Night of the Animals(64)
Cats have a way of drawing people into their worlds. Penguin dreams and holy otters, gory jackals and creepy cults, King Henry’s Red Watch and the very white seagulls—all would have to wait. A set of needle-clawed gauntlets, with fur licked clean to a sheen, were about to be thrown down.
Cuthbert found himself in the big cats district of the zoo, passing a series of semicircular windows intended to give glimpses of large felines in their separate enclosures: tigers, a black leopard, a jaguar, and the Asiatic lions, but from that side of the complex, none of the cats were visible at the time. He wondered whether the cats were quartered in secret night quarters, and whether a tube connected them somehow to the penguins’ clandestine night-holes. Can’t imagine what the penguins and the tigers would have to say to each other, Cuthbert thought. But you never knew, did you?
He quietly sidled around to the front of the cat compound, to a gift kiosk called the Cat’s Curiosity Shop, across from the lion enclosure. There’s something happening here, he thought. There was a red sign fastened to the kiosk that read (in handpainted, gold, metal-flake script, which was incongruously ornate):
ALARM BELL
IN EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS
Below the sign was a small red box. It was designed for the lion enclosure specifically, but Cuthbert didn’t see that. Instinctively, he started to reach for the box, then hesitated. He took a deep breath and rubbed his wrist across his eyebrow. There was certainly an emergency of some kind in England, he felt.
He gawked into the darkened shop. It nauseated him, looking in. There was a shelf crammed with old-fashioned, twentieth-century-style stuffed leopards and pumas. On another shelf, several holographic jaguars and tigers waved their glowing heads back and forth, but the projections were jumbled up and growing grotesquely through one another like a spotted and striped cancer of catness. He tried a window, and, surprisingly, it opened. There were, right beside the window, bags of popcorn and algae crisps on sale, too, and Cuthbert grabbed a few and stuffed them into his shirt. Close to the locked door, the blue-light numerals on a till could be seen displaying a huge sum from earlier in the day: ￡80,044.50. Was it possible, he wondered, that a zoo visitor had purchased a lion?
He closed the window, turned around, and stepped toward the lions, who had come out from wherever they were hiding. They appeared wide awake, scrutinizing him, but sat crouched and motionless, their forelegs extended like furry golden cudgels. To be watched in this way by wild animals, as the sole human of interest, was the rarest of occurrences in England, a phenomenon daytime zoo visitors seldom experienced or would even notice. Cuthbert took it for granted. One of the lions’ tails rose like a brown-headed cobra, then fell. There were five of the creatures, the famous old maned male, Arfur, fronted by four females. One of the females, Chandani, suddenly stood up and strutted a few meters to the right; she climbed up into a grassy cubbyhole, and turned around to face Cuthbert again.
Gregarious and greater in number than all the other big cats, the lions held prime position in their enclosure. Theirs was one of the more sensitive, animal-friendly enclosures in the zoo, but it still offered little more space than a studio flat gives a human. It comprised a widely moated jumble of ledges and tall pillars made of concrete. Tall grass, overgrown by design, spewed from every cranny and obscured the concrete’s geometric motif of rhomboids and sly cambers. To their credit, the zoo managers were trying especially hard to make the lion exhibit seem less artificial, less self-conscious, less “boundary driven” than so many others at the zoo—it was all part of a “new” thinking that had flowered for a while with the millennium celebrations fifty years ago.
But sentimentality, scientific stuffiness, a lack of funds, little space, and three persistent fetishes—for art, architecture, and horticulture—had stymied the new thinking elsewhere in the zoo, and when the social upheavals and rapid extinctions of the 2020s came along, the zoo management had its hands full simply keeping one of a quickly dwindling number of zoos open. The lion terraces seemed gracelessly situated. The organic wholesomeness of the weeds often looked a lot like simple laxity: bright algae blanketed the moat water so thickly it resembled some green variety of the reinforced cement with a few lily pads set on top, like table doilies. Mud splattered every flat surface.
The lions themselves looked grubby and somnolent, and their flaccid musculature betrayed years of confinement. The algae stains all over the concrete gave the terraces an abandoned quality, too.
Toward the center of the den stood a Chinese tree of heaven with its beckoning thousands of paired, shiny leaves. Beside it was a three-tiered play-shack built of logs. It was as if children had taken up residence in a Mesopotamian temple ruin. The whole enclosure impressed and disturbed Cuthbert greatly.
“Come over here, Cuthbert,” Chandani said, in a gravelly, richly self-pitying voice. “Come forward, not back. We don’t want to die like this, as slaves, in cages.”
Cuthbert said, “Not sure. Not yet. Do you know the penguins?”
“They are good animals,” she said. “But they are fooling themselves. They are waiting for something that will never happen. Now, Cuthbert, step closer.”
“Not yet,” he said. “You’re the end of me, you lot. I can see it.”
He still felt terribly nervous about approaching the huge felids themselves—their communications to him had been characterized by an immaculate righteousness. No other animal unnerved him as much. He felt that the lions were trying to keep something from him—they represented a kind of authority that had never welcomed him, an official power. It smelled much like Harry9 and the Windsorite radicals. And yet, the lions were also victims of that power, even as they symbolized it. Cuthbert was not sure why this should all bother him particularly. But he decided to put the lions on hold, again, and he crept around the back of the terraces and there came upon an often-missed nook in the rockery where the sand cats lived.