The Zoo (3 page)

‘It's no good,' I say, spinning in my chair, ‘You've ruined my concentration. Now you're going to have to make up for it.'

She laughs, a rich, clean, melodic sound that resonates about the office, and then she stands to meet me halfway across the room.

 

Mark is hunched down over the work surface, waiting for the kettle to boil. Something is kicking off in the day room. The sound of a chair being kicked over. A scuffle. Then nothing. I roll my eyes at Mark and he smirks and rolls his back. The kettle clicks off, filling the small kitchen with steam. I take two stained mugs out of the cupboard and drop in a couple of tea bags. I run my finger around the rim of one.

‘This one's chipped.' I tell him. ‘Not very hygienic. I'll have this one.'

‘Cheers,' he replies.

On the fridge someone has written “suck my balls” with the magnetic letters. I push my hand through, scattering them out over the surface. Taking the milk out, I sniff, pour it into one mug, then the other.

‘Say when.'

‘When.'

He holds his tea between his hands, blows into the top of it, then drinks it with a slurp. We go back through to the day room. It's quieter now, everyone has left, the TV is on but silent, showing the local sports news. I look about for the remote control, but can't find it. Mark comes up behind me.

‘They're shit. City. They're shit. I don't know why I bother with them. They only ever piss me off. I swear I can count the times I've come out of that ground with a smile on my face on one hand.'

I settle into one of the armchairs and balance my tea on a wooden arm. We sit in silence for a while, watching the TV screen, people mouthing words at us. There is something hypnotic about it. After a while I give up attempting to work out what they are saying and just gawp at the shapes their mouths make. Oval, circle, pout, oval, teeth, smile.

‘Mark?'

‘Uh-huh?'

‘You from round here? Your accent's not a Leicester accent is it?'

‘No, I'm from Derby originally.'

He says it Darbeh. He's lying back in the chair, his feet crossed in his hightop trainers with their scuffed toes and lolling tongues.

‘How did you end up here?'

‘What, in here?'

‘No, Leicester.'

‘We moved over here when I was a kid. Me Dad got work in a hosiery factory down Frog Island. Course, they've all gone. It's a shithole down there now.'

‘Not for long. They want to turn all the old factories into apartments.'

‘Like we need more apartments. How many ponces do they think live in one city?'

He's grinning at me with a gap-tooth grin and I know I should have laughed so I squeeze one out for him. I hold my mug up to my face, push my chin into it and enjoy the heat rising against my skin. I don't really know what else to say to him and after a bit he gets up and starts to leave.

‘I think I'm going to get an early night,' he says.

‘Okay, 'night then.'

He walks across the room, his slippers slapping on the tiles. When he reaches the door I call out to him ‘Mark?'.

‘Yes?' he replies, but I realise I haven't got a reason to stop him.

‘Nothing. 'Night.'

‘'Night.'

I sit on my own until my tea is cold. I imagine that it's a cool, illicit pint, sizzling on my tongue and insinuating its way down, and my psyche reaches out over the walls clamouring for it. I wait as long as I can before returning to my room. I pause outside it and put the palm of my hand flat against the door. I can feel The Zoo hum through the wood and know that it won't let me be, so I turn away and attempt to delay it a bit longer.

It always starts like this. Cramp in my calves.

I try to massage it out, hoping it's only cramp, but it's not and I know it isn't. This hope, that there is a natural explanation for all this, never really goes away, I cling onto it, even as I should dismiss it.

I'm talking to the night porter when it starts. He's behind the desk, telling me about his kids, two of them, a boy and a girl. Then the sound goes funny, like a wah wah pedal, and I know it's on the way.

Not now, not now, I silently plead, please not now.

It doesn't listen to me. It never listens.

I bite my bottom lip as it tightens on my legs. I'm squeezing my fists, forcing nails into my palms, straining to keep a smile on my face, looking for a break in his speech so I can leave, but now he's taken out photos and is holding them out to me. I know I'm supposed to take them, but my hands are shaking and there's blood in my palm, so instead I smile and nod.

Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop.

I concentrate on my breathing. Focus on it. Count it. In. Out. In. Out. The Zoo is shouting louder, drowning out the counting. Louder, always louder, so I try and concentrate on the porter, his face rippling like a reflection in a pond after someone has thrown a stone into it. Concentric circles across his face and onto the wall, the ceiling, then up over my head. I blink hard, shake my head, causing the ripples to change direction and I feel nausea rising, a warmth in my throat, try to focus on him, pick a point on his face and really drill into it. He's talking about his children's mother and how he loves her and the pain is so intense my vision is spotted with stars, explosions across each eye so I can hardly make out his features. Somewhere he's asked me if I've got any children.

‘A son,' I force the words out, a croak in a voice that doesn't belong to me.

Another wave of nausea hits me and my stomach tightens. I mumble something about having to go and he's asking me ‘everything alright mate?' as I back away from him, cannon into a wall, nodding, saying ‘I'm fine, I'm fine'. I double over and he puts a hand on my shoulder, but I shrug it off, saying ‘stomach cramps'.

I'm away down the corridor, the walls curling in over me, the door to my room moving further away, perspective shrinking. My hand is big on the handle and the metal hot and heavy to my touch, then I'm inside, sliding down the door.

The sensation grips my legs and I try and stretch my toes out. It feels as if a vice is being tightened on me so I scream out and roll myself up in the foetal position. It's on my back now, pressing into my spine, I can feel it rattle off the vertebrae, one by one, slowly at first, then quicker, quicker, until I feel it throughout my body, my teeth against each other, clacking, and my vision is blurred by the movement. I squeeze my eyes shut, behind the lids there is an explosion of colours and I become dizzy. The weight of it presses me down into the bed and the material of the bedspread is in my mouth, choking me, forcing down my throat. I'm struggling to breathe, nose squashed against the bed, the material blocking my airway. I try to push back against the weight, enraging it further, and it pushes me harder. I can feel my bones creak, my skull feels like it is going to crack, my eyes bulging. The blood rushes to my head, pumping in my temple, my face burning red. I attempt to scream for help, my face in the bed, the words gone, muffled, useless, and this is happening to me and me on my own.

When I think I can take no more, when I think I am actually going to die, the weight is off me and I can breathe again. It lets me take a few breaths, I'm reaching for them, snatching at them and then the noise starts.

First the sound of waves on a shore, pebbles against pebbles, the clack of stones, the water itself, rolling over and over. This grows in intensity, tinnitus filling my head. Then a clanging: the clanging of bells, not church bells, not tuneful, more the sound of a ball being kicked against a garage door, a dull metallic ringing, discordant.

In one ear, then through my head to the other ear. I press my palms onto my head, try to block the sound, but it is in me now, it is of me and it is too late.

All the air is sucked out of the room and I exist momentarily in a vacuum. I panic and flail about. I always do this, even though I know it is temporary. My fingers scrape into the wallpaper, ripping it beneath my nails. It bunches up in furrows as I plough it.

Then the air comes rushing back in and it smells of sulphur and burning and it is close and hot, scalding me as I breathe it in. I can taste it, feel it singeing the hair in my nostrils, prickling my eyelashes. I gasp.

Then on top of that the noises return, the sound of static electricity in the air and in it are words I can't make out, like a choir or the murmur of a discontented crowd. I can feel myself lifted, buoyed by it and I fight, struggling to keep myself grounded, my feet dangling, and I bob for a second on it, then it is a rough sea and I am thrown against one wall, then the other, each time with a thud that winds me, I try to stop myself with an outstretched hand but the force of it snaps my wrist back and I cry out in pain. Then my face is pressed against the ceiling, the chipboard cutting into my cheek, my legs thrashing about for purchase where there is none. The noise of it fills everything. I can't tell whether it is in my head or outside, or both. I can't hear my own voice but know I am screaming out. The Zoo is speaking to me and it is a vengeful God.

 

I wake on top of the sheets, half on the bed, half off. I run my hands over my body and look for injury. I find none, so I roll my body and test the floor with my feet.

The Zoo is still.

In the half-light of early morning it is safe. The outside is trying to force its way through the blinds in silver-blue slivers. I get up and cautiously avoiding making eye contact with The Zoo. I split the blinds with my fingers and find a world that is two-dimensional. In the trees above the chain mail fence a rook barks at me. From the main road I can hear the thrum of cars. They seem miles away. The sky is threatening morning, wisps of cloud light with the hint of day.

I can feel the presence beneath me, so I kneel, let the blinds snap back into place and now I am eye level with The Zoo. I know I can do this now; it never comes for me twice in such quick succession. There is always a break, as if it has to recharge itself or regroup, or let me recover before it takes from me again.

I look right at it.

‘What are you?' I ask it.

It says nothing. Why would it? It doesn't need to say a thing.

I clamber back into bed and doze fitfully.

 

I wake again to the sound of screaming and a commotion in the hall. It takes a second to register this as real and, when it does, I jump upright, rush out of my room and into chaos. There are people everywhere, jostling and running about. A nurse passes me, head in hands, muttering to herself, ‘I can't believe it, I can't believe it'.

I attempt to halt an orderly. He brushes me aside and heads into the depths of the ward. Beaker comes out of the day room. I stop him with hands on his shoulders.

‘What's going on?'

‘Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong,' he replies, spittle on his lips, wild in his eyes.

In the day room there are a crowd of people, inmates and orderlies, huddled about one of the armchairs. I try to force myself through, but the group is too tight and I can't. Then I see the wall and I know who they are encircling and why. I slump down at the table. Everything is knocked from me. I slam my forehead on the table again, the vibration passing up through my body.

Then I force myself to look.

In the centre of the wall is Mark's picture. The one he folded. Above the picture is his ponytail, severed at the root and stuck to the plaster with Sellotape. About it, speckled with glitter and star shapes are words written in shit, big and ragged and from hell. Then around this, lumps of shit have been lobbed at the wall. Beneath the picture and the hair is drawn a smiley face, like the Acid badge from 90s rave culture. I look at the words and I moan.

There is no way
out.

There is no way back.

This is all there
is.

This is it.

We're in one of the glass pods that line the main office space. The blinds are lowered, lights off. It's warm in here. We're all squinting at a projection on the far wall. Collins is fucking about with the MacBook Pro, trying to get what's on the screen onto the wall.

‘I hate these things,' he whines, ‘every time I try and use them, this happens.'

‘It's got to be something you're doing then,' Client Services Director, to my right.

‘I don't know, I swear it does it to make me look stupid.'

‘If it does, then it's doing a bang-on job.' The others laugh at my joke. Probably through politeness.

Collins glowers at me from over the top of the laptop screen. His face lit from underneath like a Halloween pumpkin.

‘Turn it off and turn it back on again,' I say.

Baxter, to my left, sniggers into the back of his hand. I dip the tip of my finger into my glass of water, allow it to drip off onto the tabletop and try and stretch the droplets out into my name. I only get the J and the A done before Collins guffaws in triumph and the company logo appears on the wall behind him.

‘I'll skip through the creds, you know what's in them. Blah blah. Right.'

He pauses here. Points at the screen.

‘The Big Idea. Transparency.'

He enunciates it with a flourish. Teases out each syllable. Tran-spa-ren-cy.

‘We need to have absolute transparency. You have been allowed to hide behind the old institutions for too long. Old boys' networks and funny handshakes. Our money spent doing God knows what.'

A second of darkness as the slide changes, then a picture of a baying mob, black and white, grainy, Baader-Meinhof maybe.

‘We need to get from here. To here,' says Collins and clicks through to the next slide.

A 50s style picture of a classroom, robotic kids in a row, eyes front, attention on the teacher, blond hair and the whitest of teeth.

The warmth of the room is making me tired. There is a weight in my eyelids. I begin to drift away from what he is saying. I need to do something to snap myself out of this torpor.