A bite, a snip, and Old Betsy was gone, just like that. For a fortnight after, the neighbourhood was more sullen than silent, and then folks started going about their business in much the same manner as before. Things really hadn�t changed too much. Elizabeth Marncell didn�t push her granny cart down the pavement anymore. That was that.
And besides, there were other things in the neighbourhood to worry about. The two young men who�d moved into Flat 53 were suspiciously unrepentant and ineligible bachelors. One was called Jim (Mick Elphick�s boy, from Upper Clapton) � he worked in advertising, and he was 30-ish, stocky and balding. He stretched his vowels on a by-way-of-Walthamstow rack and the result was friendly, Bob�s-your-uncle, a half-pint, mate, thanks for asking. Because of his profession, you knew he�d sold his soul, but other than that, you couldn�t pin a single fault on Jim Elphick, try as you might. No, the death of Elizabeth Marncell was probably not Jim�s fault.
His boyfriend Craig was another matter. Craig was American, a mature student of computers, dull-looking and quite shy. He put up NOT-IN-MY-NAME anti-war posters in the street-facing window when it looked like Anthony Blair was jumping on the bandstand of the man (dubiously) elected president of Craig�s homeland, and he always recycled the Hoegaarden bottles that the couple had delivered from Sainsbury�s Online for only five quid, and he volunteered at two literacy projects, so the threatening qualities of Mr Craig Cave weren�t immediately manifest.
It was more a shade of the eye (grey); a slip of the tongue (Craig still omitted the �h� in herbal after seven London years); a tone of the hair (rusty brown, and it is a proven fact that many Englishmen and women are groundlessly distrustful of ginger hair). The small things about a man that add up to and attest to his essential foreignness. No one on Mulberry Street, not even crazy old Moira Lagomort across the way, begrudged Jim his boyfriend. It was 2003, after all. It just would have been better altogether if Jim had settled down with a nice local boy.
Moreover, if you walked by their house, you could look right in, because the young gents in question eschewed net curtains in favour of neo-yuppie wooden shutters that they always forgot to bind up. When the pensioner Trenton Bromley walked by one night, for example, he could see all the way through to the kitchen.
There stood Jim and Craig. They had their arms round each other�s waist, and they were kissing ferociously. Then Craig-the-American moved his hands up to cup Jim�s jaw, either side, and the kiss played on. You could make out the force of the kiss if you stood looking from the street, and you could see how Jim blushed but then recovered, and tried to put his hands everywhere on his lover � neck, ass, thighs, crotch, arms, fingers. Fingers. Jim licked, gently, Craig�s thumb, with a subtle potency, and even through the window you could see Craig�s lips part in a moan, and you could also imagine laughter from those exciting foreign lips.
Mr Bromley hurried into his adjacent flat and told his wife after dinner and after Brookside, so that the information wouldn�t put her off her food.
That night the Bromleys both heard the moans quite clearly, though, through the wall that separated their flat from the Cave-Elphick residence, as Jim sucked Craig�s cock with a good deal more effort than he had his thumb, and Craig reciprocated in kind by curving his palm round Jim�s cock and pulling him into a sugary state of sweat and sex and grip, faster and faster, until Jim shut his eyes and felt himself stretched elsewhere by Craig�s broad sure hand, and felt the scratch-sweet twinges of unvarnished pleasure, little shocks like tiny icicles and wee fires, snippets of pain that flavoured the goodness of sex and made it still better, and he pulsed helplessly in Craig�s fist, and felt quite the better for it.
As Craig and Jim lay blissfully in each other�s arms, naked, happy, sleeping, Trenton and Tricia Bromley tossed and turned and couldn�t drift off until 5.27 and 6.13 respectively, and then at 7.07 they were both wakened by the squawk of an ex-patriate Canada goose, right on schedule, that had recently begun performing morning solos of forty minutes minimum.
�Right,� said Tricia to her husband, �this has got to stop.�
The Hackney Mumble later reported that four garbage cans had been overturned and two cats and one bird killed during the night, and that was when everyone on Mulberry Street knew a fox had come to town.
You need to remember that at this point emotions about foxes were running high all over England. The Countryside Alliance was gearing up for another march on London to support its favourite bloodsport of fox-hunting � not that people noticed that kind of thing too much in very civic surroundings of pavements and asphalt and street-cleaners (Londoners felt themselves more sophisticated and tolerant than barbaric hicks such as the CA), but all the same there was a measured sympathy for rural folk, since even city-dwellers remembered the foot and mouth crisis of the year before and the troubles of that slaughter. (�Though it�s the sheep you feel sorry for, not the farmers,� commented Jim to Craig, as his thoughtful boyfriend served him breakfast in bed later that week.) So nearly immediately the Mulberry Street Fox Eradication Brigade was set up.
Some bad things happened.
A pigeon, a species over which no one normally concerned themselves much, locally referred to as the rat of the sky, with its throat torn out, lying in front of the Vietnamese takeaway one morning.
A compost heap belonging to a married City-attorney couple, totally destroyed.
A couple of boys in their early twenties who were swaggering along the street and had nothing better to do on a Saturday night threw rocks at Jim and Craig�s shutterless windows, but they couldn�t see in anyway too well since the sun-curtain was in place and it was still quite light outside but, if they had been able to, they would have seen Jim and Craig down on the floorboards together, sucking and fucking and laughing, coaxing kisses and come from each other, twined into a beast with two backs and two very prodigious horns. Their very Priapicity would make the hardest heterosexual man on earth flush, feel himself tightening and then excuse himself to the lavatory for a good five minutes at least.
One rock cracked through a lower pane, just a bit, and Jim replaced it fairly easily the next morning.
When Jim and Craig went out in the sunlight to trim the geraniums in the windowbox under the freshly replaced glass later that afternoon, they saw anti-fox posters plastered over the entire street � on every lamppost, tucked under the windshield wipers of every vehicle, half-flapping out of the mail-slots of every front door on Mulberry Street. �They are a terrible menace,� the posters screamed, �they stink and cause havoc to the order of a family garden; they destroy property and lives; they are a threat to our very way of life.�
They finished the replanting, swept the doorstep, and then when they stepped back inside the house they latched up the wooden shutters across the main window. They remembered, for once. But light still came through in long skewers that touched the opposite wall, and when the two men reached for each other, the rays shifted on their bodies � a cheek, a shoulder, an elbow � and lit these patches for all the world like Jedi sabres, straight from the sun, pow.
Someone in the house opposite, across the garden, had the radio on. You couldn�t tell what station it was. But you could hear the vitriol. There were fox- veterinarians sputtering and shrieking. There was a call-in programme where fox-haters outnumbered fox-lovers 20-to-1, and the programme announcer tried to make the whole exercise seem impartial which fooled nobody, really, at the end of the day. Their horrible redness, their stinky sly paws, their bestial crusted tails where shit stuck to the fur rather than the pelt being all beautifully soft the way wild-animal tails are supposed to be, because let�s face it, foxes are just-not-natural. Someone in the house opposite, listening to the debate, turned the volume up even higher.
Craig had a hand on top of Jim�s head and rubbed the bristly short hair he found there, grinding it into his palm. He loved Jim so much. He loved him enough to stay in this dirty part of London when he personally was from semi-tropical Southern California. And when Jim nuzzled Craig�s neck and ran a hand over the seat of Craig�s jeans, pulling him into him, a sharp tremor started in Craig�s crotch and rose all the way to his head. He felt dizzy with lust and crazy with love, as the sayings go. Their groins met, both cocks newly stiffened, and Craig put a hand down to feel the outline of Jim�s rock-hard prick. He smoothed his palm over the extrusion, wanting to press it, keep it where it was and tease it. Their tongues were touching now, a light stimulation that only made the contrast of the heavy ache down below more piercing.
�Herod was a fox!� squealed and blared the radio across the way. �See Luke 13:32! Foxes are drunkards! They�re an insult to Christianity! See the Song of Solomon 2:15! �Our eyes are dim, for the mountain of Zion which is desolate: the foxes walk upon it!� Lamentations, 5:17!�
Craig grabbed Jim even closer, making the light skip over the other man�s skin, and when he pushed his fingers up under Jim�s Armani shirt, he felt that when he finally removed it, Jim�s whole body would reflect light, like a small stocky man-shaped moon, almost as if the wooden shutters weren�t there and all the sun was coming in, all at once.
�Zion, which is desolate: the foxes walk upon it!�
There were no new reports of fox activity during that night.
Craig ran into Mr Bromley in the garden the next afternoon and offered him some mint bunches, since he and Jim had grown too much, and Mr Bromley politely but stiffly declined. Craig thought he heard the older man whispering sermons to himself: "Catch the foxes for us, the little foxes that are ruining the vineyards, while our vineyards are in blossom." Mr Bromley sounded faintly like Gollum in �Lord of the Rings.� A man drove down the street in one of the cars that have both external speakers and built-in microphones, and shouted out that foxes were taking over the neighbourhood.
And that evening Craig and Jim were snubbed by Alice Trudy on the right, and Jim could have sworn that he heard Alice muttering about people with ginger hair, but he didn�t want to report it back to Craig in case it made Craig feel like shit.
Instead he snogged Craig on the doorstep where everyone could see, and looked into his strange grey eyes and smiled.
�Zion, which is desolate: the foxes walk upon it! Yes, the foxes walk upon it!�
That night Craig grew a tail, red and fluffy as the fur round a lady�s fashion-coat. Yes, the analogy is meant to be ironic. Craig�s teeth tapered out until he could bite a pigeon in half, or even an old woman who had spat at him and Jim, and then in the moonlight he looked down at his sleeping lover. Jim�s eyes under his lashes moved as subtly as the breath that raised and lowered his torso, and Craig wondered what Jim�s dreams were about, exactly. Craig caressed his own chest, ran a hand through the fine auburn pelt and then looked down again to see how vulnerable Jim�s human body was � pale, nearly bald, loose in sleep. He would defend Jim tooth and claw. He loved the guy. The moon shafted through the Japanese-style bedroom blinds, and it wasn�t nearly as strong as the sunlight had been the day before yesterday in the front room, not nearly as strong.
The next morning the Hackney Mumble ran a story stating that old Betsy Marncell hadn�t been murdered bloodily after all, but had died of a fairly speedy aneurysm. They didn�t know how they got the story so wrong the first time, and they were very sorry.
Mr Bromley leaned over the fence and told Jim that he had changed his mind and would take a bunch of mint after all if Jim and his, uh, young American chap didn�t mind. Then Mr Bromley attempted a smile.
In No. 53, Jim and his grey-eyed boyfriend kissed, and Jim fingered animal skin, felt his tongue touch fangs, felt a claw tightening on his ass. They kissed more tensely. Then the impression faded. The room stunk of fox and sex and emergency, a wild sort of scent, and Jim wasn�t sure he ever wanted it to fade tidily back into workaday domestic perfume. He nipped Craig�s tongue unexpectedly and heard the other man growl softly with need.
Fox-hunting was eventually banned and the Countryside Alliance calmed down. The local Mulberry Street Fox Eradication Brigade never capitalised on the respectable attendance of its inaugural meeting, and the group slowly evolved to a Committee for Correct Disposal of Human Waste & Litter, a ponderous transition, almost like a beast losing hair and teeth, changing imperceptibly to a man. Tamed, you could even say.
'THE CHILD GARDEN' by Geoff Ryman
'CATCH-22' by Joseph Heller
BRUCE BAGEMIHL
