Night of the Animals(62)
He saw only one solution. He put his wire cutters on the ground and climbed up upon the Penguin Pool’s wall. He had to heave himself up with a brutal lurch that almost threw him over the edge into the pool itself. He rose for a second, reeling side to side, trying to recover balance, then sunk down on all fours like some drunk, acrophobic infant on a rooftop. He crawled to the service stairs.
Do not try to touch us, the penguins suddenly said. We go nowhere without the gulls of Imago.
Cuthbert felt annoyed by all this. Perhaps the penguins were, in fact, snobs.
He kicked his legs back, dangling them down, feeling for the stairs with his feet, and dropped down onto a small, square landing.
Leave us, said the penguins. We perform by secret schedule, and not without the gulls of Imago.
Cuthbert sucked a bit of mucus from the walls of his mouth, and spat down into the pool.
“Bollocks,” he said.
The gesture had an immediate effect, causing a streak of chittering up the conga line. He noticed for the first time a few little wooden hutches, like red taxiglider shacks, set poolside, a few feet from the water. They didn’t match the crisp style of the Penguin Pool in any way. They looked like hovels, sloppily nailed together.
“What’s in there?” he said aloud.
He took a few steps down, but all at once began to fall forward. He reeled back, and nearly tumbled straight down the stairs. He grabbed hold of the edge of one of the wide, spiraling ramps and flumped in its direction with his whole body. Almost falling against it, he felt the ramp’s corners jab hard into his side.
“Oi, Christ,” he said. “Ow!” He needed to get onto the ramp. With great difficulty, he managed to get one fat leg, then his fat middle, then his other fat leg up on the ramp. At first, he didn’t try to stand up. He could feel that the ramp was slick with fish-slime, and at this point, it was crowded with little penguins. He thought, If I let go, I’ll slide right down to Penguin Hell. And a slip might knock a dozen penguins down, he thought, like bowling pins. So he edged down, carefully, first one butt cheek, then a foot, then the heel of his hand, then the other butt cheek, and so on. The closest penguins, no more than a meter away, turned around and began waddling away from him, crowding each other. Suddenly, first individually, then in twos and threes, gaggles of them started sliding down the ramp, zipping along expertly. A few birds made stiff little leaps off the ramp and plummeted down into the pool water with plunking splashes.
Cuthbert said, “Oh, damn it, wait now then. I’ll find your blunky gulls.” He commenced to shimmy forward hastily. He approached the place where one ramp crossed the other—if he didn’t mind himself, he was going to slam into the other incline. As often was the case with Cuthbert, he was the last person whom he protected.
“I’ll find them, all right! I’ll promise you that much. I’ll get my clever brother, Drystan, too, and ’e’ll get to the bottom of all this. You need to get moving now, out of the zoo, see? This American chap, Applewhite, he aims to obliterate you, see?”
When the Gulls of Imago return.
“You’re yampy, you lot!”
Cuthbert asked: “What have these f*cking Imago chaps done for you? For f*ck’s sake!” He felt frustrations cutting through his chest like an opening and closing fan of blades.
So he tried to stand—a huge mistake. Not more than a few seconds passed before, unable to grip the slick concrete ramp, his feet flipped out from under him, and he was swiftly the very description of the term “arse over tits.” He seemed to rise up a few inches before all twenty-two stones of him crashed hard. A deep-reaching, snapping noise sounded out. Cuthbert bounced up, and when he hit the ramp again, he knew something strange had occurred. He was still plunging toward the water, almost flying.
The force of his tumble had been so severe it broke one of the two ramps off. Down went Cuthbert and ramp. In a matter of seconds, Lubetkin’s fanciful “DNA strand” was forever unstrung, and a new mutation born. It was as if a new epoch, when all art was to be broken and imperfect and free, had been signaled, and Cuthbert was playing the role of unknowing situationist. After he smacked the water and sank, he felt, perhaps for an entire half minute, fixed in serene suspension. He was unable to breathe, lost to time, place, direction. He felt euphoric. I can die now, he thought, and I’m not afraid. He recalled thirty years before, submerged in Dowles Brook, where an otter had looked him in the face and spoken to him. Ga go ga maga medu. The otterspaeke sang in this head, a lovely death hymn. The animals will leave the zoo on their own. But what of the aliens and their Californian proxies? He shook his head, underwater, and said, “nooooooo” with a burbling seriousness. The salty, bitter birdwater finally flooded his nostrils and mouth, and he panicked. He threw his head back and arched out of the water. He swam, coughing, to the poolside and flopped up onto a sort of performance platform. He lay there for a few minutes, recovering, but blankly staring at the penguins.
The penguins were terrified. They had crowded by now on the opposite side of the pool to guard the red nesting boxes, those huge eyesores of rough-daubed wood that had been added to the architectural masterpiece to make it more livable. Indeed, there were four live eggs in the boxes (and two infertile ones).
Cuthbert pulled himself up and sat forward and stretched his legs out, letting the water run out of his trousers and shoes. He felt more sober than he had in months. He wanted to stand up and cheer. It was all a big laugh—the busted pool, the penguins stirred from their torpor.