Night of the Animals (7 page)

Baj said, snorting a bit, “All this—it hasn't seemed to affect
you
.”

“No,” the man said bitterly. “I just hoods 'em, and bury 'em in pleasure. I don't like it, but it's me job, innit?” He squinted at Baj. “You poorly, man?”

“Just a little. Do they . . . ever get better?”

“Ha!” said the orderly. Then he leaned in, confidentially. There was a stench of eel and vinegar on his breath. “This is a place of where the spirit thrives. And even the ghosts live well.” The man greasily chortled for a moment, then slapped Baj's shoulder.

“Right, mate,” said Baj.

AS BAJ LEFT ST. CLEMENTS,
the injustice of his dismissal from research hit him anew. When he passed through the gate, he turned around to see the old NHS sign bolted to a brick pillar. He glanced around to make sure no one was watching. If he wasn't careful, he'd end up struck off the medical register—or much worse, perhaps in St. Clements himself, guffawing at nothing, and planted beneath a Nexar hood.

He pulled out his old-fashioned fountain pen and wrote on the sign: “Fuck Harry.” He coughed, and a few pink flecks of faintly bloody spittle landed on the sign. Then he walked away, trying not to look rushed, until breaking into a trot.

“It's going . . . to get worse . . . and then . . . it's going to get better,” he said to himself, jogging along, gasping for air in gulps.

THE NEXT TIME
Cuthbert came to see him, the doctor observed that, as Cuthbert saw it, the animals were vying for control over him, and the animals wanted out of their cages. He was in full, Flōt-induced hallucinosis. Walking into the consult room, he showed Ingall's Sign markedly, taking long strides and leaning forward excessively.

“I've no say in matters anymore, doc,” he said.

“If you don't stop the Flōt,” he told Cuthbert, “it is indeed over. And you can't go around saying you hear animals anymore, my friend. You can't.”

Cuthbert had looked down at the Afshar rug with its paisley patterns. “The Flōt is one thing,” he said, “but the animals, with all due respect, doctor, I could never just tell them to hush up. It's not just withdrawal. Even when I drink the Flōt, the voices come on.”

“That's not a good symptom, Cuthbert. It's called hallucinosis. It will only grow worse if you don't stop.”

“But their message is for everyone—for me, for you, for England, for the world. There might just be a little white pony what knows
yow,
Baj.”

With that, Baj at long last lost his patience. All his professional restraint seemed to fly off like a flock of irritable starlings rousted from a tremendous, withering tree.

“Cuthbert! For fuck's sake!” he bellowed. “Can't you bloody see, you fool? It's the Flōt. The Flōt! It's standard first-Flōt-withdrawal syndrome. There are no fucking animals. There are no voices. You are delusional, my friend. It's Flōt withdrawal.”

The doctor was almost weeping now, standing up from his seat, and the spectacle appalled Cuthbert, who lurched up and backed away, toward the door of the office, doddering on his old legs, his dry lips moving but nothing coming out.

“No. Stay!” cried Baj as Cuthbert opened the door. “You've got to listen to me. I don't want to lose you, my friend. The Red
Watch will be after you, you know? They'll beat the bloody fuck out of you and drag you half-dead before an EquiPoise P-Lev, and it's St. Clements after that. Please, Cuthbert. Please. Let's try the hospital—just one last time! Just one—”

But before he could finish the phrase, Cuthbert was gone.

THUS IT CAME TO PASS THAT, ON THE LAST DAY OF
April of 2052, as an enormous comet began to smear streaks of light above the Northern Hemisphere, the aged Cuthbert found himself stuck in the zoo's boundary foliage beside a floaty green blob of trouble.

For the six previous months, Baj had tried to protect him from the Watch and from EquiPoise, but the doctor had been no match for Cuthbert's drug addiction (nor for talking otters), and now Cuthbert had a case of Flōt withdrawal shakes in his muscles, a bizarre plan in his head, and an arboreal phantasm beside him. He seemed, to all appearances, beyond human aid.

The yew creature, a kind of botanical steam, was soaking into his very skin, and Cuthbert felt himself breathing in sweet fogs tessellated with long green leaves. There was still fear, but the sense of shock had passed. His pulse puttered in his ears. There was a minted, pennyroyal scent and a whiff of roses, and a wildness and warmth, like an unexpected kiss from a dodgy stranger. He'd encountered, over the years, many figments in the tumbling-down
experience of Flōt withdrawal, but none that felt so intimate or so peculiar.

The closeness came with strange timing. The Red Watch was now quite actively looking for him. In the last weeks, Cuthbert had more or less abandoned his IB flat to avoid detention and gone back to his old habits of sleeping rough, panhandling, and thievery. His dole payments, of course, had stopped, as had his meetings with Baj, whose perceptions of the old man's perils had been, after all, quite accurate. Cuthbert had rarely felt so vulnerable and lonely.

But not alone. As the yew tree covered him with its sparkling emerald plasmas, Cuthbert sensed that the being (him, her, it?) knew him deeply—too deeply. He wanted to crawl away, into his grotto, but his sore limbs wouldn't budge from their integuments of age and exhaustion.

“Wha . . . what do you want?” Cuthbert asked it, his teeth a'chatter. “You want me to get caught? It ain't even dark yet, is it?” His heart began palpitating oddly—flipping over, trotting, bursting into double beats. It felt like a broken propeller in his chest. His lips and hands went numb. If he could just reach his grotto, he thought, he would get his Flōt, and all would be OK.

“You do not need to do this, Cuthbert,” the being said, in a nearly melodious whistle, a sound like the breeze being inhaled by all the trees around him through mouths the size of flute holes. “You will never be the same if you do.”

“Not topple the zoo, you mean? Bloody no way,” Cuthbert slurred. “Oi
won't
be packing it in now. Oi'm here for the beasts. They're what's called me. And my brother.”

Cuthbert squinted. He made out a kind of mouth, opening and closing in the vernal vapor, blowing lunar moths from lips as tender as a small boy's. Is this me, he wondered, from half a century ago? Was it Drystan? One of the green moths fluttered
above him, then flashed into a little pentecostal flame over his head.

“
Gagoga,
” he said. “
Gagoga
.” He tried to touch the flame's fern-colored cloves, but they stung his hand. He jerked it away. His heart suddenly galloped a few times and settled into its normal, pulpy
hwoot-dub hwoot-dub
. The haze was beginning to thin, and the simple, pinnately veined leaves of the hedge itself were reemerging. It was nearly dark.

“Drystan?” he asked.

“No,” said the creature. “But he is part of me, as are you, and you are blessed, Cuthbert. Before this night is over, you will see him. But there is great danger now . . .”

The old man's arms were beginning to shake in mild fits. He was sweating badly, and his aged Adidas weather-buffer made it worse.

“Are you . . . an
animal
, at all?” he asked. He felt starved for air. “Is you the one that's called me here?”

There was no reply, yet the breezes he'd felt before suddenly seemed to puff out from everything around him in a plangent
gaaaaaagooooooogaaaaaaa!
The wisps of minty green vapors grew as thin as hair. When he looked for the astonishing yew tree in his midst, he saw nothing but the usual hackberry leaves.

The yew was gone.

“Jesus,” he said. “Jesus fuck.”

Something was jabbing his kidney now, and it wasn't the finger of common sense. It was the broken spoke of a hackberry shrub, of which there were thousands in and around the zoo.

“Shittin 'ell,” he whispered. “
That
one hurts.” His heart started a new round of scary, trilling beats. The Flōt half-life was only a few hours, and the withdrawal for someone as old and long-addicted as Cuthbert could be lethal.

“This is it,” he said, panting. “This is how I go winkers.” Dark
ness suddenly encroached on his peripheral vision. He felt broad, crushing chest pain, a python coiling around his chest, and the classic proprioceptive sensation of falling, literally, down from on high.

If he didn't get Flōt, he was going to die, and he could not allow that.

ROLLING TO THE
side a bit, still held up by the hazel branches and a few tough hackberry boughs, Cuthbert put his hands over his eyes and bulldozered deeper yet, shoulder first. All at once, a thick mat of branches that had been impeding him came apart, and he crashed a few paces farther in. He was just a foot or two now from his grotto, but knackered. He turned again and lay with his back against a new layer of branches, allowing all his weight to be supported. He was hidden now, at rest, gazing again back out into the park. His legs ached and felt stunted—another symptom of Flōt withdrawal—and he was banged up a bit, but he felt a little better, for the moment.

I
will
stay off the Flōt, he said to himself halfheartedly, even if it kills me. But Cuthbert's body screamed for it—that purple orb of relief, concealed somewhere in sedge-grass in his grotto. Cheap enchantment. He could nearly taste its smooth, oak-charred flavor of rum and licorice, and the secret ingredient that gave it all a peppery edge: a set of alkaloids, derived from the white larvae of England's leaf-miner moth.

“Canna I have one last moment of my life without spiring?” he asked aloud. “If I'm a dead man, let me die sober with my eyes upon Drystan and animals and lovely trees that smudge
^*
my skin.”

He shook his head. “No, I won't touch it!” he cried.

Oh but yes, he thought, I bloody must. It will calm matters.
Even as he fidgeted there, caught in the hedge and vacillating about Flōt, he could hear the zoo's animals again, pulling him into their own more unruly set of traps. And while he still didn't know what they meant, he felt compelled, once again, to say aloud, in a voice as tremulous as dreams written on clouds, “
Gagoga
.”

He closed his eyes. He burrowed now into this last, densest part of the shrubbery, grabbing at and deflecting branches like a blind man under attack by hornets. He ducked down to the right and felt the blunt, hard top of his liver nosing up inside him like a shark. He jerked back in agony.

“Fuck me,” he said. Need to keep my back straight, he thought. He knelt down and sunk his fingers into the loose, mulchy loam.

Just then, not unexpectedly, a very familiar voice snarled at him.

“Mr. Handley!”

“No, I don't want to talk,” muttered Cuthbert. “You canna see I'm bloody busy?”

It was one of the zoo's Asiatic lions, an old male, Arfur, from whom Cuthbert had been hearing quite regularly that week. Of all the zoo's denizens, the lions were without question the most articulate and provocative, especially in the last few days. They growled at Cuthbert in tones simultaneously bellicose and hard-done-by, arguing impatiently for justice, and, naturally, for release from their cages.

“You really do need to free us first,” rasped Arfur. “Failing in that would be . . . well, it would be
immoral
.”

“Rubbish.”

“That old French writer Camus, you know he thought a man without ethics was a wild animal, ‘loosed upon the world'? And if you don't let us out, you stand convicted of the gravest indifference, old Cuddy.”

“But I'm not indifferent,” he said. “Look at me!”

These lions could cleverly walk a line between sounding con
fident and subtly mistreated at the same time, thought Cuthbert. Arfur made him think back to long ago, to the pushy assurance of the once-fresh “New Labour” party chap, Tony Blair, but a version of him like the statue he'd seen during his first zoo visit—elderly, wizened, skin burnished like a body from a peat bog.

“Taking Britain forward is really the only choice, and lions simply
must
lead the way!” Arfur said to Cuthbert, groaning slightly, and goading, goading, goading.
Panthera leo
had given more to Britons than any other species, Arfur claimed, and “never once” complained or demanded reward.

Cuthbert countered: “Well, what . . . what about, say, England's field voles? They're far more common than you, these days. They're millions and millions of souls. And they're not mithering at me like dying ducks in a thunderstorm—no, not that lot. The voles 'ave no, like,
program
as you lot've got.”

Arfur retorted: “You make our point, actually, Cuddy. You can't be tiny and common and very well stay regal, can you? The English aristocracy
do
things—obstinately. A field vole sounds like something from Siberia.” But to Cuthbert, Arfur seemed less obstinate than pigheaded.

A few nights before, Cuthbert had admitted to the lions that he feared them. The aggrieved tone of their thoughts had unsettled him. Gravel-voiced and glottal, they were among the first creatures (perhaps
because
Cuthbert feared them most) to send messages to him, no matter where he went in London, no matter the time. They seemed to be able to reach out and finger him.

“You're really not much of a being, are you?” Arfur once observed. “We could master a whole country of Cuddies.”

Cuthbert didn't like that. “You canna even master your cage. I'm the free one, aren't I?”

“Ha!” said Arfur. “Thus speaks the Solunaut. You wait. You haven't even visited us, have you? Let us out first, Cuthbert.”

“I was preoccupied. There were otters . . . I . . . I needed to see.”

“Nonetheless, we require immediate release, my friend. Otters! Who cares about otters?”

Cuthbert sighed. “I do.”

“But mark my words, we lions are going places—you'll see.” Arfur added, “I wouldn't be terribly surprised if we”—he cleared his mucky voice—“if we reclaim Alexandria someday.” Arfur coughed, clearing his throat with a rumbling grunt. “Soon. And we're not really in a cage, are we? Just
undo
our enclosure. It's more a kind of moated theater of sorts.”

“It's still a cage. And you're in one because you're dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” Arfur whined. “We're the last lions in the last zoo on earth.”

As bedraggled and amusingly haughty as Arfur could sound, lions nonetheless, as a group, still terrified Cuthbert. In childhood, he would see David Attenborough on the telly, explaining how lions used group-hunting tactics. He still recalled one program in which a lioness plunged its entire head into the open skull of an elephant. When it pulled out, Cuthbert recalled, it bore the wet-haired, sated look of a swimmer who'd just swum a dozen laps.

“You're bloody war beasts,” Cuthbert said to Arfur at one point. “You're walking terror. I think it's best to let the jackals out first.”

“No . . . first!” Arfur spat. “We've kept this island safe. We're ‘lionhearted,'” he added with a soupçon of mockery. “Don't blame us for defending national interests.”

For a moment, Cuthbert pictured his father, swilling lager in the old sitting room, raising his battered Spode mug from the queen's coronation, and belting out the words
never never never never shall be slaves
as the Proms blared on television. So much for lionhearted.

Still, Cuthbert felt a serious sympathy for the lions. Their images still ennobled pound coins, chocolate bars, passports, treacle
tins. He himself knew every detail of the three Plantagenet lions
passant
on England's football jersey. Then there were Landseer's pigeon-shite-speckled quartet of bronze males at Trafalgar Square, supporting Great Britain's public imperial phallus. A thousand drainage-spigots shot through lion mouths on churches. Countless misericords, crests, hallmarks on wedding bands—the country was overrun by an animal which had not been native to its soil since the Pleistocene. Dar es Salaam, Johannesburg, and even Tehran, one might argue, held legitimate claims on the image. Rome could offer a certain logic for leophilia, perhaps.
But London?
Since Henry Plantagenet had housed his lions in Tower Menagerie, in 1235, the lions had lent England muscle it could not find in itself, at least not until the massive remilitarization under Harry9. And in the country's last zoological project, its lions lived in a cramped, bewildering terrace covered in dirt. The case for change was strong.

“In one way or another, we have been the clawed scepter of all your kings and queens, and surely, with the great King Henry, our time has come.”

“Oi'm mulling it,” Cuthbert had told them. “If it's good for the king and country, and all that. You do sound like you've been . . . in the wars,” he said, echoing his doctor, whose ministrations seemed so far away now. It was all he knew to say. The lions just seemed too large a problem to deal with, for now.

“Where would you go, if I was, somehow, to let you lot out?”

“We'll
go
to war for you,” Arfur said. “Against the republicans, against the religious fanatics, against fallen demons from the sky. We'll fight in the streets, in the hills, in the fields. We'll never surrender.”