THE ZOO
On the 18th October 2002 James Hendry insisted that a bird had flown into the oil tank so we couldn’t use it.
‘It’s true! I fuckin saw it!’
‘Shut up, James. A bird did not fly into the oil tank,’ said Barry emphatically.
Oh, if that had only been the final word on the subject…
The next day Neil, John Levin, Chris and Erwan went to the zoo.
‘Let’s take a bit of tea,’ said Levin.
‘Cool,’ said Erwan. ‘But won’t it kick in too soon?’
Erwan was as eager as a terrified mouse presented with a giant acorn. He hadn’t had a cup of tea since Levin’s birthday, almost one month ago.
Chris explained to them how they could wrap cannabis resin in a cigarette paper and swallow it at their leisure.
‘Just, ah, grate the gear into a wrapper, twist it up, and keep it in your pocket. Me and my mates used to do that instead of drinking tea. It works just as well.’
The others consulted each other by looks and gestures, and then concurred.
‘All right, lets do that then.’
Erwan, Chris, John, Levin and Neil walked down to the city centre, having sequestered their wraps carefully in their inner coat pockets. From the City Centre they got the 71b to the Belfast Zoo.
The bus dropped them off near the entrance and they made the steep twisting walk to the entrance. Somewhat puffed, the five paid in at student rates (even those who were not students thanks to ancient student cards).
‘So here we are,’ said Erwan, unnecessarily. ‘The Zoo.’
They swallowed their wraps, except Neil who decided not to take one, and proceeded to have a look round. The first exhibit they went to see was the emus. Erwan and Levin asked Neil a bunch of questions about it, while John and Chris tried touching the beleaguered bird. It swiftly avoided their clumsy prods. Neil told Levin and Erwan fascinating and probably true facts. The emu padded softly away from the five gentlemen and disappeared around a corner. The young men moved on.
The air was chilly, with a metallic autumn tinge to it typical of the time of year. Leaves were drifting from the trees and collecting at the sides of the road. The thick hedge behind which most animals were enclosed was brown too.
The five of them walked up the hill, reaching an old derelict floral hall. They had an impulsive nosy at it, but couldn’t tell what it was about or what it had been for.
‘It’s just always been there,’ said Neil, who was the only one amongst them who had been here in the past five years.
He led them past it to the prairie dog enclosure. Or what had been an enclosure: the beasts had escaped and made their homes in the surrounding region.
‘Cool,’ said John, as the four of them (Neil stood by and patiently watched) tried to sidle as close as possible to the numerous burrows without frightening the animals away.
‘You won’t get near them,’ said Neil, leaning against the concrete wall of the official prairie.
He was proven right. They continued up hill, toward the monkey enclosure.
Belfast Zoo is built on a hill. The hill is Cave Hill, named for a room-sized hole in its eastern face. Cave Hill itself is one of the basalt mountains that surrounds Belfast in a half-ring. The mountains, Black Mountain and Divis, visible from any west-wandering street in the city, mark the bottom south-east corner of the Antrim Plateau, a great mass of lava that erupted from volcanoes around Lough Neagh some 60-62 million years ago. Lough Neagh itself was formed from this event; the Earth beneath the area became so depleted of mineral volume that it collapsed into a shallow depression.
The consequence was that the five young men had to climb and climb. Only one of them knew the reason.
The reached the gorilla house. Neil marveled at these near relatives.
‘Gorillas,’ he remarked, ‘are famously badly hung. Chimps, on the other hand – well, the stones on them are quite impressive.’
‘Is that so?’ asked Levin, fascinated.
The fascination was tinged with a knife edge of cannabis, just starting to sharpen him up.
‘That is so. It is linked to promiscuity. Species that spend more time screwing around have larger gonads than those that don’t. Humans, interestingly, are intermediate between gorillas and chimps.’
‘Well I’ll be,’ said Levin.
They moved on to look at the smaller monkeys, but none were visible. Neil, Erwan and John spent some time looking at the Colobus monkeys fighting. Levin and Chris walked on a little, talking to themselves.
Neil began to simmer with rage. They were approaching his most hated of creatures. The god of war was hammering his shield; Neil could hear it. A thump, thump, thump in his ears. They rounded a corner. There they were, those diabolical fish-eating fiends.
‘Pah,’ spat Neil. ‘Penguins.’
Neil tried to pass them with an air of disdain, but his comrades rushed down to see the lovable butlers.
‘Check them out,’ said Erwan.
‘Yeah, streamlined,’ said McIlroy.
‘Cool,’ said Levin.
‘Look at them swim,’ commented Chris.
Neil hid his gruffness as best he could. It was intolerable that these black-suited oafs should garner so much praise and attention. But he suffered in silence.
‘Neil, you are very silent. Don’t you like these creatures?’
Neil unleashed a short diatribe.
‘No. I despise them. I wouldn’t be unhappy if every penguin were exterminated from the face of the Earth. They do nothing, they are nothing, and yet there is this endless fascination with idiotic penguins waddling across two hundred miles of ice to get a meal. Once you’ve seen this it is more than enough for one lifetime. But perhaps I’m not making myself clear.’
They asked him, by all means, to clarify himself.
‘Let me give you the figures. There are in excess of probably one billion species on the planet. Each is as fascinating as the other. Perhaps the most impressive thing of all is the sheer diversity – the endless variation of forms that makes life so wonderful. To concentrate on one particular group of species, the penguins, or indeed lions and tigers, at the expense of all the others is symptomatic of the monomania of the human race. Yes: I have noticed: humanity prefers a groove. It prefers to run like the stylus of a record player over the same old song. Penguins; penguins; penguins. Penguins in each and every nature documentary: in the Serengeti; in the Alps; in Wallacea; in the bowels of volcanoes. It makes me steam with an unconstrained passion. Humanity must move from its staid humdrum line. It must step beyond the narrow comfort zone of its previous experience. There are mind-bending wonders out there. I will, I wish, that each human being would bend and twist its mind into an impenetrable knot. That we would dash our brains out against the rocks of the unrecognizable. There are truths in existence that it would be folly to attempt to understand – but this is what we must do! We must throw the penguins into the bonfire and use the blaze to penetrate into the darkness of the unknown. To risk everything, our sanity even, to know what we cannot know; the dark mysteries of our perceived world. The mind is small; the world is immense; so we fear to lose ourselves in it. Go out, I say, and lose yourself. Lose your mind. Your ego will be crushed as a mote as soon as you step outside of the comfortable constraints of your own self. Our minds are like drawing-rooms: we have furnished them with comfortable armchairs by the fire, we have closed the thick curtains and we are slowly falling into sleep, certain that nothing can come tonight to disturb us. Throw back the curtains of your mind, I say. Extinguish the lulling fire, open the door and let in the sharp burning flames of creation. It will wake you up. Expose your feeble frame to hideous writhing tentacles. Be as insecure and vulnerable to shock as you know how.’
Levin, Chris, Erwan and John turned into jellyfish and floated away from the penguin enclosure. Neil, now a mongoose, made them follow him up the steep hill towards the very crest of the zoo. Their minds were resonating with strange lines; the terror of
really being exposed to what exists, began to beat upon them like hoodlums with sticks. The steepness of the hill they climbed knew no bounds; it defied conventional geometry. Indeed, their whole space was decidedly non-Euclidean.
Now the larvae of monkeys, the troop howled and blubbered. This slope was too exposed, too dangerous. They might whisk off it at any moment and fly like the paper rice thrown at weddings. Far below them lay the stretching vale of Belfast Lough, blue and reflecting the grey clouds of the sky. Now they reached the dangerous café. It was at the top of the mountain, the steep climb to a café that now seemed to be closed. All this place was as deserted as the moon. It seemed like some apocalypse had descended.
Someone gave a shout. It was McIlroy. He was waving his hands like an angry centipede. They saw him by thick plastic glass mounted atop four feet of concrete. Some creature lurked in there, they warranted; some creature they had never seen. Like seagulls Levin, Erwan and Chris swept down and perched on the edge of the enclosure. Neil followed as a sedate and kingly mountain lion.
McIlroy spat his chewgum into the enclosure. It followed an arc in the air and landed squat in the mud. No-one could understand why he did it, not even he himself. He said it was to allow the bear to taste mint.
The sorry creature, nameless, probably a bear, did not taste mint. It had been made to dance on hot coals when a slave to street artists in communist-era Bucharest. Neil, a pigeon, pointed a wobbling, effervescent finger at the bear and spake:
‘Lo! See, the sun bear,
‘Is stressed and would like to get out of there.’
The minds of Levin, Erwan, Chris and John bounced about like ping-pong balls. The sunbear appeared to be pleasuring itself. They watched it suck itself off and then approach them, semen dripping from its nose. It looked up at them from sixteen feet of solitude. Erwan and Levin fell dizzily away not knowing how to incorporate these new experiences. John and Chris banged on the glass seeking redemption from the sinister forces at work. Neil stood back, patient and grim. He was a toadfish, mouth pouting. He turned into a zebrafish.
Levin and Erwan ran to look for something else, anything else. They found a set of red river hogs. They looked ferociously at the hogs, beasts running through their own filth. This, and the sunbear, were the only two animals here at the top of the world. It seemed a remarkably empty space, this peak, and yet entirely self-contained, as if it would be impossible to escape from it. They were like jugglers under a diminished ceiling. Neil appeared to them. He said that red river hogs ate roots, bulbs and fallen fruit. Their heads spiraled out of control. It seemed that Neil had just told them … that Neil had just told them … they did not know what.
The sinister leopards of truth began to hunt them down.
‘What would it be like to be a zombie?’ asked McIlroy, when they had found the way out from the top section.
None could answer him.
‘I’ll tell you: it would be like being a remote-controlled car. You would be driven about, anywhere, without your will.’
‘So … who would be driving you?’ asked Levin.
‘There needn’t be a driver,’ said Erwan. ‘Look at plants.’
They looked at Neil. He had become a geranium.
‘Ah yes,’ said Neil, interested. ‘That’s a good point, Mr Erwan. Plants have motion, of a sort. They move in response to the sun. They will grow, often in a twisting motion, towards the light, and many plants also respond to touch, either by dropping their leaves suddenly, or, more long-term, producing stunted growth in response to repeated pressure. That’s why trees grow in that peculiar shape near the sea shore, or other exposed places. This they do all without a mind.’
‘Zombies,’ said McIlroy.
‘Then why is there a mind?’ asked Levin.
This was a question to induce Fear and Trembling.
They continued their merry tour around the zoo. They became a variety of other animals – butterflies, spider monkeys, reptiles, bits of gravel – and some people did not change at all, but retained their original shape. Levin was not amongst these. Chris was; he retained his identity, by accepting every event that occurred to him. Others were more like wind-buffered plants growing in weird shapes. They saw an otter during a split second before it vanished in the stony water. Other animals they were less successful in seeing.
They climbed down the steep, steep hill.
Belfast Zoo is built on somewhat of a slope. The walk up is reasonably arduous; the walk down is death-defying. There is a long, almost vertical, and remorselessly straight path all down the western side. Neil had once witnessed a young child stumble and become a rapidly revolving dot that was never seen again. Levin, Erwan and Neil stayed carefully on one side, clinging to the stems of hardy plants; Chris and John did the same on the other.
Suddenly a great screeching occurred.
‘Ah!’ said Neil, and promptly vanished.
They discovered where he had gotten to. There was a thin path leading off the dizzying slope to a bird enclosure. This enclosure was built in a faux– concrete, crag-like veneer, with sheets of green netting draped over the top. The five adventurers entered through the chain doors. They rattled them one by one.
Around them brightly-coloured birds, some with tufted head gear, others with blue tail-plumes, red beaks, sharp darting heads, and strange mannerisms, sang and clucked and ran across paths around, above and in front of them. There was even a family of small terrapins nesting amongst the bushes.
Levin, Erwan, Chris and John were becoming tired; their eyes were red and sore from all the strenuous looking they’d been doing. But Neil was now in his greatest element. He loved nothing so much as birds. They were his most profound interest. Even, to this day, he kept a dwindling aviary at home. This was something to aspire to.
Neil aspired, but Levin, Erwan, John and Chris expired, longing for relief from this never-ending odyssey that had begun so innocently and now had taught them so many difficult truths. They felt like wave-battered ships. Indeed they had travelled many miles, and their feet ached, and their backs, and they hungered for comfort and the love that only a warm sofa can give. They knew, too, that the most arduous part of the journey was yet to come. The demonic bus ride home. They knew that their fragmented mental states would not repair on that path backwards. Quite the reverse. They would suffer a decline in mental prowess that knew comparison only with the chopping down of trees in a forest by eager timbermen.
Their happiness increased marginally when Neil recognized their plight.
‘Jeez you guys look like fucking wrecks. All right, I guess it’s time to go home.’
They almost leapt and frolicked like new-born goats – but a heavy sense of that most pervasive force, Gravity, kept them in check. They could not even raise a smile to express what they felt.
‘Home,’ whispered one of them.
‘That would be nice,’ responded another.
Grim moment by moment they trundled down the hill, brains shutting down incrementally. A dense fog of interpretation had closed in on them. They couldn’t see their footsteps in front or behind; it was confusing.
Somehow they made it to the bottom of the hill without anyone suffering severe freakout.
In this delicate condition, each spending half their energy just keeping their minds in orbit around their body, the bus came. There were people on the bus. Levin wasn’t the only one to find this painful. Erwan found it singularly difficult to pay the driver and take his ticket. He felt almost certain that his incompetence was exposed to everybody. Chris shivered as fire and brimstone melted his face into obscurity. John told the bus driver an incomprehensible joke in a hostile tone and then slumped into a seat and refused to talk for the rest of the journey.
Neil sauntered on, last and perfectly at ease with himself.
They sat on the bottom floor of the double-decker, Erwan and Levin facing Neil and Chris. John sat behind. There were others on the bus that none of the four cannabis victims could face or ack
nowledge. A terrified silence entrenched itself.
Erwan whispered to Levin: ‘The mood on this bus is …’
Levin shook his head, urging Erwan to desist. It was clear to Erwan that Levin felt the same way about the soul-sucking void of life or conversation that trundled along with them in this car.
The bus stopped and a little old lady got on. From a distance she seemed old, well dressed, well kempt. She paid her fare and with painful rickets stumbled down the narrow central aisle looking for a seat. The bus lurched off again making the old woman’s motion more difficult. She rocked from side to side. As she neared the four her odor and general state of hygiene became clear. Erwan was sitting facing her on the aisle seat. It seemed to take her an age to move one step in front of the other, but when she did, it looked like she was going to collide straight into Erwan. Erwan became entirely helpless, gazing at her, fear etched over his face. He couldn’t move; he couldn’t help either her or himself. She righted herself and missed him. A smell of rancid dried shit passed them by.
Erwan still could not move.
Neil asked him if he was all right, with a genuine note of concern in his voice.
***
BOOK SEVEN