Denial and feigned hurt, my mind scurrying underneath, looking for excuses, for a way out.
Bamidele passes me a magazine. A finger on the advert. He hands me a pair of scissors. I hack it out, hack it and tear it. He points at the wall. Gesticulates at my hand, I hold it out. He takes the scissors from me and draws the blade across my palm. Presses the advert onto the wound and then crosses the room, sticks it to the wallpaper with the blood. I watch crimson seep through the image. Watch it stain the smiling face of the happy couple. He leaves the room. I can hear him clattering about in the kitchen. I pick up the bottle of red wine, push the cork through with my thumb and take a deep, bitter slug.
Thinking back.
Sally holding her phone out, stabbing at the screen. Taking it from her, knowing even then what it was. Looking at the text, seeing the image. Remembering the flash, remembering the chase. Seeing my number attached to it. Denial. Complete denial. All the while I’m scrabbling to unravel it. To understand it, how the text came from me. Her palm stinging my face. The tears on her face.
Bamidele is back with a pile of papers and magazines. He slams them down in front of me, then the scissors on top. He turns the TV on, and the images spill out of the screen onto the walls and fill the lounge. We are amongst them – figures and words about us, threatening us from the corners of the room. Then it is there. The advert. The smiling faces, the bone white teeth. Instinctively I reach for the remote. He snatches it away. I grab for it again. He skips away, too agile for me, I stumble to the TV, turn it off, but the images are still there on his face, dancing across his dark skin. He’s laughing. I take another slug of the wine and squeeze my eyes shut.
Thinking back.
Sally shouting at me demanding that I leave. Me refusing. My home. My home. Our home. And her screaming no, no, this is no longer a home, you killed it. She’s slapping me, stinging blows on my face and I take them, each one jolting my neck. Taking them, wanting them, welcoming each jarring blow.
Sally throwing the toys at me. The gifts I asked Ruth to buy. Shouting, ‘You can’t buy him, you can’t buy us.’
It’s over.
Sally is gone.
Harry is gone.
And I am alone with Bamidele.
I pick up the scissors and take a magazine from the top of the pile. Flicking through, it doesn’t take long to find the first advert.
The images dance across Bamidele’s teeth as he laughs at me.
72.
The name on the post-it is ALAN. I scroll through The Zoo and try them all for size, all along knowing where he should go.
The Pirate is the first of The Plastics and the last of The Figurines. His sheen and gloss is peerless amongst them. This is the reason that he is first, because he is quite childlike in his rendering, certainly nowhere near as delicately drawn as The Knight. It is his sheen that saves him. As Head of The Plastics he has his own subjects to lead, but answers to The Metallics.
Tipping up the base of The Pirate I slide ALAN’S name underneath. My fingers burn as I remember dropping him and I want to apologise.
Janet is all encouragement. All professional smile.
Next.
COLLINS.
The Zebra by contrast is squatter, his flanks broader and less elegant. Although his markings go some way to compensate for his lack of finesse, they can only go so far. In those Rorschach stripes I see moths, a crow, a rictus smile, a betrayal and the end of days.
The Zebra’s back is not strong enough to hold the weight of a man. He cannot carry us like the Horse can and he tries to make up for it with pretty patterns.
Collins through and through. No hesitation. Collins is The Zebra.
Janet taps her finger in the gap.
‘What is this for?’ she asks.
She knows. I told her. I fucking told her.
‘I told you,’ holding it down. Biting it back. The Ape will have to wait, so I scan the remaining names.
Mine. SALLY. LOU. JESSICA. BEN. HARRY. BERKSHIRE.
The Knight. The Ape. The Dog. The Chicken. The Soldier. The Rhino. The Lion.
I take the easy option and pick up BEN.
Put him straight under The Dog.
Maybe if The Dog was a Collie or a Husky then he would be higher, but he is a mongrel, the sort seen scavenging on the streets of a South American city. The sort seen trotting behind malnourished teenage gang members, being chased away from bins with a stick, only to return when the humans have left.
He came from the wolves, but he is tamed, broken and beaten. He runs alongside us, docile, friendly and not as intelligent as we like to think.
We train him to walk us when we are blind, but we also dress him in human clothes and carry him around in handbags as trophies to our ego. He is fashion and as such is utterly ridiculous.
Poor Ben. He knew and he tried to warn me. He gave me the opportunity to stop it.
Something smashes in the hallway. The sound of raised voices and running feet. I swivel my head round. When I look back at Janet she hasn’t moved. She’s used to it, immune to the noises of the ward.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ she says, ‘someone else will sort it. We don’t need to worry about it. This time here is just for me and you. Carry on when you’re ready.’
The Knight.
He is about fighting for an ideal, for a belief even if that means committing wrong in the process. He is the muscle behind a cause. The horrific violence that only unthinking loyalty can deliver.
LOU?
The Knight has a sword as his peacemaker, a long sword. And he leans nonchalantly on it as he looks off into the distance, the wind whipping his dark shoulder-length hair up around his face. It is this alertness that makes him The Cowboy’s lieutenant; he is surveying the horizon, protecting The Cowboy’s domain. But you have to ask whether he is happy with this position, whether that alertness is something more sinister.
SALLY?
It could be either. He could be either.
‘Can I put two names to this one and come back to it?’
‘Of course,’ she says, ‘whatever feels right.’
I want to tell her that none of this feels right. That this could anger The Zoo.
73.
The TV is off. The phone is off. Still, I am drowning in the messages. They fill my lungs and my throat until I am gasping and gagging and struggling for air, my broken ribs stabbing at me.My words makes up a blood stained montage on the wall of the lounge.
Days have gone by.
Time means nothing.
Bamidele brings me magazines and newspapers and fliers. I cut them out and stick them in my gallery with my own blood. He tells me of the success of the campaign. How my poisonous words have increased sales, the public impression of the bank has improved. I have been successful in my work. I can just imagine the smiles and the congratulations. In the past I would have been pleased with what I have done.
Instead I scream at a wall of print.
As I piss thick yellow urine into a stained bowl I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I am a ghost. Newspaper print spells out reversed threats on my white cheeks.
I search the house and find all the transmitting devices, pile them up, full of horror at the amount of them. At the ways that the insidious little words and slogans and propaganda seep into our lives. At the drip, drip, drip of all this poison. Even there, in the mound, I can hear them whispering to me, telling me secrets and making me promises. From the garden shed I get a crowbar and an axe and set about them. Even when they are reduced to an electronic graveyard the words are there.
Once there are no transmitters left, Bamidele tells me to go outside. I’d forgotten there was such a thing. We stand on the threshold and wait for the world to slow down before stepping out onto it. The pavement is cold to my bare feet. The wind stings as I breathe it in.
The sound is almost unbearable. The air crackles with it. The hum of electricity in the overhead wires. The voices coursing down the phone lines
. The megabytes screaming through the cables under my feet. I spread my fingers wide and force them through the viscous mobile conversations about me. I can see the traces left by my hand amongst the words. Amongst the breakups and the arguments and the laughter and teasing and emotional confessions, through the day to day chatter, through the confusion and collusion, through the monotone and through the diatribe.
I stumble past a string of 6-sheets, each one with my face on them. Each one taunting me. My face. Grimacing at me. Saying, you know. You know.
As I get nearer to the city centre it’s worse. People walk around me, avoid my gaze and there is always the noise of the messages. They increase, and I’m washed along in them. My feet no longer need to move. I am swept along in the river of messages. It washes me up in front of an electronics shop, where I press lacerated palms against the glass.
An ambulance tears past me, the siren rattling me, the screech scraping my bones, blue light throwing dancing shadows about me.
A stray dog stands next to me, baleful and shy. I shoo it, shove it with my leg. It doesn’t move, just pushes itself against my leg, showing no sign of hearing me, understanding or caring.
On the TV screens are repeated images of an ape sucking its multitude of teeth at me.
My reflection in the glass as I look into dark chimp eyes. A foot hanging over the edge of a hammock. The swirl of fingerprints, calloused and grey. A lip curled over human teeth. It picks at its nose and the gesture is so familiar. The blink of an eye and in it I can see recognition, understanding, empathy.
Harry showed me the sign language for chimp.
I call at the chimp, call its name at the glass and the chimp turns, looks at me and I am screaming, ‘it heard me, it heard me, it knows its name’.
I look at its hand on the screen then my own pressed against the glass and I see the comparison, grasp the link between us. I look down at the dog, blissfully unaware of the noise all around it and then up at the chimp, see how the chimp understands, again the link between us, and I wiggle my thumb and the ape wiggles its thumb too, back again at the dog, at its stationary paw.
In that moment I understand, understand the difference between us and the animals, how the chimp understands it all too, but the dog doesn’t. Then in an explosion of clarity I know absolutely know how I can make the noise stop, what I must do and where I must do it.
74.
JESSICA.
The only Animal below The Dog is The Chicken and he has no worth other than fodder. They are the last of The Plastics. They are well thumbed. Like The Rhino’s horn The Dog’s tail has been chewed, flattened with teeth marks. Without the rule of The Cowboy they would simply be wild and aimless. They are after all the beasts and this is what they do. They are the mongs, the spackers, the retards. They are the brainless, the followers, the masses.
I push Jessica underneath The Chicken. There is no doubt. I look at the gap where The Ape should be.
He is a spy in the camp of The Animals. He is one of them, but not of them. He is a surreptitious link between The Cowboy and his mindless followers in The Animals. And now he is the missing link.
He is like us. But not.
He is a Chimpanzee. He squats with his knuckles down, touching the ground. He is looking up under sad eyebrows. His eyes are just black dots, but within them is sadness and knowledge and when he looks at me I see a reflection of myself. He lived in a society that is structured like ours, then he lived in The Zoo, in a society that is also structured, just not in the same way. From the way he is bowed, the way his head is lowered, eyes looking up, it is obvious to me that he is not the alpha male. I could tell this even if I didn’t know his position within The Zoo.
Like us he can laugh, but there are no laughter lines around his eyes. Just a smooth pink face ringed in plastic fur that doesn’t move in the wind, stays frozen for all time, moulded and immobile.
He is our closest relative, regal and dignified, collected by Solomon, important to Darwin. He is dressed as Man, laughed at and pointed at and ridiculed. He is a comic sidekick. We can laugh at him because he is us, but can’t complain at our jibes.
He tried to stop Charlton Heston from discovering the truth. He is Tarzan’s faithful companion. He is a reminder to us of our superiority and how far we can fall. He is a group of chimps drinking tea while lip-synching to northern stereotypes. He is learning to use tools in front of a black monolith. He is a character in a book that Beth is reading.
I put my name under the gap.
And for now it is done.
I collapse back in the seat, exhausted, exposed. Afraid of what The Zoo might do.
‘Well done,’ Janet says, ‘Really well done.’
I nod. Squeeze out a flat smile.
‘I’m proud of you, I think we’ve made real progress.’
In that moment I realise it’s been a very, very long time since anyone said that to me and it is a struggle to stop myself being overcome with emotion.
‘I think that’s enough for today.’ She waves a hand over The Zoo. ‘We’ll leave this here for now, okay?’
I surprise myself by agreeing and return to my room hollowed out and rattling.
75.
Back home I ignore Bamidele, force myself to imagine he is not there, as I shower and watch weeks of disgust spiral away down the plughole.
I am determined now. Lucid.
I take out pen and paper. My hand has to remember how to write.
Dear Baxter, I write at the top of the paper, you are too good for this business. It will eat you up and spit you out. Take this, use it to marry your girl, and get out. Go somewhere else and do something else.
I write him a cheque. Worry about how many zeros to put on it. Stick it in the envelope and seal it before I can change my mind.
On another sheet of paper I write the name of Hilary’s wife at the top and then tell her the truth.
Next I call Sally. Her phone goes straight to answerphone, so I tell her the truth too. All of it. Every last little bit.
I pull a shirt from the wash basket, press it flat with a lukewarm iron and force myself into a suit. All the time I’m pushing Bamidele away, brushing aside his pleas, his questions about what I am doing. I cannot be stopped now. I must not be stopped.
Outside the world spins.
Behind the wheel of the car I remember how to start it and roll it out into the street.
When I enter the office Ruth smiles warmly, squeezes my arm and tells me she is glad to see me. Baxter isn’t in yet, so I push the envelope under his keyboard until just the corner is showing. As I cross the open space I see Collins, who says, ‘Sorry to hear about your wife.’
I try to decipher what his smirk/smile means, wonder about the phone, assume it must have been him, he must have taken my phone, my temper threatens but then remember why I am here and what I must do, so lock myself in the office.
Then I wait until it’s the monthly board meeting.
I’ve got a pad in front of me and I’ve written fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you next to the names of the other Directors. There’s all these words floating around us: Hilary is looking at me with his veiny face and bulbous drink nose, he is saying something about forward-loading and I think I’m supposed to reply so I pretend to check something on my pad and say something back about Media Spend Analysis and Return On Investment, about Tangible Measurable Results that will lead us into the Next Quarter, and from the way they are all looking at me I realise it wasn’t a sentence so I excuse myself and go to the kitchen. I splash water onto my face. I try and breathe, but the same thought keeps coming back to me – now is the time, do not stray.
I open the drawer under the sink to get some painkillers and find the cleaver. I take it out, hold the cold metal to my forehead and everything feels a little better. I tuck it into the back of my suit trousers and go back into the meeting,
They look up at me briefly as I enter, the conversation continues, but I don’t want to understand the words
, I want it to be somewhere between the fuzz of the un-tuned television and animals. And it’s clear.
A chimp’s hand on the glass. How the chimp understood, the link between us, the opposable thumb and the dog, its paw, and the difference between us and the animals and how the chimp understands too. It’s all about the opposable thumb. The animals don’t have it, so they are separate and they don’t hear or have to understand the noise.
No going back.
I have to give up my humanity. I have to lose the understanding. Become an animal. So I take the cleaver out and watch them recoil, scuttle about the room like cockroaches, trying to flatten themselves against the skirting boards. I lay my left hand flat on the glass table and swing the blade down onto the joint of my left thumb, struggling to hold the cleaver even as the bulk of my plaster gives the arc weight , and it goes about halfway through, so I drop the blade again, but this time it goes all the way, severing it, hitting the glass underneath, shattering the table. I look at Hilary, his face speckled with my blood, he is speaking and already I can only just understand him. The words are going. Thankfully, they’re all going. So I swop the cleaver, clenching it with difficulty in my remaining fingers, shove my other thumb out of the plaster, my blood pumping onto the table as I try to raise the cleaver but Alan has hold of my arm, then Hilary is up too and they’re wrestling me down, my face flat against the frame of the table and one of them smashes my hand against the table leg, my grip loosening, smashes it again, the handle of the cleaver impossible to hold in my blood-slick fingers, and it’s now that the pain hits me, searing pain, shooting up and down my arm. Someone is screaming, Me. I am screaming. Someone else is hollering for help. More people now. My arm is behind my back and I’m forced onto the ground. All the fight gone from me. The harsh carpet against my face. Then there are medics and police and painkillers and I drift away.
76.
Back in the office. Janet is waiting for me. Waiting for The Zoo. So I address it again. Grab The Lion and put it in place.
The Zoo Page 24