Night of the Animals(54)
“Oh, Jesus,” said his father. “If only the focking vicar would have watched.”
“Hank,” said Cuthbert’s mum, grimacing at her husband. “The boy. Please. Not here.”
His parents looked destroyed that day, but Cuthbert, bruised inside and out, actually felt very proud. He still recalled how he had rubbed one of the otters’ heads and said, “Magic.” To Cuthbert, his ghostly granddaddy was as well marked as he could possibly be. His lost body, folded into deep England, was being both guarded and marked by St. Cuthbert and two otters that traveled between dimensions. This was far better than any headstone, better than religion, better than his parents, better nearly than England.
a brother to jackals
CUTHBERT, STANDING IN REGENT’S PARK, FEELING ready to wake up the world, leaned close to the Wounded Elephant and kissed the granite as if it were some blarney stone. He wished it would kiss back, warming him inside, licking him like an otter into its own sacred self, into warm animal sainthood, into its strong, hot, brown mind of bronze.
“St. Cuthbert,” he said. “I will not drink Flōt again. Here I will stop. I will really give it a go!” It was his own distraught form of “taking the pledge,” perhaps. He’d have a go at stopping tonight, with all his heart. As he freed them, he would ask the animals for help.
CUTHBERT WAS EXCITED NOW, and he trotted along toward the zoo. He crossed the Broad Walk. Far away south, on the other side of a big, ornate fountain, he thought for a moment that he saw a light flash that would have to be inside the park itself. He ran to his little nest in the shrubs beside the zoo’s fence. Just as he crawled in, an astonishingly long and tightly focused beam of light shot across the playground. It raked across a tubular slide and an aerial ropeway. There were four little wood-plank towers with red saddle roofs in the middle of the playground, and the searchlight lingered on the towers, as if waiting for dome-helmed archers to rise from the fortress cupolas.
Cuthbert sat as still as he could. A Royal Parks Constabulary glider, a Vauxhall Paladin, drove right up the Broad Walk and parked about thirty meters from him. It was a bright white police pandaglider with yellow-green decals and reflective strips, and it stood out in the darkness as if it were radioactive. Cuthbert couldn’t believe his bad luck.
He pressed himself as close to the ground as possible, and rifled through the junk in his jacket pocket for the eye shadow.
He opened the case while it was still in his jacket and clawed out as much makeup as he could with his fingernails and then, with his face down, rubbed the stuff all over his cheeks and forehead. It smelled odd to him, like clovers burned in oil, and for a moment he began to retch. He figured that there must have been some trouble reported—perhaps an argy-bargy between two street people. Or had someone seen him come in?
Eventually, Cuthbert managed to get his hands on the old Flōt orb left from his last visit.
“Just once more,” he said quietly. He drank. The Flōt soothed his muscles quickly, but it didn’t take away the dread. He drank all that was left, but it just didn’t help.
“Now, it’s really over,” he said, burping. “It’s all over. Never again. I’ll never drink again.”
After what seemed hours to him, the glider’s engine stopped and the headlamps snapped off. A little while later, the searchlight, which had remained aimed at the playground, was extinguished. Cuthbert felt a little less afraid, but not relaxed, not by a long shot. He could just make out the hot cherry of a cigarette glowing where the officer would be sitting. He felt a spell of relief. The officer lowered the driver-side window of the glider. Its electric, churning hum was weird in the greenish black silence of the park, as if a tiny section of the natural night had become motorized. He could make out a dim outline, a gentle shape—a female constable, by herself. She seemed to be fussing with something in the car he could not see.
He didn’t know what time it was, but he guessed around midnight. He was sick of waiting and watching, and finally he shimmied himself around, grabbed his bolt cutters, and squeezed through the hole he’d made in the zoo’s fence earlier in the month. Once inside, he stood up clumsily, and sidestepped, half-hunched, to the Golden Jackal exhibit. There were no sounds in their pen, no “voices” in the air. They had all stopped. Cuthbert wished, so dearly wished, that he could hear words now. The foolishness of his actions tonight had brought with them a barren, icy sanity. And the Flōt had put a nice little glow above the ice, and allowed him to gaze down on it from purple clouds.
Something’s going to happen now, he thought.
Indeed, it did. The second he stepped onto one of the paved paths, a small overhead light clicked on. Motion detectors. Cuthbert knew that much. He hopped off the path and crouched down. After a few minutes, the light went off, again with a click. The night could turn into a great disaster, he sensed. Yet he felt no anxiety. Indeed, part of him hoped for catastrophe.
The jackals were stowed in their guillotine-gated kennels at night, yet this made Cuthbert’s task easy because each kennel’s back wall was formed by the main fence of the exhibit. He only needed to cut through one flimsy fence and the jackals would be free, at least to roam the paths of the zoo. They weren’t otters, and nothing sacred, but they were a start, surely.
He got down on his knees and began snipping through the fence. He worked quickly and handily, moving right to left, one kennel to the next. The fence gauge was so light, and his cutters so powerful, he could not feel the slightest resistance.