by Tobias Hill
‘Yes, that’s right, I’m sure every keeper in the zoo knows that.’ She crosses her legs, sits forward. ‘My name is PC Phelps. I’m here to find out what else you can tell me. Plural you. No need to be nervous, you’re just –’
‘Helping with your enquiries.’
Phelps laughs shortly between her teeth. It sounds like paper tearing. ‘That’s exactly right. You’d know, of course. I noticed you helped the Finnish authorities with their enquiries for eighteen months, yes? So.’
She looks down at her papers again, reading. Anja unzips her jacket. She doesn’t take it off. It’s hot in the small room. She thinks of the wolf keeper. His hand, warm against her cheek. She concentrates on that.
‘So?’ Phelps is looking at her again. A big, soft-featured, sharp woman. ‘What did it look like, this liger? Tell me about it.’
‘You must have photos from Johannesburg.’
‘Well. You tell me. You’re the trained zoologist.’
Anja shrugs. ‘Ligers are the product of lion-tigress impregnation. They’re zoo animals – unnatural. In nature the parents would never meet. Lions and tigers are two versions of the same idea, evolved on different continents.’
The policewoman nods, only half-listening. Anja watches the wallclock as she talks, the blank movement of its face. It’s already past noon. She makes herself sit back, hands loose in her lap.
‘The animal that died yesterday was fairly typical – darker and larger than either parent. Probably infertile. Very large.’ She remembers the yawning leer, the orange crescents of the eyes. ‘Heavy. How was it moved?’
‘Electric car.’ Anja imagines one of the zoo buggies whining through the deserted dark, the flurry of panicked animals.
‘There are security cameras. It must all be on tape.’
Phelps stands up without answering. Walks round the desk. Wind whistles outside. She frowns out into the snow. ‘Ms Kivinen. You do fairly menial work here, don’t you? And on a voluntary basis. What is a scientist like you doing in a job like this?’ She smiles back into the room.
Anja sits without moving. ‘I needed somewhere to live.’ They watch each other in the underlit room. ‘Also I am only half-trained. No use. Like a doctor who can cut but cannot sew. I never graduated.’
They are close together now. Phelps has stopped smiling. It makes her look kinder, younger. ‘Why?’
‘My parents died. Nothing exciting.’ The policewoman nods. The papers are exposed and white in her hand. ‘A car crash. You must have details. I didn’t want to stay in Finland.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Phelps’s voice is soft. Anja wonders if she has been trained in emotional awareness. For a moment she feels like crying anyway. ‘Anja. I don’t care about your record. I just want to finish this job. If this liger stays missing, your zoo could be liable for a lot of money. But you’re the one who cares about it, not me. Help me. Don’t you want to do something?’
Anja stands up. The chair legs grate away from her on the linoleum floor. The need to act rises up in her like happiness. ‘It’s a big place. Things go missing all the time. One dead cat more or less makes no difference.’ She zips up her jacket. ‘Now I would like to go.’
Phelps leans against the desk. She sighs, leafs through her papers. ‘Of course.’ Quite suddenly she looks bored, the eyes going listless with exhaustion. ‘Send in the next one, please.’ She doesn’t look up when Anja leaves.
The security guard is called Les. His breath smells of pickled herring and smoked mackerel. He leans over Anja to rewind the video, hand painfully heavy against her thigh.
‘Mickey Mouse is good, that’s got all puzzles in it, not just shooting and stuff like in Doom. Doom’s seriously diabolical. Here.’ He stops the tape and presses Play. Smoke from Alexis’s cigarette curls into Anja’s eyes. She sits closer to him anyway. The wall is full of televisions.
‘Raz – his mum’s Indian he told me, not corner-shop Indian though – it was him what was up here last night. He’s in a bit of trouble, as it goes. For not noticing. He’ll keep his job, though, definitely. Definitely. It weren’t a living animal or nothing.’
The nearest screen comes on in a wash of white static and noise. Les adjusts a dial. On the ranked monitors are images of the zoo in grainy black and white: the turnstiles, the members’ gate, a roundabout with moulded goldfish and giraffes. Anja knows every scene, but the camera-angles make them oddly alien. Child-faces in the afternoon crowd look up, wave.
‘Does your head in at night. All the screens. I play Doom, only just to keep my eyes open. The adrenaline buzz. But Raz, he sleeps mostly. Crashes out. Give us a fag, Alexis. Cheers.’
A new picture blinks on. It is distorted by static and sharp contrasts of light. There is a skip full of broken caging, a drab laboratory entrance, the tail-end of a sign: R1 (FELINES). Shadows of caging criss-cross the doorway. An electric zoo buggy whines in from the left and coasts out of sight behind the skip. The movement leaves after-images on the close-circuit screen, soft and grey.
There is something coming out of the shadow, standing. Big in the bone, but full of small movements – head cocked, listening, hands touching the skip, the cages.
Anja feels a rush of emotion that leaves her smiling. There – he’s real, he was here, she thinks. She looks round at Alexis, wanting to share her exhilaration. But his face in the dark is white and twisted with something. Fear or repulsion.
‘The feather man,’ says Les. His chair creaks in the dark.
‘Don’t be a wuss. It’s just some sick bastard, you can see it in his face. Do you not see his face?’
But she can’t see his face. The light picks out nothing except the sheen of a head, almost hairless. The figure lumbers round the side of the building. Two minutes later it comes out of the entrance door with a black plastic bag under one arm. It goes back in, moving with the huge oil-suppleness of a bear. When it comes out again it is crouched, dragging something down the lab steps, briefly into the light.
It is a roll of plastic sheeting, some kind of floor covering or a shower curtain. On the bottom step a massive forepaw catches and pulls against the ground. The figure looks back. The camera’s digital readout flashes 3.09 a.m. across the abstract black-white face. There is nothing visible except a circle of darkness, the distorted socket of an eye.
The picture cuts without sound to a long black hall, lit with rippling light. The Aquarium. The juxtaposition is disturbing; Anja takes a quick breath, feeling the rhythm of her own heart muscle against her lungs.
‘What happened?’ Her voice sounds raw and angry. The figure turns in her mind, face obscured, half-animal in the half-light. Anja wants to find him. She feels she would recognise him anywhere. She feels Les shrug next to her. The chairs smell of old cigarettes.
‘It switched. Different camera. That’s what close-circuits do.’ She pushes back her chair, walks to the window, pulls open the blinds.
Outside the snow has stopped. A heron flies low over the building, bow-necked and reptilian. Anja bites her knuckles, staring out at the hunchback skyline of aviaries and concrete mountains.
‘Anja?’ Alexis’s hand is fragile against the hard leanness of her shoulder.
She thinks of the wolf keeper. His voice, the smell of iron on his hands. But most of all she thinks of a figure in the dark, clumsily shaped but moving with grace. The green dust of hummingbird feathers. She wants to touch and talk to them, the people who have brought her here. It has been a long time.
‘She all right?’
‘Sure, she’s fine. I’ll see you, Les, yeah?’
‘Yeah. Later.’
She turns round. ‘I’m fine.’ But Alexis is already out into the corridor and Les is putting on headphones. There is no one here for her. These are not the people she is looking for.
She walks along the canal path towards Camden Town. The backs of houses and undersides of bridges are scrawled with black graffiti. It reminds her of the video, shadows of caging against white concrete walls. Harsh in the thro
wback of arclights.
There are children in Chalk Farm Road, running between the traffic-lanes. The screech of tyres disturbs Anja; she forces her hands hard into their pockets, walks with her head down. The children are screaming laughter. ‘Slow snow! Look, slow snow!’ Cars hoot and flash their lights in the four o’clock gloom.
Anja looks up, surprised out of herself. The snow has begun again without her noticing, fine white flakes drifting down. She can measure the sky in them, looking back and up until it makes her dizzy and she leans against the market wall. She can hear the children, but already they are out of sight.
Camden Lock Market is deserted. Anja walks through the rambling warehouses and alleyways towards the railway line. The early darkness makes her think of the Scandinavian winters, havens of bright music and electric lights and drink. She wants a drink so much.
The railway looms ahead of her, brick archways rising up over shut-down weekend market-stalls. There are signs nailed to the crumbling brick: FRIDAYS = GRUNGE NITE + CLUB DJ MISTAH KIPLING. Arrows pointing to the last arch, the end of the market. Anja follows the arrows. The entrance to the club is painted in psychedelic orange and green swirls, locked-up and unlit. Anja comes to a stop outside, the momentum going out of her. She doesn’t know what to do next.
She turns round, looking for the toilet cabins. It takes her a few minutes to find the place they were parked, halfway between the club entrance and the road. The ground is slightly discoloured with motor oil, less littered.
She kneels down. Gravel grinds against her knees. The snow hasn’t settled, but the light is going. In thirty minutes there will be no colour left to see, only the unnatural neon-blues and greens of restaurants and late-night shops. And colour is important now. Anja concentrates on the red of an impacted Coke can, the yellow sheen of a McDonald’s carton. Her eyes are good, she trusts what she sees. Taking small, straight steps, she begins to cover the ground.
It takes quarter of an hour and she finds nothing. Her knees ache when she stands. She looks around but the market is still deserted, no one is watching. There are lights in the condemned houses along the railway, but Anja can’t see people there. She is sweating inside her jumper despite the cold.
She’s running out of time. Squatting down, Anja begins to search again, moving out towards the club, the road, the derelict houses and warehouses.
There is a feather caught under a broken wedge of breeze-block. Sharp and slender, long as her thumb, the colour of egg yolk. She gives a short shout of laughter as she picks it up. Two fire-engines go past on the road; she holds the feather up against the glare of their siren-lights. It is exotic as saffron in her hand.
The lights pass. The laughter goes out of her. She turns, looking off towards the dead-ends of brickwork and the blank windows of empty houses. She knows what she knew days ago; he was here. She has learnt nothing. The yellow feather is useless, it leads nowhere.
Anja holds it tight in her fist. Tomorrow she will be back to look again. She grins, walks. The air outside the market gates smells of street-food, sweet and sour. Her stomach growls. She crosses the road, towards the shops, moving carefully between the hard momentum of cars.
There is nothing sharp enough to gut with except the bread knife. Anja uses that. She cuts open the turbot on its blind side, reaches in for the intestines, cleans it out. She grates the white root of a horseradish into a bowl of green mustard and dill. Crushes fresh green peppercorns. Water simmers on the cooker. She melts butter, brushes the fish-skin. Scrubs black mineral earth off the silvery skins of new potatoes.
The kitchen windows are cladded with condensation. Passers-by outside would see nothing except her movement, his motionless bulk. And there is no one outside. Mist comes off the Grand Union Canal, drifting between animal cages.
She is cooking for the wolf keeper. It has been a long time. Eating has become a private thing. Privacy is all she has. She works with her back to him. They talk a little.
‘All this.’ He clears his throat. ‘It looks expensive.’
‘I have money.’ She cuts smoked salmon and smoked sturgeon into glass-thinness, folds them on rye bread. Scatters them with chives, drips them with the juice of limes.
‘You don’t need to work. Here, in the zoo.’
‘No.’ The flatfish cooks, turning from translucency to opacity, the skin crisping. She opens the fridge, takes out the wine from its bright glare. ‘I don’t need to work anywhere.’ She opens the first bottle, pours. Two long glasses. They frost instantly. ‘I told you why I’m here.’
‘To get away.’
She turns to him. Holds out a glass. ‘Yes.’
‘You didn’t say from what.’ His eyes are lucid, pale brown. Canine. She takes a long drink, letting the alcohol warm her. For a moment the taste makes her nauseous, so that she stands, waiting for it to pass. Then there is only warmth. She shakes her head.
‘Later. First let’s eat.’
The food is good. She enjoys it and the way he works at it, head down, face open with concentration. When there is nothing left he leans back against the wall and grins, easing the weight off his stomach. They sit on the floor of her room, between the uneven piles of books. Traffic passes on the Outer Circle road. She watches the red glare of tail-lights crawling across the ceiling, fading out. For a while they don’t talk. It feels good.
‘You went looking for the feather man.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you didn’t find him.’
‘No.’ The pale yellow wine seeps into her bones. She leans back against the side of the bed, cradling her glass, eyes half-closed.
‘It might not have been him. The liger. There is a market for that kind of carcass.’
She opens her eyes. ‘So the feather man needs money. Did you see the security video?’ He watches her for a moment, then away. He nods.
She remembers the ligerskin, barred with light and shadow. ‘It was him. And the animal was beautiful. Another beautiful thing.’ The wolf keeper nods again.
‘Why do you want to find him?’
She doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t know. He holds up one hand, taking the question away. Leans forward to pour out the last of the wine.
‘I am here because I killed my parents.’
She wants to say it very quietly, so that she doesn’t have to hear. He looks at her as if she has shouted into his face. She stops watching him. Some time soon he will start to swear, try and attack her. She tenses her crossed legs, ready to hit back. Swills the wine in her glass.
‘We drink a lot in my country. Not this, though. Wine is too fine. But you’ve been there, yes? So. Do you know why we drink in Finland?’
He puts down his glass. She keeps talking. Fast; she is getting out of breath already. ‘We drink to get drunk. Crayfish season, midsummer, midwinter – especially winter. Because it cheers us up. Because we miss the light.’ Her left eye is stinging with tiredness. She kneads it with her fingers, leans against the hand.
‘It’s a long season to go without light. Drinking made it better. For me. Without drink, I couldn’t do anything. When I was drunk, I could remember what summer was like – the fenlands, the field-flowers. All the colours. In winter everything was dull. The sea was the colour of coal. Blue-black under the ice. When I was small I thought it was all that colour, like handfuls of ink. But my father brought me some back from the rigs. Norwegian sea. In a plastic bottle.’
She looks up at him, as if this is important. It isn’t important. It’s just that she doesn’t know where to begin. Nothing is more important than anything else.
‘It was only black from a distance. My mother taught me why. The rules of light. Diffraction and diffusion.’ She sees sky over Edith’s house. The sky is blue from distance. It is the colour of flags snapping taut at Helsinki South Harbour and Tar Island.
‘My father brought me things. My mother taught me the rules. Now you know my parents. He bought me a beer, she taught me to drink. He bought me a car, she taug
ht me to drive.’
She sits with her mouth slightly open, past talking. She goes over it in her head. Later the wolf keeper’s arms are round her, he is whispering in her ear, something. But now there is only
the smell of blood and pines. It makes her want to vomit. She can taste vodka, the clean abrasion of it coming up from her guts. She is hanging from the seatbelt.
She is hanging from the seatbelt. The catch is on the ceiling. It takes too long to find it (too long for what?). She releases the belt and falls onto the hard car roof. The interior metal is slithery with frost. Glass crunches into her hair, she can feel it, cold pain against her scalp.
She opens the door and pulls herself out flat. The hill up to the road is steep and she lies back against the car, looking up at the firs, the white-green wood shining where they have been broken. Her father was telling a joke but she can’t remember the punchline. Only laughter, the steering-wheel moving under her lax hands. Anja wishes she could remember the punchline.
The smell comes to her again. She retches but nothing comes. It is already too late to stand up, she knows. She stands up anyway. The car creaks, it rolls away from her. Down the hill, into the green trees.
She follows it down. Now the car looks right again, only the windows are broken. Her parents in the back of the car. They are holding hands. They are sprawled together – no. They are making love in the back seat. Anja can’t see their faces. She looks away. They make her bored.
She tries to remember where they were going. Was it home? It is important to remember. For the police and the ambulance to know. Drunk drivers go to prison. Every Finn knows the law. It must be important to know where she was going, where she was coming from.
There is no noise, the hiss of the engine has died. Sometimes snow falls down from the wings of firs. It sounds like breathing. Anja imagines sirens. Sometimes it is the ambulance to take her parents away. Sometimes it is the police coming for her.
There are no sirens, only the sweet-mint smell of blood and pines.
She can’t breathe. She crouches down against the car and vomits alcohol. She isn’t very drunk any more. In winter she is always a little drunk.