Chapter 47 – At the Zoo
Tarquin filled in the forms and attended the interview. He strolled around the zoo with the Director of Inhuman Resources to look at the animals. Do you know what that one is? asked the Director. It looks like a giant woodlouse, said Tarquin. It’s an armadillo, said the Director. Tarquin jotted the name down in his notebook: armoured dildo. What about that one? I know it’s a zebra, said Tarquin, but I can’t look at a zebra for any length of time. It makes me want to cross the road. The Director chuckled. How about that one? Do you know what it is? Tarquin looked long and hard. A cleaning lady? he suggested. That’s very amusing, the Director retorted. I think we will put you in with the funny animals. You start Monday.
Monday arrived. It was atypical. The sun was shining. Pretty much everyone in the country was happy with the way things were going. The government was enjoying a 94.7% approval rating with the general public, and the Prime Minister was hitting 94.72. The global pandemic of slightly humorous irony was ploughing through the population with a full head of steam on. Nobody was interested in the creation of vaccines. Nobody had never had it almost not so good.
Tarquin arrived at the zoo on Monday morning to start work. Go and look after the chimpanzees, said the Supervisor. So he did. Looking after the chimpanzees was easy, because Tarquin had relevant experience: he had once worked manning the phones in the Customer Service department of Thames Water. But by lunchtime he was bored and wanted a bigger challenge. Throw me to the lions, he said to the Supervisor. My pleasure, said the Supervisor, and did exactly that.
Lenny was a very pleasant lion, as lions go. He was fairly enormously well-educated compared to the majority of lions, and was more than happy to sit down with Tarquin and discuss the development of early philosophical thought in the pre-Socratic period of ancient Greece. Indeed, although he rather baulked at the term “pre-Socratic”, he bowed to Tarquin’s argument that while the term was considered contentious by some, it seemed churlish to allow it to hinder the development of their relationship. And to ice the metaphorical cake, Tarquin threw Lenny the haunch of a freshly slaughtered something-or-other to munch on while they debated whether or not Empedocles was quite the twit he by all accounts appeared to be. Bronze shoes indeed! A god indeed! Throwing oneself into a volcano indeed!
Tarquin had, at last, found his place in the world. Things were going swimmingly, especially in the aquatic park, where Tarquin had become intimate with one of the mermaids, Marina – a terribly unimaginative name. When their date nights came around he very much wanted to take her to the cinema, and then for a lovely meal at a restaurant of her choosing, but there were practical difficulties, so they settled on watching something on his phone, and they shared a shrimp and seaweed salad Tarquin had prepared especially.
Of course, things could not go on like this. When Tarquin proposed marriage and Marina accepted, the zoo management put their corporate feet down and denied permission on the grounds that it was too ludicrous, and had they known that an employee was conducting a relationship with one of their livestock they would have fired him long before now.
So Tarquin was back among the unemployed or, to put it another way, in his discomfort zone.
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Conrad Titmuss
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