Night of the Animals(51)
“Oh, who focking knows?” he said aloud, almost huffing for air.
But the otters, he knew where to find them. The average British citizen didn’t know it, but otters were the sacred mascots of Albion, as precious as cattle to certain Hindus. If nothing else, he must release them; and, yes, along the way, he would also release as many other creatures as possible, of course, opportunistically or methodically—it didn’t matter. The more free animals to face the coming attack of the death cult, the better, he reckoned.
It was all, of course, a florid delusion. But there it was, for better or worse: Cuthbert Handley, a working-class Flōt sot from Birmingham, had to save the animals.
the scent of a wounded elephant
HE FELT FAMISHED; HE WAS TREMBLING. VOMITING had made him hungry. He got out a Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie he had been saving, as well as a leftover block of Golden Syrup cake from the cupboard. For the past few days, he had been eating nothing but vacuum-sealed mackerels and instant treacle cake—and drinking cheap supermarket swills such as Longbow cider. He liked to eat at least a pie a week, but he still considered meat pies a luxury, since each cost seven and a half pounds at Tesco.
To preserve their traditional image, the Fray Bentos pies still came in old-fashioned, flat tins. Cuthbert opened the tin with a can opener whose nuplastic handle was melted badly on one side. He put the oily lid in the sink. He touched the rubbery surface of the uncooked pastry with his fingertips. There was a red-orange film of grease on the pastry. He licked this off his fingers, and got the lid from the sink and licked that, too. It was salty and metallic, and this reminded him of the blood he tasted if he brushed his teeth too harshly.
He pinched off a corner of the manufactured treacle cake, and chawed on that. It was beautiful, he thought, really beautiful stuff. Count on McVitie’s! The thousands of dead frugal members of Heaven’s Gate apparently frowned upon the enjoyment of food. For their last meal they had “splurged,” he read, and ordered thousands of turkey pot pies at a particular chain restaurant in America. They stacked their plates for the busboys. Cuthbert loathed turkey. A beef kidney—that was a feast. He carefully placed the pie in the oven. He could hardly wait for it to puff up.
When the pie was cooked and he’d finished it, he rooted through all his drawers and closets looking for dark clothes and something dark to rub on his face. He located the electric torch he kept underneath his bed; its solar-cells had run down, and it offered only a meager glow, but he still thought he should take it.
He could find no shoe polish. He did find an old case of dark brown eye shadow; the nuplastic cover was dusty and smeared with something sticky, but the makeup itself looked perfectly untouched. It was something from the days, years ago, when women and sometimes men would still touch him, perhaps even stay in his bed. He stood in front of the mirror and dabbed a little of the substance on his chin, then wiped it off with his sleeve. He leaned toward the mirror and stuck out his tongue. It seemed pale and thick, like a cod fillet. He still couldn’t see any lump in his throat, but he remained convinced something was in there.
He’d thrown a pile of suitable clothes on the toilet seat. Cuthbert undressed. He did not like to see his naked body in the mirror. It was bruised and veiny and his stomach was distended beyond mere mild obesity. The doctor had explained that his liver was in, as he put it, “not great” condition, and he wasn’t clearing fluids as well as he should. There was a red patch the size of an apple beneath one of his breasts. He hadn’t the faintest idea what it was or what it meant, and he gratefully yanked a black jumper over himself. Trousers were another problem. He didn’t own simple dark ones, and many plausible pairs that used to fit had grown too tight in the last few years. He ended up pulling on some old, dark gray pajama trousers that didn’t really look like pajamas; they were “loungewear,” he said to himself, and though loose and saggy, they had two big pockets.
It was well past dusk when Cuthbert put on a black training cagoule he hadn’t worn since the 2010s (it had an Aston Villa patch on its lapel, with a lion and the word PREPARED in claret on a field of blue—and he feared, for good reason, wearing it around Finsbury Park’s Gunner fans). He left his IB in a hurry. Just as he walked out of the IB’s atrium, he saw a flash squad of the Red Watch pull up to the estate in two red-and-gold gliders. The Watchmen scampered into the building, neuralpikes held high. They were so focused on rushing the IB building, or perhaps because of Cuthbert’s disguise, they completely missed him. It was, to the say the least, a whisker-close call.
He took the No. 29 back down to Camden Town. No one had looked at him askance on the bus, of course, but that’s not saying much—he was in Camden, an Indigent zone, and the pubs were just closing. He saw a haggard couple he knew from a mental health drop-in center he used to visit in Kentish Town when such services still existed. They sat on a blanket outside Camden New Tube station with a small ratty dog, a border collie of some kind, but from the border of a very morose nation; they were selling carnations whose stems had been wrapped in faux-palladium foil. No one was buying, naturally, and Cuthbert kept getting jostled.
The flower sellers were thoroughly cabbaged, as far as Cuthbert could see. He waved at them and leaned down and looked at the sad pink carnations, but they didn’t recognize him. He remembered the woman, who had long ginger hair—they’d played Master Mind Air a few times at the center and had a tea. But she was off her box, that’s for sure, and Cuthbert felt a bit jealous of it. For a moment, he felt a sense of being very different from the lost souls he saw on the blanket. The public were not looking at him with pity and contempt. Did they sense who he was? Could they see the Wonderments in him?