The monkey knows that something is wrong. She’s a metre away, behind reinforced glass, leathery lips curled back, baring her buckled teeth. At first, I think she’s laughing, but this is not laughter. This is fear.
She’s braced for an attack.
I press my nose against the glass. Perhaps it’s me she fears, a forty-seven-year-old man. If so, it’s a justified terror. We’ve done our damage to the world, we white men, but I doubt she has singled me out as a particularly egregious 74threat. The glass is smudged with marks left by the noses, lips and fingertips of many other zoo visitors who have stood in this spot to look at the crested black macaques perched on rootless trees and blocks of artificial rock.
No, it’s not me. There’s something else. An existential threat that she can sense but which I cannot see. She stares past my shoulder, trembling. Hands tightly grip the rock on which she sits. A torrent of golden piss gushes from her vulva, splashing over her fingers. The other monkeys start to leap up and down, shrieking frantically.
This doesn’t seem normal. When I arrived with my daughter this morning, I expected most of the animals to be asleep, or in hiding, which is how I remember zoos from my youth; not freaking out like this. I cannot tell if it’s a manifestation of my anxiety or a real phenomenon but there’s a tension in the place. When we tried to visit the lemurs, they were racing around their enclosure in a frenzy and we were quickly ushered out. The keepers cancelled the public feeding session, telling the line of parents and toddlers that the lemurs were feeling funny today and needed to let off steam before they settled down for a rest.
Maybe it’s the heat. This endless summer drought, longer even than the one we had last year, and the one before that. There’s not a cloud in the sky. The sun is bastard hot. I can’t stand it myself and I’m not covered in black fur, nor confined behind glass, hands covered in my own piss. Perhaps that’s what’s wrong with the monkey. But what do I know?
I look at my daughter. She’s staring at the monkey too, but with a bored expression, impatient for the next enclosure and the next incarcerated animal. 75
‘It’s a crested black macaque,’ I say, pointing to the information plaque. ‘Endangered.’
Almost all the plaques say endangered. This place isn’t even a zoo, according to the promotional literature on the website. It’s a wildlife refuge for rare animals, born in captivity, unable to return to their felled habitations, their scorched plains and polluted rivers. This crested black macaque is pissing for my entertainment in a glass box in the East Sussex countryside when she should be foraging the jungles of Indonesia; jungles we have hacked down so we can have takeaway coffee cups. To make matters worse, macaque meat is prized by some indigenous peoples, who like to flame roast them whole, then eat the peppery flesh. I’ve seen pictures on the internet of charred monkeys with rictus grins, like simian Egyptian mummies, piled high on market stall tables beside charred bats and pythons.
I don’t tell Molly any of this additional information. She’s almost ten, smart as a whip, but still too small, too innocent, to hear the whole truth. I brought her into this world, and I must shield her as best I can. Give her a childhood in which she can be free to wonder and dream, to hope, unburdened by guilt and the crush of information, the awful weight of knowledge. A childhood close to the one I enjoyed, when everyday actions like driving a car, drinking from a plastic bottle and eating a burger did not feel like you were hastening the apocalypse. When visiting a zoo did not feel like you were gawping at the last survivors of a catastrophe for which you were responsible. A time before the sixth great extinction, before the ice caps melted, before antibiotics began to fail and a blood infection took the life of the mother of my only child, leaving me to deal with it all alone these past five years. 76
I must stop thinking like this, so I have been told, repeatedly, by my friends, my family and my therapist. I must quieten that anxious voice and focus on Molly’s happiness. As my wife is no longer around, and I am too unbearable to live with, according to the women I’ve dated, then it’s up to me, and I must become better than the father I am. I try, though, I really try. But it’s hard. Other people seem to become fathers effortlessly. They build things with their kids. Take them skateboarding. Bake cakes. Picnic in the park. They look happy, too, like they were born to do it. But I feel like I’m putting on an ill-fitting costume, pretending to be a dad, here at the animal park on the sort of day out I see other people posting on Facebook.
It doesn’t help that Molly’s an unsociable kid who prefers to sit in her room and read or play computer games. She has a habit of dismissing my suggestions for weekend activities. It saps my motivation a little, trying to sell something to her that not even I want to do, which is why we usually end up kicking around the house, watching Doctor Who and eating takeaways. That said, Molly was encouragingly excited this morning as we drove across East Sussex, through the Pevensey Levels, fields baking hard in the heat. The countryside looks good in the sunshine, I admit, even when that sunshine is killing it. The road took us past the Long Man of Wilmington, a chalk outline of a figure etched into the downs, holding a staff in each of his hands.
‘A giant with no face,’ said Molly. ‘And no pants on either, so he’s naked, Dad, outside in the nude.’
‘It’s a hot day,’ I said.
I read an alternative theory somewhere that those vertical lines were not staffs but the outline of a door between the 77physical world and the spirit world. It has stuck with me, that idea, but I never interpret it as a figure entering our realm, nor a guard at the threshold. Instead, all I can see is a figure making a swift exit, arms reaching out to pull the door closed behind him, sealing the portal, leaving it all to hell.
Don’t go there, he tells the other spirits. Go anywhere but that fucking place.
Shortly after the Long Man vanished into the folds of the hills, the zoo appeared, set a little way off the road, among the parched fields. My daughter laughed at the plastic giraffe peering over the hedgerow, a sign for Wellesbury Animal Park hung around its neck. The car park was already busy, so we parked in the gravel overspill area, then joined a queue of people in T-shirts, shorts, flip-flops and summer dresses, carrying rolled-up towels and picnic bags, Instagramming each other with thumbs up, pouting.
I gritted my teeth and held Molly’s hand tight, trying to focus for once on the here and now, so I could treasure a moment with my daughter and inhabit it properly, see the magic of the world through a child’s eyes, where the past is just a story, and the future is so far away that it might as well not exist.
* * *
Molly has had enough of the macaques and their nervy antics. She leads me down the corridor and out to the open-air pens, past the beaver enclosure and the flamingos, wings clipped, amassed by a concrete pond. Next door, a giant anteater does laps of a scrubby lawn, its long snout curving into the dusty corners of the perimeter wall. 78
Molly squeals with delight. ‘Look at its funny head!’
I am surprised by the sheer heft of a beast that feasts on tiny insects. Its oversized forelegs and claws are so destructive that it must curl them up and walk on its knuckles. The anteater is moving at a quick pace. Not foraging for food but obsessively lapping its habitat. Occasionally it staggers slightly, as if drunk in the heat. There is some shade beneath a tree, but the anteater keeps on moving.
Over the back fence of the enclosure is the car park and the A27, hissing with weekend traffic and hazy with pollution. The anteater is no more aware of what is beyond the fence than I am of thriving alien planets or alternative multiverses. A supreme entity might be observing us humans right now in the same way I observe this anteater, unaware of our incarceration and the limits of our perception. We live in a planetary prison that we chose to pave over with concrete, choking on fumes.
There I go again. Compulsive melancholy, my late wife called it. A form of OCD, says my therapist, an obsessive repetition of negative thoughts that my psyche uses as a weapon against itself, like an autoimmune disease of the imagination. But I’m not so sure about that. At times I feel as if I see things closer to how they really are; rather than me wilfully looking on the dark side of life, it might be that most people are wilfully blinding themselves to the truth. After all, I’m not making things up. The ice caps really are melting. The weather really is weird. Britain really is in another crippling recession. Our civilisation really is in an inexorable decline. I really am losing clients for my graphic design business. My wife really did die of an antibiotic-resistant 79infection. The newspapers might have used words like ‘freak’ and ‘virulent strain’ but there have been others since. Other fathers, other mothers, other sons, other daughters.
This is not a groundless anxiety from which I suffer. I don’t see problems that don’t exist. These are objective truths; there are statistics and measurements to back it up. It’s all actually happening. If others aren’t experiencing stressful reactions to the situation, then it’s a flaw in their psychological makeup, not mine.
‘Dad, do you think Mr Anteater has a funny head?’ says Molly.
‘It’s absolutely hilarious,’ I reply.
Between the zoo and the theme park section of Wellesbury Animal Park, there’s a miniature bandstand with a gang of animatronic animals on it: mandrill, lemur, python, vulture, alligator, tarantula. Molly hits a button and the animals jiggle from side to side, jaws flapping open, singing in vibrato voices, ‘Carnivores swing, herbivores jive, the food chain keeps us alive!’
The robot animals have seen better days. Threadbare fur and rickety mechanics. There’s something awry with the mandrill’s jaw. It keeps falling open too far, then getting stuck, vibrating and clicking as if it’s about to snap off. The audio track crackles hoarsely through clapped-out speakers as the animals sing: ‘We are happy happy jungle friends, let us hope life never ends.’ Even Molly looks disturbed.
‘Let’s go and eat lunch,’ I say.
In front of the cafe, the picnic benches are heaving with people, their skin red with sunburn. Some loll about on a verge of yellow grass almost turned to hay. Others line up for attractions: an inflatable slide, tin can alley, teacup ride. With a 80piercing whistle, Thomas the Tank Engine chugs to a stop at the miniature railway platform and families pile off the carriages as the tinkly piano theme song blasts from a tannoy. I shudder at the sight of Thomas’s tortured face on the front of the train, human flesh stretched and grafted onto steel, a mutant cyborg enslaved by fat controllers. Molly was banned from watching it as a toddler, not that she wanted to, thank god, innately understanding the implications of its diabolical body horror.
We find a space among sprawled families on a lawn between the entrance to the Adventure Maze and the Costa kiosk, where we sit with our pre-packed sandwiches. As Molly regales me with an overly complicated argument about why we should buy a pug, I notice a black cloud behind the theme park, incongruous against the brilliant blue expanse. No, not a cloud but smoke. Smoke, fed by a line of black curling upward, a dark scar, yellowing the sky on either side of it. A farmer perhaps, burning some waste, a barbeque out of control, or merely the fracked earth of Sussex coughing up a lung. I find it mesmerising, the slow, creeping stain.
I lose the thread of Molly’s argument completely, not that it matters, as her voice is being drowned out by the amplified flatulence of a life-size fibreglass Indian elephant on the nearby footpath. It makes a trumpeting noise when people press the yellow button and a farting noise when they press the brown button. Every passing child presses the brown button. Molly sniggers each time and wafts her hand near my backside. After a while I cannot take it. I throw our remaining snacks into our backpack.
‘We’ll go someplace else,’ I tell Molly. She shrugs and sighs deeply, like this happens all the time. Which it does, I suppose, come to think of it. But I cannot help it. 81
Through a corridor of soft-toy shops and arcade games, we pass from the picnic area into the adventure playground zone and sit on a bench outside the GET SOAKED waterpark where artificial geysers spurt, kids shoot each other with plastic jet-guns and a red slide spirals into a paddling pool. The waterpark is packed with revellers in trunks and bikinis. Naked toddlers. Grandparents in white hats eating ice cream. Teenage girls drinking slushies from oversized plastic containers. The air fills with squeals and laughter, punctuated by the odd gruff shout as a child gets admonished. It’s the sound of life going on for other people, as if they exist beyond an invisible partition, separate from me. I know this is how Molly feels too, sometimes, and I wonder if it’s my fault, or her mother’s fault for dying young, or the fault of society’s historical abuse of antibiotics, or if that’s just what we’re like, me and her.
It’s early afternoon and the sun is high, with a warm breeze offering little respite. The few remnants of shade are cast in hard angles against the concrete and plastic. Many people huddle beneath the slide to stop burning in the sunshine. I try to understand how the park can operate these fountains when there’s a hosepipe ban on. I assume it’s the same water going around and around, gathering more traces of suntan lotion, sweat and child piss with every cycle.
I cannot eat any more of this sandwich. I feel sick.
Molly seems bored, eating her crisps, gazing longingly at the gangways, ropes and slides of the adventure playground, full of children running in madcap circles and screaming with faux fear.
‘You can go and play if you like,’ I tell her. ‘Meet me back at this bench. If I’m not here, wait for me.’ She nods. Smiles 82wanly. Then skips off to the wooden fort structure in the centre of the network and disappears inside its ramparts. Moments later, she’s on the wobbly rope bridge between two towers, waving down at me. There are some other kids loitering on the bridge, but I doubt she’ll make friends with them. She rarely does. It makes me sad. She’s a victim of both genetics and circumstance.
The smoke is now overhead, black clumps of spiralling charcoal, emitting wisps, trailing from a column that’s thickening and darkening. The sky is turning rapidly from blue to orange, casting a sepia hue over the zoo, like an Instagram filter. Nobody seems to care, and I assume it must be from a distant bonfire, perhaps a house on fire in a nearby village. But it seems a lot closer than that, only a few fields away, though I find it hard to measure distances at the best of times. It’s quite worrying to look at, but worrying is what I resolutely wanted to avoid today, for my daughter’s sake.
‘Molly!’ I yell up into the interior of the adventure playground’s central fort. ‘I’ll be back in a minute!’
‘Okay, Dad.’ A distant cry from above, but she sounds happy enough.
I return through the corridor of shops, looking for the toilet. On the way, I notice there’s a security guard in the soft toy emporium, talking to the woman behind the counter. I slip inside the shop, pretending to look at some fluffy lemurs, and eavesdrop on the conversation, assuming they’re discussing the smoke. But they’re talking about one of their fellow staff members, who has allegedly been talking behind people’s backs, something they’re keen to discuss behind her back. 83
‘Excuse me,’ I say. ‘What’s going on with that smoke?’
The security guard shrugs. ‘Fire in a field.’
‘Is it close?’
‘Oh, it’s a way away.’
A way away?
One of the quirks of my anxiety is that I constantly look to people for reassurance and yet never believe their comforting words. However, when I come across people who are utterly oblivious to any sense of a problem at all, like these two staff members, I find it disarming, making me feel silly for harbouring a concern, like my woes are entirely fictional.
They return to their conversation and I continue to the toilets near the Thomas the Tank Engine railway. When I emerge, the sky looks radically different. Gone are the black wisps. The smoke has unfolded like two great moth wings, with a dense brown thorax core that intensifies with every passing second. Next to it is what looks to be another source of smoke, a separate feeder channel pumping more noxious gasses into the swirling whole. I glance around, seeking signs of concern, but people are eating ice creams, queuing for chips and sauntering between attractions. A staff member with a walkie-talkie is nattering happily with the litter-picking guy.
Clearly there’s nothing wrong.
But, clearly, there is something very wrong.
Where is the smoke coming from?
Molly will be alright for a few more minutes so I hurry across the picnic area, past the farting elephant, to the perimeter hedgerow. As I approach, the air becomes palpably hotter. Above me, the clouds of smoke seethe into 84each other, giving birth to a denser mass that is beginning to block out the sun, rolling like thundercloud across the zoo enclosures, out towards the levels. Nearby there’s a skinny young security guard in a white shirt, shifting uneasily, turning his gaze between me and the smoke.
‘What’s happening?’ I ask.
‘Oh, it’s a fire in the field,’ he says, overly casually. ‘We’re keeping an eye on it. Should be fine.’ He doesn’t seem certain. Bites his lip. I am sure that I can hear the crackling of flames.
‘John, mate! John!’ another security guard jogs into view, clutching his walkie-talkie. When he sees me, he stops dead in his tracks. Beckons his colleague over. Whispers something in his ear. They turn and run to the office building near the turnstiles. A fire engine siren whines in the far distance.
Repressing my panic with deep, measured breaths, I return to the main complex, walking at pace towards the cafe area and adventure playground, back to Molly. Suddenly she seems very far away, as if the ground is stretching beneath me, the earth pulling us further apart. The heat on my back intensifies even though I am increasing my distance from the source. I weave through folk still queuing and eating and bickering with their kids beneath a vast orange mass that is rapidly absorbing all the blue from the sky.
I pass by a covered area where people can stand and vape, not unlike one of the zoo’s animal enclosures. Inside, three men stand docile in a haze of vanilla steam. They can definitely see the smoke canopy billowing over us, because one of them points up at it, and the others follow the line of his finger, nodding. They laugh. Clearly they don’t think it’s 85worth worrying about, but I’m losing trust in the nonchalance of others and I’m determined to leave as soon as possible.
Shouting my daughter’s name over and over, I push through the arcade game players and out into the adventure area, where giggling kids run around the base of the wooden fort.
‘Molly!’ I shout up into the structure. I can see a few bare legs dangling but cannot tell if it’s her or not. ‘Please Molly, I need you down here now.’
No answer. I climb the ladder onto the first platform. Then squeeze up through a hatch to the second, where the rigging takes me up past a couple of bewildered boys playing with action figures. They look startled momentarily then go back to their game. Eventually, I’m at the top turret, poking my head out like a tank commander. There’s no sign of Molly, but I can now see clearly across the animal park, where there is a wall of fire in the adjacent field, a red tidal wave at breaking point, moments away from crashing onto the perimeter hedge.
This is what it must like after the ship hits the iceberg. That strangely serene period when it is afloat, as it should be, and yet fatally compromised, doomed to sink.
I cry out Molly’s name again when I see three kids below, one of whom is her, I’m certain, heading towards the monkey enclosures. I clatter down the rigging, scuffing my knees and shins, jumping from the bottom platform onto wood-chippings. As I jog past the water park, I see that people are beginning to look up at the sky. A rising hubbub of nervous voices. Outbreaks of frantic activity. Parents gather up clothes, rub their children dry, jab at their phones looking for information. 86
Entering the monkey enclosures, I see Molly stood with a couple of older girls by the mini-bandstand of animatronic animals, whacking the buttons and howling with laughter at the mandrill with the broken jaw, which is now dangling from a piece of wire.
I grab her hand but she pulls away, disgusted. ‘Dad!’
‘We need to go now, Molly!’ I tell her.
She curdles with embarrassment. ‘No.’
‘Look up, Molly, look up.’
As she looks, her expression softens, as if she finally sees the smoke, or rather, comprehends what the smoke means. She takes my hand.
‘Find your parents,’ I tell her companions, then I lead Molly in a brisk walk through enclosures of antagonised animals, circling, leaping, screeching. We pass red pandas, meerkats, capuchin monkeys, rock hyraxes and capybaras, all trapped behind glass, aware yet powerless, and out onto the main pathway, where a model of a Tyrannosaurus rex guards the turnstiles.
The breeze has strengthened into a wind, carrying the smoke far across the Sussex sky. There is no longer any sunshine, only the hint of a pale disc casting an ochre glare on the gravel as we hurry through the car park. There are others out here too, clambering into their cars, reversing out. I curse our luck at being parked so far away in the overspill area. I pull harder at Molly’s arm, breaking into a jog, as shouts and calls rise from the zoo behind and sirens cry out in the distance.
By the time we reach our car, feathery grey snowflakes of ash have begun to fall. Molly brushes them from her hair and gets into the back seat. A shambling mass of people 87pours from the zoo, dragging kids and pushchairs. A queue of cars already snakes around the access road. We’re going to have to move quickly if we want to leave.
Our tyres crunch on stones as I manoeuvre through a gap in the lines of parked cars, but it makes no difference. We soon come to a stop, and as more vehicles mobilise from their positions closer to the exit, we gain only a yard or two every five minutes. I flick on the wipers to keep the windscreen clear of ash but it falls thicker and thicker.
The slow pace is a torment. Fortunately, Molly doesn’t yet realise the extent of the danger. She sits, bewildered, staring out, asking me when we’ll get to the road, complaining that she’s hungry. I turn on some classical music and talk softly about what we’re going to have to eat later. Maybe pizza from the takeaway, any toppings she likes. Even ice cream. A tub each. I struggle to keep the fear from my voice as I see flames startlingly close to the zoo buildings and the steel structures of the ape houses and aviaries, the fire whipped along by rising wind and brittle vegetation.
‘Are the animals going to be alright, Dad?’ Molly asks, face pressed against the window.
‘I don’t know.’ I fight back tears. ‘The zoo has procedures.’ It’s all I can think of to say. Staff members are amassed by the emergency assembly point near the entrance, but this has taken them by surprise and the situation is escalating rapidly. They don’t know what to do about the burgeoning mass of cars trying to leave through the same narrow exit onto a single lane road.
A woman in a hi-vis jacket tries to help fleeing pedestrians pass through the grumbling mass of vehicles 88but she’s getting abuse from panicking drivers. Horns blast but nobody has any power to move faster. In order for us to leave, we must approach the zoo entrance before we can turn right, taking us closer to the inferno. It’s as if we are at a diabolical drive-in. The low brown buildings in front of us are crested with a backdrop of belching flame. To the left, the top of a netted enclosure is visible above the fence. I see something flit upwards like a firework, a bird maybe, or a small monkey, before it falls away.
A cacophony erupts. The bleats and howls of terrified animals in the heat of the blaze. Smoke plumes burst from shattering windows. There’s a whoosh and crack as one of the fences beside the main building crashes down. Molly screams as the giant anteater staggers through the gap, flames roaring from its back, hind legs dragging. It gets only a few yards before it buckles and hits the gravel in a smouldering heap. Molly screams again.
‘Fuck this.’ I pull the car to the side of the road, switch off the engine, and kick open the door. I lift Molly from the back seat. She’s grown a lot bigger this past year, but I can still carry her. I can still hold her and tell her I love her and that I will look after her, like I did the morning her mother died. I can stop her from watching this horror, at least for today.
‘It’s okay, sweetheart, we’re going home now.’
I turn away from the zoo and march with my daughter in my arms, through lines of cars in the snowing ash, towards the wide green fields beyond the A27, where I know we shall find a fragile sanctuary.