Whistling for the Elephants Page 11

  ‘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 butterfly. The change from caterpillar to butterfly 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 mass 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 butterflies. 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 quantities. 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.

  ‘Hello,’ 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 shift 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.

  ‘Damn,’ she said, dropping her end of the bale with a shiver. 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-fashioned 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 butterfly 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 hell to sandal; and any number of Ne Ne geese. It was a strange and eclectic family. We sto
pped 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 title. Nor did Cloelia, the white rhino.

  ‘Cloelia was seriously cool,’ Cosmos assured 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.

  ‘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 fashion. 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.

  ‘Cunt!’

  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 twang in her voice. It was an old-fashioned sound with old-fashioned 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.’

  ‘Cunt,’ 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 passed 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 passed 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 hell broke loose in the theatre. A group called Radical Women stormed the stage and started shouting: