Whistling for the Elephants (16 page)

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:

‘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
god, 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.

‘God
damn, God damn.’ 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. Cocktail 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.

‘God,
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 lusty cooking such as my mother could
never imagine.