Apocalypse Cow (2 page)

In the ensuing silence, he suppressed a grin. There was nothing more satisfying than throwing Fanny’s own words back at her, particularly when it justified his fake Christianity. He had even considered joining the priesthood, but thought committing himself to a lifetime of Mass, alcoholism and playing Snap! with nuns just to annoy his mother might be overkill. Plus the Catholic Church was fervently anti-masturbation, as his English teacher Sister Maria was fond of
ramming
home when she was supposed to be introducing them to literature. This policy clashed with his frantic rate of fiddling, which was only gathering pace as he approached his sixteenth birthday.

Only a few things could dampen Geldof’s libido. When he opened his eyes, one of the chief culprits was hovering six feet away: the jungle of black hair sprouting from between his mother’s legs, even more unruly than her dreadlocks. Two long hairs protruded from the thicket like the antennae of a Madagascar hissing cockroach. Even though her penchant for nakedness meant he had seen it all before, it was still an unnerving sight. He hopped back up onto the sofa.

‘You’re right, I’m sorry,’ Fanny replied eventually. ‘Please just pray quietly. I’m about to meditate.’

‘I’ll be quiet if you and Dad stop running around naked,’ Geldof muttered. ‘It’s embarrassing.’

‘I only want you to be comfortable with your body,’ Fanny said reasonably. ‘If you stop wearing clothes at home too, you won’t feel embarrassed.’

‘In the changing rooms last week, the PE teacher said I looked like a skeleton draped in tissue paper,’ he snapped. ‘Why would I want to put that on show?’

Maybe because you wouldn’t be as itchy
, a little voice in his head told him. He ignored it. He would rather flake away to nothing than be naked in the same space as his parents. That was wrong in every way imaginable.

‘Your PE teacher is misguided,’ Fanny replied. ‘Your body is just as beautiful as anybody else’s.’

She reached for Geldof’s hand. He ignored the conciliatory gesture and pointedly reassumed the prayer position. Her drooping smile prompted a small pang of regret, which he
quickly
suppressed. She wheeled away, and within seconds of her disappearing upstairs, whale song kicked in, setting the Chinese lampshades dotted around the room vibrating. Geldof gritted his teeth. Fanny’s yodelling mantra began. If he had had anything else to grit it would have been firmly gritted.

He crossed to the mantelpiece and began stacking the statuettes of Buddha, Krishna and other gods into a pyramid. Like most of the knick-knacks around the house, the figurines came from the shop of new-age tat Fanny ran in Glasgow’s West End. Had she located it anywhere else, the business would have closed in a week. But the proximity to Glasgow University meant hordes of drink- and drug-addled students frequented the shop to blow their loans on dragon-shaped incense burners, ethnic jewellery and books on lucid dreaming.

When Geldof was satisfied the tableau would be sufficiently annoying, he stood at the window and ran a finger around the inside of his collar, trying to ease the nip. His father, James, was in the back garden, impervious to the misty spring rain drifting through the air to speckle the windowpanes. He was watching a squirrel shimmy across a rope towards a pillar with a transparent plastic tunnel fixed to the top. James virtually lived in the back garden, either in the shed, devising new obstacle courses for the squirrels and taking notes on their performance, or tending the vegetable garden that provided the ingredients for many of the family’s meals – all accompanied by continuous spliff-smoking.

James looked just like the animals he studied. His grey ponytail kinked up and down like a squirrel’s tail and his face looked as if somebody had grabbed the end of his nose and
pulled
his features forward a few inches. Even his eyebrows were grey and bushy, like squirrel fur. Only his slow movements, and the fact he was six foot and clad in cords, sandals and a parka, differentiated him from the twitching rodent scurrying through the tube towards a pile of mixed nuts. Geldof was convinced his father’s obsession with setting up assault courses derived from his army days, before he was reborn as a peace activist. Not that he had ever discussed the army with his father. James’s mind was always somewhere else – probably in the void, given the amount of Gold Seal he smoked each day.

Geldof opened the patio door and stepped into the garden to escape the racket for a few minutes. The smell coming over the tall wooden fence Fanny had erected to keep the surrounding middle classes at bay captivated him instantly. He stood on a stone tiger and peeked over. Through the pulled-back flowery curtains of the next house, he spied Mary Alexander – his neighbour, maths teacher and love of his life – contemplating two steaming plates of mince and potatoes.

He closed his eyes and sucked in air through his nose. The glorious, forbidden meat smelled as divine as Mary looked. Her little paunch was pressed against the table top and her dark-framed glasses sat halfway down her nose as she twirled a lock of wavy hair, staring at the plates. Geldof could almost hear her massive brain whirring. She was probably calculating the forces of attraction between each globule of mince or pondering the mathematical complexities of the vortices of steam that rose from the food. She scooped up a lump of mince with her index finger, sucked it and ran her tongue the length of the digit to clean off the gravy. The blood in Geldof’s legs rushed off, urgently required elsewhere. He fell off the tiger.

Once he had recovered, Geldof stood up and headed for the gate. His mother had settled into her meditation, while James hadn’t even noticed him collapsing to the ground a few metres away. He didn’t intend to eat anything, as Fanny had a nose like a drug-squad dog. If she detected meat on his breath, his computer privileges, and thus access to the recreational maths websites and chat forums he frequented, would be withdrawn. That would be a punishment too horrible even to consider. He simply wanted to bathe in the rich aroma of the mince. The Alexanders didn’t mind him coming over, and the twins would be at football practice or lurking in the park smoking, so he wouldn’t get any grief from his chief tormentors.

Geldof crossed into his neighbours’ property and tapped on the door. A few seconds later, David Alexander threw it open.

‘Hello, son,’ he said. ‘The wails of the banshee driven you out, have they?’

With a non-committal shrug, he followed David into the living room just as Mary came through with the food. Geldof eyed the meals with the despairing look of a de-clawed, toothless cat tracking a fat mouse.

‘Want some?’ David asked, balancing a plate on his large stomach.

Geldof looked away guiltily.

‘Mum will be making dinner soon.’

‘What you having?’

‘Rice cakes in a tomato and red pepper sauce.’

‘Sounds fucking disgusting,’ David said, and spooned a large pile of mince into his mouth. Some of the meat clung to his beard, while more plopped onto his Led Zeppelin
T-shirt
, surrounding Robert Plant’s head like a beefy halo.

‘You sure?’ he asked between mouthfuls.

‘Stop torturing him,’ Mary said. ‘You know he doesn’t eat meat.’

‘Not by choice,’ David retorted.

Mary waved a dismissive hand at her husband and smiled at Geldof. ‘So, are you ready?’

Yes, take me now
, Geldof thought. Alas, that was not what she meant.

‘Today I want the proof for the infinity of prime numbers,’ she said.

‘Easy!’ Geldof blurted out. ‘
P
is a prime number, and
n
is a number defined as one plus the product of all prime numbers less than or equal to
p
. So if
n
is prime then there is a prime greater than
p
.’

‘Are you even speaking English?’ David interrupted.

Mary shushed him and indicated Geldof should continue.

He rattled off a procession of acrobatic
n
s and
q
s and
p
s and
r
s even though Mary’s approving gaze left him feeling slightly flustered.

‘My head hurts,’ David complained once he fell silent.

When Mary ruffled Geldof’s hair, his heart lurched.

‘Correct again,’ Mary said. ‘One of these days I’ll catch you out.’

She turned to pick up her fork, and Geldof, so softly even an elephant with an ear trumpet would have struggled to hear him, whispered, ‘I love you.’

Mary began eating as David turned his attention to the tail end of
Countdown
on the Bang & Olufsen flat-screen TV that filled half of the far wall. David shouted out his own solutions to the word quizzes, which were mainly four letters and
not
likely to win any prizes for intelligence or originality.

Geldof could not fathom why Mary had married David. He was as loud and crude as she was quiet and refined. Until three years ago, when the Alexanders won the lottery and moved in next door, David had been a technical studies teacher renowned in school for his instability. Once he had clamped an unruly boy’s ponytail in a vice and left him there for a whole lesson, periodically hitting him on the head with a T-square. And then there was the time some youths on scooters broke a school window at break-time. In front of a playground packed with cheering pupils, David hurdled the fence and punched one of them clean off his ride, breaking his knuckles on the startled biker’s helmet. Geldof was pretty sure he would have been fired eventually had he not struck it rich and quit. And that was another thing: while David could not wait to dump teaching for a life of loafing in front of the television, Mary had stayed on despite her new-found wealth, displaying her love of mathematics. All the more reason to adore her.

The show ended, and David switched to the early-evening news. The screen showed a fleet of ambulances, police cars and fire engines parked outside a burning building.

‘That’s more like it,’ he said. ‘You can’t beat a bit of blood and guts.’

‘These were the scenes earlier today when tragedy struck at McTavish & Sons abattoir near Milngavie,’ the newsreader announced. ‘Preliminary reports indicate at least twenty-three people died in a fire and stampede.’

‘Christ, that’s only a few miles away,’ David pointed out.

The cameras cut to the fire chief. His face was reddened from the heat, and he had to raise his voice above the roar of the flames.

‘The police received a call around one p.m. from a hysterical employee who said the cows were attacking. We believe this means the fire provoked a stampede,’ he shouted. ‘Our units were hampered by an overturned lorry on the approach road. By the time we got here, the building was fully ablaze.’

‘Doesn’t your cousin Terry work in an abattoir?’ Mary asked.

‘He was working on the other side of town last time we spoke,’ David replied.

‘And when was that?’

He shrugged. ‘Dunno. Ages ago.’

Mary furrowed her brow and seemed about to say something. She was interrupted by a knock on the door. The chaotic images so entranced Geldof that it took him several seconds to register that the new voice, which was growing louder, belonged to his mother.

‘Oh fuck, it’s the dreadlocked crusader,’ David muttered.

‘I would just like you to keep the window closed when you’re cooking,’ Fanny was saying in a voice still a few steps down from full-on haranguing. ‘It’s hard to meditate when the smell of murdered flesh is—’

Fanny, thankfully clad in a silk kimono, broke off as she stepped into the living room and saw Geldof.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

‘I just wanted to … er … umm …’ he stuttered.

‘He wanted to ask me a question about quadratic equations,’ Mary chipped in.

Fanny ignored her. ‘Have you been eating meat?’

She didn’t wait for an answer. Instead she marched over and thrust her nose at Geldof’s mouth, taking several deep sniffs before coming away satisfied.

‘No. Well that’s something.’

She glared at the TV screen, which had cut to the building’s burnt-out carcass. ‘You know I don’t approve of you watching television.’

David snorted, sending Geldof catapulting off the sofa. His neighbour knew just the right buttons to push to send Fanny ballistic, and he delighted in ramming his big fingers at them at every opportunity. The only hope of stopping the coming argument was for Geldof to get his mum out of there. He was too late.

‘Come on, love, TV’s magic,’ David said, lighting the touch-paper with glee.

Fanny rounded on him. ‘Don’t call me love. TV fills people’s heads with the ideals of consumerist society and promotes violence.’

‘That’s hippie shite.’

‘Don’t start, David,’ interjected Mary, who was now attempting to herd Fanny from the room with fluttering hands.

‘She started it, coming over here to complain. Which is a bit fucking rich if you ask me,’ David continued, not taking his gaze off the screen. ‘She sticks her opinion down everyone’s throat, banging on doors and handing out leaflets. Even the Jehovah’s Witnesses won’t talk to her.’ He picked up his fork and brandished it. ‘And if I have to hear whale song one more time I’ll burst a fucking gasket.’

Fanny sidestepped Mary. ‘You have no right to complain. You cook meat for breakfast, lunch and dinner and I put up with the stench. Can’t you give up your filthy habit even occasionally?’