Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms (15 page)

Because he was still watching, arms folded, Will lowered the bun into one of the black garbage cans, but very carefully,
onto someone's newspaper, so it wasn't touching the banana skins and cigarette packets. Then she carefully waited for him to nod and smile gruffly and walk on, and she carefully took it out again and retreated, past the warthogs and past the elephants to the monkey enclosures. There—still carefully—she tucked up her legs on a bench so as to hide the bare skin, and sniffed the hot dog deeply, not carefully at all. She inhaled yellow sauce and coughed. Nobody saw. The zoo was almost deserted.

It looked like a biltong sausage, but it didn't taste like one; more like tin and water. But the yellow sauce was delicious—not quite like real mustard; sweeter—and she ate the whole thing in four bites and a lick.

As she sat, sucking the sauce out from under her fingernails, a bell sounded suddenly. Will felt her heart dilate with brief panic. From somewhere, an invisible giant warned her that the zoo would be closing in a quarter of an hour. Would she please collect her personal belongings and make her way to the nearest exit.

What should she do now, she wondered. To give herself time, she hunched smaller and pulled her hair in front of her face. Two girls stopped in front of the monkey enclosure. They were the same age as Will, with hair in high ponytails and shoes you could run in.

“Jess! Look at the one on the top branch—what's it doing?”

“Cleaning itself, obviously.”

“It's not! Look, it's eating.”

“That's what they do. They eat their fleas. And they eat each other's fleas too.”

“No!”

“They do! It's healthy.”

“Would you eat my fleas?”

“Of course. That's what best friends are for.” The first girl laughed loudly. Will, watching from her bench, was astonished. Girls, then, weren't all like Samantha. “Wish we could touch them, though.”

“Wouldn't they bite? You might die of jungle fever.”

“Is there a way in, d'you think?” The girl reached over the barrier and ran her fingers along the wire front of the enclosure.

“Jess! You wouldn't!”

“All right! Calm down. Don't have monkey babies. I'm not going to.”

“What's the word for a monkey baby, anyway? Are they monkey cubs?”

“No, ‘cubs' is just lions, I think.”

“Mini monkeys?”

“Monkettes?”

“Let's ask someone—”

They ran—their ponytails flicking left-right in unison—after a woman in green overalls.

Will waited, careful and wary behind her hair, until they were out of sight. She approached the cage slowly. Monkeys got shrieking-scared easily, and these must have had a long day. She stared at the cage front.

Her heart began to tick.

As she stood thinking, statue-still, a boy dragged an old woman and a teenage girl up to the cage; Will ducked behind her hair, and kept studying the wire meshing. It wasn't actually that thick, up close, more like very strong chicken wire. The flickering excitement of a plan began to stir in her stomach, and she ran a hand along the wire.

It made the boy look up at her. He stared at Will, at his watch, at Will. Will didn't see. The boy hit his sister with a rolled-up comic, saying, “Lizzie.
Lizzie!
” She brushed him off, so he pulled on the strap of her backpack, whispering, “Lizzie.
Look
, Liz. That girl's not blinked for two minutes and thirty-eight seconds and”—he looked at his watch again—“six milliseconds.”

Will heard that; she glared at him and then blinked, as pointedly as she could. Her scowl didn't seem to work on
him; he grinned at her. “New watch for my birthday. It's got an extra bright night-light. It does milliseconds. It can tell the time a mile underwater, yeah.”

Will said, “Oh. How would you get a mile underwater?”

“Dunno.” He brushed the bangs out of his eyes to look harder at her. She stared back. His hair looked like he'd cut it himself, in the dark, with the captain's fish slice, by the light of his extra bright night-light. But his face, underneath it, was good. “In a submarine, I guess.”

Will stared. “Do you have a submarine?” Perhaps English children were even richer than she'd thought.

“No! Of course not. It was a
joke
, yeah.”

“Oh. Maybe next birthday,
ja
?”

He laughed. They grinned at each other.

“What's your name? I'm Dan.”

“Will.”

“Seriously? My cousin's called Will. He's a boy.”

“It's a girl's name too.”

“No need to shout. I never said it wasn't. Why aren't you at school?”

“Why aren't you?” Will felt her skin begin to tense again.

“Report day. I've been watching you; you're not here with a grown-up.”

She weighed up how much she had to lie to this boy. He
had a long, lanky body and a clever face. “It's a day off,
ja
.” That was almost true.

He snorted. “Right. Look.” He checked over his shoulder that the old woman wasn't listening, but she was busy with his sister. “It's nothing to do with me if you're cutting school, but you should do something about your clothes. Not even tramps wear shorts in February. And your hair.”

“My hair?”

She must have looked stricken—this was the Leewood girls all over again—because he said, “No! I didn't mean it like that. There's nothing wrong with it—it's nice.” The tips of his ears went red. “But tie it up, yeah, or put it under a hat. You stick out like a rat in a handbag.”

Will liked that. It was, she thought, the right way to talk. “We used to say,
ja
, at home, ‘like a warthog in a shoe shop.' ”

He snorted and grinned. His face widened when he smiled, and his ears stuck out like the doors on the Toyota pickup. She liked it—hugely. “Like a monkey in a tutu,” he said.

“
Ja
!
Ja
,
ja
, like . . .” She wanted something that would make him smile again. “A giraffe on a swing set.”

“Like a wildcat in a classroom,” he said. Will choked and stared, suddenly frightened and suspicious. He said, “What?”

“Nothing . . . No, nothing.”

“Right,” he said. His grandmother was smiling and tapping her watch. “Look, I've got to go. You—you do have food, yeah? Dinner money?”

“Food?” Will tried, and failed, to look like someone with a well-stocked fridge in tow.

“Yeah, food. You know—edible things? Stuff that makes you grow? Wait. Don't go. I've got a Mars. Here. You can have half of it.” He split it in two, and then his own half again, stickily. “Wait. You can have three quarters. And here—take this.” He tore his comic down the center fold. “You can have the first half of this. I've read the first half anyway.”

His grandmother tapped him on the shoulder.

“Daniel, love. We'll miss the bus. Say good-bye to your friend.”

Will was surprised by how sharply it hurt her chest to see him go. She wished, for perhaps the 999th time, that Leewood hadn't been an all-girls school.

There were no humans in sight now, only the orangutan watching with interest, and a baboon scratching its ankle, and the two monkeys. The heaps of straw in the monkey cage looked warm and soft (though straw wasn't ever as soft as it looked; Will knew that from nights with the horses), and it smelled like home.

Will pulled off her gloves with her teeth and shoved them
into her pocket. She spat on her hands and, with a scrabbling kick, pulled herself high up and over the barrier. She checked again over her shoulder; all was clear. The wire front of the cage was easy to climb—it was the same stuff the captain used to protect his goats from the
nzunas
and jackals—but here the roof was wire as well, whereas the captain's was corrugated iron. At the top Will crouched and pulled out her pocketknife. The scissors on it were sharp, designed to cut through meat and bone. All the same, she was astonished at how easy it was to cut a hole in the wire as wide as her shoulders. She thought,
Good thing I'm so small, after all
. And even as she was shivering with excitement, she remembered to wrap her hands in her scarf before she gripped the rough edge she'd made. Through the scarf she felt the barbed edges cut into her palms. She bit down on her lips, and made no noise.

With both hands gripping the rough edge of the hole, Will lowered her legs into the cage. She kicked off her boots and—this was harder—her socks. They dropped down into the cage and bounced in the straw. Will swung her legs up and gripped at the wire with her toes and hung there for a second, upside down on all fours, with everything but her head inside the cage. Then she had to stop for a second to laugh, silently and wildly. She bit her tongue to stop herself.
“Concentrate
, hey.”

Will edged toward the wire front of the cage and began to inch down it. It was slow and painful, with every finger in a separate hole, straining with her own weight and cutting into slices on the wire edge. And then Will felt her stomach lurch, before her head knew why; and then she recognized the thump of footsteps, and she was still only halfway to the ground. She sped up, sliding, and bending her fingers backward, and then suddenly everything was upside down and blurred and black, and a monkey was screaming, and she was tumbling down amongst the straw. She landed badly, on one knee, and all the air coughed out of her lungs. Unable to breathe, and blind and heaving, by instinct she found she was scrabbling into the straw and tucking her head between her knees just in time to hear a man's voice say, “What's all this, eh? What's going on here?”

Will waited. She bit her lip and didn't answer. He might not have been talking to her. His voice had that sticky lilt that people used in this country for babies and animals.

The voice said again: “What's all the ruckus, Wilbur, lad? Did someone feed you Coke again, Wilbur? Did they give you mustard?”

A second voice said, “Bloody kids. Can't they read the sign? ‘Do not feed the animals.' ”

“Probably not. Illiterate little blighters.” And there was laughter.

“Come on. Sandra's promised to buy us a pint.”

The steps passed on, and the lights over the refreshment kiosk went out. The zoo was filled with darkness, and the solid murmur of a hundred animals, and Will's audible heart.

I
T WAS ONE OF THE
happiest nights of Will's life.

As she unclenched her fingers from around her ankles, there was a ripple in the straw behind her. A hand—a hand like a baby's fist, but with sharp nails and black fur—tugged at her hair. Another fastened on her shoulder. Over her shoulder, a beautiful black face appeared.

Will breathed, “
Oh
 . . .” and then, “
Oh
 . . .”

The monkey licked her eyelashes.

There weren't words.

It didn't take long to explore the whole cage, though it was large enough. There were two monkeys, and a tire swing, a climbing frame, and her. The larger monkey (Will
guessed it must be Wilbur—though it seemed far too formal a name for a monkey, but then, Will was an odd name for a girl, they said at school) squatted up on a branch in a corner, unsure and resentful of the enormous intruder. Will gave him as much space as she could. An angry monkey, she knew, wasn't a good sleeping companion. She and Simon both had scars to prove it.

But the other monkey was small, with arms as thin as the tines of forks, and he clung to Will's neck and arms when she stood up. He breathed love into her ears, and nibbled her eyebrows and tried to lick the inside of her nose.

“Hey!” whispered Will. “Hey, hey. . . . Hush, beauty. . . . Oi, oi, oi! If I wanted to fight, I'd have stayed outside, my dear. Hush,
ja
? Hush, beauty.”

Will found her flashlight and wrapped her hair over it to dim the light, and then moved very slowly, very silently across every inch of the floor, looking for food. She didn't know what zoos thought monkeys ate; she hoped for bread, and apples and carrots, sweet corn and cheese. Half an hour of searching produced a handful of sunflower seeds, half a mango, and a dusty banana. It was black, and flies buzzed around it, but Will felt soft and exhausted with hunger.

As soon as she sat back against the wall, the little monkey reached into her lap and fumbled at the banana.

“Hey!
Sha
, hey!” she whispered. “I gave you some of my Mars bar, remember?” The monkey patted Will's mouth with a tiny fist. She gave him the last quarter, and half the skin to lick.

Will piled straw into a heap in the far corner of the enclosure, where she thought she would be shielded from passing keepers by the climbing frame. She made a ball of the softer hay and wrapped her scarf round it for a pillow. She stuffed more into her boots, her shorts, and between her T-shirt and sweater. Steadily, she grew warmer. She blew on her hands. Across the zoo, night birds sang into the stars.