"I do love these ancient ruins:
W e never tread upon them but we set
Our foot upon some reverend history."
--The Duchess of Malfi, V.iii
Rex was waiting for him, like had been promised. Heaven knows how he’d got there. Perhaps he’d been there all day; had stolen in during visiting hours and secreted himself in some secluded spot till closing time before surfacing when darkness drew in. Probably hid somewhere that housed animals as revolting as he was, Brown mused. Rex would fit in just right in the snake house; a dark moist hole in which he could sit and lick his wounds, surrounded by the other reptiles. But then again, if Rex really was as good as he claimed to be, perhaps he had a key. If so Brown envied him. It had been a nerve-wracking and humiliating experience breaking into the zoo. He had spent two hours sitting in the car-park, constantly checking his watch and following each of the employee’s vehicles (land rovers and saloons and quirky little beetles) out into the street with his gaze. Finally, satisfied that they had all left, he had crept under the cover of darkness to the perimeter fence; thick wooden slats of burnt umber set into a concrete plinth a metre high. A suitable entrance eluded him however. Clambering onto the plinth and jumping to clutch the top of the fence, he realised that he was hardly the first person to try to gain access to the zoo come nightfall. No doubt the animals held a morbid fascination for the children and the bored teenagers who congregated on the streets after dark. The fences were meant to keep the predators in and the scavengers out, and as such were more than enough to frustrate the attempts of a middle-aged man with a beer-gut, the beginnings of a beard, and orthopaedic shoes.
He walked further round the outskirts of the zoo, looking for some opportunity of entrance, but none presented itself. Hugging the perimeter fence on his left, the tarmac of the car-park was replaced by the sand and loose gravel of the over-flow, and that in turn by the signs an impromptu land-fill site; sparse patches of grass clinging to dunes of builder’s sand and green plastic milk crates. Behind that, a tall and rusting fence separated him from an industrial canal, wide and tow-path less. Walking back, he reconsidered his options. Two heavy iron gates opened onto the overflow (the bolts that fastened them in place, ready to be padlocked, had cut two expansive curves into the sand), but they had been shut for the night, and offered no possibility of access. Even if by some freak accident they had been left ajar, he had no idea where they lead, and perhaps it was somewhere he didn’t want to be. Brown was no zoologist, but he knew that it was just as easy to die by being sat on or trampled by an elephant, or kicked by a giraffe, as it was to be torn apart by tigers or bears. His suspicions were confirmed when, spotting two old-fashioned metal rubbish bins he briefly entertained the notion of clambering onto them and then over the fence.
He received for his efforts only a brief glimpse of another fence made of lengths of thick steel cable and just as high as the one he was clinging to, before the bins overbalanced and found himself bruised and stunned on the gravel. As the bins fell, they unleashed a torrent of stinking viscera; animal parts rendered unrecognisable by the teeth of carnivores and by decay. He could have sworn he saw a horse’s head wedged in the bottom of one, with compound eyes like a fly’s. He stumbled retching, to the canal. Afterwards he did his best to wipe off the crimson liquor which had spilled from the rim of the bins, pulling up handfuls of Marram grass from the dunes and scrubbing furiously with them at his shirt.
It was with his head hung down, cursing his stupidity that he finally entered the zoo. Walking past the entrance to search for another point of entry on the opposite side of the perimeter, he had noticed a solitary light still on in the little office come ticket booth. Tapping on the window he finally managed to attract the attention of the slip of a girl talking coyly into her mobile and brushing out her long blonde hair. He made up some vague story about leaving something valuable but unidentifiable in the zoo, and backed it up with a few hesitant hand-gestures. She smiled sweetly, flicked the switch which allowed him to push past the turn-stile, and then promptly forgot about him. He took a few minutes to get his bearings, then pointed his feet towards the footpath up the hill where the silhouette of Dudley Castle loomed in the darkness like a piece of painted scenery. Only the cannons leant it the semblance of depth, projecting out over the zoo like the booms of a great ship. The eyes of eager, paranoid meerkats and of depressed llamas watched him as he passed. Or maybe they were Alpacas. As Brown reminded himself, he was no zoologist.
* * *
“Why here?” he asked Rex. They were standing in the court-yard of the castle. Rex was puffing away furiously at cigarette after cigarette as they spoke; the effect being that as they spoke he kept disappearing mid-conversation, only to reappear moments later in the orange light of a Morley filter-tip.
“Atmosphere, innit?” was his reply. “My customers, they’re people ‘ppreciative of history. Men like you. Brown, that’s you right?” Rex accompanied every word longer than two syllables with a jab of his finger towards Brown’s chest.
“Mr. Brown.”
“Right mate, whatever you say.” There was a pause, then Rex’s features took on a philosophical slant. “You a teacher, Mr. Brown? I get a lot of custom from the educational profession, so I do. Want to give the little kiddies the best lesson they ever had. Be remembered one day when one of them kids is famous; a footie player or a singer or a weather presenter or whatever. Know that they done good and it weren’t all a waste.”
“No I’m not a teach—.” Brown had begun to reply, but it was obvious from Rex’s hasty wave of the cigarette that the question was rhetorical.
“Let me give you a lesson then, Mr Brown.” He took a step back and swept his arm out in an all encompassing gesture, nearly jabbing Brown in the eye with his cigarette as he did so. “Sorry ‘bout that mate.” Then a deep intake of breath to mark the significance of the prepared speech that followed. “Now, this place, it has history. You might not see it, but I do. This place is, god, well; it’s really old, ok? Really old.” Searching around him for some significant land-mark, Rex’s eyes lighted on an orphaned block of masonry. “See that stone over there? Oliver Cromwell himself once sat there. Cross my heart mate.”
“The flyer I picked up earlier said that the castle was a royalist stronghold in the civil war” Brown interjected, dubiously.
“Alright then, King Charles, that’s what I meant. The first one. Yeah, so he sat there, directing his troops as they fought off the Roundheads, and old Cromwell was at the bottom of the hills, where them Zebras are. Bloody terrible battle it was, Cannons going off, clouds of smoke, stink of gunpowder – the works. Soldiers all along the walls getting blown off, bits of stone falling all round, taken off by the sodding great metal balls fired out of the artillery. In the middle of it all, the King bless him (I’ve always been a monarchist see, it was my mother what made me one, cried like a baby when Princess Diana died she did, took flowers to Buckingham Palace and everything) he sees one of his soldiers get shot straight through the chest and fall down in front of him. The king, he leans down to look into this guy’s face, which is all sooty and bloody, and all that poor soul can say is ‘water, give me water.’ So the king reaches down to his side where he’s got this bottle of champagne, what with being the king and a bit of a lad and all, and he gives it to this chap. Says to him, ‘your need is greater than mine, so he does.’ Or was it ‘let them eat cake.’ One of the two, either way—.”
At this point Brown tried to interrupt again, flustered and weary and angry that his desire required that he wasted his time with an idiot. But above all he wanted to see the item, to discover whether it had been worth it. He coughed politely, then angrily, but Rex was in full flow and there was no stopping him.
“Either way he said it, and that soldier goes and dies in his arms and all the king can do is look on, a little tear forming in the corner of his eyes (that’s a nasty cough you’ve got there by the way mate, I could sell you something for that if you’re interested). Anyway, it was like something out of Sharpe, so it was. That’s a famous story, that is,” he said authoritatively. “You can quote me on that one if you like. But like I say, History is always more interesting than fact. Never tell it like that to the kids in schools do they? That’s their mistake if you ask me. If I had my way they’d stop using all those musty text books and show the kids some proper telly in the class room, tell it like a story see, so they was interested. Tell them how it really happened, not who fought who where, but all the really juicy interesting bits. Whatchamacallit. Human interest, that’s right. You wanna hear a fact? A real fact like. Not boring dates or nothing.”
Rex flashed a sideways glance at Brown, the first in a while. Prior to this he had almost had his back turned to him, gesturing with his hands. Brown followed his gaze and realised he was actually looking towards a rudimentary wooden stage nestled underneath the keep of the castle, the most complete part of the structure that still remained. Brown remembered coming here a long time ago, brought by an aunt or his primary school perhaps, to see a play. Shakespeare maybe; something polite and acceptable and merrily incomprehensible to put on on a warm summer’s evening to entertain the bemused crowd, staged by a beleaguered and culture starved local theatrical company. Students probably; one of them had a pony-tail and a ring in his ear like a pirate. Brown remembered getting extremely bored and wandering off to look at the animals again, and had watched as a group of older boys dangled the smallest of their number over the concrete wall of the lion enclosure. He distinctly remembered one of them calling the animals pricks. Now Rex was actually addressing the stage, like a bizarre inversion of performance, in a monologue delivered to nobody, to thin air. He was muscling in on the drama, stealing the power and the magic from the empty wooden boards; not treading them, but trampling them with his own obnoxious, worldly self-confidence. Had there been any actors he would have been preaching to the choir, sermonising with all the sincerity of a salesman. As it was, his words were falling on deaf ears; there was nobody on the stage and Brown had switched off some time ago.
“Bloke down the pub told me this one day. Tell a lie, it was my brother-in-law. Though he was hardly one for the council pop, if you know what I mean. Anyway, you see that bloody great big tower over there?” Rex pointed towards the south tower, but predictably he did not wait for any assent. Brown was glad, because he could hardly make out anything but didn’t want to tell Rex that in the fear that he would insist on showing him, prolonging their assignation. “That was where the barracks used to be.” This was dubious. “It’s all a ruin now of course.” This, Brown could at least assent, was true. “One day some little girl’s running round, slips and falls. Skims her knee, goes right through the tights she’s wearing. Anyway, her daddy bends over to pick her up, sees the cut and kisses her knee better and all that, promises her an ice-cream or a balloon or whatever so his little darling, who’s severely trying daddy’s patience now, will stop crying. Only when he’s taken her over to the ice-cream stall to get her a Mr. Whippy with a flake and extra strawberry sauce, he wonders what it was she cut herself on, seeing how the floor of the tower is closely packed dirt and such, not really any stones or pebbles in it either, and the ones that there are have all been worn down by so many little kiddies pretending to be Robin Hood or Darth Vader or Cinderella. So he goes back with her, and of course the little cherubs all smiles now she has her ice-cream, and he asks his little angel to show where she cut herself. She points to her knee, and drops her Mr. Whippy on the floor, then bursts into howls of tears again. He makes to smack her but everybody’s staring at him now, and he doesn’t want the kid to say nothing to the social worker or her mother when he drops her off, because he only has for the weekends see, and this is long before Fathers for Justice and whatnot. So he takes her back to the ice-cream van, gets another Mr. Whippy with a flake, and thrusts the money into the hands of the greasy Italian guy behind the counter because he’s well pissed off now. Probably gets himself a Feast too, because this parenting larks hard and he reckons he deserves it. Actually he’s lucky it was twenty years ago, or that Jamie Oliver would have popped up and told him daughter was going to get obese, and given her some carrots to munch on instead. Is that smell you mate?
It took Brown a few moments to realise Rex had stopped his soliloquy and now demanded another player in his performance. “I spilt something down my front earlier” he replied hesitantly. Rex seized on this contribution as if it filled some EU minimum quota of outsider input, and its status as a conversation secured, he began his speech again.
“I thought so mate. No don’t tell me what it is, it smells like… Bovril. Yeah, it’s definitely Bovril, isn’t that what it is? I can always tell see, I’ve got a good nose for stuff like that. I’m like one of them forensics guys off the telly I am. You’ve always gotta pay attention to the details in my profession, remember that.” He puffed himself up proudly. For a minute Brown was sure he stuck his thumbs into the belt loops on his trousers, but he couldn’t be sure, because nobody did that any more. “Right, so to cut a long story short” (Brown fought the urge to punch the air) “daddy and the little monster come back, only now she’s his little angel again. This time he’s really careful to ask her where she fell over, holding her ice-cream while he does so, and she points to the dirt where there’s this little corner of stone sticking out. Only he thinks it’s the end of a carpentry tool or a paint stripper or something because it’s pretty dark in his shadow and the bit of stone is really dirty. Now he calls out to one of the zoo staff, this bloke walking round handing out balloons, because though this might be before Fathers for Justice it isn’t so early that he still isn’t thinking he could sue the zoo for leaving some dangerous tools lying around and make a mint. Calls a crowd of people over too, so he can have some witnesses and they’ll be plenty of Mr. Darren Parker’s, 31, and Mrs. Stella Gibbs, 54, to tell the Advertiser or the Observer what a lovely little girl she was before the accident, so full of life, and how worried they are now that she’ll never walk again. Only when the poor sod in the gorilla outfit who’s already had to deal with a sprained ankle today, and some little shits trying to feed the elephants a glass beer bottle (heaven knows where they got it, what with only being eleven and all), only when he bends down and clears the dirt away, turns out its not a tool at all, but the beginnings of a heavy stone slab. Now those eager parents have all seen Indiana Jones about thirty times between them, so they know what’s going to happen, and daddy starts reminding everyone it was him that found it, picturing his face on the face on the front of the paper holding a chest full of doubloons. Of course that wouldn’t happen, because as our Len found out treasure trove laws mean it all belongs to the government, which” here he leant forward and winking conspiratively, though Brown reasoned it was probably to take the first breath of air in about three minutes of sustained conversation “is why men like me have to be careful and meet in abandoned zoos after hours when they’d rather be in the pub.”
In spite of himself, Brown slowly began to be pulled into Rex’s story. He tried to stop it by reminding his brains of two things; firstly, that this was without doubt the least trust-worthy man alive, a man who had confided in him on a prior occasion (in a dingy pub in Darlaston) that he was capable of getting his hands on anything, even if it involved robbing a national trust property in the process. Secondly that this was the Black Country and things like that didn’t happen round here. The region was what, two hundred years old at the most? If something had been found of even the slightest archaeological importance, it would have trumpeted on the front of every local newspaper, and in every regional news bulletin, and whenever the news was particularly slow it would have been resurrected. Reporters would return to the site every year for ‘progress reports’ every anniversary of such a discovery, and no doubt a feature would be run every time some minor celebrity or even more minor royal was conned into visiting. However, Rex made for an arresting story-teller, if only because it was physically impossible to fit another word in edge-ways when he was speaking.
“And this is where my brother-in-law comes into it all. He was a labourer for the council then, a bit of a dogs-body. Only, he preferred the term ‘materials technician’. Well this technician had spent his day shifting a lot of material all right; at the time he and his mates were on the other side of the zoo with a bloody great big plunger trying to unblock the drains in the elephant house. Turns out somebody had fed them one of the dodgy hotdogs from the Mr. Sizzle next to the station for the land-train, given them pachyderms a right case of the shits. Anyway, one of the staff comes running, asks if he can borrow my brother-in-law’s crowbar. Now my brother-in-law does have a crowbar; got his name on, bevelled into the handle, and it’s even been painted a different colour so that none of the other guys get mixed up and pick it up by mistake. Quite particular about his tools was brother-in-law, still is, only now he ain’t got a job he’s got worse, if you can believe that. Spends all day with a ring of Allen-keys, assembling and then disassembling all the Ikea furniture in the house. Sends my sister insane, I can tell you. So he says that if his crowbar goes, he goes too, and all his mates chime up and offer to lend a hand, and though it’s only been eight minutes since their last tea-break they realise they can chalk this up as council-business and get paid for standing around doing even less than usual. Plus they could then charge overtime. All of a sudden they’re like the bloody A-team: wiping their hands down their fronts, rolling up the sleeves of their overalls and barging through the crowd that have gathered round daddy’s little monster. She’s still busy telling anyone who’ll listen how much her leg hurts and how brave she’s being, because she hasn’t cottoned on yet that the insurance scam’s fallen by the wayside and that daddy would rather she wouldn’t tell all and sundry how reckless he’s being with his daughter now that he might be coming in for some money and still owes two months alimony. Eventually he shuts her up by promising to buy her a pony. So the crowbar is produced. The ‘material technicians’ draw lots on who gets to shift the slab, and surprise surprise it falls to the new guy, fresh from fetching left-handed hammers and jars of elbow-grease. Plus he hasn’t made a cuppa for anyone in ages, so it’s only fair that he does his fair share of the work now. Now he’s a cocky little bugger, and plays up to the crowd: especially to the blonde bird in the denim skirt more like a belt, and the boob-tube that’s a lot more boob than it is tube. He takes a fag from behind his ear and lights it with his Zippo, flicking the top back and turning the flint on the front of his leg like a right show-off. Of course that’s a terrible idea because what with all the elephant dung down the front and being waist deep in well, waste all day, especially with him being the new guy, they’ve soaked up enough methane to make Al Gore throw an epileptic fit. By the time he’s put the flames on his trousers out the crowds all laughing, even the blonde in the back, so he just slicks back his mullet (trying to salvage a little bit of his dignity) and gets on with it. The slab slides back, some know-it-all pipes up that it’s only made of slate and the little girl could probably have done it herself, but nobody’s listening. They’re all staring into a pit, two foot square, and trying to make out the glitter of gold, the gleam of a sceptre, or the harsh glint of polished bone. Do you know what they found down there, Mr. Brown?”
Brown was really hooked now, following the lure of the story so closely that he knew when to answer such questions and when to stay silent. He found himself unable to resist Rex’s perfunctory question. “I – I don’t know,” he stammered, leaning in to better hear the inevitable revelation.
“Fuck all. You know why? Because the silly bastards were excavating a sodding rubbish tip. Less Indiana Jones, more bloody Time-Team. Nobody hides some buried treasure then just forgets about it, and I swear to God, if you want to hide your valuables from an oncoming army you have to try a fuck of a lot better than covering it with one measly slab. If an occupying force arrives, they will take everything; if it’s not nailed down they’ll have, and if it is they’ll still have, plus the nails. My great-uncle Roger, he explained the concept to me the time he showed me all his old medals and I asked him where he’d got the Iron Cross.”
Rex had turned back to address the empty stage. Brown stood behind him, grinding his teeth like a millstone and rolling his eyes to the heavens.
“Nope, nothing in that pit but animal bones, a few rags and some shards of pottery. And do you know what else?” Brown protested that he did not, that this meeting had gone on far too long as it was, and that he really should be going. Rex continued. “That and a small leather sheath about six inches long, seven if we’re being kind. They were going to throw it away with everything else, except one of the handlers from the petting zoo chimed in that it was made of pig-gut. Said he thought he knew what it was. Everyone looked at it really hard for a while, because apparently this guy had a glint in his eye like he’d won the lottery, but nobody else saw it so in the end they let him take it. Turns out it’s a fucking rubber; the oldest existent condom in the world. There’s the round-heads, battering seven shades of shit out of the castle, the king with that guy dying in his arms like I said, all the chaos and havoc of war, and where’s Private Smith? He’s only nailing some tart back in the barracks isn’t he? There’s no mention of anything like that under the treasure trove law, and besides its original owner threw it away in the first place. Lucky bugger from the petting zoo puts it up for sale at Christies, makes a fucking packet. And that” he said, and Brown could tell from the wheezing sigh that escaped Rex that his speech was drawing to a close, “is how I got into this business. I realised that people will pay for any old shit as long as its got history, and I decided to get me a piece of that.”
Rex was smaller now, hunched over, almost as if all the life in him had all been used up along with the speech. He threw the latest cigarette to the floor, stomped it to embers, then turned to face Brown, pointing as he did to the stage again.
“Talking of business, the package is over there under the platform. You’d better have the money, and you’d certainly better not try any funny stuff because I’ve got a loaded flintlock pistol in my pocket and I ain’t afraid to use it. And” he added with a malicious sneer “if you were a history teacher you’d know that those things make bloody horrible wounds in people.” Brown had first thought that he said it with the smile of a Cheshire cat, but then he remembered that a Cheshire smile was something horrible that gangsters did to people who broke deals with them, and quickly tried to think of something else. He reached into the pocket of his suit-jacket and pulled out a Tesco’s carrier bag, tightly wrapped around a wad of new twenty pound notes. Rex snatched it from his hands, and began greedily counting the money. In the meanwhile Brown walked to the stage and groped under it, till his hands touched canvas. He had to hand it to Rex; he certainly had his presentation down. From beneath the boards he pulled out a slender package, almost as long as he was and tied tightly at either end with green bailing twine. This was it. Involuntarily, Brown gulped. Crouched, his hands began to scrabble at the knots of twine, and he didn’t even notice the blood springing from chafes and cuts on his hands as, frustrated, he resorted first to his nails, then a jagged flint plucked from the floor under the stage, and finally to the pen knife he remembered he kept in his pocket. Eventually he managed to undo the nearest knot, and peel back the thick canvas.
And there it was. Nearly two meters of solid English yew, cut into a D-shaped cross-section at the hand-grip, where its thickness roughly 5/8ths its width (his archivists streak gently prodded him into remembering from the hours spent pouring over glossy Dorling Kindersley books in the local library), and slightly recurved at its middle. Alongside lay a string of tightly wound silk, double bound with leather round the loops at either end where they hooked into the nocks of the bow. The string glistened in the moonlight. Rex had been so careful as to give it a new coating of beeswax. Brown caught himself looking, and quickly pulled the canvas back over his prize, hurriedly looping the bailing twine back it and tying it in a neat bow. He looked back over his shoulder to see the Rex tensed onto his tip-toes, peering inquisitively like the meerkats Brown had seen earlier. All the feline maliciousness had drained from his face, to be placed by the innocent, urgent curiosity of a kitten.
“Here, what do you want that for anyway? You never did say mate.” A sense of desperation dashed across Rex’s face, and Brown saw his command drop away from him.
“No, I never did,” he replied. As he walked away from the stage towards the ruins of the barbican, he glimpsed Rex slumping to his knees, as if he was becoming a member of the audience for the first time in his life. Furnished with his prop, Brown’s bit part now easily dominated the scene; dashing aside Rex’s hollow and well practised speeches. Stepping through the Barbican (his own proscenium arch) he heard Rex’s frenzied exclamation, rising to a howl: “I mean, what can you want with a bloody longbow? It’s not even that old!”
* * *
One hundred and eighty years to be exact; in short, a Victorian replica. Commissioned no doubt, the curator of a local museum Brown had approached told him, by someone who had read too much Walter Scott. Replica or not, Brown could feel its urgent potential energy in his hands as he stalked the tow paths and the overgrown landfills, shady lanes and verdant parks by moonlight.
Tune of the moment: The Night - Frankie Vallie & The Four Seasons
Jac
