Bill Broun - Night of the Animals

“You’re bloody war beasts,” Cuthbert said to Arfur at one point. “You’re walking terror. I think it’s best to let the jackals out first.”

“No. first!” Arfur spat. “We’ve kept this island safe. We’re ‘lionhearted,’” he added with a soupçon of mockery. “Don’t blame us for defending national interests.”

For a moment, Cuthbert pictured his father, swilling lager in the old sitting room, raising his battered Spode mug from the queen’s coronation, and belting out the words never never never never shall be slaves as the Proms blared on television. So much for lionhearted.

Still, Cuthbert felt a serious sympathy for the lions. Their images still ennobled pound coins, chocolate bars, passports, treacle tins. He himself knew every detail of the three Plantagenet lions passant on England’s football jersey. Then there were Landseer’s pigeon-shite-speckled quartet of bronze males at Trafalgar Square, supporting Great Britain’s public imperial phallus. A thousand drainage-spigots shot through lion mouths on churches. Countless misericords, crests, hallmarks on wedding bands — the country was overrun by an animal which had not been native to its soil since the Pleistocene. Dar es Salaam, Johannesburg, and even Tehran, one might argue, held legitimate claims on the image. Rome could offer a certain logic for leophilia, perhaps. But London? Since Henry Plantagenet had housed his lions in Tower Menagerie, in 1235, the lions had lent England muscle it could not find in itself, at least not until the massive remilitarization under Harry9. And in the country’s last zoological project, its lions lived in a cramped, bewildering terrace covered in dirt. The case for change was strong.

“In one way or another, we have been the clawed scepter of all your kings and queens, and surely, with the great King Henry, our time has come.”

“Oi’m mulling it,” Cuthbert had told them. “If it’s good for the king and country, and all that. You do sound like you’ve been. in the wars,” he said, echoing his doctor, whose ministrations seemed so far away now. It was all he knew to say. The lions just seemed too large a problem to deal with, for now.

“Where would you go, if I was, somehow, to let you lot out?”

“We’ll go to war for you,” Arfur said. “Against the republicans, against the religious fanatics, against fallen demons from the sky. We’ll fight in the streets, in the hills, in the fields. We’ll never surrender.”

“Oh, that’s bloody inno vay tive, that,” said Cuthbert. “But let me think about it all. Do you think King Henry would approve?”

“We are King Henry, and he is us. But this is no time for ease,” he answered. “It’s time to dare.”

“Get off my wick.”

Cuthbert felt hard-pressed to make a decision, or at least to tell Arfur what he had long planned.

“I supposed I might as well say that I’ve mostly made up my mind. It’s going to be the jackals first. They’re the closest things to dogs, aren’t they? And I owe the dogs of this world, for my evil to them as a child. I owe ’em. Then we’ll. see.”

“Jackals?” gasped Arfur. He guffawed showily in Cuthbert’s ears. “Starting on a rather tenuous note, if you ask me. Good god, man. How will you save the English?”

“But my mind’s made up, and I won’t change.”

With that, Arfur and the other lions let out a loud and most pained chorus.

CUTHBERT NOW LOWERED HIMSELF TO THE ground and moved toward his grotto, dragging his stomach over the damp soil. A foot or two more, that was all. Hazelnuts from last summer, now brown and soft like tiny rotten cabbages, rolled under his big abdomen. He stuck his head into the small cavern in the vegetation he had chosen so capably. Years of sleeping rough had given him an intuitive skill at finding hiding places in the midst of the metropolis. The city possessed countless nooks, hanging flanges, recesses in Victorian brick, but almost none went unused or uninspected, if only by other rough sleepers. You had to know what you were doing to find a quiet, safe, free place to sleep in London.

At last, his head ruptured one final net of twigs, and he poked it into his grotto. It was a perfect if messy lacuna, rounded and silent as an egg. He crawled forward on his hands and knees. He collapsed in fatigue. He was a very old man — far too old and too fat for this.

The grotto was like a zoological exhibit of its own — the parkland lair of an unhoused English urban Homo sapiens . There was an air of disgrace and commercialism about it. Weathered debris — soft-drink bottles, Flōt orbs, silvery torn-open Hula-Hoops, and Golden Wonder and Alga-Bite bags — lay on the ground and jammed into the branches of the shrubbery. Dark, shiny garden snails clung to the leafy walls of the space. They were the same sulfurous yellow-brown as the decomposing leaves on the ground from last autumn. A slight depression in leaves and embankment, formed only by Cuthbert’s recent sometime habitation, made it look like a one-man version of some Iron Age hill fort.

He lay still for a while. Thin strands of thought unreeled in his head— foamy blue grips on my bolt cutters. this foamy stuff, something new, isn’t it? was one bit; my trazzies are too tight was another. He tried to sort one thread from another, but they diminished in thickness the further he pursued them until they became a fine mist of confusion.

He sat up and frantically dug out an old, enormous two-liter orb of Dark Plume — label Flōt in the dirt of his grotto. He’d kept it hidden beneath the back of a round-collared shirt he had found in someone’s rubbish and ripped into useful pieces. One of the hardest things he had ever done in his life was to leave this bottle here not completely unemptied. He popped off the cap. For all his efforts to stop drinking Flōt, when presented with an orb, Cuthbert displayed no resistance whatsoever. He lifted the huge bottle high and took a few long, tense swigs. He repeated the procedure again. He lifted the orb again, and he drank again.

“Thank bloody Jesus,” he croaked. It hurt to swallow. It felt as though something were growing in his throat, but whenever he looked in a mirror, he saw nothing but his tongue, as well as his slightly sunken right cheek, from an old street injury. (Up until just a few years ago, women would still compliment him on his high cheekbones, a feature that distinguished both him and his lost brother Drystan.)

The old man started to feel a bit calmer, physically, and his heart slowed down. It never took much these days, such was the weakness of his heart and liver.

Apart from the animals, there was plenty else to drink about, as far as he was concerned, wasn’t there? It had been a strange week, even by Cuthbert’s forbearing standards. (Much of his news came by word of mouth or the lurid reports glimpsed on fast-food packaging, and the raucous public video screens around Camden Town. He only had access to WikiNous’s free, advert-saturated basic Opticall service, which allowed for reception but very limited transmission of messages.)

In Los Angeles, principally, nearly sixty thousand members of one of the most infamous and oldest cults — Heaven’s Gate — had poisoned themselves along with nearly a million animals in what was being called the largest mass suicide and act of animal cruelty in history. Enormous outbreaks of self-murder and animal sacrifices among the same cult members had also occurred in Britain, Germany, and Japan. With souls “released” from what they called their “vehicles,” the cultists intended to travel astrally into outer space and meet a god they believed resided on the comet everyone was talking about. The animals, according to the cult’s beliefs, were being helpfully “voided,” as they put it, as means of travel for souls, too. It was all over the public screens. Harry9 had long ago recriminalized “self-murder” as a psychological tactic against the cults, and the Red Watch had recently begun another of its roundups of suspected cultist cells, and they weren’t too particular about whom they jabbed with the neuralwave pikes.