeny, mossy branches. She imagined a sloping bit of wood with a gentle light and some fallen nuts cracking beneath her foot. Yeah, and a cottage made out of gingerbread at the end of the path, said her best friend Sandra when she told her. No, she thought, the antlers turn into branches, the branches into antlers. Everything’s connected, and the reindeer
can
fly.

She saw them fighting once, on television. They butted and raged at one another, charged headlong, tangled horns. They fought so hard they rubbed the skin off their antlers. She thought that underneath there’d be just dry bone, and their horns would look like winter branches stripped of their bark by hungry animals. But it wasn’t like that. Not at all. They bled. The skin was torn off and underneath was blood as well as bone. The antlers turned scarlet and white, standing out in the soft greens and browns of the landscape like a tray of bones at the butcher’s. It was horrible, she thought, yet we ought to face it. Everything
is
connected, even the parts we don’t like, especially the parts we don’t like.

*

She watched the television a lot after the first big accident. It wasn’t a very serious accident, they said, not really, not like a bomb going off. And anyway it was a long way away, in Russia, and they didn’t have proper modern power stations over there like we do, and even if they did their safety standards were obviously much lower so it couldn’t happen here and there wasn’t anything to worry about, was there? It might even teach the Russians a lesson, people said. Make them think twice about dropping the big one.

In a strange way people were excited by it. Something bigger than the latest unemployment figures or the price of a stamp. Besides, most of the nasty things were happening to other people. There was a cloud of poison, and everyone tracked its course like they’d follow the drift of quite an interesting area of low pressure on the weather map. For a while people stopped buying milk, and asked the butcher where the meat came from. But soon they stopped worrying, and forgot about it all.

At first the plan had been to bury the reindeer six feet down. It wasn’t much of a news story, just an inch or two on the foreign page. The cloud had gone over where the reindeer grazed, poison had come down in the rain, the lichen became radioactive, the reindeer had eaten the lichen and got radioactive themselves. What did I tell you, she thought, everything is connected.

People couldn’t understand why she got so upset. They said she shouldn’t be sentimental, and after all it wasn’t as if she had to live off reindeer meat, and if she had some spare sympathy going shouldn’t she save it for human beings? She tried to explain, but she wasn’t very good at explaining and they didn’t understand. The ones who thought they understood said, Yes, we see, it’s all about your childhood and the silly romantic ideas you had when you were a kid, but you can’t go on having silly romantic ideas all your life, you’ve got to grow up in the end, you’ve got to be realistic, please don’t cry, no maybe that’s a good idea, here, have a good cry, it’ll probably be good for you in the long run. No, it’s not like that, she said, it’s not like that at all. Then cartoonists started making jokes, about how the reindeer were so gleaming with radioactivity that Father Christmas didn’t need headlights on his sleigh, and Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer had a very shiny nose because he came from Chernobyl; but she didn’t think it was funny.

Listen, she’d tell people. The way they measure the level of radioactivity is in something called becquerels. When the accident happened the Norwegian government had to decide what amount of radiation in meat was safe, and they came up with a figure of 600 becquerels. But people didn’t like the idea
of their meat being poisoned, and the Norwegian butchers didn’t do such good business, and the one sort of meat no-one would buy was reindeer, which was hardly surprising. So this is what the government did. They said that as people obviously weren’t going to eat reindeer very often because they were so scared, then it would be just as safe for them to eat meat that was more contaminated every once in a while as to eat less contaminated meat more often. So they raised the permitted limit for reindeer meat to 6,000 becquerels. Hey presto! One day it’s harmful to eat meat with 600 becquerels in it, the next day it’s safe with ten times that amount. This only applied to reindeer, of course. At the same time it’s still officially dangerous to eat a pork chop or scrag end of lamb with 601 becquerels in it.

One of the TV programmes showed a couple of Lapp farmers bringing a reindeer corpse in for inspection. This was just after the limit had been raised ten times. The official from the Department of whatever it was, Agriculture or something, chopped up the little bits of reindeer innards and did the usual tests on them. The reading came out at 42,000 becquerels. Forty-two
thousand
.

At first the plan was to bury them, six feet down. Still, there’s nothing like a good disaster to get people thinking clever thoughts.
Bury
the reindeer? No, that makes it look as if there’s been a problem, like something’s actually gone wrong. There must be a more useful way of disposing of them. You couldn’t feed the meat to humans, so why not feed it to animals? That’s a good idea – but which animals? Obviously not the sort which end up getting eaten by humans, we’ve got to protect number one. So they decided to feed it to the mink. What a clever idea. Mink aren’t supposed to be very nice, and anyway the sort of people who can afford mink coats probably don’t mind a little dose of radioactivity on top of it. Like a dash of scent behind the ears or something. Rather chic, really.

Most people had stopped paying attention to what she was telling them by now, but she always carried on. Listen, she said, so instead of burying the reindeer they’re now painting a big blue stripe down the carcases and feeding them to mink. I think
they should have buried them. Burying things gives you a proper sense of shame. Look what we’ve done to the reindeer, they’d say as they dug the pit. Or they might, at least. They might think about it. Why are we always punishing animals? We pretend we like them, we keep them as pets and get soppy if we think they’re reacting like us, but we’ve been punishing animals from the beginning, haven’t we? Killing them and torturing them and throwing our guilt on to them?

*

She gave up eating meat after the accident. Every time she found a slice of beef on her plate or a spoonful of stew she thought of reindeer. The poor beasts with their horns stripped bare and all bloody from fighting. Then the row of carcases each with a stripe of blue paint down its back, clanking past on a row of shiny hooks.

That, she explained, was when she first came here. Down south, that is. People said she was silly, she was running away, wasn’t being realistic, if she felt that strongly about things she ought to stay and argue against them. But it depressed her too much. People didn’t listen enough to her arguments. Besides, you should always go where you believe the reindeer can fly:
that
was being realistic. They couldn’t fly up in the north any more.

*

I wonder what’s happened to Greg. I wonder if he’s safe. I wonder what he thinks about me, now he knows I was right. I hope he doesn’t hate me for it. Men often hate you for being right. Or perhaps he’ll pretend nothing has even happened; that way he can be sure he was right. Yes, it wasn’t what you thought, it was just a comet burning out in the sky, or a summer storm, or a hoax on TV. Silly cow.

Greg was an ordinary bloke. Not that I wanted anything different when I met him. He went to work, came home, sat around, drank beer, went out with his mates and drank some more beer, sometimes slapped me around a bit on pay-night. We got on fair enough. Argued about Paul, of course. Greg said
I ought to get him fixed so he’d be less aggressive and stop scratching the furniture. I said it wasn’t anything to do with that, all cats scratched the furniture, maybe we should get him a scratching pole. Greg said how did I know that wouldn’t encourage him, like giving him permission to scratch everything a whole lot more? I said don’t be daft. He said it was scientifically proved that if you castrate cats they’re less aggressive. I said wasn’t the opposite more likely – that if you mutilated them it’d make them angry and violent? Greg picked up this big pair of scissors and said well why don’t we bloody find out then? I screamed.

I wouldn’t let him have Paul fixed, even if he did mess up the furniture quite a bit. Later I remembered something. They castrate reindeer, you know. The Lapps do. They pick out a big stag and castrate it and that makes it tame. Then they hang a bell round its neck and this bell-bull as they call it leads the rest of the reindeer around, wherever the herdsmen decide they want them to go. So the idea probably does work, but I still think it’s wrong. It’s not a cat’s fault that it’s a cat. I didn’t tell any of this to Greg of course, about the bell-bulls. Sometimes, when he slapped me around, I’d think, maybe we ought to get you fixed first, that might make you less aggressive. But I never did say it. It wouldn’t have helped.

We used to row about animals. Greg thought I was soft. Once I told him they were turning all the whales into soap. He laughed and said that was a bloody good way of using them up. I burst into tears. I suppose as much because he could think of something like that as because he said it.

We didn’t row about the Big Thing. He just said politics was men’s business and I didn’t know what I was talking about. That was as far as our conversations about the extinction of the planet went. If I said I was worried what America might do if Russia didn’t back down or vice versa, or the Middle East or whatever, he said did I think it might be pre-menstrual tension. You can’t talk to anyone like that, can you? He wouldn’t even discuss it, wouldn’t row about it. Once I said maybe it
was
pre-menstrual tension, and he said yes I thought so. I said no,
listen, maybe women are more in touch with the world. He said what did I mean, and I said, well, everything’s connected, isn’t it, and women are more closely connected to all the cycles of nature and birth and rebirth on the planet than men, who are only impregnators after all when it comes down to it, and if women are in tune with the planet then maybe if terrible things are going on up in the north, things which threaten the whole existence of the planet, then maybe women get to feel these things, like the way some people know earthquakes are coming, and perhaps that’s what sets off PMT. He said silly cow, that’s just why politics is men’s business, and got another beer out of the fridge. A few days later he said to me, what happened about the end of the world? I just looked at him and he said, as far as I can see all that pre-menstrual tension you had was about the fact that you were getting your period. I said you make me so angry I almost want the end of the world to come just so you’ll be proved wrong. He said he was sorry, but what did he know, after all he was just an impregnator as I’d pointed out, and he reckoned those other impregnators up in the north would sort something out.

Sort something out?
That’s what the plumber says, or the man who comes to nail the roof back on. ‘Reckon we’ll be able to sort something out,’ they say with one of those confident winks. Well, they didn’t sort something out on this occasion, did they? They bloody didn’t. And in the last days of the crisis, Greg didn’t always come home at nights. Even he’d finally noticed and decided to have some fun before it was all over. In a way I couldn’t blame him, except for the fact that he wouldn’t admit it. He said he was staying out because he couldn’t stand coming home and getting nagged at by me. I told him I understood and it was all right, yet when I explained he got very uptight. He said if he wanted a bit on the side then it wouldn’t be because of the world situation but because I was on his back all the time. They just don’t see the connections, do they? When men in dark-grey suits and striped ties up there in the north start taking certain strategic precautions as they term it, men like Greg in thongs and T-shirts down here in the south begin staying out
late in bars trying to pick up girls. They should understand that, shouldn’t they? They should admit it.

So when I knew what had happened, I didn’t wait for Greg to come home. He was out there knocking back another beer, saying how those fellows up there would sort something out, and in the meantime why don’t you come and sit on my knee, darling? I just took Paul and put him in his basket and got on the bus with as much tinned food as I could carry and some bottles of water. I didn’t leave a note because there wasn’t anything to say. I got off at the terminal on Harry Chan Avenue and started walking towards the Esplanade. Then guess what I saw, sunning herself on the roof of a car? A sleepy, friendly, tortoiseshell cat. I stroked her, she purred, I sort of scooped her up in my arm, one or two people stopped to look but I was round the corner into Herbert Street before they could say anything.

Greg would have been angry about the boat. Still, he only had a quarter share in her, and if the four of them were going to spend their last days drinking in bars and picking up girls because of the men in dark-grey suits who in my opinion should have been fixed themselves years ago, then they weren’t going to miss the boat, were they? I filled her up, and as I cast off I saw that the tortoiseshell I’d put down just anywhere was sitting on top of Paul’s basket, looking at me. ‘You’ll be Linda,’ I said.

*

She left the world behind from a place called Doctor’s Gully. At the end of the Esplanade at Darwin, behind the modern YMCA building, a zig-zag road runs down to a disused boat ramp. The big hot car-park is mostly empty, except when tourists come to watch the fish feed. Nothing else goes on nowadays at Doctor’s Gully. Every day at high tide hundreds, thousands of fish come right up to the water’s edge to be fed.