Natural History Read online

  Perhaps things no longer felt quite real to her, not until she could see them played back on a monitor.

  Perhaps Richard hadn’t touched Jane’s arse. He’d touched the arse of a woman who had been transfigured by appearing on television. Charlie understood how women could be transfigured that way. He thought of Robin and Sam, parochial demi-gods in that low-ceilinged nightclub. And he thought of the erection he’d endured as he imagined a filthy lorry driver rooting her in a stinking toilet—how he’d taken horrified pleasure at the thought of her being defiled, his grimy hands palpating her little tits. And her humiliation, even as she revelled in it; biting on his hairy shoulder to keep from crying out.

  He said, ‘You’re happy, though?’

  Her eyes were a curious light grey, and they met his, unblinking, for several seconds. Then she held out a hand and hauled him to his feet. The strong muscles in her forearms. The freckles on her nose and cheeks.

  ‘I’ll be a lot happier when this place is up and running.’

  Charlie stood with the roll-up in one hand and twisted at the waist to dust himself off.

  Jane clapped his shoulder, fraternally, and walked away.

  Inside his shiny Land Cruiser, Richard made a show of stuffing whatever he’d been reading into the glove compartment, starting the engine and reversing out of the car park.

  And Jane wandered through the open gates of Monkeyland, her self-selected kingdom.

  Sound Mick and Camra Dave weren’t given permission to film Jo meeting her prospective new personal tutor, even though Richard wanted them to, for human interest.

  This was 3 February 1996.

  The tutor lived several miles from Innsmouth, in a small white house which stood far back from the twisty, hedge-lined road. Its path was bordered by winter-naked rose bushes.

  Jane knocked on the door and they waited while, within the silence, there was a sense of something stirring. And then Mr Nately came to the door. He was younger than Jo had expected—no more than thirty. He looked like a Spitfire pilot; boyish and pale, with a lick of strawberry hair.

  Jane kissed him on one cheek and said hello. Patrick shook his hand and said, ‘Hello, John.’

  And then Jane said: ‘So! This is Jo. And Jo, this is Mr Nately.’

  Mr Nately smiled at her. It was a lepidopterist’s smile; a contented squint.

  He said, ‘Pleased to meet you, Jo. Come in.’

  Inside, the cottage was antique and orderly and it smelled of beeswax and lavender. The furniture belonged to an older person—stuffed armchairs with antimacassars, dark wooden tables with lions’ feet.

  Mr Nately had laid out tea and biscuits. He poured them all a cup of tea, the colour of the furniture, and told Jo, ‘I teach all the usual subjects, up to A level. Everything except Physical Education.’

  ‘How big are the classes?’

  ‘Oh, one at a time is all I can handle, I’m afraid.’

  Jane told her, ‘Mr Nately tutors Gifted Children.’

  Jo looked around the room—an old lady’s room with no old lady in it.

  ‘My last pupil left me in August,’ said Mr Nately. ‘He’s gone on to bigger and better things.’

  ‘Oxford,’ said Jane. ‘He was only sixteen.’

  ‘And about the PE thing,’ said Patrick. ‘What we thought we’d do—a couple of times a week, you and I could go swimming together. Or running. The roads are quiet round here.’

  Jo nodded, ‘Okay,’ and the grandfather clock ticked four times.

  Mr Nately said, ‘So. I understand you’re interested in astronomy.’

  Jo waited for him to say, golly, or gosh, or to make a popping goldfish mouth. But Mr Nately just put his hands in his pockets and said, ‘Do you know Hyakutake?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Hyakutake. A few days ago. a Japanese astronomer—Mr Hyakutake­—he sighted a new comet. He’s a lucky man, actually. He was browsing the same patch of sky where he’d found another comet, a few weeks back. A much smaller one.’

  ‘The same patch of sky?’

  ‘The same patch of sky.’

  ‘But a different comet?’

  ‘But a different comet.’

  ‘What are the chances of that?’

  ‘Astronomical.’

  Flattered by the joke, Jo asked him, ‘What magnitude?’

  ‘Eleven. It’s going to come close.’

  ‘How close?’

  ‘Nought point one.’

  Patrick leaned in and asked, ‘Nought point one what?’

  ‘Astronomical units,’ said Jo.

  ‘That’s a measurement of distance,’ said Nately. ‘The average distance between the earth and the sun—’

  ‘—a hundred and fifty million kilometres.’

  ‘Which is pretty close, actually.’

  ‘Pretty close,’ said Patrick.

  Jane nudged him with her elbow. He stepped back, towards the corner, and clasped his hands behind him, like Dixon of Dock Green.

  ‘And it’s going to be night-visible,’ Nately said. ‘It’s a serious comet.’

  Patrick coughed. Jo and Jane both looked his way, now—identically irritated.

  Patrick said, ‘So, this isn’t the comet Jo’s been going on about? The big one, coming in?’

  ‘No,’ said Jo, meaning obviously.

  Nately said, ‘I expect you mean Hale Bopp. That’s coming later. So we’re getting two great comets in one year. That’s actually pretty unusual.’ Then he turned to Jo and said, ‘Do you know when the last great comet arrived, Jo?’

  Jo thought about it. And, all at once, she noticed how the stranger Mr Nately had been, a few moments ago, had been replaced, like a genie leaping through the hatch in a stage floor, by a teacher.

  ‘Comet West,’ she said. ‘Nineteen seventy-six.’

  Mr Nately nodded, and glanced at Patrick and Jane.

  Behind her, Jo felt her parents relax.

  Mr Nately held lessons in the back room, which overlooked the garden with its vegetable patch and curiously modern shed. The garden bordered an orchard—always moving in the corner of Jo’s eye.

  The room was equipped like a proper classroom, with a grey desk and school chair, and a wooden desk for Mr Nately. There were posters on the wall—the Periodic Table, Gandhi, the Moon, a mass of white birds taking off from the surface of some lake, a computer on a stand. Instead of a blackboard, Mr Nately had a whiteboard. He wiped it clean with an old Pink Floyd T-shirt. Jo did not comment on this. She pretended to think it was a proper whiteboard-erasing cloth; for some reason, the scrunched up Pink Floyd T-shirt made her hurt on Mr Nately’s behalf.

  Once in a while, Mr Nately walked or cycled to the village, where he did most of his shopping. He had his milk, his bread, and The Times delivered. He grew his own vegetables and some of his own fruit. He made jam and apple sauce and cider. He hung his laundry on a creaky old rotary line that stood in an overgrown and sunless corner of the back garden. And in the evening, he took it inside again, still damp and smelling of laundry powder.

  Make yourself at home, he said every morning, as she lolloped her stuff to the classroom.

  And she did—although there was nowhere less homely than Mr Nately’s house, with its mixture of old people’s things, chairs and cookers and kettles, and antimacassars and china animals.

  That and the back room with its Apple Macintosh and its school chairs and its TV and VCR, and the creepy orchard that bordered the garden, making a sound like the sea.

  MONKEY BUSINESS!

  US BRITS ARE ANIMAL CRACKERS,

  BUT HAS TV’S JANE JONES FINALLY GONE APE?

  Jane Jones—the animal-loving babe dubbed THE PHWOAR OF THE JUNGLE by cheeky fans of her trademark khaki shorts—is worried she’s bitten off more than she can chew … by taking on an ailing chimpanzee
sanctuary in the wilds of Devon!

  ‘Monkeyland is the biggest challenge of my life,’ confesses the jungle temptress.

  Monkeyland’s star attraction is Rue, the chimp made famous by a 1982 Mirror exclusive that revealed how cruel circus owner Jerry Lovelock was using violence and intimidation to train his animals.

  Animal-loving Britain took gentle Rue to its heart after gruesome footage showed Lovelock beating her with a plank of wood and shouting: ‘You f*****g bitch, I’ll sort you.’

  Mirror experts revealed that, at ten times stronger than a human being, Rue could easily have injured or killed her crazy master.

  Lovelock left Britain following our investigation and now works as an ‘animal consultant’ in France.

  ‘Rue has been through a lot,’ says Jane. ‘She’s a very special lady. Her welcome has made us all feel very honoured—especially­ my son Charlie, whom she seems to have adopted!’

  In the photograph, Jane wears shorts and caterpillar boots, and kneels, her arm about Rue’s shoulder. Charlie kneels to the left. Rue is holding his hand.

  Patrick read the piece out loud, in the office. He peered at her over his spectacles.

  He said, ‘“A very special lady”?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘I should hope not.’

  ‘They make it up anyway,’ said Jane. ‘No matter what you say. So why bother?’

  A week later, Rue was killed.

  To capitalize on Rue’s death, Richard arranged lunch in Soho with a journalist friend, a good contact. His name was Nick Avery, and he accorded in no way with Jane’s expectation of a tabloid journalist; he was well-dressed, plummy, homosexual.

  Nick was on his eighth cigarette and his fifth espresso when Jane directed into his Dictaphone the quote she’d written the previous night and rehearsed all that morning, on the train to London.

  ‘The fact is,’ she said, leaning over the table, squinting into the cigarette smoke, ‘we don’t know who’s responsible. But the police are taking this very seriously, not just because of Rue, but because of certain threats my family and I received over the course of 1995.’

  Richard sat back, arms crossed, job done, while Avery quizzed Jane for half an hour.

  Next morning, the banner head on page one showed a picture of Jane—in shorts, naturally—and the legend: TV JANE: ‘My Stalker Horror.’

  She came home late the next night.

  A couple of local reporters were at the gate, and Jane stopped off to speak to them—to offer a wry no comment and a cup of tea; they must be cold. They declined. Jane thanked them, went inside.

  Patrick was upstairs, reading. Jo was watching Star Trek: The Voyage Home on video. It contained a scene where life was given to a lifeless planet—it happened in real time, as the viewer appeared to orbit the alien world.

  Charlie was in his room, listening to music with the earphones on.

  Jane went upstairs.

  Patrick could read her mood by her footfalls. Now he heard restraint, apprehension.

  She paused at the door. He measured it, the shape and intention of the pause. And then she came in.

  ‘Are you awake?’

  He peered over his half-moons. ‘Reading.’

  She sat down on the bed. Unlaced her boots.

  ‘What a day.’

  He folded a page, closed the book.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Tired.’

  ‘Me, too. When are they going to leave?’ He nodded at the wall. He meant the local journalists.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Next day. Soon.’

  ‘Why did you tell them?’

  ‘Why did I tell them what?’

  ‘About the threats.’ He’d seen the headlines. ‘Did Richard put you up to it?’

  She crossed her leg and massaged the arch of her foot. ‘No.’

  He opened The Three Musketeers.

  ‘It was kids,’ he said. ‘It was just kids.’

  ‘Probably, yes. Probably it was.’ She took the book off him. Then she curled up and laid her head in his lap. She said, ‘I was sending a message to him. In case he’s out there.’

  ‘Well, he’s not.’

  She nuzzled his thigh; nibbled it. He yelped.

  ‘It was probably kids,’ she said.

  Because she appeared on television, Jane had always received a certain amount of fanmail.

  The very first obscene letter had made her guffaw in shock. It was a Polaroid of a man in a gorilla suit; through a hole in the crotch projected what Jane at first honestly took for a banana—the man in the gorilla suit having taken the trouble to paint it yellow.

  But after that, it wasn’t funny. The letters, with their inept obscenity, depressed her more than they frightened her. There just weren’t enough synonyms for breasts, penises, vaginas, anuses, semen, orgasm. But all those words got used, and used up, and used again and again.

  Her agent paid a long-retired corporate PA to filter the fanmail. And for three years this woman, Gwen, spent every Wednesday opening white envelopes and Jiffy bags addressed to Jane c/o the production company, or the BBC, or various magazines that had featured or even mentioned her in passing.

  Gwen sorted the DIY porn and the hatemail and forwarded the rest of it—the fan worship, the begging letters, the marriage proposals—without comment; just two loopy initials scrawled on a hand-dated comp slip.

  Jane never met Gwen, so she wasn’t able to picture the look on Gwen’s face, the day in 1994 when she opened the first of the really bad letters.

  At a first, cursory glance, the letter resembled an invitation to attend a local function, perhaps high tea at the Lord mayor’s house.

  Dear Whore (it read)

  I know how much you love it I know the things you do. Your ‘husband’ doesn’t know, does he. But I do, I know. I have stood close to you I touched your arm I could smell the cum on you

  As well as the letter, the envelope—which was postmarked Bath—contained Polaroid photographs of Jane’s house, and Jane in her car, and Patrick walking Jo to school.

  They went to the police. A young PC took them to an office. He listened, then read the letter to himself as Jane sat there, squirming. Then he tugged at an earlobe and told them the best thing was, keep an eye out for anything unusual.

  ‘Like what?’ said Patrick. ‘A pervert in a tree? In my wardrobe? What?’

  ‘Anything unusual.’

  The kids knew nothing of this: not the letters, nor the injury it caused to their parents’ marriage, because Patrick and Jane made a furtive secret of it all, keeping their frightened arguments, to hissing spats in otherwise empty rooms.

  But there was hardly any need for all the whispering and skulking around. The kids were teenagers; Patrick and Jane were little more than fixtures so permanent they’d become morally invisible.

  When Jo wasn’t at school, she was in her room, reading. Now and again she could be found in the living room, watching Star Trek movies on VHS. The Voyage Home was her favourite.

  Charlie was struggling with some unhappiness of his own. Something was wrong. He alternated, apparently at random, between resentful silence and confrontational malice.

  Patrick thought Charlie resented Bath, because he liked it; liking it unsettled him. He’d liked other places, and left them.

  So it was Patrick’s idea to acquire for him a token of domestic permanence. At Bristol Dogs’ Home Charlie picked out a mongrel terrier—a perky bitch called Blondie who sat panting in his lap all the way home.

  Blondie never learned the proper place to shit. Every morning, Patrick scooped her curly black turds into a carrier bag, knotted the carrier bag and threw it in the dustbin.

  She had not been spayed. That was Patrick’s job, and he never got round to it. It was an omission he regretted, because
Blondie’s oestrus drew to the door a jostling, whining pack of males. This feral presence bored Patrick and infuriated Jane; she equated the dogs’ pink, importunate cocks with the obscene letters. Charlie cursed the horny dogs under his breath; he thumped the windows, threw out buckets of water; he ran outside wielding a golf umbrella like a club, breaking up the pack and driving the dogs away.

  Patrick disliked Blondie. Secretly, he kicked her up the arse when no one was around; she cowered and scuttled away with her tail covering her genitals. In the garden, safe from Patrick’s toecap, she cheerfully ran in circles and yapped at passers-by, her tail springy and erect.

  She didn’t like being alone with Patrick, yet she was alone with him much of the day. So when she ran away there was no real reason to suspect anything but an escape. Probably her new life of urban scavenging would be cut short by the dog-catcher; or perhaps a speeding car on a dual carriageway. Perhaps, like Lassie, Blondie would come home.

  But perhaps not.

  A week after she disappeared, someone left a Milk Tray box on their doorstep. A curl of shit had been mashed into the circles and squares of the liner tray; and inserted into the shit like a crippled flag was a Polaroid of what Jane eventually decided might be the foetus of a dog. It lay, curled and purple, on a yellow baby blanket, edged with a wide ribbon of satin.

  When Patrick allowed himself to consider this, he grew very scared. Because he was scared, he never discussed it with Jane. She was scared, too.

  Charlie had been made happy by the way Blondie clung to his heels, her busy claws skittering on the old tiles and floorboards. So which was worse? The likelihood that she’d gone because she wanted to? Or the slight probability that Blondie had been taken by a stranger who wished his family ill?

  Neither Patrick nor Jane knew the answer to this, and they kept silent. The guilt made them angry with each other.

  The letter that followed contained a photograph of Jane on the doorstep, peering into the Milk Tray box, and Patrick, lost in the shadows behind her, his daylit hand on her shoulder. Jane’s face, however, was blistered and melted, because someone had burned it with a cigarette lighter. Then, using a sharpened, orange pencil—in many places, it had scratched away the surface of the Polaroid to reveal the white paper backing beneath—they had circled on exaggerated breasts and grotesque, elongated nipples. With the same pencil, they had punched a hole through Jane’s crotch and drawn tear-shaped drips down her thighs, pooling between her legs. Piss, semen, blood?—who knew?