by Bill Broun
However things unfolded after that, the one thing Cuthbert knew he must accomplish, at any cost, was to free the otters. If they did know where to find Drystan, they held in their black claws, in his view, the future of all Britain—of all Earth.
He heard them then, in a susurrus of watersongs: gagoga gagoga gagoga miltsung miltsung miltsung.
“I am coming,” he said. “You’ll see.”
A lone jackal was watching him, watching him talk to himself.
“Don’t mind this dotty fool,” he said to the jackal. “I’ve got otters on the brain.” The jackal tilted his head to one side, then the other, puzzling over the old man.
Cuthbert imagined it running across the great dark spaces of the Regent’s Park as joyfully as it might have, long ago, on the savannas of Ngorongoro. Releasing it would be a sort of ritual of atonement, of hope. He’d been able to watch these creatures all winter, as carefully as any nonpaying observer could, sizing up security issues, obtaining any necessary equipment. The jackals were by far the easiest choice, much simpler than the otters. They also struck him as oddly innocent in their messages to him. They were just dogs, he said to himself. Little ones, too. They called themselves lies, as though they genuinely didn’t believe in their right to exist. They only want to run about the park. They had asked, calmly and without unctuousness, for a simple release. That’s what any dog wants and needs, he felt.
Just one, they had said. Just two, just three, let us free!
AFTER HALF AN HOUR or so of dazed staring, Cuthbert took a packet of diatom-and-cinnamon chewing gum from his pocket and put a piece into his mouth. Already, he could feel a distant nervousness again, a thunder-footed jackboot of Flōt withdrawal on the far edges of his being but tramping toward him brutally with tiny, hard limbs. He got the orb back out. He took another belt off it, screwed the cap back on, and hid it beneath the shirt fragment.
The zoo’s lights were beginning to pop on like an outbreak of giant orange flowers. The activity within the zoo seemed to be winding down, and finally he decided—making a woeful error—that it must be closed.
“Time now,” he whispered. He wondered whether he might just not pick up a bottle again—ever. He smiled. Could it be that easy? Could he follow the otters and lions to a new life on the other side of Flōt, one in which he might see Drystan again? It was always easy to “quit” when he was kaylied.
He used his elbows and toes to shimmy forward, dragging his bolt cutters after him. Oh bloody hell, how his liver hurt, he thought.
Coated in a glossy black paint, the main zoo perimeter fence, inside and up against the hedge barrier, was a heavy iron affair with spiked pickets as well as the mild-steel mesh backing. But a few wide gaps between some of the section posts existed, and one of these fell beside Cuthbert’s hiding spot, which is partly why he’d chosen it. Here, as elsewhere, only the mesh backing protected the gap, and Cuthbert had already tested the bolt cutters on this obstruction. He had been stunned by the ease with which the cutters went through steel mesh, like scissors snipping spaghetti.
He got to the place where he had fashioned an oval breach a few days before. It was time to crack on, he said to himself. As he stuck his head in, the hole seemed barely wide enough for him, and it was placed awkwardly high. Great stalks of holly entirely enveloped the other side of the fence hole, adding to the nettlesome task ahead. He first had to squeeze into the barbed gap itself, tugging his limbs while trying to keep himself above the ground. A few prongs of galvanized steel dug into his torso like fangs rising out of the ground from hell. His buffer caught, too, and its hissing rips distressed him.
But he kept pushing in. A spiny leaf of holly which had fallen to the ground got stuck into his palm and he let out a small cry. He stopped where he was, midway through the fence hole, and pulled the leaf off. He scrubbed his palm on his other arm to loosen the tiny thorns. It was all awful and he wanted to wail out for help. But he began shoving forward again. At one point, his foot seemed caught, and he thought he was trapped for good, and then, as if some iron-toothed chimera had deigned to free him from its jaws, the foot came free and Cuthbert Handley was in, bolt cutters in hand.
Even in his Flōt haze, as he stood up and surveyed this hidden area of the zoo, he could see he’d made an enormous error—the kind of stupid slipup Flōt engendered like clouds did rain. It was late in the day, but in fact, the zoo wasn’t quite closed. Visitors still strolled about. He couldn’t free anything yet unless he wanted to end up in a Calm House before the first animal escaped. Cuthbert thought of going back to his grotto but changed his mind, thinking it would only risk more attention. After a few seconds, he pushed the bolt cutters back through the hole in the fence. He couldn’t very bloody well be seen with them. But why not have a look around? he thought. You’re in.
“Oi’m in,” he said to himself aloud. “Fuck it. I’ll nip back later tonight and open the whole focking shite-stand.”
Not a few people were still sauntering quite unhurriedly along the walkways and gazing at exhibits. Zoo workers scurried about—carrying boxes for restocking, sweeping, gathering rubbish bin liners—carrying out their usual closing jobs. All the people ought to have represented a huge risk for Cuthbert; a single message sent to the Red Watch, and Cuthbert would be detained. But he was now too intoxicated to grasp any of that. He only saw the silent jackals, in their enclosure, and he felt a shrieking desire to get closer to them. We’re lie, they said to him. Lie.
two
a day trip to the wyre
CUTHBERT HAD SEEN AN OTTER ONCE BEFORE IN his life—or so he thought.
It happened more than eighty years before, on a scalding summer afternoon, in 1968. His family—Drystan, his mum and dad, and his maternal grandmother, Winefride, who lived with them—had driven from Birmingham to an area well west of the Black Country, not far from the Welsh Marches of Worcestershire, to visit a few elderly relatives on his father’s side. It was Cuthbert and his older brother Drystan’s first trip to a region their gran had told them strange tales about from their earliest years.
The visitors were first taking an early tea in their relatives’ cottage, and everyone—the boys, their parents and Gran, the old Handley aunties and a great-uncle—crowded a dark sitting room. Cuthbert and Drystan were unable to sit. They kept begging to ramble off by themselves into the nearby Wyre Forest, a radiant remnant of primeval woodland near the ancient settlements of Wribbenhall and Bewdley town.
“Please, Mum, please, please, please, please, please, please, ple—”
“Enough!” scolded their mum.
Cuthbert was only six, still pronouncing his l’s as w’s, and Drystan eight, and they were city boys. Apart from the heavily trod Dartmouth Park and empty tins of Lyle’s syrup, little that was green or gold grew any longer in their West Bromwich world of chemical dumps and football madness. Making matters worse, a new expressway had isolated West Brom from the park, a last salubrious leafy retreat that had been donated and laid out specifically for local factory workers a hundred years before.
“I’d like to see the deepest parts, you know, the sort of middle bits of that forest, I would. Can we have a look now?” asked Drystan. “Gran? What do—”
The boys’ father, Henry Handley, interjected, “With all due respect to dear gran, she’s not your gaffer, is she? Who pays for—”
But Drystan cut him off, saying boldly, “You should be better to Gran. She knows more than—”
“Huh,” his father said, with an odd, taut smile. He was a dumpy, freckled man with long woolly red hair combed to the side and, at the time, muttonchop sideburns. He was often both irritable and transparent, so when he said to his aunties with clenched, stifled fury and a forced Brummie* twang, “Awww. ’E’s a swait boy oo adores his gran,” it sounded as false as it did spiteful. They all knew he beat the boys regularly, especially the elder one; they often had puffy pink welts on their white legs and arms, still chubby with toddler-fat in Cuthbert’s case.
; Their grandmother didn’t react to these edgy exchanges between her eldest grandson and son-in-law, who had developed a recent mutual loathing. She waited a few moments and quietly began explaining how it was best to avoid the forest’s interior, which she still remembered well.
“Things thee’ll want to forget—that’ll be in the middle of the Wyre,” his grandmother was saying, hamming it up for the boys but not without real unease. They needed a look at the world out of West Brom, but she also sensed the Wyre might be too much for them, especially little Cuddy. “It’s a tricky place, boys, but it’s lovely, too. But honestly, thee const* get right lost.”
Cuthbert’s mother, Mary Handley, sat cramped beside Henry on a black-leather settee that looked big and misplaced in the cottage, fingering her teacup and leaning forward with a stiff, mannered face, unwilling to relax. Husband and wife each maintained, in their own miserable ways, an illusion that all was diamond-glinted good fortune in the city. Having moved themselves from the Marches to Birmingham years ago, they had barely broached the lower middle class; they kept their own ire at this state of affairs tamed with purchases of chocolate and lager and a few overworn sports jackets and perfumes, jingoism, and an abiding unctuousness toward the rich. Neither had any use for forests.
“I’d like to see it cleared, meself, except if there’s any, loik, swans in there,” said Henry. “There’s loads of woodlands in Wales, and no one makes a tuppence off Wyre these days, do they? It’s not like the old barking-peeling and tannin days, is it?”
Their gran, who was named Winefride after one of the local so-called miracle wells of the Marches, took a frank swallow of tea, trying to ignore the man’s foolishness. Hundreds of species of birds inhabited Wyre, but no swans. She was a white-haired woman with a strong, square face; for the day trip, she’d worn a long pretty nylon dirndl skirt with gold acanthus-leaf designs and a gray Orlon sweater, both bought by catalog order from Kays.
“Of course,” said Henry, sitting up a bit on the settee, and smirking. “The politics of chopping anything down is all mardy* these days. Even in Wales.”
Two plump rose-cheeked women of roughly the same vintage, the great-aunties, were scurrying in and out of the kitchen, bringing a pot of damson jam, triangles of toast, slices of Cox’s Orange Pippins, and a Spode teapot.
“Bist sure thee’st stay near the big oaks, along the edges, and don’t be too loud, and you’ll see or hear a thing or two,” their gran said to the boys, ignoring her son-in-law’s last comment. “But if errun of thee go loblolling in there, all tittery and tottery, no living thing will show itself. But the Boogles will!”
“Boogles,” gasped Cuthbert.
“I’ll outrun any Boogles,” said Drystan.
“No you won’t,” said Cuthbert. “You ’av to stay with me, Dryst. You’re not doing a runner, roight?”
The boys had heard about Boogles, the “owd sprites,” many times from their gran, but they had never been close to a place where the creatures supposedly lived.
Still restive from the car ride, they had been roving the tiny sitting room. A gold-framed photo on a wall cabinet caught Cuthbert’s eye, and he scrutinized it from inches away. It showed a young, burly soldier with a brisk, proud smile. He wore the same heavy wool tunic and puttees he saw in a photograph of his dead grandfather, but this soldier looked robustly healthy.
“That’s your great-uncle Tom,” one of their aunties said. “’E used to keep a pet hob-lamb e’d let run around our kitchen. E’yunt come back from Ypres.”
“That’s a man,” said Henry.
There was a brief silence, and Cuthbert’s father looked down stiffly, out of respect. He gave his whiskers a scratch.
Despite their age difference, in their blue-striped T-shirts and matching khaki camp shorts, the boys might nearly have been mistaken for twins that day. Cuthbert was very tall for his age. Unlike other Handleys, their hair was as dark brown as cloves. They both had high pale foreheads, long mahogany eyes, and small, delicate O mouths. The younger boy was only a little shorter than his brother, though he still possessed the round face and short jaw of a child.
“I’m not afraid of any Welsh forest,” said Drystan. Of the two, he exuded a particularly languid self-assurance and sweet inattention, with longer hair and a slightly more prominent chin. He’d been walking around since breakfast with untied shoes. His father’s quick violence toward him and lack of warmth had wrought something darker and angrier in Drystan, combined with an intense but underfed intelligence. “I promise that I’ll never go mad.”
Their mother, who had fairer hair but the same black-brown eyes, said, “If you don’t stop your mithering, we’ll all be mad! And it’s not Wales. It’s the Marches.”
Winefride put down her tea and sniffed at Mary. She said, whispering loudly enough for Cuthbert to hear, “Don’t be such a cruel munch. They’re just lambs.”
“Gran?” said Drystan. “I don’t want to be any lamb. I want to be something clever—and brutal.” He grabbed his little brother and scrobbled his hair, then started tickling him under his arms. Cuthbert squealed with laughter. “Someone needs to herd this little lamb.”
“Dryst!” barked their father, in a severe tone that embarrassed everyone present. No one said a word for a few moments. Cuthbert’s brother glared at their father with open contempt, shaking his head.
Since arriving from the city, the Handley parents had planted themselves in the murky sitting room of the great-aunties’ home, a room that smelled of burned oats and damp flagstone in an eighteenth-century cottage with tiny casement windows. Their old uncle George Milburn slept in a chair.
Winefride, on the other hand, who often wore a sad expression of declined pride, was as vivified by the trip to her “owd Wyre” as her daughter Mary seemed querulous. She looked nearly as anxious to get outside as her grandsons, and she kept tapping her foot and looking out the casement window. Her ongoing descriptions of the forest could not have been more potent to Cuthbert’s ears. They seemed like the breathtaking words of some grizzled space mercenary in his Dan Dare comics, not of a rheumy old woman living in her son-in-law and daughter’s cramped terrace house in West Brom.
“Madness!” Cuthbert said, with great delight, though he had no idea what the word meant.
“That’s right,” said Winefride. “And it won’t go away ’til the sun shines on both sides of the hedge.”
Drystan asked his brother, quite earnestly, “What hedge? How’s that?”
Cuthbert said, “Saft head! Whisten, will you?”
The boys sidled up to their gran and cuddled in for stories.
of fairy kitchens and pet hares
“NO, YO’DUNNA GO TOO KEERFUL INTO THE Wyre,” their gran was saying. “But ye go, just the same. ’Tis almost time, too.”
She looked at her daughter, raising her eyebrows, and continued: “When I was a little badger-lass, we once found an owd broken baker’s peel in there. We took it home to our dada to have it fixed. I remember him marveling, ‘Why’s thar a baker’s peel in the middle of the forest?’ Well, babbies, my granddaddy, who had the Wonderments, as thee well know, well, ’a said there were fairy kitchens in Wyre, where fairies and their pet hares—hares that talked, yo’know—where thay ran their coal ovens.” She smiled more easily, her mouth softening, the wrinkles around her lips folding into milky pink ripples. “So once the peel was put right, we left it back in the forest, and the next day, we found in its spot the most perfect little cake we’d ever tasted, flavored with violets and juniper-berry glaze.”
The boys were rapt now, kneeling beside their gran, one of their little hands on each of her chunky thighs, sitting perfectly still. Since their earliest childhood, their gran had told them various tales, notions, and advices she referred to collectively as the Wonderments. All along Welsh Marches, where Offa’s Dyke once bullied the Welsh with Mercian royal might, a dwindling number of families bound “neither by rank nor nation,” as their gran put it, had for centuries quietly be
queathed the Wonderments, from granddad to granddaughter, then grandmother to grandson, and so on.
“And the fairy bakers make all kinds of little cakes so tasty and noice—well, thee dunna forget it if thee ’av one.”
The two aunties giggled, with bell-like happy notes, and the smaller, more vocal of the two, Bettina, said, “Er’s good as gold, your gran—you two tiddlings, you listen. But don’t let her wind you up. We’ve got good’n noice cakes here, too.”
“Oh, a little winding’s in my binding,” said Winefride. “But your aunties’ cooking is better than any fairy’s.” She very lightly touched her grandson’s nose with her fingertip. “Do your shoes, Drystan.” He slowly knelt down and tied his laces with long, sluggish movements. “Thee cosn’t be foresting like that. And if thee fall down in Wyre, thee dars’na stop to get up. Thar’re one or two ethers in that forest.”
“Snakes,” said Mary Handley, frowning. “Mum means snakes. Adders.” Cuthbert looked at Drystan with a big, gap-toothed grin.
“Can’t believe our luck,” said Drystan, marveling, shaking his head. “Adders!”
Apart from Cuthbert’s mother, the women were desperately pleased to be together—“like chicks in wool,” as Bettina commented, despite an awareness of Henry and Mary’s vague air of censure. When they met, which was rare, their speech silvered and gilded into the singsong, jingly bells-and-bracelets dialects of the Marches.
“More tea?” asked Bettina, standing to walk back into the kitchen. “Here goes ding-dong for a dumpling then.”
Winefride chuckled. “Oh, Jack’s alive,” she exclaimed. “We’re having fun, aren’t we?”
“Yeah, Gran,” said Cuthbert. “And we’ll be awfully good in the wood—awfully.” The brothers grinned at each other, and Cuthbert gave Drystan a little punch on the arm.
