The Zoo (20 page)

At the table I pull my seat in close, sit on my twitchy hands.

‘Are you okay?' asks Jessica and I nod mutely, aware that she must think I've puked.

They're still wittering about work.

Jessica's hand is still on my leg.

‘Where do you see yourself in 5 years, Baxter?' Hilary's speech is a message in a bottle floating on a boozy sea.

‘Financially stable, with a healthy family,' replies Baxter, puffed with pride.

‘Very admirable. Bloody boring, but admirable. How about you, young lady? What do you want?'

Jessica pretends to be thinking, a manicured nail to pouting lips and then says, ‘I want your job, Mr Perkins,' and the whole table is laughing.

More wine. More wine. More wine. A predictable cycle. A weary predictable cycle which I give in to, all the while trying to suppress thoughts of my wife and son with wine after wine after wine after wine.

 

Then outside. Leaning on a wall.

So far so good. So far so good.

Walking home with one eye shut – the only way to judge distance.

Wrapped up in a half-formed memory of kissing Jessica goodbye, and I'm saying to myself, it was on the cheek, it was on the cheek and that was it, nothing more, nothing more, though I can't be sure and the night is cold and the pavement wet and the reflections of the street lights are like rips in the earth. As I weave and stagger I'm aware I might topple into one at any misplaced step.

Beth stops me in the corridor. I try to steer away from her into my room. She steps between me and the door.

‘Have I done something to upset you?' she asks.

I should tell her, ‘I need to stay away from you because it's marked you'. I should tell her, ‘I'm doing this for your own safety'. I should tell her, ‘the last thing I want to do is avoid you'.

How can I though? Whatever I say it's going to sound like the rantings of a madman. Because whatever The Zoo is, whether it's in me or from without, it does have the power to hurt people. I've seen it. There have been physical consequences, so I can't dismiss it. I have to take its threats seriously. She's waiting for me to reply. Her eyes are wet. I'm hurting her. I really don't want to hurt her. I should tell her.

‘No, you've not done anything,' is what I say instead. I pull short of ‘it's not you, it's me' but it's implicit.

‘Well why then? Why are you avoiding me?'

‘I'm not.'

She wipes tears from her face with the back of her cardigan sleeve.

‘I promise you,' I say, ‘I'm not avoiding you. It's just a place I'm in.'

A cliché again. A crap relationship cliché and I hate myself all over and she looks like she hates me too. There is incredulous disgust on her face. She turns away. I grab her arm. She stares into my face, then looks at my hand. I remove it.

‘Sorry,' I say.

‘I'm getting better. The doctors say I'm getting better. I feel better.'

‘That's great. I mean it, that's really good.'

I reach for her hand. She lets me hold it for a second.

‘And that's another reason why I should stay away from you. I'm damaged, Beth.'

Anger in her. Red hot and deserved.

‘Aren't we all, James? Aren't we all?'

She walks away. I throw futile words after her, about how it's for her own good, about how I hurt people, about how damaged people need to hurt others to feel better about themselves. Until I am just a man on his own in the corridor shouting at a wall.

In the dust at my feet someone has drawn an approximation of a monkey. It's pointing down the corridor.

I stand in front of the plastic sheeting, push my hand through the gap, then my arm, then my shoulder, then step through.

The dust is deeper here, two or three inches maybe. I wade through it, down the dark corridor. Past work-scarred walls, shapes where pictures used to be. The light from the ward, filtered through the plastic, only reaches a few paces in and I'm soon stumbling along taking baby steps into the blackness. I reach about me and find nothing. I am the centre of a black void. Behind me I can only just make out the faint glow of the ward. I inch further forward. The heat is stifling and the beginnings of claustrophobia begin to grip me. I suppress an urge to turn and run back down the corridor, to emerge into the clinical light of the ward. Swallowing it, I press on.

The temperature is rising. A thick, dry heat, it tastes warm in my throat and lungs. Sweat prickles my forehead. My legs become heavier. I want to sit and rest. I want my back against a cool wall. I have no idea how far above me the ceiling is, how far away the walls are from my outstretched arms.

A smell too – sulphur. I gag, retch, hold my hand over my mouth and nose, but it finds its way around my fingers and fills me.

This seems to drag on for hours, small steps forward as the pressure of the heat pushes down on me.

Then there is a change of quality in the light ahead. A slight blue tinge. Then that grows. Develops into a patch of light, a patch of light that grows into a defined shape, into a jagged hole of brightness.

I stumble into it, through a gap in a wall. Torn teeth edges where bricks have been punched through the wall. On the other side the light is too bright to define any shapes, a pure white light that hurts my eyes. I hold my hand up. The heat is intense. My palm bristles.

I climb through.

I know it's wrong, but it pains me to watch Harry butcher GTA. It pains me the way he can't control the bike. The way he makes the character walk into the wall and round in circles. I want to take the control back from him and continue with my game, but he's perched on my knee and trying to snatch the controller off me.

‘I w-w-w-want a go, Daddy. Let me drive the car.'

‘There's more to it than driving the car, Harry. It's not for little boys, this is an adults' game.'

‘It's a computer g-g-game. Computers are for children.'

I can't fault his logic. Every wife and girlfriend in England will agree with him.

The cat joins us, paws at my leg and then, resting its front paws on me, settles down.

I'm tired from the night before. My body is a maze of aches. The inside of my head feels like it's full of wire wool. I want to be left alone.

I realise Sally has come in from work when I hear her tut behind me. She goes through into the kitchen and clatters around, then comes back into the lounge.

‘Can I have a word with you please?'

‘Uh huh,' I reply without looking around.

‘Out here.'

I look around now. Hands on hips, pulling off the angry school teacher look perfectly. I pick Harry up and dump him down on the carpet, shooing the cat away. I follow her through into the kitchen. She leans her elbows on the surface and talks in a hushed insistent tone that she is battling to keep down, because she wants to scream at me.

‘What the fuck do you think you're doing?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Letting him play that filth?'

I roll my eyes and lean back against the work surface.

‘Fucking hell Sally it's a computer game.'

Her fists clench and unclench.

‘It's a disgusting computer game. We agreed. We've got rules. There are things he can and can't do. We agreed. We're supposed to be a team.'

‘Get a grip. It's a game. It's just a game. He's not hurting anyone.'

‘It's a game where you can drive around indiscriminately killing people, running children over and raping prostitutes. It's not something I want our son to see. We've discussed this,' she is rigid with anger.

‘He doesn't know what it means.'

‘Of course he fucking does.' The
fucking
is a hiss between her teeth.

‘Okay. Okay. I've had a hard day. I don't need this right now. I'll go and turn it off.'

‘You've had a hard day? You've had a hard day? You've struggled to get through work because of fucking hangover. That's not a hard day. Working in A & E is a hard day. You don't even know the meaning of a hard day,' she leans back, runs her hands through her hair. Breathing out heavily through her nose, almost a snort, she appears to be counting under her breath, her expression a flickering montage. Hatred. Anger. Disappointment. Love. I understand them all. Because I feel them for myself too.

‘Look,' I say, ‘I'm sorry. I didn't think. I'll go and turn it off and I won't let him near it again. It's not like he can't see all this on TV anyway.'

‘Good God. I can't believe that just came out of your mouth. You of all people. There's a difference between watching a news report and glamourising it in a fucking game. You know this. Why am I having to tell you?'

I just want this over. I just want to have peace. I haven't got the energy to argue with her and inside I know she's right. But there's stubbornness too. A sense of injustice that she's talking to me like a child. I am petulant and stupid and hungover and I want this to stop.

‘I'm going in there now and I'm going to turn it off and sit him in front of Teletubbies or something fluffy and nice. I'll never play the game in front of him again. Happy?'

She swallows heavily.

‘No,' she says, ‘no, James, I'm not happy.'

I know she means more than this. I leave the kitchen before she has a chance to vocalise it.

 

After work the next day. Everyone already shuffled out at 5.30. Just Collins and I huddled around the MacBook Pro. We run through the credentials pitch. He is nodding as I show each slide, saying okay to prompt me to move forward. I let him control it, can see that he likes it, see the earnestness in each nod of his coiffed head. I scroll though examples of past work and, while a video of some PR we got for an energy company is running, I slip away to the toilets. I lock the main door behind me, then go into the cubicle and take out a plastic sealy bag of chop and trace a lumpy line on the cistern. I'd called for it earlier. Feeling tired and weak and not knowing how I was going to make it through the rest of the day, I'd nipped out and met my man in a local car park. He pulled up in a brand new Audi RS3 and I started to take the piss out of him for being conspicuous, then saw the growl behind his smirking lips, paid him the money and fucked off. A couple of lines off my car owner's manual and the day didn't seem too bad. Now, huddled in a cubicle at work, I hold the bag up and shake it. More than half gone. Still, no problem, just got to get me home. I check my face in the mirror, hold open a bloodshot eye with my index finger and the world blurs.

Through a world of mist I see the cubicle door begin to move. So slowly at first that I don't think anything of it. Then it slams, my body jolts with shock and I poke my finger into my eyeball. Inside the cubicle I hear the window being opened. I inch over to the door and with a shaking hand try to open it. Can't budge it. Locked from inside.

‘Collins?' I ask, ‘Who's in there?'

No-one replies. I try the door again.

I'm ice cold. The airs on my arms are stood straight up. Crackling electricity in the air.

I'm frozen. I know that I need to do something.

My breath fogs in the air in front of me as thick as cigarette smoke.

I half-heartedly ram my shoulder into the door. Then the window inside slams shut and the door swings open. There's no-one inside. I clamber onto the seat of the toilet and push the window open. It's only about 40 cm deep, certainly too small for anyone to fit through, but as I peer out the boy breaks from the shadows and runs across the car park. In the dusk he looks back up at me, his face is all smile in the murk, and he raises his left hand, index finger extended, then is gone. I shout after him. Words spat into the growing night.

This can't be real. This can't be real. Working too hard. Not sleeping enough. But, this cannot be real.

I slump back and sit on the toilet seat. Hold my hands up. They're shaking. Partly from the gak, partly from fear. I squeeze them together, compose myself and return to Collins.

‘This is looking good,' he says.

‘Should do. It's tried and tested. Is there anything you want to add to it?'

My words are lies, trying to hide what I've just seen.

‘No, I don't think so. She knows us. It's more of an introduction to the others there.'

‘Okay. Set then?'

‘Set.'

‘I might nip over the road for a swift half. Do you fancy one?' I can't believe I'm choosing to spend my leisure time with him, but I'm pretty shaken up and can't face going home, even though that's exactly where I should be and I know it.

‘Nah. Thanks though. Going round to a friend's for dinner.'

‘Okay. I'm going to stick around for a little while and answer some emails.'

He says goodnight and leaves. Now I'm in the office alone, it suddenly seems dark and cold and I find myself shivering.

In my private office I take the bottle of JD and a tumbler from the shelf and pour myself a heavy glass. Already the effect of the line is dissipating. Cocaine. Such a teasing bitch of a drug. She grips you so quickly, promises so much then leaves you just as quickly. A one-night stand of a drug. I tap another line out onto to my desk. Roll a business card and hoover it up, run my finger over the residue and rub it on my teeth. Chemical taste – the numbness of novocaine a petty insult at the end of it.

‘Time to go home,' I say under my breath. Steel myself. Gulp the JD down. Squeeze my eyes against the aftertaste.

The main office is lit by the glow of the MacBook Pro screen. I turn on the corridor light and then make my way over to the laptop.

The laptop is still showing the presentation. But in the centre of the last slide the words read ‘
Your real life is at home and you'
re here jumping at shadows. Fucking joke.
' I angrily delete them. Collins wouldn't, would he? Probably would. But I'd have heard him coming back in. I hold down the power button and the screen turns blue. The fan whirrs. Without the glow of the screen the office is sharper, the shadows deeper, the windows gaping possibilities. I shudder. Run to the corridor, pull the door behind me, struggling to get the key in the lock. I have a sense of something behind me and can't help but look over my shoulder. Nothing there but the canyon of the stairwell. I take the stairs two at a time. I'm out of the fire door, not even waiting for it to shut and when it does the clunk makes me start, stumble, then I'm opening the car door, falling into the seat, clicking the central locking shut. I laugh. Ridiculous. You're ridiculous. I start the engine and make my way home on roads which are slick with rain and speckled with the spit of reflections.