Part 7 (1/2)

Behind the turquoise and emerald s.h.i.+mmer of my shrieking friend stood a large statue of a woman animal tamer holding a tiger at bay. She wore strange men's trousers and a collar and tie permanently pressed in bronze. I knew it. This was the great Billie Blake. Even in bronze she was stunning. I touched her hand, willing her to me. I wanted her to come to life. I wanted to talk to her about great cats and being brave. Behind her a giant carousel of motionless creatures - horses, ostriches, giraffes - waited patiently as their paint peeled. The carousel stood in a small square with four large cages placed one at each corner. They contained animals but I couldn't see what. I didn't go look because a familiar voice made me jump.

'I thought you wouldn't come back,' it said. 'You ran.'

I turned and saw my insect lady from the house. 'Sorry,' I said, always ready to be apologetic, to be English and in the wrong.

'Do you like colours?' she asked.

'I guess.' To be honest it wasn't something I thought you had to have an opinion on.

'How many colours can you see in Mr Honk? The peac.o.c.k?' I didn't really understand the question. I plumped for an easy one.

'Blue.'

'Really? Just blue?'

'Well, no... uhm... green, yellow... lots,' I said.

She nodded. The woman spoke very quietly, as if she was trying not to take up too much room with her voice. It didn't bother me. I came from a family of partial communicators.

'That's it. Lots of colours,' she said. 'Well then, here's what I don't understand. Say you're a trichromate. Well, you are, 'cause you're a primate. You can make a range of colours out of three basic ones but Mr Honk and dogs and cats, they're dichromates. They only have two basic colours. So why does Mr Honk need all those colours if Mrs Honk doesn't appreciate them?' I couldn't think.

'Maybe it's for us.'

'For us,' she repeated. 'I hope so. Come on.' The woman led the way. She had very thin legs and seemed to walk on the very tips of her toes, making no disturbance in the air. She was still dressed all in brown just like the other day. She probably hadn't noticed that I had changed entirely, what with no hat and no tie. We walked around the outside of the carousel square, past a Spanish-style house and on to a large, formerly white, gazebo-shaped building. It was topped with a white dome and a weather-vane shaped like a pig. The woman opened a door in the side and pushed through some thick, weighted curtaining. I followed her into an intense tropical heat. Plants were growing so thickly inside that the view of the rest of the zoo was entirely obscured. Small cages were dotted about with light bulbs hanging above them, and b.u.t.terflies flitted above our heads. The woman reached down for a small cage made of mesh net, picked it up and put it on a stool.

'Would you like to see the most remarkable event in the natural world?' she asked, looking straight at me. I supposed that I would. It was not an everyday offer. We bent down to look into the cage together. Inside were a number of leaves on stalks. They appeared to have small pearls on them, some darker than others.

'The darker ones, they're about ready,' she whispered. I looked more closely at the pearls. They were very fine, with delicate ribs running up the side to meet at the top of their small round shapes. In the darkest of them something was moving. Slowly a slit appeared in the pearl. A kind of observation window was being created by whatever lived in there. There was a pause as the creature used the observation slit to check the world out. Then slowly it began, from the inside, to cut a perfect circle off the top of the pearl. It was like watching the smallest can opener in the world at work. As the top came off, small hairs were released from the inside of the round container. Then a head appeared with absurdly large mouthparts. It had no eyes to speak of, but tiny antennae which seemed to take in the world. For a while there was nothing to see but the head, then slowly it began to wave its entire top half and wiggle itself free of the pearl-coloured egg. It exerted pressure on the natal leaf and pulled hard to release itself. The creature looked like a brown-headed, naked shrimp. It was not an attractive start in life. The tiny thing was fantastically vulnerable-looking and yet there were no flaws in its determination. Once it was free it turned back to its birthplace. The egg was now empty. A clear, translucent structure. A small rose bowl kept in shape by its ribbed surface. The creature had no sentiment. It proceeded to eat the thing.

'What is it?' I whispered.

'It's not what it is,' the woman replied. 'It's what it will be. That little fellow will turn into the most beautiful owl b.u.t.terfly. The change from caterpillar to b.u.t.terfly is one of the most remarkable events in the natural world. Don't you think ”chrysalis” is the most beautiful word in the world? Look here.' She pointed to some small brown pods hanging from a branch above my head. 'Inside there the body of a caterpillar is being broken down and gradually an adult formed.'

I looked closely at one of them. It was dressed from much the same wardrobe as the woman, but the thing seemed lifeless. It just hung there. Perhaps it was like the spider. A secret ma.s.s of seething emotions. Something fluttered and landed on my shoulder.

'A crimson patch longwing. Look, it has a wing like a bag to catch the air. It would expand like a balloon but it has tiny ligaments inside the wing to stop the upper and lower membranes separating too far. Isn't that brilliant? That one's perfect. You can get crippled b.u.t.terflies. It's very important that their wings are allowed to expand and dry quickly when they emerge, otherwise they can't fly. Did you know that a leaf-mining moth spends almost its entire life between the upper and lower surfaces of a single leaf?'

I was trying to imagine such a thing but when I looked up the woman was gone. She was weird. Outside the gazebo I could hear whistling so I let myself out and followed the noise. Over in a corner of the park was an old barn. Like the rest of the park, it was halfway between standing up and giving up. The red wooden building was everything I had imagined about America before I came. It screamed life on the prairie, Kansas, the Wild West, bounty hunters and people spitting tobacco. The doors were open and light and hay spilled out in equal quant.i.ties. The whistling was coming from inside so that's where I headed. A young woman was sitting at the very top of several bales of hay stacked almost to the roof. She was playing a wooden flute. It was a strange tune which I had never heard before. It wasn't that high-pitched stuff which really only dogs find attractive, but it didn't exactly sound like spring water either. I don't know why I was so drawn to it. I stepped toward the barn, mesmerized. It should have been a magic moment but a cat leaped from the shadows and landed on my shoulder. I shrieked. The young woman looked down and laughed.

'h.e.l.lo,' she said.

Typically the cat slipped away. Cats never take responsibility. 'Sorry,' I stuttered. 'The cat ... I didn't expect...'

The woman began climbing down. 'Hey, don't sweat it. Mac is like, evolving. He is reconsidering his life. I mean zoo cat is hard, you know, it's a big responsibility. Also,' she lowered her tone confidentially, 'I do not think he has been the same since his near-death experience. The marabou stork swallowed him whole and Miss Strange had to persuade it to disgorge him.'

I realized it was the woman from the Pop Inn. The one Hubert had been speaking to when I bought Rocco's funeral card. She was young, maybe twenty, but very relaxed for a grown-up. She moved like water in a plastic bag, as if she were almost boneless, and glided to a stop in front of me. Her eyes were wider than seemed possible and she smiled as if that was all she ever did.

'Cosmos,' she said, looking at me with that smile.

'What is?' I asked.

'My name. And you?' 'Dorothy,' I said.

She looked at me. 'Nah. I don't think so.'

No one had ever doubted me on that point before. 'It is. Dorothy. Dorothy Kane,' I said defensively.

'Woah, bad aura. No. No. Dorothy is so wrong. Kane. Sugar. I'm going to call you Sugar.'

A nickname? Someone had given me a nickname? I nearly died of delight.

'Here, help me with this, Sugar.' She tucked a homemade wooden flute into a tie-belt round her middle and moved to s.h.i.+ft a large hay bale. I raced to grab the other end. I would have moved the earth for her. It was too heavy but I didn't want Cosmos to know that I thought so.

'Cosmos?' I tried out the name.

'Yes?'

'Who is the... uhm... brown lady?'

'The brown lady? Oh, Helen. She's like...

A mouse ran out from under the bale. Cosmos gave a strange girly shriek. A Judith sort of noise. It wasn't what I would have expected.

'd.a.m.n,' she said, dropping her end of the bale with a s.h.i.+ver. For a brief moment she was less cool than before, then she looked at me and tossed her head with a laugh. The little bell on her head rang and she relaxed back into easy mode. 'Indians used to live here and they were very together. They believed that animals and humans were created as companions, that the animals are our spiritual equals, which is so cool, but I have some kind of block with mice. I'm meditating on it.' I realized I was still holding my end of the heavy bale so I put it down. Cosmos smiled her wide smile at me.

'You want to like, check out the zoo?'

I shrugged, trying to adopt some of her nonchalance. We wandered out of the barn and stood in front of the large doors.

'You haven't been before,' she said, staring at me so intently that I felt she could see right into me, 'so just let it happen to you.' I wasn't at all sure how to do this. Cosmos was wearing a pair of moccasins on her feet. She padded off entirely silently. I took a deep breath before trying to match her Indian footprints. My blue sandals suddenly seemed very noisy.

The once glorious zoological collection had faded rather dramatically by the late 1960s. It certainly wasn't a zoo in the way that we think of them now It held no pretence of an educational function. The word 'conservation' was never even mentioned. This was old-fas.h.i.+oned family entertainment with Crackerjack concession stands and all-concrete floors because they were the easiest to wash down. Until the place had fallen on financially fallow times, the main response to the death of an exotic animal had been to order another one off the African or Indian shelf.

Most of the buildings were in a kind of pueblo-style architecture. Lots of red brick with small detailed arches on the walls. The park was laid out in a vast rectangle with the carousel square at the heart and cages, pits, buildings and the barn lining the edges. Beyond the carousel stood the b.u.t.terfly gazebo and beyond that the penguin pool and a small, defunct restaurant which overlooked the Amherst River. Although the animal collection had withered there was still something to see.

There was a pygmy hippo, two Bruijns echidnas, an aye-aye, several tough-looking flamingos, a lowland anoa and a rare Western example of the hog-nosed bat. There was the gentoo penguin, a stubby little fellow with very wide feet which would have been h.e.l.l to sandal; and any number of Ne Ne geese. It was a strange and eclectic family. We stopped for a minute in front of the South American tapir. It looked like a black pig which had got its head caught in a revolving door. Cosmos squatted down on her haunches to look at it.

'The tapir is so neat. One of the world's most primitive large mammals. If it wanted to it could trace its ancestry back twenty million years.'

Wow, I thought. It's a good job Father isn't a tapir. He'd never finish his project. The sea lion pool with its concrete slide was empty, as was the old bear cave, but all the animals left had one thing in common. They all had names. In the farthest corner of the park was an old buffalo.

'Hrotsvitna of Gandersheim.' It wasn't the buffalo's type or species. It was her name. I was amazed. I couldn't even tell it was a girl. Cosmos gave out little pieces of information like gentle smoke signals. 'First known European dramatist. Germany's first poet. A woman. Tenth century.' The buffalo carried on grazing. She didn't seem interested in the weight of her t.i.tle. Nor did Cloelia, the white rhino.

'Cloelia was seriously cool,' Cosmos a.s.sured me. 'She was like, a real star in Rome. She lived in the sixth century which is super long ago and she was taken hostage by the Etruscan King Lars Porsenna during an attack on Rome. Anyhow she escaped and she stole a horse. Then she rode for her life and had to swim this huge river, the Tiber, to get back to the city. Anyway, the Romans were dumb, they gave her back. Can you believe it? But old King Lars was so freaked out by her, you know, impressed with her courage and all, that he freed her and all her fellow hostages.' The rhino grunted as if to confirm the story.

We moved on to Hypatia and Cyril, the polar bears. They were wandering back and forth in their concrete enclosure, shaking their heads and rubbing their sides against the wall. Cosmos leaned against the railing. Cyril stood on the spot and shook his huge, moulting body from side to side in the slow rhythm of the deranged.