A small crowd, mostly milky-skinned women with small children in strollers, had gathered. They glared at Cuthbert with curiosity and contempt. There were no Indigents among them, from what Cuthbert saw.
“Leave him alone,” a younger woman with a long lilac skirt said to the Watchman. “He’s just a poor old man who eats too many biscuits. He’s allowed at the zoo.”
The Watchman quietly made a sheeh sound, snorting a little. “Just keeping the zoo safe, ma’am. This man was, erm, loitering. It’s a tactic I associate with that Heaven’s Gate lot. Or ’e’s a dangerous Flōt addict.”
Cuthbert picked himself up. He patted himself for the sphere of Flōt under his coat, and he felt relieved to feel it intact.
“Take it easy,” he said to the Watchman. “I’ll go. I’m not in any bloody cult.” He glanced toward the otters for a moment, but they had disappeared, sensing a threat. He whispered to them, “Good-bye, you good creatures.” He would see them again, he thought — somehow — and he would see them go free.
As Cuthbert exited through the zoo’s main turnstile, an old anger erupted in him. He trudged north with heavy steps. He knew nowhere to put his ire, so he waved his arms, calling attention to himself in the streets, which was danger in itself. Like millions of others, he had tasted the wrath of an evil and reckless new monarchy’s power structure. But by the time he made his way to Camden Town, halfway home, he realized his anger was gone. It was replaced with a plan: before summer, he was going to break into the zoo and free all the animals — and especially the otters.
“Gagoga,” he had said, almost laughing. “Ga-bloody-goga!”
the secret patient
DR. BAJWA JUST HAD NO IDEA HOW DRAMATICALLY unhinged things were about to get. When he’d learned of Cuthbert’s introductory debacle at the zoo, he’d merely asked Cuthbert to visit at least twice a week, “off the books,” late in the day, without signing in, for Cuthbert’s own protection from EquiPoise. He was perceptive enough to sense a kind of formless, escalating catastrophe on the horizon — one that seemed to have glomped onto his own life — but he felt it more as a broad-spectrum anxiety than a specific worry.
They sat in Baj’s familiar consultation room, after hours. “I reckoned you’d be fed up with me by now.”
Dr. Bajwa said, “I haven’t minded our talks.”
The long dark days of the English winter, and a worsening cough, had made the doctor morose. He found himself glad to see Cuthbert and looked forward to a resumption of their sessions, yet he sensed a subtle impatience in Cuthbert. It took him by surprise, and it seemed to mirror a mounting, recent prickliness in himself.
Cuthbert seemed especially tired and shaky this evening.
“Looks like you’ve been in the wars.”
“Why waste your time with a wode-wode mon* as lives in doss-housen*?” asked Cuthbert, almost confrontationally.
“It’s not a waste.”
It was half past four o’clock, and black outside. The crack of old-tech small-arms fire outside — handguns — as well as the horrible hissing of microwave explosives filtered through the window. It all made Baj uneasy.
Cuthbert looked unfazed by the nightly sounds of north London violence. At times, he tilted his head to hear the noise outside better, then resumed conversation ebulliently.
It was said that the most prominent of the English republican terrorists, called the Army of Anonymous UK, or AA-UK for short — and engendered by the long-outlawed hacktivists, Anonymous — were amid a winter offensive in southern England, but accurate news was almost impossible to obtain these days. The flesh — the only transmitter of WikiNous — often told lies.
“Enough of this chaos for long enough, and you see why people start running to the cults,” the doctor said. “Don’t think I haven’t thought about their promises.”
Cuthbert nodded sadly and clasped his hands together, as if preparing to pray for them both.
“We’re running out of options, aren’t we?” the doctor said to Cuthbert. “I guess you could say that Windsors are making good health mandatory.”
“Then I’m in luck,” said Cuthbert, grinning. “I’m as bloody fit as a butcher’s dog.”
“I don’t know what a butcher is, but you aren’t, I’m afraid, healthy, not in the least,” Baj said. He tried to speak in an ariose, teasing manner, not wanting to offend his charge. “If you stopped the Flōt—”
Cuthbert interrupted, “If I’m not healthy, then why don’t you ’av me sign in properly?”
“I have my reasons,” said Baj.
The truth was, the Ministry of Mind automatically scanned office records for what it termed “excessive support,” and Dr. Bajwa’s compassion had seriously endangered both of them. Hypochondriacs, Flōt addicts, and the otherwise mentally ill inevitably ended up before the Ministry’s EquiPoise inquisitors, whom Dr. Bajwa considered little more than psychological versions of Red Watch thugs.
“I’m telling you,” said Baj. “You’ve got to keep a low profile. Please, Cuthbert. Do it for your old mate.” He raised his brows and tried to affect an accent from the recently declared All-Indigent zone of Bethnal Green, where he’d grown up. “Look me in me mincies, mate — I wouldn’t tell you a cherry!”
Cuthbert sat puzzled, blinking. East End slang always sounded preposterous to him. It certainly wasn’t yam-yammy Black Country talk, he thought, and it wasn’t otterspaeke. But he did value the joviality, more than Baj realized.
“We’re friends now?” asked Cuthbert.
Baj coughed a couple times. He worked to clear his throat of both phlegm and his strained Cockney. “Well. yes. Why not?”
“Fact is,” said Cuthbert, “I’m goin’ to let all the animals out of the zoo. But I dunna want to see you scragged by any Red Watch for my animal business.”
Baj laughed. He simply did not believe Cuthbert was serious.
“No,” said Baj. “You can’t do that. It’s quite impossible anyway. You’d have the whole bleedin’ RAF bearing down on you. It’s the last zoo on earth, isn’t it? I’ve heard that underground they’ve thousands of complete gene-maps for every animal known. It’s the ark.”
“I will,” he said.
“Cracking,” said Baj, still not believing Cuthbert had the intention — or the means — to do so.
IN THE NEXT, final week before things turned grim for Baj, he pressed the idea of a Flōt detox at the Whittington, but gently. Cuthbert would bring in copies of old scientific journal articles, meticulously scissored out and somehow printed — and almost no one printed anything these days — onto ivory paper, a passé resource hard to come by for anyone, let alone an Indigent.
The articles all came from the sober but tiny subset of psychology researchers who studied animal cognition. “Cats Shatter Applied Rules Barrier,” read one title from the 2010s. Another asked, “Do Bees Have an Imagination?”
The doctor began to wonder whether his secret patient was as crazy as he let on.
“Really, I’m not sure you’re quite as ill, at the end of the day, as you may be officially,” Dr. Bajwa found himself pronouncing at one point.
“Yes? S’that mean I oughn’t worry about the otters?”
“No,” said the doctor. “There’s a problem there — in not worrying at all, I mean. And I’ve been wanting to ask you, what — er, what do they — the otters — actually say? To you?”
“Oh, they’re complete sixes and sevens,” said Cuthbert. “Just mad and yampy as paper tigers in the rain — ha-ha. Things like ‘blah blah blah’ and so on. And let us out, or what.”