SmokeLong Quarterly

Reading Festival 2010, a wet August bank holiday and the mud’s on special offer. We don’t care, we’re lost in never-never land—you in a tutu, me in badger costume. You love the thrill of lacy frills around your sturdy man-thighs; I love the incognito intimacy, the unbegged attention. Guys pat me, awkward but fond. Women stroke my stripey snout while confessing their furry fantasies. On Friday I dance on all fours to Gogol Bordello, revel in Eugene Hutz’s “Shout-out to the badger.” Next day I charm the bouncers into letting me backstage, where Pete Doherty puts a spliff in my mouth and takes a selfie, louche brass-buckled arm flung around my neck. Carl says he’ll report him to the RSPCA. I want to laugh, but I won’t go out-of-character, not even for The Libertines.

Monday we’re both back at work like proper people, you in a suit facilitating a merger, me in a skirt preparing court reports on knife crime perpetrators. My job’s top of the overwhelm league, there’s little room for your stress. I listen to teenagers describe their abusive childhoods and let them see me yawn. I used to listen, but that was when I had a brother. Now I ask them what would make them stop, hum inside my head as they trot out their lies. All recidivists, they’ve lied before, and they’re lying now. Why shouldn’t they rot in prison? Let them sleep six to a cell where the rain drips on their guilty heads and rats eat their runaway feet.

When I get home today, you’re not in. I feel lonesome, find myself fingering the badger costume stuffed in our wardrobe with the camping gear. Next thing, I’m sat at the kitchen table in full badger regalia, finishing a report. I recommend a minimum sentence of five years for a guy caught with a blade. First offence? First apprehension, more like. In BadgerWorld five years seems reasonable. I put my laptop away, pause as I pass my kid brother’s photo on the wall, remember when he didn’t come home, remember the knock at the door, the two police officers, my mother’s wail. That day she became a banshee and she’s remained in character ever since.

A sudden claustrophobia vice-grips my brain and I head for the back garden. Crouched in winter-withered bracken under the apple tree, I snuffle into the wild garlic pushing up through the early earth. It’s dusk: the relief of rain on my face, the rub of leaves like leather on my bare feet. My out-of-breath slows to outbreath, tickles the grass tips.

I hear the back door open and you’re standing on the patio with your dad’s old hunting rifle under your arm.

Hey!

You don’t acknowledge me. I call again. It’s like you can’t hear me.

I stand up, move out of the undergrowth. It’s me, dickhead. You point the gun at me. I rip off my badger head. Scream. You drop the gun, drop to your knees. What the fuck, I say kneeling next to you. You begin to tell me about your day. The merger failed. Your line manager blames you. Twenty jobs have gone already, all the newcomers, the youngsters, you couldn’t save them. Shut up, I say, what’s that got to do with anything, with you aiming a rifle at me? You scared the crap out of me.

You start talking about your childhood, about how your stepmum used to undress in front of you when your dad went away, which was frequently, how you wanted to hurt her. Shut up I say, you could’ve killed me.

You start crying, you’re shaking now, you say sorry, you say you need to talk more about the stress. I shrug, go indoors so I don’t have to hear you blabbing on. I come back out with your tutu. Here, I say, lifting the rifle from your overwhelmed arms. Here. Shut up. Put this on, and come into the undergrowth with me.