Balthazar Jones and the Tower of London Zoo

‘The old hen is worth forty chickens,’ Hebe Jones replied, when she finally handed over the spectacles.

After dialling the owner’s number in Århus, given to her by the receptionist at the eye manufacturer’s, Hebe Jones doodled on her pad as she waited.

‘Hallo,’ came the eventual reply.

‘Hallo,’ Hebe Jones repeated cautiously. ‘Frederik Kjeldsen?’

‘Ja!’

‘This is Mrs Jones from London Underground Lost Property Office. I believe we may have something that belongs to you.’

There was a moment of pure silence, after which Frederik Kjeldsen began to weep with his good eye. When the damp sound eventually came to an end, the man apologised, and began to explain what had happened.

‘Two years ago I lost my eye in a road accident, and spent seven weeks in hospital,’ he said. ‘I was too scared to drive again and had to give up my job as a teacher. I was so depressed, I didn’t bother getting a…what do you call them?’

‘A prosthesis?’

‘Ja, a prosthesis. It wasn’t until my sister announced her wedding that I decided to get one to save her the humiliation of my solitary eye in the wedding photographs. I made the decision that, once the celebrations were over, I would take my own life.’

There was a pause during which the two strangers held on to each other through the silence.

‘I had to take two buses to reach the manufacturer’s,’ he continued. ‘But the moment the eye-maker lifted her head from her instruments, and spoke to me with the voice of an angel, I fell for her. After eight months, and what I have to admit were many unnecessary appointments, I proposed to her under the same fir tree that my father had proposed to my mother. Our wedding emptied the florists for miles. I was so happy I cannot tell you.’

After swallowing loudly, Frederik Kjeldsen continued: ‘Ten days ago, I was travelling back to the airport after a weekend in London to see my niece when the Tube suddenly stopped. I banged my head against the glass and my eye flew out. There were so many feet and suitcases in the carriage I wasn’t able to find it before arriving at Heathrow. If I had stayed looking for it any longer, the train would have taken me back to London, and I would have missed my flight. I needed to get back in time for work the next day, and I had such a headache you wouldn’t believe, so I put on my sunglasses and got off. Of course my wife has made me another eye, but I so wanted the one that had brought us together. And now it seems that you have found it. It is truly a miracle.’

After Frederik Kjeldsen apologised again for his salty state, Hebe Jones assured him that she would get it into the post immediately. As she put down the phone, Valerie Jennings approached and peered at the eye over her colleague’s shoulder, scratching her nest of dark curls, clipped to the back of her head. She then walked to one of the shelves and returned with a box containing a hand-blown glass eye purporting to have belonged to Nelson, and another made of porcelain, which, according to its accompanying label, was used by a fourteenth-century Chinese emperor whenever he slept with his favourite mistress. After showing them to her colleague, Valerie Jennings, who had started to smell the rank breath of boredom, asked: ‘Fancy a game of marbles?’

Hebe Jones was certain of winning, particularly as she was prepared to suffer the indignity of lying flat on the office floor to execute a shot. She had honed her skills as a young child on the cool, tiled floors of the house in Athens, and her talent flourished when the Grammatikos family moved to London when she was five, despite the challenge of carpeting. Her ability to win even blindfolded led to the widespread belief that her expertise was due to exceptional hearing, rather than the more obvious explanation that she was peeking. She subsequently claimed to be able to hear the talk of infants still in the womb, and mothers from the Greek community, who were more ready to believe such ability in one of their own, presented their swollen abdomens to the girl to learn the first utterances of their child. After demanding absolute silence, she would sit, one ear pressed against the protruding umbilicus, translating the squeaks, whistles and centenarian groans with the fluency of a polyglot.

‘No, thanks,’ Hebe Jones nevertheless replied, turning over the prosthesis in her hand. ‘Look. It’s concave. And anyway, that poor man’s eye has rolled around enough of London as it is.’

After sealing up the box with brown tape, kept on the inflatable doll’s wrist by mutual agreement following one too many disappearances, Hebe Jones added Mr Kjeldsen’s address, and dropped the package into the mailbag with the warm glow of victory. As she looked around her desk for the next task, her eyes stopped at the urn. Feeling a stab of guilt for having ignored it since its arrival, she turned the wooden box round in her hands and ran a finger over the brass nameplate bearing the words ‘Clementine Perkins, 1939 to 2008. RIP’ in an elegant script. She tried to imagine the woman whose remains had been travelling around the Underground, but felt even greater pity for the person who had mislaid them. Hoping to find something to help her trace Clementine Perkins’s relatives, she decided to look up her entry in the national register of deaths.

‘I’m just popping out to the library,’ she announced, standing up. And within minutes, Hebe Jones and her turquoise coat were gone.

Valerie Jennings watched her turn the corner and immediately regretted not having asked her to bring back a Chelsea bun from the high street bakery. Despite her patronage, she had long lamented their offerings, and had once even boycotted the establishment when she noticed two French tourists looking into its windows discussing whether its wares were for the purpose of plugging holes. But eventually she relented, defeated by patriotism and necessity.

After labelling a yellow canoe, she took hold of one end, and dragged it through the office shuffling backwards in her flat black shoes, uttering a string of profanities. Eventually, she managed to slide it on to the bottom shelf of the nautical section. Standing up, she arched her back, then made her way to the original Victorian counter, and noted down the shelf number in an inscrutable code in one of the ledgers.

It was the only office in the whole of London without a computer, the introduction of which the two women had refused with a steadfast obstinacy. When, five years earlier, they were informed that the unfathomable machines were to be installed, both immediately offered their resignation with the freaky concurrency of twins. Then, like two circus curiosities, they demonstrated their encyclopaedic knowledge of every item stored on the meticulously numbered shelves, including on which Tube line they had been abandoned.

Their invincible memories were not, however, enough to dissuade the authorities from accepting their resignations until an attempt was made to follow the logic of the cross-referencing in the ledgers. The antique code, invented by clerks to make themselves indispensable, had been handed down from Victorian times when the office was established to handle the onslaught of muffs and canes left behind on the breathtaking new transport.

As soon as management realised what they were up against, one of them filled his pockets with barley sugar, and visited the only staff still alive who had worked in the antiquated office. He found the pair propping each other up in the sitting room of an old people’s home, covered in a coat of dust. But despite the joy of an unexpected visitor, and one with such treasures in his pockets, nothing could persuade them when their mists of senility temporarily parted to give up the key to the code that had ensured them a job for life. All attempts at modernisation were therefore abandoned until the next change of management, which, despite renewed tactics, always failed as emphatically as its predecessor.

Arriving back at her desk, Valerie Jennings reached into her black handbag, and returned a novel to its place on one of the bookshelves. Each volume she borrowed was brought back to the office the next day lest its owner arrived to claim it. There it would remain until she slipped it back into her bag again on leaving. And, once installed in her armchair with the pop-up leg rest, she would rampage through the pages, intoxicated by the heady fumes of fantasy.

On hearing the Swiss cowbell, she brushed away a kink of hair that had escaped from its mooring, pushed her glasses up her nose, and headed back to the counter. On the way she tried to open the safe, as was the office custom. But it remained as closed as the day it had been discovered on the Circle Line five years ago.

Turning the corner, she found Arthur Catnip partially obscured by a bunch of yellow roses. It was the second bouquet he had bought her. When he found the shutter closed the first time, his courage instantly abandoned him, and he fled to the street. He offered the flowers to the first woman he encountered, but she, along with the eleven after her, rejected the gift in the common belief that all fellow Londoners had the potential to be psychotic lunatics.

Flowers were not the only gift the ticket inspector of limited height had bought for Valerie Jennings. Recognising her weakness for literature on account of her habit of reading the back of each novel he handed in, he scoured the capital’s second-hand bookshops for something to give her pleasure. Ignoring the bestselling paperbacks, he eventually came across the work of the obscure nineteenth-century novelist Miss E. Clutterbuck. Skimming the pages, he found that the female protagonist who featured in all of her work was graced with stoutness, a fearsome intellect, and a long line of suitors of varying heights. Never once did a tale end without the heroine having discovered a new country, invented a scientific theory, or solved the most fiendish of crimes. It was only then that she would retire to her parlour with a bowl of rhubarb and custard to consider her numerous marriage proposals, surrounded by love tokens of yellow roses. Arthur Catnip bought all the novelist’s work that he could find, and would arrive at the original Victorian counter with his latest cloth-backed musty purchase, claiming he had found it in a carriage. Valerie Jennings’s face would immediately light up at the prospect of another instalment. And she would gaze with unfettered anticipation at the colour plates of the fleshy heroine throttling a serpent in a newly discovered land, introducing her latest invention to awed gentlemen in Parliament, and stepping out with one of her elegantly moustached admirers, a number of whom were of inferior height.

Suddenly finding himself in the presence of Valerie Jennings while holding the flowers of choice of Miss E. Clutterbuck’s suitors, Arthur Catnip was unable to speak.

‘How lovely!’ she said, peering at the bouquet. ‘They must have been for someone special. Where were they left?’

Panic rattled him, and Arthur Catnip found himself uttering the three wretched words that he spent the following week regretting.

‘The Victoria Line.’

Rev. Septimus Drew crossed the cobbles on his way back from the chapel, where he had waited yet again in vain for the woman who had unsettled his heart. As he approached his front door, he looked around hoping to spot her, but all he saw were the first of the loathsome tourists who had started to seep into the Tower. As he reached into his cassock pocket for the key, he noticed that the visitors were not in fact the first, as there was someone already sitting on the bench next to the White Tower staring straight at him. Knees clamped together, and her short gunmetal hair lifting in the breeze, he recognised instantly the chairwoman of the Richard III Appreciation Society. For months she had been trying to persuade him to become a member, her passion for the maligned monarch inflamed by the gasoline of unrequited love for the clergyman. Fearing that she was going to try and convince him yet again of the injustice of the King’s reputation as a hunchbacked child slayer, Rev. Septimus Drew quickly unlocked his door and closed it behind him.

He made his way down the hall to his bachelor’s sitting room where he spent more time than he cared to. Avoiding the unruly spring, he sat down on the sofa, a relic from the former chaplain, along with the rest of the mismatched furniture. Picking up a biography of Jack Black, rat-catcher and mole destroyer by appointment to Queen Victoria, he started to read. But he soon found his mind wandering after the woman who had failed to return to the chapel. His gaze settled on the family portrait on the mantelpiece taken on Christmas Day when his six sisters had come to his home for lunch with their husbands and numerous children. As his eyes ran along the familiar faces, he tasted the bitterness of failure for being the only one who still wasn’t married.

His nose still invaded by the smell of rat droppings from the chapel, he picked up a bottle of Rescue Remedy from the side table, and released two drops on to his tongue. His belief in the mystical powers of the blend of five flowers, and the other more lunatic offerings distilled by the druids of alternative medicine, was as strong as his belief in the Holy Spirit. As the chaplain advanced towards middle age, he had begun to grab all the defences against ill health he could find, filling his bathroom cabinet with the latest tinctures and potions brewed for the worried well. For he was firmly of the conviction that the body was more susceptible to disease without the presence of love to warm the organs.

The belief was not without its foundations, however unstable. He had watched his elderly mother, the colour of porridge, lying in a hospital bed for months, while the entire family was convinced that she would meet her maker at any moment. It was such a foregone conclusion that the music for the funeral had been chosen, and the florist put on standby for the approaching calamity. With her sheet pulled up to her whiskered chin, Florence Drew spoke of nothing other than joining her husband in heaven. Her only fear was that he would fail to recognise her on account of the disease that had infiltrated her body.