The Zoo Read online

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong,’ he replies, spittle on his lips, wild in his eyes.

  In the day room there are a crowd of people, inmates and orderlies, huddled about one of the armchairs. I try to force myself through, but the group is too tight and I can’t. Then I see the wall and I know who they are encircling and why. I slump down at the table. Everything is knocked from me. I slam my forehead on the table again, the vibration passing up through my body.

  Then I force myself to look.

  In the centre of the wall is Mark’s picture. The one he folded. Above the picture is his ponytail, severed at the root and stuck to the plaster with Sellotape. About it, speckled with glitter and star shapes are words written in shit, big and ragged and from hell. Then around this, lumps of shit have been lobbed at the wall. Beneath the picture and the hair is drawn a smiley face, like the Acid badge from 90s rave culture. I look at the words and I moan.

  There is no way out.

  There is no way back.

  This is all there is.

  This is it.

  7.

  We’re in one of the glass pods that line the main office space. The blinds are lowered, lights off. It’s warm in here. We’re all squinting at a projection on the far wall. Collins is fucking about with the MacBook Pro, trying to get what’s on the screen onto the wall.

  ‘I hate these things,’ he whines, ‘every time I try and use them, this happens.’

  ‘It’s got to be something you’re doing then,’ Client Services Director, to my right.

  ‘I don’t know, I swear it does it to make me look stupid.’

  ‘If it does, then it’s doing a bang-on job.’ The others laugh at my joke. Probably through politeness.

  Collins glowers at me from over the top of the laptop screen. His face lit from underneath like a Halloween pumpkin.

  ‘Turn it off and turn it back on again,’ I say.

  Baxter, to my left, sniggers into the back of his hand. I dip the tip of my finger into my glass of water, allow it to drip off onto the tabletop and try and stretch the droplets out into my name. I only get the J and the A done before Collins guffaws in triumph and the company logo appears on the wall behind him.

  ‘I’ll skip through the creds, you know what’s in them. Blah blah. Right.’

  He pauses here. Points at the screen.

  ‘The Big Idea. Transparency.’

  He enunciates it with a flourish. Teases out each syllable. Tran-spa-ren-cy.

  ‘We need to have absolute transparency. You have been allowed to hide behind the old institutions for too long. Old boys’ networks and funny handshakes. Our money spent doing God knows what.’

  A second of darkness as the slide changes, then a picture of a baying mob, black and white, grainy, Baader-Meinhof maybe.

  ‘We need to get from here. To here,’ says Collins and clicks through to the next slide.

  A 50s style picture of a classroom, robotic kids in a row, eyes front, attention on the teacher, blond hair and the whitest of teeth.

  The warmth of the room is making me tired. There is a weight in my eyelids. I begin to drift away from what he is saying. I need to do something to snap myself out of this torpor.

  ‘Wait. Collins. Go back. Go back to the beardy-weirdy revolutionaries. Yes there. Stop.’

  I look at the picture for a while. Everyone is waiting for me to say something.

  ‘What the fuck are we trying to say here? The population of England is so pissed off that they are likely to turn into hairy fucking German terrorists? And that what we really want is to turn them back into the Stepford fucking children?’

  ‘They’re just pictures?’ offers Collins.

  ‘Just pictures? Just fucking pictures. Fuck me. How long have you worked here? Just fucking pictures. There’s no such thing as just fucking pictures.’

  ‘Visual metaphors?’

  ‘For what? What the fuck are you trying to say? Who put this together? Collins, sort those two slides out. Next time I see it I want to have something in place of those two, not just some pictures we used because some teenage art-worker liked the look of them. Jesus.’

  The room is quiet now. I can hear the fan of the laptop. Client Services Director raises an eyebrow at me. I sneer back at him and suck my teeth.

  ‘Get on with it,’ I say. ‘And go straight to the campaign visuals.’

  Pictures of an obvious banker type, pinstripe suit, red tie, arms outstretched, being searched by what looks like airport security. The headline reads ‘We’ve got nothing to hide’ and the rejoining text ‘so you know your money is safe with us.’

  ‘Good,’ I say, ‘show me more.’

  Later in the corridor Managing Director stops me with a hand on my shoulder. He is all smiles, Stepford too, but with a weariness to his face.

  ‘The Bank looks good,’ he says.

  ‘Thanks. You okay? You look tired.’

  ‘Yes. Fine. Don’t worry, trouble at mill, you know, the bread knife. Stroppy old bitch. Nothing I can’t handle. When do you present?’

  ‘Next Wednesday. At three.’

  ‘Excellent. Let me know how it goes.’

  ‘Will do.’

  The following morning and I’m stuck in traffic. My car smells of winter meadows. The speedo is white with black Times New Roman numerals and I’ve been watching the needle as it points at zero for what seems like half an hour. The stereo is on. The seats are tan leather and they creak as I shift my weight.

  We are next to the glass monstrosity of the new shopping centre. Above our heads a bridge acts as an umbilical cord between the womb of the car park and the shopping centre. I can see a flock of feet clattering across it and I giggle a little, thinking of Billy Goat Gruff. Collins is next to me. He has been spitting hyperbole forever.

  ‘I mean. There’s no proposition. There’s no fucking brief. How can we put anything together without a brief? I mean. Come on. She’s supposed to be a marketing director and she’s totally fucking clueless.’

  I look across at him and he’s all smirking smugness.

  ‘I mean, she must know that without a good brief you can’t do fuck all. We may as well be in the sixties.’

  I’ve no idea what he means by this and I don’t think he does either. There is a spot of blood on his white collar.

  ‘We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dream,’ I say to him.

  He nods enthusiastically, thinking me profound. The blood on his collar seems to be spreading. The traffic starts moving again. We pull level with a truck and I realise it belongs to one of our clients. ‘Call now’ it says in a big, crass starburst on the side. I jump the red lights and burst away from it and when I think about the van again later I can’t be sure that the number on it wasn’t mine.

  8.

  Beaker peers at me. His eyes are narrow and they dart about so it takes me a second to realise he is addressing me.

  ‘It’s not right.’

  ‘It’s not,’ I reply.

  ‘It’s not right,’ he says again, this time with a little more force.

  ‘I know. It’s not.’

  This time he leans right into me. His breath smells of mint and whistles down his nose. It reminds me of cocaine and my brain stretches out for it. This is how the white lady works. Even when it’s out of your system and your body has long since forgotten all about it, your brain remembers and reminds you.

  ‘It’s not right.’

  ‘I fucking know. I said it’s not. What else do you want me to say?’

  He sighs and repeats it once more, then spins on his heels, his shoes squeaking as he walks away.

  Since the ponytail incident I’m sure the dosage of the meds has been increased. I’m in a funk. The drugs dull me. I don’t really know what they are. They reduce everything to the static of an un-tuned TV. Like when I was a child and the transmissions stopped with a pop, the image contracting on itself and then for hours there was nothing but th
e dancing of the fuzz. Hypnotic. Empty. They questioned everybody, but no-one knew anything. No-one said anything.

  The ward is an uncomfortable place to be, so I go back to my room. I look at The Zoo. Using only my peripheral vision I consider The Knight, get thinking about him and where he sits.

  Secondary to The Cowboy is The Knight. I suspect he is from the Round Table, but am unsure so wouldn’t presume to name him Gawain or Lancelot or Percival. He is just The Knight. He too is cast from metal, but the painting is a little more slapdash, as if it is done by machine or a less skilled hand than that of The Cowboy. This is one of the reasons that he is second, as well as the lack of a Winchester.

  The Knight has a long sword as his peacemaker and he leans nonchalantly on it as he looks off into the distance, the wind whipping his dark shoulder-length hair up around his face. It is this alertness that makes him The Cowboy’s lieutenant; he is surveying the horizon, protecting The Cowboy’s domain. But I have to wonder whether he is happy with this position, whether that alertness alludes to something more sinister.

  The Knight wears a full suit of armour, has spurs as sharp as razors and a red cloak with a dragon painted on it in gold. He has a scarlet plume on his helmet that curls down the back of it, proud as a rooster. He faces out at the world from behind a shield with a spike in the centre. His armour is broken down into panels – shin pads, knee pads, box over his groin, breastplate, upper arm and lower arm, metal gauntlets. His weak spots are between them. I want to dig at the space behind his knees with my fingernails.

  He is Morte D’Arthur and I think of its author locked in a cell, collating myths. He is greedy empires and attacks on a Holy City. He is about honour and dignity and chivalry, and the contradiction behind killing in the name of God.

  He is the chess piece that moves forward two, left one or forward one, left two or forward one and right two.

  He is about fighting for an ideal, for belief even if that means committing wrong in the process. He is the muscle behind a cause. The horrific violence that only unthinking loyalty can deliver.

  He is a Knight before his title was given to benevolent pop stars and retired football players.

  He is the Templars and the White Knight, but also a perma-tan eighties actor in a black car with a moving red light.

  He looks up at one and down at many, me included.

  9.

  Another day. A Thursday in November of blue ice and low sun that chops your windscreen in two and makes it impossible to drive. I leave the car on a terraced street and cross a road as snow hangs in the air, in my mouth, in my eyelashes.

  A bar. A line of what I think is coke but probably isn’t. Fear is at the edge of everything. I buy a gram of actual chop to clear my head. Just the one to sort me out. But it’s never one, and there’s a bottle of vodka in the middle of the table.

  Walking home, listening to Led Zeppelin on my iPod, as I slip on ice and land on my elbow, half in the road, half out, asking the sky, ‘How many more times?’

  When I get in the house is dark and I stumble over loose shoes in the hall. In the kitchen I fill a glass with tap water and gulp it down, pouring it over my chin and shirt. I drink another. Have to close one eye to judge the distance of the glass to the tap, still can’t stop myself from clanking the rim against the metal.

  The stairs creak. I stumble. See the nightlight under my boy’s door, want to go in and sit with him, to watch him sleep. I don’t.

  She’s turned away from me, but I can tell she’s not asleep.

  I undress, clothes in a pile. The air’s cold. So is the duvet as I climb under it.

  I whisper, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ she replies.

  ‘Meeting ran over.’

  She snorts and turns further away.

  ‘Sally?’ I touch her shoulder, feel her tense, take my hand away.

  I try to sleep but can’t, instead run over things in my mind, over and over. Work and us. Us. Mostly us. I want to roll over, spoon her, press myself against her. It’s just because of the coke I say to myself, just the coke, making you think like this, she’s annoyed because you’re late, that’s all.

  I watch the slice in the curtains change colour.

  I sweat.

  When she gets up to go to work I pretend to be asleep. I listen to her get him ready for school. Imagine her helping with his shoes and his gloves, putting the sandwiches in his Sponge Bob box. Hear their conversation in the kitchen.

  She comes back into the bedroom to get her handbag. As she leaves the room she turns back and looks at me, I snap my eyes shut too late and she notices.

  When she leaves I pad into the kitchen and collect a selection of cutlery. Hold a spare duvet over the window and use the cold knives and spoons to wedge it under the curtain rail. The room is pitch black. Turning my phone off I collapse back into bed and sleep in shallow bursts, dreams filled with faceless figures in autumnal parks.

  The morning of the pitch, a week later, smoking a cigarette in my car. The rain plays a solo on the roof, sobs down the windscreen. Collins taps along on the top of the laptop case.

  ‘Will you fucking stop that?’ I ask.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says.

  I watch my smoke hit the inside of the windscreen and spread out across it. Collins starts tapping again. I lay my hand on top of his. He stops. I leave my hand there for a second, squeeze his fingers and when he looks at me I can see the nerves in his eyes so I smile.

  ‘We’ve got this,’ I say and he nods.

  I take another drag of the cigarette. Paper crackles. Opening the door I let it drop onto the wet tarmac where it fizzes and dies.

  ‘Okay.’ I take a packet of Extra Strong mints from the glove compartment, put two in my mouth and pass them to Collins.

  I step out into the rain, closing the door with my knee. Water runs down my face, drips from the end of my nose, where I catch it with my tongue and taste metal. We cross the car park, aquaplaning. Through the automatic revolving doors, Collins missing the gap, stepping into the next, his face is stretched by the glass, ugly, contorted, then we are in the foyer, met by a wall of warmth, stifling, and for a second I gasp for air, loosen my scarf, gulp. Then we’re through it, at a huge curved desk, the mahogany cold on palms and I’m looking into the smiling face and cold eyes of a beautiful girl who is saying ‘Can I help you?’

  I tell her my name, then Collins’ and she gesticulates at a visitors’ book. I sign us in, with a signature that doesn’t look like mine. She’s on the phone, saying my name, and then she’s smiling at me again, asking me to take a seat, pointing at a sofa.

  We sit. And wait.

  Music in the air.

  Smell of perfume.

  Collins’ breathing.

  Through this I struggle to identify the music. No vocals, just guitar and I can’t place it.

  A man comes in, leans over the desk, kisses the receptionist on the cheek, only his toes touching the floor. They laugh and my mind is full of Sally.

  Then another man is standing in front of me.

  ‘Berkshire,’ he says and holds out his hand. I shake it and as we follow him I catch a glimpse of my game face in the window of an office and feel a surge of confidence.

  10.

  Delicate hands against a porcelain face. Round tears in black eyes that dart about, but are cloudy and half blind under cataracts of medication. Beneath the blur and the weeping and the panicked search for words is a smudge of intelligence and with it a warmth, the first I’ve seen in here. It makes me want to listen to her. I turn my chair from the TV, try to drown out the chunter of Beard.

  ‘It’s about dignity,’ she’s saying.

  I reach back, search for the object of her sentence. But I’m foggy too and can’t find it.

  ‘Dignity,’ she says again.

  She’s talking to an old man. He’s nodding. I move my chair closer to them. She smiles at me, a gap between her teeth. I mouth ‘Hi’.

  Drugged boy meets drug
ged girl.

  Hear the music in the background of the advert, feel the words scrolling under my chin and wonder what I’m selling. Hope it’s something good.

  She’s staring at me.

  ‘Beth,’ she says and from her voice I know it is hand cream or shampoo or perfume.

  ‘James,’ I say and hold out a weak hand. She takes it, her fingers like toys amongst mine, her skin cool and soft.

  As she takes her hand back the sleeve of her hoodie rides up over the white of a bandage. Her body folds in on itself. I watch her shrivel. I raise my left hand and when she sees the bandage over my thumb and around my palm she unwinds, fills her body again, says ‘Snap’ and gifts me a wan smile.

  I’m unsure what to say, so we fall silent. Just the chatter of the TV, where Jeremy Kyle is launching into somebody, saying, ‘You’ve got to take responsibility for yourself, you’ve got a child now, you can’t be out there running around with your boys, you’ve got to be a man, you’ve made a life and now you’re responsible for it, don’t smirk, look at you sitting there smirking, it’s not funny, my friend, this isn’t a joke, let me make something very clear for you, you can’t . . .’ and then an orderly is speaking quietly to Beth and leading her away. As she passes me I hold my breath and she whispers something that sounds like ‘damaged’.

  I look about the day room. Mark is sitting in an armchair, a magazine on his lap. I walk over, lift the cover of the magazine, try not to notice his flinch and ask, ‘What you reading?’ He doesn’t reply. It’s a copy of Hello magazine with the Beckhams on the cover. At least three years old.

  ‘Not a lot to be learned from that, mate,’ I say.

  He shrugs.

  I pat my pockets for cigarettes, find them empty, so return to my room. I pause at the door and count to ten. Nothing, so I push the door open and tense in readiness. Light streams into the room. The window is open and it smells cold and fresh and safe. I pull the window shut and as I do my elbow catches The Pirate and sends him tumbling from the shelf, bouncing off the radiator and skidding across the floor.