He grabbed the head by a horn—it was surprisingly heavy, as heavy as a four-pack of Flōt orbs. He went back and got the goat’s leg and tucked it under his arm.
He made his way back to the maintenance shed area and the broken-open main fence. Every half dozen yards, he knelt down and daubed the pavement with the carcass remains. A few times, he bashed the head down, splattering bits of blood and brain matter on the walk. He did it calmly and meticulously, like someone trying to get ketchup from a bottle. When he finished marking a spot, he would move on another half dozen meters or so. He used his foot to mush the pieces of goat into the pavement until he could see a distinct mark. When he got to the maintenance shed, he threw the head toward the spot where the fence had been brought down, but it bounced and rolled horribly several yards to the left, its one remaining long ear whipping like a tiny bloody pennant. He was trying to create a system of blood-splattered signposts. He hoped the animals might follow the trail out, like Hansel and Gretel’s trail of bread crumbs. It seemed an astute plan to him, based not in wheat flour, but in gore and death and insanity—things that lasted.
Heading north again, toward the majority of the animal enclosures, including the otters’, Cuthbert felt more buoyant. The blotches of the goat’s blood did not strike him as morbid or gory, but momentous. They marked the beginning of the end of a great threat to Kingdom Animalia.
song of the penguins
SOON CUTHBERT CAME UPON THE LONDON ZOO’S once-famous Penguin Pool, adjacent to the Children’s Zoo. He gazed at the stark DNA-like double-helix of ramps at its center, which many an architecture student in the previous century had observed with an unruffled enchantment. Cuthbert gave a satisfied little chuckle.
“Bostin, that is!” he said.
The birds were not visible.
“Penguin muckers,” he called in his most singsongy Black Country accent. “I’m heeee-earrrrrr. I can help yew-oo . . . escape, eh—from your noyce little clink.”
There was no response. At that moment, the zoo’s relic collection of black-footed African species—their joints arthritic, their instincts to dive and swim cramped by the unnaturally shallow pool, their hatcheries incorrectly placed—were dozing miserably, slightly offstage, in a High Modernist rookery of iceberg-white cement attached to the main pool and facing into it. These “Jackass” penguins, as they were called in their homeland, had lived up until their extinction in the wild on the softest of sands, not on icebergs, and certainly not on reinforced concrete.
THE LEGENDARY POOL had been designed in the early 1930s by a young Jewish émigré from Russia. Berthold Lubetkin and his team of Bauhausers, all of whom ate great quantities of a new white food called yoghurt, had studied the penguins very carefully and very earnestly. Unfortunately, what they mostly kept discovering were artistic-politico devices rather than birds. (This was the politically explosive 1930s, after all.) At the time, this approach excited the zoo authorities terribly, stoking up their worst paternalistic impulses. As absurd as it sounds, it actually seemed to them that the zoo might lead the nation not merely in life sciences, but also in social architecture: if penguins could appear happy in a clean, hygienic, artful domicile, and given proper care and food, it would set a great example for what to do with England’s poor in their flea-infested, crumbling slums. Tuberculosis would vanish. Joy would appear. One of the greatest of the zoo secretaries, Chalmers Mitchell, brought in unemployed Welsh miners as laborers to dig out the pool—all part of the example.
“More light!” Mr. Mitchell was to have exclaimed one day while the pool was under construction in 1933. He had stood at the edge of the lovely new hole. It was the happiest day of his life. He had brought a pewter tray of teacups for the workers. They were all full of yoghurt. Personally, he found the stuff nauseating, but it was supposed to be very healthful, according to one of Lubetkin’s Bauhauser friends who was selling and promoting it on the side.
“More light! Here’s a bit of refreshment—free, of course!”