The Beast in the Bin

The beast lives in the yard.

Murdoch knows this the way he knows the names of his people, which is to say not as words but as facts that have always been true. The beast lives in a tall green-walled room with a heavy lid, out by the side gate, in the place where the lavender used to be. It does not come out. It is fed.

The feeding is what convinced him.

All week long, members of the household come to the yard with offerings. Plastic bags, soft and complicated. Cardboard, folded with a kind of ceremony. Apple cores, eggshells, the wrappers of small private pleasures. They lift the heavy lid — and Murdoch's ears go up at this, because lifting the lid is a holy action — and they drop the offering inside, and the beast accepts. Sometimes a sigh comes back out, a long settling exhalation, before the lid clangs shut. Sometimes nothing. The beast is moody. Murdoch respects this.

He is a brindle terrier of no clear ancestry and very strong opinions. For most of the week he is a quiet animal of small enthusiasms — the postbox, the cat over the wall, a particular tuft of grass near the corner that for reasons best known to him has been classified as urgent. But the beast is the deep matter of his life. He thinks about it the way a monk thinks about God: not constantly, but always.

Tuesdays are the hardest.

On Tuesdays, the beast is taken out.

What happens is this. Dad goes to the yard before breakfast and grasps the beast by some sort of handle and leads it away. Murdoch sees this from the front window, where he is locked in for his own protection — a fact he understands, dimly, to be a kindness. Through the glass he watches Dad walk down the path with another animal on a tether, a great square-shouldered creature that rolls along behind him on two wheels. From inside, Murdoch can hear it. It growls. It growls all the way down the paving stones, a steady low rumbling growl, the sound of a thing only just consenting to be led. Other men, from other houses, are also leading their beasts down the road. The whole street is full of them, this rolling parade of obedient monsters, going to the square together to be — Murdoch is sure — counted, or judged, or fed again, more grandly, by something larger than themselves.

He whines at the window. He cannot help it. He has tried to be brave. The beasts go to the square and after a while the men come back, alone, walking lighter, and that is when Murdoch knows the great creatures have been taken up. There is a sound for this too, a sound the size of a building, that comes from the end of the road on Tuesday mornings — a roar, and then a silence. After the silence Dad returns, and the green-walled room in the yard is empty again, lid open, panting.

It is empty for one night only. By Wednesday the offerings have begun. By Friday there is a sigh again when the lid is closed. The beast comes back. The beast is always coming back.

Murdoch has worked all this out. He is, he thinks, the only one in the house who properly understands.

He is wrong about this, and also right, in the way that all believers are.

In the kitchen, Mum is making a list of things to put on a different list. She does this before church on Tuesdays, on Sundays, on any morning that contains a Tuesday-shape or a Sunday-shape, which is most of them. Later she will go to the small church on Bell Lane and put out hymn books for the Wednesday service and tidy the flowers and sit for a minute in a pew with her hands flat on her knees, asking nothing in particular. She would not say she is praying. She would say she is gathering herself. The vaulted ceiling above her makes its own kind of hum, the way old buildings do, and when she leaves she feels — and this is the only word for it — led, gently, by something she does not need to name.

Upstairs, Iris is fifteen and has a therapist on Thursdays and a vocabulary on every day of the week. She has been anxious-attached this term, and high-masking, and last month, briefly and gloriously, autistic-coded. She writes the words in her notebook in tiny careful capitals, as if labelling specimens. The labels do not stop the feelings, but they sort them. They put each feeling in its own jar and screw the lid on. When she walks past the bin in the yard on her way to the bus she does not see it. She is busy explaining herself to herself, in a language her therapist would approve of. She believes, she would tell you, in understanding. She believes if she can name a thing she can survive it.

In the living room, Dad has the chart up on the laptop. He has the chart up every morning before work, and at lunchtime, and again before bed — a green line and a red line and a little scrolling number that he watches as if it might, at any moment, do something miraculous. He owns small shares of large companies and slightly larger shares of small ones. He has opinions, fierce and tender, about people he has never met. The market is nervous today, he says aloud, to no-one. The market is digesting the news. He talks about the market the way ancient sailors talked about the sea: a creature with moods, rewards, punishments, an unknowable inner life. When the green line climbs he is briefly and visibly redeemed, and when it falls he is briefly and visibly bereaved, and in between he is held up, hour by hour, by the conviction that next week, surely, the line will mean what he hopes it means.

None of them notice the dog at the front window, performing his own careful theology.

Outside, the bin is at the kerb. The growl has gone, taken away in the great metal mouth, and the world has been made safe again until next week.

Murdoch lies down at last by the door, his chin on his paws. The kettle clicks off. Iris's pen scratches. Dad murmurs something tender to the chart.

The beast is fed, thinks Murdoch.

He sighs, deeply, and closes his eyes.

He is not, in the end, so different from the rest of them.