The Zoo Read online

  Our dinner arrives.

  We eat. My steak is too rare but I don’t complain, don’t want to make a scene tonight. I drink my wine too quickly, it goes to my head and the darkness, the candles and being here with Sally makes me woozy, like I’m underwater and Sally’s face shimmers in the heat from the flame. Over the table, she’s in the distance.

  We talk about Harry, how he’s doing at school, how his stutter is getting on. She moans about her job, about the headmaster, about government cuts and as she’s talking I think back to another date. More like a pub crawl. The two of us in a sports bar. Dressed in tattered jeans, her hair lank and eyes rimmed with kohl. Standing talking about Nirvana and Kurt Cobain and arguing whether Bleach is a better album than Nevermind, Sally passionately standing up for Nevermind and me pulling out clichés about Bleach being more real. Her calling me a snob, that it being real has nothing to do with whether it’s a better album. Then it’s closing time and the bouncer asks us to leave. I’ve still got most of a pint left and he’s telling me to hurry it, so I neck it in one and as her laughter chimes about us both his anger grows and suddenly I’m vomiting the beer onto the table, onto the screen embedded into the table and onto the bouncer’s shoe. He’s grabbed me by the throat and dragged me down the stairs and thrown me out the door and Sally is punching his back with little balled up fists. I’m face down on the tarmac, tasting the blood from my nose and she’s hunched over me, brushing my hair from my face, kissing my eyelids and we’re both laughing. We stagger down the hill from the centre. Stop at the park and drunkenly clamber over the fence. The moon’s reflected on the boating lake. We fuck on a basketball court, grazing my knees. Then go back to our new home. Our first home – with damp walls and borrowed furniture, a TV on a box, books in a shelf from the wood they pack glass in and mismatched crockery.

  We leave the restaurant and walk across town, Sally’s arm through mine. There’s no weight to it, it might as well be made of air. Outside Lloyds Bank a beggar and a dog lie on a patchwork quilt.

  ‘Have you got any change?’ Sally asks.

  I root around in my pocket and pull out a handful of shrapnel, her painted nails pluck two gold pound coins and drop them into his polystyrene cup.

  At the cinema we watch a Mexican film about a drug dealer who discovers he’s only got a few months to live because of cancer. It’s full of haunting imagery of reflections that don’t follow the person making them, shadows that move on their own, dead immigrants washed up on a beach like driftwood. It hollows me out and when we leave I can’t vocalise my feelings about it.

  We take a taxi through the muted city to an empty house.

  38.

  I’ve been allowed back in my room. It’s been tidied since I left, it smells of disinfectant now. My bed sheets are new and taut and there’s a new desk and chair. They must have cleaned fairly recently as only a thin layer of dust has settled on the surfaces. I run my fingers through it on the desk top, drawing veins and road maps and spaghetti and . . . something is wrong. The room is dead quiet.

  Flat. No noise at all. Not the road. Not the ward. Not the heating. Nothing. I sit on the bed, looking about. The Zoo back in its place on the windowsill. Someone has tidied it up from the floor and replaced it. Put it back in the wrong order. I get up and stand before it. Nothing. Nothing there. The Zoo is silent. I can’t help but smile.

  I lie back on the bed and look at the ceiling, try and make patterns from the shadow of the chip paper. My eyes get heavy, then I drift off.

  A dream of Harry holding hands with the boy from Monkey Kingdom, they’re both talking in a language I half understand.

  I wake with a banging headache, a pain in my stomach and a crippling feeling that I’ve forgotten something. Something important. I try to remember the dream as it fades quicker than I can grasp it and within minutes I’m left with a vague sense of unease and nothing more.

  Lying there I remember Beth and want to make sure she is okay, to check that nothing happened to her while I was away. I feel anger at myself for not finding out before. I push myself up against a bass drum in my head, using the wall as support I leave the room. I trace it along the corridor like a blind man and when I reach the day room the gap across the corridor is as wide as the Atlantic, my head as turbulent. It takes me three attempts to get across. Stumbling forward, washed back, forward again. The TV threatens to break my head in two. I rest in a chair at the table, lashed with sweat. At the back of my mind the disarray of The Zoo is a constant. I do a circuit of the room, swaying, keeling, mumbling. She’s not there. Panic grips me. Mark is outside in the courtyard. I grab him by the arm, demand if he’s seen Beth. He pulls away from me, fear on his face, shaking his head violently. The sun bores into my skull so I narrow my eyes against it. Leaning against the wall I try to motivate my body to move again, battling against the inertia that wants to hold me there. Somehow I’m up and moving again, back through the day room, the world rolling, kaleidoscope colours, my vision like oil on water. Down the corridor again where the cramps hit me, snap me in two like a mousetrap and I’m crawling now, back towards my room, when I see her, near the door, reading the notice board. I make it to my feet, using the wall as scaffold and in jerking, strobing steps approach her. She sees me, tries to hide the look on her face, grasps my elbow and in an urgent whisper says, ‘James, are you okay?’ and I get out a grunt, nod, but that causes the world to explode and I feel my legs going again.

  ‘You need a doctor,’ she says.

  ‘No, no doctor,’ I force out, voice cracked and desperate, ‘fresh air.’

  She helps me back out, feeling the eyes on me, shying away from them, burying my head into her shoulder, her hair, until we’re outside. She helps me onto the bench, then stands facing me, her hands either side of my head, palms so hot they scald my skin.

  ‘What happened? What’s the matter?’

  I can’t speak. Squeeze my eyes shut. I know what it wants. The inside of my skull is a frozen scream of no.

  She cups my chin with her hand. I open my eyes and the world is her face, behind it shadows and depth and in this depth shapes move.

  ‘Your beard has grown,’ she says and I run my hand across my face, find thick hair.

  She sits next to me. I rest my head against her, shiver and shake.

  ‘You need to see someone,’ she says, gentle and insistent.

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘I just need to be here.’

  I feel for her hand and find it, she allows me to take hold of it. Our hands fit together. Perfect and airtight. I become aware that I’m squeezing her hand tight, too tight, that she hasn’t let go, hasn’t complained, has just stayed there. With the back of her other hand she tests my forehead. Strokes it.

  Despite the pain that grips me I feel myself begin to drift away. The pain seems to sense it. It’s as if a dial has been turned and it jumps up a level. I grit my teeth. Listen to the shout of no in my head. Focus on it.

  No. No. No. No. No.

  The more I strain against it the more it ramps up the volume of pain. My head is ready to split in two, my stomach full of twisting knives. Tears fill my eyes. My teeth feel as if I’m grinding them into powder from the pressure of my jaw.

  All the while she is there. Holding one hand. Stroking my head with the other.

  All the while I’m thinking. No. No. No.

  I know how to make this stop, how to make it all go away.

  I taste death in my mouth and can’t stay there any longer. I wriggle my hand from her grip. The cramp pushes into my stomach and I barely make it to the toilet before I’m pole-axed with violent diarrhoea. I hold my knees and pray for it to stop. It does momentarily and then cripples me again. I hear Beth outside the door calling my name, asking if I’m okay. I’m too weak to answer. I hear her running down the corridor calling for help. When it’s over I am so weak I hardly make it back to the bed.

  When my door is opened to check on me I can’t lift my head, instead remain curled like a foetus, a doc
tor over me, shining a light in my eyes. I feel the pressure of fingertips against the inside of my wrist, then someone is holding my head up, pouring water down my throat, tablets washed down on it. Through it all I hear Beth’s voice, and a male voice, though I can’t make out their words. The light is turned off and I’m left alone. The room spins slowly.

  This carries on at intervals for what seems like days. Each time I barely make it to the bathroom on time and then return to my bed on shaking legs, with watering eyes and a headache stamping black spots in my vision.

  I try to sleep my way through it, a disco inside my head, flashing lights and explosions of noise.

  At one point I wake standing over Beth’s bed, watching her sleep. She looks so peaceful, all the angst that is present when she is awake has gone. She snores slightly, her mouth open, displaying the tips of her teeth. The bed cover is pulled back and the skin on her neck is pure white in the moonlight, porcelain, fragile. I reach out, touch it with the tip of my index finger, trace her collarbone.

  ‘Do it’, says The Zoo. ‘Do it’.

  I run my fingertip across her throat. She turns onto her side, mumbles something unintelligible. I am numb. The Zoo moves my other hand so it circles her neck, only millimetres away from touching her skin, from closing round it. I can see the shake in my fingers.

  Hurt her.

  I snap out of it, the panic coursing through me. I clasp my hand to my mouth and the headache washes back over me. The cramps return to my stomach. I spin away, hurl myself from her room, race back to mine.

  I know what I need to do.

  It wants order and I have to supply it.

  ‘Okay,’ I say, ‘okay. Just leave me alone long enough to do it.’

  I lay still and the headache recedes like the tide. The pains in my stomach become more sporadic until there is just a dull throb remaining.

  I pull the chair over from the desk, place it at the window, facing The Zoo. I hate myself for being this weak. Tell myself that this way I can watch it, that I can stop it, so I pick it up and place it all on the floor, then one at a time put The Figurines back in place. The Cowboy. The Knight. The Pirate. The Soldier. Then begin on The Animals. The Lion. Then The Rhino.

  The order goes: The Cowboy, The Knight, The Pirate, The Soldier, The Lion, then The Rhino. The Rhino is stocky and grey as an English winter. He is frozen in time as though charging, head down and red eyes blazing. You can see knots of muscle under his thick hide. His stumpy tail is stuck straight in the air like a car aerial. The comical effect of this negates all his ferocity, and ensures that despite his size and strength he is below the Lion.

  Of course there is also intelligence to take into account. He is an automaton. A tank. He is bullish and instinctual. He is prehistoric. The past in the present.

  He is thick skin.

  He is point and go. A machine. Trampling. Squashing. Barging.

  The irony is that despite his looks he is a vegetarian. He is a one ton hippy.

  The horn that is his weapon is also his Achilles heel. The thing that protects him, the thing that makes him hunted. His defence is what makes him prey. The sword on his head becomes ornaments and pretend medicine. It is made of keratin, as lacking a solid core as our fingernails.

  He is all front.

  39.

  When Janet asks if I am ready to share I tell her I am, but only with her. She is to be my confessor. Her and her alone. I will say nothing to anyone else. I will not talk to doctors. I will not talk to orderlies. I will talk to Janet and she will share the burden with me.

  ‘What happened next?’ she asks.

  I sit in the chair, feet dangling, and I begin to talk again.

  I’m late for work. A traffic jam. An accident. An old lady crossing the road has been mowed down by a delivery van, causing an avalanche of fruit and bread rolls to block the road. When the traffic starts moving again I can see the wet patch on the road where they hosed her away.

  Jessica is sat on the front desk talking to Ruth, the Office Manager. I hunch over the desk and sign in.

  ‘I can’t believe anyone would do that to a woman,’ says Jessica.

  ‘A girl. She was a girl really.’

  Jessica nods. Neither of them acknowledges me. Jessica holds her phone up, taps the screen.

  ‘All because of these,’ she says, ‘all those murders so we can have mobile phones.’

  ‘Morning both,’ I say.

  They notice me. Jessica’s smile flashes like a toothpaste advert. Ruth waves at me.

  ‘Ben something from the bank has been calling for you.’

  I sit at my desk and turn on my computer. The Apple appears on the screen. In the kitchen I make myself a cup of black coffee. When I return to my office I see that the desktop has been changed to a picture of Charles Manson.

  I open the door to my office and shout out, ‘whichever of you fucking clowns thought it was funny to change my desktop, think again. If I catch anyone messing with my computer I’ll cut their fucking hands off.’

  I slam the door hard enough to make the pictures rattle on the wall. I revert the desktop to a picture of my family.

  After checking my emails I go to the Sky website and look at the details about the programme about Nghosa. An investigation into the mining of Cassiterite and Coltan in the African nation. The civil war fought over the control of the mining. I open Wikipedia and type in Cassiterite. A tin oxide mineral, it is black and crystalline and looks like something from outer space. Used for solder on circuit boards. I type in Coltan. Again black, but shards this time, like iron filings, it’s used to make electrical capacitors in mobile phones, DVD players and computers. Next to the text is an image of children digging in an open mine. I see the word Nghosa. I see the words European markets. I close the window down.

  The morning drags. I do my billing. Check the hours spent on each job against the price quoted, hand-write invoices that I know Ruth will struggle to translate.

  One of the creatives brings in the first draft of the press ads for the bank. I can’t concentrate on them.

  At 11.30am I take a bottle of vodka from my desk drawer and take a slug from it. The burn wakes me up. I make myself another cup of coffee and pour some more vodka into it.

  I remember that Ben called, dial his number and get his answerphone. A minute later he calls back.

  ‘James.’

  ‘Ben. How we doing?’

  ‘Good. Good. You?’

  ‘Yeah, fine. Sorry I missed your calls. Anything I can help with?’

  ‘I’ve been speaking to Michael’, he says and it takes me a while to realise he’s talking about Baxter, ‘he says we’re looking good, that you’ll hit all the deadlines?’

  ‘Yes, of course. We’ve got a planning meeting later this week. After we’ve finalised that side of things we’ll be ready for final sign off.’

  ‘The board is keen to see the whole campaign.’

  ‘As we all are. Nearly there, Ben. Nearly there.’

  I take another gulp of my coffee, the forgotten vodka making me wince.

  ‘I need to go back to Mr Berkshire with a timescale.’

  ‘End of next week,’ I say, worried he’ll hear the drink induced cough in my voice.

  ‘Excellent,’ he says, ‘that’ll get them off my back.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Ben. We’ll give you something brilliant and they’ll love you for it.’

  I can feel his relief down the phone. I hang up, turn on iTunes and scroll through it, settling on Thom Yorke, Eraser. The melancholy cradles me. I lie back in my chair.

  Everything fades into the background apart from his voice and when I put my hand to my face it is wet with tears. I rest my forehead on the desk. As I pull myself up I see my tears have smeared the ink on my invoices.

  At lunch I cross the road to the local. Sit by an unlit fire with a flat pint and flick matches into the hearth. The rasp of the match against the side of the packet. The flare of the flame. I drink the pint and order an
other. As I cross back to work my legs are unsteady.

  I close my office door against the world.

  Mid-afternoon there is a knock on it. When I ignore it there is another.

  ‘Come in then,’ I shout at the wood, barely even trying to cover my irritation.

  Baxter looking uncomfortable in the door way. He shuffles and fidgets.

  ‘Are you coming in?’ I ask.

  He looks back into the office as if deciding and then comes in, closes the door behind him.

  ‘I’ve just had Ben on the phone asking about the campaign. I told him we were on track. Nothing I should know about?’ I ask.

  ‘No. Not at all. I think we’ll come in on time and on budget.’

  ‘Good,’ I say turning the music off on my computer, ‘how’s Jessica doing?’

  ‘Well, she’s doing well.’

  I nod sagely, then say, ‘you tried it on with her yet?’

  I regret it immediately, aware that I sound like a dirty old man. Baxter shifts uncomfortably in his seat. I shrug to show I was joking.

  ‘Do you mind if I ask you a favour?’ When he asks me, he doesn’t meet my eye, instead focusing on the floor in front of him.

  ‘I guess that depends on what it is.’

  It looks like an effort for him to be asking me this. I wonder when I became the monster.

  ‘Go ahead, ask away,’ I say to make it easier for him.

  ‘I haven’t told the others yet, but I’m getting married. I asked Melissa to marry me and she said yes.’ He is all coy schoolboy pleased with himself. I want to tell him of the pain of marriage, about the work, about the death of love, about uncomfortable silences and empty beds. About how it used to be and how far I’ve let it all fall.

  ‘Mate. Congratulations,’ I say instead, work my way around the table, pump his hand, clap him on the shoulder.