The Zoo (15 page)

The car park is empty. I can hear the groan of the city. Nothing else.

As I'm driving home I pass a poster for Lou's exhibition and experience a crushing pang of guilt. I pull the car over and dial her number. She doesn't answer. I light a cigarette and the car fills with smoke. After a while I notice the phone flashing. When I answer it Lou just says, ‘well', and waits for me to speak. Now that I'm faced with the reality of talking to her I don't know what to say.

‘Look Lou, I just wanted to say I'm really sorry about what happened,' I spit out eventually. It sounds false, hollow and not even close to near enough.

‘That's it?'

A lorry rushes by, close enough to buffet my car. It continues to rock for a minute, like a pedalo in the wake of a tanker.

‘Nothing I can say will make it better. I was an asshole. I know I was.'

‘You were more than an asshole. You were a childish, stupid, violent asshole.'

‘I know. I'm ashamed of myself.'

She falls quiet. I listen to the echo of my breathing through the phone.

‘I don't know how to say what I want to say. It's not my place to have to say this but you made it my place when you ruined my party and wrecked my sculpture. My fucking sculpture, James. You of all people should know what that means.'

‘I'm really fucking sorry. I was off my tits. I know it's not an excuse . . .'

‘You're right. It's not an excuse. But it is always your excuse,' her breathing is quick and angular, ‘You've changed. That sounds clichéd and horrible and is nowhere near strong enough for what I mean. But you have. I barely recognise you anymore.'

‘Lou . . .'

The anger is rising in her voice. I can imagine the face she is pulling, blotches of red rising on her cheeks.

‘We've known you for a long time. Even Dan says he doesn't recognise you anymore.'

This hurts more than it should, hurts more than her thinking I've changed. Ridiculous, but I don't want Dan to think ill of me. I can handle Lou being pissed off with me. Dan is somehow different. I stammer another apology.

‘You need to take a long look at yourself. Look at what you're doing and who you're doing it for. I know you don't believe in karma, but what goes around comes around and you're racking up a huge debt.'

‘You're talking about the bank aren't you?'

‘Yes, I'm talking about the bank.'

‘What do you think they've done.'

‘Watch the fucking TV James. I'm not your teacher.'

The tone of her voice has changed. Softer. Still angry, but there seems a way forward.

‘Are we going to be okay?' I ask.

‘We're going to have to be okay because you're married to my best friend. This doesn't mean I've forgiven you. I'll be polite to you for Sally's sake, but I want you to stay away from me as much as is possible. And know this, I'm watching you.'

‘Thank you,' I say, ‘I am sorry Lou.'

She hangs up. I open the window and the smoke spills out into the night.

The thing that gets you in here, the thing that makes it unbearable, is the boredom. Human beings aren't supposed to be kept locked in the same place day after day. We're not supposed to repeat the same actions over and over.

Get up. Eat breakfast. Go outside for a cigarette. Sit at the table in the day room. Art therapy. Once a week go down into the gym to swim twenty lengths in a pool full of piss. Weekly doctor's rounds. Eat dinner. Watch TV for a couple of hours. Go to bed. Get up. Repeat.

Then there's group therapy. Sit in a group and share your most private thoughts. Spill out the reasons why you're so fucked up, so a group of strangers in the same position can nod and sympathise and applaud your misery. Led by another stranger in a white coat and dirty trainers who will cajole and prod and push you and try and make you give everything up in the name of your recovery. So you can get from in
here
to out
there.

‘Mr Marlowe.' The surname, always the surname. Formal and respectful.

I move my gaze from the tiles to the voice coming from a coat and a jumper, a face that is too young to talk to me with authority, a face kissed with a hint of stubble and eyes that are free of lines. Eyes that hold mine and will me to talk.

I return to the tiles. Count the number between my foot and Beaker's sock to my right. One. Two. Three. Study the dirt in the grout, the dust over everything, the curl and twitch of Beaker's toe in his threadbare sock.

‘Mr Marlowe.'

Again.

‘Mr Marlowe?'

I raise my head.

‘Have you anything you'd like to share?'

I have. I'd like to tell them about a lost wife, a lost son, a lost boy in a zoo, a lost life. But I don't. I bite my lip and shake my head. I want to tell them about how the time in here is filled with a longing for the drink and the cocaine that will take away the boredom and the doubt and the fear. But I don't.

‘It helps, you know. It helps to share with the group. No-one is judging. There's nothing to be afraid about.'

But he's wrong. There is something to be afraid about and I can hear it. It's always there now, beneath everything, as a constant. It wants me to know it can do what it wants when it wants and I am powerless to stop it.

He's moved on. The doctor or the intern or the orderly or whatever he is, with his near moustache and scruffy shoes, with his clipboard and pens and questions. He's moved on to someone else and they're talking. They're telling us things they wouldn't share with their closest friends or with their families. We're lapping it up, nodding and clapping and making sympathetic ohs and ahs. This circle of loonies perched on plastic chairs, each one of us with a halo of baggage above our head.

I push the dust about on the floor with my feet, drawing figures of eight. It's everywhere, settled on everybody's shoulders like the first snow.

It's hot in the ward, the heat on too high. It makes me apathetic and drowsy.

The day stretches out before me, a highway of wasted minutes. I trudge along it. Given my medication by the pudgy hand of a nurse, put them in my mouth, swill them round, consider hiding them under my tongue, then swallow them down. They stick in my throat. Two waxy lumps and I swallow, swallow, swallow, until I can dislodge them, splay my mouth wide open so she can see my fillings. Then the highway weaves and winds and becomes softer round the edge as the day is spent in confusion and the embrace of the armchair, of cigarettes and the wooden plank of the bench outside. Then it is time to go to bed and I lie, eyes on The Zoo, afraid to turn my back on it, it being made of whispers and accusation.

The heat is rising, until the air is full of it. Hot and dry like the air in a sauna. Hot in my lungs as I breathe it in. The heat on my chest is like a black dog.

The Zoo.

All the while, pointed fingers and implicit threat. I dare not turn my back because I know it is there. I don't have the courage to move it or face it, so instead I watch it through itchy eyes, fighting off sleep until I can't any longer and I fall into a well of dreams of crowds and motion, that push me this way and that, people all around me, so close I can smell the food on their breath, their sweat, my feet are off the ground, washed along on them, trying to look over my shoulder. When I manage to turn my head I can see my son, way back, way back behind all these people, all these faceless people, his arms raised, his mouth moving, calling ‘Daddy', as all the while I'm dragged further away from him, then pulled under, into the world of chests and arms, screaming out for my boy, then I'm lifted up, spun around, looking down on the hands that are bearing me along, the hands that belong to The Zoo, I see them all, and I'm screaming his name again, but he's long gone and all that is left is this. I'm filled with a sense of loss and hopelessness that I could never have imagined, so complete, nothing of me left.

When I wake it takes me time to realise that it was a dream.

The sheets are kicked off. I'm slick with sweat and panic.

When I am calm enough I sit up in the bed. On the floor is a piece of paper torn from a spiral-bound notepad.

I pick it up. When I read the words, bile fills my mouth and I remember the dream, am there again and I thrash about on the bed, try to find purchase, something to kick against. I kick myself weak like a toddler, and when I am spent the paper is still there.

Written on it in a childlike hand, is one word.

Beth
.

I scrumple the paper up into a ball and throw it at the wall where it bounces and rolls to the feet of The Zoo. I hug my knees and avoid looking towards the window, towards The Zoo, towards the paper.

Beth.

The intention is clear.

I think of her – delicate, damaged with big, teary eyes. The scars on her wrist.

I unfold myself and go to the door. I put both hands on the frame and lean out into the corridor. The ward is quiet; even the workmen have stopped. The heat is oppressive, the air hardly moving. I close the door as quietly as I can and, cushioning the handle, push it until it clicks. Leaning against the wood I face The Zoo. Swallowing fear I kneel on the floor in front of it, clasp my hands together and push the ball of paper away with my knee.

I look up at The Cowboy, The Knight, The Pirate. The Figurines. The Animals.

‘Why her?' I plead. I squeeze my hands together until they shake, close my eyes and whisper, ‘Not her. You don't have to have her. Take me instead. You don't need to have her.'

Even as I say it I know why it has to be her, know that I have played my hand and become acutely aware of the danger I've placed her in.

‘Please,' I say, ‘anyone but her. Take Beaker. Not Beth.'

Silent amid drifts of dust on the shelf, The Zoo won't bend or deviate. It will always do what it intends to do, so the only reason it has shown me is to hurt me, to taunt me about how little I can do.

Not this time. I won't let it happen.

‘No,' I shout at The Zoo. ‘You won't hurt her.'

I make a decision. I haven't got long – they will check on me soon.

I take the chair and wedge it under the door handle, testing the movement. It holds, it is a start, but it won't go on holding. Around me the atmosphere is beginning to crackle and hum, static all about me, the hairs on my arms upright. Through the window the sky is darkening, a bank of cloud rolling over the horizon, angry and full of rain. Still the temperature is rising. I am drenched in sweat as I drag my desk across the room, move the chair and wedge the desk up against the door. I put the chair in front of it and sit challenging The Zoo.

The whole room is full of electricity now, sparking about me. There's pressure in my head, thumping behind my eyes. The door handle flaps up and down. Someone is calling my name but I blot it out. Stare at The Zoo through the heat haze. A roll of thunder tears the bank of cloud open and rain begins pelting the window. My head is full of the sound of The Zoo starting up. Clanking and whirring and grinding and I know it wants to get out, out through me, out into the ward, at Beth.

I grip the seat of the chair, squeezing hard, as if the pressure of my fingers alone will keep her safe from it.

Then the smell again – sulphur and burning. In my mouth. In my throat. In my chest.

And the voice.

‘You cannot help her.'

I'm shouting that I can. That I
can
help her. The world is shaking around me, the door handle wrenching up and down, my chair rattling on the floor. Rain is slamming into the window in waves and all about me the sound of The Zoo, so loud my ears ring with it. Someone thuds into the door from the outside, the voices telling me to open it calm at first, then more urgent, distracting me and I turn away from The Zoo for a second. Something smashes into me from the side, launching me from the chair. I hit the wall, my head striking it first. They ram into the door again. The room is lit by lightning. Ram the door again. The chair flies across the room. I pull myself up, drag myself across the room and sweep my arm through The Zoo, sending it skittering across the floor. The sharpest of pain in my chest, neck, a vice tightened on me.

A shoulder rattles the door again. There's a hand on my chest holding me down, sharp nails against my skin, another hand around my throat squeezing. There are people are all about me grabbing my arms. I kick out, connect with someone's shin and they fall next to me. Then they've got hold of my legs. I'm screaming her name, telling them to keep her safe. My sleeve is rolled up. A spike of a needle and a coldness spreads through my body. I fight against it, determined to stay focused, but it is like ice in my veins, down my arm to my fingertips, up my arm to my shoulder, across my chest. My eyelids are heavy and I am loose in their arms. Underwater. They lift me and carry me from the room, down the corridor with my head lolling upside down. Faces watching me. Into the isolation room, onto the bed, straps over my arms. The door closes then a hatch in it opens and a pair of eyes look through.

The Zoo is quiet. It can't say anything.

From in here it can't say anything.

I allow myself a smile.

A day or a week later. They've upped my medication; I am weighted down.

Initially I was checked on constantly. Sporadically a nurse came in and injected me with a substance that made me feel like I was sinking. Then after a while the door was left open and the visits became less frequent. I didn't have the energy to stand, let alone walk, so I lay in a stupor on my bed.

The dust gathered on me, filling my eye sockets and coating my tongue. It built up around me like snow drifts. Then the injections stopped and I steadily regained my focus.

No-one has mentioned me moving back to my room, so I stay here. At least from here I can't hear the building work.