Part 7 (2/2)

'Hey, fella,' Cosmos called softly. 'You having a bad day?'

It sure looked like it but it wasn't a subject I felt confident about. This was the whole area of happy and unhappy tigers, brown bears taking Tuesdays off and Rocco not really liking anybody.

'Do you think they have bad days?' I asked cautiously.

'I don't know,' said Cosmos. 'People say that animals are happy in a zoo if the babies play and the adults have babies. I don't know. I mean like, they had babies in the concentration camps and that wasn't too great.'

All the female animals had been named to provide a history of women's achievements. There was Woolf the camel and Tubman the donkey The boy animals had a different heritage. In the four cages which stood around the carousel were the largest and most dangerous of the creatures. They were all male and each one had been named after a deceased zookeeper.

There was Girling the Gorilla. He was a big fella, named after an inebriated keeper called Edward Girling who was bitten by a cobra at London Zoo in 1852. Then there was a pair of cheetahs called Mr Goss and Mr Kruger. Mr Goss, the seventy-two-year-old parrot keeper at London Zoo, had been trampled to death by a baby elephant called Rostom in 1879.

'He had his leg amputated but he like, died three weeks later. Rostom went to Berlin where two years later he killed another keeper called Kruger.'

A very elderly lion was named after the unfortunate Whittle. 'Late nineteenth century. Whittle worked for something called O'Brian's Menagerie. He wasn't trained as a lion keeper. Got transferred to the lion act at short notice. He liked it, though. Wanted to be famous. In one of his first shows in front of the public he put his head in the lion's mouth. Whittle was not used to lions and, to be fair, probably the lion was not used to him. It closed its jaws.'

Finally, in the fourth cage was Horace, a Bengal tiger just like Rajan from the magazine. This was what Billie would have faced. Through the bars the bright reddish tan of Horace's coat stood out, beautifully marked with dark, almost black, transverse stripes. His underparts, the inner sides of his limbs, his cheeks, and a large spot over each eye were whitish. He was stunning. I tried to imagine opening the cage door and stepping inside. Billie, in her leather boots and tight-fitting pants, adjusting her tie before sticking her head between lethal tiger jaws. Horace, the keeper for whom the tiger was named, had been killed in typical tiger fas.h.i.+on. Horace had been feeding the creature when it seized him by the neck and then let go. There were hardly any external injuries.

'Anyone who knows tigers said it was a mistake. You know-tiger error in the excitement of feeding,' explained Cosmos.

The distinct naming of all these diverse animals gave the zoo a strange sense of being a cross between a serious public place and a personal collection of pets. I was going to ask Cosmos who had named them all when a sound I had heard before cut across the picnic area.

'c.u.n.t!'

A woman stood in the lengthening shadows of the day. A tall woman with a large grey parrot on her right shoulder. I had seen her before. Once outside Milo's Toy Store when she drove by and that first time at the Burroughs House. She waited for us to approach. I had to look up a long way to her face and at first I thought I wasn't seeing well in the fading sun. One side of her face was rather lovely. Well, faded lovely. An elegant woman grown lined with dignity. That side of her, the faded beauty side, she held erect and proud. It was the other side which I stared at. The whole of the right side of her face began at her hairline and then simply fell away. It was as though her face had been made of Plasticine and someone had given it a great yank toward the floor. As if she had strayed too close to the fire. Her eye and her cheek and the right side of her mouth all fought gravity to stay on her face. Her right arm hung limp at her side and she listed over toward it. It meant that the parrot sat at an odd angle all the time.

'Hey,' said Cosmos, unconcerned. 'Hey, Miss Strange, this is Sugar. Sugar, this is Miss Strange.'

Miss Strange. She looked at me and I tried not to look at her. She reached out and pulled my chin up to look her in the eye.

'How do you do?' she said with the slightest Southern tw.a.n.g in her voice. It was an old-fas.h.i.+oned sound with old-fas.h.i.+oned manners.

'Very well,' I stammered. I felt like I was sweating. I didn't know what to say or where to look. 'I've been learning all the names,' I managed.

'Good,' she said. 'Names matter. Did you know that Theodore Roosevelt's son was called Kermit? Kermit Roosevelt. The day he was baptized he was cursed not to follow in his father's footsteps.' She nodded at the parrot and let go of me. 'This is Mr Paton.'

I had got the hang of it. 'How did he die?'

'Killed by Tommy, African elephant, brought back to Plymouth by Prince Alfred, second son of Queen Victoria, on the Galatea. They loaded Tommy on the train to London. He wrecked the van and killed Paton.' Miss Strange turned her attention to Cosmos. 'How's the pet corner?'

Cosmos seemed entirely unfazed. 'Pet corner? Oh, yeah. I had like, this vision. I thought we would call it Manitou Manor. Manitou is Algonquin for-'

'Yes, well. I had this vision that we'd open it this weekend, so you'd better get on. Nice to meet you, Sugar.'

'c.u.n.t,' said the parrot. Miss Strange turned to leave.

'Oh.' She stopped and spoke over her shoulder to Cosmos. 'I think the salamander is missing again.'

It was getting late and Cosmos headed back for the barn. The sun was going down and we sat for a moment together on the dropped hay bale.

'I love this time. Listen.' The park was silent apart from the occasional interruption from Mr Honk and the rather distant cry of the timber wolves. 'This is when humans and animals speak the same language. Just think, if we could combine our skills we could overcome anything.' It was quite dark now and the moon had begun to rise.

'The stars will be out soon,' she said. 'You look for seven of them together. They're the Pleiades. The dancing children. A group of Indian children loved to dance. They danced so much that they didn't eat. After a while they floated off to the sky. Now they dance all the time.'

'I have to go now,' I said, though I wasn't sure what for. 'Sure. Hey, you want one of my whistles?' She pulled the hand-carved flute from her belt and handed it to me. 'They use these in the Sudan, you know. To summon the elephants. If the village is in trouble then they all get together and whistle and the elephants come and save them.'

I took the small flute carefully in my hand, thanked her and turned to go.

'Good night, Sugar,' she called. Sugar! I headed for the entrance on a cloud. On the way out I pa.s.sed a small building next to the barn. Upstairs a light was on. A narrow wooden staircase led the way up and on the wall was pinned a handwritten note. It read: Remember the dignity of your womanhood. Do not appeal, do not beg, do not grovel. Take courage, join hands, stand beside us. Fight with us.

- Christabel Pankhurst I didn't understand it. I didn't really understand anything. This was the strangest place I had ever been and these were the strangest people I had ever met. They were none of them anything to do with me or Mother or Father or where we'd been or what I expected. I pa.s.sed Girling the Gorilla, Mr Whittle, Mr Goss and Mr Kruger looking out at the still horses on the carousel. When I got home Harry was watering his front lawn.

'Where you've been, kid?' he called.

'The zoo,' I said.

He snorted. 'Town's gonna close that dump. Should have happened years ago.

We looked at each other and I couldn't think of anything so I said, 'The salamander is missing again.' I didn't exactly know what that was but Harry nodded. It was a mistake. I should have listened to Father and all his stories about the war. I didn't know then that I was giving information to the enemy camp.

Inside, Mother had made me a ready-made meal from the freezer. She sat at the kitchen table and watched me eat it. She hadn't quite cooked it properly but as she rarely did anything culinary I just sucked round the frozen bits. She sat watching me from the edge of a chair. Then she took one of her pills and went back to bed. Like a leaf-mining moth, most of her life was taking place between the upper and lower sheets of a bed. Father was late at work but I didn't feel like driving. I sat up alone and watched Johnny Carson. He was laughing about the news. They kept showing a clip of some man in a tuxedo called Bert Parks who had very unnatural-looking hair. He was standing on a catwalk putting a crown on the new Miss America. I didn't really think she was that pretty. She looked a bit like Mr Parks had bought her somewhere or made her from a Woman Kit. Then suddenly all h.e.l.l broke loose in the theatre. A group called Radical Women stormed the stage and started shouting: 'Miss America is an image that oppresses women.

They all threw bras, girdles, curlers, false eyelashes, wigs and other things they called 'women's garbage' into a Freedom Trash Can and outside the theatre a sheep was crowned Miss America. I wondered if sheep were tame, which would make them third on my Chinese order. Looking at the sheep with the crown on its head, that seemed quite high. I didn't really understand any of it but that was the first time I ever heard of women's liberation.

Chapter Eight.

The next morning I was sitting in my usual place on the dock with my Sears, Roebuck catalogue. I had taken my sandals off and was wondering whether Mother could be persuaded to get me some quieter shoes. I had just decided to test myself by putting my feet in the water and not worrying that a horseshoe crab might get me when I heard the wailing. It started quite low, from Sweetheart's house, and then it kind of grew. I got up and went round the side of the house. Sweetheart was standing in her front yard, crying and crying. Across the street Judith was screaming and running in demented circles around her lawn. I knew Rocco had only been dead a few days but I still thought it was excessive.

Aunt Bonnie was trying to stop her. Joey had run out of his house and he ran straight at Judith and put out his arms to grab her. She kind of fell into them and was standing with him clinging on to her when Harry and Uncle Eddie came skidding round the corner in the fire engine. All the time the tears were just pouring down Sweetheart's face and she never moved.

'Oh G.o.d, Harry, Harry,' she called to her son, but Harry didn't stop. He ran across the lawn, grabbed his wife. Joey was still holding her so without a beat Harry punched Joey to the ground. It seemed to be something they did to each other. Aunt Bonnie pulled Judith away and Uncle Eddie ran up between all of them. I couldn't hear what anyone was saying but I knew it was terrible. After a while Aunt Bonnie came and took Sweetheart home and Harry and Judith went in the house. Uncle Eddie helped Joey up and walked back to the fire truck. As he got up into the driving seat he saw me.

'Hey, kid. Okay?' I nodded. 'Bad news.' He nodded back to the Schlicks' house. 'Harry's kid, Pearl? She's dead.' He shook his head. 'Kids today.'

Uncle Eddie backed the fire truck out of the street and took off I could still hear Sweetheart crying through her screen door and now Harry had started yelling in his house. That wasn't right. People shouldn't yell when other people are dead. I felt scared. Death seemed to be in the neighbourhood. I ran into our house and down the corridor to Mother's room. The door was closed so I raised my hand to knock but I didn't. I couldn't.

I went over to the Dapolitos' to see if I could get something to eat. The house was in the usual uproar. Donna Marie was listening to some records in her room. She had this really fussy room. Her bed had a lace canopy over it and everything was very pink. She was trying on make-up and wanted me to put false eyelashes on. I went downstairs. Eddie Jr was flipping baseball cards in the den but he wouldn't let me have any. Aunt Bonnie had come home and was watching the TV. It was on real loud.

The news broadcast pounding out in colour. There had been an anti-war demonstration in one of the Midwest cities. The National Guard had opened fire and Pearl was dead. I had never met her but I had seen enough pictures. Now they had a picture of her on TV. A smiling picture, but she was dead. I kept thinking about Judith screaming and Harry getting so mad. I didn't know what people did after their little girl died. It wasn't what I thought.

'G.o.d d.a.m.n, G.o.d d.a.m.n.' Aunt Bonnie kept saying the same thing over and over, lighting one Virginia Slim from another. A kind of personal smog zone was developing around her as she watched. Then she went in the kitchen to make Sloppy Joes for everyone. I went and watched her. I sat on one of the high stools by the corner bar. Uncle Eddie had made the bar in the kitchen to look like a little Hawaiian drinking place. It was made of bamboo and had a plastic pineapple on top to keep ice in. c.o.c.ktail cabinets, full bars, drinks cupboards with ice dispensers, every house had something in those days to dispense alcohol. The Dapolitos' bar had a little refrigerator for Aunt Bonnie's beer and she was in and out of there that afternoon.

'G.o.d, Harry loved that kid. He gave her everything he never had.' Aunt Bonnie threw ground beef in a hot frying pan and steam erupted from the cooker. 'Nice house, family. That's what it's about, right, kid? Family. Sixteen she leaves home. Sixteen. I thought Harry was going to die.' She threw tomatoes in the pan and poured a pack of Sloppy Joe mix in from a great height. Red sauce splashed out on the cooker as she stirred. It was l.u.s.ty cooking such as my mother could never imagine.

'Is that why he's so mad?' I asked.

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