‘You really are a verbose cuntrocket,’ said M, ramming the penknife through Two Swords’ jugular vein in an aurora borealis of blood.
The silence of the little girl from the front seat of the car was deafening. M tore open the passenger door and her bloodied limp body flopped into his arms. Helpless, as he had been in that hospital ward when he bore the terrible weight of his own son, he beseeched capricious life into lungs that had forgotten how to breathe.
M cried. He cried for this little girl, for the son he had lost and the one he was about to lose, he cried for the childhood he could never retrieve but although he cried, there were no tears, there was only sand.
The girl’s mother was at his side, howling her name, tearing her from M’s hands and as she did so, her daughter’s lips parted into an enfeebled cough. The blood which covered her face belonged to Two Swords alone, her mother had been released from the hell where she had resided.
But for M, hell was boundless.
Chapter 28
Daniel sprinted out through the buxom gates of The Cart just as a javelin flashed past the tip of his nose and buried itself in the bonnet of a passing delivery van. School sports day was well underway and with the commencement of the field events the body count amongst pupils and teachers was already into double figures. Still breathing hard, his running vest tattooed with a Jackson Pollock, like melange of blood and vomit, Daniel stepped out into the road only to see a 1974 Austin Allegro bearing down upon him with earth-searing velocity.
‘This is it then,’ thought Daniel. Again.
The driver of the vehicle began braking in a way which suggested he had forgotten that servicing this ‘turbo-charged deathtrap’ had ceased to be a priority for a dozen or so years, leaving it unroadworthy to a degree that was almost capricious. As the little boy in the windscreen grew ever larger and his feet took root in the North London tarmac the car slewed from side to side like a crack-addicted ferret on the Cresta Run before coming to rest five millimetres from the end of Daniel’s chin in a slew of rubber and brake fluid.
The passenger door swung open slowly in a manner which was intended to be intimidatory before coming off its hinges completely and falling into the road.
‘Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks, bollocks, bollocks,’ said M, demonstrating once again the dazzling lexicon of his vocabulary. He dislodged his guts from behind the steering wheel using the industrial wrench he stored below the driver’s seat for that purpose, walked around the front of the vehicle which was currently wearing his son like a hood ornament, picked up the car door, carefully reattached it to the rotting carcass of the car and stood back to admire his work. He was truly a craftsman.
The door instantly fell off.
M was, if nothing else, an officer of the law and, demonstrating that he fully appreciated the role of the police force in society, he Frisbeed the car door into the path of an oncoming mobility scooter, peeled his son from the bonnet, deposited him in the passenger seat and drove off.
*
Daniel watched the central crash barrier of the M25 pass by with alarming briskness and proximity from the doorless passenger seat of the Austin Allegro. He mustered the remaining crumbs of faith in his father into a tiny pile and clung to the frayed seatbelt which separated him from eternity.
‘Did you go to work today, Dad?’ Daniel asked, hoping to calm his father down.
‘Oh I worked,’ M snarled. ‘And I saved a little girl’s life.’
Daniel stared straight ahead, slightly dazzled by the honesty in his father’s voice. He felt a twinge of jealousy. ‘Do you think…’
‘What?’ M barked.
‘Do you think…you could save my life, too?’ Daniel knew he was in uncharted territory.
‘YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND!’ bellowed M.
Silence reigned in the vehicle for a few minutes. Then Daniel noticed all the signs were facing the wrong way.
‘Why are you driving this way down the motorway, Dad?’ asked Daniel with practised caution.
‘Since when have you become the expert on how to drive?’ replied M, swerving out of the path of an onrushing articulated lorry, narrowly missing a hearse, causing a taxi to smash through the central reservation before he returned the Austin Allegro to the fast lane and accelerated to 100mph.
‘I just thought that…it just seems to me…all the other cars are travelling in the opposite direction and so…’
‘Fuck the other cars, Daniel,’ screamed M, ‘don’t think like a sheep, think like a wolf.’
‘A wolf who is driving the wrong way down the M25,’ muttered Daniel.
M was sweating so profusely that his police tunic had adhered to him like a wet suit. He inserted an anthrax-riddled cassette of Chaka Khan’s I’m Every Woman, and began to make the exact noise that an Alpaca makes when it is playing ladies’ and gentlemen’s tea parties with another Alpaca’s jimmy jangles.
‘Whatever you want, Whatever you need, Anything you want done, baby, I’ll do it naturally,’ howled M as he scooted his car around an Albanian juggernaut which had safely negotiated the 2,549.9 km trip from Tirana but now found itself doing a wheelie just outside the Clacket Lane Services before entering a drive-through McDonald’s at 85mph.
‘Cause I’m every woman.’
Thupp, thupp, thupp, thupp, thupp, thupp, thupp, thupp
Daniel looked up into the cruel blue sky of a world which had forgotten how to intervene, as a police helicopter hovered incredulously overhead.
‘It’s all in me. It’s all in me, yeah!’
*
Christopher Winstanley-Stanley had an exceptionally small penis, luxuriant but wiry armpit hair which made him creak, pendulous buttocks which slapped together when he moved and a habit of ending every sentence with a dying badger-like snort. He was however peerless in the realm of quantum gravitational physics, logical positivism and all that sort of bollocks. So it was that Christopher and his tiny penis found themselves tootling out of his nasty little flat in Sevenoaks to present a lecture at Tonbridge College which he had hastily titled ‘The Quantum Nature of Black Holes, Big Bang Singularity and Stuff.’
Just over fifteen minutes into his journey Christopher Winstanley-Stanley noticed what appeared to be a 1974 Austin Allegro headed in his direction at wondrous speed. He calculated that a head on collision would occur in less than 2.356 seconds unless he was able to create a series of the tiniest of quantum fluctuations which would minutely alter the course of his vehicle. ‘The key is understanding the dynamics of exotic quantum matter and correlated electron systems and applying it to holographic duality,’ thought Winstanley-Stanley, wobbling his steering wheel with the kind of wobbles that only a master of gravitational physics would have thought possible but which actually made absolutely fuck all difference to anything.
‘Shitetoads,’ screamed Christopher Winstanley-Stanley as the side of his car was hit by the police helicopter, the propellers of which had been discouraged from turning by the motorcycle that passed through them having been launched into the sky by an exploding oil tanker.
Daniel watched the carnage unfold in the rear-view mirror.
‘This my childhood, Dad,’ said Daniel.
‘Childhood isn’t a right, it’s a privilege which you lost on the day you were born,’ said M.
*
‘This is the end of Ramsgate pier,’ said M, pointing out of the window of the stationary car.
‘Why?’ asked Daniel, not without just cause.
‘Because I intend to drive off the end of the pier and kill both of us,’ replied M, without turning his head to look at his son.
‘I see’ said Daniel, not seeing. ‘Why?’
‘Why?’ said M, as if this was not a question that had crossed his mind previously.
M adjusted the wing mirror so that he could see his face. He did not recognise the man who was looking back at him. He gradually released the handbrake of the car, which rolled towards the railings where a man was fishing.
; ‘On the day I discovered your mother was pregnant,’ said M, ‘I read a bedtime story to Saul. In the story a little boy dreams of imitating the wings of a bird and learning how to fly. One night the boy hears a voice singing in his heart and he follows it out into space, where the stars link arms and dance to the echo of worlds. Gradually he lets go of everything that is a child until he is nothing but interstellar dust.’
Daniel looked at his father whose eyes were beaded with tears and began to move his hand towards a giant leather-gloved paw.
‘And now I’m going to kill us,’ said M, pulling his hand away as if he had been stung by a jellyfish.
But the car was not moving because the fisherman had leant in and put the handbrake back on.
M grabbed the fisherman by his throat. He could see the man was elderly, he knew he could have snapped his neck with a single movement but it was apparent from the fisherman’s expression that he did not care.
‘Time to take your little boy home,’ said the fisherman.
‘He’s not my little boy,’ said M, letting go of the old man’s neck.
But his own eyes, staring back at him from his wing mirror told him that he was.
Chapter 29
The following morning Daniel awoke at 3.52am with a shocked inhalation of breath to find M’s nose touching his own.
‘We’re going to the zoo, zoo, zoo, how about you, you, you, you can come too, too, too, we’re going to the zooooooooooo,’ sang M, bouncing Daniel up and down on his bed with each word.
‘I thought we should take a break from all of this infanticide malarky and share a little quality time, mano-a-mano. Waddya say, waddya say?’
Daniel wondered why his father didn’t just pull the cushion out from behind his head and place it over his face – a delicate murder. But that was not what M needed. It seemed that he wanted to abrogate the act of his son’s death, to own it but not to perform it.
‘I’ve got us some toffee apples,’ shrieked M like an excited school boy. ‘We love a toffee apple, don’t we?’ With some effort, he peeled two sweat soaked toffee apples from the Kevlar-lined pockets of his police combat issue trousers and chomped upon them with manic gusto. All the while his eyes convulsed in ashen sockets.
Wiping toffee shrapnel from his voluptuous chops, M settled down, causing his son, who now occupied only a fraction of the bed, to draw his knees up to his chin.
‘Ants,’ said M, gesturing towards the speck, skittering along Daniel’s skirting board. ‘Did you know that ants live in little communities much like our own? They have their own political system and economy and they communicate using a very complex and ancient language which incorporates extreme violence. They live in houses which never have any more than two bedrooms and they decorate them using materials which they steal from other small creatures such as grasshoppers and diminished antelope. Although they have developed a form of medicine it is almost always fatal. Their court system is perplexing but from what we can understand they employ a draconian morality, dealing with the perpetrators of the slightest crime with cruel, swift and deadly justice. So all in all, this makes ants probably the most fascinating and sophisticated little creatures on the planet. Do you know what I think of ants, Daniel?’
Daniel didn’t.
‘I fucking…’ M stood up and stamped down with all of his force on the ant and the skirting board, ‘fucking,’ stamp, ‘fucking,’ stamp, splintering skirting board, ‘fucking,’ smashed remnants destroyed under M’s piston-like boot, ‘fucking hate them. Now get your things on – we’re going to have lots of lovely fun whether you like it or not.’
*
In the interior section of the newly refurbished enclosure in Regent’s Park Zoo, Jumbe, the 300kg giant Kruger lion, sat on a rock above his pride, shook his imperious black mane, opened his immense jaws and displayed all of his thirty teeth; his serrated canine fangs for holding, puncturing and biting, his carnassial blades for shearing through flesh, his premolars, which worked like a pair of scissors, for cutting through dense physiological materials and his normal incisors that helped to scrape tissue from bones.
‘It’s the colour of it that puts me off,’ he said, pushing the ragged lower half of a pig aside with his immense, blood encrusted paw. ‘I really fancy a bowl of vichyssoise, followed by some grilled aubergine and polenta in a light garlic sauce, perhaps with a nice glass of Barbaresco Riserva from Marchesi di Gresy or a really good Monferrato Rosso for just that hint of vanilla and lemongrass.’
‘I’ve been urging you to go for counselling for years and you can’t put it off any longer,’ said Malkia, the eldest female. ‘You have to eat meat because you’re a fucking lion. I don’t want to hear one more polemic discourse about how I need to move with the times or about managing your cholesterol, it’s what we were designed to do. I told you that last year when you went on the Cambridge diet and I’m telling you it again now. Eat the pig and stop trying to impress us with your knowledge of Italian wines, does anyone here look impressed, Kibibi, are you impressed?’
Kibibi stopped licking her bottom for a moment, looked confused by the question and resumed her task with gusto.
‘No, exactly,’ replied Malkia.
‘What do you think, Imara?’ asked Jumbe. ‘It will be your turn to make decisions for us all next week.’
Imara, the junior member of the pride’s male coalition had been chasing his tail for the past ten minutes, stopped, sniffed at a pile of fresh dung and fell asleep.
‘He doesn’t want to be our leader for a week, Jumbe, neither did Kibibi last week or Kibwana the week before. You cannot run this pride like an anarcho-syndicalist commune. You have to dominate us with power and violence,’ said Malkia.
‘Well, it just doesn’t feel very democratic, that’s all,’ replied Jumbe.
‘You are an utter head fuck, Jumbe – where does all this even come from?’
‘That’s a rather pejorative response, wouldn’t you say, Malkia? Try to find your inner chi,’ replied Jumbe. ‘Now, have any of you seen my newly abridged copy of Tess of the D’Urbervilles? Hardy was obviously trying to make a point about the disparity in life between the rich and the poor and he does it so very well. I just know I’m going to struggle to get through again it without bringing on the waterworks.’
*
The zoo was definitively closed.
‘The zoo’s closed, Dad,’ said Daniel, pulling his father’s leather-clad hand gently back in the direction of anything else that was not a zoo.
‘Stop being so negative, Daniel,’ replied M, tapping on the ticket kiosk.
‘It’s not even five o’clock in the morning, Dad, it doesn’t open until 10. It’s raining and my pyjamas are getting a bit wet. Couldn’t we…’
‘Listen to that,’ said M. There was a long period of silence. A Siberian Ibex coughed, there was what sounded like a ‘shhhhhhh’ and then more silence.
‘You see, the animals are not closed – no, the animals are open and looking forward to meeting with Daniel and his dad and you know how I know that, Danny boy?’ M asked rhetorically. ‘Cos I fucking well asked them and they told me. So all we have to do is find a way of getting into the zoo so we can get this show on the road. It might have to be a bit of a naughty way but that’s OK because dad’s a policeman and policemen are allowed to be as naughty as they like, God said so.’
They circled the zoo until M located the staff entrance which had been secreted down a side street. The force applied when M rammed his arse against the door was 6.30 x 10^3kg – the same as that required to push a 61.78 kN bull elephant wearing ice skates and stranded in the middle of a frozen lake over to the shore (neglecting friction). The door did not so much open as capitulate out of extreme consternation.
They walked past the staff lockers and equipment store until M found the manager’s office. The majority of the keys were in a locked display case but this was not what M was searching for. The key to the lion enclosure was on a key ring with a Colchester Uni
ted key fob, hanging from a nail just under a signed photograph of David Attenborough. The rationale behind this was that no one on the planet would ever try to break into the lion enclosure on account of the fact that it contained fucking lions. M trousered it and led Daniel out of the office and into the zoo proper whilst whistling the theme tune to Spartacus.
*
By the time they had reached the lion enclosure Daniel had arrived at the far side of trepidation and was headed for a crash-landing between consternation and foreboding. M was pacing up and down, apparently oblivious to his son’s existence. This afforded Daniel the unwanted opportunity to remind himself, from various illuminated information points, that lions are not known for their gentle good nature and compassionate dispositions. An enormous male had entered the central observation arena and appeared to be sniffing and snarling around the perimeter.
‘The lion’s attack is short and powerful; they attempt to catch the victim with a fast rush and final leap.’
‘Ooh,’ said Jumbe, ‘a little boy. I wonder whether you might know the answer to the question that has been absolutely plaguing me over the last two weeks. I know that you conjugate “amar” in Spanish in the present tense as “nosotros amamos” but if I am using the Preterito pluscuamperfecto…’
‘The prey is usually killed by strangulation, which can cause cerebral ischemia or asphyxia (which results in hypoxemic, or “general”, hypoxia).’
The lion was staring directly at Daniel and growling angrily. Daniel backed away from the enclosure slowly, being careful not to trip, but was fixated by the lion’s wicked stare. M was sitting on a bench, rocking back and forwards with his giant watermelon head in his gloved hands.
‘Would it be “nosotros habiamos amado”?’ asked Jumbe, ‘or “nosotros amabamos”? Or is that the preterito imperfecto? Oh, I get so very confused…’
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