MAVE
“We can only offer you fifty-five thousand, Mave. But that’s fully pensionable, of course, after six months. Times are tough and the public sector’s under pressure. Nothing but government cut-backs these days. Blame the bankers.“
Jude Wingfield, chair of the Department of Discrimination Studies at Snaresborough University, formerly known as the East Riding Apprentice and Manual Skills Institute, sat back in her swivel chair and gave a glance of sympathy at the slim and rather faded woman in her mid-thirties who sat opposite her.
“We wanted to appoint three artists-in-residence at Discrimination but we’ve had to settle for two. Theoretically, you’ll have to turn up one afternoon a week – do a bit of seminar work, make yourself available to the kids – you know. But things are a bit quiet this term. In fact, to be absolutely honest we haven’t got any students at all right now. Somebody forgot to register us with UCCA so nobody applied, or if anyone did we never heard about it. A typical admin slip-up. What’s more, and we didn’t notice this at the time either, it seems the students from years two and three have all dropped out. So the faculty’s on extended leave. Which is great for you – just concentrate on your work at home. Look in now and again if you can manage it.”
Mave Spratt nodded mechanically. She possessed only a vague notion as to the duties of an artist-in-residence, for the call of art had been a recent one, and previously she had been employed for several years by the Snaresborough police authority as a clerical assistant. Her duties there had been to collate and log the Chief Constable’s spacious personal expense account, but that official had found her a somewhat unsatisfactory subordinate who possessed little aptitude for figures or timekeeping – which he could have overlooked – and who treated him with less than the deference he felt he deserved – which he could not. He was not therefore wholly distressed when the incident occurred which had terminated her career with the Police Authority and had led to her present sinecure.
The sole male employee in the all-female clerical department had been a vague and self-effacing widower, named Harold Tiptree. One afternoon, finding himself alone in the lift with Mave Spratt, he had rather shyly invited her to go to a film with him the following Saturday evening. Her response had been immediate and unequivocal. She had fled the lift at the next floor and, through her union representative, lodged a formal claim for sexual harassment against the Police Authority. Mr Tiptree’s dismissal had followed within the hour – the only occasion in living memory that anyone had lost a job in the local authority for any reason whatsoever – and her compensation settlement was duly approved. The sum awarded was rather a disappointment.
“Only £650,000 – it should have been more,” the union convenor had commiserated. “We normally look for £800,000 at least, but it gets up the nose of the ratepayers association when we go over three-quarters of a million on a harassment deal. Bunch of toffee-nosed Tories. They can afford double”.
Mave, still feeling herself traumatised by the incident in the lift, had undergone a lengthy course of counselling, in the process of which she had realised that her career had so far lacked creative direction. With her substantial police authority pension, taken early, and a useful capital sum in reserve she felt ready to engage in a new sphere of life. Her councillor – a pony-tailed psychologist in his forties for whom, during what he called their ‘emotional re-calibration’ sessions she had developed a certain regard, only to learn that he was, inevitably, gay, had suggested that her internal distress might be assuaged by artistic expression.
“Feel your pain, Mave,” he had advised. “Meet it face-to-face. Better still, articulate it. The asymmetry inherent in heterosexual gender relations which led to the unacceptable emotional onslaught – I might say defilement – which you underwent in a very real sense in that lift should provoke anger. You need to take control – to develop a self-definied personal empowerment narrative in a non-exploitative life environment – know what I mean?”
Mave felt that she did, which was why, one afternoon in late September as she was sitting on the narrow sofa in her single-roomed flat scanning the property pages of the Snaresborough and District Advertiser she came across the answer to her previously unfocused needs.
“Blight Grange. Desirable and spacious stone-built residence of character, in tranquil moorland setting. Enormous potential. Apply Winthrop & Co. Estate Agents.” She laid down the paper thoughtfully and after a moment’s reflection reached for the phone.
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Jess Muggleston, standing in the hall of his sparsely-furnished bungalow in the village of Blight, gazed raptly and disbelievingly at the banker’s draft in his calloused hand. £250,000! Two hundred and fifty thousand, a quarter of a million pounds for that four-walled sponge and a quarter acre of gorse up on Skenfrith Moor and he hadn’t even included its land in the sale. Blight Grange had been on the market for nearly seven years and he had despaired of finding anyone weak-minded enough to take it off his hands. Despite an initial flurry of viewings even the credulous good-lifers from the south had retreated down the rutted track from Blight Grange in their dozens.
Cringing on the hillside like an exhausted beast hunting cover, its bleak grey exterior barely separable from the limitless surrounding bleakness of sky and moor; any view that it might once have enjoyed now violated by a double line of giant pylons half a mile below marching towards Huddersfield; surrounded by a treeless morass of sour peat bog and 150 acres of exhausted grazing, Blight Grange had been farmed after a fashion by Mugglestons since the Wars of the Roses. After the battle of Towton it had fallen into the hands of one Black Kit Muggleston who, reluctantly pressed into the Yorkist cause, had taken the opportunity to disembowel its troublesome owner who was fighting beside him in the field and with whom he had a disputed claim on the property, rightly assuming that in the confusion of battle nobody would identify him as the perpetrator of the deed. From that time to the present, the farm had remained in the family’s hands, a tenure which had endured throughout a thousand vicissitudes of English history on the sound principle that no-one else in the entire kingdom would have given half a blind ewe for it.
And at the exact time that Jess, some five miles away, was gazing in awe at his cheque, Mave Spratt, equally rapt, was standing in Blight Grange in what the estate agent, in a burst of poetic inspiration, had described as the Great Chamber, savouring the first pleasurable rush of ownership.
It had been a whirlwind romance. Even though nothing about the inside of the house except a pervasive miasma of damp suggested antiquity, with every saleable door, fireplace or architrave having been ripped out and cashed in by various Mugglestons over the previous half-century, Mave had been ravished. As the agent, smiling weakly, had conducted her through the downstairs rooms, edging round by the walls, obliquely indicating the sagging floorboards, the indescribably offensive 1970s fireplaces in cheap slabs of multi-coloured stone and the flock wallpaper which contrived to peel with damp at both ends, Mave remained in a trance. This was to be her studio – here she would bring forth works of radical power and inventiveness, coruscating, mould-breaking indictments of male, white Anglo-Saxon autocracy. Her imagination soared. Perhaps in the future she could open a gallery – the Whitechapel of the North…. establish a collective of alternative feminist artists.....overthrow the military-industrial establishment….
At that moment a shrill squealing issuing, it seemed, from her garden, cut short her reverie. She ran to the window and gaped in disbelief. More than two dozen large dogs were seething over the gorse-fringed patch of turf which constituted her lawn. With waving tails directed outwards they formed a rough circle of brown, grey and white and they appeared to be disputing over a reddish-brown bag of irregular shape which they had already reduced to tatters. With incredulity rapidly turning to horror and wrath, Mave saw that the bag was in fact the remnant of a fox, which had already half disappeared into the dripping maws of the pack.
The sight of a scarlet-faced and furious woman hurling maledictions as she leaned from a ground floor casement window of Blight Grange was both puzzling and disconcerting to the members of the Blight Fell-Hounds, who had just arrived on the scene and who were whooping encouragement to their charges.
Tony Sowerthwaite pushed his cap back and scratched his head. “That thy new missus, Jess? She looks a right harpy. Where’d you find her, lad?”
Jess Muggleston, who whipped in for the Blight Hounds on a Wednesday, seemed a touch embarrassed “Nay lad, haven’t been told? She’s new owner. I sold Grange last week, but nay, I didn’t take it she was so unfriendly, like. We’ve always run across Blight land, but we’ll have to keep off her patch from now on. No matter, she’s only bought a few yards round house.”
“Ay but happen she’ll cause trouble wi’ police – chopping foxes like – its not legal any longer, as you might have heard,” pointed out Tony Sowerthwaite with an inflection of sarcasm.
“What, from Constable Ramsbotham? Nay, he comes out wi’ Fell-Hounds regular. He’ll not shop us."
“Maybe, but what about Fox Shed? It’s just over there, and she might hear summat.” Tony pointed with his whip to a range of ramshackle barns some two hundred yards beyond the Grange.
“She’s an artist, lad – wouldn’t know a barking vixen from a tin whistle. Nay, we’ll have no trouble from her.”
“Anyhow it were a grand quick run,” put in Tom Slight, a neighbouring farmer. “Straight from barns, two mile point, clean kill and back home for tea. Takes a bag fox for that – got any more as fresh as him over there, Jess?”
“Ay, happen,” replied Jess cautiously. “We’ll see on Saturday.”
The pack was already streaming out of the garden and down the track and, with what he hoped would be taken as a conciliatory wave in the direction of the Grange windows, Jess followed.
During the following weeks those few and invariably disoriented hikers who stumbled across Skenfrith Moor and passed close to the Grange, were surprised and mystified to see a number of prominent painted boards rising over its hedges which bore the ambivalent legend: ‘NO CRYPTO-FASCIST BLOOD-FEST HERE!”
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Meanwhile, Mave, alone in Blight Grange, discovered that she had, at last, been granted a glimpse of that bright ascending path along which she was to take the first faltering steps of her personal odyssey. From deep within, from the subterranean caverns of her soul where the living streams of life and joy had long been barricaded, thwarted and suppressed before they could rise to nourish her parched spirit, she was vouchsafed a vision, an epiphany. She knew now what she was called to bring into being, the realisation of which would conjoin with, and give substance to, the timeless and universal current of women’s consciousness. She had, in short, found the form and medium to respond to that emblem of phallocentric male oppression, the importunate Harold Tiptree.
From a scrap-metal dealer in Snaresborough she acquired a rusty and dilapidated telephone box which, duly hauled up the long track from the lane, now rested on a base of breeze-blocks over the creaking floor-boards in the centre of the principal living room. In the dank cellar directly beneath, she laid in a supply of canvas, paint, wood and glue; and from a Huddersfield second-hand bookshop she bought a heavy bundle of 1950s American teen fan magazines. Then she felt herself ready.
First she clipped from the magazines a selection of faded colour photographs featuring bland, grinning teenage couples in the back seats of Buicks and Oldsmobiles, the boys sporting crew-cuts or Bobby Darren quiffs, the girls, wreathed in vacuous smiles, blond and anodyne in full-flaring skirts and bobby socks.
She mounted these images carefully on the inner glass panels of the telephone booth and illuminated the interior with spasmodically-flashing strobe lights. The exterior of the box was painted a uniform and sombre black. To complete the work, she installed a crude sound system which, when the door was opened, played a looped tape consisting of ringing telephone tones overlaid with women’s screams recorded from long-forgotten horror movies.
‘Date Rape Box’ was, in the opinion of its creator, a postmodern masterpiece; ironic, subversive and iconoclastic. She walked round it carefully, appraising it from every angle. Then she pulled open the sprung door and, ignoring the protesting floorboards beneath, she stepped inside. It was entire, it was faultless. The world was ready to know that a new radical visionary had arrived. Without more ado, she reached for her camera and began to record her triumph for posterity.
Thus it was that, one dark morning in early December, Mave was standing in the Mugabe Room of the Snaresborough University Arts Centre with the curator, Gary Snail, discussing possible future projects in her role as artist-in-residence. “It’s all about grabbing the media’s attention, Mave. You want to be hard-hitting – disturbing –outrageous –offensive. Offensive to Daily Telegraph readers, that is. We can’t afford to upset the people who matter. And for God’s sake keep clear of minorities. Epater les bourgeois and all that. Then we get Arts Council funding big time. What we want is a series of works on the same theme – defilement, violation, assault – something to stir up the Church of England, maybe. We could call it the Blasphemy Suite; how does that grab you?”
But Mave was already meditating on an idea. That distressing incident in her garden earlier in the autumn had impressed itself on her inner eye with disturbing insistence. She found herself picturing a photo montage of small eviscerated animals, the mute victims of man’s despoliation of nature, staring in agonised terror from the walls of a new and even more disquieting installation. She heard the intimidating cacophony of hunting horns, the cracking of whips, the coarse bellows of men inflamed with the lust for death.
Yes, that was it. ‘Slaughter Box’. It would make her name, confirm her status not as an ephemeral local luminary but as an original, a virtuoso, a Promethean with a creative agenda to challenge the social order. She hurried home and spent the afternoon measuring and planning. The new work would be assembled in the big living room studio beside Date Rape Box, and the combined impact would be overwhelming. But first she needed materials. A large old crate would be ideal – suggesting a prison cage of bleak exterior and tormenting confinement. Where could she pick up something suitable? At that moment her gaze wandered through the window towards the cluster of dilapidated farm outbuildings a short distance beyond the garden. These, along with the grazing land, had been retained by Jess Muggleston and seemed to have no particular function other than to impair the view from the Grange to the north.
The following morning, pushing a serviceable wheelbarrow before her, Mave steered her way cautiously towards the barns. The moor was utterly still. Only the omnipresent moan of the December wind and the plangent mew of a circling buzzard disturbed the silence. Closer scrutiny revealed that the farm buildings formed three sides of a square with an open rectangle of cracked concrete in the centre. The barns themselves, built mostly of breezeblock with cement rendering and topped by roofs of corrugated asbestos, seemed empty and unpromising. She wandered idly round to the side furthest from her house and discovered a scattered assortment of discarded farm equipment, rusting harrows, rotting tyres, the unsightly dross accumulated by a marginal upland farm over sixty years. Then, as she was turning to leave, she noticed, propped against the side of the furthest building and evidently undisturbed for a decade or more, a pile of corroded metal sheep palings, beyond which was a stack of flat wooden pallets. This looked more hopeful. A cage could be built from half a dozen pallets. Surely a few would not be missed.
As she stepped across and tugged at the nearest pallet she became aware of an intense and pungent odour which, incongruously on that barren site, evoked the sensation of untamed and feral nature. It was, she felt, unmistakeably the tang of a wild animal, musky, sour and assertive. And suddenly she jumped, her heart pounding, for, from close by, on the other side of the thin cement wall, came an ominous scuffling and panting as though some malefic body were attempting to break through and assail her. She hesitated for a moment before curiosity conquered her trepidation. A dozen paces along the wall was a door. She pushed it open and stepped inside. In the dim light she saw that the building was entirely empty apart from a stack of what appeared to be hutches in the far corner. Drawing closer, she realised that each contained not a rabbit but a thin dog-like creature, whose nose restlessly and obsessively probed through the narrow bars. Instantly she understood. They were captive foxes.
Mave thought quickly. She was wholly ignorant of hunting but could see that these foxes had been caught simply to be released and chased to order, and her outrage swelled. Her first impulse was to spring them from their cages and let them escape out on to the moor. But would they have the time or instinct to run far enough to avoid pursuit and capture? Then another reflection supervened. She needed their images for ‘Slaughter Box’ – she wanted anger-provoking pictures of powerless, timid creatures, of hunted innocents which would serve as metaphors for man’s tyranny over, and defilement of, the world of nature. But, as she stared into the sharp green eyes of the nearest fox, she found herself momentarily and unwillingly doubting this sustaining trope. They were treacherous eyes, merciless and impersonal, and through their slanting black pupils she glimpsed an utterly alien domain, a realm of unfathomable and implacable purpose, devoid of pity, conscience or remorse. Those eyes spoke of many things, but not of timidity or innocence.
She suppressed these misgivings with an effort and impulsively stretched a hand towards the caged fox, which simultaneously, and without switching its eyes from her own, unsheathed its yellow fangs and attempted to snap at her through the constraining grill. Mave made up her mind. The animals were clearly distressed and hungry. They needed care and at least temporary protection while she planned her next move. She would remove the foxes to the Grange and return their cages to the barns.
With much difficulty, keeping her hands clear of its frontal bars, she managed to ease the first of the heavy cages on to her wheelbarrow and started to push it in the direction of the Grange’s cellars.
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The following evening In the tap room of the ‘Ratcatcher’s Arms’ in Blight, which served as the ex-officio headquarters of the Blight Fell-Hounds, a passionate debate and some recrimination was in train.
“It’s that woman, Jess, that artist of yourn. She let them foxes out on to moor. How else did they get away, you tell me that?”
Jess Mugglestone, who was deeply sensible of his responsibility for having introduced into the hunting Eden of Skenfrith a serpent in the shape of Mave Spratt, lowered his mug wearily.
“I’ve told thee, lad, As soon as we saw empty hutches yesterday we cast hounds across moor. And found nowt. If them foxes had run from barns we’d have laid on to their scent in no time. It’s a mystery to me what’s become of ‘em.”
“Ay, Jess is right, Tony,” put in Tom. “She didn’t slip ‘em into her handbag, like – they’d take the fingers off anyone who tried to touch ‘em. And there’s been no whisker of a fox seen for miles around. We checked every earth from Pendle’s Beck to Snape Fell.”
“It’ll tak weeks to get another lot together,” said old Ben Sowerby morosely. “Fine way to end season, I must say.”
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Mave, meanwhile, was discovering that the fostering of half a dozen wild foxes in the cellar beneath her studio was not without its hazards. Having with the greatest difficulty and at some risk to herself propelled the apprehensive and snarling animals down the steps and through the oak door into the stygian blackness beyond, she was faced with the task of bedding and feeding them. The former was facilitated by the presence of a substantial pile of mouldering straw in the middle of the cellar floor. The latter was proving more intractable. Mave was not quite sure about the diet favoured by a wild fox but she supposed that, like badgers, they consumed a certain quantity of meat, and made up the balance with natural greenery, roots and fruit.
However, when, on the first evening, she placed a tray of what she hoped was an appetising compote inside the cellar door a violent and prolonged skirmish took place in which the two largest dog foxes established brutal supremacy over their smaller rivals and pools of blood and fur appeared across the cellar floor. Next morning, as she peered tentatively round the door, she saw a dozen baleful eyes gleaming out of the darkness at the far end of the room while her carefully-prepared meal, apart from the few scraps of meat, appeared to have been untouched. She supposed that they were adjusting to their new and unfamiliar surroundings and decided to persevere with the feeding regime for the time being. A more balanced diet would surely do them no harm.
The next phase was to shoot the photographs with which she planned to line the walls of ‘Slaughter Box’ but this involved making closer contact with the captives in the dark cellar and she shrank from the task. By the third day, however, as a rank mammalian odour began to vie with the aroma of damp in the upper rooms, and as the muffled whining and yapping from below grew more insistent, Mave realised that something had to be done. Another unforeseen difficulty had arisen in the shape of the man who arrived without warning to read the electricity meter, which was mounted on a wall of the main cellar. To forestall him while he stood waiting in the hall she pretended to have lost the key to the door but noticed that he listened and occasionally sniffed in a puzzled manner before departing, with the meter unread.
She discovered, too, that her stores of glue and canvas in the cellar were shrinking fast, for apparently the foxes, eschewing their vegetarian diet, were seeking alternative sources of nourishment. More ominously, they appeared to have been nibbling at the cables that traversed the cellar walls before rising into the main house.
The animals, it seemed to Mave, were finding it hard to settle. At nights, the incessant staccato yapping broadened into a chorus of lugubrious howls and as she passed the descending steps on the way to bed she was aware of puckered and desperate noses probing beneath the door. It was becoming clear to Mave that her protective custody of the foxes could not be prolonged indefinitely.
Armed with torch, camera and flash gun, therefore, and summoning up all her resolution she descended the cellar steps the following morning and edged inside. At once a skittering of sharp claws indicated that the occupants had retreated to the furthest corner behind the straw piles. She attempted to pinpoint the skulking forms with her torch and capture them on flash as they hugged the cover of the damp walls but the results proved disappointing. A series of furtive and sinister silhouettes with red eyes glaring malevolently out at her audience would not perhaps evoke the righteous outrage at which ‘Slaughter Box’ aimed.
And then, on a dark evening in mid-December, after she had returned from one of her infrequent visits to Snaresborough University, Mave received the first shock. On the mat at her feet lay a buff official envelope and its content was startling:
‘NOTICE OF INSPECTION OF PREMISES,’ she read. ‘It is reported that the occupier at the address given below may be keeping or causing to be kept a wild animal or animals in premises unlicensed for said purpose viz. Blight Grange, Blight, Yorks., contrary to Section 116b of the Wildlife and Countryside Act, etc, etc. A statuary inspection is therefore scheduled to be carried out Thursday 17th December 11AM.’
Mave was stunned. Only thirty-six hours to resolve the crisis. But how to salvage her project and protect the animals? She could envisage the local newspaper headline: “Foxes imprisoned in cellar by local animal-rights artist. RSPCA prosecution to follow.” She was painfully aware that her career at Discrimination Studies would not prosper after such a disclosure.
At that moment she received a second shock. As though to accompany the chorus of nocturnal howls that had started up in the cellar beneath, the lights in the hall suddenly trembled and went out. She found herself standing in total darkness. Presumably the foxes below were agitating the cables again. Then the lights flickered on and died once more. This latter disturbance, however, seemed to have triggered the sound and lighting system of ‘Date Rape Box’, for, as she could see through the studio door, it had sprung into electronic life and was emitting strobe flashes, ringing telephone tones and women’s screams in fantastic juxtaposition.
Mave felt suddenly vulnerable. There was a nightmarish quality about standing alone in the blacked-out hall while her installation performed in the next room as though possessed by a malign will of its own. She seized a torch, ran across the creaking floor to the centre of the studio and, as the strobes flashed and crackled, wrenched open the sprung door of the erstwhile telephone booth. The mechanism must somehow have jammed. She shook the box desperately, tugged ineffectually at the wires inside, then, growing more frantic, gave the steel door a violent slam.
Instantly and without warning, the studio floor sagged violently then gave way and collapsed with thunderous and shattering force, precipitating Mave and the heavy box into the cellar beneath. She came round a moment later to find herself lying on her back on the pile of straw, staring upward at the dim ceiling of the studio, visible through the swirling dust and vast jagged rent in the boards above her head. Something seemed to be pressing on her legs, and turning her head with difficulty, she saw that the telephone box itself was lying immovably across the lower half of her body. Inexplicably, its electronic circuit had survived the impact and the flashing lights and recorded screams continued as it lay, otherwise wrecked, on its side on the cellar floor.
She felt no pain, merely, despite the overwhelming shock, a kind of numbed drowsiness. Hours seemed to pass as she drifted in and out of oblivion. At one moment, she awoke and imagined that she saw a ring of faces, sharp, inhuman faces, which leered at her before she slipped back into a succession of elliptical dreams. It was night, endless night, and day would surely come, and yet the darkness seemed limitless. She floated into semi-consciousness once more. She was in a lift at the police authority with Jess Muggleston who was offering to take her hunting bag foxes the following Saturday evening and she was demanding half a million pounds to keep his secret; she was standing inside a cavernous wooden crate whose walls were plastered with images of doe-eyed American teenagers which abruptly mutated into the merciless eyes of foxes.
Suddenly her own eyes were wide open and staring upward. She was awake and intensely cold. Something was moving insidiously on the straw beside her limp arm. She uttered a questioning groan but received no reply; then, horribly, out of the flashing darkness, there came a scuffling and scraping and a pair of slanting green pupils, fathomless vulpine slits, loomed a few inches from her own in closer and more intimate proximity than she could have imagined possible. Another pair gleamed on her right, then another. She tasted rather than smelt the fetid breath, and at the same instant a thousand steel needles seemed to penetrate her right shoulder. Convulsed with agony, she found herself to be paralysed; there came another multiple stab of excruciating torment, and then she was screaming frenziedly, her voice merging with the looped screams of the installation. All the creatures were now busily occupied and after a while her cries became weaker. At last the biggest of the dog foxes jumped on to her chest and, grinning into the semi-comatose face with a kind of ghastly solicitude, nosed towards her throat, broaching its scarlet jaws almost casually for the final consummation.
The designated cast of ‘Slaughter Box’ was enjoying its most sustaining meal for over a fortnight.
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© Charles Jackson 2010
Jude Wingfield, chair of the Department of Discrimination Studies at Snaresborough University, formerly known as the East Riding Apprentice and Manual Skills Institute, sat back in her swivel chair and gave a glance of sympathy at the slim and rather faded woman in her mid-thirties who sat opposite her.
“We wanted to appoint three artists-in-residence at Discrimination but we’ve had to settle for two. Theoretically, you’ll have to turn up one afternoon a week – do a bit of seminar work, make yourself available to the kids – you know. But things are a bit quiet this term. In fact, to be absolutely honest we haven’t got any students at all right now. Somebody forgot to register us with UCCA so nobody applied, or if anyone did we never heard about it. A typical admin slip-up. What’s more, and we didn’t notice this at the time either, it seems the students from years two and three have all dropped out. So the faculty’s on extended leave. Which is great for you – just concentrate on your work at home. Look in now and again if you can manage it.”
Mave Spratt nodded mechanically. She possessed only a vague notion as to the duties of an artist-in-residence, for the call of art had been a recent one, and previously she had been employed for several years by the Snaresborough police authority as a clerical assistant. Her duties there had been to collate and log the Chief Constable’s spacious personal expense account, but that official had found her a somewhat unsatisfactory subordinate who possessed little aptitude for figures or timekeeping – which he could have overlooked – and who treated him with less than the deference he felt he deserved – which he could not. He was not therefore wholly distressed when the incident occurred which had terminated her career with the Police Authority and had led to her present sinecure.
The sole male employee in the all-female clerical department had been a vague and self-effacing widower, named Harold Tiptree. One afternoon, finding himself alone in the lift with Mave Spratt, he had rather shyly invited her to go to a film with him the following Saturday evening. Her response had been immediate and unequivocal. She had fled the lift at the next floor and, through her union representative, lodged a formal claim for sexual harassment against the Police Authority. Mr Tiptree’s dismissal had followed within the hour – the only occasion in living memory that anyone had lost a job in the local authority for any reason whatsoever – and her compensation settlement was duly approved. The sum awarded was rather a disappointment.
“Only £650,000 – it should have been more,” the union convenor had commiserated. “We normally look for £800,000 at least, but it gets up the nose of the ratepayers association when we go over three-quarters of a million on a harassment deal. Bunch of toffee-nosed Tories. They can afford double”.
Mave, still feeling herself traumatised by the incident in the lift, had undergone a lengthy course of counselling, in the process of which she had realised that her career had so far lacked creative direction. With her substantial police authority pension, taken early, and a useful capital sum in reserve she felt ready to engage in a new sphere of life. Her councillor – a pony-tailed psychologist in his forties for whom, during what he called their ‘emotional re-calibration’ sessions she had developed a certain regard, only to learn that he was, inevitably, gay, had suggested that her internal distress might be assuaged by artistic expression.
“Feel your pain, Mave,” he had advised. “Meet it face-to-face. Better still, articulate it. The asymmetry inherent in heterosexual gender relations which led to the unacceptable emotional onslaught – I might say defilement – which you underwent in a very real sense in that lift should provoke anger. You need to take control – to develop a self-definied personal empowerment narrative in a non-exploitative life environment – know what I mean?”
Mave felt that she did, which was why, one afternoon in late September as she was sitting on the narrow sofa in her single-roomed flat scanning the property pages of the Snaresborough and District Advertiser she came across the answer to her previously unfocused needs.
“Blight Grange. Desirable and spacious stone-built residence of character, in tranquil moorland setting. Enormous potential. Apply Winthrop & Co. Estate Agents.” She laid down the paper thoughtfully and after a moment’s reflection reached for the phone.
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Jess Muggleston, standing in the hall of his sparsely-furnished bungalow in the village of Blight, gazed raptly and disbelievingly at the banker’s draft in his calloused hand. £250,000! Two hundred and fifty thousand, a quarter of a million pounds for that four-walled sponge and a quarter acre of gorse up on Skenfrith Moor and he hadn’t even included its land in the sale. Blight Grange had been on the market for nearly seven years and he had despaired of finding anyone weak-minded enough to take it off his hands. Despite an initial flurry of viewings even the credulous good-lifers from the south had retreated down the rutted track from Blight Grange in their dozens.
Cringing on the hillside like an exhausted beast hunting cover, its bleak grey exterior barely separable from the limitless surrounding bleakness of sky and moor; any view that it might once have enjoyed now violated by a double line of giant pylons half a mile below marching towards Huddersfield; surrounded by a treeless morass of sour peat bog and 150 acres of exhausted grazing, Blight Grange had been farmed after a fashion by Mugglestons since the Wars of the Roses. After the battle of Towton it had fallen into the hands of one Black Kit Muggleston who, reluctantly pressed into the Yorkist cause, had taken the opportunity to disembowel its troublesome owner who was fighting beside him in the field and with whom he had a disputed claim on the property, rightly assuming that in the confusion of battle nobody would identify him as the perpetrator of the deed. From that time to the present, the farm had remained in the family’s hands, a tenure which had endured throughout a thousand vicissitudes of English history on the sound principle that no-one else in the entire kingdom would have given half a blind ewe for it.
And at the exact time that Jess, some five miles away, was gazing in awe at his cheque, Mave Spratt, equally rapt, was standing in Blight Grange in what the estate agent, in a burst of poetic inspiration, had described as the Great Chamber, savouring the first pleasurable rush of ownership.
It had been a whirlwind romance. Even though nothing about the inside of the house except a pervasive miasma of damp suggested antiquity, with every saleable door, fireplace or architrave having been ripped out and cashed in by various Mugglestons over the previous half-century, Mave had been ravished. As the agent, smiling weakly, had conducted her through the downstairs rooms, edging round by the walls, obliquely indicating the sagging floorboards, the indescribably offensive 1970s fireplaces in cheap slabs of multi-coloured stone and the flock wallpaper which contrived to peel with damp at both ends, Mave remained in a trance. This was to be her studio – here she would bring forth works of radical power and inventiveness, coruscating, mould-breaking indictments of male, white Anglo-Saxon autocracy. Her imagination soared. Perhaps in the future she could open a gallery – the Whitechapel of the North…. establish a collective of alternative feminist artists.....overthrow the military-industrial establishment….
At that moment a shrill squealing issuing, it seemed, from her garden, cut short her reverie. She ran to the window and gaped in disbelief. More than two dozen large dogs were seething over the gorse-fringed patch of turf which constituted her lawn. With waving tails directed outwards they formed a rough circle of brown, grey and white and they appeared to be disputing over a reddish-brown bag of irregular shape which they had already reduced to tatters. With incredulity rapidly turning to horror and wrath, Mave saw that the bag was in fact the remnant of a fox, which had already half disappeared into the dripping maws of the pack.
The sight of a scarlet-faced and furious woman hurling maledictions as she leaned from a ground floor casement window of Blight Grange was both puzzling and disconcerting to the members of the Blight Fell-Hounds, who had just arrived on the scene and who were whooping encouragement to their charges.
Tony Sowerthwaite pushed his cap back and scratched his head. “That thy new missus, Jess? She looks a right harpy. Where’d you find her, lad?”
Jess Muggleston, who whipped in for the Blight Hounds on a Wednesday, seemed a touch embarrassed “Nay lad, haven’t been told? She’s new owner. I sold Grange last week, but nay, I didn’t take it she was so unfriendly, like. We’ve always run across Blight land, but we’ll have to keep off her patch from now on. No matter, she’s only bought a few yards round house.”
“Ay but happen she’ll cause trouble wi’ police – chopping foxes like – its not legal any longer, as you might have heard,” pointed out Tony Sowerthwaite with an inflection of sarcasm.
“What, from Constable Ramsbotham? Nay, he comes out wi’ Fell-Hounds regular. He’ll not shop us."
“Maybe, but what about Fox Shed? It’s just over there, and she might hear summat.” Tony pointed with his whip to a range of ramshackle barns some two hundred yards beyond the Grange.
“She’s an artist, lad – wouldn’t know a barking vixen from a tin whistle. Nay, we’ll have no trouble from her.”
“Anyhow it were a grand quick run,” put in Tom Slight, a neighbouring farmer. “Straight from barns, two mile point, clean kill and back home for tea. Takes a bag fox for that – got any more as fresh as him over there, Jess?”
“Ay, happen,” replied Jess cautiously. “We’ll see on Saturday.”
The pack was already streaming out of the garden and down the track and, with what he hoped would be taken as a conciliatory wave in the direction of the Grange windows, Jess followed.
During the following weeks those few and invariably disoriented hikers who stumbled across Skenfrith Moor and passed close to the Grange, were surprised and mystified to see a number of prominent painted boards rising over its hedges which bore the ambivalent legend: ‘NO CRYPTO-FASCIST BLOOD-FEST HERE!”
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Meanwhile, Mave, alone in Blight Grange, discovered that she had, at last, been granted a glimpse of that bright ascending path along which she was to take the first faltering steps of her personal odyssey. From deep within, from the subterranean caverns of her soul where the living streams of life and joy had long been barricaded, thwarted and suppressed before they could rise to nourish her parched spirit, she was vouchsafed a vision, an epiphany. She knew now what she was called to bring into being, the realisation of which would conjoin with, and give substance to, the timeless and universal current of women’s consciousness. She had, in short, found the form and medium to respond to that emblem of phallocentric male oppression, the importunate Harold Tiptree.
From a scrap-metal dealer in Snaresborough she acquired a rusty and dilapidated telephone box which, duly hauled up the long track from the lane, now rested on a base of breeze-blocks over the creaking floor-boards in the centre of the principal living room. In the dank cellar directly beneath, she laid in a supply of canvas, paint, wood and glue; and from a Huddersfield second-hand bookshop she bought a heavy bundle of 1950s American teen fan magazines. Then she felt herself ready.
First she clipped from the magazines a selection of faded colour photographs featuring bland, grinning teenage couples in the back seats of Buicks and Oldsmobiles, the boys sporting crew-cuts or Bobby Darren quiffs, the girls, wreathed in vacuous smiles, blond and anodyne in full-flaring skirts and bobby socks.
She mounted these images carefully on the inner glass panels of the telephone booth and illuminated the interior with spasmodically-flashing strobe lights. The exterior of the box was painted a uniform and sombre black. To complete the work, she installed a crude sound system which, when the door was opened, played a looped tape consisting of ringing telephone tones overlaid with women’s screams recorded from long-forgotten horror movies.
‘Date Rape Box’ was, in the opinion of its creator, a postmodern masterpiece; ironic, subversive and iconoclastic. She walked round it carefully, appraising it from every angle. Then she pulled open the sprung door and, ignoring the protesting floorboards beneath, she stepped inside. It was entire, it was faultless. The world was ready to know that a new radical visionary had arrived. Without more ado, she reached for her camera and began to record her triumph for posterity.
Thus it was that, one dark morning in early December, Mave was standing in the Mugabe Room of the Snaresborough University Arts Centre with the curator, Gary Snail, discussing possible future projects in her role as artist-in-residence. “It’s all about grabbing the media’s attention, Mave. You want to be hard-hitting – disturbing –outrageous –offensive. Offensive to Daily Telegraph readers, that is. We can’t afford to upset the people who matter. And for God’s sake keep clear of minorities. Epater les bourgeois and all that. Then we get Arts Council funding big time. What we want is a series of works on the same theme – defilement, violation, assault – something to stir up the Church of England, maybe. We could call it the Blasphemy Suite; how does that grab you?”
But Mave was already meditating on an idea. That distressing incident in her garden earlier in the autumn had impressed itself on her inner eye with disturbing insistence. She found herself picturing a photo montage of small eviscerated animals, the mute victims of man’s despoliation of nature, staring in agonised terror from the walls of a new and even more disquieting installation. She heard the intimidating cacophony of hunting horns, the cracking of whips, the coarse bellows of men inflamed with the lust for death.
Yes, that was it. ‘Slaughter Box’. It would make her name, confirm her status not as an ephemeral local luminary but as an original, a virtuoso, a Promethean with a creative agenda to challenge the social order. She hurried home and spent the afternoon measuring and planning. The new work would be assembled in the big living room studio beside Date Rape Box, and the combined impact would be overwhelming. But first she needed materials. A large old crate would be ideal – suggesting a prison cage of bleak exterior and tormenting confinement. Where could she pick up something suitable? At that moment her gaze wandered through the window towards the cluster of dilapidated farm outbuildings a short distance beyond the garden. These, along with the grazing land, had been retained by Jess Muggleston and seemed to have no particular function other than to impair the view from the Grange to the north.
The following morning, pushing a serviceable wheelbarrow before her, Mave steered her way cautiously towards the barns. The moor was utterly still. Only the omnipresent moan of the December wind and the plangent mew of a circling buzzard disturbed the silence. Closer scrutiny revealed that the farm buildings formed three sides of a square with an open rectangle of cracked concrete in the centre. The barns themselves, built mostly of breezeblock with cement rendering and topped by roofs of corrugated asbestos, seemed empty and unpromising. She wandered idly round to the side furthest from her house and discovered a scattered assortment of discarded farm equipment, rusting harrows, rotting tyres, the unsightly dross accumulated by a marginal upland farm over sixty years. Then, as she was turning to leave, she noticed, propped against the side of the furthest building and evidently undisturbed for a decade or more, a pile of corroded metal sheep palings, beyond which was a stack of flat wooden pallets. This looked more hopeful. A cage could be built from half a dozen pallets. Surely a few would not be missed.
As she stepped across and tugged at the nearest pallet she became aware of an intense and pungent odour which, incongruously on that barren site, evoked the sensation of untamed and feral nature. It was, she felt, unmistakeably the tang of a wild animal, musky, sour and assertive. And suddenly she jumped, her heart pounding, for, from close by, on the other side of the thin cement wall, came an ominous scuffling and panting as though some malefic body were attempting to break through and assail her. She hesitated for a moment before curiosity conquered her trepidation. A dozen paces along the wall was a door. She pushed it open and stepped inside. In the dim light she saw that the building was entirely empty apart from a stack of what appeared to be hutches in the far corner. Drawing closer, she realised that each contained not a rabbit but a thin dog-like creature, whose nose restlessly and obsessively probed through the narrow bars. Instantly she understood. They were captive foxes.
Mave thought quickly. She was wholly ignorant of hunting but could see that these foxes had been caught simply to be released and chased to order, and her outrage swelled. Her first impulse was to spring them from their cages and let them escape out on to the moor. But would they have the time or instinct to run far enough to avoid pursuit and capture? Then another reflection supervened. She needed their images for ‘Slaughter Box’ – she wanted anger-provoking pictures of powerless, timid creatures, of hunted innocents which would serve as metaphors for man’s tyranny over, and defilement of, the world of nature. But, as she stared into the sharp green eyes of the nearest fox, she found herself momentarily and unwillingly doubting this sustaining trope. They were treacherous eyes, merciless and impersonal, and through their slanting black pupils she glimpsed an utterly alien domain, a realm of unfathomable and implacable purpose, devoid of pity, conscience or remorse. Those eyes spoke of many things, but not of timidity or innocence.
She suppressed these misgivings with an effort and impulsively stretched a hand towards the caged fox, which simultaneously, and without switching its eyes from her own, unsheathed its yellow fangs and attempted to snap at her through the constraining grill. Mave made up her mind. The animals were clearly distressed and hungry. They needed care and at least temporary protection while she planned her next move. She would remove the foxes to the Grange and return their cages to the barns.
With much difficulty, keeping her hands clear of its frontal bars, she managed to ease the first of the heavy cages on to her wheelbarrow and started to push it in the direction of the Grange’s cellars.
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The following evening In the tap room of the ‘Ratcatcher’s Arms’ in Blight, which served as the ex-officio headquarters of the Blight Fell-Hounds, a passionate debate and some recrimination was in train.
“It’s that woman, Jess, that artist of yourn. She let them foxes out on to moor. How else did they get away, you tell me that?”
Jess Mugglestone, who was deeply sensible of his responsibility for having introduced into the hunting Eden of Skenfrith a serpent in the shape of Mave Spratt, lowered his mug wearily.
“I’ve told thee, lad, As soon as we saw empty hutches yesterday we cast hounds across moor. And found nowt. If them foxes had run from barns we’d have laid on to their scent in no time. It’s a mystery to me what’s become of ‘em.”
“Ay, Jess is right, Tony,” put in Tom. “She didn’t slip ‘em into her handbag, like – they’d take the fingers off anyone who tried to touch ‘em. And there’s been no whisker of a fox seen for miles around. We checked every earth from Pendle’s Beck to Snape Fell.”
“It’ll tak weeks to get another lot together,” said old Ben Sowerby morosely. “Fine way to end season, I must say.”
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Mave, meanwhile, was discovering that the fostering of half a dozen wild foxes in the cellar beneath her studio was not without its hazards. Having with the greatest difficulty and at some risk to herself propelled the apprehensive and snarling animals down the steps and through the oak door into the stygian blackness beyond, she was faced with the task of bedding and feeding them. The former was facilitated by the presence of a substantial pile of mouldering straw in the middle of the cellar floor. The latter was proving more intractable. Mave was not quite sure about the diet favoured by a wild fox but she supposed that, like badgers, they consumed a certain quantity of meat, and made up the balance with natural greenery, roots and fruit.
However, when, on the first evening, she placed a tray of what she hoped was an appetising compote inside the cellar door a violent and prolonged skirmish took place in which the two largest dog foxes established brutal supremacy over their smaller rivals and pools of blood and fur appeared across the cellar floor. Next morning, as she peered tentatively round the door, she saw a dozen baleful eyes gleaming out of the darkness at the far end of the room while her carefully-prepared meal, apart from the few scraps of meat, appeared to have been untouched. She supposed that they were adjusting to their new and unfamiliar surroundings and decided to persevere with the feeding regime for the time being. A more balanced diet would surely do them no harm.
The next phase was to shoot the photographs with which she planned to line the walls of ‘Slaughter Box’ but this involved making closer contact with the captives in the dark cellar and she shrank from the task. By the third day, however, as a rank mammalian odour began to vie with the aroma of damp in the upper rooms, and as the muffled whining and yapping from below grew more insistent, Mave realised that something had to be done. Another unforeseen difficulty had arisen in the shape of the man who arrived without warning to read the electricity meter, which was mounted on a wall of the main cellar. To forestall him while he stood waiting in the hall she pretended to have lost the key to the door but noticed that he listened and occasionally sniffed in a puzzled manner before departing, with the meter unread.
She discovered, too, that her stores of glue and canvas in the cellar were shrinking fast, for apparently the foxes, eschewing their vegetarian diet, were seeking alternative sources of nourishment. More ominously, they appeared to have been nibbling at the cables that traversed the cellar walls before rising into the main house.
The animals, it seemed to Mave, were finding it hard to settle. At nights, the incessant staccato yapping broadened into a chorus of lugubrious howls and as she passed the descending steps on the way to bed she was aware of puckered and desperate noses probing beneath the door. It was becoming clear to Mave that her protective custody of the foxes could not be prolonged indefinitely.
Armed with torch, camera and flash gun, therefore, and summoning up all her resolution she descended the cellar steps the following morning and edged inside. At once a skittering of sharp claws indicated that the occupants had retreated to the furthest corner behind the straw piles. She attempted to pinpoint the skulking forms with her torch and capture them on flash as they hugged the cover of the damp walls but the results proved disappointing. A series of furtive and sinister silhouettes with red eyes glaring malevolently out at her audience would not perhaps evoke the righteous outrage at which ‘Slaughter Box’ aimed.
And then, on a dark evening in mid-December, after she had returned from one of her infrequent visits to Snaresborough University, Mave received the first shock. On the mat at her feet lay a buff official envelope and its content was startling:
‘NOTICE OF INSPECTION OF PREMISES,’ she read. ‘It is reported that the occupier at the address given below may be keeping or causing to be kept a wild animal or animals in premises unlicensed for said purpose viz. Blight Grange, Blight, Yorks., contrary to Section 116b of the Wildlife and Countryside Act, etc, etc. A statuary inspection is therefore scheduled to be carried out Thursday 17th December 11AM.’
Mave was stunned. Only thirty-six hours to resolve the crisis. But how to salvage her project and protect the animals? She could envisage the local newspaper headline: “Foxes imprisoned in cellar by local animal-rights artist. RSPCA prosecution to follow.” She was painfully aware that her career at Discrimination Studies would not prosper after such a disclosure.
At that moment she received a second shock. As though to accompany the chorus of nocturnal howls that had started up in the cellar beneath, the lights in the hall suddenly trembled and went out. She found herself standing in total darkness. Presumably the foxes below were agitating the cables again. Then the lights flickered on and died once more. This latter disturbance, however, seemed to have triggered the sound and lighting system of ‘Date Rape Box’, for, as she could see through the studio door, it had sprung into electronic life and was emitting strobe flashes, ringing telephone tones and women’s screams in fantastic juxtaposition.
Mave felt suddenly vulnerable. There was a nightmarish quality about standing alone in the blacked-out hall while her installation performed in the next room as though possessed by a malign will of its own. She seized a torch, ran across the creaking floor to the centre of the studio and, as the strobes flashed and crackled, wrenched open the sprung door of the erstwhile telephone booth. The mechanism must somehow have jammed. She shook the box desperately, tugged ineffectually at the wires inside, then, growing more frantic, gave the steel door a violent slam.
Instantly and without warning, the studio floor sagged violently then gave way and collapsed with thunderous and shattering force, precipitating Mave and the heavy box into the cellar beneath. She came round a moment later to find herself lying on her back on the pile of straw, staring upward at the dim ceiling of the studio, visible through the swirling dust and vast jagged rent in the boards above her head. Something seemed to be pressing on her legs, and turning her head with difficulty, she saw that the telephone box itself was lying immovably across the lower half of her body. Inexplicably, its electronic circuit had survived the impact and the flashing lights and recorded screams continued as it lay, otherwise wrecked, on its side on the cellar floor.
She felt no pain, merely, despite the overwhelming shock, a kind of numbed drowsiness. Hours seemed to pass as she drifted in and out of oblivion. At one moment, she awoke and imagined that she saw a ring of faces, sharp, inhuman faces, which leered at her before she slipped back into a succession of elliptical dreams. It was night, endless night, and day would surely come, and yet the darkness seemed limitless. She floated into semi-consciousness once more. She was in a lift at the police authority with Jess Muggleston who was offering to take her hunting bag foxes the following Saturday evening and she was demanding half a million pounds to keep his secret; she was standing inside a cavernous wooden crate whose walls were plastered with images of doe-eyed American teenagers which abruptly mutated into the merciless eyes of foxes.
Suddenly her own eyes were wide open and staring upward. She was awake and intensely cold. Something was moving insidiously on the straw beside her limp arm. She uttered a questioning groan but received no reply; then, horribly, out of the flashing darkness, there came a scuffling and scraping and a pair of slanting green pupils, fathomless vulpine slits, loomed a few inches from her own in closer and more intimate proximity than she could have imagined possible. Another pair gleamed on her right, then another. She tasted rather than smelt the fetid breath, and at the same instant a thousand steel needles seemed to penetrate her right shoulder. Convulsed with agony, she found herself to be paralysed; there came another multiple stab of excruciating torment, and then she was screaming frenziedly, her voice merging with the looped screams of the installation. All the creatures were now busily occupied and after a while her cries became weaker. At last the biggest of the dog foxes jumped on to her chest and, grinning into the semi-comatose face with a kind of ghastly solicitude, nosed towards her throat, broaching its scarlet jaws almost casually for the final consummation.
The designated cast of ‘Slaughter Box’ was enjoying its most sustaining meal for over a fortnight.
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© Charles Jackson 2010
