Night of the Animals (13 page)

He was out—and free to return, as long as the Watch didn't nick him. He shuffled away from the gate now, and stood there, amazed at what he had done. He savored the feeling, glancing around himself. He hadn't released any animals yet, but he'd done something rather nonpareil, and all his slipshod planning and grotto-making and crawling and Flōt-guzzling had somehow led to it.

OUTSIDE THE MAIN ENTRANCE, SEVERAL AFFLUENT
families had begun to regroup on the pavement. The zoo was closing, and anywhere one glanced, a fraught child yearned for something. Cuthbert should have left then.

One red-faced toddler shook a fist for a pseudoapple-ice. A dapper boy in a sky-blue morning suit, surrounded by a tiny herd of holographic zebras he'd escorted from the gift shop, averred that his sprog-juice gorilla lolly wasn't as good as last time. A little girl with wispy blond curls damp from her own sweaty distress screeched for an expensive “living-leather” elephant, which simulated the beast's 37.5˚ C body temp but retracted in chill air. Another brandished a long, giraffe skin–design cloud-doodle pencil, a recent fad item with which a child could scribble on the local sky. At one point, an old-fashioned stuffed King Penguin—nothing like the zoo's own South African birds—was hurled hopelessly toward the street in a tantrum.

Cuthbert, an isle of relative calm, observed a fat boy next to him, savagely ripping apart a nuplastic bag containing an owl kite and
waving its unassembled pieces through the air until a sheet with a pair of yellow eye stickers fell to the ground. The boy's mother scolded him, and Cuthbert moved to pick the eyes up for the boy, but the boy pounced on them covetously and gave him an impish grin. Several white nuplastic pieces of the old-fashioned kite assembly and its pine sticks had fallen to the ground and bounced around. Cuthbert backed off.

“Tell that gentleman thank you, Nelson,” the mother said. Her pristine waffle-textured green demi-cape, her flawless blanched skin, her air of confident ease—all signified the conventions of the new aristocrats. She regarded Cuthbert with a distanced but authentic compassion. He felt exposed and didn't know quite what to do. So he waved at the woman, and she smiled at him. He and the mother then watched the boy deal with his kite mess.

Cuthbert thought of his own mother, who had died in 1994, and his father, who lived until 2014—just shy of the era of BodyMods (Cuthbert hadn't spoken to him since his mother's funeral). He felt anguish and some disgust. They were both the offspring of country people, and each had endured a kind of poverty nearly forgotten in England for almost a century, one that was now returning with grievous force.

His mother had been born in Bewdley, a pretty little medieval market town, but by age seventeen, she had moved to the larger Kidderminster, a bit closer to Birmingham. It was supposed to have been her big move out of the blighted countryside to the west. It wasn't. She lived in a noisy women's rooming house and plucked chickens at a small poultry plant. Her roommates made fun of her Wyrish dialect, her melodious accent, her love of ale and fear of hard spirits. The Black Country and Birmingham was where the real fun was—dances, cars, silk dresses, Quality Street chocolates in pink and gold cellophane. When Hitler started sending over his deadly Heinkel 111s, she ran against the refugee traffic and moved
to
bomb-targeted Brum. As she saw it, death by mustard gas or shrapnel was preferable to pulling hanks of cold feathers off hundreds of dead roasters a day. She moved to West Bromwich and got a job making bullets.

Cuthbert's father, Henry, who was a few years younger than Mary, had come to West Brom soon after the war. Like many of the new residents of the Black Country, he too hailed from the red sandstone and coal-sweetened countryside immediately to the west. He had grown up in a tiny farmhouse in Far Forest, just a few miles to the west of Bewdley, and right on the Wyre's edge. There was no running water, no electricity, no gas—only a coal stove with a big hob.

He met Mary in a dance hall, in Handsworth, in 1949. They married, and gradually turned themselves—and were turned—into Brummies of a cold, acquisitive, routine-led nature. Henry liked to think of himself as a tough “gutter Tory.” He'd been a lorry driver in the Royal Army Service Corps, and eventually came to fancy himself a kind of Enoch Powell without the Cambridge degree. He had seen horrors in Egypt during the Suez emergency. He spoke of the fedayeen as “animals,” and his children as one step above them, as if they were always slipping toward an ungovernableness that required a stern taking-in-hand. He had killed two Egyptians, “and enjoyed it,” he would sometimes say. “It doesn't affect me as it does some blokes.”

One cold day, the winter before Drystan died, he and Cuthbert were breaking icicles off the eaves of the house and licking the long dark spikes. Cuthbert remembered the bumpy-scratchy feeling of the ice on the tongue, how it tasted like rotten poplar wood.

Drystan had said that he thought that children must be considered worse than animals to parents in Birmingham—at least in their case.

“They don't care,” he'd said. “The most they ever touch us is to
hit us—they never give us anything nice, never give us cuddles or smiles, never kiss us, never pat our hair or say they love us. They'd put us in boxes if they could, I'm sure.”

The little chubby boy Cuthbert was watching gathered up the kite pieces on all fours, then sat down on the ground, swami-style, and flattened the kite across his knees. All the kite's bits and bobs were spread around him on the pavement in front of the zoo. A few other bystanders had taken notice of the scene, and one of them, a man with a new sort of sunshades with a hovering red vapor bulbed around his eyes, now stared at Cuthbert with open suspicion.

“You,” the man said to Cuthbert, who pretended to ignore him.

The boy removed the adhesive backing from the eyes, and held them as carefully by their edges as a surgeon might hold actual organs. Cuthbert wished he could help the boy, but he knew that the boy didn't want his help. So he just stayed where he was, gawping, and risking the attention of the Watch.

The boy was now smoothing the eyes onto the microthin nuplastic wings of the kite, pushing hard with his knuckles. His mother stood over him, beaming. She was a compact woman with straight red hair and an elegant waffle-cloth capelet whose loden color clashed with her hair: seen up close, she reminded Cuthbert a bit of some of the smart middle-class women he used to see getting on the train at New Street back home, back when more women worked, but her cool poise marked her out.

She said to Cuthbert, “You see, these old-fashioned toys—kites!—they're still better than all these poly-D games, don't you think?” The question was strictly rhetorical, and Cuthbert didn't dare answer.

He did nod, tentatively. He asked, shyly, “Is he going to have a go with it here and all?”

The man with the red-smoke sunshades approached the woman.

“Is this . . . man . . . is he bothering you?”

“Heavens, no,” said the woman.

“So sorry—I offer ten tall tanks of apologies,” the man said, sniffing at Cuthbert. The man withdrew but peered around, as if searching for a Watchman.

“Is he going to fly the kite now?” Cuthbert asked again.

The boy faced his mother scornfully, and she smiled tensely around the vicinity. The bystanders who had been paying attention to the boy turned away.

“No,” she said to Cuthbert. Then she addressed the boy: “Roll it up into the bag, Nelson. Right away.” The bag was already destroyed, so the boy just folded the kite into a little, puffy trapezoid and jammed it into his trouser's front pocket. The woman grabbed some of the nuplastic joints and sticks and the paper-curl of instructions off the walk, and she and the boy made to go.

She said, “He'll actually get to fly it. In Spain, next week. Hols for us—again.”

“Why not just go to Hampstead Heath?”

The woman said, “Oh, that's a nice idea.” She glanced around for a moment, took a pair of £5 coins from beneath her demi-cape, and forced them nervously into Cuthbert's willing, filthy hand.

“You be careful,” she said. “The Watch is around. You're asking for trouble, sir.”

Then the mother and son walked away, the boy still fiddling with the kite in his pocket.

Because the zoo had been unusually busy that day, a sluggish queue snaked toward a half-door set into a gate building where day-rental nuplastic strollers could be returned. The zoo was curiously authoritarian about the strollers, its staff checking in each one, sweeping an open hand underneath them, like customs officers, and creating the kind of queue one normally only saw Indigents standing in.

“Probably a neural bomb threat, from the usual suspects,” a red-
faced man in the queue scoffed. “Bloody last-gaspers.” It was commonplace in central London for the republican terrorists to ring in phony bomb threats, except sometimes they weren't faked. They had killed civilians, all right, but their hypothetical neural devices created confusion for effect.

Cuthbert watched the families. Among them were not a few neoteric aristocrats, who looked surprisingly able to cope with a wait. It was a rare sight. He decided to stand in the line himself, just to be closer to them, even though he didn't have a stroller to return. The self-conscious, bourgeois joie de vivre he imagined them relishing engrossed him.

One lanky father behind Cuthbert lugged a ginger-haired tot on each leg. The girls seemed to be identical twins, and the man doted on them, rubbing their heads like little cats.

The bulbous, greasy-looking gray strollers were shaped like elephants, and seemed quite popular. The gate itself was a long brown-brick and stucco structure with dark Spanish tiles that reminded Cuthbert a bit of the entrance to the old Pentonville prison, but one with hanging baskets of orange and grape-colored auriculas, just like the ones at the Whittington Hospital, Cuthbert's old drying-out center, at Highgate Hill. There were geraniums on the zoo entrance, too, and polyanthuses, but it was the auriculas that fascinated him—small and exact, and intensely bright, like fairy-light bulbs.

“Allo,” Cuthbert said to the little twins. He reached down for the fallen head of an auricula on the pavement. He smelled it, and he wanted to hold it out toward the girls, but he sensed that could seem creepy. “Yow 'ad some fun?” he asked them.

But the father placed a large hand on each of the twins' heads, and turned their faces away from Cuthbert. The man turned back at Cuthbert with a strained smile, as if trying to mask his apprehension.

“Girls,” the father said. “Eyes forward.”

Cuthbert was playing with fire, and he knew it. If the Watch saw Indigents bothering citizens, they would arrest them, beat them, or worse.

Shut yowr gaubshite mouth, he silently seethed at himself. Shut it!

AS AN ADOLESCENT, IN THE YEARS AFTER DRYSTAN'S
death, Cuthbert would whisper to a ghost-brother at night as he lay in his narrow, creaky bed.

“You're all the good that's in our blood, Dryst—what little there is.”

Through Cuthbert's youth, in the middle 1970s, during a period of some of the worst of the beatings, the late Drystan's tiny empty bed had sat across from Cuthbert in the bedroom, its dark navy and brown plaid covered in stacks of automotive part boxes from their father and bags of undelivered clothes for Help the Aged. Around this same period, Cuthbert began, slowly and half-secretly, first for minutes and then for hours and days at a time, to conflate his and his dead brother's identities. He would even call himself “Drystan” in the third person.

Drystan can't sleep again
, he might say.

Dryst just broke his shoelace
.

The orange skies of Dudley are the same color as the dirt on Drystan's hands.

Cuthbert also began to struggle to finish things as a teenager, struggle to get out of bed, struggle to live a single second more, and the idea of a ghost-Drystan somehow helped. Twice, he had given up a series of musical instruments after two or three lessons. At one point, his father had frogmarched him with a reluctantly rented viola back to a music shop and, slapping his head, forced him to admit he was a selfish, lazy child to a large Polish woman shopkeeper, who had seemed terrified by the scene.

“Mister, no,” she'd said. “
Ty świnio
!”
^*

Henry Handley showed little tolerance for money spent on the arts and humanities, but to waste money on it openly—that killed him.

“But Drystan will help me, Daddy,” Cuthbert would tell his father. “I promise, promise, promise.”

“Leave off that gaubshite,” his father had said. “You'll get taken away for being a nutter. Or a faker.”

Neither parent was kind or world-wise enough to steer him toward either psychological counseling, which he so needed, or a good public school, where the bright boy certainly could have won a generous bursary. So Cuthbert (often thinking of himself as Drystan) took his O-and A-levels two years earlier than usual, at the mediocre West Bromwich Grammar, and grew crazier and crazier. He achieved seven straight-A O's and four A-grade A-levels in the sciences and maths, leading, at age fifteen, to an unconditional place reading biology at University College, London, his first choice. It had been an astounding feat. The
Evening Mail
published a little profile titled “West Brom Boy Boffin off to Uni.” The attention mortified Cuthbert, but another part of him, deep inside—the Drystanest part—soared.

The fragile boy seemed poised for an almost golden, if quite
wounded, flight away from the Black Country, to a happier place. (As an old man, Cuthbert never remembered how clever he actually was before his addictions kicked in; his main memory of grammar school chemistry was burning his finger badly while trying to form copper oxide gas with a Bunsen burner. He and his mates had been passing around and inhaling balloons of the requisite nitrous oxide under their lab tables.)

Drystan, on the other hand,
he
could be allowed in Cuthbert's blinkered mind—with its shades of dissociative disorder—to be the cleverer one, and naturally the precocious lad got into a bit of trouble at his primary and secondary schools, too, right?

In his last year of secondary school, the summer of 1977, before entering university, Cuthbert was mildly disciplined twice, by a sympathetic headmaster, Mr. Hawkes, for snogging another very lonely boy, named Ashley—Ashley had very dry, dark hands—in the school's boiler room. They had both merely wanted to try out kissing, and neither had luck with girls. But the incident attracted special enmity from Cuthbert's father.

Henry, one hot Saturday morning, used his usual black belt with the dye abraded off, and a favorite heavy-gauge wire coat hanger, to beat him for this. This time, Cuthbert felt he was fighting for his life. He struggled, defenseless as a skinned knee, to hide in the Handleys' blue eggshell kitchen, with a gray-yellow light glaring through the windows and the sound of Tommy Dorsey's “Opus No. 1” turned up loud on the phonograph to camouflage the rumpus.

“Yow'll stop this shite, yow scallywag,” his father raged, raising the belt (which he folded into a rigid loop) again and bringing it down and kicking him, knocking him against the stove, and then against a pine kitchenette. “Yow bloody poof, yow bloody focking poof!”

Mary Handley howled at her husband to stop, but she did nothing else. With Winefride dead, there was nothing to mitigate the brutality.

“You'll go to hell for this, Harry. You'll go to hell,” Mary yelled, but she always stayed with him, and he often went to the dirty pub afterward, where it was hellish enough, where he would paint himself as an unappreciated mentor “'oo did wot needed done.”

Cuthbert could still recall the whistle of the coat hanger in the air, the fanging bites of the belt, the squeal after squeal of “Opus No. 1” 's strangled trumpets.

Cuthbert completely depersonalized in such conditions. He would call for Drystan sometimes; he would unroll the ghost-child inside himself, like a shimmering emerald electric blanket. He would crawl beneath, panting for breath. His head that time took several bad knocks against the refrigerator, and he felt dizzy. He had tried to “defend” himself from the belt, but he only ended up woozy, with his calves whipped so hard that puffy welts rose up on them like secret budding fins. He'd wished he could use them to swim away from West Bromwich forever.

“Yam killin' Drystan!” Cuthbert once screamed when he was being attacked. “Yam killin' 'im!”

The mention of that name, in such contexts, always horrified his parents.

“Don't say that,” cried Mary. “You bloody well stop that!”

“The boy's 'af-baked,” Henry gasped, standing back from the boy. “He's focking mad as a box of rabbits.”

Finally, during a similar life-or-death beating, the neighbors called the police, and Cuthbert—mildly concussed—was temporarily put under a protection order by Sandwell council, and he lived with a foster family near Birmingham City University. He made everyone call him “Dryst,” and no one questioned him about it. He was a tall boy for age fifteen, and many overestimated his age and
maturity. After a week, he was sent home. The overwhelmed social worker who'd been assigned his case had failed to transfer many of the details of the abuse discovered by the police to Cuthbert's case file. There were comments among the council authorities about how “a grown boy” had got “a bit of aggro” from his dad. In the context of Sandwell, it just wasn't a big deal. Henry, for several weeks, seemed contrite, too. He repeatedly said he was sorry (“Something's wrong with me 'yud, son. Yer dad's so sorry, son.”). He even bought Cuthbert a child's phonograph that came in a sort of red suitcase. There was a David Bowie record, too, and Cuthbert would play a song called “Joe the Lion” over and over and over and over.

In a month, Henry's attitude (if not his fists and belt) was back to its old deportment. He felt hazily penitent, but the sense of public humiliation had been searing. He wouldn't risk hitting the boy again, but the emotional abuse became as caustic as ever.

“Yow'm 'aff the boy your dead brother ever was,” he'd begun telling Cuthbert.

“Well, I'm
not
me—not anymore,” Cuthbert would respond. “I'm something no one knows.”

CUTHBERT'S PLACEMENT AT UCL
never impressed Henry Handley, who still felt Cuthbert should get a trade even as he matriculated, collected his grants, and moved into Ramsay Hall.

“Yow'll give it up like everything else,” his father kept telling his son. And the teenager did flounder badly at UCL, from the start. Mentally, he was completely off the rails. By 1978 or so, with London nearly at the peak of punk, Cuthbert spent most of his time thoroughly convinced he actually was his dead brother. He grew his dark brown hair unfashionably long and straight, parted on one side, and sometimes wore an absurd Native American wampum of yellow, white, and black shells as a hairband.

He skipped lectures, dropped blotter after blotter of LSD, guzzled grant money away at the pub, and found himself exquisitely alienated from every single soul he encountered.

AT UCL
, his revisions eventually came to seem pointless, and he began to study noncourse books about esoteric religion and mysticism. He read
Magick—Book 4
and Sellotaped poems by Rumi and Ted Hughes to his wall beside the bed. He came to believe that Hughes was covertly trying, through his poetry, to communicate with him. Cuthbert once wrote on the wall, right beside where his head writhed nightly on its pillow, “He opened his mouth but what came out was charred black.”
^*

He also got into kooky altercations with other UCL students.

“You keep your fucking red thoughts off me,” he once screamed at an innocent sociology student as they reached for the same bowl of warm custard in the dining hall queue.

“I don't know you,” the student answered.

“Arr,” he said. “And I see everything you think.”

Cuthbert/Drystan spent far more time reading about Sufism and obscure Middle Eastern hermeneutics than about organic chemistry. At one point, he started (then quickly abandoned) a summer Beginning Modern Standard Arabic class. He may never have been invited to join the Golden Dawn, but he became an incomprehensible moonchild to himself and to others.

It should have all caught someone's attention. Something was desperately wrong, something that went beyond the usual new-to-uni breakdown or naff religious conversion. In one letter he penned (imagining himself to be Drystan and “writing” to his brother Cuthbert in Brum) a bizarre account of gazing out a Floor Nineteen
window of the Senate House Library.
To the west
, he wrote,
shone the gold dome of London Central Mosque, partly green from the reflections of huge plane trees from Regent's Park
. He described the glow at that moment as “a hostile eye of sunlight,” pouring out from a hole in England. He continued,

I started rocking back and forth, Cuddy, gently bumping my head upon the cold window, repeating the phrase “imagine me imagine you,” quite audibly, I suppose, in my crude effort at a Sufic
dhikr
—that's a sort of God-consciousness, right?—I was bumping my head, bumpiebumpiebumpie imaginemeimagineyou, bump rock bump rock bump bump bump imaginemeimagineyou—until a library aide marched over and says to me, “Do you mind, sir?” This really happened, Cuddy, all down to the Eye of God!

Cuthbert carefully avoided his young, ambitious tutor, Mr. Daniels, who seemed only intellectually, and never emotionally, at ease with the boy's deep Brum accent and up-front manner, as well as suspicious of his exuberance for animals and religious studies. When it came to Cuthbert's signs of serious disturbance, poor Mr. Daniels, who truly stood the most chance of seeing that something was wrong, was a perfect idiot—the sort of person who liked to champion the working class as long as they did not smell up his little corner of academia a few meters from the corpse of Jeremy Bentham. Seeing in Cuthbert only a bit of sudatory kookiness, Mr. Daniels recommended the boy immerse himself in the salubrious rigors of schoolwork and contemplate his smallness in the scheme of things.

“I believe that you'll see your pleasure variables rise,” Mr. Daniels said in a joking tone. “That is, if we can trust in the ‘felicific calculus' of old Jeremy, right? Ha-ha!”

But for Cuthbert, grueling revision on his biology course offered no chance for self-forgetting, least not as Mr. Daniels con
ceived it. When he did forget himself, he drew into Drystan even more—the ghost beneath the green rushes, the otter-brother in the bosky claw-waters of long, long ago. Otters obsessed him, too; at one point, after reading Ted Hughes's “An Otter,” he developed the notion that the poet was, like Drystan, a therianthropic being who crossed between the animal and human worlds, and in fact, Hughes had simply been writing about himself in his animal poems—and not metaphorically. In one meeting with Mr. Daniels, just before he abandoned the course, he tried to explain Hughes's secret to Mr. Daniels in his sour-smelling office.

“I'm stuck on Hughes, and I can't stop thinking about 'im, no matter how hard I try,” he was saying. “His otter's the most profound sort of animal. It's all biology and all of the animal soul, in one little beast. ‘Of neither water nor land. Seeking some world lost when first he dived . . . from water that nourishes and drowns.' See what I'm getting at?”

Mr. Daniels looked annoyed, tapping the crystal on his cheap watch. It had a black wristband, and he kept playing with it. “This isn't a literature course, is it?” He looked at Cuthbert solemnly. “Forget ‘animals' and think ‘cells.' Forget ‘phenotype' and think ‘gene.' It's liberating, I tell you, if you really think about it. Have you finished
The Selfish Gene
yet?”

“I day,” answered Cuthbert. “I mean, I did not, sir.”

“Too bad. See, you're born, you hitch a ride to your alleles, and you fly forward into human evolution. We really have no utter control over anything. Ha-ha.”

“Ar—I mean,
yes
,” he had answered. “I tried to read it, but it made me feel . . . like life's pointless.”

“Not for genes it's not.”

Cuthbert/Drystan survived two terms at UCL. He went straight from Ramsay Hall to a squat in Euston to the park benches. It was a terrific, if not quite classic, debauched decline. And it was
during this time that the ghost-brother first went missing from Cuthbert's ambit of control. He seemed separate from Cuthbert. Indeed, Cuthbert had even begun to think of himself again, ever so slightly, as himself. For whatever reason, Cuthbert's total replacement of himself with the wiser, more intelligent, more able, more erotic figure of Drystan came to a ragged end that coincided with the failure at uni.