Night of the Animals(61)

In any case, if what happened to Cuthbert comes across as too far-fetched, rest assured, it was all too true for him: after he had demanded, in so many words, that the penguins answer him, they finally obliged. The nearly extinct Jackasses, none of whom had ever seen their dinette-size home isles off the Cape of Good Hope, who slept stuck inside a twenty-ton objet d’art, sang these bizarre words:

Seagulls of Imago, your song shall make us free,

From Cornwall to Orkney, we dine on irony,

Along with lovely kippers from the Irish Sea.

Seagulls of Imago, your song shall make us free,

Until that day we’ll wait, and watch French art movies,

Your avant-garde near saved the twentieth century,

Along with lovely kippers from the Irish Sea,

We’ll take our daily fill of anguished poetry,

’Til the world becomes zoologically arty.

Seagulls of Imago, your song shall make us free,

Seagulls of Imago, your song shall make us free,

Make it new! Things not ideas! Ambiguity!

And endless lovely kippers from the Irish Sea.

Whatever did it mean? If all the Nobel laureates in the world parsed such a grandiloquent, rambling statement, they would surely have remained befuddled. It was the essence of obscurity.

Yet this case could be no plainer to one man, yoghurt in his tummy or no.

Cuthbert said, “You’re all stuck up, you lot.” He felt piqued by the villanelle the penguins had recited. What he wanted to talk with them about was helping them to escape the zoo, not the mysteries of Imago. Who the bloody hell were the Seagulls of Imago anyhow? He wondered how Drystan might view all this—far more sensibly and clearly than he, Cuthbert guessed. He’d sort these penguins. He’d handle ’em.





a broken art, a broken neck


“COME OUT THEN,” CUTHBERT SAID. HE FELT SURPRISED that the penguins still refused to show themselves, even after their paean to seagulls and all. There were unnatural noises elsewhere in the zoo again, and he knew his time to free them was quickly running out.

“If yow don’t come now,” he slurred. “’A corr come back.”

Unlike most enclosures, the Penguin Pool, sunken about twenty feet down in its Modernist pit, could not simply be sliced open with wire cutters. He could not throw a rope down or wedge open a door or gate. Indeed, he could not determine how the penguins had been put into the pool. The only approach he felt might work was to find a long, flat plank of some sort to tilt down onto one of the pool’s helical ramps. But then what? Short of walking across the plank himself and grabbing a penguin in each arm, he would need to employ persuasion. What would he use to lure the penguins out? He had no kippers, from the Irish Sea or anywhere.

He examined the little information sign. It read: “The only natural home of the endangered jackass penguin was off the coast of South Africa. Harvesting and eating of penguin eggs by humans was the greatest reason for the species’ extinction in the wild.”

Penguins from South Africa, he thought. What a marvel!

Cuthbert had an idea. He felt he knew these arty types well enough to make the plan work. It was luminously simple: he would shame the penguins into action by accusing them of snobbery.

He said, “Bloody elitist birds!”

No, answered the penguins. Never. We are . . . artists.

“Artists? Oh-ho-ho! That’s quite particular, innit?” He mouthed the word like a filthy, oily slur. Gazing into their quiet pool, with its dull green blanket of vapor trapped in white, stiff walls, he could not resist grinning. The birds had got a cob on all right. Surely, they’d come out any second.

He waited a moment and added: “So come along then. Defend yourselves. Show yourselves—artistes!”

Nothing. Not the faintest echo of a stirring.

“You’re going to let the world be destroyed if you don’t come out, little poshies.”

Seagulls of Imago, your song shall make us free.

The poetry startled Cuthbert from his thoughts. He looked at one of the ramps. Penguins! He was amazed to see, as instantly apparent as something switched on, a sort of conga line of half a dozen penguins. They looked different than he had imagined—they weren’t robust, tall creatures colored in neat tuxedo panels of black and white. They possessed mottled bellies, very small, delicate frames, and hooked banded beaks.

“Bostin!” he said. “Oh, I knew you’d come. Some of you, anyway.” He jumped higher upon the wide, shelf-like edge of the pool—the edge with a notorious flaw of being too high for most children—and balanced on his stomach. His feet were off the ground. He could see, from this perspective, that he could, perhaps, drop himself onto a set of service stairs, to his right. The stairs led down to the lowest level of the pool platforms, where the nesting boxes were. From there, conceivably, he would pluck the birds out and toss them (gently) over the wall.

But would it hurt the penguins? They seemed so vulnerable, so diminutive. More of the penguins had appeared on the ramps. They seemed to be engaged in a kind of preliminary procession. It was as if some critical mass of discomfort had ejected them from their nests, and now, once stirred, they all had to leave their nests and prepare for—what? Cuthbert had no idea. Some confrontation between bird and drunkard, sculpture and dissolution?

“Come along, come now,” he said.

He felt newly disheartened as well as indecisive. He’d tried so hard to lure the penguins out, and his effort had seemed to pay off, but what did it add up to?