The fox hunter
Gabriel had a lot of friends in the North of England; she had friends in cities – Durham, Newcastle, Middlesbrough, Leeds; towns – Darlington, Northallerton, Hustwickgate, Harrogate, Pickering, Kirbymoorside; and villages – Skipton-le-Beans, Hutton-le-Hole, Morton-on-Swale, Ainderby Steeple and Harome. Friends who had spread far and wide across the north east, a few down to London, one as far as France. She kept in touch with all these people religiously; visited them when she was supposed to be hawking kitchenware; talked to them incessantly when she wasn’t talking to me, Kurt or Courtney. Friends she was set to systematically introduce me to in a pressure cooker of meet and greets; some coming to us, some us going to them, some, the more distant ones, meeting somewhere in-between. I was all for this – moulding a new and intrinsically English social group around whatever Gabriel thrust in front of me.
Then some halfwit posted a bunch of letters from Southampton.
After that I made it very hard for Gabriel to introduce me to anybody. Duncan and Archie needlessly died and suddenly I desperately needed to get out of the house. She suggested the Tickle Toby, supposedly one of the more lively pubs in Hustwickgate. She also suggested involving a friend because she was scared I’d brood into my beer and make for an intensely boring night unless forced to impress a stranger. She knew me well.
The stranger she chose to ease me back in after the trauma of Chicken Gate, Danby the still imprisoned dog and Duncan and Archie was Penny James. A sadistically injudicious choice at best…
‘I don’t do a lot really,’ Penny said with a self-mocking chuckle and her little pug face took to fighting off embarrassment. ‘I taught English for nearly a year. Senior school.’
‘She had an affair with one of her pupils!’ said Gabriel who was now well on the way, as small people tend to be when they can pay someone else to reach the top shelf. ‘And it was a girl’s school! She licks the stamp on both sides, does our Pen.’
Penny seemed only mildly put out. ‘Thank you, Gabby,’ she said with mock disdain. She turned to me adjusting her hindquarters and resting forequarters on the table in a neat tepee of jewellery-free hands. ‘I don’t do much at the moment to be honest. But for six months of the year, through autumn and winter, I look after horses. That’s all.’
‘Oh right,’ I said, warming to her. ‘What? Race horses?’
‘No, ahm…’
I shot a glance at Gabriel. ‘What?’
A curious little exchange of mouthed words had just taken place between Penny and Gabriel, with Gabriel the instigator.
Gabriel flashed me an oversweet smile. ‘Nothing, monkey face. Why don’t you go and get us a drink.’ She sculled the remains of her glass, slid it across to me.
‘What was all that mouthing?’ I asked looking from her to Penny.
‘Nothing," Gabriel said curtly. 'I just remembered something I needed to tell Penny. Alone. Girl’s stuff, monkey. Period pain. Off you trot.’
Off I trotted with many a look back. At the bar, I surmised I’d had six pints. I certainly felt like I’d had six pints. A pasty razor cut man in a black, short sleeved shirt flicked his eyebrows at me.
‘Hi,’ I said cheerfully.’ Have you got any light beers?’
He leaned in frowning. ‘You what?’
‘Light beers. You know, as in low alcohol.’ He regarded me like I’d asked for smack. ‘Preferably tap if you’ve got it.’ I peered at the logos adorning the row of ceramic and brass taps.
‘We’ve got Tetleys,’ he said.
I sucked through my teeth. ‘Nooo. That’s about four per cent, isn’t it? I was thinking more like three.’ I scanned the row again. ‘What’s John Smiths?’
‘Beer,’ he said.
A portly gent in a black short sleeved shirt had noticed the pale faced man struggling to process my order. ‘What’s he after?’ he asked rubbing an ash tray with a cloth.
‘He wants light beer,’ said the pale faced man to the portly man.
The portly man stopped rubbing his ash tray. ‘He wants what?’
‘Light beer. As in low alcohol,’ I said helpfully and all too aware of my accent.
They both eyed me like I had three heads, exchanged a ‘What have we got here?’ smile, and then the portly man said, ‘Aye, marn. We’ve got light beer. It’s called lemonade and it comes in a pint like this,’ – he held up a beer pint – ‘and it’s got a little smiley face on t’side and training wheels.’
The sniggering was appalling and unprofessional. But such was the pub culture in England; the concept of a light beer was indeed laughable. It wasn’t about stamina, it wasn’t about decorum; it was about drinking full strength beers that got you as drunk as possible as quickly as possible. They didn’t call 5.4% alcohol Stella Artois ‘Wife beater’ for nothing. Satisfied I had already made enough enemies in England, I merely shrugged, forced a laugh and asked for a Tetleys. Armed with this, Gabriel’s double vodka, lime and lemonade and Penny’s double gin and tonic, I returned to the table where the demeanour of both girls was now strangely stilted
‘Right Penny,’ I said. ‘Where were we?’
‘I told you,’ she said with a strangely nervous chuckle. ‘I look after horses. Groom them, train them.’ She shrugged. ‘What more can I say?’
I gazed between the two overtly innocent faces. ‘Well, by the looks of both of you, plenty. What’s with these horses you’re not telling me?’
Gabriel took the reins. ‘If we tell you, do you promise to behave?’
I gaped at her. ‘I’ve had six pints! I can’t promise anything!’
The conspirators exchanged a ‘Will we? Won’t we?’ glance, Gabriel’s head cocked in the manner of the reticent mole-to-be. ‘He’s going to find out eventually,’ she said to Penny as if I was in a sound-proof booth.
‘Find out what?’ I asked.
Gabriel’s resigned gaze shifted from Penny to me, picking up a decent stack of steel as it went. ‘You promise me now you won’t make a scene.’
I shrugged, smirked, promised.
‘Penny hunts foxes, monkey.’
I gasped, glared at Penny. ‘You don’t?’
‘I do.’
‘Uuuuh, God!’ I said throwing my hands in the air. ‘And you seemed so nice!’ I swivelled in my seat, glared around the bar. ‘Does everybody round here kill things?’
‘Told you,’ Gabriel said to Penny.
I lit a cigarette and sat back heavily in my chair. ‘You’re a fox hunter? Who’d have thought?’ I sucked hard on my fag, cursed and glowered around the bar. ‘Who’d have bloody thought?
‘Monkey, can we not do this tonight?’
‘Gabriel! Can you not call me monkey in public for the umpteenth time?’
She groaned and flopped back in her chair, shot a forlorn glance at Penny. ‘See? I knew this would happen.’
***
Given my intake of beer and given my proximity to a very recently exposed murderer, Gabriel was very brave to give me licence to interrogate Penny James. ‘So long,’ she said, ‘as you can do it quietly, rationally, and without attacking her with broken glass.’ Penny winced. ‘It’s all right, Penny! Choose your words carefully, you’ll be fine.’
‘Right, fire away,’ I said giving her a free shot at defending herself before I poked her in her sadly unseeing eyes.
‘Like I said,’ she began with a nervous smile, eyes all over the place – at Gabriel, at the ceiling, at the nearest source of escape. ‘I groom horses. Arm, basically I look after them, I get them absolutely, you know, in top condition. I get them extra fit in the autumn so they’re ready to give a full day’s hunting. Or a half day anyway. They’ve got to be out for five hours with the Master’s but most Masters do second horses.’
‘They do which?’
‘Second horses. They hunt on one horse, then the staffer from their yard will bring them another horse and they swap over horses to go onto the second part of the day, say til half three or four. While the nights are longer, it will be half four or five.’
‘God, so it’s all day?’
‘It’s all day, yeah.’
‘Really? You’re terrorizing foxes that long?’ I was determined to treat this like a cool, calm fact seeking Parkinson-type interview for Gabriel’s sake. So long as Penny didn’t turn out to be as flaky and evasive as Meg Ryan, we’d be fine.
‘Tell me honestly, Penny, and I ask this as a New Zealander who’s only seen fox hunting from afar and found it a hundred per cent disgusting…Do you think it’s cruel?’
‘How can it be cruel anymore?' she said with another nervous chuckle. 'We don’t hunt. We just shoot them.’
I knew this, of course. I had cheered as loud as Prince Charles had groaned when the ban took effect. ‘Which of course makes it fine.’
She failed to grasp my sarcasm. ‘Yeah. But me personally? I’m only in it for the chase. Most of us are just in it for the chase.’
I scoffed. ‘Then why don’t you forget the foxes and just ride around really fast?’
Her orange visage almost reddened with indignation. ‘There wouldn’t be the dogs then, would there?’
‘But you just said the dogs had been taken out of the equation.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘The dogs still follow a scent. Before the hunt, they lay a trail for them to follow.’
‘Is that someone dragging a dead fox through the countryside behind a horse?’
She sniggered. ‘It’s quite sad when you put it like that. It can just be a rag with blood on it.’
‘Far more civilised.' I sipped my beer, eyes about the bar. 'And whose job is it to shoot them?’
‘Some of the huntsmen have guns but they—’
‘If the chase is why you’re there,' I interjected with a withering glare, 'why is it still necessary to shoot them?’
‘Because it’s still fox control,' she fired back. 'The farmers still want to get rid of the foxes.’
‘Right,’ I said shooting a glance at Gabriel, who sat opposite, tense, drinking and smoking, taking in every word, ready to hurl herself across the table as the world’s smallest human shield.
‘So you guys are just glorified pest controllers?’
She laughed. ‘Yep. You might say that.’
‘Rentokil Mounted Division. Why fuck around with messy baits and traps? We can be there within hours with a hundred horses and dogs. Sort of Rent-an-Overkill really, isn’t it? Can you imagine the rat man turning up with a hundred cats?’
She laughed again, as did the world’s smallest human shield, which annoyed me – I was trying to be scathing.
‘The humane reason we hunt,' Penny continued with a slurp on her drink, 'is to get rid of the old and sick ones.’ She laughed, inappropriately I thought until it became clear she had been reminiscing. ‘I watched this fox once. It was before the ban and it could hardly run across the field. It came straight out of a hole and it sort of looked. Like, if you were a fox and you saw a load of dogs charging at you, you’d run surely. It didn’t. It was that old and that sick, it sort of lumbered across this field. It had no energy, it had nothing. It didn’t even run from these dogs, it just stopped and stood there.’
‘What did the dogs do?’ I didn’t want to know.
She shrugged. ‘The first one there killed it.’ Then with the instinct of the hunted, she whipped out the company line. ‘They go straight for the throat. That’s their instinct and it’s instant death.’
‘No pack of dogs tearing at it while it’s still alive?’ I said with patent sarcasm.
‘That doesn’t tend to happen, no,' she said with patent sincerity.
‘Because, of course, the first dog outsprinted the others by such a margin…’ More sarcasm.
‘Unless they’ve been on a scent for a while, the whole pack doesn’t chase.' More sincerity. 'Normally it’s one dog that’ll find the scent and that will be the first one there.’
‘Unless they’ve been on a scent,’ said Gabriel into her drink.
Penny railed on her. ‘If you threw a massive bit of meat into a kennel full of dogs, they would tear it to bits. Bloodhounds of any kind, their instinct is to kill instantly.’
And so it went on, round in circles and back again. Much like a hunt, I imagine. Thrust and counterthrust until something small and furry became too tired to fight. I attempted to lighten the mood as Penny exhibited signs of becoming too tired to fight, such as sticking her cigarettes in her handbag.
‘Does the fox get a respectable burial somewhere with a headstone?’ I asked trying to lighten the tone.
‘Absolutely!’ she beamed. ‘Haven’t you seen the little fox cemeteries dotted about the countryside? The hunt masters go in and put flowers on the graves every week.’
‘How lovely! So the foxes aren’t just taken off and burned or something?’
‘Yeah, they are actually.’
‘Nice.’
She sighed. ‘We’re just doing a job. Getting rid of sick foxes and the ones bothering the farmers on their land.’
I emitted an incredulous laugh. ‘What’s humane about setting dogs on an old, sick fox? If your grandmother was old and sick and piddling in the aisles of buses, would you set hounds on her?’
She shot a glance at Gabriel who shrugged and reached for her drink.
‘We’re putting them out of their misery,’ she said none too convincingly.
‘Couldn’t a vet do that?’
‘A vet would never catch them.’
‘You just said they were old and sick!’
‘Gabriel. I might go.’
‘What’s the problem, Penny?’ I said. ‘You’re not doubting your own hobby!’
My mobile rang. ‘Excuse me, Penny. Got a call coming in. Yes, Gabriel?’ I shot her a glance.
‘If you can’t be nice about it,’ she said into her phone, ‘talk about something else, please? Penny didn’t come here to be torn to pieces. I’ll rephrase that—’
‘Actually, Gabriel, I think Penny’s probably quite used to this, aren’t you, Penny?’
‘Arm, yes and no,’ she said as we replaced our mobiles on the table. ‘There’s definitely a lot more antis around now.’
‘A lot more which?’ That was me.
‘Antis. Anti-fox hunting people. In the last few years especially, loads of city people have moved into the towns and villages, so our lives certainly aren’t any easier than they were.’
‘You poor things.’
She leant in, tapped the table in my personal space. ‘See, Bailey, what you have to understand is it’s a country tradition.' Her tone was now pleading and passionate. 'As a child I never understood the ins and outs, but I used to go hunting because it was a good thing. It was a tradition. It was a countryside sport. We were encouraged to do it for the riding and whatever, so we went. It was good fun! As a kid that was all you did! It didn’t bother you at all.’
‘You were just being brainwashed.’
‘Not at all! It was fun! It was so you could get blooded.’
I screwed up my nose. ‘You what?’
‘Blooded. The tradition was you used to get blooded, the first time you went out on a hunt. When they caught the fox, you’d get blood.’
‘From the fox?’
‘From the fox.’ She moved her fingers around her forehead and cheeks. ‘You’d wipe it on your face.’
‘That’s fucking appalling! That’s Lord of the Flies!’
She laughed. ‘Nah, it’s a tradition. Last year I took my old boss’s children out. They were…six and eight? And they loved it, they loved hunting. I mean literally. One of them hung off the leader and the other I led off my horse. And ahm, we caught this fox and they couldn’t wait to be blooded. They were absolutely ecstatic about the whole situation. They were straight there. The Hunt Master got off his horse, dipped his hands in the dead fox…’
I gaped at an equally disgusted Gabriel. ‘Penny, excuse me, but doesn’t that strike you as even slightly peculiar behaviour for civilised human beings?’
She laughed. ‘I can see how it might look.’
‘What? To anyone with eyes?’
Penny sighed and rolled her eyes. ‘Have you ever owned livestock, Bailey?’
‘Do dogs count?’
She ignored this. ‘There is nothing worse than raising animals, hens, lambs, whatever. Like, you might breed a prize hen – People show hens in this country, very weird. Anyway, you’ve got this hen and it’s won lots of competitions and things and then in comes Mr. Foxy and just murders it. And they leave them. They don’t, you know, take what they want and eat it. They will kill a whole shed of chickens, maybe take one and leave the rest. Now, that’s killing for sport. Foxes kill for sport.’
‘And so do you!' I cried. 'Difference is you have the cognitive abilities to know it’s wrong!’
‘Foxes are predatory creatures, Penny.’ This was Gabriel.
‘Whatever!’ cried Penny. ‘Anyway, I’m not saying any more. We’re not really supposed to talk about it any more, I mean, the nuts and bolts of it. Not as individuals. The Masters are meant to do that.’
‘Why?’
‘Just because they know what’s going on. They’re trained to deal with this sort of thing.’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘This!’
‘You mean they’re trained to say the right thing.’
‘I don’t know! They just prefer to speak for the hunt.’
‘Mmm, because that’s not suspicious! If there was nothing to hide…Are the little kiddies with blood on their faces sworn to secrecy as well?’
‘You’ll have to ask them. Anyway guys,’ – she looked at her watch – ‘I have an early start.’
‘Don’t go, Penny,’ said Gabriel. ‘Bailey was about to shut up.’
‘No, I wasn’t!’
‘It’s okay, Gabby,' Penny said finishing her drink. 'I don’t want to discuss it any more.’
‘Why not?’ I asked belligerently.
‘Because I don’t know who you are.’
‘I’m your friend’s fiancé!’
‘Yes, I know you are.’
‘Well, she’d know, wouldn’t she, Penny?' nodding at Gabriel. 'She’d know if I was some militant activist about to sabotage your hunt.’
Penny laughed darkly and gave me a cold stare. ‘No. She wouldn’t. I can assure you, she wouldn’t.’ She gazed from Gabriel to me in a way I didn’t like. Then suddenly she stood. ‘Nice meeting you, Bailey,’ she said, this aimed rather strangely at Gabriel. ‘Ta for the invite,’ she added and left.
***
‘And another one’s gone, and another one’s gone, and another one bites the dust!’
Midnight post Tickle Toby and Gabriel was flat on her back very much on her side of the bed singing in the dark. I normally liked Gabriel’s singing – tuneful, high and sweet in the manner of an un-American Cindi Lauper. Yet tonight, singing Freddy Mercury’s 1980s classic, the original meaning of which has been lost in an endless procession of dismissed cricket batsmen, her meaning was patently clear.
‘Another one?’ I said to the dark. ‘I had nothing to do with the first one!’
“There’s a definite trend though, monkey. I’ve introduced you to family and one friend. They’ve all abandoned me.’
‘She hasn’t abandoned you.’
‘You saw her.’
‘Yes, and you know her. She’s a good friend. She won’t let what happened tonight come between you.’
‘You’ve come between us!’
It was as if the blackness had grasped her by the throat. I chose my words as carefully as a man as drunk as she was could.
‘Fuck you,’ I said.
‘Fuck you too,’ she said.
And that seemed to do it for while. She seemed to be falling asleep. I seemed to be fully awake, lying as still as I could. Hoping she was falling asleep. She wasn’t.
‘Take away the fox hunting,’ she suddenly said in the dark, ‘Penny’s a nice girl.’
‘Take away the exterminations, Hitler was a nice man!’
‘No, he wasn’t!’
‘Exactly! And neither’s she!’
‘Penny’s not a man.’
‘Don’t try to confuse me!’
‘You can’t judge people on one aspect of their life, monkey!’ I felt and saw a silhouette of her angry little person turning her back to me. ‘You know, I just love your selective morality.’
‘What selective morality?’
‘It’s not just ads, Bailey. You do it with everything.’
I laughed. ‘I do what?’
‘You did it with Penny tonight! You played Indignant Animal Man with her!’
‘Of course!’
‘So why did you tell Dave Land you wanted Duncan and Archie for their meat?’
I gasped as quietly as I could in the dark. Turned my head her way. ‘How do you know that?’
‘Dave Land told me.’
‘When?’
‘Today. He dropped by with some new potatoes while you were getting the papers. Why didn’t you tell him the truth?’
‘For obvious reasons!’
‘Were you embarrassed to come clean with Dave Land, him being a big, gruff manly farmer and all?’
‘No!’
‘So why didn’t you tell him the truth?’ She giggled in the dark. ‘That you were going to keep his bullocks as pets! Tie little bows round their heads.’
I managed a chuckle, said nothing.
‘Honestly though,’ she said settling on her back again. ‘It does bother me a lot. You’ve got these double standards all the time. It is like a selective morality. To put it really bluntly, it’s like, if there’s something in it for you, like an award or if you don’t think speaking your mind will work for you, you shelve your beliefs. It’s like you just don’t feel strongly enough about anything to believe it all the time and stand by it. You’re not honest with yourself and you’re not honest with other people.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘It is fucking true! I’ve seen it time and time again! Be proud of who you are, Bailey!’
‘I am proud!’
‘Prove it. Because I don’t think you can! Actually,’ she sprang from the bed. ‘I don’t think I even want to sleep in this fucking room!’
The bedroom door slammed so hard the wall shook. And so did I. Yet again, Gabriel’s propensity to fly suddenly and violently off the handle over next to nothing had caught me unawares. The temptation was there to run after her to the spare room and suggest she sort out her own relationship threatening defects before railing on mine. I resisted. It would only lead to more shouting and I hated the shouting. Two furry forms snuggled up on their beds by the kitchen radiator didn’t like it much either. Gabriel would probably call that selective morality as well. I just called it keeping the peace. And sometimes peace was a far safer option than progress.
