OUTSIDE THE MAIN ENTRANCE, SEVERAL AFFLUENT families had begun to regroup on the pavement. The zoo was closing, and anywhere one glanced, a fraught child yearned for something. Cuthbert should have left then.
One red-faced toddler shook a fist for a pseudoapple-ice. A dapper boy in a sky-blue morning suit, surrounded by a tiny herd of holographic zebras he’d escorted from the gift shop, averred that his sprog-juice gorilla lolly wasn’t as good as last time. A little girl with wispy blond curls damp from her own sweaty distress screeched for an expensive “living-leather” elephant, which simulated the beast’s 37.5? C body temp but retracted in chill air. Another brandished a long, giraffe skin–design cloud-doodle pencil, a recent fad item with which a child could scribble on the local sky. At one point, an old-fashioned stuffed King Penguin—nothing like the zoo’s own South African birds—was hurled hopelessly toward the street in a tantrum.
Cuthbert, an isle of relative calm, observed a fat boy next to him, savagely ripping apart a nuplastic bag containing an owl kite and waving its unassembled pieces through the air until a sheet with a pair of yellow eye stickers fell to the ground. The boy’s mother scolded him, and Cuthbert moved to pick the eyes up for the boy, but the boy pounced on them covetously and gave him an impish grin. Several white nuplastic pieces of the old-fashioned kite assembly and its pine sticks had fallen to the ground and bounced around. Cuthbert backed off.
“Tell that gentleman thank you, Nelson,” the mother said. Her pristine waffle-textured green demi-cape, her flawless blanched skin, her air of confident ease—all signified the conventions of the new aristocrats. She regarded Cuthbert with a distanced but authentic compassion. He felt exposed and didn’t know quite what to do. So he waved at the woman, and she smiled at him. He and the mother then watched the boy deal with his kite mess.
Cuthbert thought of his own mother, who had died in 1994, and his father, who lived until 2014—just shy of the era of BodyMods (Cuthbert hadn’t spoken to him since his mother’s funeral). He felt anguish and some disgust. They were both the offspring of country people, and each had endured a kind of poverty nearly forgotten in England for almost a century, one that was now returning with grievous force.
His mother had been born in Bewdley, a pretty little medieval market town, but by age seventeen, she had moved to the larger Kidderminster, a bit closer to Birmingham. It was supposed to have been her big move out of the blighted countryside to the west. It wasn’t. She lived in a noisy women’s rooming house and plucked chickens at a small poultry plant. Her roommates made fun of her Wyrish dialect, her melodious accent, her love of ale and fear of hard spirits. The Black Country and Birmingham was where the real fun was—dances, cars, silk dresses, Quality Street chocolates in pink and gold cellophane. When Hitler started sending over his deadly Heinkel 111s, she ran against the refugee traffic and moved to bomb-targeted Brum. As she saw it, death by mustard gas or shrapnel was preferable to pulling hanks of cold feathers off hundreds of dead roasters a day. She moved to West Bromwich and got a job making bullets.
Cuthbert’s father, Henry, who was a few years younger than Mary, had come to West Brom soon after the war. Like many of the new residents of the Black Country, he too hailed from the red sandstone and coal-sweetened countryside immediately to the west. He had grown up in a tiny farmhouse in Far Forest, just a few miles to the west of Bewdley, and right on the Wyre’s edge. There was no running water, no electricity, no gas—only a coal stove with a big hob.
He met Mary in a dance hall, in Handsworth, in 1949. They married, and gradually turned themselves—and were turned—into Brummies of a cold, acquisitive, routine-led nature. Henry liked to think of himself as a tough “gutter Tory.” He’d been a lorry driver in the Royal Army Service Corps, and eventually came to fancy himself a kind of Enoch Powell without the Cambridge degree. He had seen horrors in Egypt during the Suez emergency. He spoke of the fedayeen as “animals,” and his children as one step above them, as if they were always slipping toward an ungovernableness that required a stern taking-in-hand. He had killed two Egyptians, “and enjoyed it,” he would sometimes say. “It doesn’t affect me as it does some blokes.”
One cold day, the winter before Drystan died, he and Cuthbert were breaking icicles off the eaves of the house and licking the long dark spikes. Cuthbert remembered the bumpy-scratchy feeling of the ice on the tongue, how it tasted like rotten poplar wood.
Drystan had said that he thought that children must be considered worse than animals to parents in Birmingham—at least in their case.