The Zoo Read online

  I have. I’d like to tell them about a lost wife, a lost son, a lost boy in a zoo, a lost life. But I don’t. I bite my lip and shake my head. I want to tell them about how the time in here is filled with a longing for the drink and the cocaine that will take away the boredom and the doubt and the fear. But I don’t.

  ‘It helps, you know. It helps to share with the group. No-one is judging. There’s nothing to be afraid about.’

  But he’s wrong. There is something to be afraid about and I can hear it. It’s always there now, beneath everything, as a constant. It wants me to know it can do what it wants when it wants and I am powerless to stop it.

  He’s moved on. The doctor or the intern or the orderly or whatever he is, with his near moustache and scruffy shoes, with his clipboard and pens and questions. He’s moved on to someone else and they’re talking. They’re telling us things they wouldn’t share with their closest friends or with their families. We’re lapping it up, nodding and clapping and making sympathetic ohs and ahs. This circle of loonies perched on plastic chairs, each one of us with a halo of baggage above our head.

  I push the dust about on the floor with my feet, drawing figures of eight. It’s everywhere, settled on everybody’s shoulders like the first snow.

  It’s hot in the ward, the heat on too high. It makes me apathetic and drowsy.

  The day stretches out before me, a highway of wasted minutes. I trudge along it. Given my medication by the pudgy hand of a nurse, put them in my mouth, swill them round, consider hiding them under my tongue, then swallow them down. They stick in my throat. Two waxy lumps and I swallow, swallow, swallow, until I can dislodge them, splay my mouth wide open so she can see my fillings. Then the highway weaves and winds and becomes softer round the edge as the day is spent in confusion and the embrace of the armchair, of cigarettes and the wooden plank of the bench outside. Then it is time to go to bed and I lie, eyes on The Zoo, afraid to turn my back on it, it being made of whispers and accusation.

  The heat is rising, until the air is full of it. Hot and dry like the air in a sauna. Hot in my lungs as I breathe it in. The heat on my chest is like a black dog.

  The Zoo.

  All the while, pointed fingers and implicit threat. I dare not turn my back because I know it is there. I don’t have the courage to move it or face it, so instead I watch it through itchy eyes, fighting off sleep until I can’t any longer and I fall into a well of dreams of crowds and motion, that push me this way and that, people all around me, so close I can smell the food on their breath, their sweat, my feet are off the ground, washed along on them, trying to look over my shoulder. When I manage to turn my head I can see my son, way back, way back behind all these people, all these faceless people, his arms raised, his mouth moving, calling ‘Daddy’, as all the while I’m dragged further away from him, then pulled under, into the world of chests and arms, screaming out for my boy, then I’m lifted up, spun around, looking down on the hands that are bearing me along, the hands that belong to The Zoo, I see them all, and I’m screaming his name again, but he’s long gone and all that is left is this. I’m filled with a sense of loss and hopelessness that I could never have imagined, so complete, nothing of me left.

  When I wake it takes me time to realise that it was a dream.

  The sheets are kicked off. I’m slick with sweat and panic.

  When I am calm enough I sit up in the bed. On the floor is a piece of paper torn from a spiral-bound notepad.

  I pick it up. When I read the words, bile fills my mouth and I remember the dream, am there again and I thrash about on the bed, try to find purchase, something to kick against. I kick myself weak like a toddler, and when I am spent the paper is still there.

  Written on it in a childlike hand, is one word.

  Beth.

  35.

  I scrumple the paper up into a ball and throw it at the wall where it bounces and rolls to the feet of The Zoo. I hug my knees and avoid looking towards the window, towards The Zoo, towards the paper.

  Beth.

  The intention is clear.

  I think of her – delicate, damaged with big, teary eyes. The scars on her wrist.

  I unfold myself and go to the door. I put both hands on the frame and lean out into the corridor. The ward is quiet; even the workmen have stopped. The heat is oppressive, the air hardly moving. I close the door as quietly as I can and, cushioning the handle, push it until it clicks. Leaning against the wood I face The Zoo. Swallowing fear I kneel on the floor in front of it, clasp my hands together and push the ball of paper away with my knee.

  I look up at The Cowboy, The Knight, The Pirate. The Figurines. The Animals.

  ‘Why her?’ I plead. I squeeze my hands together until they shake, close my eyes and whisper, ‘Not her. You don’t have to have her. Take me instead. You don’t need to have her.’

  Even as I say it I know why it has to be her, know that I have played my hand and become acutely aware of the danger I’ve placed her in.

  ‘Please,’ I say, ‘anyone but her. Take Beaker. Not Beth.’

  Silent amid drifts of dust on the shelf, The Zoo won’t bend or deviate. It will always do what it intends to do, so the only reason it has shown me is to hurt me, to taunt me about how little I can do.

  Not this time. I won’t let it happen.

  ‘No,’ I shout at The Zoo. ‘You won’t hurt her.’

  I make a decision. I haven’t got long – they will check on me soon.

  I take the chair and wedge it under the door handle, testing the movement. It holds, it is a start, but it won’t go on holding. Around me the atmosphere is beginning to crackle and hum, static all about me, the hairs on my arms upright. Through the window the sky is darkening, a bank of cloud rolling over the horizon, angry and full of rain. Still the temperature is rising. I am drenched in sweat as I drag my desk across the room, move the chair and wedge the desk up against the door. I put the chair in front of it and sit challenging The Zoo.

  The whole room is full of electricity now, sparking about me. There’s pressure in my head, thumping behind my eyes. The door handle flaps up and down. Someone is calling my name but I blot it out. Stare at The Zoo through the heat haze. A roll of thunder tears the bank of cloud open and rain begins pelting the window. My head is full of the sound of The Zoo starting up. Clanking and whirring and grinding and I know it wants to get out, out through me, out into the ward, at Beth.

  I grip the seat of the chair, squeezing hard, as if the pressure of my fingers alone will keep her safe from it.

  Then the smell again – sulphur and burning. In my mouth. In my throat. In my chest.

  And the voice.

  ‘You cannot help her.’

  I’m shouting that I can. That I can help her. The world is shaking around me, the door handle wrenching up and down, my chair rattling on the floor. Rain is slamming into the window in waves and all about me the sound of The Zoo, so loud my ears ring with it. Someone thuds into the door from the outside, the voices telling me to open it calm at first, then more urgent, distracting me and I turn away from The Zoo for a second. Something smashes into me from the side, launching me from the chair. I hit the wall, my head striking it first. They ram into the door again. The room is lit by lightning. Ram the door again. The chair flies across the room. I pull myself up, drag myself across the room and sweep my arm through The Zoo, sending it skittering across the floor. The sharpest of pain in my chest, neck, a vice tightened on me.

  A shoulder rattles the door again. There’s a hand on my chest holding me down, sharp nails against my skin, another hand around my throat squeezing. There are people are all about me grabbing my arms. I kick out, connect with someone’s shin and they fall next to me. Then they’ve got hold of my legs. I’m screaming her name, telling them to keep her safe. My sleeve is rolled up. A spike of a needle and a coldness spreads through my body. I fight against it, determined to stay focused, but it is like ice in my veins, down my arm to my fingertips, up my arm to my shoul
der, across my chest. My eyelids are heavy and I am loose in their arms. Underwater. They lift me and carry me from the room, down the corridor with my head lolling upside down. Faces watching me. Into the isolation room, onto the bed, straps over my arms. The door closes then a hatch in it opens and a pair of eyes look through.

  The Zoo is quiet. It can’t say anything.

  From in here it can’t say anything.

  I allow myself a smile.

  36.

  A day or a week later. They’ve upped my medication; I am weighted down.

  Initially I was checked on constantly. Sporadically a nurse came in and injected me with a substance that made me feel like I was sinking. Then after a while the door was left open and the visits became less frequent. I didn’t have the energy to stand, let alone walk, so I lay in a stupor on my bed.

  The dust gathered on me, filling my eye sockets and coating my tongue. It built up around me like snow drifts. Then the injections stopped and I steadily regained my focus.

  No-one has mentioned me moving back to my room, so I stay here. At least from here I can’t hear the building work.

  An orderly enters and helps me to my feet.

  I’m led to Janet Armitage’s office and plonked into a tall-backed leather chair opposite her. It’s the most comfortable thing I have sat in in a long time.

  Janet is reading a sheath of papers in a brown A4 folder. She doesn’t acknowledge me.

  I study my nails. They’re longer than I normally wear them and encrusted with dirt.

  She grunts, a satisfied noise, and closes the folder. Puts it down on the desk, leans back in her chair and folds her arms.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ she asks.

  Manners win and I say, ‘I’m okay thank you.’

  It sounds ridiculous as soon as I say it.

  ‘I’ve been reading your file.’

  I nod. I am childishly small in the chair as I swallow a snivel in my throat.

  ‘You were, are, a very successful man.’

  I shrug.

  ‘Intelligent too.’

  I shrug again.

  ‘There’s no need to be modest,’ she says, tapping the folder, ‘it’s all in here.’

  One more shrug.

  ‘I’m sure you don’t want to be in here.’

  I shake my head.

  ‘You haven’t spoken to anyone since you got in here. If you don’t speak to us we can’t help you. And if we can’t help you, you won’t be able to go home. A man of your intelligence is wasted in here.’

  I study the grime under my nails.

  ‘You’ve got a family, haven’t you?’

  A tear rolls down my cheeks. I’m nodding, yes, I have a family. Janet is waiting but she is no more than a shimmer through the mirage of my tears. Through the tears I’m trying to say, ‘it’s always someone else gets hurt, always my fault, but it’s always someone else who gets hurt’, but the words are lost in the spasm of my throat.

  ‘Are you ready to talk to me now?’ Her voice is velvet.

  I nod. ‘It all started falling apart because of a television programme.’

  37.

  The day it begins I pick Harry up from school. He’s excited, showing me a picture he’s made: shells and pasta and glitter stuck to a sheet of pink crepe paper. He’s scrawled his name in huge letters with a blue crayon along one edge.

  ‘It’s a m-m-monkey,’ he says, pointing at a shape, which looks nothing like a monkey. I coo at him with parental pride.

  When Sally returns from work she is carrying a grey tray piled high with exercise books and spends the evening working through them with a red pen. I make us a stir-fry and Harry, fish fingers. I’ve been trying to quell my drinking, to come straight home from work, behave like a husband, so when she asks me to open a bottle of wine it feels like we’re heading in the right direction.

  I choose a bottle of white Burgundy. I place the glass in front of her and take away her plate. She waves a thanks at me, eyes still on the exercise books.

  Harry is nagging at her, trying to get her attention, so I sit him on the sideboard and get him to help with the drying of the dinner dishes. He chatters away all the while.

  ‘The monkey looked at me D-d-dad. Did you see it? When I called its name it looked at me. I-I-I-I’d like a monkey. Do you think we could be friends? I don’t talk monkey, but I think it could understand me. M-m-m-maybe I could teach it sign language like at the z-z-z-zoo. Do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know Harry, maybe. It’s nearly time for bed. Go and say goodnight to Mum and then I’ll read you a story.’

  He reaches out with his hands, I help him down and he trots into the lounge. I follow him through. He kisses and hugs Sally.

  ‘I’ll put him down,’ I say to her. She mouths thank you.

  Upstairs I help him brush his teeth, pull on his pyjamas, tuck him into his bed. He insists on me reading him The Gruffalo for the 30th time. He is all smiles and reciting the words, halfway through though I can see his eyelids going and he’s asleep before I finish. I kiss him on the forehead and turn off his light.

  Sally’s pile of books is going down.

  ‘Do you mind if I turn the TV on?’ I ask her.

  ‘No, just keep the volume down,’ she says without looking up.

  I flip through the channels until an introduction stops me dead. The BBC logo on screen and a voice over: an investigation into mineral mining in Nghosa.

  Bookmark this moment, Janet, because this is the beginning.

  I sit cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV so I don’t have to turn it up. It begins in a hospital, an interview with a doctor who treats women who have been the victim of rape and sexual violence. It’s the only hospital in the country with the facilities to treat forgotten women. Can that really be possible? One suitable hospital in a nation of millions. There’s a 14-year-old girl with a baby on her back, a baby that is the result of gang rape by a group of soldiers. The interviewer talks to a woman whose father’s eyes were plucked out before he was hacked to death with a machete because he refused to rape her. Her own eyes are empty, her words unwavering. She is the walking dead. A prickly heat covers my back. The camera cuts to the interviewer. He is a mask of unbelieving horror. He chokes out questions, his shoulders shaking with anger as he talks to a young girl who had a plastic bottle stuck into her, heated with a lighter until the plastic was red hot and molten. Another woman, 19 years old, had her clitoris removed. Bile is rising in my throat. ‘Why does this happen?’asks the interviewer, ‘what sort of man could do this to a young girl?’ The answer is matter of fact. ‘Soldiers. Boy soldiers.’

  I want to turn the TV off, I want to stop watching, but I can’t, I have to see this through.

  Behind me Sally slams shut a book and sighs.

  ‘What are you watching?’ she asks.

  I think for a minute, consider explaining it, then say, ‘the end of civilisation.’

  She yawns.

  ‘What do you want to do? Watch a film, listen to some music?’ I ask.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind going to bed. I’m really tired. Do you mind?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  Upstairs we brush our teeth and get ready for bed in silence, then lie under crisp duvet and sheets. After a while I can hear her taking deep breaths as if she is about to say something then stopping herself.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I ask.

  ‘Saturday night. Shall we leave Harry with my Mum. Go out, just the two of us?’

  ‘Like a date?’

  She laughs, and the tension in the room dissipates. ‘Yes, like a date. Maybe go for dinner, then the cinema?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’d love that.’

  And I would. Right now, I’d love it. In the dark I roll over and try to find her mouth, miss and plant a scruffy kiss on her forehead. She grabs my hand and squeezes it. We hold hands, her palm small and warm in mine, and then she lets go, rolls over. In seconds she is asleep.

  Saturday night.
I watch her dress, pulling on a flowing black dress then sitting at her dressing table applying make-up. She catches me watching her in the mirror and says, ‘What?’ But she’s smiling when she says it and I smile back. I wrap my arms around her neck and kiss the top of her head. She squeezes my arm.

  Sally’s mother arrives, a flurry of mac and scraped back hair, all ageing glamour and pragmatism. Harry explodes in excitement at her arrival, shouting ‘G-G-Gran’s here,’ running back and forth down the corridor.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t call me Gran, it makes me feel old,’ she says, trying to catch him as he brushes past her.

  ‘Evening Sandra,’ I say, kissing her on the cheek.

  Sally comes down the stairs.

  ‘Oh darling, you look wonderful.’

  I have to agree with Sandra, she does. She looks wonderful. Elegant. Beautiful. A whole list of superlatives.

  We take a taxi to the restaurant. Butterflies dance around my stomach. The day is closing down. Across the city street lights blink on, shops close, bars open. The Yin Yang of the city.

  As the taxi slides through the inky evening, I’m thinking ‘so far so good, so far so good . . .’

  The Opera House restaurant is in the Lane area. It’s pedestrianised, with boutique shops overwhelmed by the massive new glass shopping centre that I catch glimpses of through side streets as we make our way there. We tentatively hold hands.

  A French maitre-d’ greets us and leads us to our table. The restaurant is a warren of booths and alcoves, private tables, shadowy, all lit by candles. I hold the chair out for Sally. She folds her dress under her thighs as she sits. In the light of the flames her eyes are moist. I make a show of ordering the most expensive red wine and then feel like a prick.

  Around us there is the low hum of conversation. I realise I’m listening to other people and not talking to Sally. She checks her mobile.

  ‘How’s the new account?’ she asks, putting the phone in her bag.

  So I tell her about the bank and the creative, about how the advert will run and feel like I’m giving a presentation. Halfway through my phone beeps. I check my messages while still talking, no idea what I’m saying, words spilling onto the table. The message, from a withheld number, says, you’re a fucking fraud. I delete it.