by Tobias Hill
She wipes her mouth. It is very hot against her hand. Now she can see where the sky ends and the road begins; the sky is darker. She gets into the car again, to keep warm.
Warmth becomes the most important thing in the world. She can feel where it ends, in her limbs, the points where the blood no longer circulates heat. Cold grows inwards, cell by cell. Like ice on a lake’s surface.
The air congeals in her lungs. She wants to stop breathing, to keep the air out. Her teeth are chattering, then after a while the chattering dies away. It feels good when it stops. Easier. She wants to ask her parents how they are, but her mouth is hardening and the words won’t come.
They keep quiet. They are waiting for the sirens. There is no sound. Only the smell. Snow comes in through the empty windows and settles against their skins, gently as feathers.
She feels a sharp line of pleasure. When she opens her eyes the wolf keeper is there. Very close, very warm. She can feel the hair and skin of him against her under the sheets, his hand between her legs. She moves against him. Kisses the corner of his mouth, feeling her breath quicken. Her eyes are adjusting to the dark, widening.
She wants to know what he knows, what she has said. When she tries to talk he kisses her mouth. He lets nothing out of her but the sound of her breathing. His hand has found a rhythm, not fast, building slowly. It brings her back into herself with a quickness that shocks her. The crash, the frozen cell of the car – it clicks off like a loop-tape. Now there is nothing except the dark bedroom, his neck softer than her mouth, his knuckles grazing gently against her.
It has been so long. After she comes the first time he holds her still for a while. Tightly, the way a parent holds a child that might hurt itself. When she is ready she takes his arms away, kneels over him, takes him in.
‘Anja.’
She is awake instantly. Her mouth is numb, greasy with old alcohol, and her head hurts. The bedroom is bright and cold with electric light. The harsh bell of an alarm grates the air from somewhere nearby. Inside the zoo. She sits up. The wolf keeper is already half-dressed, pulling on shoes.
She has never heard a zoo alarm at night. Animals chitter and scream, traumatised out of sleep. Something roars in the dark. She stands up, trying to remember where her clothes are, where he undressed her.
He is by the window, peering out. Turning his head, ear to the glass. Gauging distance and direction. He is already zipping up his jacket.
‘Wait.’ She shrugs on her bra, sits to pull on leggings. She can feel his eyes on her. She turns away. ‘Did you know the alarms would be on?’
‘Yes.’ He is waiting by the door. His voice is controlled, patient.
‘But you didn’t feel like telling me. The stupid foreign volunteer.’ Bitterness rises up in her, but she keeps her voice down. He shakes his head. It could mean anything, the gesture. That she is wrong, that he is innocent. She yanks at the buttons of her quilted shirt. Her hands are clumsy with sleep and hangover. ‘It’s him, isn’t it? How did they know he’d come back?’
‘It might be him. He has always come back. He had no reason to change. It was just a matter of time.’
The alarm stops abruptly. There is shouting outside, a martialling of people, the maddened flutter of wings. She recognises the expression on his face, the claustrophobia. She waves him away. ‘Go. Go! Get out.’
‘I’ll meet you there.’ He is already out of the door, his voice muffled. When she is dressed she goes to the window and looks down. The zoo is spotlit, shadows of people and animals thrown grotesquely against walls and cages. There is a mill of movement by the main gate, through the trees.
She turns out the light. At the lodge entrance she begins to run, her trainers skidding on the frozen tarmac. The condors hiss down at her from their high cages. Mantling their wings, faces like old men.
There is no one at the main gate. She stands by the ticket booths, listening to the shouts of security guards and night keepers echoing through the Monkey Houses and subway tunnels. From the distance comes the headkeeper’s voice, distorted by a megaphone, cold and mechanical.
There is no traffic along the Outer Circle. She wonders what time it is but there is no clock and she has forgotten her watch. She turns slowly, looking for escape routes. The gate, Reptile House, Aquarium. The mouth of a subway.
Anja jogs towards the subway, looks in. Light sheens the mock-cave paintings and the snow crystallising against tunnel walls. There is a hoar of frost on the sheltered ground, blackened and smudged with footprints. Someone is standing at the far end. Thin shoulders in a green denim jacket. Anja can see the small glow of a cigarette.
‘Alexis.’
He flinches back, dropping the butt. His face is red with cold. ‘Anja, is that you? Jesus, you move quietly. I thought you must be him.’ He trudges up the tunnel towards her.
‘Have they found anyone?’
‘Don’t be silly. He’s probably long gone. Fucking necro.’ He coughs up phlegm, hawks it out.
They turn back. Alexis gets out another cigarette. ‘It’s really freezing, you know. Really.’ Lights up. ‘Listen. There must be a warm place we can look for him.’
She isn’t listening. They are standing outside the Aquarium. The building is hooded with the moulded concrete mountain enclosure. White paint peels from clapboard. Anja walks up the slope to the entrance, presses her hands against the wood. It is perspiring slightly, warm against her cold skin. The door has been left half-open.
She looks back at Alexis. He smiles broadly at her through a pall of smoke and condensed breath. ‘Great, great. No problem.’ They go in.
The entrance room is dark. Alexis finds a light switch, clicks it on. The walls are painted turquoise and the air smells of water, sweetish and dank. On the wall is a sign, FRESHWATER HALL, and a map of the building: engine rooms, service tunnels, underground reservoirs. There is nothing else to see. Alexis swings open the inner doors and goes through.
Anja catches the doors before they close. She stands still, listening. There is darkness, the echoing sound of water, the rippling of tank-light. Alexis is faceless against the bright cubes of exhibits. When Anja moves, the doors swing shut behind her.
Her eyes adjust. She can see the waterlogged lengths of catfish and electric eels, motionless in their narrow tanks. Almost immediately she walks into a bench, the cast iron grazing her legs.
‘Anja? Are you OK? Where are you?’
‘I’m fine. It’s nothing. You go on.’ She sits down, waits for the dark to clear a little. Her breathing is too fast; she forces it slow. There is blood, warm against her calves. Not too much. Swing-doors whisper against the floor, up ahead. She can’t see Alexis anymore. She sits back, yawns in the dark.
The hall is full of small sounds, amplified by water, like a public swimming-pool. Now she can see black pillars between the benches, empty tanks between dim occupied light.
There is a sound in the dark. A connection of surfaces. Anja gets up and moves towards it. Not fast, but walking quickly, arms outstretched. She is aware that her eyes are wide, nocturnal, searching for movement.
She pushes through swing-doors to the Sea Hall. It’s darker here, she feels it against her eyes like a weight. There are sounds everywhere, submarine creatures moving against thick glass. She can make out the caffeine-black eyes of sharks, the pent-up collisions of leatherbacks.
The air is becoming hotter. There is a sign on the doors ahead: TROPICAL HALL. Anja is aware of a constant background noise; a muttering, the tanks silvered with bubbles. She frowns, head down, but there is no sound except the oxygen feeders. Through the swing-doors she can see the next hall, an exit sign lit green at the far end. Alexis is going through, the fire-bar swinging shut behind him. Anja feels cool air on the nape of her neck. She looks back.
There is a stepladder in the second hall, half-hidden between pillars. Anja walks back to it, puts her hand out to touch the fourth step. It sits steady and flat. The wood is slightly damp, and cold. She looks up.
She remembers the green glitter of hummingbird feathers. The zoo echoes around her, an institution of locks and bars and plexiglass. She wants to leave for the first time, and it feels like joy. She starts up the ladder.
The darkness above the ceiling is larger than the hall below. There is a sound of dripping. External light from high windows catches the sides of metal tanks, reservoirs suspended between girders. Anja puts out a hand to pull herself up. The beams are pillowed with dust, her hand sinks in and comes away coated with a grey talc.
She stands up, disoriented. Gusts of air catch at her, hot from below, freezing from the roof above. It makes her feel feverish, so that she leans back against a pillar. She thinks of going back for Alexis, but it is too far. There isn’t time.
There are rungs set into the pillar. She goes on up slowly, off-balance, swaying in the gloom. In the roof is a manhole cover. An old Chubb padlock swings heavy and broken on its clasp. The cover barely moves. Anja sets her shoulders against it. Pushes out into the open.
She is on a mesa, eroded smooth and bare of vegetation. All around is London, glittering and cold in the night. Mice skitter away from her across the steep, icy concrete. The freezing air catches at her breath and drags it away. She stumbles, almost falls. There is a pyramid of light, distant, floating in the sky.
‘The tower. It’s the tower.’
The sound of her own voice brings her back. Altitude lights wink on the pointed summit of Canary Wharf, miles away. There are other towers, closer; a mosque, the metal gridwork of a construction crane. She has come out onto Goat Hill. The abandoned enclosure still smells of mammals, their hair and faeces. Directly below are the Bear Pools, drained and overgrown. To Anja they look like inner-city landfills. She can see piles of rubble and buddleia silhouetted against the bright emergency lights. The zoo’s southern edge is close, a soft stasis of fog across Regent’s Park.
Voices shout, shout back, far off towards the Gibbon Cage. Anja sits back on her haunches, lowering her centre of gravity, testing for balance. The path down is sheer-edged, spiralling artificially from the peak like a seaside helter-skelter. The concrete rock face shines dully with frost. Anja’s left foot starts to move and she digs down with her calf muscles until it stops.
The spiral of the path looks too steep. She closes her eyes against vertigo, imagining the perspective from ground level. When she opens her eyes again, she notices that there is no frost on the path. At least he didn’t fly, she thinks. The frost hasn’t had time to grow back. She tries to smile, the cold sclerotic in her muscles. Her breath coalesces, floating out towards the fog.
She rolls onto her front and starts to slide, gaining momentum too quickly. Against her face the concrete smells of goat-piss. She grips with her whole body, hugging the cold. Cave entrances loom in the rock face, their entrances locked shut behind cage doors. Her jeans against the path sound like sandpaper. She feels pain in her calves where she grazed them in the Aquarium. Something bright flickers past her face. She cries out, throws out her hand towards a cage door. Holds herself there, one hand around the cold iron of a cage bar. Turns her head to see.
It is a fish-scale, frozen to the path. Anja turns her head, trying to recognise the species. The surface is bright silver, fading to steel-blue at the base. Large as a thumbnail, shed from a big creature. Yes. This is also beautiful, she thinks. It feels like an agreement. The water on the scale is already frozen, but still translucent.
Her hand hurts. It doesn’t matter. She lets go of the bar and slides down the last shallow turn towards the Bear Pools. There is a scum of rainwater in the darkness below, frozen around an empty oil-drum. Anja stops herself going over the edge. She kneels, head down, angry at the pain in her hands and legs. Her calves are bleeding again, she can see the frost pinking around her jeans.
‘Sisu.’ She is talking to herself in the abandoned dark. The word means what she loves in herself: single-mindedness, stubbornness, isolation. The rest of her she hates; she would cut it right out, if she could. She feels like crying and grits her teeth against it, snarling. Stands up.
Someone is running away through the fog, quite silently. The park lamp-posts throw back a shadow, a giant projection on the mist. For a moment it seems to be looming closer, and Anja has to stop herself stepping back into the half-empty Bear Pool.
Then she is moving, down the walkway, pushing through the bushes to the rusted perimeter fence. She hauls herself over and begins to run. Eyes wide open, watching the movement of shadows on the prisms of fog.
She moves easily now. Her balance is good. There is a path ahead, running along the zoo perimeter towards the Outer Circle road. Anja can see isolation cages through the fence, grey metal and concrete, shapes huddled in corners. A zoo reduced to its base components. She crosses the deserted road and keeps going.
The fog surrounds her. Now it is no longer static, she can see currents, turbulence. The peripheral movement disorients her and she stops, listening, trying not to breathe. There is still no sound, only the hulking movement of shadows ahead. Eddies of water vapour move back towards her, past her.
The path splits, a switchback going downhill to the Grand Union Canal. Now she can hear something, a rhythm, already fading. Footsteps on the hollow concrete of the towpath. Slow, barely running, moving south-east to Camden and King’s Cross. Anja is almost too close. She makes herself wait, leaning against a tree. Her ragged breathing eases, smoothes out. She tries to remember how far it is to the next towpath exit. When she can’t wait any more she walks down the slope. Her legs are shaking. They ache where they have bled.
The mist is thicker over the water, rolling under bridges and aviaries. The bottle-green water is half-frozen, floes of ice moored to narrowboats. Anja stays near the wall, one hand trailing against the damp brick. Undergrowth brushes against her wet jeans. Her teeth chatter once before she shuts her jaw tight against its own movement.
There is a sign on the bridge ahead, DEAD SLOW SHARP BEND in fluorescent red lettering. Anja remembers it from yesterday, the walk to Camden Lock. She has left the zoo behind, without noticing. The canal widens towards the lock, fog thinning under the hot lights of shops and bars and traffic islands.
She walks into clear air. The emptiness of it makes her naked. She wants to go back into the vapour, where she is invisible, where she can follow turbulence and shadows. Up ahead, a figure climbs the path to the main road. It has a black plastic rubbish sack cradled in its arms. Anja can see it breathing in the still pre-morning air, horse-clouds of breath. She wants to shout out an order or a warning.
She starts to run. It turns to face her and turns again, out onto the street. A truck horn blares up above, discordant with parallax as it passes. Anja pounds her feet against the cobbles, making friction. Her legs hurt again. She doesn’t slow down.
The road is deserted. Traffic whispers in distant streets. Lamp-posts pick out coronae in the residue of mist. Vapour hangs faintly around the shop-signs, BAR BRAZIL, BIK CHIEF. Anja walks into the middle of the high street. From the white line she can see the curve of Chalk Farm Road, heading north.
A red car comes down past Marine Ices, tyres complaining on the salted asphalt. It hoots at her as it passes. She steps back into the road behind it. Paper skitters in the gutter. Telephone wires move with the small tremor of an Underground train. There is a creak and clink of padlock chains. Anja turns to look. It is the gate to Camden Lock Market. The high metal doors have already stopped moving.
She starts to run again. Her feet go from under her. The impact of the road against her shoulder thrusts the breath out of her lungs. She lies on the white line, curled up, waiting for the pain to go. It is hard to get up again.
The cold is back, settling in her limbs. She can feel the e
xtent of her body-warmth. The point where it ends. She walks to the gates, stands close, looks in.
There is a security window off to one side. Blue light dances across the face of a guard. Sunken young eyes and lethargic, pouted lips. On the TV Claude van Damme is fighting two men on a mirror-top drinks-bar. Anja can hear the synthesised punches through the small window. She puts her hands on the gate. Pulls herself up and over clumsily, not looking at the guard. It takes too long, but her hands are numb, the metal speartops feel warm against her fingers. Then she is down, the dirt ground chuffing against her shoes. She walks without looking back.
There is an alley between the blackened backs of two buildings, high and narrow. Damp soot brushes Anja’s shoulders as she walks. At its far end the alley widens to join a path of arches. The railway. Anja follows it round.
Outside the club is wasteground, rough grey gravel stretching to the road. Anja walks with her head down, looking for the place where she found the yellow feather. The gravel is the same everywhere, so that she keeps recognising angular rocks and formations. She sighs and stands back, looking around.
The club lights and music are synchronised. Dub rhythm echoes in the alleyways and lights up the walls of empty buildings. A train clacks past overhead, goods carriages grey and windowless. Anja watches them, silhouetted dark against the sky. It is almost morning.
She turns back to the derelict buildings. There is a terrace of them along the market wall, overlooking Chalk Farm Road. Cracked windows held together with grime. Dead wires trailing out to pylons. Dirt hangs from the wires in clumps.
Anja walks to the third derelict. Looks up at the wires, pulling her hair out of her face. The accumulations of dirt are regular, tough fronds unfolding from stamens, trails of roots. Vegetation growing out along one wire. The pylon is festooned with airplants. Anja remembers the zoo nurseries at night, greenhouses illuminated like long, dim light bulbs. Her eyes travel back along the wire, to the third house.