The Secret of Tayburn Zoo: 4

A/N: To Shady, beware use of second-person "you" in this chapter. To the rest of you, does this bother anyone else? I'm not one hundred per cent married to it, but I was just trying something. So if the consensus is against I'll take it out and stick with normal limited third person. I do do lots of physical description of Patrick though, so maybe that'll get me back on your good side, Shady :P 

Also, if anyone recognises "as well as a fairly creased navy waistcoat and blue shirt", yes I may have got a bit obsessed with the World Cup...

Lastly, I know not that much actually *happens* in this chapter, but hopefully the filling in of information about Patrick plus a little more about the setup of the zoo will be enough. Might make this into 4.1 and the next 4.2 later depending on reaction.

Alrighty, without further ado...

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The next morning, Patrick sighed as his alarm beeped. He'd been lying awake for the previous twenty minutes, but that didn't mean he had any desire to start this day. The phone call had come right in the middle of him soldering a wire in Dexi's climate changer, and he'd almost burnt his fingers in the fright it gave him. But he'd managed to take the call and now, at five am, he had two hours before the construction workers would arrive to begin building the panda enclosure.

He swung his legs off his old - though still springy - mattress, and looked around his room. The wallpaper was as subdued as the rest of the underground level, but there were so many pictures of his family, his childhood home and places he'd visited crammed together on the walls that you could barely see it. And on his chest of drawers directly opposite the bed, the photograph he needed more than any other today.

"Hi, honey," he whispered. He stroked his finger along the macaroni that had been glued in a haze of glitter around the sides of the photo frame by his grandkids. Looking deep into the eyes of his wife, Judy, he took a long, steady breath. It was the last picture he had of her before she'd gone into the hospital, the last one she'd let him take of her.

Her grey hair was still thick, if a little dry, and her face, pale as ever, now combined with it to give her the countenance of a wicked witch. That sounds cruel, but if you asked Patrick he’d explain with a grin that his wife considered witches to be essentially super-grannies, and it was only patriarchal beauty standards that labelled her a hag. Besides, as Patrick now argued in her place when the story was told at family dinners, wasn’t “wicked” just another word the kids used, like “cool” or “groovy”?

He often wondered what she'd think of all this. Would she approve of his secrecy? Would she be horrified by what his company had done to these animals? But Patrick knew well that she'd have trusted him, and all he was really doing here was voicing his own doubts in her quiet Highland tones.

Patrick dragged himself into his small ensuite bathroom. Its cheap, temperamental shower-bath combo and its chipped mirrors looked desolate the first time you walked in, but for Patrick, this was just a reminder of his childhood home. All it lacked was the woodland creature patterned wallpaper that he'd begged his mother for the one time the family tried to redo the place.

He brushed his teeth, simultaneously stretching his legs and rolling his shoulders as he did to save time. He did this every morning, and the funny thing was that for Patrick it never really felt like work. It was what Judy would have wanted for him. Not a hospital, or a home. He looked old enough for it, you'd have thought, with deep creases at the sides of his eyes and his short, stubbly beard almost entirely grey. But the truth was that Patrick was only sixty-two, not even old enough to retire from Neuromax. After slipping on his only pair of suit trousers, as well as a fairly creased navy waistcoat and blue shirt, he was ready to go face the day. He was confident, with his back held straight and his gaze looking steadily ahead. Everything was going to be fine. Unfortunately, as he opened his bedroom door his phone buzzed and he nearly jumped out of his skin. He glared at his phone; the stupid thing was always interrupting at the most untimely moments. But it was a text from his only daughter, Helen, asking if he could babysit the kids today. Patrick smiled. He always looked a lot younger when he smiled, because then the creases at the sides of his eyes made sense. The thought of apologetically declining because of the day's magnitude popped into his head, but he promptly dismissed it. You could have offered Patrick an all expenses paid trip to Mars, but unless he could bring his grandkids, he'd decline in a heartbeat.

"What are you wearing?" Treego the frog shouted up at Patrick. Patrick stopped halfway across the bridge, his seventh crossing of the bridge in as many minutes.

He frowned. "I want to look smart."

Treego pointed at the bag of woodchips Patrick was lugging across on this particular trip. "You're doing grunt work. You keep grunting."

"That's not what- Oh, never mind." Patrick shook his head. "What if they come early and I have to excuse myself to get changed out of my jumpsuit in my secret underground lair?"

Treego laughed, his feet slipping slightly on his lilipad. "Fair enough, that's why you're the boss and I just take care of my pulleys."

Patrick's frown disappeared. He set the bag down beside him and leaned properly over the railing. "How are they doing, buddy?"

"Good, good." Treego nodded. Patrick spent the next few minutes listening to him describe a new system that would allow pretend clouds to be floated over the heads of the frogs and hindrances dropped from the sky. This was how he had spent the majority of his time since surfacing, always getting distracted by one of the animals' days. He was supposed to be ensuring everything was in order, without a single detail that could give them away. But he still found it fascinating to hear a little blue frog describe the potential energy of a pretend bomb dropped from the sky.

That was also why it was now time for his staff to arrive, and he hadn't even noticed. There was a tap on his shoulder.

“Patrick,” said a tall young woman, whose name was Margo. She fidgeted with the ends of her long black hair. “When are they getting here?”

Patrick considered replying with a long, elaborate morning greeting, but her deep frown and wide, worried eyes told Patrick this was clearly not the time. “About forty-five minutes from now. You’re nervous, right?”

Margo raised an eyebrow, standing with her weight on one leg. “Of course we’re nervous, Patrick. We’re neurologists, not zookeepers.”

“Did you not give them the flashcards we made?” Treego shouted up. The animals had spent a bit of time figuring out their needs, though Treego listing at least two hours a day of sunbathing as a need may have been something of a stretch.

Margo’s head stayed pointedly facing Patrick, not Treego. Patrick sighed. Neuromax had sent five of their scientists most able to work remotely to Tayburn, hoping that they would keep up appearances of the place running as a real zoo. Occasionally one of them got bored and went downstairs to his lab. They’d work for a little while on one of his experiments, but never with much conviction. Patrick had got himself into this mess; it was his responsibility to get back out of it.

“Well, we don’t have any flashcards about pandas,” she said. Her jaw was clenched slightly, but kept unclenching, as if she was trying very hard to stay calm.

“You have google don’t you!” Treego shouted. Patrick winced.

Margo took a very deep, slow breath. “Yes. Yes, we do. Fine, I’ll leave you two to your chit-chat.”

She turned round and strode away, but it was only really her legs that were taking long, confident steps. Her shoulders were slumped forwards. Patrick knew it wasn’t easy for her, for any of them. They’d worked so hard only to be stuck here where they clearly felt uneasy. He really had to talk to Treego about that.

“Treego, I-” he started, but of course, by the time he’d leaned back over the railing Treego too had bounced off down the lily pads and was at the other end of the pond.

Patrick shook his head. Well, he ought to have been getting on with the day anyway. He heaved the woodchip bag up into his arms and finally finished his crossing of the bridge.