Cocky the Fox (6)
By:
June 24, 2010
HILOBROW is proud to present the sixth 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 Fifth, Cocky was nearly brought low by a mob of rats before Otto, the dog next door, came to the rescue. The next morning, the insane raven Corvin du Noir was found in the garden; he was studying the entrails not only of rats, but of the cat French Edward. Later, Cocky discovered that Randall du Noir has also been paying visits, because — it seems — the chaos in the Borough after Holiday Bob’s demise is entertaining to the ravens. ‘We leave tonight,’ Cocky told Champion.
‘Come on! Move your arse! This is ridiculous!’ No good. Nothing I say can make Champion go any faster. ‘Oh come ON! You’re taking the piss now!’ Should I bite him? A quick nip to the rear? My coaxing words have no effect on the rabbit.
We’re moving down the canal towpath at very low speed, by night of course, him doing his clogged bunny-lurches and peering about him with blunted eyebeams, me sort of dawdling and skipping and circling around him, mad with frustration. Along our narrow course we go: water on one side, the canal’s greeny-black stopped traffic, and the cool breathing mass of the park on the other. Here and there a night fisherman sits shapelessly on his bait-bucket. Are we supposed to be careful? I suppose so…
This slow-motion thing, I have to say, is doing my head in. I’m a fox! I’m all about the whip-through, the scrape-by, the glancing visitation — a quick sniff and I’m on my way. But this is like, here’s this bush, and here’s this bush again, and hey, what do you know, HERE’S THIS BUSH. I’ll prance ahead, cursing, and then look back to see the pathos of Champion, see him advancing down the path in his dim corona of rabbit-awareness, going ‘Where… where’s… where’d…?’ Poor kid, he’s confused. I’ve tried carrying him, his nape gripped in my mouth, but that was too sad altogether — he just hung there without a word, his sullen white poundage swinging.
This is the Limit: on the opposite bank of the canal is the Northside, where we don’t go. I say ‘we,’ meaning Borough beasts in general; I’ve actually been over there a couple of times recently, when my mood ran low. There’s a Northside fox called Gumma who has a den just on the other side of Twat’s Bridge (so called because you’d have to be a right twat to cross it), and Gumma does a nice line in nail polish remover. Ethyl acetate: talk about wiping the slate clean. So do I creep along there, round Gumma’s, bearing pork scratchings as payment. High-risk behaviour, I suppose — they’d love my hide, the Northsiders — but then what isn’t, these days?
The Northside, as it was once explained to me by the psychologist Weasel Paul, is a side-effect or ‘symptom’ of the Borough. When Holiday Bob first started organising foxes a couple of years ago, establishing the territory, setting up the rackets and all that, there were a few beasts who couldn’t go along with it (too proud or too bonkers) and rather than purge them all Bob kicked them over the canal, into the badlands of the industrial estate. It’s a fox-unfriendly place, draughty hangars and ringing concrete spaces, lacking the angles in which we thrive, but these exiles were hardy. They were sociopaths, for the most part, born survivors, and they found a way to make it. The Northside came into being. Every beast for himself is the rule over there, none of your Borough niceties. Raw appetite sweeps through it like a wind, unchecked by hedge or fence. Chaos!
And believe it or not, there was a moment quite early in Holiday’s boss-hood when it looked as if the Northside might be getting ready to make a move on us. A fox called Big Barry had put himself on top with some very dirty and well-publicised fights, and to their astonishment the Northsiders had something like an organization. The Northside Kings, that was Barry’s crew, and for weeks they’d been lounging darkly into the Borough in twos and threes, either crossing the bridge or going the long way round, over the railway track. Nothing too heavy had occurred — a stand-off here, some thieving there — but it was a classic territorial wind-up. Playing us, pushing us. And the Kings were a very rough bunch, all with that low Northside look, thick-headed, slanty and opportunistic, not like us gallant and high-stepping foxes of the Borough. We didn’t savour the prospect of a straightener. Not at all!
But listen to how Bob did the Northside. It was magic. We’re sitting around the Yard one evening, a bit down in the mouth, when he beckons over his herald and special envoy, the squirrel named Popjoy, and leans towards him all sotto voce with fox-lips curled in pleasure. The ripple of mischief, the full Holiday! Wsss wsss wsss he goes in the ear of Popjoy, who gives a snort of laughter and scampers off. Here’s what Holiday Bob says, and what Popjoy, flying across fence-tops, broadcasts within minutes around the Borough and environs:
Blackberries not yet ripened —
scent of Barry’s urine in the morning.
Lovely. What economy. A note of poised foxy wistfulness, a Proustian pang by some smirched wall somewhere, its bricks warming faintly in the dawn. Definitely not an insult rhyme or a bruiser broadside.
The effect it had, nonetheless, was devastating.
The suggestion of greenness, unfitness; the presence of fruit; above all the connoisseurial attitude taken towards the pee of the gang leader…. Lethal. Word of mouth got it over to the Northside: within a couple of days no one believed that Bob had made it up, they thought it was part of the lore or something. We all wondered how it first reached the ears of Barry himself. Which of his boys would have been loony enough to recite it to him? Or maybe it crept up on him in his sleep. At any rate it was the end of his designs on the Borough, and of the Kings too, because after Bob’s little aperçu had done a few laps of the Northside Barry had his hands full keeping order on his own patch. Whispers of hilarity encircled him. Round the backs of warehouses there was an airborne snigger against him. He grew paranoid, ridiculous; beatings for anyone caught sniffing his traces, and so on. Soon they were calling him ‘Blackberries.’ You can’t run a Northside gang with a name like ‘Blackberries.’
Funny thing, though: the undoing of Big Barry turned out to be a strategic error, upon which Bob would ruminate from time to time. Because after Barry, who was just a bargain-basement despot, came Lost Johnny — and we’re still worried about him. Look: there’s a Northside fox watching us right now from one of the yards over the water, motionless at the chain link fence. I don’t like his stance, his detachment. I yell at him — ‘The Borough’s undefeated!’ — no reaction. A car makes a turn up ahead on the bridge and the headlights catch his eyes: they flare emptily. Is he connected? One of Johnny’s? A rat-friend or raven-friend? Anything’s possible — there’s no pride on the Northside, as we used to say.
‘Seriously,’ I grumble to Champion, ‘Can we please get a move on?’
‘Itching ear!’ he says, and shakes his head fiercely. He took a couple of rat-bites back there, and they can be very irritating.
‘Know what an itch is?’ I say. ‘It’s a pain with a sense of humour. Arf! Arf!’
He looks blank. I’ll be honest, I’m not satisfied with our effectiveness as a mobile unit.
Here’s the plan: to go somewhere else.
What do you think of the plan?
We had to leave, is the point. The hutch, where I have known peace — or stupor, at least — is blown. Rats I can fight; dogs I can fight. Foxes? I’ll do ’em one by one. But now the Twins are above us, malefacting at 10,000 feet, and the garden is bathed in the purple tractor beam of ravenry. Their designs, their thrall. Very entertaining, said the charcoal voice of Randall du Noir, ventriloquized by my friend Champion. Randall’s apparently been quite the popper-in of late. ‘He comes when you’re asleep,’ said Champion. Imagine that! Me conked out in the hutch, X’s for eyes and tongue-tip protruding, while Randall treads the garden with infernally dainty raven steps, up and down, up and down, boasting like a Bond villain.
So we had to go. But how to get Champion out of the garden, that was the question. As far as I knew he’d never left it before. Out of his hutch a few times, maybe, flopping down to take a sort of stunned promenade in the crappy grass, but never beyond the garden fence. I prepared myself for a mega-showdown, full of threats and suasions and fantastic promises.
‘Champ,’ I began, and my brain tingled with handy lies. ‘Feel like going for a walk, old buddy?’
‘Walk where?’
‘Just a wander, you know, bit of a ramble. Some fresh air. See the sights.’
‘With Cocky?
‘Well yeah.’
‘OK.’ Just like that. What a character this rabbit is. The back gate croaked a fairytale warning, and we were off. He’s made a couple of shuddering halts, but I’ve told him there’s a big packet of Maltesers waiting for us at the end of the trail. Who knows? There might be!
Day comes at last, hauled up like scenery. We’ve gone about two and a half yards, but the
Champ is out of breath, and we need to stash ourselves. This caravan travels by night only. ‘Hold up,’ I say. ‘Know where we are?’
‘No,’ he says. Silly question, really.
‘This is good territory. Friendly. Come on!’ And we cut away from the towpath and begin the lumpy-bumpy climb into Safeway Wood, which is a strip of banked copse overlooking the supermarket carpark and giving onto ploughed fields behind. Home to my aunt Patsy.
Autumn has burgarised this wood, trashed it. Stripped and startled trees and muttering mulch-tones, with violation in the air. Not long ago a band of teenage gluesniffers built a little hide in here, a lean-to of slimy boards – the supermarket people chased them off and knocked it down, but the detritus is still around, the used hardened glue-bags still hanging in the briar like ghosts frozen in mid-flight.
Patsy has the place to herself, by decree of Holiday Bob. Or she’s supposed to. The Champ and I are checking out a half-empty bottle of Orangina when a movement makes me raise my head: two young ’uns passing though the wood’s upper reaches, in the bare leafless light of the morning. One of them has something in his mouth – a lump of cheese? – and they noticeably fail to speed up when they clock me, cheeky sods. They aren’t Northsiders and they aren’t Borough; Rogies then, rogue foxes, seeing what they can get away with. If I was alone I might go after them and have a word. As it is I shout ‘Wankers! The Borough sees you!’ and leave it at that.
My aunt Patsy, when we find her, is in something of a state. Propped against an elm-stump, all bashed-up looking, and talking to herself in a strange, unconcerned murmur. Those two rogies have obviously just worked her over: ruinous underscents all around – the scorching of Patsy’s dignity, the sourness of defeat – and trailing echoes of tooth-clash, muzzle-knock, the old vixen’s jolted rhythm as she tried to fight them off. Nasty wound in Patsy’s shoulder. She’s a hulk of a fox, is my aunt, fully scarred up from various legendary rows. ‘Sit tight,’ I tell Champion, pushing him backwards into a pile of dead leaves.
‘Maltesers…?’ he gulps.
‘Shh!’ And I give a loud fox-cough.
Patsy stops that fluting murmur, for which I am grateful, and half-turns her head. ‘Well look who it isn’t,’ she says.
‘Did they take your lunch again, Patsy?’
‘Lunch? That was a sparring session!’ Oh yeah – I’d forgotten this: Patsy’s permanent fantasy that she’s running some kind of training camp up here. ‘Two of my most promising pupils.’
‘They did look tasty, I’ll give ’em that.’ I get nearer, and the bacterial buzz of her breath almost puts me on my arse. Teeth going, poor old girl.
‘I teach them the way of the woods.’ She’s looking around, distracted. ‘You never learned it, that’s your problem… Bastards. They did take my lunch.’
Down in the carpark there’s early-morning movement: a bluecoated man, with subdued ceremony, is steering forward a grand shining serpent of trolleys. I haven’t had a drink for hours, hours, hours, hours. Patsy has begun to weep. ‘I’m too old,’ she wails. ‘Paws cracked, nose gone… Ears no better than turnip-ends…’
‘Come on, Pats. Couple of Rogies, that’s all. We’ll get our own back.’
‘I shouldn’t have lived to see this!’
Champion’s a few feet away, rattling the dry leaves with his fear-tremors. Where do we live, for fuck’s sake? Where are we going? Now Patsy’s got her tongue out, lapping at her ruined shoulder. This whole scene has me quite freaked out. I start giving little jumps, and making mewing sounds.
‘Tension, Cocky?’ enquires my aunt, suddenly dry-eyed.
‘Don’t you worry about me. I’m loose as a goose on cuckoo juice.’ Bounce, bounce.
‘You’re going the wrong way, I’ll tell you that for free.’
‘What do you mean, the wrong way?’
‘Well, you need to go back, don’t you? You need to get a couple of lumps from the Northside and go back and fuck up your cousin.’
‘You’re barmy. And Billy’s your son!’
‘He thinks he’s better than me.’
‘Lumps from the Northside. What would Bob say?’
‘Bob’s gone.’
I slump down, drained. Life is fiasco. Daylight has shrunk the world. ‘Alright if I hang around here for a bit?’ I say.
Patsy looks at me with eyes shrewd and ungenerous.
‘Your call, nephew,’ she says. ‘You’re on the run.’
Will Cocky take Patsy’s advice, and visit the Northside?
If so, will he make it out again in one piece?
And will Champion still be there when he returns?
Find out in the next episode, on Thursday, July 8.
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.
Our thanks to this project’s backers.