Chapter 14

For his twenty-first birthday, since nobody else thought of doing it, William bought himself a camera. He spent the rest of the summer wandering about the countryside photographing birds.
He soon found that bird photography was not simply a question of taking dozens of pictures and selecting the ones with a volatile in the middle. It requires immense patience, the ability to remain still for hours on end, and quick reactions.
Over the years, he built up a large collection of beautiful photos. They ranged from a pair of common or garden sparrows whipping up a cloud of dust (he lay flat on his belly for thirty minutes for this one, the dewy lights flickering on the spider’s web in the background were a lucky bonus), to hordes of crimson-white flamingos taking off in fright at a charge of white horses on the Camargue. And a lot in between. The horses moved him on to other animals. He bought more cameras and lenses.
His personal all-time-favourite was the hippos. It was a turning-point in his life. About five years after buying his first camera he went on a photographic safari to Botswana. For photographers, for naturalists, for anyone, the Okavango Delta is paradise.
Night comes down fast in the tropics and night in the bush means dark. During the day, a herd of hippos wallowed up to their eyes in the middle of the river. The occasional yawn or petty bickering was all he’d seen all afternoon: lots of big teeth, but not much else. At night, things livened up. As darkness fell, some of the females lumbered up the bank to browse on a clump of plants. He just had to wait a few days and the moon would be perfect.
They couldn’t have done it better were they pros. As the mother waddled up, the ‘little one’ trotted beside. The first whirr of the camera rooted her in her tracks, while the young, oblivious, nuzzled up to his dam’s hindquarters and tucked in. The moon was round and bright like a porcelain saucer. A stream of light flickered across the blue-black water. The picture was perfect. It was also the first he sold. And, as he later found out, quite a scoop, hippos usually suckle underwater. When he saw it featured in the ‘Magic Moments’ section of a nature magazine, it was not the money but the wonderful feeling of pride that made him decide on wildlife photography as a profession.
He took his slides round to agencies specialising in nature. On first inspection, they seemed interested. Later, they were delighted; he was a natural. Photo after photo was sold. He appeared in magazines, adverts, holiday brochures, almost anything. Then the assignments started coming in. He spent three months one summer in Madagascar photographing lemurs for an all-colour guide to monkeys. With the help of some zoologists working up at Nosy Bé, he even managed to take some very rare photos of the aye-aye.
The book was a success. He started planning and selling his own projects. One he wanted to do was on the tarsiers. He’d been in touch with various wildlife organisations and they were interested. Tarsiers are primitive monkeys, small nocturnal animals with big eyes. Other than an owl-like ability to rotate their heads through a hundred and eighty degrees, they are also in great demand. Their tears are said to be aphrodisiac, and there’s nothing simpler than making a tarsier cry. You stick a bar of red-hot iron in front of its eyes. Then count the drops and convert them into dollars, yen, rupees or whatever currency you will.
Of all of man’s barbarian practices, this was the one which disgusted him most.
Not everything he did was as gory as this, nor was he a crusader. A lot of it was standard stuff on ‘nice’ topics: furry animals, and cute, emotionally-pleasing behaviour. In a way, he was lucky, he loved his work.

He also loved his leisure. And record shops were good places to meet women. That’s where he first met Anne-Marie. They met up again at the cash-desk and she apologised for telling him to mind his own business. William nearly made an unchivalrous comment, but thought better of it. Anne-Marie made no attempt to hide the lousy Mozart recording she’d bought. She had nothing against him as a person, she just didn’t like people telling her what to do. He wasn’t telling her what to do, he was merely suggesting. Perhaps he was, but it didn’t sound like it. Well, judging by the sort of thing she listened to, no wonder she misunderstood people. That was very funny. It was meant to be a joke. What made him so sure anyway? He’d listened to it, it was terrible. And who was he to...
It took about five or six hours before they got round to kissing.
Three years later, he still hadn’t changed his mind. His version was better than hers, full stop. The interpretation was better, the colour was richer, and the trebles! Perfect! Nothing less than delicious! Their tiny tongues pierced the massive wall of bass and baritone in a way no sopranos could do. The sort of voices to give you a serious interest in little boys.

Today, he had work to do. The girls in the bookshop knew him fairly well, partly because he was such an incorrigible flirt, but mainly because of the hours he made them spend hunting through catalogues for books that were long out of print.
Little by little, over the years since embarking seriously on his career of wildlife photographer, he had grown increasingly attracted to writing. Twice, he’d had a series of photographs accepted by magazines, along with an article he’d written himself. Both of them were rather provocative. William loved stirring things up.
Something which annoyed him considerably was inconsistency. The reason for his trip to the bookshop was information on farm animals, facts and figures: living conditions, killing-methods, psychological stress of veal calves, psychotic disorders among battery chickens, self-destructive behaviour in pigs, and so on.
The article was to follow on from the first two on fox-hunting and bull-fighting. He had a book in mind. Its title was going to be Human Rights and Animals’ Lives. It was all a long way off, and so involved it was fast becoming a mammoth task, far bigger than he’d imagined. He had to read an enormous amount, especially things which diametrically disagreed with him. They have their reasons, and demanded a great deal of good-will to understand. But it was as necessary as reading texts he agreed with, if not more.
And it wasn’t going to be enjoyable either. He even thought of trying to get a job in a processing-plant or slaughterhouse. Not surprisingly, they had greeted his suggestion of coming in to take photos with undisguised animosity. If anything, it heightened his curiosity.
Man’s relationship to animals was typical of human ambiguity. As far as the quarry is concerned, fox-hunting is like most other forms of pack-hunting. It was the dual standards that irritated him. Both the fox and the lamb are “poor little things” and while both have their lives bloodily cut short, only the fox lives free and has a chance of escaping… One is branded as cruel, the other swept under a carpet of woolly justification.
The defensive arguments for the consumption of table animals were a tribute to naivety: “They’re reared for it” (O death, where is thy sting?); “If we didn’t eat them, we’d be overrun” (a license for cannibalism to solve human over-crowding?); “We’re omnivores!” (Are we? Why cow not horse? Why snail not slug?), etc.
It was the whining sentimentality while eating the Sunday capon that infuriated him.
Accept it. We do kill millions of animals every year. We pay somebody else to do the dirty work and cut the throat, and we choose to do so. No animal is immortal.
What is wrong is how we condone the abominable conditions they are forced to live under. What do we do? We sit on our arses like impotent dogs, feel sorry, and vociferate loudly at fox-hunters, i.e. somebody else.
The second article, a ‘defence’ of bull-fighting, apart from a nice fat cheque, brought him a varied selection of hysterical hate mail, all of it anonymous of course.
It was a thorny issue. Presumably the bull does finish up on a plate, presumably bulls in pre-agricultural societies were similarly harassed by mobs of hungry humans or other animals. Whatever its historical raison d’être, it has nevertheless turned into a nice afternoon’s sport culminating in the so-called moment of truth. And people enjoy it: watch the faces.
Alongside the photos of bulls being tormented, stabbed and otherwise dressed for dinner were ones of the crowd. Admittedly, he had not been completely honest here, intentionally. The three crowd photos were all shot in Madrid, for the sake of comparison, but only one was a bull-fight crowd. The other two were football and boxing. And what do you see? The same grimacing, gesticulating jubilation, the same expressions of violent exultation.
It was not a jab at Spain, he had similar series of photos from other countries. Bull-fighting is just more colourful and sells well. He had a laugh when the letters to the editor came in. The gory cover of the well-respected magazine had certainly boost the readership, and the “I was shocked to see...” letters clearly indicated the writers and gone out and bought it.
The uncomfortable part was the slippery dividing-line between them and us. The three crowd scenes - which William took pains to avoid elucidating in so short an article; this was reserved for later - were a first coat for the human fresco he wished to paint. One and the same manifestation for three shades of human enjoyment, all depending on winning and losing. Spectatorship was watching the symbolic us beat the symbolic them, rejoicing in their defeat or bewailing our own with adequate excuses. The sporting exchange is forgotten. At best, it is a pretence allowing people to gang up and hoot, today’s palliative for the loss of public hangings.

He placed his various orders and had a grumble about his book on Saxon and Viking art still not arriving, then went for a rummage in the paperbacks. There was something else on his mind which, not surprisingly, provoked a certain amount of odd looks and ribaldry: sex and murther! Annette dug up a couple of suitably blood-curdling titles from the ‘true crime’ section and mentioned others he might find in the French section. Off he trotted. He left the shop at about six o’clock, arms laden with some forty hours’ reading, and went home wondering how he could steer Anne-Marie’s ‘choice’ onto a film he wanted to see. ¶ 1:56 AM