Night of the Animals(8)
“I’ve had enough of the Whitt—I’ve packed it in, in moi mind,” Cuthbert said. “I feel, I, I, I really ought to let the poor otters into the cuts. It’s for England.” He gave the doctor a sly look. “And the king could use my help.”
“You shouldn’t talk like that, my friend. I mean, Cuthbert. They are utterly merciless.”
There was a long silence. After a while, the doctor wrote in his notepad.
“But, go on. Come. I’m—I’m listening carefully. And when you say otters—you do mean the sort of minky, playful things?”
“Otters,” Cuthbert repeated. A gleam of aureate light radiated through the window. “I know it might sound completely barmy.” It was indeed that, as far as Dr. Bajwa saw it. One surely never heard the word otter more than once in a career in a north London GP’s office.
“You know my missing brother Dryst? I think he might have sort of become a kind of otter.” Cuthbert nibbled gently at the inside of his cheek; there was a tough little ridge of flesh there that he sometimes liked to worry. “Of sorts.”
Dr. Bajwa said, “I know you feel that loss. And after the challenges you’ve had, I’m sure you feel it all the more. And after so very many decades of . . . griefs.”
“No, no, no,” said Cuthbert, shaking his head. “He’s back, you see? Drystan has returned. And I think ’e’s in the zoo. There’s more to tell. Much more, doc. But I corr.”*
Dr. Bajwa thought for a moment, rubbing his short, graceful beard.
“I want you to stay away from the zoo, Cuthbert. Let’s avoid things that obviously upset you. And these zoo voices—they’re not your friends.” The doctor coughed a few times. He was coming down with something, it seemed. He said, “You’re a very clever man, so surely you grasp that?”
Cuthbert was, but he didn’t, couldn’t, and wouldn’t.
singled out for otterspaeke
SO IT WAS, AT FIRST, THAT DR. BAJWA SIMPLY advised Cuthbert to avoid Regent’s Park. Anything to de-escalate Cuthbert’s obsession seemed a step forward. Keep out of Regent’s Park, and these “zoo voices” will fade, the doctor thought. Here was simple, sensible medicine.
“A zoo can be a rather intense sort of place, if you think about it,” Dr. Bajwa had said to Cuthbert. “It’s no place for you.”
CUTHBERT RARELY MADE APPOINTMENTS; he would just show up, in all his shabby glory, with a heap of vinegary chips in his arms, or a warm purple sphere of Flōt in his coat. The frowning admins would send him back to the consultation room, holding his own file and wearing his usual shamefaced smile.
“The zoo admission’s twenty-five bloody pounds,” he was telling Dr. Bajwa one day. “I saw the sign at the gate.” He clasped his hands together. They were filthy and mottled with white psoriasis and liver spots.
“Hardly anyone goes—that’s why,” Dr. Bajwa said.
A few years before, after the closings of both the Beijing and Bronx zoos, a short flurry of patriotic stories about the London Zoo had memed across WikiNous, most along the lines of “the first and last standing,” although the “first” bit wasn’t entirely true. Still, almost no zoo animals existed in the wild anymore, and thousands upon thousands of species were newly extinct. Polar bears, giant pandas, as well as most large marine species, wild ferrets, and cranes, survived only as genomic software that the children of the rich used to print miniature cuddle and bath toys as well as living mobiles.
Cuthbert had never been inside a zoo, even as a child, and the doctor wanted to keep it that way.
“But you’re still visiting the park,” the doctor noted. “You’re asking for trouble. You don’t realize. A drowning man isn’t bothered by rain. Didn’t we say we should avoid the whole of Regent’s? I thought we’d got a sort of understanding, my friend.”
“Ar,” said Cuthbert. “But the otters—and the jackals and a few others—they’ve got their own little ways, haven’t they? Where am I to go, if I ignore them?” He averted his gaze and looked through the window. “I nipped into the library at Finsbury Park, but I fell asleep at my table, and this skinny library bloke with one of them f*ckin’ Eye3 pendants ’round his neck, he said he’d hand me over to the Watch to be nicked if he saw me in there again. At least in the parks, and with the animals, I won’t get nicked.”
The threat of the Red Watch was real, Dr. Bajwa knew. Unlike most public spaces, the royal parks normally weren’t patrolled by the Watch, but instead by the old, lenient constabulary. Being detained by the Watch could prove catastrophic for someone as powerless as Cuthbert, and the thought of ridiculous, feeble old Cuthbert getting dragged away by the red-suited Watchmen with their neuralwave pikes horrified him. Cuthbert would be warehoused with other mentally ill Indigents and shoved under a Nexar hood. He’d probably suffer cardiac arrest.
The doctor coughed a few times—a dry, barking hack that surprised him in its power. “Oh,” he said, reeling a little. “This dry air.” He took a deep breath and gulped. “I am just beginning to wonder,” he said, recovering, his voice still croaking, “if a visit to the zoo might not actually calm you down a bit?” He coughed twice more.