He could find no shoe polish. He did find an old case of dark brown eye shadow; the nuplastic cover was dusty and smeared with something sticky, but the makeup itself looked perfectly untouched. It was something from the days, years ago, when women and sometimes men would still touch him, perhaps even stay in his bed. He stood in front of the mirror and dabbed a little of the substance on his chin, then wiped it off with his sleeve. He leaned toward the mirror and stuck out his tongue. It seemed pale and thick, like a cod fillet. He still couldn’t see any lump in his throat, but he remained convinced something was in there.
He’d thrown a pile of suitable clothes on the toilet seat. Cuthbert undressed. He did not like to see his naked body in the mirror. It was bruised and veiny and his stomach was distended beyond mere mild obesity. The doctor had explained that his liver was in, as he put it, “not great” condition, and he wasn’t clearing fluids as well as he should. There was a red patch the size of an apple beneath one of his breasts. He hadn’t the faintest idea what it was or what it meant, and he gratefully yanked a black jumper over himself. Trousers were another problem. He didn’t own simple dark ones, and many plausible pairs that used to fit had grown too tight in the last few years. He ended up pulling on some old, dark gray pajama trousers that didn’t really look like pajamas; they were “loungewear,” he said to himself, and though loose and saggy, they had two big pockets.
It was well past dusk when Cuthbert put on a black training cagoule he hadn’t worn since the 2010s (it had an Aston Villa patch on its lapel, with a lion and the word PREPARED in claret on a field of blue—and he feared, for good reason, wearing it around Finsbury Park’s Gunner fans). He left his IB in a hurry. Just as he walked out of the IB’s atrium, he saw a flash squad of the Red Watch pull up to the estate in two red-and-gold gliders. The Watchmen scampered into the building, neuralpikes held high. They were so focused on rushing the IB building, or perhaps because of Cuthbert’s disguise, they completely missed him. It was, to the say the least, a whisker-close call.
He took the No. 29 back down to Camden Town. No one had looked at him askance on the bus, of course, but that’s not saying much—he was in Camden, an Indigent zone, and the pubs were just closing. He saw a haggard couple he knew from a mental health drop-in center he used to visit in Kentish Town when such services still existed. They sat on a blanket outside Camden New Tube station with a small ratty dog, a border collie of some kind, but from the border of a very morose nation; they were selling carnations whose stems had been wrapped in faux-palladium foil. No one was buying, naturally, and Cuthbert kept getting jostled.
The flower sellers were thoroughly cabbaged, as far as Cuthbert could see. He waved at them and leaned down and looked at the sad pink carnations, but they didn’t recognize him. He remembered the woman, who had long ginger hair—they’d played Master Mind Air a few times at the center and had a tea. But she was off her box, that’s for sure, and Cuthbert felt a bit jealous of it. For a moment, he felt a sense of being very different from the lost souls he saw on the blanket. The public were not looking at him with pity and contempt. Did they sense who he was? Could they see the Wonderments in him?
“Maybe I can stop all this bloody business,” he said to himself. He could go home, pour all his Flōt down the toilet. He would pick up around the flat and clean himself up. He would put on his old silver-flecked necktie and go see Dr. Bajwa and tell him he was ready to be healthy now. He would throw himself at the king’s mercy, which he fervently wanted to believe in.
He was beginning to sense that this king and his Watch had no mercy.
“Don’t you two remember me?” he asked the two. They held carnations toward him but seemed to look straight through him. It was clear to Cuthbert that Nexar hoods or Flōt had melted his old acquaintances’ brains.
A drunk bloke, a guy in one of the new Burberry “frilly polos”—probably some commodities trader of rapeseed futures, out with the mates among the Indigents—put his hand on Cuthbert’s shoulder. “Hell-loo!” he said, in a Scottish accent. “You’re a real bamstick!”
Cuthbert ran.
“Waitsch!” the yob was calling. “Just waitsch! Bam! Bam!”
CUTHBERT WAS GLAD to escape the ruckus around the New Tube station. He quickly made his way down the wide pavement of Parkway toward Regent’s Park. The night air was cold for the eve of May Day, but it felt fleetingly balmy as he came upon the big old oak and sweet chestnut trees—once part of the vanished Marylebone chase of Henry VIII—that signaled the edge of Regent’s district. A crisp breeze stirred and he shivered. He was near his beloved zoo.