Above His Station (9 page)

It was an anteater.

Actually, it was not. It was something remarkably similar to an anteater, belonging to the same family of mammals perhaps, but its actual name escapes me. Although, I did recall that you only ever found them in parts of southern Mexico, but that didn’t really help as it was even more of a reason why it would be rare to see one, especially one manning the reception desk of a police station in Leicester Square.

An epiphany is perhaps the only way to describe what I experienced then. As if up until that point I had been trying to assemble a 10,000 piece jigsaw blindfolded, and at last I had found a corner piece. I didn’t know the whole truth, but I knew at least an inkling of it; a foundation to build something structurally (and with any luck factually) sound upon.

‘The people didn’t just turn into birds,’ I whispered. ‘What am I missing here?’

‘Company?’ asked a reedy voice to my back.

I didn’t need to turn around, but I did anyway – and I’m glad, because if I had not then I would have missed the glorious sight of my rodent companion sitting on its haunches by the door to the station, a wonky smile on its face.

‘I thought you were gone for good!’ I gasped.

‘Can’t get rid of me that easily, Gramps,’ said the rat, hopping up onto the desk. ‘So what have we got here? Ohhh, an anteater. Awesome!’

‘It’s not an anteater,’ I corrected it. ‘It’s remarkably similar, I admit, but it’s not. It belongs to the same family of mammals and you only find them in southern Mexico.’

‘Clearly,’ said the rat. ‘So what did the other one change into?’

‘Other one?’ I enquired.

‘There are two empty uniforms down there. So where’s the other-?’

Had anyone told me several hours ago that a fire-bellied tree frog was going to leap up onto the glass partition of a mobile police station and scare me half to death I probably would have taken it with a generous pinch of salt. But there it was, and there I was too, flat on my back with a juddering pain exploding in my coccyx.

‘
Christ-on-a-bike!
’ shrieked the rat. ‘What the fuck is that?’

‘It’s only – oof!’ I went, ‘a frog.’

‘Do you think it’s poisonous? It looks poisonous.’

‘I really have no idea,’ I groaned.

‘Don’t touch it, whatever you do!’

‘I hadn’t planned on it,’ I said, rocking back and forth, trying to generate enough momentum to get up to my knees. I completed a sort of aborted forward roll and then flopped onto my side, where I managed to hold onto a hat-stand behind the door and regain my verticality. ‘It’s probably harmless,’ I said, peering from a safe distance at the frog as it climbed up the other side of the glass with its little suction-cupped feet. ‘Best you take a few steps back though…just in case, eh?’

‘Solid,’ said the rat, hopping off the desk and in no time at all resuming its place upon my shoulder as if it had never left. ‘So…you any nearer to cracking the case?’

‘I’ll let you know in a minute.’ I spied a plastic chair against the far wall of the station and plonked myself into it, making sure that I kept watch on the fire-bellied tree frog. ‘I’ve worked out that whatever happened is a lot bigger than I’d first thought. It seems to have affected every human being within a considerable radius.’

‘No shit, Sherlock and…?’

‘And it didn’t have any qualms about who it affected. Anyone was fair game,’ I said.

‘So you no longer think people changed into birds?’

‘Oh, absolutely I do…but that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface,’ I said, hoping that if I kept on talking by the law of averages I had to arrive at something resembling the truth at some point. ‘I keep thinking back to the driver of the train, at how strange I thought it was that he’d just vanished, and how the train had managed to slam into Regal Street.’

‘Only it didn’t slam, did it?’

‘No, and that’s exactly what I was going to say,’ I said. ‘I distinctly heard the driver apply the brakes, which meant that someone
had
to have been driving it.’

‘But there was no one there,’ said the rat. ‘We checked it out ourselves, remember?’

‘Yes, and what did we find?’

The rat shrugged in that funny way again. ‘Same as always. Just a bunch of clothes.’

‘And the spider that came crawling out from under the control panel.’

‘The one you stamped on, you mean?’

‘Yes…only now I’m thinking that it wasn’t really a spider,’ I said.

‘It looked like one to me.’

‘And that’s the point, don’t you see?’ I implored the rodent. ‘It looked like a spider because it
was
a spider…but what if it was a person that had just turned
into
a spider?’

The rat’s beady eyes went whatever the opposite of beady is. ‘Shit.’

‘My sentiments exactly,’ said I. ‘The metamorphosis must have been instantaneous!’

‘No, I meant ‘
Shit
’ as in ‘
Shit, if you’re right that means you just killed someone, dude!
’ shrieked the rat. ‘Two if you include the tiger. You only need one more and you officially qualify as a serial killer. I’m probably risking my life just talking to you.’

‘This isn’t a laughing matter,’ I said, ignoring the enormity of my crime for the time being. I had bigger fish to fry. ‘And if you want to blame someone for what happened to the tiger, blame the bloody train driver – it was him that squashed it!’

‘And then you squashed
him
,’ said the rat. ‘There could be some serious karma shit going on right now, did you think about that?’

‘I’ve been relatively open to most possibilities up to this point, but no, I haven’t got to that one yet,’ I replied. ‘So if my theory is correct, it explains how the tiger was able to navigate though the tunnels without getting electrocuted.’

‘And it also explains the mynah bird!’ said the rat. ‘It must have been a security guard at the palace that had changed into one! But what about those wolves?’

‘People once, I presume. And the flamingo too. That’s why it still had the bloody seatbelt on! The change must have occurred only moments before and that’s why it lost control…why
everyone
lost control! That’s why there are so many crashed cars about the place!’

‘So you think that somehow everyone in London just changed into all sorts of random animals at the exact same fucking time?’ said the rat.

‘Not everyone,’ I said, thumbing my chest.

‘How come it didn’t affect you then?’

‘I’m blowed if I know,’ I admitted. ‘But I wouldn’t mind finding out.’

‘Where to next then, Omega Man?’ asked the rat.

‘We need to find someone in London who’s an expert on animals,’ I replied. ‘And I think I know just the place.’

‘The Natural History Museum?’ suggested the rat.

‘No, I mean
alive
animals. We need to get to Darwin Street Zoo! Now hop on up,’ I said, offering the rat the crook of my arm. ‘As Dr Dolittle said, let’s go talk to the animals!’

‘Eddie Murphy was great in that,’ said the rat, scampering up onto my shoulder.

‘I think you mean Rex Harrison,’ I corrected it.

‘No, I’m talking about the guy that played Dr Dolittle. That was Eddie Murphy.’

‘No, it wasn’t,’ I corrected it again. ‘Rex Harrison was Dr Dolittle. I should know, because it was one of my late wife’s favourite films.’

‘Sorry, Gramps, but it was Eddie Murphy, one hundred per cent.’

‘You’re probably thinking of the stage version,’ I said.

‘I’m not! I’m talking about the film!’

‘Then you’re still wrong, because in the film Dr Dolittle was played by Rex Harrison.’

‘Eddie Murphy.’

‘Rex Harrison.’

‘Eddie Murphy.’

‘It was definitely Rex Harrison.’

‘No, it was definitely Eddie fucking Murphy!’ insisted the rat. ‘Remember the bit when the rat thinks it’s dying but it just does this really massive fart and stinks the whole place out?’

I frowned, not recalling any such thing.

The rat rocked with laughter on my shoulder, and before long I found myself laughing too, even though I had no idea why. My furry companion was clearly mistaken and I was right. Dr Dolittle was definitely played by Rex Harrison, but the rat wouldn’t have any of it.

We were still giggling like naughty schoolboys looking at the top shelf in a newsagents’ as we left the police station and set off for Darwin Street.

We walked for some time without a word (which was an achievement in itself on the rat’s part) and just as a comfortable silence settled between us, the rat said:

‘Eddie Murphy.’

And then quick as a flash I said, ‘Rex Harrison.’

‘Eddie Murphy,’ the rat sniggered.

‘Rex Harrison,’ I laughed.

As the afternoon drew on and the sky beckoned dusk, we continued with a spring in our steps, knowing that we were that much closer to learning what fate had befallen London. And then just as I’d let my mind wander, just as I’d relaxed and far too much time had elapsed since our last round that it was obvious that neither of us was prepared to carry it on any longer, a tiny voice upon my shoulder would say:

‘Eddie Murphy.’

And we’d both be in fits of giggles.

And so on and so forth, indifferent to our ignorance of what was to come.

5

We arrived at the zoo’s main entrance an undetermined lapse of time later and went through the covered walkway and inside. The zoo should have been bustling with people, even at this time of the evening, but instead it was bustling with animals – and not only the ones in cages. I was thankful that for the most part they seemed harmless: lots of cats running about and in-between my legs. I had to give one of them a swift punt up the rear end with my boot. I couldn’t risk them taking an interest in my rodent companion. There were lots of dogs, too. All breeds and all sizes. They seemed by far to be the most popular of animals. Domesticated ones I could contend with, but as we moved deeper into the foyer, the variety increased. I kept a tally in my head for every new species that I spotted, testing my knowledge. A chinchilla, a porcupine, several guinea pigs and lots of chickens – and that was only in the foyer! An armadillo was manning one of the ticket booths, so I just pushed on through the turnstile. It didn’t even bother to ask me for a ticket. You just can’t get the staff these days.

‘It’s like fucking Noah’s Ark in this place,’ said the rat. ‘If there are no people anymore, how are we supposed to find someone to give us a heads up?’

I did not reply, but walked on confidently through the zoo, past the gorillas and the African birds, ignoring the pigs and pygmy hippopotami, straight through the jungle-themed children’s playground and out the other side, where the words ‘BIG CATS’ painted on a sign above our heads should have given the game away. Alas, it seemed that my rodent friend was still not seeing the bigger picture, unlike myself.

‘We need to speak to whoever – or whatever – is in charge,’ I said, filling the rodent in on thoughts that it was usually so attuned to. ‘We need to speak to the king.’

‘A lion?’ the rat said, finally twigging.

‘No, not just
a
lion…
the
lion,’ I said. ‘We need to see the biggest, most ferocious lion in the whole bloody zoo. I’ve got a feeling that if anyone knows the answers, it’ll be him.’

But before we could get into the Big Cat enclosure and anywhere near the King, first we had to get past two muscular silverback gorillas stood like bouncers outside a nightclub doorway. I looked at the rat and the rat looked back.

‘Bollocks,’ it said.

‘Indeed,’ I agreed.

‘Any ideas?’

‘I was about to ask you the same,’ I said, generously.

‘You take the one on the left and I’ll take the one on the right?’

‘You’ve got to be kidding! They might rip us apart!’ I said to the rat.

‘So what are we going to do?’ asked the rat. ‘Stand here like pussies or mosey on over there and test the water?’

‘I suppose we don’t really have much of a choice,’ I said, taking a step towards the gorillas.

Although neither one moved to rip me apart, it was enough to send shivers down my spine. I tensed what few muscles I could commandeer just in case I needed to make a getaway, but there wasn’t a hope in hell of it being a quick one. Here I was in the twilight of my life, thinking that the greatest challenge that I would ever have to face was not being able to wipe my own arse and then this happens. I focused on the primary objective: what had happened to London? And somehow that gave me an extra boost of much needed confidence. Right at that moment, I was possibly the only human being left in the city, perhaps even the whole country, or perhaps (dare I even think it?) the entire World. A lot rested on my shoulders, and I’m not talking about my cowardly companion shirking beneath the collar of my anorak. Knowing what true fear tasted like, I cleared my throat to address the gorillas.

‘Good evening, chaps, I’d like to see the King.’

‘King don’t see nobody without an appointment,’ the gorilla on the left said.

‘And do you got one of those, old man?’ asked the one on the right.

‘Actually, I don’t, no,’ I admitted, thinking that it would grease the wheels of due process if I was 100% truthful. ‘It’s funny, but coming here was a bit of a spur of the moment decision. I didn’t even know I needed an appointment, but it’s terribly important that I speak with the King anyway.’

‘That’s what they all say,’ grumbled the gorilla on the left (let’s just call him Left Gorilla from this point on to minimise confusion). ‘No appointment, no deal.’

‘Yeah,’ growled Right Gorilla.

So much for due process, I thought, but I wasn’t prepared to give in just yet. I had travelled halfway across ruddy London to get here.

‘Look, I know you fellows have got a job to do, and that’s all very admirable, but as I said, this is really important. Something terrible has happened and I really think the King might be able to help.’

‘
Help?
’ sneered Left Gorilla. ‘The King don’t help no one…‘specially no
man
.’