The Zoo Read online

  ‘Take your hand away from your mouth,’ she says.

  He shakes his head again. Mutters, ‘I don’t want to’, from behind his finger shield.

  Sally picks up his fork, the metal scraping on the plate. A banshee cry of metal on ceramic that cuts right through me. She scoops up a fork full of lasagne and aims it at his mouth. He screams no behind his hand and lashes out with his other hand, catching the fork and sending it bouncing off the table, leaving a jet trail of food on the tablecloth. Sally gasps and recoils. She shouts his name, grabs the fork again, gets another portion, holds his other hand and says, ‘you will eat your dinner.’ He shakes his head again. Before I know what I’m doing I’m around the table grabbing his head, pulling his hand away and growling in his face,

  ‘Stop being a baby and eat your fucking dinner.’

  The look on his face, the look on Sally’s, makes me realise what I’ve done and I step back, already apologising and they’re both staring at me and I’m backing away, into the lounge, slamming the door that separates the two rooms and through the wood I can hear him wailing and Sally trying to calm him down. I fall into the armchair, cover my head with my hands, but that’s not enough, so I push a pillow over my face and scream into the fabric, into this thick, thick air and wonder what it would be like to suffocate. There are footsteps on the stairs, him running, Sally running after him, the bedroom door kicked shut, her muffled voice, muffled through the pillow, through the wall, through the floor, through everything that divides us.

  I am remorse. I am guilt. I am too caned to know what to do. So I press the pillow tighter into my face, until it squashes my nose, fills my eye sockets and my mouth and I can taste the material, taste the dust, taste my aftershave, the air freshener, the smell of our house, our home and hold it there, hold it there, hold it there.

  48.

  I can’t bring myself to join them, to see the aftermath, so I turn on the TV but leave the sound off, feeling sorry for myself along with Nick Drake. I hop through the channels, bouncing over a reality TV show about fat people, Gene Hackman in The Conversation, Stoke City versus Manchester City, crap, crap and more crap.

  I settle on Sky News.

  Visions of children with guns. A jeep on a track through jungle. Men in the back, bandanas over their faces. Another group of men firing AK47s into the sky. A journalist in front of a group of grinning and waving children. I jump up, turn off the CD player and turn the volume up on the TV. The journalist is addressing the camera.

  ‘It is shocking how quickly the country has fallen into civil war. Always a volatile country, Nhgosa is rapidly becoming a no-go zone. The British government today warned all British citizens who don’t have pressing reasons to stay to leave the country.’

  I shuffle off the seat and move on my bottom towards the television, my face now inches from the screen. I reach for the connection Lou made and find enough to disturb me.

  The journalist holds his hand out to the camera. Each palm holds a pile of black minerals.

  I have to squeeze one eye shut so I can focus on the image on the screen. If I have both of them open the picture jumps and spins and tries to elude me.

  ‘And it is all about this. Coltan and Cassiterite.’

  He raises his left hand.

  ‘Coltan is used in the west to manufacture electrical items. 65% of the world’s supply of the mineral can be found here and is mined in small artisan mines, often dug out by hand by children and then shipped across the border and sold through intermediaries. Most of the electronic giants will deny that they buy Coltan from Nghosa, but the statistics don’t support this. No matter which way we look at it, and no matter how much they deny that it came from here, there just isn’t enough of it produced elsewhere to fuel the hunger that we in the West have for our electronic devices.’

  He raises his right hand.

  ‘And this is Cassiterite, again used in electronic devices, this time for soldering. This innocuous looking material is used to make the phones you speak on and the TVs you watch this report on and these two minerals are tearing this country apart.

  ‘There are reports that the rebel army are pushing to the north of the country, to the part of Nghosa where the majority of the mines are. There is no doubt this is a civil war that is about exploiting the natural resources of this country. If you spend any time here you realise the vast fortune raised by the mining of these minerals doesn’t reach the common people. It is that fortune the rebels are after. Even now they are pushing the government forces back.

  ‘We have received unconfirmed reports of villages being burned on the way. It is impossible for foreign journalists to get near enough to the fighting to corroborate these reports and the government minders are intent on only showing us their side of the conflict, but everyone I speak to has a tale about horrific acts perpetrated by both armies. We may not have officially reached a humanitarian crisis yet, but whichever side wins it will be at a huge cost to the people of Nghosa. This is Guy Allen reporting for Sky News in Nghosa.’

  I turn the sound down and listen intently for any sounds of my family upstairs, but there is none. I presume they’ve gone to bed. I pull myself back to the sofa, clip my bottle of beer and watch without moving as the amber liquid spreads out into the carpet.

  I try to shake myself out of it, trace a ponderous and meandering path into the kitchen and take a pressed tea towel from a drawer. Halfway back into the lounge I return to the fridge and grab another beer. I can’t be bothered to root around for a bottle opener so crack it open with my lighter. The lid bounces and jumps its way around the sink.

  Back on the sofa I pull my legs up, lie on my side, nestle the beer against my chest, feel my eyes get heavy. I jerk awake as the beer spills onto my chest. The room spins. I prop myself up. Drape my arm off the edge of the sofa, lower it for what seems hundreds of fathoms until it touches down on the floor and barely pull my arm back again before tumbling into a drunken sleep.

  In the darkness inside my head I meet the African boy. He points a gun at me. The gun is the same size as his torso. The tendons in his forearms strain with its weight. He is smiling. A grim smile belonging to someone who has seen more and knows more than he needs to. He levels the gun at my head, cocks his head and squints down the barrel. He opens his mouth and says a word I understand, ‘Nghosa.’

  I wake with a crick in my neck. Daylight teases me through the curtains. As I stand, my knees cracking, I realise I have pissed on the sofa.

  49.

  Cocooned in my room, blinds shutting off the world, door closing out the ward, I hear The Zoo talking to me. Words and ideas are all about me. It is a worm in my inner ear, tender words I don’t understand, fractured and mixed up, dyslexic and confused. Amongst them my name, the names of my family, place names, times, fractions of memories, read out to me as if in a play. A harsh whisper, playing with the hairs on my neck. Then when I relax, I’m snapped out of it with static and feedback and a flow of messages that make my head spin.

  I study it. Study the gap in it and strive to visualise what should be there to fill the void. I know it, I know this, it’s in me, I just need to dig it out. The Zoo in my head is a radio trying to tune itself. The volume skips up and down as my subconscious plays with the dial. My focus is a red line that rolls left to right stopping at numbers and here I catch snapshots of things, then it rolls on and I am left with the chaos.

  Eyes closed. Picturing The Zoo, working along its rows with my mind’s eye.

  Nearly there. Nearly have it.

  See the shape. See the base of it. See its outline. A shadow form.

  Then I have it. I know what is missing.

  The Ape.

  The Ape should sit beneath The Rhino. The Ape should be next and he is gone.

  A mixture of fear and relief. I remember him, but he is absent. He is within me again now, even when his physical form is missing. I know him and I can remember him.

  The Ape is next. The order should go: The Cowboy,
The Knight, The Pirate, The Soldier, The Lion, The Rhino, then The Ape.

  He is here because of his size and his power. Below The Lion and The Rhino despite his closeness to man. Perhaps because of. He is a spy in the camp of The Animals. He is one of them, but not of them. He is a surreptitious link between The Cowboy and his mindless followers in The Animals and now he is the missing link.

  He is like us. But not.

  He is a Chimpanzee. He squats with his knuckles down, touching the ground. He is looking up under mournful eyebrows. His eyes are just black dots, but within them is sadness and knowledge and when he looks at me I see a reflection of myself. He lived in a society that is structured like ours, then he lived in The Zoo, in a society that is structured as well, just not in the same way. From the way he is bowed, the way his head is lowered, it is obvious to me that he is not the alpha male. I could tell this even if I didn’t know his position within The Zoo.

  Like us he can laugh, but there are no laughter lines around his eyes. Just a smooth pink face ringed in plastic fur that doesn’t move in the wind, stays frozen for all time, moulded and immobile.

  He is our closest relative, regal and dignified, collected by Solomon, important to Darwin. He is dressed as Man, laughed at and pointed at and ridiculed. He is a comic sidekick. We can laugh at him because he is us, but can’t complain at our jibes.

  He tried to stop Charlton Heston from discovering the truth. He is Tarzan’s faithful companion. He is a reminder to us of our superiority and how far we can fall. He is a group of chimps drinking tea while lip-synching to northern stereotypes. He is learning to use tools in front of a black monolith. He is a character in a book that Beth is reading.

  He is gone, someone else has him and I miss him.

  50.

  I am into the corridor before my mind can stop my legs, pushing past Asian Radio Lady so she spins like a fairground ride and her radio hits the tiles, spilling batteries. Her complaints are tracer bullets trying to find me as I storm away. I don’t knock on Janet’s door, I virtually kick it open; it bounces off the wall and rattles in its frame. Janet is talking to a man I don’t recognise. He is dressed in a black suit, white shirt, black tie, oiled hair, pencil moustache. He looks like Howard Hughes dressed as an undertaker. They are rabbits in the headlights, wide eyes and dropped mouths, they are a freeze-frame of surprise. Then the man steps towards me, begins denouncing me for bursting in, something about manners and private but I am seeing red and his words bounce off me. Janet is holding her hand up to him, calming him, cooing at him like a pigeon and I want to hurt, hurt him, hurt her, hurt me, find it.

  ‘James,’ says Janet. Composed once more, steady, calm and in control.

  I am not, I am shaking, I am anger, I am out of control.

  ‘Who’s got it?’ I shout.

  ‘Now look here,’ says Howard.

  I can barely see him through the red mist which coats my eyes. I point my finger at him, my arms so tense it shakes.

  ‘No. Fucker. You look here. Where is it?’

  Howard looks at Janet for support. She pats his arm. He is a dog now.

  ‘James. You seem very upset. Is there something I can help you with?’ She’s doing that voice. That voice full of empathy and, even as I don’t want to fall for it, I can feel it working, until I use the red to push it back down again.

  ‘Someone has taken something that belongs to me and I want it back.’

  ‘Okay. Well you need to calm down and tell me what it is you’ve lost.’

  ‘Not lost. Stolen.’

  ‘I’m sure no-one wants to steal any of your belongings, James.’

  ‘Not wants to. Fucking has.’

  I’ll take your empathy and raise it two red mists.

  She says something quietly to Howard Hughes. He edges his way around the desk and then past me, never turning his back to me, arms held as if he is surrendering. He seems so pathetic that I can’t help but jerk and growl as he gets close, laugh as he flinches, whimpers and scuttles out of the room. Humour beats red mist. I swallow the laugh. It sticks in my throat.

  ‘Now, if you’re calm, please tell me what you’re missing. And please remember, we have rules here, they’re for everyone’s good, they make the ward run as it should. You know this as well as everyone else and one of them is that you don’t come bursting into my office and intimidate my guests.’

  I’m not calm, nowhere near calm. I squash the anger down, bury it in my chest cavity and say, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think.’

  Janet nods acceptance, so I continue.

  ‘I am missing something from my room.’

  ‘When did you last see it?’

  I reach back, finding no definitive answer.

  ‘I think before I moved rooms for a while,’ I say.

  ‘And now it’s not there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you looked everywhere?’

  ‘Yes, of course, I wouldn’t have come to you if I hadn’t.’

  Red mist. My voice quavers.

  ‘I’m trying to help,’ Janet says, ‘we can’t just accuse people of stealing. We need to be absolutely sure. If you could describe what it was that is missing we can begin the work of finding it.’

  I find myself not wanting to tell her, while knowing that I must. I’m unsure whether I can trust her. View her as a suspect, whereas a minute ago I simply viewed her as a figure of authority to report the crime to.

  ‘Well?’ she says.

  ‘A model. A model of a chimpanzee. It was on my windowsill. I need it back. It’s imperative that I have it back. Of all of them it had to be the chimp. The only one who understands.’

  Janet realises something, I can see it on her face and at the same time I realise I have given something away I didn’t want to, or given her an opportunity I didn’t want to.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ she says, ‘the toys. Are you ready to talk to me about the toys?’

  Bitch. No, I’m not ready to talk about the toys. They’re not fucking toys. I’m not ready, never will be ready. If I talk about The Zoo it will only get angrier. We have reached an impasse of late. It’s there, but it’s not hurting me or anyone else. If I start talking about it this could all change. There’s no way I’m risking it. I think about Beth’s name on a piece of paper. I think about her telling me she’s feeling better. So I seal my lips and seal The Zoo within them like a crypt.

  Instead I say, ‘no, I’m not ready to talk about the toys. I’m ready to talk about the missing piece.’

  She seems disappointed.

  ‘Okay. If you’re convinced that it’s been taken, of course we’ll take it seriously. I will ask someone to look into it.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘But, if it’s important to you I think we do need to talk about it.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  I try to sound determined when I say this, aware that I’m avoiding her eye and fiddling with the belt loops of my trousers. She won’t leave it alone though. I should have known this before I came to her. Instead I floated in on the red mist and now I’m facing the third degree about the last thing in the world I want to talk about.

  ‘They obviously mean something to you. These toys. They’re obviously important to you and for that reason it’s my opinion that it may be instrumental in your recovery that we begin to look at what they mean,’ she balances her glasses on her nose, moves the mouse on her desk and the blue light of the screen reflects in her glasses’ lenses.

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘not now.’

  I leave this breadcrumb for her and she snaps it up.

  ‘Okay. Another time then. But being as you’re here and have scared off my visitor is there anything else you’d like to talk to me about?’

  I know I need to give her something. Something to take her mind off The Zoo. So I say,

  ‘I’d like to talk about my job and the way it made me feel.’

  My judgement is right, she can barely hide her delight.

  ‘Okay, plea
se do.’

  She thinks she’s winning so I make a show of composing myself. I lean back into the chair, squeeze my eyes shut and then begin in a flat voice,

  ‘Okay Janet. This is what I do to people; you drive to the supermarket, listening to the radio and there’s an advert in the break between the songs and you think you don’t listen to it, but you do really. All the while stuck in the traffic jam behind a bus with a banner on the back and you take that in too, even though you think you don’t. The traffic crawls along and you go past a 48-sheet poster that has a slogan on it that you recognise and a beautiful woman smiles down at you saying “everything is going to be alright”. You park and the ticket is spat out of the machine, you turn it over and it has an advert on the back of it for multivitamins, so when you next cough, just a cough, maybe a dry throat, you wonder if you’re coming down with something.

  ‘As you get your trolley you idly read the message on it for holidays and then it starts raining so you have to hurry into the supermarket, and all you can think about is how you deserve a family holiday. Then this gets you thinking about your last family holiday, say Lake Garda and the hired canoes and the sun on the lake, the slap of the paddle on the water, the sound of your children playfully arguing and an idea starts to come together.

  ‘Inside the supermarket you push your trolley along in a stupor, not really listening to the piped music and the seductive voice telling you about the manager’s special, and you pass the 2-for-1’s and the special offers and the discount flashes and the dump bins full of the week’s bargains.

  ‘And then when you get home you unpack your shopping and look at it all on the kitchen work surface, this consumer mountain, all this stuff you didn’t want, that you’re only going to throw away again and you think to yourself, “why did I buy all this crap?”

  ‘That’s what I do to people, Janet.’

  ‘How does that make you feel?’ she asks.

  ‘How do you think it makes me feel?’ I ask her because I don’t know the answer anymore.