Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales (8 page)

‘That was before I met Mendal. Now I don’t think it’s workable. I think you need to move on. I have. I’ve grown. I’ve gone beyond what we had together.’

‘You bitch. Are you suggesting I was a stepping stone to something better?’

Her mouth twisted and I think she was about to say something really nasty, something that would have crushed my heart like a ripe plum thrown under the heel of a Spanish flamenco dancer, but then she changed her mind. Instead she offered a word of advice.

‘Look, Dean, I don’t want to say things that will hurt you. Have you thought of doing something to take your mind off things? What about going on holiday.
The Far East?
You’ve always liked Indo-China and jungles full of animals. Or
better still
,
get yourself a pet
. You can love that all you want and it won’t leave you like one of us rotten bitches.’ She said this tongue in cheek of course. ‘What about one of those new bonsai pets? I’m sure it’ll help. Now, I’ve got to meet Mendal at the theatre. You look after yourself, Dean, and
..
.’ I knew she was about to say ‘keep in touch’ but she thought better of it. ‘...
you
just hang on in there.’

She left me then. My heart was as black as sin. I felt ugly. I felt wasted. I felt destroyed. I paid for my coffee and then went out into the neon-jazzed night, to ride the flickering street back to my apartment. On the way I passed a hole-in-the-wall pet mart. What the hell, I thought, she could be right? Maybe a pet would help? At least it would give me something else to worry about, other than my pitiful self.

I went across to the mart outlet, thinking of a little puppy or a miniature kitten, and came away with a bonsai tiger.

It was in a secure cage, of course. I held it up under the pearl
street lights
. It was perfect.
Diminutive, but perfect.
About the size of a sewer rat, it paced up and down the cage, stopping occasionally to stare out, not at me, but at some distant land beyond. Its stare went right through me. There was no expression in its face, nothing I could read in the tiny bright eyes like sequins buried in the black and yellow fur.

A marvel of genetic engineering, my bonsai tiger was a real wild beast from a far off place, an exotic half-shadow creature
which
could hunt and kill as well as any full-sized big cat, albeit its prey would be of proportions suitable to its own length, girth and breadth.

Under the opal light it yawned with its small mouth, revealing two rows of sharp white teeth and a little red tongue. My perfect little tiger then flopped down, cat-like, and curled its tail over its legs. It was beautiful. My new pet was beautiful—and already I was beginning to forget the horrible empty ache inside me.

‘What was her name?’ I joked with my pet, as we skimmed along. ‘I don’t remember, do you?’

Once at home I put my tiger on a shelf below the stacks of computer manuals. Actually, to be more accurate, it was a female, a tigress, but the world was swiftly erasing gender nouns, so tiger was fine.

‘Sheba,’ I said. ‘A name fit for a queen. That’s what you are, my Lilliputian Queen Sheba of Blackhill Street.’

Sheba looked up, as if acknowledging her new name.

‘Excellent. We’re going to be a cool couple. Krystina will be proud of me. I’ll just look her in the eye when we meet, accidentally of course outside some bar or night club, and say, “I’m living with Sheba now. She’s great. We get on terrifically well,” and witness her surprise at how so together I am— how I still love her of course, evident only in my demeanour and the way I hold my head—but how I’m bravely getting on with life without her.’

My computer made a noise like a wet fart. They’re not supposed to do that, but they do. They do lots of things they’re not supposed to. I think it’s the only way bored programmers get their rocks off.

Sheba, however, let out a tiny roar—I thought of approval.

The voice at the mart had said to feed her steak. I was having fillet of lamb for dinner. I cut off a small corner and pushed it through the steel bars of the cage. Sheba pounced on it and began to rip pieces off it with her teeth. It was fascinating.
Nature in the raw.
Those geneticists were geniuses. To be able to make tiny elephants, tigers, lions, panthers, crocodiles! Never again would there be endangered species. We had all the codes
now,
we could make the animal whenever we wanted it. Some of the extinct creatures had been revived. There were even miniature mammoths and dinosaurs on the way. Sabre-toothed tigers.
Mini plesiosaurs and in aquarium tanks.
Cycad jungles.

Jungles! Now there was an idea. Why not get a rainforest or a jungle for
my
pet? Why not indeed? I phoned Krystina. She was in a theatre lobby with people milling round her. As soon as she saw my face she said, ‘I’m changing my number.’

I tried to catch a glimpse of the girl-stealing Mendal, but couldn’t be sure which of the skinny males in the picture was
him
. Krystina had said he was ‘sensitive’ which meant he was a geek. She had implied she had gone up the evolutionary scale, the chain of being, from Neanderthal to Modern Man. It was my belief she’d found a codfish that talked.

‘No, don’t do that,’ I said. ‘I’m only ringing to say I’m fine with everything. I’ve...’ but she had switched off. When I tried again the voice said, ‘This number is unobtainable at present, please try again later.’

‘Bollocks!’ I shouted, taking it out on the synthesiser. ‘Bloody bollocking bollocks.’

‘
Testicles,’
said my computer smugly, programmed to answer definite questions or give the definitions of repeated words.
‘Nonsense, a muddle, a mess.
In American slang, to make a botch of.’

Later I went to bed to dream of judgement days, but was kept awake by snuffling noises and the sound of straw being shuffled from one end of the cage to the other. The next morning Sheba’s cage smelled a little high, so I changed the bedding. I lured her into a small compartment at one end of the cage with some raw liver,
then
changed the drawer containing her bed and faeces. It was all quite simple. I’d never had a pet before, but these bonsai animals were like having gerbils. There was little do except enjoy the ownership of a live creature.

Bonsai
actually means ‘bowl cultivation’ in Japanese and of course originally referred to dwarf trees, but you know how words alter their meanings over time, especially when they come from another language. (
Sophisticated
originally meant ‘artificial’ but soon came to mean having the worldly wisdom characteristic of a fashionable life.) When the genetic labs starting producing tiny wild creatures for the commercial market they had to think of a marketable name. ‘Shrunken beasts’ didn’t have the right ring to it, so they settled on ‘bonsai pets’.

Naturally, the bonsai tiger only distracted me for a few days,
then
I descended into misery once again. I felt absolutely fucked up. And, of course, when you’re fucked up, there’s the extremely likely possibility of getting fucked up further, because you are so wrapped up in your own private hell you forget to do things that should definitely be remembered.

I forgot to feed Sheba.

Arriving back at the apartment after stalking Krystina and her Cro-Magnon (he wasn’t that Modern after all and had threatened to smash my face in if I didn’t stop following them) I found the cage on the floor. It had burst open. Three shelves had come down with it and there were computer manuals all over the floor plus a vase and my two soapstone carvings. My guess was that the tiger had become so hungry she had thrown herself at the bars of her cage in
a frenzy
and had brought the shelves down. The heavy manuals had crashed down on the cage and broken it open, allowing Sheba to escape.

‘Shit!’ I said. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’

‘Faeces, excrement; the act of defecating; a contemptuous term for a person...
’

‘Shut up, you stupid machine!’

‘
...
rubbish
, nonsense; marijuana or heroin.’

There was a pause before the computer spoke again, with censure in its drone.

‘
I hope you realise hard drugs are illegal and soft drugs do your brains in.’

Bloody programmers.
They
ought to be made illegal.

The first thing I did was to glance around the room, to see if she was anywhere to be seen. She wasn’t. Assessing the situation I came to the conclusion that the apartment was escape proof. There was no chimney, no open windows, and there weren’t any chutes. There was no way she could get out.

I went into the kitchen and found the rubbish bin knocked over and its contents spilled all over the kitchen floor. Any edible scraps which had been in that bin had been devoured. At least she had probably assuaged her hunger. That was good, wasn’t it? But where the hell was she?

‘Sheba, Sheba, Sheba,’ I called in a ‘kitty-kitty’ voice.

‘A biblical land corresponding to Sabaea in present-day Yemen, South West Arabia; an unbeaten racehorse during the first four years of this century; a Las Vegas drag queen whose lewd act included a live anaconda; a kind of sugared muffin made in Bhutan...
’

She didn’t come of course. I went into the bathroom. A bar of soap lay half-eaten on the floor. Hell, when had I last fed her? I cleaned everything up then began a serious search of the four rooms. I couldn’t find her anywhere. Maybe she
had
managed to get out somehow? There was nothing for it but to go to bed and have another look in the morning. Maybe she would be out looking for food. I started to think how I would catch her. Put some meat in her cage? That sounded right.

In the middle of the night there was a terrible fight in the
living-room
. I heard crashing and banging, then a thin high-pitched
scream which hurt my ears
filled the apartment for several minutes. When I got up the courage I went through the door and switched on the light. I almost threw up. There was blood all over the carpet, halfway up the cream-coloured curtains I had fought with Krystina over, smeared down one wall, and smudged on the sofa. In the middle of the room was a pile of putrid-smelling, smoking innards, draped across a broken lamp. Right at my feet, in the doorway, was the severed head of a large rat.

‘Jesus Christ!’ I cried out loud. ‘I didn’t know we had any rats in here! How did rats get into a modern building?’

‘
Fact: rats are never farther than six yards away from a human, especially in a city
.’

‘Thank you for that mind-boggling piece of information.’

‘You’re welcome.’

‘Sheba!’ I yelled. ‘Come on out!’

Again I searched the apartment. Where the hell had she
got to?
Where could she be hiding? By the time I finished the kitchen, she had obviously been into the
living-room
again and eaten the rat’s entrails, because they were gone. I cleaned up the blood and hair, finding a bald tail like a dead worm behind the sofa. It took me quite a while.

Then I went out and bought some raw hamburgers and a humane
mouse trap
. I was going to catch that she-cat if it took me all day. I set the trap in the
living-room
, where the action had taken place. Then I went out. I hoped to run into Krystina and her boyfriend by accident. If he attacked me again I was going to sue him for assault.

When I came home the
mouse trap
was all bent and twisted. Sheba had taken it apart from within. In despair I thought about getting a
rat trap
, but I guessed it was too late. She wouldn’t go into another cage with sprung doors if I knew anything about wild creatures. I’d seen a programme about trapping animals. The trapper said you had to get the beast the first time, or you’d never see hide
nor
hair again.

Well, there was another way. Starve her out of her hiding place. There couldn’t be too many rats in the apartment, surely?