Animal People (13 page)

On a wall outside the enclosure was a photograph each of Adik and his mother Long-Long. In the rhino merchandise the animals were made to look appealing in a cuddly, big-horned way, but in the flesh there was no way round it: they were hideous. Their heads were boot-shaped and elongated, concave where they should have bulged and blunt where they should have had points. Their stumpy legs were too short for the great bodies, they had bizarrely shaggy hides and lashless, bulging eyes. Adik didn't even have a horn, just a tumorous swelling on his snout. As if to compensate for this repulsive alienness, the photographs were accompanied by paragraphs about the creatures' inner lives.
Adik: Born: 23/8/2011—Personality: Cute and pretty laid-back, can be very cheeky. Likes: His keeper Rusty; Bamboo Back Scratches. Dislikes: Getting out of bed on winter mornings!
Long-Long's personality, the sign said, was
pretty outgoing
and she liked
Rhino treats
.

Russell often threatened to poster some other information over the sign (
Dislikes: Being imprisoned against her will, Anthropomorphism
) but so far the only graffiti was the weekly scrawled misspelling of Adik's name, with accompanying drawings. A man with a squirty bottle of cleaner came to remove these after every school visit.

A little further on, just outside the rhino exit, two young women stood peering down, scrolling through photographs one had taken on her mobile phone. ‘That was pretty lame,' one said. The other nodded, frowning, puzzled, at the pictures. ‘It just sort of
stood
there,' she said.

The sun beat down.

Russell looked towards the Komodo dragon's enclosure as he dragged on his cigarette, eyes narrowed against the smoke. Smoking was prohibited within the zoo, but Russell paid no heed to the signs, nor the repeated warnings from Marilyn Parris, the catering director. The dragon was unvisited for a change, and it lay like a long, irregular stone against the wall of its house.

Russell was forty-three, had never married and lived alone in a rented one-bedroom flat in a distant suburb. He didn't have a car, nor a mobile phone. He said the only topic of conversation more boring than real estate was mobile phones, and if anyone in his earshot said the word ‘iPhone' Russell would leap to his feet, stick his fingers in his ears and begin screaming as if stabbed. Russell had a long-term girlfriend called Lucy who worked for customs, rummaging through people's suitcases at the airport, and who appeared to demand nothing more of him than weekends of television and cheerful sex. He was well read, knew a lot about history, made off-colour remarks about women and despised almost everyone. He abhorred ambition of any kind and had for years refused promotions or other enticements to remove him from contact with the zoo's public. Nobody knew how long he had worked at the kiosk, but his tenure originated in some ancient contract that made it impossible to shift him, and too expensive to pay off with a redundancy. The kiosk was his realm and he ran it how he wanted, employing shiftless men and women who could hold a drink and would laugh at his jokes. Russell kept a running tab on the decline of civilisation, documenting travesties in an exercise book he kept in the drinks fridge.
Item no. 2876: The word ‘Awesome'.
Reality television had a whole section to itself.
Item no. 6759: ‘Bondi Vet'.
He did not use the internet, had no intention of ever owning property and would never give up smoking. Russell watched nuclear families lining up outside the baboon house and nudged Stephen behind the counter. ‘Look at this poor sad fucker, mortgaged up to his arsehole,' he would say, pointing his spatula across the piazza to where an overweight, weary-looking 32-year-old wearing the corporate dad's leisure uniform of navy cargo shorts, leather flipflops, aviator sunglasses and an
Andersen Consulting Fun Run 2009
t-shirt. Russell would yell, ‘Might as well get inside the cage yourself, mate,' and turn back to the hotplate. Casually, as if the man had heard nothing, he would slowly turn around. Finding no culprit he would have to pretend serious interest in the plaque about the natural habitats of baboons. In the gloom of the kiosk Russell and Stephen would snigger happily and go on flipping burgers.

When Stephen saw Russell now, lazing at the outdoor table smoking a cigarette, a surge of gratitude flooded through him. Russell was his sane, intelligent, uncompromising friend. He slumped down on the bench beside him. ‘Sorry I'm so bloody late.'

Russell kept gazing at the Komodo dragon, appearing not to have heard. He stretched out a skinny leg and leaned backwards on his metal stool to insert the cigarette lighter into his jeans pocket. ‘I gave it a roll-mop the other day,' he said, staring wistfully at the beast. ‘But it sicked it up.' The lighter now in place, he realigned himself to hunch once more over the table.

A woman and her elderly mother appeared at the dragon enclosure and stood, an empty stroller between them, at the fence. They had not noticed the huge concrete-coloured reptile merging into the wall; they were reading the sign. A little girl aged about seven, wearing an Australian flag cap and jeans, and a pink and yellow t-shirt that said
OMG!
on the front and
WTF!
on the back in large letters, eventually stomped up behind them, arms folded.

The mother suddenly noticed the dragon, gasped, and wheeled around to her child.

‘
Look,
Bronte!' She crouched at her daughter's side, and pointed. ‘Look at him. He can see you!'

Stephen had always found this strange, watching people at the zoo; their odd, desperate need for the animals to notice them. He's looking at us! He's coming over! Surely the most appealing thing about animals was that—far from offering unconditional love—they wanted nothing from you. He liked this absence from their comprehension—the fact that he could stand in front of the open eyes of the Komodo dragon for an hour or a day or a week, and the dragon would apparently never register his presence, nor care. It was a chance for you to stop existing.

Overhead came the mingled sound of an aeroplane and the birds. One birdcall high, far away and whooping, rhythmic as a car alarm; others squirting in arrhythmic shrieks, squeaking discordant arcs, like rusted metal wheels turning. One rhythm overlapped another, dissolving in and out, the sounds of the zoo rising and sinking away.

The woman at the dragon enclosure gripped her daughter around the waist. ‘See?' She cried. ‘He's looking at you!'

Russell followed Stephen's gaze. ‘Pathetic, isn't it.'

Bronte squirmed, pinned between her mother's body and the sharp edge of the fence. But the mother was undeterred, desperate for the dragon to show a sign of life. She shrieked now into the child's ear, ‘He's watching us!'

Humans
were
pathetic, it was true. Stephen had left a busload of people for dead because he was too gutless to speak. But it wasn't only cowardice that had caused him to abandon them. It was something else. It was his knowledge of what would have happened if he raised the alarm—the irritated glances, the shrugs of disdain. Some of them might casually get off at the next stop as if they had always planned it, but they would not thank him, nor show any fright. And some, out of a fear of looking panicked or stupid, would simply stay in their seats, riding to their deaths. Perhaps this was what separated us from the animals—not language, but embarrassment.

Although, Stephen thought as he and Russell watched the woman gripping her struggling daughter at the fence, prattling on, there were still quite a lot of people unencumbered by the problem of embarrassment.

‘I saw a bunch of Yanks this morning, at the Eastern greys,' Russell said, tossing his cigarette butt to the concrete and twisting his heel over it, ‘with their backs turned to the roos, videoing their kids. Hopping.'

A birdcall scratched at the air with a high, abandoned cry.
Hierk, hierk, hierk.

‘I gotta have a slash,' Russell said, getting up from his seat. ‘Big Bertha's waiting for you.' He meant the fryer. Russell called everything by women's names.

Stephen wanted to tell Russell about the accident, about the junkie girl dying on her couch, about the bomb on the bus, about Fiona. But he was out of breath from the walk up the hill. And what would he say? He was exhausted, he was
hot
, and there was still the rest of the day to be endured.

The woman and her mother and the child wandered away from the dragon into the reptile house.

Hierk, hierk.

This was what he would tell Fiona. Things happen, they pass. Life casts you, you drift. He nodded as this occurred to him. You go with the flow. Animals and children understood this: everything was temporary. He was not running, not evading things; he was accepting the way of the universe. All things passed. He let a peaceful, Buddhist sort of feeling rise up in him. He could say these things, for they were true, he believed them. He could do it. He imagined looking into Fiona's eyes, and holding her hand, and saying these things. Then he felt sick.

For three hours he scrubbed at the slimy walls of the fryer. It was the fifth time he had done this job—they took it in turns—and it was the fifth time he wished they had changed the oil when they were supposed to. The oil was verging on rancid and the smell made him gag. It was no cooler inside the kiosk than out, despite the whirring fans, and he had to use near boiling water in the buckets to cut through the film of grease. He was certain his body temperature had never been this high in his life; he was faint with it. The scouring pad soon grew slick with grease, and he found he was just shifting the oil from one part of the wall to another. Every so often he had to step outside the kitchen and stand in the trees with his hands on his knees, taking in great gulps of clean air. People passing with their children stopped to stare at him, the limp white hygiene cap drooping round his ears, the sweat pouring down his bright red face. He went back inside and scoured and scoured, the muscles of his arms and shoulders and his back burning. It was weird how, bent down into the vat, scrubbing, this greasy duty somehow kept reminding him of the interminable hours at Mass as a boy. Kneeling on the hard floor. Penance. He squeezed the scourer into the bucket and began again. Whenever his mother came to his mind, or Fiona, he scrubbed harder, as if he could rasp away what he had done, what he was yet to do.

After three hours he was finished. He was drenched in sweat, and still between his fingers and in the crooks of his elbows he felt the oil, no matter how many times he washed. His pants were wet with sweat and filth, and he remembered with a dull thump that in his hurry this morning he had not packed a change of clothes to wear at the birthday party.

Russell sat down beside him in the shade of one of the umbrellas, holding out a lemonade Icy Pole. Stephen unpeeled the sticky paper and sucked at the glorious cold ice.

‘You look like shit,' Russell said. He nodded. He felt like shit.

Mia, assistant to the catering director, came strutting over the paving towards them in her sturdy high heels. She clutched a yellow A4 envelope in her right hand, and pressed her glossed lips together as she walked. She wore tiny tailored navy-blue shorts and a white top with thin shoulder straps, and her impressively sized breasts bounced behind each step. Despite these, and the appeal of those long tanned legs, Mia always made Stephen think of a praying mantis. The long triangular shape of her face, the blunt fringe making her eyes seem wider apart than was natural in a human face. Nevertheless Stephen and Russell watched her walking, appraising her as she approached. Russell said, ‘Greetings, Torpedo Girl,' referring to her nipples, just as she reached them.

Mia could tell Russell had meant something vulgar, and eyed him as she thrust the envelope at Stephen. ‘What's that smell?' she said, wincing in distaste.

‘Hi, Mia,' Stephen said, ‘I had to clean out the deep fryer. It's probably me. Sorry about that.'