The Zoo (11 page)

‘I've got a son.'

‘You must know what I'm talking about then? How do you keep it all away from him?'

‘I can't keep him away from anything from in here.'

‘Of course. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to suggest anything. Where is he now?'

‘His mother.'

‘Are you still together?'

I consider answering her properly and telling her everything.

‘Sorry, that's really personal,' she says, ‘Don't answer if it makes you feel uncomfortable'

‘No. It's okay. We're not. Weren't, even before this,' I gesture to the building with my head. ‘She'd taken him away from me before I came here.'

She rests her hand on the top of mine where it lies on the bench. Her fingers are minute against mine. Minute and pale. Doll's hands. I can feel the pulse in her thumb. She makes no attempt to move it away. I stroke her little finger with my remaining thumb. Neither of us looks at each other.

‘I became very depressed,' she says. ‘I watched them leave me and go into the main school. Watched these beautiful, innocent little children turn into something else entirely and it hurt me much more than it should have, to be honest. I struggled to deal with it.'

‘Do you mind talking about this?'

‘No. It helps.'

She closes her eyes.

‘Each year I felt they needed me more and more. And each year without fail I could help them less. I don't want to sound like a cliché, but I spent less and less time teaching.'

‘My wife. My ex-wife is a teacher.'

‘You know then. You know what it's like. There's this machine behind us all. A big, clumsy juggernaut of a machine. Don't get me wrong; education has always been something of a production line. But the end product is less important now. It's as if it's the actual production that matters now. It doesn't matter now what comes out the other end as long as we tick all the right boxes on the way through.'

Her eyes are still pressed shut, but tears are rolling down her cheeks, dragging mascara with them. I let her cry, dabbing at her swollen cheeks with the sleeve of my jumper. Still she doesn't make a sound. When she eventually begins to talk again her voice is staccato with concealed sobs. As she talks I become aware that she's never spoken about this at length before. I get the impression this is a long rehearsed internal monologue, which has never been shared. I can see it in her body, the way it unfurls, her shoulders becoming looser. I realise I am doing something good by listening, by letting her simply speak. I don't interrupt her or interject at all. I put my arm around her shoulder and she buries her face in my neck so I have to strain to catch the words. Her tears are hot against my skin.

‘The irony is,' she says, ‘as the council take more and demand more, there is less opportunity to give to the people you actually want to be giving to. I always knew who I was and what I was doing, or at least what I wanted to do, but this was steadily being eroded and I became little more than a bureaucrat. I was worried the kids could sense it in me. They're like animals in that respect, children. They sense weakness. You must have experienced it as a child, a supply teacher coming in and being totally destroyed by the class. As soon as I acknowledged the change I think it became inevitable that I would fail. I thought of nothing else. I lost all my faith in myself, and what I was doing. Of course when it happened it was in front of a class. It's my own fault. I tried to fight it. You can never beat the system. I should have realised my hands were tied and tried to make the best of it, but I couldn't because I cared too much.'

She pauses. Pulls herself from my grip, fingers fumbling for another cigarette. I light it for her.

‘If you try and fight anything of that size, with that much momentum, you are bound to lose. And I became more and more depressed. Found it harder and harder to get up, to go to work. It's pretty standard from there on in. Everything just collapsed and here I am.'

We stay outside for another half an hour or so. The air gets noticeably colder. Beth is shivering. As we get up to go in she whispers ‘thanks', and I tell her she is welcome and mean it.

The first day of filming. Ben Jones is there from the bank. Baxter, myself, Hilary and Jessica are seated on uncomfortable plastic folding chairs behind the camera crew, talking in hushed voices. I wonder why Hilary is there, showing off, clinging on, trying to be involved. It irritates me. Jessica is wearing a grey skirt suit, dark tights on impossibly shapely legs. I keep looking at them as her skirt rides up. I'm sure she sees and makes no attempt to pull it down.

In front of the camera is a mock-up of a family kitchen. From where I'm sitting I can see the plywood backing to everything. The orange make-up of the actors under the lights, the plastic whiteness of their teeth and perfect hair.

Ben puts his hands on the back of my chair, leans over my shoulder and says, ‘I almost believe it myself'.

‘Let's hope so eh?' I reply.

He claps me on the shoulder and goes and stands next to the director, who shouts ‘action' and the proxy of daily life begins in front of us again.

They repeat their movements, aim at crosses on the floor, say their lines, the director calls ‘cut', they do it all again, like mechanical toys, actions by rote, perfect and the same every time. I look at the darkness behind the dome made by the studio lights and I can't see the ceiling, can't see the back wall, just black extending back and back and back, my eyes un-focus, a softness around the edge of things, it all falling away from me, and the girl in the set is Sally and the boy is Harry and the man is me and as they get smaller and further away I reach out for them and . . .

‘I need to get a drink and some fresh air,' I hiss at Hilary.

‘I'll join you,' he says and the others stand and come with us.

 

We're in the canteen drinking cheap coffee. The place is nearly empty. My phone vibrates an email into my pocket. As I reach in to read it Ben interrupts me.

‘So,' he says, reaching across me for the sugar, ‘talk me through the concept again. I've got to report back on this tomorrow. Mr Berkshire wants a full debrief.'

‘Didn't they tell you? This has all been signed off, hasn't it?'

‘Yes of course, but I haven't seen anything other than the original documents you showed us.'

‘Okay,‘ I say. My coffee is cold. I wave at Baxter and point at my cup. He nods and leaves the table, ‘it's about putting the public's mind at ease. We're writing you a whole new ethos. It's about not just knowing where your money is, but what it is doing, so you can get on with your life without worrying. We're playing on the guilt that people have that makes them have a load of direct debits for charities every month and the whole transparency thing. We're filming the life without worrying bit today.'

‘Gotcha,' he says and I realise how young he is.

Once the shoot is over we go for dinner at a nearby chain restaurant to eat badly cooked steaks and drink house wine. Halfway through the meal I remember the email. It reads ‘I hope you're proud of yourself'. It appears to have come from my own email address. Confused, I stare at it, phone in one hand, glass of wine in the other. I must stay frozen for a long time because Hilary asks me if I'm okay. I tell him I am and go to the bar to order another bottle of wine, but I am shaken and can't lose the feeling there is someone behind me. Back at the table I keep checking the phone. It stays blank, flashes the time back at me, which creeps inexorably to the early hours as the wine bottles multiply around us. Hilary is demanding karaoke, the waiter is trying to tell him they don't have it, have never had it and Hilary is accusing him of lying. Then I'm at the bar with the bill and Hilary is nowhere to be seen so I pay it and shovel mints into my mouth, filling my cheeks like a hamster and then we're moving to a bar nearby and Hilary is back, swaying as he walks, leaning on me, muttering about having no-one to go home to and I check my phone again, think about calling Sally, telling her where I am, opt instead for an easy text message: ‘
Shoot just finished having dinner
won't be late
,' and I know it's a cheap, cheap lie, I know she knows it and my face burns red.

The pub is old-fashioned, traditionally English: a fire in the corner, Johnny Cash on the juke box. Baxter is telling the old joke about the man jumping from the Empire State building, as he's falling repeating ‘so far so good, so far so good' and Jessica is laughing a laugh like wind chimes. Ben is opposite me with a big drunken smile on his face.

‘I've got to go to work first thing,' he says, ‘probably didn't ought to have any more.'

We scoff and tease him, order another round, organic lager, strong, yeasty. Surrounded by the wood and the red leather, the thud of darts into a board, the crackle of the fire, the rasp of Johnny Cash's voice and the lager sitting on top of it all, I'm starting to feel very drunk. Before I can stop myself I have turned to Hilary and asked, ‘Do you ever question it, you know, what we do?' and he looks at me as if I've spat into his face.

‘Bloody hell, no. Why would I?'

‘I don't know. I was just thinking. Do you never ask whether we're doing a good thing?'

‘What's good got to do with anything? People are going to buy things whatever we say. They're going to spend money they don't have on cars and clothes and get fat from food and booze. They're going to go on holidays and fill their credit cards until they can fill them no more. We can't affect that. We don't affect that. What on earth has got into you?'

‘God knows, must be the drink talking.'

‘Well for heaven's sake tell it to keep its bloody mouth shut. You're putting me off the evening.'

He studies me over his pint, glasses falling down his nose, glazed eyes struggling to focus.

‘For pity's sake, man up. You're not going all commie on me now are you?'

I'm laughing, trying to make out I'm joking and he seems to be buying it.

Sometime later and I'm at the jukebox with Jessica and she's scrolling through the tracks, flipping the CD covers. Baxter joins us, putting his arms around our necks.

‘I'm going to get going. Got to start being responsible now,' he says.

He hugs Jessica, looks like he is going to hug me, thinks better of it and shakes my hand instead.

‘Good work today,' I tell him and he grins at me.

We turn our attention back to the jukebox and I look at Jessica's profile, at her neck, her nose with the hint of a bump in the middle, at the small silver hoops in her ears, the way she holds her tongue between her teeth as she reads the labels, at those furrows either side of her nose, at the hair fallen out of her pony tail. She catches me looking and smiles, so I turn away, suddenly bashful. Then she shouts ‘Got it', thumps the glass and whirls away from the jukebox as ‘You've lost that lovin' feeling' begins and she's singing, moving her hips, looking at me and singing and I'm saying ‘Tom Fucking Cruise' and watching her hips, watching her hips, watching her hips.

At a different bar somewhere deep in the centre of the city, polished, crisp and modern. Three of us looking down the jaws of a line of shots. Multicoloured jewels of shots in a wooden plank. There's a reflection of us in the mirror behind the bar, too far away to see anything other than misty pink shapes. Drink the shots down, peppermint, chilli, apple, toffee, pure vodka, something else.

In a booth and Jessica is in the toilet and I'm making a lechy comment I know I shouldn't. Ben shows no sign of hearing it, then he says something about the campaign, something about whether we should be saying what we're saying and I mean to ask him what he means, mean to pin him down to it, but Jessica is back and we're in the street, hailing cabs, saying goodnight to Ben, then we're in a cab, just the two of us, and the glass is cold against my face, the world spinning, looking at her legs, her beautiful legs, close to mine, feel the heat from them and we're outside her house, she's looking at me and we hold eye contact too long, then I kiss her on the cheek and she gets out and we pull off and I'm drifting off to sleep in the lullaby of the motion and the last thing in my head is ‘so far so good, so far so good, so far so good, so far . . .'.

The office is soggy with hangover. Hilary hasn't turned up yet, Baxter is at his desk, head down. I've avoided Jessica. Alan takes pleasure in slapping me on the back of my skull. I pour glasses of water down my throat one after another and eat too many Nurofen. I phone our IT department and ask them to check if anyone could have broken into my email account, they tell me no, no-one has been in it, so I check my sent items and see only the stream of business mails I sent yesterday. The email is no longer in my inbox either.

Mid-morning Sally texts me and reminds me that we're going out for Harry's birthday at the weekend and asks if we can have a nice family day. I reply ‘yes, of course', then after a second add a kiss to the end of it. She doesn't reply.

The director of the ad phones and tells me the rushes of the shoot are on our FTP. I spend the next couple of hours in a darkened room watching hours of silent footage with Baxter. It's good, if not inspired, and I hope it can be enriched by a well-chosen soundtrack and the rest of the footage.

Hilary arrives after lunch, a pair of sunglasses on and a trilby pulled over his face. He goes straight into his office and closes the door. I don't see him for the rest of the afternoon.

One of the designers asks me to look at some work he has been doing for another of my clients. It's based around semaphore. A series of flags arranged to make up the name of the company. I tell him it's too complicated and that the consumer just won't get it. He argues we shouldn't be pandering to the lowest common denominator and I inform him that that is exactly what we should be doing. I can tell he is annoyed, that I've offended his artistic pride. He argues with me for a while longer and I can feel myself getting angry with him. I bite my tongue and in the end I walk away from him mid-sentence.