Switchers (10 page)

‘But they must be worth a fortune!’ said Kevin. ‘Why don’t you sell them?’

‘What does I want with a fortune?’ said Lizzie. ‘I has a fortune already. I has a house of my own and my cats and hens and ducks and my Nancy. I has green fields all around me and I likes it that way. I lets the farmer use the land and he brings me everything I needs from the shops. What’s that if it isn’t a fortune?’

‘But you could live anywhere. Have anything you want.’

‘I lives somewhere already, and I has everything I wants. I did enough travelling for a dozen lifetimes before I married and came here. What would I want to be taking to the roads for at this time of my life?’

For a moment all three of them were silent, and then Lizzie looked at Kevin and said: ‘Now I knows you isn’t a rat.’

Kevin clicked his tongue and sighed in exasperation. Tess sniffed the tea and had a nasty suspicion that she knew who Nancy was, but she decided to ignore it and think of more important things. ‘I didn’t really mean that kind of business,’ she said. ‘I meant the business of why we’re here. Why you told the rats to bring us here.’

‘Oh,’ said Lizzie. ‘That’s something different altogether, isn’t it? That’s not business. That’s a matter of altogether more urgency, that is.’

‘Right,’ said Tess, gently. ‘Then perhaps it’d be a good idea if we talked about it.’

‘Oh, not now,’ said Lizzie. ‘No, that would never do.’

‘But you just said it was urgent,’ said Kevin.

‘There’s some things in life,’ said Lizzie, ‘that just can’t be talked about when the sun is shining and the birds are singing. There’s some things that aren’t fit to be seen, or heard, or said, or even thought in the daytime, no matter how urgent they is.’ She threw Kevin a disdainful glance. ‘If you was a rat, you’d know that.’

Kevin got to his feet in exasperation and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jeans, ‘Then I’m going out for a walk,’ he said.

‘Hold on,’ said Lizzie. ‘We’ll all go in a few minutes, and you can meet Nancy. But let’s have another cup of tea first. After all, it isn’t every day I has a couple of young Switchers to visit me.’

W
HEN TESS AND KEVIN
had finished their second cup of tea, Lizzie brought them out to the back of the cottage to meet Nancy. She was a white goat, as Tess had suspected, and she was tethered by a long rope in a scrubby field which lay between the orchard and the ruins of what was once a large and rather grand house.

‘I lived there once,’ said Lizzie, ‘many years ago. But it was too big for me all on my own. I prefers the cottage.’

Nancy stayed where she was as the three of them approached, and chewed her cud with weary patience as Lizzie prattled over her. Tess had something of the same distaste for goats that she had for rats. They were the poor relations of the other farmyard animals, always bony, always hungry, always eating what they shouldn’t.

‘There now, Nancy,’ Lizzie was saying. ‘Isn’t you a lovely goat? You’s the best little goat in the world, so you is. You’s my poppet. This here is Kevin, and this one is Tessie. They’s Switchers, both of them. You can believe me or not believe me, it makes no difference to me, but they is. Don’t you wish you was a Switcher, Nancy? I bet you does.’

Nancy spotted a few green bramble leaves that she had missed earlier in the day and barged her way between her admirers to go and collect them. Lizzie looked a bit embarrassed. ‘She’s very fond of me, really,’ she said. ‘But she’s shy of strangers. Was you ever a goat?’

Kevin nodded, but Tess shook her head.

‘Really, Tess?’ said Kevin. ‘Were you never?’

‘No.’

‘But why not?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I never fancied it, I suppose.’

‘Goats is all right,’ said Lizzie, ‘except that they has poor manners. Not Nancy, of course. Nancy has manners.’

But Nancy wasn’t there to display them. She had disappeared around the other side of a clump of brambles and was straining as hard as she could on her tether.

‘They has brains, though,’ Lizzie went on. ‘Goats has wonderful brains. Ten times as many as sheep has.’

‘It’s true, Tess,’ said Kevin. ‘Why don’t you try it, eh? We could go for a spin.’

‘You can’t do that,’ said Lizzie. ‘That’s bad manners. You’s only just arrived.’

‘But we wouldn’t be long, would we Tess? Just a quick spin.’ He turned a little further towards her so that Lizzie couldn’t see his face, then he widened his eyes in a pleading way, and Tess realised that she was being very slow. He just wanted an excuse to get away from the old woman for a while.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘all right. I suppose it could be interesting.’

‘Now I thinks about it,’ said Lizzie, ‘it’s not such a bad idea. You two could do me a favour.’

‘How?’ said Kevin, slightly suspicious.

‘Easy. There’s a few gardens around here that could do with a bit of a trim by a pair of goats. They’s an awful toffee-nosed crowd, those ones up the road. They sneers at me if I’s out for a stroll. They thinks they’s better than me what with all their fancy cars and posh clothes and their business and all. The way they talks! Pfoo! You can smell it.’

Kevin looked at Tess with mischief shining in his eyes. ‘Come on. What are you waiting for?’

Tess hesitated, thinking of her own mother and her love for her garden, wherever she found herself. And her father had a fancy car and good suits and worked in what Lizzie scornfully referred to as ‘business’. If they had bought a house here instead of near the park, it might have been her own garden they were intending to ‘trim’. She looked at Kevin. He was waiting eagerly for her reply. They were living on opposite sides of the tracks, she realised. And yet, they were alike.

‘You thinks about things too much, young lady,’ said Lizzie.

‘That’s true,’ said Kevin. ‘She’s right for once.’

‘You bad-mannered little pup!’ said Lizzie. ‘Go on, the two of you. Get out of here and eat some shrubs while you still has the chance.’

Kevin winked at Tess and looked around. They were well hidden, there among the bushes and trees.

‘Make sure you isn’t white, now, whatever else you does,’ said Lizzie. ‘I don’t want anyone coming blaming my Nancy.’

Tess was converted. While Lizzie watched, they made their change. Nancy stared around the edge of the bushes, astonished by the sudden appearance of two goats, one brown and one black.

‘Ooh,’ said Lizzie. ‘That did me the power of good, that did. Makes me feel young again.’

But none of the three goats understood a word that she said.

Tess and Kevin hopped over the stone wall which bounded the scrubby field and into a small orchard. Behind them they could hear Nancy bleating pathetically at the loss of her new friends. For a moment or two they dithered, drawn quite strongly by the call of one of their own kind, but then they moved off among the trees.

Tess knew immediately why the others had been so keen that she try out being a goat. She had been sheep, cattle, horses, and recently she had quite often been a deer along with the others in the Phoenix Park, but none of them had felt quite like this. She had realised quite some time ago that her ability to experience the lives and beings of other creatures had an effect upon her personality as a human being. Each time she changed, something of what she learnt of the animal character stayed with her. She had developed quickness of reaction and awareness of her surroundings from the timid creatures of the fields and woodlands: the mice and squirrels and birds. From the farmyard animals she had learnt patience and a kind of resignation. Now, as she felt the full-blooded mischievous nature of the goat, its sharpness and its love of life and wildness and freedom, she became aware of how tame and careful her life had always been. The values that she had absorbed in her succession of comfortable homes and high-class schools had prejudiced her more deeply than she supposed. She had always avoided those animals which had characteristics that she perceived belonged to people of a different, inferior class. She had never experienced life as nature’s scoundrels because of her fear of their human counterparts. Foxes, bats, crows and magpies, rats and stoats were all villainous creatures in her imagination. She had seen herself as being on the other side of an ongoing battle between good and evil.

Now things were beginning to change. Some of that change was certainly brought about by the days and nights of existence as a rat, when she had experienced for herself how it felt to live outside the law, despised and hunted. But there had been good things about it, too. She had discovered a new sense of courage, and a willingness to stand up and put that courage to the test when she had to. It had been exhilarating. She remembered how she had felt when Long Nose had bitten off her tail. She had been utterly fearless at that moment. It had been a very different feeling from her prim and petty resistance of Kevin when they had first met, and she suspected that she would have more useful resources to draw on now if a similar occasion arose. Her time as a rat, and even more so this new, exciting exploration of goatness, had given her a new understanding of Kevin. He was the kind of boy that she knew her parents would view with contempt. They would mistrust his guarded and suspicious manner and be shocked by his outbursts of temper and foul language. He could not, by any stretch of the imagination be classified as ‘our kind of person’. But Tess had been into his world now, and experienced it from the inside. She knew how all those alien and conflicting feelings arose in him, and how he could not live the life he did without them.

As Tess mused, she and Kevin were wandering slowly through the orchard and browsing on the leaves and twigs that fell within their reach. There were windfalls lying on the ground, apples and pears, but they were small and hard and bitter because of the long spell of cold. The leaves had suffered too, and those that had not already fallen were fibrous and dry, but to a goat they were as delicious as mature cheese.

Tess was surprised by some of the things that she was learning. She found that it was a myth that goats would eat anything. On the contrary, her senses of smell and taste were so refined that she could tell in an instant whether a moth had laid eggs on a leaf or a bird dropping had landed there, even a month ago. She would leave anything that was the slightest bit tainted where it was on the tree, and eat carefully around it. She found that she had a rich and rare sense of her own independence, and that, much as she enjoyed the pleasure of Kevin’s company, she would depart from him without hesitation if the need arose. Nancy was still bleating on the other side of the hedge, and although Tess recognised that the sound held within it the desire for company, she knew that Nancy was calling for more than that. For stronger than every other emotion in a goat’s heart is the love of freedom. Even here, amid the luxury of the rich lands where food would never be scarce, her goat soul longed for the high, craggy places of the world, places which are of no use to mankind but are the wild, windy kingdoms of the goats.

She and Kevin browsed their way peacefully to the edge of the orchard where two strands of barbed wire reinforced a neglected hedge. On the other side of it, cattle were grazing.

Kevin turned to Tess, and the sly, mischievous glint was in his eye again. Tess knew that for the first time, she was returning it. Together they slipped through the fence as if it wasn’t there and strolled out into the field.

The cattle stared, disconcerted, and swung to face them, blowing blasts of steaming air from their nostrils. For the hell of it, Kevin jumped at them, and they spun on their heels with surprising speed and careered away across the field. A goat can’t laugh, but Tess’s heart stretched with mirth as she watched them. Stupid creatures. She despised them.

From where she and Kevin stood, they could see the neatly trimmed hedges of the nearest house, and with another quick glance of agreement, they set out towards it. Behind them the cattle recovered themselves and followed cautiously, closely grouped for safety.

The garden they had seen proved to be impenetrable. The cattle were held back by barbed wire which prevented them from getting anywhere near the hedge, but this was no deterrent to the goats. Nor was the hedge itself, for it was immature and full of gaps. It was fortified, however, by a heavy chain-link fence that even a goat could not work loose, and the two sides of the property that had no hedge were guarded by a high stone wall. Tess and Kevin spent a while nibbling at the protruding sprigs of the hedge, but there was no damage they could do, so they left it and stepped out into the road.

A goat can see over great distances and hear sounds from miles away if it chooses to do so. In the normal course of events, however, it doesn’t waste its attention in this way, but holds it to a much smaller radius around its immediate environment. It was not greatly surprising to either Tess or Kevin, therefore, when they found themselves stepping right into the path of an oncoming car. Nor was it particularly dangerous, because a goat thinks fast and acts faster. They sprang out of the way, feeling nothing more than a brief moment of excitement which made them jump and dance for a few yards along the verge, just for the joy of existence. The driver, however, got the fright of her life when the two shaggy goats appeared from nowhere, and she swerved much more violently than was necessary to avoid them. When she eventually calmed herself down and reversed out of the hedge, there was a hole in it that would have taken the two goats a week to eat.

Lizzie was standing with Nancy in the scrub behind her house.

‘Hush, now, Nancy,’ she was saying. ‘Shhh. Don’t you worry about them two.’ She peered between the trees. ‘Where is they, anyway? They’s gone out of sight, Nancy. They’s disappeared.’

As it happened, they had disappeared from Nancy’s mind at around the same moment, leaving an abrupt vacuum which she filled by lying down in calm detachment and chewing her cud.

‘There’s no sign of them at all, Nancy,’ said Lizzie. ‘I suppose they’s forgotten us.’ She was right.

The next house the two goats met was surrounded by a stone wall with a wide coping stone running along the top. The wall was high enough to deter a stray cow or sheep, and more than high enough to contain the little terrier who yapped at them from the other side of the gates. He was one of those pampered little dogs that are somehow never to be found in farmyards or houses that have children, and he had never in his life encountered a boot or a rough hand. To protect him against the cold, he wore a red tartan jacket which made him feel a lot bigger and stronger than he ought to have done.