The sixth ring. That’s where I am. I’ve counted.
The bouquet at Zalie’s gate: two days later it’s still there, but by then it’s one of hundreds in a terracotta army of candles and toys. Some of them are sophisticated, like garden-centre displays with plaster animals and wind chimes. There’s even a solar-powered plastic water feature designed to look like weathered stone. How long before it can be cleared away? What makes a ‘decent’ interval decent?
It used to be the time it took the soul to reach the place it would spend eternity in. Now it depends on when the binmen come, or when the council decides it’s a fire hazard or blocks the pavement.
But there is this odd thing that distinguishes this particular bouquet: the fresh flowers sit alongside their predecessors on the turn, starting to wilt, the heads drooping and the petals crisping at the edges. The visibly dead bouquet with the for-now-invisibly dead one, I’ve never seen that before – usually the old one is taken away and binned. That’s the form, the language of these things. Here it’s different. It seems that something important is being said that I can’t quite get to.
‘Where now?’ asks Gary once he’s seen that I’ve returned from the place in my head he calls my home.
He is squeezed into the driver’s seat and hulks there, making the car feel tiny. Gary is overweight the way a certain kind of Englishman is. The skin is drum-taut over the fat; there’s no sag or flab like with Americans, the punctured sausage look, doughy bits overhanging collars or leaking out of sleeves, tumbling out over waistbands and swallowing belt buckles. His stomach and arms are hard, and his skin is tight, as if it hadn’t been informed that he was fat. If you pushed your finger along it, it would squeak like a balloon inflated to just before bursting. He’s quick on his bulk, thinks fast, moves fast. He’s made of heft and instinct. And when his instinct fails him, which is not often, his heft never lets him down.
‘Could you drop me at Mrs Snow’s?’
Gary doesn’t like my visits to Mrs Snow, but he’s stopped complaining. ‘A two-crank fantasy’, he calls it. It’s easier to remember than the technical term, folie à deux, he says. ‘Well, two cranks and a ghost.’
‘Shall I wait outside?’ he asks.
I tell him no, it’s late, it’s almost dark, he should get home.
‘Ah yes, home,’ he says, fingertipping quotation marks around the word.
To get to Mrs Snow’s, we have to skirt the outside perimeter of the zoo, half a mile of pale plaster like cracked icing with bricks showing through, topped by barbed wire that straggles along for a while and then gives up. The city degentrifies as we go. The delis become corner shops, the shops selling designer lighting or bespoke wallpaper give way to betting shops and ‘amusement’ arcades. Litter twitches in porches. But the houses are tidy.
The zoo has been shut for eighteen years. When the last polar bear died in 1993, all that was left were a giant tortoise, a few seals, a rhino with melancholia and parrots that kept escaping their tattered aviary to harass the residents of the old people’s home – the Three Ports Senior Lifestyle Community – next door to the school. By then the zoo had been rebranded a ‘sanctuary’ – a way of depressing expectations while simultaneously banking the pathos. Even the staff were on their way out, and by the time it shut its big iron gates for the last time, the average age of those who worked there was fifty-four. It closed down the year I joined the force. I remember the articles in the newspaper, its always-imminent demolition. The photographs of the tortoise and the rhino being sent for rehoming in London.
Built to resemble a space-age city, its clean edges and white concrete are now grey and flaking. The mosaic tiles that decorated its avenues have been stolen or pointlessly smashed. By the end, the animals were kicking chunks out of the walls that held them in. Kids threw stones at the glass panels of the dome at the centre of the zoo’s main square. Its low Tecton buildings are covered in mould and damp. The thin spiralling ramps in the penguin enclosure that once looked delicate as slivers of peel are crumbling. Skateboarders use them, tag them with gang names and slogans. But there is a splendour about it, an optimism. It looks like a housing estate for people who don’t yet exist.
In the 1980s and 1990s the zoo’s airy design provided no protection from the urban foxes that started to move into the city, and which now run free in the parks and edgelands. They killed what they found, usually penguins, puffins and flamingos. The gulls and the rats, the badgers and the crows found their way in, drawn by the free food and the smell, and unbothered by the ragged exotics with which they had to compete.
Predators inside, predators outside: the Lansdale-led Medway Regeneration Company watched it throughout the eighties, kept offering money for the site, boasted of building two hundred flats in the heart of the city. But the owners held fast to their fraying asset. Maybe they loved the animals – that’s what we told ourselves when we were children – but they were probably holding on for the very best price. They held on until it never came.
The Lansdales lost big in the 1992 crash. Their most valuable possession was their name, so they sold it, along with their big shop and their classy outlets in Hastings and Tenterden, but kept enough shares to stay rich. Lansdale’s remained on the shop fronts, the bags and the uniforms. After the Lansdales, it was the multinationals, the asset-strippers, the loss-adjusters, the debt-buyers and the liquidators who went after the zoo. That’s when the whole country learned that you could be fucked paternalistically, by someone you knew and could occasionally catch sight of, and who lived close enough to insult and spit at and piss through the letterbox of, and you could be fucked anonymously, remotely, algorithmically by a calculator and some graphs on the other side of the world.
But what saved the empty zoo was its Grade I listing. No one saw it coming: while the developers argued and the accountants pushed their numbers around, the whole complex was declared a site of unique architectural value. ‘An iconic part of the South East’s built heritage,’ said Historic England. It is untouchable, but also unusable, and stays there like the remnants of a lost civilisation; or sometimes, in the right light, the foundations of a civilisation to come.
‘A hipster paradise,’ says Gary, and he’s right. It’s a big attraction for the urbanists of neglected places. There’s rarely a month when it isn’t being used for photoshoots or filming. Usually sci-fi and noir movies. Once they filmed a Doctor Who episode where the protagonists end up on a planet that is 2050 as imagined by the year 1936. Even the future dates, and the way we imagine the future dates us. Nothing ages you, anchors you to your here and now, more perfectly than your idea of what the future will look like. The zoo reminds us of that; it is the past’s idea of the future.
The gates are open today. There’s a Christmas market there all month, craft stalls and street food caravans. Gary slows down. ‘You ever go when it had animals in it rather than scented candles?’
‘Yes, a few times. Often, actually.’
‘What was it like?’
Vera
Mrs Snow is waiting, as she always is, though not for me.
Her tea is strong and she never puts enough milk in it. Her kettle boils and calls from its hob; an urgent, uneven yodelling, and she lets it fill the house before she sees to it, waits until the sound has visited every room, drilled into every corner of dead air.
She passes me the cup, sits down and says nothing. We are building the silence to speak onto. Partly that’s why I come here, to take silence at its source, to hear her clock tick distendedly. It seems to be adding time to the world, not counting it down. When Marieke is with me, she always records that first, the way a sound engineer takes the room’s hum. ‘There’s no such thing as silence,’ she says, ‘listen: …’
But I hear nothing.
‘Welcome back,’ Vera Snow tells me. ‘It’s been … what? … three weeks?’
‘Three weeks,’ I confirm. Mrs Snow likes the basics reiterated: weather, politics, state-of-the-nation details such as
bus-route cuts, tabloid front pages, neighbours’ rows. ‘No Marieke today?’ she asks. ‘Activity Club,’ I reply. ‘She hates it, and they won’t let her record anything, so she has to play. Pretend to. But what can you do? She admitted last time that she quite enjoyed it, so that’s a step in the right direction.’
Mrs Snow doesn’t have the internet, and the local paper hasn’t been delivered yet, so I’m surprised when she says:
‘You think he did it?’
‘I’m starting to hope so, yes.’
‘And Gary?’ she asks. She has met Gary: ‘Not the sort of Gary that’s short for Gareth,’ she observed. ‘What does he think?’
‘Same I reckon.’
She says nothing, pours a third cup of tea and sets it beside the usual armchair, the one with the doily-fringed square of lace over the headrest. Like they used to have on trains, with rail company logos, and which caught Brylcreem smears, dandruff, scalp-grime.
‘We’re not sure,’ she says, ‘are we?’ She nods at the chair; shakes her head. ‘Not sure at all.’
The reason I don’t ask who the ‘we’ are is that Mrs Snow’s husband is dead, and has been for almost a year. Looking at it from the outside, which I no longer can, she’s in denial. Looking at it from the inside, where I have begun to find myself, she’s fighting a battle with death, and isn’t necessarily losing.
I am part of Vera’s charade now. I’ve started feeling Victor’s presence. Today, his armchair seems a little, well, warmer. More sat on. Imprinted. Lived in. The bookmark in the novel he was reading seems to have advanced a dozen or so pages since I last visited. He was always a slow reader so that isn’t bad going, especially for a dead man. Today I even imagine I can smell him – alive I mean: smell him alive, though I never knew him alive.
Her neighbour claims that he heard them talking, not just Vera herself but Victor: his voice, his kind, careful voice as it trails off.
‘Must have dreamed it,’ said the neighbour uncertainly, ‘or the radio.’
‘Must have, yes.’
‘Happened a couple of times since, mind,’ he looks to me for confirmation or denial and I can’t give either.
One person can be mad. Two can share the same madness. But three? There’s no folie à trois, is there? One is a one-off; two is a coincidence; three is a pattern. Three stands for everything that comes after.
Victor’s budgie, Joey, has taken the loss badly: he has moulted, stopped chirping, and shed all his feathers except on his head. Gary says he looks like a testicle wearing Aztec headdress. He moves slowly, scratches around on the bottom of his cage, climbs laboriously with his beak along the bars. They used to leave the cage open so he could flap around the house. He even has a perch on the mantelpiece, but since Victor went he hasn’t been out.
From the start, Vera Snow knew that her husband’s death need not present any insuperable obstacle to their life together. There was grief, of course, and plenty of it, because she loved him; they had been married forty-eight years and still laughed at each other’s jokes. Especially the old jokes – especially the bad ones. ‘Because it’s important,’ he’d say. ‘Because it’s important,’ she’d agree, ‘because you feel closer to someone over a bad joke, because you each have to bring something to it.’
So there was nothing good about his death, and as he hadn’t been ill there wasn’t even any stoical relief to be had in his suffering coming to an end. No, she thought: you can’t spin this one: it’s bad.
As she told friends: ‘One minute he was there, the next … well, he was still there actually, but dead.’
She remembered the ambulance. No siren, of course. She remembered the lameness of her greeting as the medics came in, her apology for bothering them, her embarrassed explanation: ‘I think he’s dead, I’ve checked, but I thought you’d be able to give me a second opinion.’ Second opinion? What is this? An estimate for a loft conversion? she snapped at herself. You ridiculous woman! A quote for a new bathroom? The way she behaved as if she was taking some faulty goods back to a shop, or had called in a plumber. Dripping tap; U-bend blockage.
No: she didn’t need a ‘second opinion’. Besides, death is the second opinion.
Above all, she thought, death is embarrassing. The fact of it is one thing: it’s absolute and has a cleanness to it that was attractive to a certain kind of mind. Hers, for one – she had always been tidy, liked facts, and realised that facts were hard and clean because the life they were facts about wasn’t. So from the point of view of tidiness she couldn’t really fault death. But the rest of it is untidy: the body, the papers, storage of corpse, booking of funeral, clearing of house, closing of bank accounts. The odd socks, the half-finished book, the half-empty bedside blisterpack of Warfarin. The half-done crossword. Untidy and embarrassing.
The moment, as she heard the paramedics talking when they thought she wasn’t listening, he went from being him to the body. As if in all this cleanness the him had suddenly slunk off on the sly, the part of him that said ‘me’ and ‘I’ and ‘we’. The bit of her that said ‘you’ to him went, too. Death took his personal pronouns away.
She remembered all that, and decided she wanted no part in any of it. ‘This …’ she stopped and thought; she wasn’t very good at finding the right words, ‘this … charade.’ That’s it. Charade.
‘I’m not having it.’
The first thing to do was get allies, and they could be found in unlikely places. They could be found, she thought, in the very places that seemed to be conspiring against you.
Daily life, for example: does the news stop coming on at 1 p.m. because your husband has died? Does the number 31 suddenly stop running, does the janitor (do they still have janitors? she asks herself as she speaks the sentence in her head) padlock the school gates and do the shops shut for an hour, a day, a week?
Though she did, she admitted, wonder whether it would be on the news, the local segment, the news where she was: ‘Victor Snow, aged 84, died unexpectedly this morning at his home.’ Now the news where you are, it would start, and maybe it would come quite late on, after the unsafe playground in Strood but before the retirement of the ninety-year-old lollipop lady in Hythe.
But the fact was that nothing cared about Victor. No thing, and only a few people. The first job therefore was to co-opt (that’s the word she used, not then, but she found it later, when things started to need explaining, to neighbours, to the police, to social workers) the world’s complete indifference and to make it work for her – for the two of them.
So now, in Vera’s house, the clock still ticks, his favourite radio programmes still go out, the detective series he records because it’s after their bedtime and watches the next day after tea is on tonight, as always. They’re still on VHS video cassettes and their telly is one of those 1980s models you only see in skips nowadays. ‘A few dozen of those and you could build a sea wall,’ Victor would joke. Along with Mr Wolphram’s, that makes two VHS recorders I’ve seen lately; more than I’ve seen in twenty-five years. The video player’s little computerised hook was embedded in next week, a line Victor cast into the days to come, the days he’d never see and where he would not be, except in the form of these little digital crampons, fishing lines thrown downriver into a life without him: Tuesday 10 p.m.; Wednesday 9; the late film. Let them stay there, thought Vera, let them reel the future in.
Let the milkman continue to deliver their two pints, their six eggs. Let the dogs bark, let the phones ring, let the freight trains run to the no-place where they go.
Let all that happen, let things go on as always. As always she keeps saying to herself: as always.
I met Vera eleven months ago. Eleven months and eight days, if I’m precise. Maybe the eight days are important; maybe they aren’t. But something has happened in the weeks since I last came here. She is less of a shocked widow and more of a worried wife.
I look at her there, with her tea and her open packet of biscuits, the boring ones Victor liked because they were
good enough to eat but not good enough to eat all of, the packet with the clothes peg she uses to seal it afterwards and keep the biscuits crisp, and I see someone who is just waiting for her husband to come back.
Okay so she’s waiting for her husband to come back from the dead, but she manages to do it with such ordinariness, such a sense of the quotidian, that I expect him to walk in right now, apologising, saying he got held up. He used to like walking around the zoo, looking in sometimes if it was open. That’s it – he must have lost track of the time.
Vera didn’t – to start with – have the air of someone swimming against death’s black tide. She was an old lady who looked a bit like the Queen: powdered and jowly, kind-eyed and hardwired for duty. The sort who dead-headed roses, listened to Gardeners’ Question Time, and left the TV on when she wasn’t watching it – ‘for company’. She has the kind of face you’d find on the banknote of some universal currency.
Something about Vera’s situation appealed to me – the resistance, and the futility of the resistance – so we are now regular visitors, Marieke and I. The house was cold and empty. It feels fuller now, bodied out and warmer. Each time we come, the air feels brighter, more inhabited.
Lynne Forester
Mr Wolphram has deteriorated since yesterday.
‘He’s having a bit of DNS,’ says Gary. DNS is Gary’s abbreviation for Dark Night of the Soul. It’s what we wanted, but still, I am surprised. Wolphram hasn’t seen the press yet, nor had access to a computer or a phone, but he senses it all gathering around him and he is changed. He stutters a ‘Good morning’, gets up, sits down, gets up again; begins a sentence – ‘Could you please tell me how long …? … how much …? … when you’ll …? when I can …?’
Anyway, it’s all the same question in the end, and we all ask it eventually: why me?
He is grimacing in front of what he must know – from the films and TV shows, surely he watches them? – is a two-way mirror. On the other side, we can see both him and the man going mad inside him.
Throw Me to the Wolves Page 9