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Cloven, by C M Taylor

1: A FAILED HORSE WITH TITS



Though not yet sixteen, Paul Buxton had twice come to the attention of the press. In the first incident, he had made the nationals. Aged nine, Buxton had gone missing from the back of his home in the village of Faeversham. It was thought that he had been abducted, but eleven days later ‘Feral Boy Buxton’ was discovered healthy and unharmed. Paul was found ‘wild’, up a tree, and journalists reported that he clutched a spear and had ‘discovered fire’. They did not say that Paul was wearing a track suit; that the tree was behind a service station on the M4, nor that the fire was some cardboard boxes he’d torched with a lighter.

The second newsworthy exploit of young Buxton saw his local paper, the Swaring Magna & Faeversham Echo, run the headline: ‘Feral Boy Injured At Local Zoo’. The incident occurred on his thirteenth birthday, and that week the Echo printed a photo of Paul outside the Mid-Suffolk Hospital. In the picture, Paul held aloft his bandaged hands, while next to him his elder brother scowled. So that now, in the village, after his ‘feral’ behaviour (“Reported right across the country”), and after the incident at the zoo (“Known more particularly to the locals of the Faeversham and Swaring Magna district”), a certain superstition and lore had come to surround young Buxton. He was thought by some elders in the village to be “A wrong ’un”; at the very least he was a “Rum character”, and behind his back Paul was known as “Apeman” and “Neanderthal”. Because it was true that he could be rough, and Paul certainly was very hairy for a fifteen-year-old.

The Buxton house lay east of the village of Faeversham, a brown-roofed bungalow squatting up a rough track. The house was ringed by geometric flora, by pertly clipped shrubs and primly trimmed arbours. It was cow country, and beyond the garden stretched the fields, each stocked with a huge herd of creamy bovines, mooing and lowing and ruminating away between twice-daily milkings. Udders swayed from the cows’ bellies, pendulous and unwieldy as over-stuffed shopping bags. And who can say, perhaps it was this early exposure to cows which was to prompt the years of cattle madness that the unusual Buxton brothers were to experience?

Paul was alone in the old brown bungalow. He was edgy and alone. But he stared down at his trainers and he thought they looked good. Paul turned the TV on then off, then on then off. Then he turned it on again and walked through the brown hall onto the bungalow’s slumping porch. Paul moved pointlessly around the garden. He lit a fag and looked across to the barbed wire fence. A cow was licking the wire, its thick, bent tongue scratching wetly against the sharp hardness of the metal. Paul didn’t want this silent garden, those fussy plants, these comatose cows. For as far as he could see, everything was boring and shit. Paul ardently wanted man’s things: garish lighting and humming crowds, sleek clothes, cash machines, urgent shouting; he wanted to be carried away, exalted in a spiral of men’s things. He’d spent all his almost sixteen years in this house, suspended in its amniotic peace.

Paul had endured flat, dusk skies and torpid vegetable greens, and the aggressive silence which tapped and tapped so ceaselessly at him, making him crazy and morbid and caged. Sometimes, Paul felt that he was going to burst. He was fizzing and popping with frustration and tedium. Paul felt the meemoo far off inside him. Meemoo was the name Paul had given to his wild behaviour, or his ‘fits’ as the medical profession preferred. He had come up with the name as he sat in the solitude of the children’s hospital following his first attempt to run away. Nobody else knew that he had a name for the fits, and nobody really understood what they were like – not his family, nor the doctors and psychiatrists who had questioned him about his eleven runaway days. But Paul never explained, and Paul kept running away. The meemoo had visited Paul on the day of his thirteenth birthday. It was the origin of the scars plaited around the knuckles on his left hand.

He had been at the zoo, staring at a shaggy-haired buffalo, its inordinate head bobbing down to lap the water in a trough at the edge of a wide grass enclosure. And as the buffalo lifted its triangular head from the water it had seemed to Paul to be staring at him, its black, domed eye catching his reflection across its watery meniscus. The eye was staring at Paul. There was something in there looking out, something four-legged and dim and massive and not like him, but something which could look and stare and drink, just as he could.

His newly thirteen-year-old brain formed questions. Was he an animal too? If he were an animal, did that mean that animals were people? What made people people and animals animals? But he had no answers. His fists clenched and banged into one of the wooden stakes which fenced the buffaloes’ enclosure. The buffalo shimmied backwards and clomped into the covered sleeping area. Paul hit the stake harder and harder, punching and shouting, shouting sounds that could have been words but weren’t. With one punch the stake pushed away from him and Paul bent to the low stone wall which ran in front of the enclosure. He began to punch the wall. A keeper dragged him backwards, and lacking other ideas locked the mad kid into a nearby cleaner’s cupboard. Some minutes later, his identity having been established (“I’m Paul. Paul. Paul.”), his parents’ beguilement by panthers was fractured by a tannoy announcement, and the boy was inducted into the Mid-Suffolk Hospital.

Outside, in the garden, Paul looked up to the sky, and he knew that the shit sun didn’t care about him, and the clouds didn’t know his name. He fixed on the one thing that he knew would help him… Soon he would be out of here, soon he would be out. And as Paul concentrated on this fact, that chronology made more manifest each day, he felt the meemoo calm and shrink inside him. Paul didn’t know what he was going to do when he left the village. There was no plan. Paul did not want career guidance, vocational qualifications or on-the-job training, he wanted movement, velocity. He would hoist a prickly shrug if asked what he was going to do when he left home, but inside he would feel a deep sense of utter Paulness; a sense he trusted to liberate a future for himself. In his dreams, inchoate years spangled seductively before him, beckoning him from this dull garden towards feast and fame and fornication.

The tinkle of a bike bell announced an arrival, and with the reflex subterfuge of the secret smoker, Paul lowered his fag and readied it to drop and stub. He spied Jo, his brother’s girlfriend, rounding the last corner of the drive on her heavy bicycle. She entered the garden and leaned the bike against a tree, approaching the house.

“Hello?” she shouted into the emptiness, the black bob of her hair winging upwards as she walked. She was heading no doubt for Chris’ room.

Letting Jo believe she was alone, Paul watched her enter the house. She was cool in the eyes of the great Pauldino. True, she was of the same vegetarian ilk as his brother, but he found in her an elven mischievousness, a tykish giddiness that prevented her from being too earnest. Jo was a giggler, and when she laughed her eyes flashed with easy life. She spanned Paul’s malicious humour and Chris’ precious caring, bridging the brothers’ separateness. But it was not a bridge either chose to cross. It was a weak spot. Each vied for Jo, using her empathy as an emblem of the other’s misjudgements. Paul finished his cigarette, and walked into the bungalow, cheered by the thought of surprising Jo, scaring her.

In the lounge he paused by his mother’s knitting machine, a half-completed cardigan bagging from its mechanism. Jo was not in the lounge. Paul entered the formica of the kitchen. Neither was she there… He walked into his brother’s room – no Jo. Pushing open the door to his room he saw her on the bed. She was curled up, knees brought up towards her chin. Eyes were closed, her head pressed deep in the fold of his pillow. Paul stood and looked at her, and Paul malfunctioned. What did it mean? What could it mean? He moved towards her and she sensed him, her eyelids batting open. Fear and exposure floated across her face.

“Hi. Jo… You okay?”

Paul’s question was direct, but his tone required more allusive explanations.

“Is Chris here?”

“No one’s here Jo. What you doing Goldilocks, sleeping in little bear’s bed?”

She smiled then and pushed her hand towards him. It was sleek and smooth as a flipper and he took it. She looked at the thickening hairs on his wrist, the caterpillar stitching of his scars, and he half-fell, half-climbed onto her. At once he felt the softness of her length and the parallel hardness of her pubic bone, and he sensed the lolly-like sweetness of her breath. His acrid mouth, tobacco more than a smell, like a gagging gas. They kissed, mouth and mouth. And quicker than he wanted he frisked her jumper up towards her neck, and he ran his mouth across the ribbed tube of her throat. The whiteness of her breast. And he rubbed his face against it, his cheek and eye pushing into it, skin improbably smooth like a sea-rubbed pebble. The short hardening cock of her nipple in his mouth now, now between his teeth. Her hand rubbing over denim to pinch the cleat of his zipper, pulling it down through the furrows of its gathering. The ends of her fingers like soft pliers against him.

*


Malice criss-crossed the dinner table. There had been an argument at the shops, that much had been obvious from the moment of his family’s return. Paul guessed what had happened. His brother’s environmental consciousness would have blossomed in the supermarket. There would have been objections to the ethical track record of the manufacturers of this breakfast cereal, objections also to the packaging strategy of that cake. He would have opined and whined and his mother would at first have tried to listen to him, and give him the benefit of the doubt. But the father would have grown irritated, swinging in wider and wider arcs away from the shopping trolley, volunteering to return to distant isles in search of forgotten glacé cherries or multipack toilet roll. Eventually he would have blown, telling Chris to shut up.

The mood in the car on the way back would have been unbearable.

“Pass me the gravy, Chris,” said Mr Buxton.

Chris didn’t respond, but stared down inside the gravyboat, straining to see the minute granules of flesh which constituted the stock. Jo leaned over and picked up the vessel, skimming it towards Mr Buxton.

“There you go.”

“Thanks Jo.”

Paul decided to take advantage of his brother’s tetchiness, “Mum this really is good beef. Is it local?”

“Yes, it’s from Tommy in the village.”

“Is it from one of the fields?” he asked, indicating the surrounding countryside with a twirl of his fork. “I think so, yes.”

“It’s a Friesian isn’t it? I think it is. Friesians have this smooth taste about them.”

“I’m not sure. I didn’t ask, love. That’s enough now.”

“Yes, it is Friesian. You can tell Friesian beef by…”

“Shut up,” exploded Chris. “Just shut up. Why do you have to go on about it?”

Chris reached for Jo’s hand and clasped it.

“Jo and I choose not to eat meat. It’s a decision that we made.”

The diners collectively sighed, fearing Chris would again hijack a family meal with a volley of verbalised ethics on vegetarianism, moral health and barbaric cruelty. His family, truth be told, thought Chris was a crank and his fixation with animals – mostly, it had to be said, with cattle – was jarring and tedious to them. Paul often remarked that Chris was “Obsessed with bloody cows” and this was something with which his parents would agree. Chris did seem to be obsessed with cattle.

But mercifully, Chris settled for a swift parry to Paul’s goading, “Look, we don’t eat meat, okay. But we don’t go on about our ethics. We don’t ram our ideals down people’s throats.”

But Mr Buxton could not resist, “You do Chris. You do. You do go on about it. All the bloody time.”

“Sshhh love, it’s alright,” said Mrs Buxton. “Not now.”

“But he does go on about it. I can’t buy an apple without him telling me I’m supporting some bloody regime somebloodywhere. It’s all vegetablism this and Karl Marx that, and Capitalism the other. Save it till you get to uni’, eh son. I’m more interested in my garden.”

Chris lowered his head, blotches of rage pulsing in his face, acute familial hatred jagged in the table’s silent air.

*


After dinner Paul went outside to smoke a fag. A spiked curl of moon chopped at the sky and the viscous cold of the stars pulsed over. He walked to the bottom of the garden and leaned against a tree. He sparked and blew his smoke into the night. A cow wandered from its aluminium shed and lay in the middle of the field, the wetness of its nose silver in the moonlight. Paul hated that cow. How could it help him? How could it ever begin to be relevant?

When Paul had left the house, Jo had slipped from the lounge and ducked into the dining room. Turning out the light, she flipped back the curtain and peered into the moonlight. After moments of searching, she spotted Paul by the tree. In the garden, guilt and confusion taunted Paul. He had to get out… The garden was hostile; the plants and sky and the animals did not react to you, did not recognise you, did not defer to you. He sucked on his cigarette and looked at the cow, the fat stupid cow. What was it anyway? It was a failed horse with tits. A tautness entered his head, as though the vein on his temple were a tightening rope. He had to get out.

The meemoo took him quickly and quickly he ran forward, vaulting the fence, his knee grazing on the wire. He landed and rushed towards the cow, the grass whipping his trainers and ankles, the blood pulsing inside him. He reached the cow and kicked out, his instep pushing deep into its belly, the cavernous maw yielding. He kicked again, this time at the udder, its lolling pinkness bulging sideways as the liquid displaced. The cow stood, tottering backwards, and Paul kicked again, cracking his foot against its knotted knee.

Jo dropped the curtain and ran into the lounge. The Buxtons stared at her as she entered the room, “It’s Paul. He’s… He’s sick again.”
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