Cocky the Fox (4)
By:
May 27, 2010
HILOBROW is proud to present the fourth installment of James Parker’s The Ballad of Cocky the Fox, a serial tale in twenty fits, with illustrations by Kristin Parker.
The story so far: Cocky the fox, a handsome specimen of Vulpes vulpes living on the edge of an English town, is in trouble. His mentor Holiday Bob, top fox in the Borough, is dead. His family life has collapsed, and he’s moved in with his friend Champion, a distressed albino rabbit. His enemies are everywhere. And he’s been drinking a lot of aftershave.
In Fit the Third, Cocky paid a visit to the Borough’s new boss, Billy Five Wives, at the Yard. In no uncertain terms, Billy ordered him to move out of Champion’s hutch, patch things up with his vixen Nora, and cease his program of self-medication. Stung by Billy’s officiousness, not to mention the pitying glance of Billy’s vixen Trixie, Cocky returned to the hutch and picked a fight with his consigliere, Weasel Paul. It was really awful.
‘So what’ll it be, French?’ Silence. Just the hum of his mystique. Fucking cat! I’m on top of the hutch, waving my paws about in the vivid after-rain evening, and French Edward from two gardens over is down there giving me the cat-stare. I know what he wants: he wants his Old Spice, his regular tipple. And I know he wants it now, otherwise he wouldn’t be getting his precious arse wet in this unmown grass. But if I wait for him to ask me for it, I’ll die of old age.
‘Can I offer you something, French Edward? A drink?’ The pores of the evening are open; the garden is being generous with its smells. Soft personalities roam the middle air. My nostrils, though, are scratchy, and I’ve got the twitches. There’s a crumbling at my margins, a feeling I know of old: the encroachment of error. And this cat, to be honest, this frowning minimalist before me, is not helping.
‘Well,’ I say, ‘maybe next time, eh?’ And make as if to descend from my perch, gathering my bottles and samples, when French springs up soft-footed next to me. Hilarious, the feline leap! Shocking speed, and then the instant restoration of poise, as if to move at all had been a lapse in taste.
‘My Old Thpithe, pleathe,’ he says. All cats lisp.
‘Of course, mate, sorted. And you’ll be paying me in…?’
‘Pork pieth.’ His eyes, level with mine, seek to initiate me into the higher cat-mathematics.
‘What kind of pork pies?’
‘Ginthters.’
‘Jolly good. Could you make it half a dozen this time? He really likes them.’ I nod at the hutch beneath us. ‘His Nibs.’
Again with the cat-stare, the heatless glare.
‘Probably not what I should be giving him,’ I babble, ‘but he’s just so stubborn when it comes to —’
‘Your couthin know you’re thtill dealing?’
‘Billy? Fuck him.’
Town-sound goes up around us, a vague unanswerable roar.
‘And the Horde?’ says French Edward slyly. ‘I heard you’d been declared Undethirable.’ He’s quite right. Mother Mercury’s been preaching against me in her cellar, anathematising the Cockster. Her presence floating over the rat-mob, bloated like an out-of-date carton of something or other. Undesirable — me!!
‘Let ’em come. I’d eat rat brains every day if they didn’t give me the shits.’
‘Quite, quite.’ His most Zen look, one of supernaturally candid appraisal. ‘Lonely, aren’t you?’
‘Eh?’
‘New moon tonight. Careful out here, Cocky.’ The disc of a face, for a second, seems to be fringed with abstract fire. Then he picks up his aftershave and skims away.
Fucking cat! Lonely? I’ve got friends all over this Borough! And a couple out in the country as well. I mean, yes, I did have that small disagreement with Weasel Paul, my consigliere… And when I think of my cousin Billy Five Wives and his crew my heart goes black with vengeance… And then of course there’s Nora. Sigh. Nora, my vixen, whose deep simple love is gone from my life. She’s stopped loving me; I can feel it. Without her love the earth draws harder at my bones, and I sink into carnality, bad habits. What’ll I be without her love? A dead one, soon enough. A hairy rubble of organs in some lot somewhere, melting away. A stain, with the ground stealing my minerals. Depressing? I think so. I’m quite fucking depressed about it. For the day does lag and the bones do sag/And the earth drags at your bollock-bag… (One of the Weasel’s, that. You’re a poet, Weez!)
Nora, sweet Nora, trotting and skipping ahead of me with her winking vixen-parts, through the cloudy grey-green nettle beds! I came upon her, light of step and neat of hip, the exact and freshly-discovered shape of my desire. This, apparently, was what I’d been after all along; these were the specifications. So we nipped and tumbled and somersaulted in circles, tightening centripetally towards the moment of fox-on-fox. A sample of our chat (add the panting and the clack of teeth):
— I’m the fox for you. The big dog fox for you.
— Could you please me? I don’t think so.
— Pleasing you is not what I’m after.
— You’re lacking in brains, fox. The vixen poked by you makes a litter of stupids.
— Don’t bring our children into this. This is between you and me.
— Not yet it isn’t.
And so on. Just good clean foxy banter, round and round. I had her in the end of course, on top of a heap of wet leaves; those loins were narrow and wobblingly gained, but Cocky gets his way. And as we sank together into our aftermath, all pressure off, I grew amorous. ‘Where I go, you go, little thing,’ I said. ‘And I’ll batter the fox that comes near you.’
But now I have no love, and now I see my death, and the rude weeds that will poke up around my scattered giblets.
‘She stuck with me through thick and thin!’ I thump on the hutch roof with a back foot, desperately. ‘Champ! Champignon! Do you hear me?’
We parted badly, my Nora and I, but at the moment of our parting she still loved me. It was summertime and I was in the den — a disused garden shed — with Hughes and Hayes. We’d been in there all day, doing hits of conditioning mousse. Foam from a spraycan, great quivering chunks of it, we gobbled it down, we had a session. Hughes had been posturing and reciting something, Hayes had a sick wet grin on his face, and I was just lolling, degraded, a rotted king on a throne of splints. Cans clanked — the cubs were rolling the empties back and forth across the floor, weak and irritable with hunger. I smelled the brisk stink of approaching Nora — her shockwave of Nora-ness — and realized I’d been dreading her, dreading her. But then I thought: Fuck it.
So in she comes, through a hole in the wall, bristling with sobriety and daylight. Total buzzkill — even Hayes looked up, his grotty rapture pierced — but I feigned cheeriness. The hearty husband. ‘Alright doll?’ I said. ‘I’ve got Hughes and Hayes over.’
‘The atmosphere in here is disgusting,’ she said.
‘Join us in some mousse, Nora?’ said Hughes, smirking. What a shit-stirrer! Nora picked up one of the cubs, who were now complaining loudly at her feet.
‘No one fed you, I suppose,’ she said. ‘Any foraging, Cocky?’
‘Now hold on,’ I said. ‘Hold on a frigging minute. Where have you been all day?’
‘I’ve been finding us another den, you idiot.’
‘Oh yeah, that’s right…’
‘You IDIOT,’ said Hayes, and bayed abruptly with loose-lunged laughter. We all jumped except Nora, who bared her teeth. ‘Out!’ she hissed. Not to be trifled with, my girl. Bloody Nora they used to call her.
‘Sorry about Hughes and Hayes,’ I said when they were gone, having suffered much winking and leering from Hughes on his way out. ‘Bob never really liked those two.’
She said nothing and started bustling about, ‘clearing the place up.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘WHAT? Because I had some friends over? Damn it, Nora!’ My whole being vibrated grandly with offense. The cubs were piled up on each other in a corner, heads squirmed out of sight: they hate a row. And then ‘BUT—’ I was saying, and ‘BUT—’ she was saying, while shimmering bands of wrath overlapped in the air between us. ‘How come you don’t get beaten up more often, Cocky?’ That was one of her comments. ‘Eat my shit!!’ That was another. She called me a fake fox. I laughed. All of it was unforgiveable. I accused her of wanting to bite my balls off: she cursed me with her eye, and I felt it settle over me like some sort of whitening ague, like something that might bring down a tree in about fifty years.
‘My testicles for breakfast, yeah!’ I said. ‘And don’t look at me like that. Unless you want a clump.’
Then she put the claw on me. She did! She blazed out with a right to my head and left a hot, bleeding groove over one eye.
‘Oh, you’ve done it now, Nora,’ I said, cowering. ‘We’re finished!’
‘I decide when we’re finished. Now fuck off!’
So I did. I fucked off. ‘That looks painful!’ chirped Minstrel the squirrel as I wobbled out into the afternoon, and if not for the blood running into my eye I’d have had him — he barely made it up the tree in time.
And where did I go, after my row with Nora? I went to the garden. Or rather, I found myself there. Again. For weeks — ever since they pulled Holiday Bob out of the old canal, really — I’d been showing up at the hutch on my way home, at bender’s end, coming down off this or that, or with a fight reverberating in my cells like a struck gong. Consoled, I suppose, by his haiku-like conversation style, and the tragic noisy relish with which he’d scarf up any titbit I chose to throw his way, I’d become a bit of a regular chez Champion. My trail in the dewy grass behind me, dark splashes breaking the silver, I’d cool my furious belly in the dampness and just blabber away at him — my issues, my anxieties. His ears would move, responding. Ah, the garden, the garden, in the hour of the snail. My chillout zone!
This time was different, though. It was mid-morning and the poor rabbit was half-drowned in the back corner of the hutch, a real mess, blinking between drooped and sozzled ears, his fur churned, his meagre straw blasted about and the hutch-walls all dark and wet. What’s all this?, I said. Shivering, he told me the story. The fat kid, his owner, had only been trying out his new mega-water-pistol on him — his Super Soaker! Pinning down the Champ with hose-like lateral fire. Little prick! In my mind I could hear his shrill glutted laugh. Champion still doesn’t get it, incidentally; he worships his owner despite everything. I can never utter a bad word about this kid for fear of a big sulk. ‘He was p-p-playing with me!’ he said that morning, the words brayed through chattering teeth.
I looked at him there, in his compartment of wire and wood. His life was no pleasure cruise, was it?
‘I just thought of something,’ I said.
‘Wuh-what?’
‘Me and you, pal. We’re gonna be roommates.’
**************
When I wake from my nap everything has changed. Night is around us now, cool, dark and instantaneous, and now I see that little fang of a moon up there. I’m alert. I’m spry. I’m slightly less ill than I was. I smell action. ‘What’s up?’ I say.
Champion’s sore red eyes are on me and he’s all clenched, chugging like a generator, the fear-fumes rising.
‘Rats!’ he groans.
Ah yes. That’s what I’m getting, the air is all a-whine with it — that thin inimical rat-stink. Lots of them, near in the darkness. I’ve been expecting this. I squint through the hutch-wire: rat-eyes prickle, like the lights of a distant slum. Rat-action, under the rat-grin moon.
‘Okay,’ I say, ‘Alright. But let’s try to keep it together, shall we?’ Scaredness is like champagne to rats. Right to their heads.
‘FC?’ gibbers Champion.
‘Nah, nah,’ I say. ‘No FC anymore.’ Which is true, as far as it goes. Let me explain. Rats, being so stickily numerous, are very gang-oriented — they can’t stop clumping together and forming things. Like the FC — the Friendship Club — a rat-gang that was very big around here a few months ago. Large enforcer rats who snorted bleach and were scary, into really rotten violence, heads gnawed off and so on. Not quite crazy, they pretended to be, which is so much worse. Some of the saner soldier-rats quit the Horde because of them — from what I understand it was quite a drain on the officer class. But worth it, because the rep that the Friendship Club had was tremendous, just tremendous. For a couple of weeks the name alone could send any beast back down his hole, me included. But then their legend undid them, as tends to happen. Younger, unaffiliated rats and small-timers started claiming they were FC, like the swaggering pube who snatched a packet of Jelly Tots out of Champion’s rigid forepaws one day, which of course he’s never forgotten. This callow rat just leaned in through the wonky hutch-wire, sneered ‘FC!’ and helped himself, leaving Champion aghast for weeks.
‘They broke up the FC,’ I tell him. ‘This lot here are the BRG.’
‘BRG?’ The Burly Ragged Gentlemen: another gang. Mother M. encourages them. Gang life keeps her rats keen, and factionalism suits her ruling style. Pitting one crew against another is how she stays on top, and the resulting casualties are never a problem — no shortage of rats, after all.
‘Yeah. One rat, two rats, three rats, four…’
He brightens. ‘BRG knocking on your door!’
‘That’s it!’ Champion and I enjoy the various battle-rhymes that are bandied about the Borough. ‘Five rats, six rats, seven rats, eight…’
‘Never clever to make ’em wait!’ He’s cheered up a bit now, which is good — don’t want his terror-vibes wafting over to those greedy rats.
‘You got it!’ I say, full of encouragement. ‘Now if you listen, you can hear them grooming.’
This turns out to be a mistake. Halfway down the garden fence, shadowed from the house lights, there’s a lot of dabbing and mewing and slurping going. The BRG always groom extensively before battle. They come prancing in with whiskers knotted, all vicious and dandified and shining with rat-spit. Their top boy, Ambrose, even gives himself a sort of filthy centre-parting, spreading the fur between his ears with prissy pink rat-hands. Anyway, Champion, once made aware of these sounds, is instantly terrified again.
‘BURLY RAGGED GENTLEMEN!’ he cries, then flattens his ears and goes into shock. I’ll get no more sense out of him tonight.
One lone rat, an outrunner, comes scurrying up the garden towards us and then stops a few feet away, twitching his whiskers neutrally. I oblige by baring my teeth through the hutch-wire — there’s a certain form to these things — whereupon he pisses off to make his report. A fox with a hangover and a scared-stiff rabbit, sir. I recommend immediate offensive action. Up in one of the next-door windows I can see Otto’s great head in silhouette, the ears quizzically cocked as he looks down.
I have to get out of the hutch. Can’t operate with the Champ in here, and besides, I can do much more damage on the ground. The typical rat-tactic when taking on a larger beast is to try and work in around the edges, out of bite-range, keeping clear of the head and aiming for the belly and midriff. I’ve seen it a hundred times. They’ll try to give me some woundings to the lower body, deep as they can, mad rats battening there until I’m weak enough to be dragged down. Then they pile on: rat-delirium, what Horde types tenderly call ‘the Overkill’. And fifteen seconds after that, it’s finished.
So I hop up onto the upturned wheelbarrow, with the fence at my back. That way my arse is covered, at least. Two gardens over, I can hear French Edward’s owner calling for him. Good luck with that. The Frenchman is stretched in undomestic darkness somewhere, off his tits on Old Spice!
‘Stay there,’ I tell Champion. ‘And keep the door shut.’ He’s out of his mind, though.
The moist hubbub of their grooming ceases. Suddenly the rat-static hits me and my tail flares like a Christmas tree. Okay then. It’s on.
Will Cocky prevail in his battle against the rats?
What will Billy Five Wives do when he finds out that Cocky is dealing?
And isn’t it about time the ravens showed up?
Find out in the next episode, on Thursday, June 10.
SAME FOX-TIME!
SAME FOX-CHANNEL!
Each installment of THE BALLAD OF COCKY THE FOX was complemented by an issue of THE SNIFFER, a COCKY THE FOX newsletter written and edited by Patrick Cates. Originally sent only to subscribers, they are now all freely available here.
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