“Please, no, no, no,” Cuthbert whispered to himself. “I’ve got to bloody go.”
There was a bawling boy with leopard face paint among the families and other middle-class strangers. The paint was so ingeniously delicate that the boy did indeed look like a bipedal cat-child. He was punching a man’s knee—his father? uncle?—with a solemn effort. His tears made the yellow and black makeup runny below his eyes, drawing his humanness out, against his will. The boy’s fist was fat and soft and the man took little notice, except for a passing smirk. Cuthbert felt an urge to accost this heedless man, to show him what violence could mean. The compulsion animated him, and he wove deftly through all the people, and away from the bobby. He felt unnoticed, too, in a familiar way—as if he had not just left the zoo after undertaking the first part of his scheme, as if the copper only recognized a common vagabond hanging about children and good parents.
But the animals noticed him—especially the lions. They were beginning to speak at him again, imploring him to stay.
“You can’t delay your solemn duty any longer,” Arfur the lion moaned. “You can’t—unless you want to look weak. You can’t go now.”
“I’ll return tonight—I promise,” he answered. “A promise is a promise.”
The lions roared angrily in reply. And there were monkeys crying, antelope nickering, and bobcats screeching miserably, threatening to escape the zoo themselves if left behind.
Stay! they all begged.
“Leave off now!” he pleaded, so loud that everyone around him looked at him, this man with dirty hands, this irritating Indigent, talking to himself.
He left the area quickly, trotting toward Camden Town station. After a while, he turned around and he saw that the Watch Auxiliary was back near the same queue. The hovering officer irked him, but Cuthbert also felt a new, feral kind of satisfaction, too, something he could not recall ever feeling so intensely.
He said aloud, to all the beasts, “Ta-rah, animals, ta-rah!”
Will you come back? many of the creatures asked.
“Oh, will I,” he gasped. “And soon. And this time, the true prince of England will come again, in all his furry glory.”
the words of a wise chihuahua
CUTHBERT DECIDED TO HEAD TOWARD HIS ABANDONED IB. It was a dicey move, to hide there until night, but by now, he reckoned, the Red Watch would already have tossed his IB and departed. The IB grounds and hallways always offered one certainty: apart from the occasional mugger, rapist, or psychopath, no one cared about you.
Using one of the ￡5 coins from the kind wealthy woman outside the zoo, he took the No. 29 bosonicabus from Camden Town, just north of the zoo, to Finsbury Park—a district that had remained resistant to gentrification for three centuries—and from there, he walked from Finsbury Park’s raucous station to the Indigent estate where he’d last lived.
A few teenage Indigent boys loitered in front of IB Building 3, the great pillar of reinforced concrete ignominy he’d once inhabited, and as usual, the boys were trading insults and venting bluster. Cuthbert felt uneasy.
One skinny-faced kid with a sharp chin, who wore a preposterously tall sky-blue speedfin on his back (such fins worked with glider-discs, a mode of transport the boy would almost certainly never be able to afford), was hurling a hardened hurtball at his mates, over and over, aiming below the neck (yet holding back a bit on his pitches, too). In the fading light, the glowing ball marked the air in red gashes. The game, a dangerous pastime often played in stairwells and lifts, was popular among Indigents in their towering IBs. The object was to throw the pointillion-cored, steel-studded ball at one another with the full intention of causing bodily injury. One normally went for the head in hurtball, and games often devolved into out-and-out fights. Cuts and blood were commonplace, concussions never unexpected, and deaths from cranial hematomas frighteningly common.
As Cuthbert approached, he took a deep breath. He wanted to get away from the boys, and he feared they could perceive this. Just as he passed, the sharp-chinned kid fired the ball very hard, its glowing neowool rasping the air. A red blot whooshed past Cuthbert’s face. The ball glanced off the back of a boy who had skin colored like burned sugar and a very round face with dark freckles.
“Just look at the cunt,” the victim said, rolling his eyes and wagging a finger at the ball-tosser, but obviously in some pain. “He couldn’t hurt shite.”
“Fuck off,” said the thrower. “You’re a tosser, mate.”
For a second, Cuthbert felt he was also being addressed. He wanted to seem neither too interested nor too aloof—either might irritate them. He tried to step past them fast. Even these boys probably feared causing any trouble that might bring the Red Watch down on them all.