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In the time of foxes

In London, where Nina lived, it was the time of foxes.

There had never been so many. It was said there were ten fox families per square mile. Their numbers thinned in the countryside as they migrated to the cities, a great animal migration to match the human one. They trotted into town along railway tracks, scavenged in bins, scouted territories, pissed and shat, snoozed on manhole covers, bit the heads off chickens, left corpses and intestines strewn about back courtyards, lucky-dipped for frogs, and generally sniffed about. They went from garden to garden, heeding neither man nor fence.

Hackney Council sent a leaflet. It came through the door one day.

The red fox is a wild member of the dog family.

The fox year – a month-by-month guide to fox activity and behaviour.

(There was a chart with descriptions and colour illustrations.)

Foxes are very adaptable and extremely well suited to urban environments. They have the largest natural distribution of any land mammal except humans.

‘Sorry, you were saying…’

Nina had other things on her mind the day the leaflet came through the door. She stood in her kitchen, looking through the French doors to the garden. On the phone, her faraway brother was questioning whether their mother should stay in her own house. She was trying to persuade him that yes, of course she should.

‘That’s what’s best for her. She knows where she is, she has all her things, it’s home.’

Outside, the garden was overgrown, the grass luxuriantly green. Nina spoke with her head crooked at an angle, sandwiching the phone between her shoulder and ear so that her hands were free to clean the coffee machine casket. Ronnie was at her legs, saying, ‘Mama, Mama,’ and frisking her jeans-clad thighs.

‘Wait a minute, darling, Mama’s speaking to Uncle Jared.’

When she looked up again it was to see two young foxes in a sunbeam. They were bounding and tumbling. Cavorting, she thought.

‘Foxes, Ronnie,’ she said. ‘Look. They’re cubs, fox children.’

As soon as she said the words he detached himself from her legs and hurried to the doors with his funny waddling almost-run. He put his hands out, stroked the glass, and let out a breathy Oh.

‘Works like a charm every time,’ she told her brother. But she knew something must be done. Foxes were breeding in the garden. There was a nest – a den? – back there.

With Ronnie entertained, they returned to their conversation.

‘We can make it work with her at home,’ she went on. ‘I’ll manage the invoices, I’ll help.’

She knew it was hard on Jared. There was only so much she could do over the phone and by email. He was the one in Sydney, living closest to their mother (although he wasn’t close enough to make the visits easy). She could tell he was unconvinced but he gave her the dates of his holiday, and she agreed to stay with Helen in his absence.

‘Got it,’ she said. ‘I’ll look at flights.’

She called the real estate agent next. ‘We have a Fox Situation,’ she said, emphasising the words. The animals were getting to be a problem, what with the holes they dug everywhere. Her son could fall and hurt himself. Anybody could.

‘It’s also the poo,’ she said. The Poo Situation. ‘You have to play hopscotch to miss them.’

‘The foxes?’

‘No, the poos.’

‘Ah, I see. Sounds like we’d better have a look.’

When she hung up, the cubs were still revelling in the sun, snapping at blades of grass. Ronnie watched in wonder, mesmerised, until she told him, ‘Okay, mister, time for your play date at the park.’

As she packed his bag, Nina felt a little guilty. With her call to the agent, she had set things in motion – there would now be a process, perhaps involving the council and men wearing dungarees. Or so she thought until the agent called her back the next day. Apparently the landlady wanted to be humane. Had Nina tried securing the rubbish bin and not leaving food about?

Nina was curt in response. She insisted on action. Afterwards, she told her husband she was going to have to be the baddie, the one putting her foot down. ‘I’ve had my share of appalling landlords but this woman takes the cake. We can’t be expected to run a sanctuary in the garden.’

The thing with the foxes was one more thing to sort out before their trip. The other things included work things, Ronnie’s childcare hiatus, and plans for how to get from the airport in Sydney to her mother’s house two hours south. She crowd-sourced distractions for Ronnie for the plane, putting the call out in a Facebook post.

Other things, so many things. She received a recommendation for a grief counsellor and hoped to squeeze in a session. It had been six months since her father had died, but she’d barely had time to grieve. Grieve: put that on the to-do list with everything else!

Nina was never not in motion, never not hurrying somewhere. She tag-teamed with her husband Brent on dinner-and-bath routines. She read children’s books to Ronnie; she never read adult books anymore (or just ‘books’, as she used to call them). At best she read articles on her phone, scrolling mindlessly in the dark after checking her messages. She took her son on the tube to the co-working creche, which had an adjoining office where she could do a few hours’ work, always feeling there was never quite enough time to make a dent in her projects.

On the days Ronnie was in childcare she went to her agency in Shoreditch. They had rooms that she could use for editing and meetings. Most of her work was directing arty-looking TV commercials and documentary-style content. Lately she had worked as one of the directors on a TV series, a comedy about the trials of parenting. The show was irreverent and funny and a lot of people liked it. In the background, she was also labouring on a project of her own, a script for a feature film. This took untold hours of writing, with much plotting and re-plotting, and sometimes she had the feeling that it would never be finished.

In between meetings and the odd brief creative burst, Nina made calls about the Fox Situation. The landlady was being silly. Securing the bins – ugh. She tried that. It didn’t work. Researching online, Nina found the details of a fox rescue group that ran a catch-and-release program, but she ruled this out, guessing the foxes would return. She had started to get some serious side-eye from her neighbours, who saw her garden as a hotbed of fox activity. Her neighbour at number 40, a man with a military bearing, accused her of feeding them. Not knowing his name, she mentally christened him Old Gammon. He told her to have the foxes shot.

‘From those French doors of yours. There’s a man you can call for that,’ he said. ‘Get the nasty little Charlies. Wait till you hear them screaming in the small hours of the morning, that’s when they have intercourse,’ he told her with distaste.

She didn’t care about the neighbours’ dirty looks. But the smells, the defecation, the missing shoe of Ronnie’s that delayed a trip to the doctor – these were things she didn’t need. The trip to the doctor was a checkup; they wanted to check his vital signs and say what percentile he was in for this or that, was he tall or short or fat for a two-and-a-half-year-old. She found the shoe later, masticated, slimy with saliva. She rinsed it with detergent, thinking that would have to do. Worst of all was the morning when, on leaving the house, she saw there had been a hit-and-run. The body was inert. It made a neat crescent shape on the road. It was one of the cubs; she knew it by its ears, the colouring on its paws. The runt of the litter. Ronnie gazed at it, dismayed.

‘What happened, Mama?’

‘A car. A car is what happened, sweetheart.’

She was about to call the council when out came Old Gammon from number 40. Putting on a pair of gardening gloves, he lifted the lifeless fox and slid it into a heavy-duty bin bag, then dumped it in his wheelie bin like any other bag of rubbish.

‘Pickup day,’ he said to her. ‘They won’t be long.’ Then he muttered something about needing to scrub the bin out later. His tone said, I told you so, this is what you get for feeding them.

With her hand forced, she spoke to the agent and threatened to call someone herself. ‘Name’s Bruce. He’s very nice. He has a .22 Winchester, pops them off from the back window.’ She had seen this on the internet. It was legal, apparently. She saw her husband’s horrified look as he glanced over from the sofa. He was gentle by nature; he never so much as raised his voice. She flapped her hand at him: don’t worry.

‘How does that sound, alright? We can send you the invoice when he’s done.’

Her bluff had the desired effect. A fox man arrived promptly. He wore dungarees, looked the part.

‘My word, they’ve had a field day. You’ve got yourself a breeding earth. That big old tree stump in the ground, it’s rotted out from the inside. That’s what they’ve been burrowing to get to. A bit of shelter for them – very cosy, I imagine.’

A breeding earth. So that was what it was called.

‘Don’t worry,’ he reassured her. ‘We’ve strict instructions from the client to be humane and sympathetic.’

‘Hmm,’ said Nina. ‘That’s why I’m worried.’

She said it needed a proper job, he had to get rid of the breeding earth. She took no pleasure in saying so. She didn’t want to be the baddie; she knew the eviction of the foxes would distress Ronnie. He saw them as his friends, furry counterparts of a sort. How was she going to tell him that their homes had been destroyed?

She arranged for the work to happen while they were away. Flying Heathrow to Sydney for the second time in six months made her feel pre-emptively exhausted. They flew as a trio at the beginning of December: Nina and Brent, both with their laptops for emails, and Ronnie with his own small backpack of toys.

Nina’s brother met them at the airport and drove them to Wollongong, to save them renting a car. He made one stop, to show Nina the residential home in Sydney’s southern suburbs.

‘It’s on our way,’ he pointed out. ‘It’ll take us twenty minutes.’

She was jet-lagged and unimpressed, but she agreed. They toured the home. It was nine in the morning when they reached the complex, the sun was rudely bright and Ronnie’s hat was buried somewhere in their luggage. This was nothing to him, of course. He had slept well on the second leg and now tottered happily behind, holding his dad’s hand. The home was well laid out as a series of share houses for three or four residents. Each house was fitted with special lights and special doorknobs, a manager told them. The lights were ambient and soft, and the doorknob for every room felt different, features designed to reduce disorientation. Nina listened politely. She duly admired the fittings. She whispered to her brother so the manager wouldn’t hear her, ‘This is overkill, Jared. She doesn’t need this stuff.’

He pretended not to hear her. ‘It’s not like other old people’s homes,’ he said. ‘There are no stupid crafts, which is good if you’re like Mum and you’ve never been into crafts.’

When they finally reached the real house, Nina’s childhood home, her mother was inside waiting, still wearing her floral cotton nightie. Ronnie launched himself at his nanna. He rarely saw her in person, but they spoke every week on Skype.

‘Aren’t you big, Ronnie!’ she said, cuddling him and making him beam. But as Nina moved about the kitchen, putting out a plate of biscuits and sitting at the Formica table, she saw how much her mother had aged in the last six months. She was greyer, more stooped and uncertain, more defeated. Her brother had warned her, it had all come on so quickly. She was only sixty-three. Sixty-three! Unable to let her hands lie still, she kept smoothing her hair, her thighs, or rubbing her forearms, up and down, an incessant habit. Sometimes, when she remembered or Jared handed it to her, she squeezed a raspberry-pink stress ball with a nubby surface.

This was what Nina’s mother’s Alzheimer’s was like. It seemed less like an illness of forgetting than a bad case of anxiety. She had always been anxious, had always rubbed her forearms when she worried, but now it was as if the worrier was the only part of her left.

It had been three years since Helen was diagnosed with the disease. Until then, Nina knew almost nothing about Alzheimer’s. Working as a director, she’d made mini-documentaries for charities, short films about misfortunes that happened to other people. Blindness, for instance. Or having your life saved by the London Air Ambulance. For the macular blindness one, she used blurry and shadowed footage to mimic the progression of the illness. First a shot in which a mother adjusts her son’s school tie, then a later shot where she can’t.

In the Air Ambulance one, she filmed a road accident survivor. She took him back to the intersection and had him tell the story: how he was hit by a car while riding his bike, how the car ran him over, crushing his pelvis. Going over the footage later, she cut the part where the man cried, deciding to show him almost-crying instead. You had to hold something back, give the viewer room to feel. Her style played well with the British. They were crazy for stoicism, someone keeping it together. When she played a cut of the film, the reps from the client started crying. They hugged her and said they could not have been happier.

But Alzheimer’s had been a mystery. Slipping away from the gathering in the kitchen to look around the house, Nina saw evidence of her brother’s efforts and felt the familiar guilt. Thanks to him, the bathroom sported a new set of safety handles – plasticky, beige and sturdy; not very attractive. On the fridge door she had noticed instructions for the carers, a laminated mini-essay with the heading ‘A Typical Day’. Helen has two crumpets with honey for breakfast. There are crumpet bags in the freezer. If the left side of the toaster sticks, give it a jiggle…

The house was otherwise little changed. It was in a working-class neighbourhood, a place of straight, unshaded streets to fly along on a bike. It was still the house of Nina’s childhood, a postwar brick box with an upstairs addition. Taking their bags upstairs, she found that her old room had been taken over by the young couple who lived in the house rent-free, an arrangement that ensured Helen was not alone at night. They had timed their own holiday to coincide with Nina’s brother’s, but the space was full to bursting with their big upholstered bed, matching bedside tables, and throw pillows embroidered with motivational sayings. She closed the door on the room, which was hers no longer. She dumped the bags in Jared’s old room, unfolded the sofa bed in the upstairs sitting room for Ronnie, and located a box of her brother’s old toys: Transformers, Lego, Duplo, a train set.

Before long, Jared left them, taking the train back to Sydney and leaving his Subaru for them to use. There was a booster seat in the back (borrowed from a cousin, as Jared did not have children). He was taking two weeks’ leave from his busy job in TV production to go on holiday with his partner. They would decamp that night to Queensland, somewhere with snorkelling and rainforests.

Once her brother had left, Nina made crumpets, pushing them down in the ancient toaster. A typical day, she thought. She spread honey and made more tea, let the mug cool for a good five minutes, put it on the table in front of her mother.

‘Love a cup of tea,’ said Helen.

‘Nothing better,’ Nina said, though she herself drank coffee.

That first day and night, Nina saw just how much vigilance was needed. Her mother was now unable to notice when she was too hot or too cold, so Nina had to keep watch for the signs, put her cardigan on or take it off. She couldn’t shower by herself, but she didn’t like Nina to help her do it either. She preferred to wait until mid-morning when the carer came, whoever it was that day according to the roster. The one thing she could do without help was clean her teeth, but then she would forget and worry that she hadn’t done it.

‘Ronnie, let’s clean your teeth,’ said Nina.

‘Did I clean my teeth?’ asked Helen.

‘Yes, Mum. You did.’

‘Oh good.’ To mask her embarrassment, she turned the exchange into a lesson. ‘Very important to clean your teeth, isn’t it, Ronnie?’

Waking at odd hours during the night, a jet-lagged Nina read emails on her phone. Remembering the foxes in her garden, she summoned justifications for clearing them out. It wasn’t as if they were endangered. They were colonisers, really. Furry little conquistadors, making themselves at home, profiting from easy pickings wherever humans built towns and cities.

In the mornings they woke to birds. The birds! The sound declared the day as belonging to a different country, even before you were fully awake, before your brain kicked into gear. There were the normal suburban birds, raucous and loud, and the smaller twittering birds that were drawn to the nearby lake. On the second morning of their stay, when Nina rose and went downstairs in the quiet house, she found a pair of her mother’s underpants laid out, wet, on the kitchen table. It looked as if she had rinsed them in the sink. Finding her mother in her room, she asked what had happened, but her mother knew nothing about it. She just kept smoothing the nightie over her bottom and thighs as if she felt self-conscious with nothing underneath.

In the two weeks that followed, Brent came and went from the house, taking the train to work in his company’s Sydney office. He was the finance guy in a team that consulted on the redevelopment of old industrial sites, turning them into mixed-use precincts and waterfront meadows and so on. Having used up all of his annual leave on their last trip, he was working remotely this time and had to keep up with his projects. In his absences, Nina was often alone with Ronnie and her mum. It was always a relief when the carer came at eleven o’clock each morning. With the help of some government support and a great deal of wrangling, Nina and Jared had organised the carer roster after their father’s death.

The best of the carers was Cath, a large, indefatigable woman. She came with her bulk and her cheerfulness and helped out for several hours. She showered and dressed Helen. She helped her to go to the toilet, making male visitors stay clear of the hall to preserve Helen’s dignity. Cath was very particular about toilet-related matters. She had worked for a woman in a wheelchair who, when Cath was in the toilet, parked herself outside and kept up the conversation.

‘I quit that job, don’t worry! Some things should be sacred.’

Back in London, the fox man emailed to update Nina on the breeding earth. He attached a photo of the garden looking like a demolition site, which made her glad that Ronnie was well out of the way. Those dark voids in the earth made her think of her mother’s mind, its mysterious workings. Had parts of the brain got hollowed out, leaving cavities? Was that where her memory had gone? Or was it all still there, intact, but unreachable somehow?

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