Cocky the Fox (14)
By:
November 18, 2010
HILOBROW is proud to present the fourteenth 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 Thirteenth our heroes suffered a separation. Sure, it was classy of Cocky to race back into combat and save the life of Shakes the badger, but in the meantime Champion got himself abducted! It was Brutus who took him, continuing the grim portage of the white rabbit to the Black Pond, and into the jaws of Jackpot. Cocky and Shakes set off in pursuit, and the badger inducted the fox into the lore of the monster Jackpot: a lore that Cocky suspects has been partly concocted by those fiendish aesthetes the Du Noir brothers, his great enemies, the ravens.
Big smells around here. We’ve snooped in off the nettled verges, Shakes and I, and come to a small plain of concrete, and a hangar with haybales in it. Metal barns watch us through their enormous open doors. There’s a tractor here somewhere, or a fuel tank — the soporific dusty hay-vibes are flavoured with rich diesel stink. I love a bit of diesel, me. If I was a country fox I’d roll in diesel and then rush through the woods like a pungent goblin, trailing fumes and curses.
‘Shush,’ says Shakes. Our claws snitter over the cement.
‘What? I didn’t say anything.’
‘Yeah well. Just shush.’
‘What are we doing here anyway?’
‘Short cut.’
Grey headache of an afternoon, dull light edged with a mean clarity. A tiny breeze rips and tilts across this yard, and there’s another smell too. Sort of toffee-like… Shakes, for the first time in our acquaintance, appears truly nervous, huffling forward and then freezing, flattening. A badger on concrete cuts a desolate figure. Something booms in one of the barns – a voice? a falling object? – and he goes six inches straight up, twanging with apprehension.
‘Bloody hell, Shakes,’ I say. Now I’m nervous.
‘Keep movun,’ he says. ‘No joke no joke.’
‘But what —’ He’s stopped again. That noise from the barn has become a kind of rumour, moving around, coming at us off the metal sheeting. It’s getting louder. Here’s what it is — we’re being barked at. And now: percussion of incoming paws. The caramel smell thickens.
‘Oh no,’ says Shakes.
‘What? Jackpot? Is it Jackpot?!’
‘RUN!’ I’m already running. I’m running so fast I barely heard Shakes telling me to run. I’m across the yard, I do bouncing skids round the corner of a building and yes, there’s my big snub-nosed tractor, parked and empty. I fly up over the cartoon back tyres with their dinosaur treads and into the driver’s cab, whence I peer, in a cringe, though the side-window. I see Shakes, I see him scrabbling for cover with indecent badgery haste, and then I see some kind of golden-brown fuzzball just exploding off him. He’s down, he’s being mauled, he’s being… licked?
‘Big Boy!’ cries Shakes, in a tone of remonstration. ‘Rargh. Groff. Big Boy! Fuckun fuck off will you!’
But this animal — a Golden Retriever, as I now see, ears whirled by its own ardency — is all over him, clubbing and clamouring. ‘Ah Shakes Shakes Shakes!’ it barks. ‘Adorable Shakes! Edible! Let me lick you until you disappear!’
‘Bollocks.’ Shakes regains his feet and brushes the drool off him. ‘Fuckun rubbish. Why are you such a nutter then.’
‘Pounding, pounding joy!’ exults the dog, running in circles.
‘Can I come out now?’ I ask through the little window. I’m keen to come out. The smell in this tractor-cab is one man’s biography. Scratch’n’sniff.
Big Boy turns toward me, delighted. His tongue flourishes wildly, his tail swipes the air. ‘A new friend?’ he says. ‘I’m overwhelmed! Embrace me!’ And he dashes at the tractor.
‘Easy there, lovebug,’ I say, bristling. ‘Stay back. No one embraces this fox without a damned good reason.’
He jolts to a stop, in burnt-sugar odor, and looks at me with expanding eyes. ‘I don’t know who you are,’ he says. His sincerity is profound and dizzying. ‘But I… love you.’
‘Ugh.’
‘But can you feel that? You must feel it! Does it elevate you?’
‘Shakes,’ I protest. ‘Shakes, can’t you..?’ I wave a limp paw. ‘I mean…?’ This is all so unspeakably naff.
‘Lissun Big Boy,” says Shakes. ‘Seen a badger along here have you.’
‘Another badger?’
‘With a rabbit like. A white rabbit.’
A splash of dog-drool hits the cement. Big Boy’s mouth is open so wide I fear it will unhinge. ‘White rabbit?’ he says, nearly choking with lust.
‘Dint see um eh. Right then. Come on Cocky.’
‘Not staying?’ Big Boy looks stricken now, like he might burst into howls and sobs.‘But … But where are you going?’
‘We’re going,’ I tell him. ‘We’re going away.’
‘Take me! Take me! I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth!’ But of course he can’t. As we debouch off the yard and into old countryside again he’s stuck on that concrete apron — runs to the edge, hits the electric limit of his domesticity and bounces back with sounds of rue in his throat.
‘Knew it,’ says Shakes, head down. He seems pleased. ‘Brutus is never takun the rabbit that close to Big Boy. Were in front of um now.’
‘Grotesque, the dog,’ I say. ‘No excuse for that, is there?’ I’m remembering with a shiver my own moment of lowbrow lovey-doveyness, all-embracingness, when I was addled from eating fungus. I was very confused. I thought I was prophetic. Whoever you were, I loved you: no quality control. And it was the brute Shakes who cured me!
‘Dead strong he is Big Boy.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Fuckun right. Hes laid out badgers with that love of his.’
Drizzle comes down on us, and my mood descends. Autumn’s genius has briefly burned and gone: the fuse of the land is doused. Across ploughed fields there’s a sort of brooding raspberry tone to the woods. Fog-creatures slither around in basins and hollows.
‘Look at that shit,’ I say. Away to our left, at the edge of a simmering copse, a deer is watching us. Regarding us, considering us – with one hoof lifted, impossibly demure.
‘Wots his problem then,’ says Shakes.
‘Champion!’ I begin with some passion, ‘My Champion, with feet so white and long!
I could not teach you right from left, but only right from wrong.
We trod the turf, we tripped through traffic, you and I together —’
Shakes grunts negatively. He disgrunts.
‘Yes?’ I say. ‘You have an opinion you’d like to express?’
‘Fuckun awful that,’ he says.
‘My poetry?’
‘Fuckun awful poetry. Diabolical.’
‘What would you know about it, you great thick badger? Poetry up your arse. When I try to imagine your soul I see a thing like a Swedish meatball.’
‘Never understood the two of you anyway. You and him. A fox and a rabbit like. Wots the deal.’
‘Listen, you lump, when you’ve been around a bit like I have, when you’ve seen the world, lived a little… A beast does things he never thought he’d end up doing. That’s the truth. And the rabbit was there when –’ I cough, pause. My voice, to my alarm, goes rather high. ‘When everyone else was against me.’
‘Thats why your friends.’
‘Yes,’ I squeak.
‘Hmph. Makes sense that does I spose.’
I say nothing.
‘And I want to see the world,’ grumbles Shakes. ‘Thats what I want to do really.’
Mud up top and mud below. Mud in the toe-clefts, mud spiking the shoulder-fur. We’re almost amphibious treading the turned chunks of this field in the dark. We just found Brutus, sitting in a hedge.
‘Quite surprised I can still talk actually,’ he said. Bracken propped him up. ‘Jackpots got most of me. Wearun me like a fuckun necklace I think.’
‘Where’s Champion?’ I said.
‘Ah your right on time mate. Hes waitun for you.’
‘Where?
‘Out in the field. Waitun for his fox face friend like. Hur hur.’
‘I’ll kill you when I get back, badger.’
‘Go on then. That ull be twice Ive got killed tonight.’
There’s a sound in the ploughland like two winos having a fight – frothings, meows, nursed resentments and dear old grievances. It’s getting closer.
‘Jackpot,’ says Shakes.
‘You look for Champion,’ I say. ‘I’m going in.’
Wind bellies above me and the earth, all this earth, sways in the wet. I twinge across it with ticking joints, abhorring the suck of the clay. And then I stop. The fox confronts the night, and growls so hard he almost pops a rib.
Jackpot has eyeshine as he approaches — there must be light coming out of me.
What is Jackpot? Ottery slickness, badgery bulk. A mutant. And vengeful like you wouldn’t believe. Innards trail from the mouth, and at the first concussion — a sort of flubbed frontal charge, with me banging off sideways — the following data is exchanged: I, Cocky, am terrified; he, Jackpot, is insane. Nothing recognizable in there at all, nothing to get a grip on, just slime and red eyes and the hugest pit of hate. And the reek…! I yak, I bleat with nausea: the smell has flippers. He comes at me again, waffling and chattering through the dark, rocking side-to-side. Serrated crash to the side of my head and now I know what he wants, what he’s been hunting for in these late rip-ups of his — he wants the the trigger, the button, the magic pink buried-deep nubbin. He wants to find the life-switch and flip it back, turn it off.
Stewed in the mere for how long, this character? Cooked there, ruined there? The isolation of his mind is awful. Big as he is you could almost step over him and not even see him, like a hank of wet sacking or a pool of bilge. I slash, I dab, I’m terribly squeamish: don’t let too much of him get on me. There’s black gunk in his blows, and I seem to be encountering more than one row of teeth — I’ve already got cuts here, here and here. I’m weakening, I’m going backwards. I’m losing this one. The night is closing over my head. Should I fight to the last belch of life, releasing it upward in a tree of silver bubbles? Or should I just..?
Watch your oxygen, Cocky, Holiday Bob would say when we were sparring. Keep your lungs full. Take sips of air, little top-ups — leave the other beast ranting in the shreds of his breath. And I’m remembering too my Aunt Patsy, how she rasped at me, scoffed at me, putting me through my paces near her shanty in Safeway Wood. ‘Chump!’ she cried, a wreck revitalized by scorn, as I pounced at a beetle and landed wrong. ‘Fiasco! Screwup! Blot upon the Borough!’
‘I hate you,’ I said. I was green with sweat.
‘Hate yourself, loser. Hate the self you’re dragging along with you. D’you know what it’s for, the self?’
‘No. Tell me.’
‘It’s so you’ve got something to GIVE UP! Something to surrender, when the woods ask for it.’
‘You old handbag. You’ve gone senile at last.’
‘Sure, sure. You cling to the self, Cocky, but you must shed it. Shed the self! That’s how you win the big battles.’
Ah, crazy, crazy Aunt Patsy. How her agedness offended my eye! How she withered my whiskers with her horror-breath! And yet, how right she may have been, eh? Possibly? Is that what the woods are asking of me now — my self?
So I give it a shot. So I inhale, forget everything, float in with empty eyes.
Jackpot roars. And look. Look at this. Skipping, dancing over the mudscape, and calling a name: a chorus line of angels is coming to meet me.
Is Cocky dead?
Or will the remembered Yoda babble of his Aunt Patsy get him through?
And if Cocky kills Jackpot — what then?
Find out in the next episode, on Thursday, December 2nd.
SAME FOX-TIME!
SAME FOX-CHANNEL!
Read the fourteenth issue of The Sniffer, a COCKY THE FOX newsletter written and edited by HILOBROW’s Patrick Cates.
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