Doctor and patient sat in a consultation room at the courtyard-facing back of a Victorian office building in north London. A rusty-red and white Afshar rug with boteh leaf designs covered most of the floor. The space smelled of fig leaves and cedar from Dr. Bajwa’s cologne, and were it not all so greatly soothing, Cuthbert might have held back more. A spray of hot green sunlight and a spring breeze trickled through the office’s ancient diamond-mullioned casement windows the doctor always kept ever so slightly open. With one sweet new breeze, Dr. Bajwa’s hope that Cuthbert was winding him up collapsed.
“You’re hearing animals? In your mind?”
“What? No.” He scrutinized his doctor’s face for a moment. “In my ears, doc. In my lug’oles.”
Soon, the particulars came out. Cuthbert claimed that thousands of animals across London—cats, dogs, rats, garden foxes, lab monkeys, hares, pet gerbils, and of course zoo animals—were trying to speak to him.
“They don’t let up, doc,” Cuthbert said. “It’s quite difficult—to be on the receiving end, as it were.” He said he tried at these moments to imagine his long-dead grandmother’s kind face, with her wispy-white tendrils of hair sometimes falling in her eyes. She would have gently rued Cuthbert’s whining. You didn’t whine about the Wonderments—and you didn’t talk about them outside the line of descent. “And you wouldn’t believe how many cats there are in this city.”
Dr. Bajwa listened, half shocked, half transfixed, and nodding more out of courtesy than acquiescence.
“There’s a sort of naffed-off chimpanzee going off on me right now,” Cuthbert had said that day. His eyes darted around the room, as though observing the black-furred words of an ape pummeling the walls. “E’s warning me to leave him alone!”
The doctor took a deep breath and nodded his head.
“That sounds like a very sensible approach,” he said, with a note of certified sternness in his voice.
Cuthbert puckered his lips and grazed his fingertips across his own forehead. “Could do,” he said. “S’pose.”
“And you remember, you’ve got help, Cuthbert. Help for you, help for your body, help for your mind.” Dr. Bajwa spoke in a slow, soft cadence. “You remember all we’ve ever said, how I’m not going to let anything happen to you, right?”
“Ar, yam a chum,” slurred Cuthbert.
reaching for the derelict heart
DR. SARBJINDER BAJWA WAS A MUSCULAR MAN with a broad neck and great tactile power. He preferred solutions to problems that could be applied manually, if not pharmacologically. In his spare weekends, he had, among other feats, learned to pilot one of the new solarcopters, which could be spun through the most theatrical, thousand-foot-high spirals with a simple kneading motion of the hands. On his consultation desk he kept a chromed fifteen-kilo dumbbell he liked to lift between patients. He could be a touch boastful, but he was always warm, too, with long, clement eyes the burned green of cardamom and a precise beard so closely shaven it seemed more a placement mark for a beard than the thing itself. His physical might, well known to his friends, seemed effortless. At weddings and family celebrations, he’d let three or four of his young nieces and nephews swing like squirrels from his arm.
Patients would always inspect, with visible appreciation, that gleaming dumbbell on the desk. It made them feel safe—sheltered from disease, protected from themselves, and beside a power more muscular, if not stronger, than King Henry and the Windsor fanatics.
ALTHOUGH CUTHBERT HAD HIS OWN Indigent block flat, or IB, as one was called, he barely occupied his assigned living-hole. The IBs were so structurally dangerous, depopulated, and crime ridden that many residents in the last twenty years had abandoned them. When he had started reporting the animal voices, he had been officially, off and on, one of Dr. Bajwa’s increasing number of “no fixed address” patients, and he had indeed spent most recent years sleeping rough, mooching sofa space from strangers, moving in and out of TB-filled doss houses, missions, and cacky B&Bs. (The only family listed on his GP records was a cousin named Rebekka, a retired NHS élite nurse listed as living in Hertfordshire. Her WikiNous cryptograph was Cuthbert’s last emergency contact, but she had moved voluntarily into a Calm House.)
Baj inhabited a more orderly world, but it was not without its own disjunctions and sudden partings. He was a former top sport-medicine researcher who had been stripped of access to his treasured laboratory under the resurgent monarchy; the doctor was thirty years younger than Cuthbert, but like Cuthbert, he didn’t fit into his country.