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The staff conference team-building exercise was about inclusivity and how everyone could play a role in the changing workplace.

In four screened off areas of a large conference room everyone employed at Wilkie’s wrestled with the thorny problem.

That was everyone except Peter Cobourne, the chief Exec. Marsha Wright the general manager and Martin from Inspire Games, who was running excitedly between the four divided segments, trying to prove his value so he’d get hired again.

Paula felt kind of sorry for him because whatever he said, everyone in the room knew what would happen.

The first team to complete the challenge would be Team Venture. Vince, Lucy, Anil, Sarah and Lawrence and some crap ones, Sian, Paul and Stig the Caretaker. Team Venture would romp home hours before the other teams and be feasting on the delicious looking the lunch buffet before 12.

In Paula’s eyes the crap ones would be the true winners the lucky bastards. Those who had won without trying just for somehow sneaking on the team with the most competitive, kill- their-own-gran-while-appearing-to-be-somehow-helping-her, types, Who always got on a team together,… somehow. She could not imagine Stig the caretaker reporting back, or Sian, who spent most of the day looking at her phone, coming up with the quickest and most efficient way for an owl and a panda with a tightrope to carry six meringues across a ravine. Paula had no idea why they would want to get to as they had the meringues already, but that was why she wasn’t on Team Venture.

She was also jealous of the members of Teams Endure and Vanquish who were made up of the people she’d been on teams with before. Those that turned up and did their jobs and didn’t stand out.

This was the first year she had ever found herself with the misfits that made up Team Excel. It was a sign of how far her standing had fallen.

Look at them! Was this the company she’d dreamed she’d keep? Marge, the passive-aggressive part-timer from finance, Robin, the posh boy who was now nearly forty and still pretending that he was about to become a novelist. Eleanor who had been on the sick for the six months and Wayne from maintenance, he of the creeping hands.

Paula saw that she’d become one of them, a fate worse than dismissal.

“Come on” Paula “Haven’t you got anything to say?” shouted Martin from Inspire Games.

“We really need you all involved”.

Paula was startled from her disgruntled malaise. The eyes of the other losers, her general manager and her chief exec bored into her demanding response. So she answered with the first thoughts that came to her mind.

“I hate pandas, they are whining, fussy, useless, fucking, twats who can’t even eat Meringues so if I’m honest if I were the owl I’d just fly off and let that fucker die”

With this she left colleagues gawping in shock and headed straight to the buffet room, then she emptied a large pile of meringues from the sweet counter into her bag and stepped out of the door into the warm July sunshine.

‘T' wit to woo, t' wit to woo,

Tha ‘avn’t got t’ bloody wit to woo.’

Yang Guang didn’t speak whatever language the irritating old bird kept hooting, but he could do without hearing it right now. He looked up with a scowl and delivered a threatening paw swipe, completely oblivious to how adorable he looked. He buried his head in his hands and growled a little. An automatic camera clicked on, beginning the process of creating a gif which would be shared a million times around the globe.

He’d loved this place when he and Tian Tian first arrived, the air smelt funny and there was something unusual about the forest at the bottom of the hill, very blocky, but they’d had so much fun. The humans seemed excited to see them, both the ones peering through the glass and the ones who came inside to play. Oh, and they played. They played with balls, and with sticks, and there were obstacles and slides, and every day felt like a new adventure. Between playing, and napping, and feeding, Yang Guang had never been so content.

Things felt different recently, it was subtle but Yang Guang knew he wasn’t imagining it. The number of faces at the windows was dropping off, and the expressions on those who came inside were less smiley, more frowny, more frustrated, more impatient. They changed things too. Where there used to be a hammock each, there was now a single large one. Same with the little sleeping huts. Toys were taken away, and there was soft jazz music in the air at night. Yang Guang didn’t know what was going on, but it was really starting to affect his napping ability.

In the hammock behind there was a movement and Tian Tian’s arm flopped out as she began a heart-breakingly cute struggle for freedom. Yang Guang immediately pretended to be asleep. Tian Tian was being weird too. She wanted to play too much, she was too restless, too needy, and she’d get into a right sulk if Yang Guang didn’t join in. Yang Guang loved to play as much as anyone, but not all the time, and he was tired of walking the tightrope of Tian Tian’s moods. She also smelt funny and had started making this weird chirping sound, bleating like a sheep.

What really unsettled Yang Guang though was the overall vibe he was supposed to be doing something about all this, like whatever it was making everyone weird was his fault. Maybe it was paranoia, but he didn’t like it.

The camera clicked as Tian Tian plodded over and sat beside her pensive partner. She sat so close he could feel the pressure of her against him, and she began nosing at his face. Yang Guang froze stiff in a reticent panic. In the observation room, a scientist watched a screen and held their breath.

Yang Guang grabbed a nearby stick of bamboo and shoved it hastily in Tian Tian’s face, rolled onto his paws, and bounded away to the sleeping hut. Tian Tian sat holding her unwanted breakfast, sighed, and offered an exasperated look to the owl above.

Gazing out the window though the heavy, autumnal drizzle, Zoe reviewed the facts. John was gone. Her family weren’t talking to her. Her life lay in ruins around her. But why could she not bring herself to care? Of course she cared, in an objective sense, but she didn’t really feel anything. Just…. Kind of… numb…. Walking a tightrope between mild apathy and complete, debilitating exhaustion.

Oh look. A soggy crow. Maybe it was worth dragging myself to the window after all, she mused.

It wasn’t like it was all her fault anyway. Yes, she’d shagged Phil, but who has the right to be that good looking, and that available. And if John hadn’t been so bloody obsessed with renovating that campervan. Yes Zoe had begged for it. And I mean BEGGED. She’d whined, and implored, and at one point even paused, mid blow-job, to look up at him, lips slightly parted, and murmured beseechingly, ‘imagine our Instagram feeds… we’d be like those cool hippie types, but less smelly’.

Pulling herself up from the window-seat, Zoe wandered over to the mirror. Urgh, she looked like a panda. She’d tried a new makeup tutorial the night before but had gotten too tired and dozed off with her eyeliner and mascara still on. Another fretful night of tossing and turning and the black smears had covered her face and her pillows. Though actually, she thought, tilting her chin to her chest and looking up, a slight pout to her lips, maybe the tragic melted goth look was working for her today. She reached for her phone, angled her elbows in slightly to lift her breasts, and snapped a selfie. It was then that she saw the message.

‘Call me’.

Those two words. Her heart skipped a beat. But what would she say to him? He’d left in tears, crying ‘how can I lie to John? He’s my only brother’.

A wave of malaise battered against the nervous fluttering in Zoe’s stomach, and she moved from the dresser to the bed. She had always been a night owl, but these sleepless nights and exhausted empty days were taking their toll. She didn’t even have the energy to post that self-pitying photo on Instagram. Laying down, she dropped into a fitful slumber, once again.

---

Later. How much later, who could say. Dragging herself to the shower, Zoe stood, despondent, in the heat and steam. Too depressed even to cry, to wash, to wank. Wrapped in a towel, she returned to her sweaty, unmade bed, and pulled the duvet around herself, shivering. Reaching for her phone, another message flashed up.

‘please!’

Then another…

‘Zoe… we need to talk’.

Pulling the duvet over her head, Zoe closed her eyes once again, to exhausted even to berate him for his fucking honesty.

Outside, the drizzle continued. Grey. Damp. Featureless.

Zoe awoke in the early hours of the morning. Unrefreshed, but wide awake, she reached, habitually, for her phone. Opening Instagram, intending to share her ‘sexy-panda’ selfie from earlier, there was Phil. Gorgeous Phil, hugging a beautiful smiling blond, ring finger extended, diamond glittering.

Eddie and George were best buds. They had been through school together, gone to university together, and so of course it was only natural for the pair of them to work at the same zoo at the exact same job – both of them joint co-head Panda keeper. Best mates, nothing could come between them. Until that fateful Halloween fancy dress party.

Of course, they were both of them going to hand stitch their own panda costume. Incredibly true to life these things were, because the pair of them lived and breathed and dreamt pandas. Well, you pretty much had to, the finicky nature of these beasts and getting them to mate successfully and all that. There’s a joke in panda keeping circles, that the word panda is Mandarin for malaise, because that’s a panda’s default one and only personality type, especially when you’re trying to get the sods pregnant.

No malaise from Eddie though at that party when he boffed George’s new squeeze. Eddie felt bad about it, but no sense of guilt – when an attractive young woman dressed as an owl yanks you out at a party and instructs you to take her, panda-style in the back garden, what else is a young man to do? Clearly a sex mad furry of some kind driven to mad lust by the accurate stitching of his panda eyebrows, and how often in life did an opportunity like that present itself?

But they got past this minor bump in their road. They got on with life, with the really important things – getting their morose and ill-tempered star panda couple up the family way. It’s a tightrope walk, getting pandas to mate. Nothing they tried seemed to work. They wove bamboo canes into heart shapes. They shipped in musks and pheromones from other zoos and staged elaborate dress up scenes with their panda costumes in an attempt to stroke some form of jealous lust that might result in a Halloween party situation (for the panda couple).

Nothing.

In desperation, George raised the final, terrible roll of the dice. Eddie regarded the panda costume laid out on the table next to a turkey baster George had daubed with black and white paint and felt a sense of growing horror. He couldn’t mean…

But oh yes, George did. One of them was going to have to dress up as a panda and do the needful.

And Eddie knew what was coming. The sodding Halloween party was going to come back to haunt him. George would have his revenge, served not cold, but at panda body temperature. He was somewhat taken aback therefore when George patted him on the back and told him that he didn’t mind taking on the panda insemination role, as long as Eddie would fly to China and collect the panda semen.

This wasn’t a problem for Eddie. He liked travel, he liked new places. George gave him a best bud shoulder hug. He put the turkey baster away and from a drawer fetched a small pile of what looked to Eddie to be chainmail.

‘Right then,’ George said. ‘It turns out that their male - Hung Hung is homosexual. They tell me he’s pretty accurate, but all the same, chainmail underpants would be a wise precaution, don’t you think?’

Fuck this, Panda thought and rolled back over. She could hear the annoying screech and growls of the passing 2 leggers, food smeered fingers extended like branches, jabbing in his direction. Go on just a little closer and I'll rip it off, she thought. She had lost track of what day it was. She used to watch carefully as summer drifted into autumn, but she didn't even care if it was night or day.

A sigh slipped out like a distant train leaving a tunnel, sending cries of the wonder from the onlookers, much to her disgust.

That was the end of the very dissatisfing show and gradually the watchers dissipated to laugh at the right rope walking monkeys or the ‘proper bears’, like the grizzly. Just one boy left, sat watching quietly.

When did I stop caring, she wondered. People used to queue for days to come and see her. Well her and him. How long ago was that? Last week? Last month? And now what? Fuck. How could she have let him go. She should have known what they were doing, she should have…

A tap on the glass disturbed her thoughts. She ignored it, staring at the wall. She thought they were just cleaning the cage, but when she woke, he was gone.

The tap came again. Unasked and unrelenting. Sighing again she slowly rolled over, her fiercest scowl hidden in those adorable eyes. What did this tiny human want. He was furiously writing something on his note pad.

“Come closer” it said scrawled across the page. Not gonna happen. Little shit probably just wants a photo. The boy seeing her lack of engagement scrawled frantically again.

“I can help”.

Help. A little human. Humans who put her here. Who kept her here. Who took her love.

She slowly bared her teeth and wandered back to her room. The boy watched her like an owl.

The next day as she lay in her spot, drizzle wafting down on her, there came a tap tap.

There he was again note pad in hand. She rolled away before he could finish his stupid note.

The next day. Tap Tap Tap. This time he was ready for her and had the note pressed against the glass. She tried to ignore him. But Tap Tap Tap. And then in the corner of her eye, she saw his face. Desperate and full of a sadness that tore at her heart. In that instant, she recognised him. He was the owners cub. He locked eyes with her, pleading.

Slowly she looked down at his note and something lifted inside her. The smallest spark of hope. She couldn't take her eyes from the note. Each word carefully written and underlined...

“I know where your son is.”