Cocky the Fox (11)
By:
October 7, 2010
HILOBROW is proud to present the eleventh 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 Tenth, at the edge of a bloody wheatfield, Cocky and Champion were visited by Randall and Corvin Du Noir, the twin ravens to whom our friends’ progress appears to be a source of aesthetic amusement. Shakes the badger made short work of Maurice the Northside fox, and two more badgers arrived on the scene — the uncharming Brutus and Brunelle. These badgers are all very interested in Champion, for some reason, and having missed the chance to make their getaway, our fox-and-rabbit duo found themselves in badger custody, being taken on a journey.
Dusk, the dusk of Albion, and this convoy’s in a mood.
We’re travelling under the sign of the badger: silence, a rusty antagonism. Big Brutus skulks and rumbles up ahead, setting the pace. Alongside us is Shakes, non-verbal mostly and heavy in the breath. And to the rear, dumpily, Brunelle.
Light drains to the west. In a thistle-bristling paddock, spicy with the piss of vanished horses, a stoat pops up on his hindies and surveys us like a small furry periscope. Thin-voiced he hails us: ‘Where are they taking you, Cocky the fox?’
‘Dunno!’ I call back, grateful for the contact. ‘Some fucking thing with the rabbit!’ Champion, riding on my back, sniffs loudly.
‘Need a hand there?’ He’s bounced in for a closer look. ‘I rip up badgers, me.’
Ballsy little chap. Shakes, who is ignoring us, could abolish this stoat and his family tree in about three seconds.
‘You’re a sportsman,’ I tell him. ‘And I appreciate it, but I’ll pass.’
‘Black Pond badgers are weirdos, eh?’
‘Too right mate.’ Excellent fellow. ‘Now how is it that you know me?’
‘His Majesty Marcus Viles says howdy.’ He about-turns, with a ninja-flip, and begins to make off.
‘Wait — you’re with Mackie?’
‘With the Stoatness!’ he returns cheerfully, unseen now in the grass. ‘You’re in his kingdom!’
Well I never. ‘Hear that, Champ?’ I say. ‘That was one of Mackie’s!’
‘Mackie who?’
‘Mackie who! Mackie Viles! Lovely little geezer from the Borough. A face, a character, a gentleman of the old school.’ I let out a sigh. ‘Moved away right after Bob died…’
Marcus Viles, a good friend of Holiday Bob’s, was a swanking, pot-bellied ermine who wouldn’t stop calling himself ‘King Of The Stoats’. It was performance art, really: a matter of entitlements, proclamations, regal motions, largesse. He had no authority at all. But a sense of occasion always accompanied Mackie Viles, slightly crackers though he was, and we humoured him. We honoured him. Once, finding me with my face in a packet of Tip-Tops, he told me with astounding seriousness that I was ‘poaching the king’s biscuits’. I backed off, smirking.
‘Got himself some troops out here, apparently,’ I say. ‘Just shows you what a bit of self-belief can do.’
The season’s on the turn. Blackberries gleam, deep in the bramble, and against an empty sky the starlings are testing their long-haul formations. Now and again some tree will present an oracular shape, bare elbows of decrepitude, and we’ll moan a bit and shrug. All beasts become fatalists in these months.
‘Now I wonder,’ I say, slow and loud, ‘can anyone tell me the difference between a weasel and a stoat?’
The Champ stops breathing, and his draped forepaws tighten against my neck.
‘It’s something I’ve never quite been clear on,’ I say. ‘You know, which is the weasel, and which is the stoat. They’re so very similar, I just can’t seem to distinguish between them. Can anybody help me?’
‘Uh…’ says Champion.
‘Yes?’
‘The weasel…’
‘Yes?’
‘The weasel,’ he says, with gratifying deliberateness, ‘is weasily wecognized,’
Shakes is looking over — he can’t help himself. I give him a big showbiz wink.
‘And…?’ I say.
‘And the stoat — is stoatally different,’ says Champion.
A snort of laughter escapes the badger, and he dips his head quickly.
You see how I’m working my psychology here. Shakes is no cosmopolitan, but he does seem different from the other two — less rooty and badgerish, a touch more fox-friendly in his thinking. Which is why they sent him after us, I suppose: from what I can gather, from the various sullen scraps of badger-to-badger utterance upon which I’ve eavesdropped — and when these badgers talk to one another, I’m telling you, it’s like they’re grumbling in their sleep — he was despatched by the Black Pond elders to pick us up, the fox and the rabbit, and bring us in. He bumps into that Northside patrol, he offers his services as a scout (figuring it’ll speed up the fox-and-rabbit-location process — quite canny of him really) and as soon as he finds us he turns on the Northsiders, summons Brutus and Brunelle on the badger-frequency, and here we all are.
‘Shakes,’ I say under my breath, sliding into step with him. ‘Shakes, dear shadow, old bodyguard. What’s it all about?’
He growls. He growls in his jowls.
‘Seriously.’
‘Not talkun to you,’ he says.
‘But you are though. So what is it, you lot badgering us through the country like this, taking us back to your Black Pond. Eh? Veneration of the rabbit, of his sagacious properties? I’m not buying it, Shakes. No sir. No sir.’
I move in closer — our flanks are almost brushing. He smells like hot metal, this badger.
‘I mean listen, you won’t find a bigger fan of Champion than me. The rabbit’s got heart. Commitment. He’s come with me all the way from the Borough! But a fount of wisdom? A leader of beasts? Even with all your dark country bullshit, no way. I’m sorry, Shakes, but no. You’re going to have to do better than that.’
And there — having prodded him in his badger-broodings — I leave it. I withdraw, I step back.
‘A fount of what, Cocky?’ asks Champion from between my ears.
‘Sssh!’
Over gloomy pasture the starling-flock coalesces momentarily in the form of a huge fingerprint. Autumn’s sad garlands are in the hedgerow: pale spurs of Boxbright, and drooping Widow’s Wrist. Brutus has turned back, a mass in the crepuscule, and hustles upon us with matronly hips. Uh oh. Shakes tenses, a two-stone grimace. Now check out the badger-speak (all lines delivered in gruff monotone, low volume, without eye contact.)
Brutus: What you been sayun to this fuckun fox.
Shakes: I’ve not said nothun.
Brutus: Well you keep your fuckun mouth shut. This fuckun fox is rubbish. The ditch wants his bones.
Shakes: Steve Bruce said bring’em both or have you fuckun forgottun. Can’t have the white without the red he said.
Brutus: Fuckun Shakes. Where’s your badger.
Fascinating, eh? Where’s your badger, I’ve learned, is what a badger says to another badger when he finds his behaviour insufficiently badger-ish. It’s considered quite the withering putdown.
What are they on about though? The red and the white — is that me and Champion? I’m reddish, he’s whiteish. But wherefore this portage unto the Black Pond? They’ll trek us through the night and then, in liquescent dawn, we’ll put up under a stump in some stifling sett, under a grille of ancient roots, with badgers shuffling up and down its tunnels like boiler brushes…
I spit, mew a little.
‘Alright, Cocky?’ asks Champion above me.
‘Yeah yeah. No worries.’
‘No worries.’
‘They depress me, these badgers.’
‘Badgers are badgers.’
I raise an eyebrow, trot on.
Are there differences between weasels and stoats?
Will the Cocky charisma prevail over Shakes the badger?
And what exactly is waiting for Cocky and Champion at the Black Pond?
Find out in the next episode, on Thursday, October 21.
SAME FOX-TIME!
SAME FOX-CHANNEL!
Read the eleventh issue of The Sniffer, a COCKY THE FOX newsletter written and edited by HILOBROW’s Patrick Cates.
Our thanks to this project’s backers.
READ MORE ORIGINAL FICTION on HiLobrow.com.