The Zoo Read online

  Turn to face nothing. Just the day room. No-one is looking at me. Asian Radio Lady is turning the volume of the TV up and down, so the words are cut in half and the speech is stuttered. Beard and Beaker are in the armchairs. Mark is singing quietly to himself in the kitchen.

  I blink into the room.

  I expected maelstrom and instead I see domestication.

  I edge my way back to the corridor. Pluck up the courage and poke my head around the corner of the door, look left and right. An orderly is sweeping up, iPod headphones in, mouth pursed in a silent whistle. At the desk at the front a nurse is speaking on the phone. I look at the door to my room and in my peripheral catch a glimpse of movement. I freeze. Looking back into the day room I see Beth’s scared face through the glass. Then there’s the sound of something smashing in my room. The orderly doesn’t look up from his sweeping and his musical earplugs. Swallowing heavily I take a step towards my room. Another. Look at the shake in my hands. Clench my fists tight. Then I’m at the door. My mouth is dry, fear is whispering in my ears, don’t do it, don’t do it, go and sit with Mark, watch TV, have a cigarette outside, don’t go in. Don’t go in.

  I step into the doorway. Everything is still. There’s no one in here. I take another step into the room. Nothing happens. Nothing at all. I laugh to myself , laugh at the situation. What did I think was going to happen? My shoulders relax, hands unclench. I’m in the middle of the room now. I look at The Zoo. Something is wrong with it, something not right, something is out of place. I can’t quite figure it out. My head is muddled, confused, heavy. I step closer. The door slams behind me. I jump, spin round and, as I do, something moves. So quickly it’s just a blur, a dark shape. I can’t get out of the way and it hits me hard in the face. I can’t feel any point of contact, not a fist, not even solid, but something with weight and matter and pain. My vision blurs and I taste blood in my mouth. My legs go from beneath me and I hit the floor. Everything spins, my vision turns orange, then white. The blur of movement goes past me. I pass out.

  As soon as I wake I know something is wrong. Very wrong. I am propped up against the bed. My neck is stiff. I stare at my hands for a long time. The skin is white, veins tracing patterns beneath it. Dirt is packed under the fingernails. The nail of my index finger has been bent back, a blue-black mark across the middle of it, crusted with blood. My throat is dry and sore. I try to speak my name, but it barely comes out. I touch my head and flinch. Probe my sore eye socket.

  I can feel the eyes of The Zoo on me. I try to stand but my legs won’t hold me, so I move sideways across the room like a crab, the floor clinging to me. I’m lower than ground level, my legs have gone. It takes me decades to reach The Zoo. With one eye closed I count The Figurines and The Animals with an outstretched finger. They’re all there.

  But there is a gap.

  On the second level there is a gap. One of them is missing. Yet they are all there. A gap where there wasn’t one. A space where there shouldn’t be. What is it? What is missing? I reach back and find nothing.

  I collapse back onto the cold floor. Creeping, creeping cold against my skin. Then I pass out again.

  I wake in my bed. It’s night. For a while I listen to the sound of the sleeping world. The tick and tock of the sleeping ward. I run fingers over my face and find nothing, no pain, no bruise. Nothing. A slight tenderness to my skin, but aside from that – nothing.

  Lights from a passing car sidle across the ceiling, drawing my eyes with them. I can hear the rumble of the heating. Music from somewhere, it sounds like ‘je ne regrette rien’, warbling and indistinct. I am cocooned by my blanket, wrapped tight in it, a chrysalis. I free my feet and clench my toes against the cold. I try to go back to sleep, but it is elusive and I lie shivering, alternating between staring at the inside of my eyelids and the ceiling. I grow restless and irritable.

  Getting out of bed I wrap the blanket around my shoulders and go out into the corridor. The world is bathed in a blue light. It shimmers like water. The reflections of a swimming pool against the walls. My feet stick to the floor and the sound of my skin peeling off the floor tiles as I walk is loud in the ward. Afraid someone will hear, I slow myself to a creep. I don’t know where I am going, only that I can’t stay in bed.

  The day room is still. There are Snakes and Ladders spread out over the table, left there against the rules. The door to outside is locked. I press my cheek against it, watch my breath fog the glass, and trace a smiley face in it. For a while I sit in the armchair. I’m unsure of how long I stay there, but when I stand I have a memory of shapes and colours, of movement, but nothing distinct, everything shaded with the pallor of a dream, narcotic and distant. I find myself in the corridor again, making my way along it. I realise the destination as a sudden burst of panic and fear, but can’t stop my progress.

  I stop at the door to his room. Wonder where the night porters are. Why I am on my own here. Someone should stop this surely? Someone should be here to see this. To stop this happening.

  I push the door open.

  Despite not being able to see anymore, he recognises movement in the room, shifts his weight up and turns his blind head towards me. I pad across to him and sit on the edge of the bed. I push him back into the bed with a palm on his chest, whispering ‘sssssssssssssshh’. There is a sound from under the briefcase. I press my ear against the leather, try to hear what he is saying. The leather holds his muffled words captive. He tries to kick out, but his limbs are bound to the bed. I study the knots, sheets wrapped into cord and knotted tight. Around them his skin is red raw and blood crusts the sheets. The briefcase is over his face. Over his head. The ripped handles are securing it around his neck. His naked body is an ugly mass of blue/purple bruises. The weapon is a sock full of soap, pulled over his penis like a balaclava.

  I put my hand over my mouth to hold the noise in, not sure if it is a laugh or a gag or a noise of revulsion. Somehow I keep it in, shoulders shaking with the effort. When it subsides I kneel down on the floor. The contents of his briefcase are arranged as a cityscape, tower blocks of personal items, the landscape of the life he was trying to keep private.

  Books, classics, piled so the bands of colours match perfectly: The Picture of Dorian Grey; Wuthering Heights; The Scarlet Letter. I allow my finger to trace their spines. They feel waxy and unreal.

  Three photo albums. I hesitate, then open the first onto family holidays – kites and picnics and laughing on a beach. I drop it like it burns.

  A birthday card. When I open it, it plays Happy Birthday. I allow the first bar of warbling, wavering notes to play before snapping it shut.

  A comb, blond hairs woven around its teeth.

  A stuffed rabbit. One eye missing, an ear falling over the other.

  These things, these totems, they were his life. I understand why he held them tight. They are personal, deeply personal and I am trespassing. I feel dirty and invasive and ashamed.

  I leave him there. Briefcase over his face. Limbs stretching against their bindings.

  I leave him them and return to my room, where I vomit into the toilet. I don’t flush the chain, afraid of the noise.

  Sleep still hides from me. So I think of The Zoo.

  24.

  The next of The Plastics is The Soldier. The order goes: The Cowboy, The Knight, The Pirate, then The Soldier.

  Logic would dictate that The Soldier should be nearer to the top than this, and he may well have been above The Pirate were it not for his defect.

  He is a cripple. The veteran on the street. A cardboard sign between his legs. He is the guilt in all of us over the horrors of war in a foreign land. The reality of death and maiming we all want to hide from. He brings it all home and we avoid his eye. Study our phone and hurry on. He is the chink of coin in a paper coffee cup. He is the TV news reeling out casualty figures like football scores. He is divided opinion.

  He is moulded out of green plastic, an American Marine from the Second World War, and the mould has left a rid
ge of plastic that runs along the centre of his fried-egg-shaped base. The ridge is too small to gnaw away with my teeth, though I have tried, scraping at it, the sharp plastic scratching at my gums. I worried away at it, trying my eyeteeth, forcing it into the side of my mouth to test it against my molars. In the end, which could have been ten minutes or four hours or three years later, I gave up and picked at it with my fingernails, discovering at the same time that he felt very satisfying in my hand, the end of his rifle pricking the inside of my thumb – an inoculation against the hopelessness of the chewing.

  He doesn’t stand, he can’t stand, he leans and rocks on his ridge like a weeble and for this reason, despite the sensory pleasure I derive from him, he is lower in the ranking than you would immediately think he should be.

  He is the following of orders. The debasement of having no choice combined with the masculine ideal of killing for a cause. He is brute force and ignorance. He is the grunt.

  He is the taker of lands and the defender of lands.

  The Soldier makes up the last of The Figurines; beneath him are only the Animals, which make up the main part of The Zoo. He is the last that understands; beneath him are those that can only listen and obey.

  In the morning Newbie is gone. When I ask Mark where he is, he looks at me blankly. I check Newbie’s room. The bed is made, the blinds up. The window is slightly open, shifting the plastic of the blind against its frame with a rhythmic slap.

  At dinner I sit next to Beth. Her hands shake as she eats. She takes tiny mouthfuls, barely a spoonful each time, then leaves half her meal.

  I push my plate away. I can’t face it. She asks me if I want a cigarette. I say yes and numbly follow her outside. The cold hurts the bones in my hands as I draw the smoke into my lungs.

  I ask her how she came to be here. I immediately want to withdraw the question. She examines me. Momentarily I think she is going to slap me: her hand is raised, her palm flat, then she rubs it against her face.

  ‘How does anyone end up here?’ she says, ‘how did you?’

  She waits for me to answer, but I don’t, so she starts talking.

  ‘I was an infant teacher. It’s a great age. They’re just starting to be people, but too young to have been affected by the world. They’re beginning to understand things, there’s no cynicism there yet though, just an intrigue. I tried teaching older kids and found it heartbreaking to see that gone. They change so dramatically, so quickly nowadays.’

  ‘Hasn’t it always been that way?’ I ask.

  ‘I know I’m sounding nostalgic. Think back to when we were kids though. Think about what we did and hat we had access to, then think about today.’

  ‘I’ve got a son.’

  ‘You must know what I’m talking about then? How do you keep it all away from him?’

  ‘I can’t keep him away from anything from in here.’

  ‘Of course. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to suggest anything. Where is he now?’

  ‘His mother.’

  ‘Are you still together?’

  I consider answering her properly and telling her everything.

  ‘Sorry, that’s really personal,’ she says, ‘Don’t answer if it makes you feel uncomfortable’

  ‘No. It’s okay. We’re not. Weren’t, even before this,’ I gesture to the building with my head. ‘She’d taken him away from me before I came here.’

  She rests her hand on the top of mine where it lies on the bench. Her fingers are minute against mine. Minute and pale. Doll’s hands. I can feel the pulse in her thumb. She makes no attempt to move it away. I stroke her little finger with my remaining thumb. Neither of us looks at each other.

  ‘I became very depressed,’ she says. ‘I watched them leave me and go into the main school. Watched these beautiful, innocent little children turn into something else entirely and it hurt me much more than it should have, to be honest. I struggled to deal with it.’

  ‘Do you mind talking about this?’

  ‘No. It helps.’

  She closes her eyes.

  ‘Each year I felt they needed me more and more. And each year without fail I could help them less. I don’t want to sound like a cliché, but I spent less and less time teaching.’

  ‘My wife. My ex-wife is a teacher.’

  ‘You know then. You know what it’s like. There’s this machine behind us all. A big, clumsy juggernaut of a machine. Don’t get me wrong; education has always been something of a production line. But the end product is less important now. It’s as if it’s the actual production that matters now. It doesn’t matter now what comes out the other end as long as we tick all the right boxes on the way through.’

  Her eyes are still pressed shut, but tears are rolling down her cheeks, dragging mascara with them. I let her cry, dabbing at her swollen cheeks with the sleeve of my jumper. Still she doesn’t make a sound. When she eventually begins to talk again her voice is staccato with concealed sobs. As she talks I become aware that she’s never spoken about this at length before. I get the impression this is a long rehearsed internal monologue, which has never been shared. I can see it in her body, the way it unfurls, her shoulders becoming looser. I realise I am doing something good by listening, by letting her simply speak. I don’t interrupt her or interject at all. I put my arm around her shoulder and she buries her face in my neck so I have to strain to catch the words. Her tears are hot against my skin.

  ‘The irony is,’ she says, ‘as the council take more and demand more, there is less opportunity to give to the people you actually want to be giving to. I always knew who I was and what I was doing, or at least what I wanted to do, but this was steadily being eroded and I became little more than a bureaucrat. I was worried the kids could sense it in me. They’re like animals in that respect, children. They sense weakness. You must have experienced it as a child, a supply teacher coming in and being totally destroyed by the class. As soon as I acknowledged the change I think it became inevitable that I would fail. I thought of nothing else. I lost all my faith in myself, and what I was doing. Of course when it happened it was in front of a class. It’s my own fault. I tried to fight it. You can never beat the system. I should have realised my hands were tied and tried to make the best of it, but I couldn’t because I cared too much.’

  She pauses. Pulls herself from my grip, fingers fumbling for another cigarette. I light it for her.

  ‘If you try and fight anything of that size, with that much momentum, you are bound to lose. And I became more and more depressed. Found it harder and harder to get up, to go to work. It’s pretty standard from there on in. Everything just collapsed and here I am.’

  We stay outside for another half an hour or so. The air gets noticeably colder. Beth is shivering. As we get up to go in she whispers ‘thanks’, and I tell her she is welcome and mean it.

  25.

  The first day of filming. Ben Jones is there from the bank. Baxter, myself, Hilary and Jessica are seated on uncomfortable plastic folding chairs behind the camera crew, talking in hushed voices. I wonder why Hilary is there, showing off, clinging on, trying to be involved. It irritates me. Jessica is wearing a grey skirt suit, dark tights on impossibly shapely legs. I keep looking at them as her skirt rides up. I’m sure she sees and makes no attempt to pull it down.

  In front of the camera is a mock-up of a family kitchen. From where I’m sitting I can see the plywood backing to everything. The orange make-up of the actors under the lights, the plastic whiteness of their teeth and perfect hair.

  Ben puts his hands on the back of my chair, leans over my shoulder and says, ‘I almost believe it myself’.

  ‘Let’s hope so eh?’ I reply.

  He claps me on the shoulder and goes and stands next to the director, who shouts ‘action’ and the proxy of daily life begins in front of us again.

  They repeat their movements, aim at crosses on the floor, say their lines, the director calls ‘cut’, they do it all again, like mechanical toys, actions by rote, perfect
and the same every time. I look at the darkness behind the dome made by the studio lights and I can’t see the ceiling, can’t see the back wall, just black extending back and back and back, my eyes un-focus, a softness around the edge of things, it all falling away from me, and the girl in the set is Sally and the boy is Harry and the man is me and as they get smaller and further away I reach out for them and . . .

  ‘I need to get a drink and some fresh air,’ I hiss at Hilary.

  ‘I’ll join you,’ he says and the others stand and come with us.

  We’re in the canteen drinking cheap coffee. The place is nearly empty. My phone vibrates an email into my pocket. As I reach in to read it Ben interrupts me.

  ‘So,’ he says, reaching across me for the sugar, ‘talk me through the concept again. I’ve got to report back on this tomorrow. Mr Berkshire wants a full debrief.’

  ‘Didn’t they tell you? This has all been signed off, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes of course, but I haven’t seen anything other than the original documents you showed us.’

  ‘Okay,‘ I say. My coffee is cold. I wave at Baxter and point at my cup. He nods and leaves the table, ‘it’s about putting the public’s mind at ease. We’re writing you a whole new ethos. It’s about not just knowing where your money is, but what it is doing, so you can get on with your life without worrying. We’re playing on the guilt that people have that makes them have a load of direct debits for charities every month and the whole transparency thing. We’re filming the life without worrying bit today.’

  ‘Gotcha,’ he says and I realise how young he is.

  Once the shoot is over we go for dinner at a nearby chain restaurant to eat badly cooked steaks and drink house wine. Halfway through the meal I remember the email. It reads ‘I hope you’re proud of yourself’. It appears to have come from my own email address. Confused, I stare at it, phone in one hand, glass of wine in the other. I must stay frozen for a long time because Hilary asks me if I’m okay. I tell him I am and go to the bar to order another bottle of wine, but I am shaken and can’t lose the feeling there is someone behind me. Back at the table I keep checking the phone. It stays blank, flashes the time back at me, which creeps inexorably to the early hours as the wine bottles multiply around us. Hilary is demanding karaoke, the waiter is trying to tell him they don’t have it, have never had it and Hilary is accusing him of lying. Then I’m at the bar with the bill and Hilary is nowhere to be seen so I pay it and shovel mints into my mouth, filling my cheeks like a hamster and then we’re moving to a bar nearby and Hilary is back, swaying as he walks, leaning on me, muttering about having no-one to go home to and I check my phone again, think about calling Sally, telling her where I am, opt instead for an easy text message: ‘Shoot just finished having dinner won’t be late,’ and I know it’s a cheap, cheap lie, I know she knows it and my face burns red.