Captivity (First 8 Chapters) (1)
Captivity A Roz Hynde Novel by Jonathan Shearer The sun rose. Doubtless, a grand spectacle of scarlet, orange and yellow played out behind the cloud, but over Brentwood Park, a thin blanket of grey unhurriedly shifted into a slightly different shade of grey. Trees, buildings, fences, pathways emerged from the night; statues, swings, kiosks, litter bins; zebra-striped Land Rovers, wheelbarrows, shovels, brushes, buckets; “Keep off the grass”, “Please Pay Here”, “Teas, Coffees, Ice-cream”, “Information”, “To The Tigers”. The night was ruled by the carnivores. Instinctively, these beasts were very active at dawn in expectation of drowsy herbivora, insectivora and rodenta. In the half hour of gloaming, they paced frantically in their miniature domains, frustrated by the smells of awakening prey all around. When the dawn fully broke these creatures would begin the long, tedious day of lolling around until evening, napping and dozing, sitting and staring, scratching and yawning. As the hunters prepared for sleep, the hunted sprang fully alert into cacophony: trumpeting and squawking, bellowing, piping, mewing, squeaking, trilling and hooting. The water-table was still high in Romney Marsh. It was a rare dawn, even in high summer, which was not born over patches of mist draped around Brentwood’s many ponds and the considerable ornamental lake, once the centrepiece of the estate. The eastern part of the estate had once been the Home Farm but was now the site of the huge fenced paddocks which were the residences of tigers and wolves. Such were the destructive powers of the pachyderm, that it had been necessary to build a huge concrete home for the park’s small herd of elephants. This monstrosity resembled nothing so much as a military installation with ample enough parking for a whole tank battalion. It was generally regarded as the finest man-made elephant environment in the world. It marked the historical boundary of Brentwood Estate. The elephant habitat was encircled by a ragtag collection of small cages and pens populated by random oddments of the biota which Brentwood’s magnetic shepherd had drawn into his fold. The lake and the extensive formal garden which had once occupied its shores had been given over to a savannah of hoof-stock and a maelstrom of aquatic mammals. Sealions, capybara, hippopotami, beavers and otters lived in apparent harmony amongst giraffes, warthogs and zebra. By night, a skulking aardvark rootled. Overlooking the lake, Brentwood House was an unremarkable Georgian manor. Currently resplendent in a new-ish coat of peach paint it was fronted by some generic Greek columns; white but shining likewise peachy in the rapidly strengthening morning light. Behind the house the visitors’ trail snaked through the woods where monkeys and smaller primates lived amongst the shadows in the uneasy company of an over-anxious black leopard who never seemed to rest. In the extreme west of the estate was the structure which made Brentwood the most important private zoo in the world. The Cathedral housed two separate troops of Mountain Gorillas, and what amounted to a lunatic asylum of chimps. Most of the chimps had their origins in the circuses and freak shows of continental Europe and had been brought to the zoo by the considerable force of Sir Miles Gordon’s charity. Smaller structures, the Chapels as they were known, housed Siamang and some impossibly difficult Orang-utan who were a constant source of worry. Like so much at the zoo, the Cathedral had come about through the power, not of Sir Miles’s charity, but of his poker game, and the full house on which Sir Malcolm Reinholds, architect of parliaments and art galleries, had staked his reputation and eight months of his time. This mist burned off. Close to main gate, in a corner of an inauspicious paddock, a gathering cloud of black flies buzzed. Chapter1 Snug in a thick, red bathrobe, Sir Miles Gordon stood between the open French windows of the morning room, and observed a moment’s silence. Almost forty years ago, he had overhead his second wife, Delilah, tell some long forgotten house-guest that breakfast could be taken at anytime after dawn because Miles was ‘up with the lark’. “Mistle thrush this morning,” he had barked. “No bloody larks in Hampstead, not for years!” No bloody lark in Brentwood either today. Brentwood was not a quiet place at night, but the sounds of the hours of darkness were deep rumblings, grunts, moans and the occasional sharp screech of mistaken alarm. The interstice of dark and light was a still point, a pivot upon which day and night balanced, when the noise of the night ceased and shrill din of the day was yet to begin. Sir Miles savoured the moment, ears pricked for the first sound of the morning. He took the clipboard from its hook by the door and checked the time on the mantelpiece. “5:47,” he wrote. “Robin.” Sir Miles dropped his bathrobe to the floor and stepped naked towards the steaming pool. At 78, his body had become and annoying chimera of fat bits that had once been thin and skinny bits that had once been toned. Hair that had once been thick and strong was grey or gone. His pale flesh was scrawled over with a mess of blue and purple lines as proof that his blood continued to circulate. He dived badly and splashed loudly to begin 32 laps of slappy front crawl. Likewise, the day sprung boisterously to life. Sir Miles allowed few genuinely nocturnal creatures in Brentwood: he didn’t see the point. Once upon a time, a beautiful enclosure in the woods had been home to a pair of slow loris. A most attractive affair, lush with imported fragments of jungle, it was warm and moist. An occasional lucky visitor on tip-toe had sometimes been blessed by the sight of a few centimetres of unmoving orange-brown fur in the depths of a gloomy nesting box. At night, when it was absolutely pitch black, the loris would cling to the roof of their cage and emit irregular blood-curdling shrieks. Anyone who heard the noise would conclude that a particularly brutal murder was being witnessed by a particularly strong-lunged nine year old girl. It was a noise that you never got used to. Sir Miles never saw anything of these loris beyond the patch of reddish fur. They were timorous beasties: they would not be stalked and their cage could not be staked-out. Regent’s Park had been very grateful. * * * * * Roz Hynde was a most atypical unmarried teenage mother. Straight-A student and junior county show-jumping champion, she had her first baby at sixteen. She never got drunk. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, she had never been kissed. Fifteen years old when she started work at Brentwood, in exchange for pocket money she passed some halcyon weeks lopping twigs and leaves from apple trees, compacting them in black garbage bags and freezing them as a winter feed for the langurs. Her Christmas holiday was spent pushing wheelbarrows full of tiger faeces, elephant dung, eland excreta, tortoise poop, coati turds, gorilla droppings and any other shit the zoo produced. Roz was up-close and personal with some of the most rare and exotic shit known to man. During the school year, each weekend she worked the gate; she sold ice-creams, served tea; she painted fences and faces; swept up leaves, and pushed endless barrows full of aforesaid shit or dismembered ungulates. She spent Easter with George Amis in his surgery, and it was there that she found herself. Jasper was born on late on Easter Sunday as Roz studied for her O levels. Thereafter Roz woke up through the night, every night, and fed him every two hours, then three then four as he grew. Passing all her exams with some panache, she announced that she no longer had any plans for University. Her parents said nothing to try to change her mind. From an early age, Roz had been the parent of her parents. She was an only-child, but she thought of herself as an only-adult, sent to care for an exotic pair of diffident and eccentric paedomorphs. Roz loved Jasper. She doted upon him and literally spoiled him. The prime objective of all foster parents is that the weaned adult should return to his or her own kind, live in as natural an environment as possible and above all, breed. Roz and Jasper bonded too well. Jasper genuinely knew not that he was a Binturong. Wholeheartedly believing himself Roz’s son and he was devoted to her. He never returned to the Binturong enclosure, but became Brentwood’s most famous attraction, and Roz’s constant companion for twenty years. She felt his loss still. The Binturong is a funny beastie with long, coarse black fur with tufted ears. They live most of their life in the trees. Their tail is prehensile and Roz was accustomed to having Jasper’s wrapped around her neck like a python. He was a smelly beast, and the smell was tortilla chips and popcorn. Sometimes he slept all day and sometimes he slept all night. He could seemingly go for days with no sleep at all. Jasper followed Roz everywhere, or clung on to her shoulders. He spent most of the summer days on the roof of the surgery, or dangling from the surrounding trees. He spent most of the winter in front of the glowing bars of the electric fire in George’s office. Every morning he accompanied Roz on her rounds and he knew all the zoo residents every bit as well as Roz or Sir Miles. He had a minor celebrity as a star of children’s TV, and had dragged Roz up the ladder of minor fame with him. On his first appearance on Blue Peter in 1990, he famously pee-ed on John Leslie. She had returned to the show once or twice a year for several years, each time taking whatever baby she was raising at the time. They were introduced on the show as “Jasper from Brentwood Zoo and his keeper, Roz”, though Roz was nobody’s keeper. He had appear in a music video with the band Supergrass; he had once sat in the passenger seat of a Transit van in an TV advert and paid for Roz to go to San Diego. It had been more than five years since their last regular appearance on TV but every day, visitors to the zoo accosted her and asked after Jasper. Dead over two years, Jasper still got mail. His peaceful death in his sleep made the Ten O’Clock News. Wreaths and bouquets were laid at the gate: Brentwood was deluged in cards, paintings, flowers and fruitcake. A couple of weeks after that, Roz had made a return to Blue Peter with a three-week-old Gorilla, who viewers phoned in to name. (“Anything but Jasper,” she had told the young audience, but when the baby was named Gorzilla by popular acclaim, she wished she had kept her mouth shut.) There was a montage of Jasper’s best bits, and Roz cried on national TV. Friends and family would never have believed it possible if it they hadn’t seen it in the corner of their own sitting-room. Gravely embarrassed, Roz determined to never be on the telly again. Jasper was – had been - a star; Roz was vet nurse. Her place was in the surgery. Roz and Sir Miles rose together, every morning, sometimes to the second, though some miles apart. As Sir Miles noted the first bird of the day and crawled his morning half-mile, Roz warmed bottles, minced mealworms, boiled eggs, opened tins of cat food, peeled grapes and spluttered along with the coffee machine. In a popular advert for instant coffee in the 80s, various hosts hid in their kitchens and made the sounds of filter coffee makers before offering their guests cups of fresh instant. Absurdly, Roz had picked up habit and whenever she brewed coffee alone, she would imitate the noise of the machine. Perhaps coincidentally, it was the ideal noise for her to make at that time of the day. It was a very maternal sound and vaguely mimicked the typical sounds of mother mammal, mother bird, mother reptile as she woke her offspring for the first feed of the day. Two multicoloured socks joined by a strip of red ribbon hung from a hook above a lukewarm radiator. As Roz sputtered and slurped her coffee song, the faces of a pair of Wallabies appeared from the socks and were immediately met by two baby’s bottles of marsupial formula. So many kangaroo, wallaby, pademelon and wallaroo were rejected or orphaned, both in zoos and in the wild, that they had their own commercial products. Roz was lucky to have only two at this time of the year. The wallabies of Brentwood raised their young perfectly normally until they were old enough to leave the pouch. All too frequently, the first time they left the pouch was also the last: the mothers simply seemed to not recognise their offspring, or not care. One or two were lost each year and one or two were hand reared. Roz fed with a bottle in each hand. When they finished, she slung the ribbon around her neck and dropped the two socks down the neck of her sweater, where they would remain for the greater part of the day, warmed by her body. Roz wondered if this wallaby behaviour was perhaps a selection pressure: she had raised many generations of wallabies now and it had often occurred to her that the most cost effective way for a wallaby to bring up her young was to chuck it out and let Roz do all the work. Roz rarely dealt with big or labour intensive orphans any more. Looking after a gorilla or orang was a full time, demanding and thankless task. It was not possible to oversee a crčche with a chimp on your back. Generally, the bigger than animal, the easier is was to rear. Big cats could be raised by anyone who could operate an alarm clock. Apes could be reared by anyone with the patience of a saint and who was happy to live in a smelly dump where everything – everything - had been broken or taken apart, chewed or rammed into a previously unnoticed crevice behind the (padlocked) fridge. Habituated big cats bred as well as those reared by their own mothers and there were obvious advantages to leopards and tigers who did not see humans as a threat or a meal. Constant contact with keepers and visitors means that zoo great apes were subject to any manner of imprinting and idiosyncrasies. Hand-reared apes often seemed more relaxed and stable that those who were raised in the troop. Apart from the wallabies, Roz was currently mother to a pair of raccoons who had once been a quartet, a cape hunting dog puppy and a mara. Most of the babies Roz reared were rejects, but the raccoons were genuine orphans who she had had since the day they were born and were now six weeks old. Cape hunting dogs had most peculiar breeding habits and after years of serial infanticide, almost all the pups were now hand-reared or fostered by the dogs of keepers. Iago would be introduced to the pack in the next couple of weeks. Chad Banrock, Head of Carnivores, was an irascible and difficult character –nothing unusual in the zoo business – but he had a feel for canines that was second to none. Soon he would take Iago and run him between the outer and inner fences of the enclosure for a couple of hours. Chad himself ran back and forth and back and forth, bullying and cajoling the pups, sometimes kicking them, or biting them, wrestling with them and generally imposing his will upon them. The pack invariably appreciated this show. Then he would simply open the gate and stroll into the den, accompanied by the pup. Desdemona was top dog, and Banrock ‘enjoyed a special relationship’ with her. He presented the pup and an ordinary Bonio biscuit to Desdemona, grunted, whined and the business was over. Banrock would strut from the scene with an unchanging expression of pure joylessness. Roz pulled the dry teat from Egdon the mara’s insatiable lips (Having reared many hundreds of babies and named them all, Roz had a number of systems, mainly based on lists of characters in literature she dug up on the internet.) and began to deal with her ‘real’ family of refugees. Like Jasper, some of her charges never made it back to the fake wild of the zoo and simply stuck with her. A certain times of the year, there was an almost constant stream of visitors to her door, bearing abandoned robins, broken winged crows, legless hedgehogs, rabbits caught in headlights and escaped ferrets. Dorothea the ring-tailed lemur slept in a parrot cage but was at liberty in the house all day. Pica, the one-winged magpie entered and departed the house through the cat flap. A possum called Voss lived amongst the thatch of the roof. In the garden, a muntjac (Huxley) and a sheep called Dotty lived in uneasy harmony in the same hut. It was almost seven, Brentwood did not open to the public until ten, but most of the work began around eight. Roz and Sir Miles each took a cup of strong black coffee and settled down to check their email. * * * * * The black and white nose of Matrix emerged from the gloom of his stable and huffed two jets of steam into the chilly dawn. He sniffed and snorted and stamped his hoof a couple of times. There was always something wrong. How could there not be? He was an antelope; a great majestic sable antelope. Programmed by millennia of evolution, he sensed and feared predators miles and miles away. Captured in his third year and taken to live alone in the dry, hot zoo by the sea, he was forever on guard, and became neurotic and suspicious. Every day was constant olfactory assault. Lion, leopard, cheetah, hyena and man surrounded him: baying, growling, breathing, feasting. The omnipresent smell of death – herbivorous death – rendered each day a new battle in the war against fear and terror, yet there was hardly an antelope more safe. Then he was taken to this colder, damper place, where everything was green and introduced to the female herd. But here was even more unknown danger, and females to protect and defend: his neuroses burgeoned and his paranoia bloomed. He had no idea what a tiger was, but he knew its smell, and he knew it was the smell of something that would eat him if he gave it a chance. His bolt response day after day deadened, but still, thrice daily at least, he or one of the women would hear a sound or catch a whiff of something musty and they would all charge off in the opposite direction and skid into the fence, whence they turned to career randomly into another corner until the sound was forgotten or the scent lost in the breeze. Despite the near company of many a more colourful or fearsome beast, Matrix was perhaps the most imposing and impressive animal in the zoo. His horns were almost two metres long, his coat glossy and black. Quarantine for hoof-stock was an arbitrary matter, and rinderpest easy to test for. When he was first brought to Brentwood there had been three females and they had seemed old and bad tempered. But now they had been joined by the fragrant Margarita, who was young and wild. The three old ladies lay in the straw of the shed, gently steaming and stinking. Matrix huffed and puffed again; gave a low, whinnying call. Margarita was ‘out there’ somewhere, but there was no response. He stamped some more. He retreated into the stable and trotted in a circle, tossing his head then took a half step outside where he called louder to Margarita. Nothing. Back inside, he ripped hay from the manger. * * * * * The road bent sharply to the left. The Mercedes went straight on. It had flew a few metres through the air, smashed into a sturdy sycamore at a height of about a metre, where it remained with the half-felled tree propping the car up, front wheels in the air. This was a very quiet road. No surprise that the accident had gone unnoticed through the night. It had been found by a birdwatcher, as so many bodies were, who had opened the door, freeing a fat black lab, and discovering… Detective Inspector Dennis Chatham was very far from a cynical embittered cop who had seen it all. This corner of Kent was hardly a hotbed of serial murders and slashings. He had never dealt with a murder committed by anyone other than a close acquaintance of the victim and all the real gore he encountered was in car-crashes such as this. He had never seen anything quite like the mess that George Amis had become. Chatham knew Amis by slightly more than sight, as he knew almost every salt-of-the-earth professional who lived and worked in his manor. Amis had become the vet at Brentwood around the time Chatham had left the RAF and joined the force. Some years ago, a lunatic with bolt clippers had broken into Brentwood and opened several tiger cages. Most of the tigers had just remained where they were, and only two had even bothered to leave the zoo. Chatham had driven Amis from false alarm to false alarm until one of the cats was tranquilised and the other was dead. Amis had been a slightly taciturn individual with the standard air of competence that surrounded most medical professionals: tweed jacket, Viyella shirt, brown brogues, real ale, fountain pen, Telegraph crossword. Ten years ago, Amis had been a confirmed bachelor, living alone with a black lab. Chatham did not imagine anything had changed on that front except the dog. Poppy, it said on her collar, was no more than four. Amis had not been wearing a seatbelt. Chatham generously imagined that Amis had had a heart attack and died from it or from injuries sustained in the crash. It was after he had died that his problems had begun. Poppy, it seemed, had eaten his deceased master, or at least the greater part of the vet’s face: his lips, left ear and all the flesh from his forehead to his neck had been ripped off and consumed. His dead eye peered out from a mask of gore. Bits of flesh, blood and what must be Labrador drool adhered to the green tweed jacket. It was somehow the most revolting thing Chatham had ever seen. Poppy now sat obediently at his feet, smiling broadly, her tail brushing the leaves from side to side. A long trail of saliva dribbled onto Chatham’s boots. There may be laws, imagined Chatham, governing the treatment and probable disposal of canines who had feasted in their dead owners’ flesh. It may well be, he surmised, a commonplace. Ancient dog owners must pass in their beds all the time. “That’s disgusting,” said Sergeant Smiley. “Very observant, Smiley. Thank you for your insight. It is, indeed, disgusting. What do you suggest we do with this flesh-eating zombie dog?” Poppy thumped her tail vigorously on the ground. “RSPCA? I don’t think we even have a local dog warden, do we? She seems friendly enough. Run her back to the station and stick her in an empty kennel? Do you know this bloke?” Sergeant Susan Smiley, dumpy in her late twenties, could have passed for forty or forty-five. She had a secure, unflappable, maternal manner; very matter or fact. Chatham suspected that her manner was the only aspect of maternity that Smiley would ever be subject to. Station speculation was, of course, that Smiley was of a non-heterosexual persuasion, but almost all policewomen with anything less that the overt sexuality of a dockside whore were subject to such subjectivity. Chatham very much suspected that Smiley had never been told about the birds and the bees, and had never known what she was missing. “Yes, I do ‘know the bloke’. George Amis, he is, was, the vet at Brentwood. Been there forever. Cottage on the estate. Pretty standard topping himself material I would guess. Single, childless, reaching the end of his usefulness. Par for the course.” “Are you saying this is suicide, Inspector? Is there a note?” “Driver alone in the car, no other vehicles involved. Might be the most common cause of unnatural death in men in their fifties, if you call it unnatural. The coroner will call it an accident.” “Funny way to do yourself in.” “Not at all, Smiley. Quite the opposite. Could be as much as 80% of crashes like this. No skid marks, probably accelerating. Dry, quiet stretch of road. He’s driven along here maybe tens of thousands of times. Not much scope for a change of mind.” “Next of kin?’ “Nothing obvious. There is always a brother or a cousin, nothing I know about though. You wait here until the medics arrive. I’ll take the panda and devil-dog to the zoo.” Chapter2 From: Reply-To: ringers@BTO.org.uk Date: Sun, 11 May 2009 22:31:50 +0100 To: Subject: Ring RTS0112098.tf3 Dear Hynde Roz Ring: RTS0112098.tf3 Species: Arctic Tern (Sterna paradisaea) Ringed at: Benbecula, Western Isles, UK AS342123 Nestling 12/06/90 Recaptured: Roz Hynde Brentwood Estate, Kent, UK PD921845 Blown inland 09/05/94 208 weeks, 6 days. Deceased: Bruce Daniels Cloghill Bay, Queen Maude Land GH455612 High Water Mark (no PM) 03/05/09 781 weeks, 6 days 985 weeks, 5 days The Arctic Tern (Ring: RTS0112098.tf3) has been recovered 26,467km from site of first contact. We thank you for your valuable support. Becca Swann Chief Ringer, British Trust for Ornithology
Copyright © 2009 Jonathan Shearer |