Night of the Animals(39)

The little chubby boy Cuthbert was watching gathered up the kite pieces on all fours, then sat down on the ground, swami-style, and flattened the kite across his knees. All the kite’s bits and bobs were spread around him on the pavement in front of the zoo. A few other bystanders had taken notice of the scene, and one of them, a man with a new sort of sunshades with a hovering red vapor bulbed around his eyes, now stared at Cuthbert with open suspicion.

“You,” the man said to Cuthbert, who pretended to ignore him.

The boy removed the adhesive backing from the eyes, and held them as carefully by their edges as a surgeon might hold actual organs. Cuthbert wished he could help the boy, but he knew that the boy didn’t want his help. So he just stayed where he was, gawping, and risking the attention of the Watch.

The boy was now smoothing the eyes onto the microthin nuplastic wings of the kite, pushing hard with his knuckles. His mother stood over him, beaming. She was a compact woman with straight red hair and an elegant waffle-cloth capelet whose loden color clashed with her hair: seen up close, she reminded Cuthbert a bit of some of the smart middle-class women he used to see getting on the train at New Street back home, back when more women worked, but her cool poise marked her out.

She said to Cuthbert, “You see, these old-fashioned toys—kites!—they’re still better than all these poly-D games, don’t you think?” The question was strictly rhetorical, and Cuthbert didn’t dare answer.

He did nod, tentatively. He asked, shyly, “Is he going to have a go with it here and all?”

The man with the red-smoke sunshades approached the woman.

“Is this . . . man . . . is he bothering you?”

“Heavens, no,” said the woman.

“So sorry—I offer ten tall tanks of apologies,” the man said, sniffing at Cuthbert. The man withdrew but peered around, as if searching for a Watchman.

“Is he going to fly the kite now?” Cuthbert asked again.

The boy faced his mother scornfully, and she smiled tensely around the vicinity. The bystanders who had been paying attention to the boy turned away.

“No,” she said to Cuthbert. Then she addressed the boy: “Roll it up into the bag, Nelson. Right away.” The bag was already destroyed, so the boy just folded the kite into a little, puffy trapezoid and jammed it into his trouser’s front pocket. The woman grabbed some of the nuplastic joints and sticks and the paper-curl of instructions off the walk, and she and the boy made to go.

She said, “He’ll actually get to fly it. In Spain, next week. Hols for us—again.”

“Why not just go to Hampstead Heath?”

The woman said, “Oh, that’s a nice idea.” She glanced around for a moment, took a pair of ￡5 coins from beneath her demi-cape, and forced them nervously into Cuthbert’s willing, filthy hand.

“You be careful,” she said. “The Watch is around. You’re asking for trouble, sir.”

Then the mother and son walked away, the boy still fiddling with the kite in his pocket.

Because the zoo had been unusually busy that day, a sluggish queue snaked toward a half-door set into a gate building where day-rental nuplastic strollers could be returned. The zoo was curiously authoritarian about the strollers, its staff checking in each one, sweeping an open hand underneath them, like customs officers, and creating the kind of queue one normally only saw Indigents standing in.

“Probably a neural bomb threat, from the usual suspects,” a red-faced man in the queue scoffed. “Bloody last-gaspers.” It was commonplace in central London for the republican terrorists to ring in phony bomb threats, except sometimes they weren’t faked. They had killed civilians, all right, but their hypothetical neural devices created confusion for effect.

Cuthbert watched the families. Among them were not a few neoteric aristocrats, who looked surprisingly able to cope with a wait. It was a rare sight. He decided to stand in the line himself, just to be closer to them, even though he didn’t have a stroller to return. The self-conscious, bourgeois joie de vivre he imagined them relishing engrossed him.

One lanky father behind Cuthbert lugged a ginger-haired tot on each leg. The girls seemed to be identical twins, and the man doted on them, rubbing their heads like little cats.

The bulbous, greasy-looking gray strollers were shaped like elephants, and seemed quite popular. The gate itself was a long brown-brick and stucco structure with dark Spanish tiles that reminded Cuthbert a bit of the entrance to the old Pentonville prison, but one with hanging baskets of orange and grape-colored auriculas, just like the ones at the Whittington Hospital, Cuthbert’s old drying-out center, at Highgate Hill. There were geraniums on the zoo entrance, too, and polyanthuses, but it was the auriculas that fascinated him—small and exact, and intensely bright, like fairy-light bulbs.

“Allo,” Cuthbert said to the little twins. He reached down for the fallen head of an auricula on the pavement. He smelled it, and he wanted to hold it out toward the girls, but he sensed that could seem creepy. “Yow ’ad some fun?” he asked them.

But the father placed a large hand on each of the twins’ heads, and turned their faces away from Cuthbert. The man turned back at Cuthbert with a strained smile, as if trying to mask his apprehension.

“Girls,” the father said. “Eyes forward.”

Cuthbert was playing with fire, and he knew it. If the Watch saw Indigents bothering citizens, they would arrest them, beat them, or worse.