Excerpted: Pet, Pet, Slap by Andrew Battershill

Pillow slept for three hours, then woke from a dream that was just spitting teeth into a hole. Then he ran five miles in twenty-four minutes. He kept walking randomly through the trees, and emerged somehow on a beach, his knees sinking into the wet, receding surface of the sand. When you’re spending all your days making your body into an automatic machine that sees another person’s eyes and throws a fist between them, you have to let the machine wander for a bit. Follow your automatic body and leave in charge the parts of your computer brain that do all the things that aren’t thinking.

The boxer fell gracefully forward, running his flat hands over the tiny bumpy surface of mollusc shells, pressed peanut-butter-cookie deep into the dough of the beach. He picked up a perfect one that was exactly the same as the others and tucked the shell into his eye socket, which was made of seven bones he’d managed not to break yet, and he watched the mollusc, who was mostly a slippery foot, flip its foot of a self loosely back and forth. Pillow pressed the shell gently back into the sand. And the sky was a curtain, he guessed, and it did one of the four things curtains ever do and opened.

The miles were done, but a six-hundred-dollar physiotherapist had told him that miles don’t count on sand. The automatic man ran the long way home, and there was nobody looking at him, but he knew that if there had been they’d be asking themselves who can run so softly. Moving back to the streets, Pillow watched the oil of 5 a.m. light flow into the stale standing water of colours in the night, the brick of roofs and the savage separate screams of hanging flowers cutting themselves slowly out of painted walls behind them.

He detoured to another park just to use its footbridge. And each step was a note on a piano that hadn’t had a string touched in years, and under a long dark wire that brought light from somewhere else, he crossed a gorge full of the corpses of trees and he tried to breathe the air in deeply, to suck the creosote into his lungs because a twelve-hundred-dollar nutritionist had heard an eighty-dollar naturopath say it’s good for the lungs and repeated it to a ten-million-dollar boxer with a twenty-cent right hand. Pillow wondered if birds ever think about anything other than food when they fly.

The boxer went home and weighed himself to the ounce, and the number was good enough for him to drink enough water to not quite soak a face towel and eat enough food to feed a squirrel for half a day. Pillow thought about knowing and things that are over, and how much still happens after you know and after it’s over. About things that eat you and the things that eat those things that eat you.

The doorbell rang, and instead of answering the door Pillow threw a grip trainer through his open bedroom window and waited. He listened to Genevieve Hamon drag a six-foot-tall bureau up two storeys one step at a time. In his bedroom, she knocked on the side and all four of the box’s wooden sides fell to the floor. On the stand there was a drooping giraffe head and a bright pink gladiator skirt with a picture of a giraffe going to sleep on the waistband. Next to the giraffe gear there was a terry cloth robe dyed to a slightly more boring than tea towel grey.

Genevieve wasn’t the sort of person to talk when a wag of the eyebrows would do.

Pillow got up and looked at each item in turn. He took the gladiator skirt and the terry cloth robe. He held the skirt in his hands and closed his eyes. What was either Genevieve Hamon or a sea anemone fixed his lip with a kiss that was moist around the edges and full of tiny, dry grips in the middle. And then he opened his eyes and Genevieve Hamon’s mouth was as big and wet as a sea and it said: ‘There’s really no difference between plants and animals and rocks, is there, Pillow?’

Pillow thought about water and wetness and how we all die all alone. ‘I don’t know the full deal on plants or rocks or animals. I’m sure I asked for this giraffe head thing at some point.’

The boxer smiled, reached into the pocket of his joggers, and threw her a brick of cash he didn’t have.

Pillow spent the rest of the night inspecting his entire torso with a large and small mirror, plucking stray hairs. He weighed himself again, grimaced, and drank enough water to make a short espresso, ate enough chickpeas to feed a baby hamster for two weeks, and then sat in his backyard wearing a beautifully stitched giraffe head, watching Gentleman Jim listlessly shuffle in perfect anti-rhythm to Cuban jazz.

Giraffes probably don’t think perfectly stitched fake giraffe heads are anything in particular. They just know they’re not fruit or a dominant male or an infinite pasture to graze through until they die.

* * *

About the book

Rocky meets Elmore Leonard meets Miranda July as Pillow Wilson, a past-his-prime boxer, trains for his last title shot. Shenanigans ensue.

Boxer “Pillow Fist” Pete Wilson should be preparing for his big comeback fight. But, having recently undergone an ethical awakening, the new vegan is busy trying to find humane new homes for his menagerie of exotic pets (including Jersey Joe the sloth and Rigoberto the shark). His roommate, Sherlock Holmes, who faked his own death by waterfall, is now Pillow’s in-house doping expert.

Pillow just can’t get motivated to train, and he’s further distracted from his push-ups when both his car and Rigoberto mysteriously disappear. Luckily, Sherlock is a master of deduction. What follows is part underdog sports story, part work of neozoological surrealism, and part existential mystery novel.