Night of the Animals(107)

“Listen,” Atwell was saying. “I’ll drive you home.” Her voice sounded a bit hoarse, and she was chewing something, a lozenge perhaps, in an irritated, rapid manner. “Ma’am, I’m ready to spit tacks, honestly. I’m not being assigned to any of the Bronze teams either, it turns out. It’s a real slap in the face. I know what’s happened with you is so unfair, but, honestly, this was also going to be my big chance. I’ve not once worked a major incident.” She sighed, said, “God damn it.”

“I’m sorry, Constable.” Astrid looked down. “You are as fine a PC as I’ve ever seen. I don’t want to embarrass you now.”

“Aww, thanks, ma’am,” said Atwell. They were quiet for a few seconds. “What should we do? This is just daft.”

The commotion—solarcopters, spotlights, emergency gliders, fotolivers, and the cacophony of the poor animals—had reached such a frenzy, Astrid could barely hear herself think. But when the conviction to do what she did next hit her, she didn’t hesitate.

“I’m going in, Jasmine. This man, this Cuthbert, I need to see him.”

“In? That’s insane. No. You are not going in, ma’am. It’s not worth losing your career over, is it? Astrid? And there are wild animals about, aren’t there?”

“I need to see him.” She gave a forced little chuckle, but she couldn’t sustain a smile. She felt scared. “I think he may be . . . in a way . . . related to me.”

Atwell said, “Oh, dear. You’re off the deep end, you are. Astrid. Do not go in there.”

Astrid looked away from her colleague. She said, in a strained, shuddering voice: “My whole life. As a . . . child . . . and a teenager . . . and then an adult, you understand? From the time I was a little kid. Until now, see? I’ve felt bloody alone in one thing or another, almost always alone. I’ve had it. I’ve had it! I don’t care if what I’m looking for isn’t there or not. He’s come back for me—someone has.”

“Who?”

“That’s what I’m saying. I don’t know. It’s Mr. Handley, perhaps? Or it’s me? But I feel there’s someone in me who’s got to come see him—and to help him. It doesn’t make sense. And the timing’s bad, isn’t it?”

She turned toward the zoo fence and began scaling it. “Don’t stop me,” she said.

“No!” shouted Atwell. “Astrid! Don’t!”

She was over the barrier in seconds. At that very moment, when her feet touched zoo-soil, Astrid felt herself beginning to awaken to a world half-created. It had been the most frenziedly un-Astrid thing she’d done in her life. For her to enter the zoo this way—it was a step off a cliff. And she hadn’t thought it through, at least not like a human being. She thought of her heavy Encyclopedia of Mammals tome back home on her bed, and its chapter called “The Wild Mind”—animals did think, it claimed, but it wasn’t like Winnie-the-Pooh, and it wasn’t like the shark in Jaws, and it wasn’t what the white-haired Brian Cox said on Wonders of Life. It was deeper and stranger, and yet it was not amoral.

The prospect of a drink of Flōt now revolted her. As she ran through a few shrubs, toward the big cats zone, her mouth seemed to water, but it wasn’t Flōt she desired. Oh, Jesus, thank, Jesus, she said to herself. She wondered if she was a “thinking animal” somehow now. Whatever it was, it drove her forward. Could she read the jackal mind, communicate with chimpanzees, night-ride the elephant soul? She thought, This is crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy. But it felt like some new plane, one she would have to walk through and to crisscross to find Cuthbert Handley. It was astral and psychokinetic, a place of tangling dimension-strings covered with fur and reptile scales and timespace flowing with blood. Yet she retained a sneaking inkling that a much simpler explanation existed, for everyone and everything she had encountered in this night were uncannily familiar. In one sense, the zoo’s interiors were all her own. Nothing truly had surprised her.





seven





close encounter at the lanterne des morts


“MUEZZA? BARMY CAT? GONE THEN?”

Cuthbert felt a visceral sadness now, his thoughts like skinless pink tubes snaking around his tummy. He also needed to relieve himself. Why did the cat have to go? Muezza was, apart from Baj, the closest thing he’d known to a friend in many years. He spotted the Green Line again, patchy and worn, and he trudged on, but then he started banging his knees together like a boy trying not to pee; he wanted to find a quiet little corner. He was no longer quite spiring. The soft, uplifting fogs of Flōt were wearing thin, and he could feel a stinging sensation in his penis. Recently, he had begun to piss in his trousers. It was a relatively new inclination, and common among older Flōters, and it contained more than a seed of childish rebellion, but it horrified him. He said to himself, ’twas time to put the mockers on the habit, wasn’t it?

Up until about four years ago, he could still enter an Indigent pub—that (just barely) worked. He used to favor the White Lion of Mortimer, in Stroud Green Road. It was a famous dive, insalubrious and half its seats ripped out to pack ’em in, but he felt comfortable there. Everybody would be spending their dole and eating algae-flavored Discos and cultured-lamb kebabs brought in from the Kurdish joint across the street. Cuthbert even had a few mates at the White Lion, for a time.