Being a Beast by Charles Foster

Author:Charles Foster
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Profile Books

4

FIRE

Fox

The Tube is a syringe, pushing a solution of bodies and electric air into the city’s limbs.

When you ooze out of Bethnal Green station, there’s a grimy brick building by the road with a tired sign: ‘Come unto me and I will give you rest.’

There’s a café round the corner. It used to be run by gentle, stammering, self-effacing Buddhists, and I used to regroup there over cheese and onion rolls after romantic routs. Now it’s full of shrill, carefully unshaven metrosexuals eating pine nuts. There’s a metallic noise which is either music or bad plumbing. Everyone’s thin, and no one’s enjoying being thin.

Outside that café, squeezed at both ends into calligraphic flourishes, was my first London fox scat, coruscating with purple beetles.

When I first came here it was a less brash, more confident place. People lived here because they did rather than because they should. There was no corrosive apartheid between the drinkers of ristretto and the eaters of pie and mash.

Back then I’d read a book and eat penne arrabbiata most nights down Globe Road, drain a carafe of rough Chianti and take a loop of the park before heading home. One warm October night, steering between drug dealers and copulating couples, I saw two foxes on the grass by the bandstand. They swung their heads smoothly over the ground like placid Hoovers, each swing marking a silver furrow in the dew. I crept closer. They took no notice. I crept very close: they raised their heads, saw that I wasn’t a dog or a car, and went back to their swinging. They were harvesting crane flies. The ground was thick with them. The crane flies were laying eggs. That takes time, and anyway, the damp stuck their wings to the grass like stamps in an album. The foxes just had to peel them off with their tongues and suck them up.

I got down on my knees beside the foxes and grazed. There seemed nothing barbarous about crushing bodies that were so slight, so dry and so still. A victim needs to have viscera to evoke visceral disgust. The crane flies were pinioned by the surface tension and didn’t move much. Think of a ticklish rice-paper garnish that turns to vanilla slime.

Half an hour later the foxes were still there, systematically working their patch under the sodium lighting, as I got stiffly up and walked home in a ruined suit.

It wasn’t the first time I had tried to be a fox. When I was nine my father arrived home, excited: ‘Look what’s in the back of the car. But be very careful.’

There, in black plastic bin liners, were two recently dead foxes – a dog and a vixen. Their lips were pulled back in a snarl. They looked angry to be dead. The vixen had swollen mammary glands. She had obviously been suckling cubs.

‘Don’t touch their teeth’, said my father. ‘They’ve been killed with strychnine.’

That’s not a nice way to die. A farmer had once delightedly told me what it did to moles, and I could understand the bitterness of that fixed smile.

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