The Zoo Read online

  Jamie Mollart runs his own advertising company, and has won awards for marketing.

  Over the years he has been widely published in magazines, been a guest on some well respected podcasts and blogs, and Patrick Neate called him ‘quite a writer’ on the Book Slam podcast. He is married and lives in Leicestershire with his wife and cat.

  THE ZOO

  Jamie Mollart

  First published in Great Britain

  And the United States of America

  Sandstone Press Ltd

  Dochcarty Road

  Dingwall

  Ross-shire

  IV15 9UG

  Scotland.

  www.sandstonepress.com

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Copyright © Jamie Mollart 2015

  Editor: Moira Forsyth

  The moral right of Jamie Mollart to be recognised as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act, 1988.

  The publisher acknowledges support from Creative Scotland towards publication of this volume.

  ISBN: 978-1-910124-24-6

  ISBNe: 978-1-910124-25-3

  Jacket design by Jason Anscomb

  Ebook by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore.

  For my family.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Acknowledgements

  To my wife, Sam, for putting up with me in every sense of the word.

  To my parents for instilling an unshakable love of the written word and making it impossible for me to leave the house without a book in my bag.

  To Mr Braddick, my English teacher. Teachers don’t get enough credit for the work they do and when they inspire someone that deserves even more credit.

  To Peter Cox, for teaching me that while writing is an art it is also a commercial concern, for seeing something in me and for pushing me on when I was near giving up.

  To Henderson Mullin for picking up the phone when he did, for believing in me and for opening some doors.

  To Tim Clare for his advice and wisdom, for showing me that less is more and many other clever and useful things.

  To Dom White for inspirational reading material and literary curries.

  To my agent Leslie, for taking a risk when others wouldn’t.

  To my editor Moira, for just getting it.

  Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  1.

  In the dark I can sense The Zoo.

  I can’t see it, but I know it is there. In the black it’s blacker and I imagine the outlines of The Figurines and The Animals: all spikes and claws and weapons and sharp edges.

  I can hear it too.

  A buzzing. Like electricity in the air. A noise that lifts the hairs on your arms. As if it has to remind me at all times that it’s there and active. I hear it over the noise of a shriek in the corridor outside my room; it may be laughter, or tears, I can’t tell. Over the noise of bare feet slapping on the tiles. Over the click and whirr of the heating.

  Over it all I can hear The Zoo.

  It’s the sound of blood in my veins and heartbeat in my ears and throat, of my fingers scratching on the coarse bedcover as I pull it over my head and the panic in my breathing.

  When it becomes too much I force myself out of bed and try to confront it. But I stand impotent and wordless and it knows I am weak.

  Time passes before I dredge up the words from my stomach. I question myself, I force my name out between bleeding gums.

  It doesn’t even sound like my name anymore. It’s abstract and once removed.

  ‘What do you want?’ I scream and get only a fist banged on the wall from the room next door in reply.

  The Zoo is mute and judgemental; it doesn’t need to justify itself to me, never has. It’s the wires behind the TV, hopelessly knotted. It’s a foreign dialect, impossible to translate.

  It’s been here as long as I have. I’ve asked them to take it away from me three times, but each time I sank into a despair that was physical and begged for it, so they returned it. We are tied together.

  I face it off and it doesn’t blink.

  Of late it comes in the day. Fearsome explosions of noise and aggression that cause the world to shake until I collapse on my knees and the teeth rattle in my head, my eyes cry blood and every sinew tenses until I think they are going to rip. This continues until I plead for death and then it is silent.

  ‘What do you want?’ I ask in the darkness.

  In the strip light day I try to ignore it. Stay in the day room, pace the corridors.

  Eventually though, I return to my room to get my cigarettes and it is there in its place. Glowering.

  So I have to break it down. Reduce it to its core components. Only then can I begin to unravel it.

  This is how it goes.

  At the very top sits The Cowboy.

  He is crafted from metal, although his base is plastic. This seems to be the wrong way round. The metal is heavier and yet it’s the plastic that does the supporting. In the past this has bothered me and I have tried to understand why he would be crafted this way, when the opposite is more logical, but the train of thought leads nowhere so I’ve buried it.

  I used to believe he was made of lead, but I’ve absent-mindedly chewed at his body many times and, despite the obvious difficulties associated with my present location, I’m in rare health.

  The brim of his Stetson is wide and elliptical, casting a shadow across his immovable face. One cannot help but b
e impressed by the firm set of his jaw and the steely determination of his chiselled bone structure. He is a formidable opponent.

  The Cowboy has two Colts he knows as The Equalisers cocooned in patterned holsters on his belt and, in his right hand, a Winchester rifle. This is the Gun that won the West and it is this weapon that places him on top. He holds it with a knowing pride. He is aware of the power it gives him over the rest of The Zoo and I can see him lying by a campfire, head balanced on rolled-up bedding, hat tipped over his eyes, but always watchful, the rifle resting on his chest, rising and falling with his breathing, a gloved hand brushing the trigger. It is an image of self-awareness and danger and an acceptance of the unknown and it pleases me.

  He means many things. He is the pushing of boundaries, the suppression of cultures. Colonial. He is the wide plains and the romance of adventure. He is the wild frontier. He is the contrast between the beige of the desert and the stark black silhouette of clapboard buildings. But he is also line dancing, and fat Americans, Boss Hog and the Marlboro Man who died of cancer.

  The Cowboy is about the relationship of man with his surroundings, dwarfed and yet somehow integral. The unbalanced, but symbiotic, equation of human being within a landscape. A shape in a doorway, black against the dusty foreground, mountains poised in the distance, the possibilities of white clouds in a dome of perfect blue.

  He is Eastwood and Jesse James. The neon sign waving over a temple to gambling. He is Shane and, at the same time, the Milky Bar Kid.

  He is at the top. He is the principal and takes his place as a leader of men with a stoic acceptance I respect. He knows this is his position, he expects it, but doesn’t seek it, and this is why it is his.

  2.

  It’s a Friday afternoon. About three or four months ago I think, but time means less to me now than it did then, so this could be wildly inaccurate. We’re in a Russian themed vodka bar, but they are running an Italian promotion. I’m sitting behind an uneven screen of Peronis. I look at the world through the green glass of the bottles and their gassy contents.

  The bar is all black tiles and shine and chrome and glass and people drinking in the afternoon when they should be working.

  It is as slick and shallow as spilled oil.

  We’ve won a substantial pitch, so this counts as work and I am smug and drunk.

  Outside, the sky hurls grey rain into the faces of the people who lean into it, heads pivoted sideways, the world slapping them on the cheek. Someone has spray-painted “What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself” onto the hoarding which skirts the scar of a building site. The letters are tall and tense, scrawled in haste.

  ‘We fucking rock,’ says Baxter, his face rouged by drink, hoisting his bottle in a toast. The others clink it and beer spills onto the polished glass tabletop.

  I shoot him a glare.

  ‘You fucking rock,’ he corrects. I look at his jaw, which seems skew-whiff and clenched and I idly wonder whether he’s had some coke and what I would do to him if he had.

  ‘I do,’ I confirm, ‘I fucking rock.’

  Later, in the toilets, Baxter collars me and slurs about how he respects me and it is an honour to work with me and he feels he has learned so much already, but if he could work on this account he would give it his all, and all I can think is his breath stinks of garlic and beer and it makes me feel bilious. Washing my hands, I scour his objectionable face in the mirror, really look at it, this backwards face. The other way round, and yet what he sees every day. I think half a thought about self-image, then it’s gone, like the water down the plughole, and I stalk back to the bar.

  Collins is talking to the group. He looks like an aftershave advert: chiselled and tanned, crisp white shirt under pinstripe suit. But I know his suit is from Marks and Spencer’s. The female clients love him, some of the male clients too.

  The barmaid catches my eye, her walk telling me stories. I could sell to her, she has ideas.

  ‘The place where I used to work, the Creative Director, he was a real asshole,’ says Collins, looking at me as if to point out that I’m not an asshole, ‘I’ll call him Mr Chips, because if I say his name you’ll all know who he is, and I may need him as a reference one day.’

  He grins at us all, milks the pause.

  ‘Well, his wife phoned into the office one morning, really early, like 7.30 or something. It rang for a bit and then a newbie account exec picked it up and just answered “hello.” This really fucked Mrs Chips off and she screamed down the phone, “That’s not how you answer the phone, young man.” The kid goes, “Fuck you” and this made Mrs Chips even angrier. ‘ “Do you know who this is?” she said. “No” says the kid. “This is Mrs Chips, your boss’s wife,” and she’s getting madder and madder by the second. She’s really fucking spewing by now. ”Okay,” says the kid, “do you know who this is?” “No,” says Mrs Chips. ”Good, then fuck you.”’

  Collins roars with laughter and the others join in. He has two silver fillings on his bottom teeth and a grey tongue. I peel the label off my beer and wait for them to calm down.

  ‘That’s not a true story, is it Collins?’ I say, loud enough so he can hear, quiet enough to be threatening.

  ‘What do you mean it’s not true?’

  ‘I mean, I’ve heard that story before, about a different Creative Director, somewhere else. But same story.’

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean?’

  ‘It’s an urban myth. A legend. It didn’t really happen. It’s like the pencil up the nose in the exam, or the hook in the car door. It’s made up. It’s a funny story, but it didn’t happen. You should know the difference, Collins. This is what we do. We make up stories.’

  I peer over his sagging head at the barmaid. She is glasses and cleavage and pouting lips. She makes me want to drink. I go to the bar and order a round of shots. One little capful of clear, burning liquid for everyone. She flirts with me and I look down her top. The edge of a black bra. It looks like home.

  In the early hours, as we weave out into the night, I put my arm around Collins and whisper in his ear.

  ‘I was only fucking with you, Collins. That story was true, but it was about me. I was the account exec. Now I’m the Creative Director. Go figure.’

  3.

  My room is about the size of a broom cupboard. The walls are steely grey and as soft to the touch as sea-smoothed bone. The ceiling is covered by chip paper. In the light of the uncovered bulb the bumps cast the shadows of insects and my skin crawls. I often stand on tiptoes on the bed, muscles in my thighs straining to keep me steady on the sagging mattress and surrendering springs, trying to flatten the chips into the ceiling. My under-exercised legs scream and I inevitably slump back onto the bed, frustrated.

  Out in the corridor I see Beaker. This isn’t his name. I don’t know his name, or if I do I have forgotten it. But he looks like the Muppet. His head is long and cylindrical, his top lip doesn’t move when he talks and his eyes panic behind thick glasses.

  He mutters something I can’t quite catch, but I think I hear the words ‘Amateur Photography Magazine’. He holds an imaginary camera to his face and mimes pulling focus on me. I smile, a lopsided affair that hides my teeth, and pose. The tourist at the edge of the precipice uncaring of the fatal drop behind. In the muted quiet I hear the click of the shutter.

  In the day room we slouch around a large scratched table with smoothed-off corners and try to be creative. Creativity is the core element of our recovery. This is ironic considering it was one of the core components in my fall.

  Plastic scissors and Pritt Stick and paper.

  I watch a heavily bearded man suck his moustache in and out of his mouth, fascinated by the pinkness of the tip of his tongue, but after a while it begins to make me feel wrong. He starts an argument about the volume of the television with a microscopic Asian lady, who always cuddles an old radio. ‘We’re trying to concentrate’, he is screaming at her, spit flying from his mouth and landing in the hair of a cata
tonic next to him.

  ‘Fuck you,’ she shouts back, ‘Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you . . .’ Tailing off until she is just standing there whispering it. I try to read her lips. Across the table the Beard is riled, I can see it in him; he is tensed and unable to let it go even though she has turned the volume down. He storms over to her and she is still mouthing ‘fuck you, fuck you,’ just a whisper, and he puts his Beardy face really close to her peanut of a head and roars ‘CUNT’, throwing a hand full of coloured paper into her face. All hell breaks loose and I skulk away to the outside smoking area.

  This from my childhood: crossing fields with my jeans soaking up dew. The sun on a window, highlighting the fingerprints of a child, one, two, three, more, a lattice-work of little hands.

  I think this now as I breathe my smoke into the cold air and gaze in through the glass at the Beard being dragged down the corridor, the soles of his shoes drawing a rubber eleven on the tiles.

  It’s like watching a silent movie.

  In the night I think of her and when we were first together. I hold her hand under the covers, the most lingering of touches. She grips my index finger, instinctively, gently. A newborn. Her body is warm next to mine, comforting. Although we aren’t touching, apart from the so slender contact of her fingers, I’m aware of where she is, where every contour of her body is. She rolls towards me, her breathing a whisper which moves the hairs on my arms. Each movement is laden with potential, unspoken futures, and I move away, release my finger from her grasp. Immediately I regret it, the distance cold and prohibitive. I understand the shading on this moment will make up the background for others in the future, so I roll close to her again, my lips pressed against her neck. She smells of promises and of sharing. She moans and I wrap my arms around her, feel her chest rise against the inside of my forearms and now I remember her by the beat of her heart.

  I freeze this, am just left with brittle sheets against my face and the orange of streetlights invading my room in slats, highlighting the shapes of The Zoo and mocking my restlessness.