Playing for the Ashes (51 page)

“It’s not you. Not the kids. It’s me. I’m out of sorts.”

“Isn’t that convenient. Balls, Kenny. Balls. You want a divorce? Is that what this is all about? You too much the milksop to say it direct?”

“Get off it, luvvie. You’re off your nut. Did I mention divorce?”

“Who’s at the bottom of this? You tell me, Kenny. You seeing someone? Is that what you’re too spineless to tell me?”

“What’re you thinking, girl? Jesus. Hell. I’m not seeing anyone. I don’t want to see anyone.”

“Then why?
Why
? Damn you, Kenny Fleming.”

“Two months, luv. That’s all I ask.”

“I got no choice, have I? So don’t turn this into a bleeding game,
asking
for two months.”

“Don’t cry. There’s no need. It’ll worry the kids.”

“And
this
flaming won’t? Not seeing their dad? Not knowing if we’re a family or not? That won’t worry the kids?”

“It’s selfish. I know.”

“Damn bloody right.”

“But it’s what I need.”

She had no choice but to agree. They wouldn’t see each other much while he thought things through. The two months he asked for stretched to four, the four to six, the six to ten, the ten to twelve. One year eased its way into two. He faced, no doubt, a moment of indecision about his living circumstances when he fell out with the Kent cricket committee and made the move to play for Middlesex instead, but by the time Kenneth Fleming attained his dream, by the time the national selectors tapped Middlesex’s new and foremost batsman to play for England, his marriage was a formality only.

For reasons that remain unclear to me, he didn’t press for a divorce. Nor did she. Why not? you ask. Because of the children? For a sense of security? To keep up appearances? I only know that when he moved back to London in order to be close to the Middlesex playing field not far from Regent’s Park, he didn’t move back to the Isle of Dogs. Instead, he moved into my mother’s house in Kensington.

The location was, after all, very nearly perfect. A hop up Ladbroke Grove, a skip across Maida Vale, a jump the length of St. John’s Wood Road and there was Lord’s Cricket Ground, where Middlesex play.

The situation was ideal. Mother was rattling round that enormous house on Staffordshire Terrace with bedrooms to spare. Kenneth needed a place to live that wasn’t so expensive that he couldn’t afford to continue to help out his wife and children.

The bond between Kenneth and my mother was already in place. She was one-third mascot, one-third inspiration, and one-third source of inner strength to him. When he shared with her the difficulties surrounding his decision to cease playing for Kent and to join Middlesex, he would also have shared his reluctance to return to his old way of life. To which reluctance she would have responded gravely, “Does Jean know this, Ken?” To which he would have said, “I haven’t told her yet.” To which Mother would have made the cautious recommendation, “Perhaps you need to let your lives unfold gradually. Let nature take its course. What if…This may sound rather impulsive, but what if you moved in with me for a while? While you see what direction your life’s going to take….” Because it was closer to Lord’s, because he wouldn’t yet be making the money that would allow the family to pull up stakes, because because because. “Would that be of help to you, my dear?”

She gave him the words. No doubt he used them. The end was the same no matter how it was effected. He moved in with my mother.

And while she was devoting herself to Kenneth Fleming’s welfare, I was working at the zoo in Regent’s Park.

I remember thinking, You want truth, Chris? I’ll show you truth, after that morning in my bedroom. I thought, He thinks he knows me, the stupid berk. He doesn’t know sod all.

I set about proving how little he knew. I worked at the zoo, first mucking round with the maintenance staff and eventually picking up a job at the animal hospital where I had access to their data bases, which eventually proved invaluable and heightened my standing with the organisation when ARM decided it was time to track where surplus animals were being shipped. I involved myself more devotedly with ARM. If Chris could love animals, I could love them more. I could prove my love more. I could take bigger risks.

I requested assignment to a second assault unit. “We’re too slow,” I said. “We’re not doing enough. We’re not quick enough. If you allow some of us to cross between units, we can double our activities. Perhaps even triple them. Think of the number of animals we can save.” Request denied.

So I began to push our own unit to do more. “We’re sitting back on our arses. We’re getting complacent. Come on. Come on.”

Chris watched me with a wary eye. He’d spent enough time round me to have the right to wonder what my ulterior motives were. He kept waiting for them to emerge.

Had we been involved in something less gut-wrenching, those motives would have emerged within weeks. It’s ironic now that I think of it. I heightened my activities in the organisation with the intent of making Chris see who I really was so that he would have to fall in love with me so that I could screw him and then reject him and walk away
fil
led with jubilation at the fact that I didn’t care. I intended to use the liberation activities coldbloodedly, with no more concern about the fate of the animals than I would have had for the fate of the men I used to pick up off the street. I ended up with my heart feeling as if someone had cut it into strips with a pair of rusty secateurs.

It wasn’t a process that happened quickly. I felt neither a dent nor a fissure in the armour of my indifference at the dry lick from the tongue of the first beagle pup I rescued from a lab studying stomach ulcers. I just handed him over to the transporter, moved to the next cage, and kept myself focussed on the need for speed and silence.

When I finally cracked, it wasn’t over scientific experimentation at all, but rather over an illegal puppy farm that we raided in Hampshire, not far from the Wallops.

Have you heard of these places? They breed dogs for volume and profit. They’re always in isolated locations, sometimes run out of what otherwise appear to be working farms.

This puppy farm had come to our attention because one of our runners on a visit to Mum and Dad in Hampshire had been poking round a car boot sale, and he’d come upon a woman with puppies. Had two dogs at home, she claimed a touch too earnestly, both whelped at once, crawling in puppies at the moment I am, willing to sell them for next to nothing, pure as pure could be the whole
fli
pping lot of them. Our runner didn’t like the look of the woman or the dispirited look of the puppies. He followed her home, on a winding, dipping, pencil sketch of a road that dwindled down to two ruts with oil-streaked grass growing between them.

“She’s got them in a barn,” he told us. He pressed his palms together and held them like he was praying as he talked. “There’re cages. Stacked on each other. There’s no light. No ventilation.”

“Sounds like a case for the RSPCA,” Chris noted.

“That could take weeks. And even if they moved against her, the thing is…” He directed a solemn look round the group. “Listen. This woman needs to be dealt with permanently.”

Someone raised the problem of logistics. This wasn’t a lab deserted at night. This was where someone lived, a mere fifty yards away from the barn in which the animals were kept. What if the dogs barked, as they undoubtedly would? Wouldn’t the farm owner set up the alarm? phone the police? make after us with a shot gun?

She might do, Chris acknowledged. He decided to recce the location himself.

He went to Hampshire alone. When he returned, all he would say is, “We’ll do it next week.”

I said, “Next week? Chris, that’s not enough time. That puts everyone at risk. That—”

He said, “Next week,” and brought out a plan of the farm. He assigned the sentries to deal with the problem of Mrs. Porter, the owner, remarking that she wouldn’t be likely to phone the police and bring the law down upon herself for running the puppy farm in the first place. But she might do something else. The sentries would need to be prepared to head her off. He told us to bring along surgical masks and right then I should have known how bad it was going to be.

We arrived at one in the morning. The sentries slipped to guard both entrances to the farmhouse, one on the yard and the other facing a perfect front garden and the crater-
fil
led lane. When the flicker of their lights told us the sentries were in position, we liberators prepared for the dash to the barn. For once, Chris would accompany us. No one dared ask why.

We found the first dead animal in a pen just outside the barn. In the circle of light Chris flashed upon him, we could see that he’d once been a spaniel. Now he was bloat, but the bloat seemed to shift in an undulating pattern in the beam from Chris’s torch. These were the maggots. His companion in the pen was a golden retriever matted with mud and faeces. This dog struggled to his feet. He wobbled back into the wire fence.

“Shit,” someone murmured.

The retriever set up the alarm we’d been expecting.

“Go,” Chris said. “Pass over this one.”

We heard the shouting from the farmhouse once we were inside the barn. But it fast became merely an auditory backdrop to what we found within. We all had torches. We switched them on. Excrement was everywhere. Our feet sucked and plopped as we sank into hay that lay over the muck.

Animals whimpered. They were crammed into cages the size of shoe boxes. These were stacked one on top of the other so that dogs beneath lived in the waste of dogs above.

Under the cages lay three black rubbish bags. One spilled out its contents into the muck: four dead terrier puppies tossed in among wet hair, faeces, and rotting food.

No one spoke, which was usual. What wasn’t usual was that one of the chaps began to weep. He stumbled against the side of a stall. Chris said urgently, “Patrick, Patrick, don’t fade on me, mate.” And to me, “Give the signal,” as he moved to the cages.

The dogs began to yip. I went back to the barn door and flashed the light to the transporters waiting beneath the hedgerow that lined the property. At the farmhouse, the sentries were struggling with Mrs. Porter. She’d made it as far as her front step where she shouted, “Police! Help! Police!” before one of the sentries whipped her arms behind her and the other gagged her. They dragged her back into the house. The interior lights went black.

The transporters thundered across the farmyard and into the barn. One of them slipped in the muck and fell. The dogs began to howl.

Chris zipped along the line of cages. I ran to join the others working the opposite side of the barn. Even in the limited light of my torch, I could still see, and I felt vertigo sweep over me. There were puppies everywhere but they weren’t the sweet little things one sees on calendars at Christmas. These Yorkies and Shelties, these retrievers and spaniels had ulcerated eyes, open sores. Parasites crawled through hairless patches of their
fle
sh.

One of the older blokes began cursing. Two of the women were crying. I was trying not to breathe and trying to ignore the alternating waves of heat and cold that kept washing over me. A ringing in my ears did much to drown out the sound of the animals. But in the abject terror that the ringing might stop, I began reciting everything I could remember from
The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts
. I’d done the yak, the polar bear, and the whale when I got to the final cage. In it lay a small Lhasa apso. I put my gloved fingers between the bars, muttering as much as I could remember from the rhyme about the Dodo. It began with something about walking around. Something about taking the sun and the air.

I flipped open the cage, concentrating on the rhymes. They had to match
around
and
air
. I couldn’t think what they were.

I reached for the dog, but I sought the words. Something something ground? Lah lah la bare? What was it? What was it?

I pulled the dog towards me. Round? Sound? Dodo not there? Somehow I had to put the rhyme together because if I didn’t, I’d start crumbling, and I couldn’t face that. I didn’t know what to do to prevent it except to move on quickly to another rhyme, one more familiar, one whose words I couldn’t forget. Like “Humpty Dumpty.”

I lifted the dog and caught sight of her right back foot. It dangled uselessly from a strip of flesh. In the flesh were the unmistakable punctures and grooves of canines. As if she’d tried to chew her own foot off. As if the dog occupying the cage below had tried to chew it off for her.

My vision narrowed to a pinpoint of light. I cried out but made no sound that could have been either a word or a name. The dog felt lifeless resting against me.

All round me was movement, smudges of black as liberators moved animals and tried not to breathe. I gulped for air but couldn’t
fin
d enough.

“Here, let me take it,” someone said at my elbow. “Livie. Livie. Give me the dog.”