Free Natural History by Neil Cross Page B

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?
    One day I’ll cum on you and in you and over you I’ll roll you in cum I’ll stuff your fucking mouth with it.
    Now Jane and Patrick shouted at the police, but there was still nothing the police could do; not until a crime had been committed.
    Britain had no anti-stalking laws, and no privacy laws either.
    Jane contacted the National Anti-Stalking and Harassment Campaign. They told her that most people assumed ‘anti-stalking’ had something to do with animal rights activism. Jane laughed down the line, and hung up. And then the letters stopped.
    There was a tentative, hopeful month. Perhaps the writer had moved to another target, one that was easier to terrorize. Perhaps he was in prison for something else, or in hospital. Perhaps he was dead.
    It was easy to say all that, and to say it all again and again, murmuring it over breakfast, and over the telephone, and in bed, and in the bathroom, as Jane pissed and Patrick cleaned his teeth. But it wasn’t so easy to believe it.
    It was preposterous, after those years spent researching real beasts, to be so disturbed by an inadequate man with a word-processor­ and an erection—someone who probably still lived with his mother. And after that, to be equally terrified by his silence.
    For many months, being afraid had made them unhappy. They squabbled, and squabbles became arguments. They