The Zoo (16 page)

An orderly enters and helps me to my feet.

I'm led to Janet Armitage's office and plonked into a tall-backed leather chair opposite her. It's the most comfortable thing I have sat in in a long time.

Janet is reading a sheath of papers in a brown A4 folder. She doesn't acknowledge me.

I study my nails. They're longer than I normally wear them and encrusted with dirt.

She grunts, a satisfied noise, and closes the folder. Puts it down on the desk, leans back in her chair and folds her arms.

‘How are you feeling?' she asks.

Manners win and I say, ‘I'm okay thank you.'

It sounds ridiculous as soon as I say it.

‘I've been reading your file.'

I nod. I am childishly small in the chair as I swallow a snivel in my throat.

‘You were, are, a very successful man.'

I shrug.

‘Intelligent too.'

I shrug again.

‘There's no need to be modest,' she says, tapping the folder, ‘it's all in here.'

One more shrug.

‘I'm sure you don't want to be in here.'

I shake my head.

‘You haven't spoken to anyone since you got in here. If you don't speak to us we can't help you. And if we can't help you, you won't be able to go home. A man of your intelligence is wasted in here.'

I study the grime under my nails.

‘You've got a family, haven't you?'

A tear rolls down my cheeks. I'm nodding, yes, I have a family. Janet is waiting but she is no more than a shimmer through the mirage of my tears. Through the tears I'm trying to say, ‘it's always someone else gets hurt, always my fault, but it's always someone else who gets hurt', but the words are lost in the spasm of my throat.

‘Are you ready to talk to me now?' Her voice is velvet.

I nod. ‘It all started falling apart because of a television programme.'

The day it begins I pick Harry up from school. He's excited, showing me a picture he's made: shells and pasta and glitter stuck to a sheet of pink crepe paper. He's scrawled his name in huge letters with a blue crayon along one edge.

‘It's a m-m-monkey,' he says, pointing at a shape, which looks nothing like a monkey. I coo at him with parental pride.

When Sally returns from work she is carrying a grey tray piled high with exercise books and spends the evening working through them with a red pen. I make us a stir-fry and Harry, fish fingers. I've been trying to quell my drinking, to come straight home from work, behave like a husband, so when she asks me to open a bottle of wine it feels like we're heading in the right direction.

I choose a bottle of white Burgundy. I place the glass in front of her and take away her plate. She waves a thanks at me, eyes still on the exercise books.

Harry is nagging at her, trying to get her attention, so I sit him on the sideboard and get him to help with the drying of the dinner dishes. He chatters away all the while.

‘The monkey looked at me D-d-dad. Did you see it? When I called its name it looked at me. I-I-I-I'd like a monkey. Do you think we could be friends? I don't talk monkey, but I think it could understand me. M-m-m-maybe I could teach it sign language like at the z-z-z-zoo. Do you think?'

‘I don't know Harry, maybe. It's nearly time for bed. Go and say goodnight to Mum and then I'll read you a story.'

He reaches out with his hands, I help him down and he trots into the lounge. I follow him through. He kisses and hugs Sally.

‘I'll put him down,' I say to her. She mouths thank you.

Upstairs I help him brush his teeth, pull on his pyjamas, tuck him into his bed. He insists on me reading him The Gruffalo for the 30th time. He is all smiles and reciting the words, halfway through though I can see his eyelids going and he's asleep before I finish. I kiss him on the forehead and turn off his light.

Sally's pile of books is going down.

‘Do you mind if I turn the TV on?' I ask her.

‘No, just keep the volume down,' she says without looking up.

I flip through the channels until an introduction stops me dead. The BBC logo on screen and a voice over: an investigation into mineral mining in Nghosa.

Bookmark this moment, Janet, because this is the beginning.

I sit cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV so I don't have to turn it up. It begins in a hospital, an interview with a doctor who treats women who have been the victim of rape and sexual violence. It's the only hospital in the country with the facilities to treat forgotten women. Can that really be possible? One suitable hospital in a nation of millions. There's a 14-year-old girl with a baby on her back, a baby that is the result of gang rape by a group of soldiers. The interviewer talks to a woman whose father's eyes were plucked out before he was hacked to death with a machete because he refused to rape her. Her own eyes are empty, her words unwavering. She is the walking dead. A prickly heat covers my back. The camera cuts to the interviewer. He is a mask of unbelieving horror. He chokes out questions, his shoulders shaking with anger as he talks to a young girl who had a plastic bottle stuck into her, heated with a lighter until the plastic was red hot and molten. Another woman, 19 years old, had her clitoris removed. Bile is rising in my throat. ‘Why does this happen?'asks the interviewer, ‘what sort of man could do this to a young girl?' The answer is matter of fact. ‘Soldiers. Boy soldiers.'

I want to turn the TV off, I want to stop watching, but I can't, I have to see this through.

Behind me Sally slams shut a book and sighs.

‘What are you watching?' she asks.

I think for a minute, consider explaining it, then say, ‘the end of civilisation.'

She yawns.

‘What do you want to do? Watch a film, listen to some music?' I ask.

‘I wouldn't mind going to bed. I'm really tired. Do you mind?'

‘No, of course not.'

Upstairs we brush our teeth and get ready for bed in silence, then lie under crisp duvet and sheets. After a while I can hear her taking deep breaths as if she is about to say something then stopping herself.

‘Are you okay?' I ask.

‘Saturday night. Shall we leave Harry with my Mum. Go out, just the two of us?'

‘Like a date?'

She laughs, and the tension in the room dissipates. ‘Yes, like a date. Maybe go for dinner, then the cinema?'

‘Yes,' I say. ‘I'd love that.'

And I would. Right now, I'd love it. In the dark I roll over and try to find her mouth, miss and plant a scruffy kiss on her forehead. She grabs my hand and squeezes it. We hold hands, her palm small and warm in mine, and then she lets go, rolls over. In seconds she is asleep.

 

Saturday night. I watch her dress, pulling on a flowing black dress then sitting at her dressing table applying make-up. She catches me watching her in the mirror and says, ‘What?' But she's smiling when she says it and I smile back. I wrap my arms around her neck and kiss the top of her head. She squeezes my arm.

Sally's mother arrives, a flurry of mac and scraped back hair, all ageing glamour and pragmatism. Harry explodes in excitement at her arrival, shouting ‘G-G-Gran's here,' running back and forth down the corridor.

‘I wish you wouldn't call me Gran, it makes me feel old,' she says, trying to catch him as he brushes past her.

‘Evening Sandra,' I say, kissing her on the cheek.

Sally comes down the stairs.

‘Oh darling, you look wonderful.'

I have to agree with Sandra, she does. She looks wonderful. Elegant. Beautiful. A whole list of superlatives.

We take a taxi to the restaurant. Butterflies dance around my stomach. The day is closing down. Across the city street lights blink on, shops close, bars open. The Yin Yang of the city.

As the taxi slides through the inky evening, I'm thinking ‘so far so good, so far so good . . .'

The Opera House restaurant is in the Lane area. It's pedestrianised, with boutique shops overwhelmed by the massive new glass shopping centre that I catch glimpses of through side streets as we make our way there. We tentatively hold hands.

A French maitre-d' greets us and leads us to our table. The restaurant is a warren of booths and alcoves, private tables, shadowy, all lit by candles. I hold the chair out for Sally. She folds her dress under her thighs as she sits. In the light of the flames her eyes are moist. I make a show of ordering the most expensive red wine and then feel like a prick.

Around us there is the low hum of conversation. I realise I'm listening to other people and not talking to Sally. She checks her mobile.

‘How's the new account?' she asks, putting the phone in her bag.

So I tell her about the bank and the creative, about how the advert will run and feel like I'm giving a presentation. Halfway through my phone beeps. I check my messages while still talking, no idea what I'm saying, words spilling onto the table. The message, from a withheld number, says,
you're a fucking fraud.
I delete it.

Our dinner arrives.

We eat. My steak is too rare but I don't complain, don't want to make a scene tonight. I drink my wine too quickly, it goes to my head and the darkness, the candles and being here with Sally makes me woozy, like I'm underwater and Sally's face shimmers in the heat from the flame. Over the table, she's in the distance.

We talk about Harry, how he's doing at school, how his stutter is getting on. She moans about her job, about the headmaster, about government cuts and as she's talking I think back to another date. More like a pub crawl. The two of us in a sports bar. Dressed in tattered jeans, her hair lank and eyes rimmed with kohl. Standing talking about Nirvana and Kurt Cobain and arguing whether Bleach is a better album than Nevermind, Sally passionately standing up for Nevermind and me pulling out clichés about Bleach being more real. Her calling me a snob, that it being real has nothing to do with whether it's a better album. Then it's closing time and the bouncer asks us to leave. I've still got most of a pint left and he's telling me to hurry it, so I neck it in one and as her laughter chimes about us both his anger grows and suddenly I'm vomiting the beer onto the table, onto the screen embedded into the table and onto the bouncer's shoe. He's grabbed me by the throat and dragged me down the stairs and thrown me out the door and Sally is punching his back with little balled up fists. I'm face down on the tarmac, tasting the blood from my nose and she's hunched over me, brushing my hair from my face, kissing my eyelids and we're both laughing. We stagger down the hill from the centre. Stop at the park and drunkenly clamber over the fence. The moon's reflected on the boating lake. We fuck on a basketball court, grazing my knees. Then go back to our new home. Our first home – with damp walls and borrowed furniture, a TV on a box, books in a shelf from the wood they pack glass in and mismatched crockery.

We leave the restaurant and walk across town, Sally's arm through mine. There's no weight to it, it might as well be made of air. Outside Lloyds Bank a beggar and a dog lie on a patchwork quilt.

‘Have you got any change?' Sally asks.

I root around in my pocket and pull out a handful of shrapnel, her painted nails pluck two gold pound coins and drop them into his polystyrene cup.

At the cinema we watch a Mexican film about a drug dealer who discovers he's only got a few months to live because of cancer. It's full of haunting imagery of reflections that don't follow the person making them, shadows that move on their own, dead immigrants washed up on a beach like driftwood. It hollows me out and when we leave I can't vocalise my feelings about it.

We take a taxi through the muted city to an empty house.

I've been allowed back in my room. It's been tidied since I left, it smells of disinfectant now. My bed sheets are new and taut and there's a new desk and chair. They must have cleaned fairly recently as only a thin layer of dust has settled on the surfaces. I run my fingers through it on the desk top, drawing veins and road maps and spaghetti and . . . something is wrong. The room is dead quiet.

Flat. No noise at all. Not the road. Not the ward. Not the heating. Nothing. I sit on the bed, looking about. The Zoo back in its place on the windowsill. Someone has tidied it up from the floor and replaced it. Put it back in the wrong order. I get up and stand before it. Nothing. Nothing there. The Zoo is silent. I can't help but smile.

I lie back on the bed and look at the ceiling, try and make patterns from the shadow of the chip paper. My eyes get heavy, then I drift off.

A dream of Harry holding hands with the boy from Monkey Kingdom, they're both talking in a language I half understand.

I wake with a banging headache, a pain in my stomach and a crippling feeling that I've forgotten something. Something important. I try to remember the dream as it fades quicker than I can grasp it and within minutes I'm left with a vague sense of unease and nothing more.

Lying there I remember Beth and want to make sure she is okay, to check that nothing happened to her while I was away. I feel anger at myself for not finding out before. I push myself up against a bass drum in my head, using the wall as support I leave the room. I trace it along the corridor like a blind man and when I reach the day room the gap across the corridor is as wide as the Atlantic, my head as turbulent. It takes me three attempts to get across. Stumbling forward, washed back, forward again. The TV threatens to break my head in two. I rest in a chair at the table, lashed with sweat. At the back of my mind the disarray of The Zoo is a constant. I do a circuit of the room, swaying, keeling, mumbling. She's not there. Panic grips me. Mark is outside in the courtyard. I grab him by the arm, demand if he's seen Beth. He pulls away from me, fear on his face, shaking his head violently. The sun bores into my skull so I narrow my eyes against it. Leaning against the wall I try to motivate my body to move again, battling against the inertia that wants to hold me there. Somehow I'm up and moving again, back through the day room, the world rolling, kaleidoscope colours, my vision like oil on water. Down the corridor again where the cramps hit me, snap me in two like a mousetrap and I'm crawling now, back towards my room, when I see her, near the door, reading the notice board. I make it to my feet, using the wall as scaffold and in jerking, strobing steps approach her. She sees me, tries to hide the look on her face, grasps my elbow and in an urgent whisper says, ‘James, are you okay?' and I get out a grunt, nod, but that causes the world to explode and I feel my legs going again.