Cocky the Fox (13)
By:
November 4, 2010
HILOBROW is proud to present the thirteenth 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 Twelfth, the nature of Cocky and Champion’s journey with the Black Pond badgers was revealed, as Barely There, the moon-mad hare, delivered his warning: the monster Jackpot had struck again, the curse of the Black Pond was alive, and the white rabbit was to be offered as a sacrifice! Then ignorant badgers clashed by night, as Fieldy and his mob confronted the Black Pond crew. Seizing the moment, our heroes made their escape, and were almost clear of the scene when they heard Shakes the badger calling for help…
There he goes again. In lisping rainfall, the bare flanks of dawn beginning to show. So that’s three times that Shakes – having never seen fit to use it before, the ill-bred bugger – has called out the name of Cocky in supplication. He’s taking a proper beating on the other side of the field, nearing his last throes perhaps — his growls have changed key, from high martial come-on-ness to a deeper, sadder stoicism.
To help, or not to help, a badger?
‘So, Cocky?’ says Champion, roosting there whitely behind my ears like an ancillary and totally useless brain.
Fuck it.
‘Climb down, would you, pal?
‘Down?’
‘Quickly now. Dismount. Deplane. There’s a good chap. Wait for me here, yes?’
‘Okey-dokey.’
And I’m away, freed of rabbity cumbrance and covering the ground at a gallop, mouth wide, tongue flying like a flag. Champion honks something from the rear — encouragement, no doubt, an exhortation to do damage! And badger-eyes widen, nostrils fastidiously flare as I steam in across the grass.
‘Rah…’ says Goon Number Two, pausing in his work. ‘Filthy fuckun FOX.’
The turf is churned all around, quite a tussle they’ve been having. Shakes is getting the worst of it for sure, on his back, wriggling and blocking desperately, his teeth bared in the weak leer of the defeated — of the dead, actually. I last saw this expression on the face of Gibby the Northsider, two minutes after I’d pulled his pipes out. Hate to see it in a living beast.
‘Shakes!’ I yodel. ‘Dude! Where’s your badger?’ And at full stretch I launch at Number Two and half-Cockinate him, reverse-leaping over his head with a passing tooth-rip to the face that sets him back startled on his haunches and gives Shakes enough leverage, I hope devoutly, to heave himself up into the fight. And I’m landing, toes spread, and wheeling around for another pass when I hear him grunt more cheerfully — ‘Ever hear of a right-hander skinny bollocks’ — as he piledrives a chunky forepaw into the chops of Number Two.
Skinny bollocks? This goon is one of the most menacingly obese badgers I’ve ever seen! And he’s not going down either. Rocks a bit, jellies up the impact, and then starts shoving and wrestling his wedge head behind Shakes’ guard, with great oofs of effort and smoke from his ears. Badgers battling, bloody hell — this is so none-of-my-business. But whirring with aggro I rush in low and get a good bite on Number Two’s hip. He stamps in anger, loses his balance and Shakes is all over him, jaws seeking the killer hold. There’s a rain coming down now and we’re slipping about, very intimate, the air thick with outrage and violent puffings. Shakes finds his mark at last. Discreet gust of expiration from Number Two.
Victoire! But Shakes is snuffling, his face covered with a guilty paw. What is this? Is it possible that he is crying?
‘The fuck?’ I say. ‘Badger tears?’
‘But Cocky,’ he blubs. ‘But Cocky you don’t get it mate. It wuz all for the rabbit to get eatun. I mean eatun by JACKPOT.’
‘Well I know that, don’t I? Come, come. This is disgraceful. Let’s go and get Champion.’
‘Poor Champion,’ he sniffs. ‘Poor poor Champion.’
‘Come along, he’s on his own over there…’
Trotting toward the spot where I set down the Champ, anticipating his splodge of whiteness, his familiar goofy shimmer in the murk of the half-dawn, I see… what do I see? I see bugger all.
‘Champ?’
Trampled wet grass. Rain shining and shuffling in the hawthorn bushes. And look here: a little frightened circle of rabbit droppings, a code, a mini-Stonehenge. What?
‘Champ! Frank Champard! Where are you?’
We’re standing in cool air. The hedges are breathing — but there’s a crowding and a crackling in my thoughts. Someone’s tweaked the pain dial again.
‘CHAMPION!”
I skid in mad circles, yelling, while Shakes watches and bleeds.
‘Do something!’ I shout at him. ‘Say something! Be something! Oh! Why did I save your fat arse?’
Brunelle lies close by, deader than dead. But where’s…?
‘Brutus,’ says Shakes.
‘Where is he? Where is he?’ I feel a bit green all of a sudden. ‘We… urgh. Bleffff. Pzzzz…. We need to —’
‘Easy there Cocky.’
But something’s backing up on me. My whole life perhaps.This long and tatty annal of near-misses, skippings-away, of showdowns dodged and reckonings evaded. The endless postponements of Cocky-ness, the undigested experience of moi, itching and slithering in my gorge!
‘We…Wuh…VLLAAAAAARGG!! ACK! ACK!!!’
‘Throwing up aren’t you,’ observes Shakes. ‘From the anxiety like.’
‘ACK! RAZM!! Yes.’
‘Better out than in eh.’ Then he says ‘Blimey’ and turns away sharply. Fox-puke is pure brimstone. I threw up in the corner of the hutch once, after a really big night, and by the time I woke up it had eaten a hole in the floor. Peered through the hole and saw scorched grass below.
‘Okay! Okay…’ I’m panting now, but I am collecting myself. ‘Let’s think this through.’
‘Rabbits safe for the time bean,’ says Shakes.
‘The time bean?’
‘Yeah. For the time bean hes safe. Brutus wont hurt him. Wants him in one piece all the way to the Black Pond.’
‘So what are we waiting for? Let’s —’
‘LOOK OUT,’ yells Shakes, as something huge and wounded comes at me from the side — a great mass of brokenness at the end of its run, a last gasp from beyond the stars. It’s Fieldy, the bastard, gravely bitten by Brunelle and extravagantly bloody but still breathing. I scoot away, he flumps on his face with an earth-shudder, rumbles ‘Go on, my son’ and attempts to lift himself onto his elbows before collapsing. ‘Wossa,’ he breathes. ‘Ya faaaaa….’ Shakes jumps onto his back and bites down until Fieldy is still.
‘Finished?’ I say.
‘Yip.’
‘Let’s go then.’
He looks at me. ‘What DO you smell like Cocky.’
I smell like bile and fireworks.
‘Never mind that,’ I say. ‘Lead the way.’
‘Orright.’ And he does.
So Shakes, as we hustle along in our pursuit, has been bringing me up to speed on the whole Jackpot thing. Some sort of diluvial splatterer with seven legs, apparently, or seven eyes or seven heads, who comes flapping and wittering out of the old pond by night in search of victims. Whom he rips to bits most thoroughly — the way Shakes tells it, there’s almost a pathos in these eviscerations, in the frantic rummagings of the monster Jackpot. My theory: he’s just a big mad otter. But rather aged, clearly. Years and years this character has been the sleeping curse of the Black Pond, an underwater legend dormant for generations of badgers but whispered of, hissed of, deliciously feared. It was said that his mutterings rose to the surface in balls of green pond-gas and became actually audible as they popped open, if you listened oh-so-closely. Young badgers attuned to this event claimed to have heard an indecipherable toad-like voice announcing stuff, threatening, or simply groaning.
‘Youve got to THINK about the pond,’ says Shakes. ‘Before you go there. Its more than a place like. Its. Its.’
And he can’t phrase it.
But I know what he’s saying.
The pond is a zone in my brain. Implosion, gravitational collapse — I see it in the middle of a rotted ash grove, perhaps, the grove all fallen in on itself and into this dark depth where slow impossible acids are digesting it for millennia. No light, no oxygen. A willow doing its time-lapse headbang at one end, while other trees that have toppled or slid without hope into the water now look like they’re growing out of it. Boughs and elbows trapped in arcane gesture. Unmoving scum mocked by the cruising dragonfly. Deep silt, dead leaves making a terrible sort of layered pie at the margins. Shafts of light bending tragically towards its core. This old place infesting itself.
‘So — what? Somebody woke Jackpot up, is that it?’ I say. ‘Broke his slumber of a hundred years?’
‘Yurp.’
‘A badger?’
‘No way.’
‘Who then?’
‘Not a badger. Badgers wuz always careful around the pond. But some say there was laughter by night. And big splashes and branches breakun downward like somethun was been dropped in there.’
‘What do you mean, dropped in there?’
‘From above like. From the sky.’
‘And what about that nasty little rhyme then?’ I say. ‘The one about the rabbit’s feet and the fox-face friend. Where’d that come from?’
‘Younguns been sayun it for a while.’
‘Years? Months?’
‘Month or two. Now we all say it.’
‘Hmmm.’
Can you see where my suspicions are tending here? I think I know who put that doggerel in a young badger’s ear, in the summertime. I see a beak opening and closing, grinding out the rhymes, and the vicious poking pistil-like tongue. And I think I know who woke the bog amphibian from his sleep of ages, just for the buzz. Just for the why-not. Just for the fuck of it. This part of the story has ravens, ravens, ravens written all over it…..
Is Cocky right about the ravens?
Can he and Shakes catch up with Brutus?
And what if Jackpot gets there first?
Find out in the next episode, on Thursday, November 18.
SAME FOX-TIME!
SAME FOX-CHANNEL!
THE SNIFFER: Current and recent issues of The Sniffer, a COCKY THE FOX newsletter written and edited by Patrick Cates, are available only to subscribers. The first ten are available here: #1 | #2 | #3 | #4 | #5 | #6 | #7 | #8 | #9 | #10.
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