Natural History Read online

  He grabbed a kagoul from a hook in the downstairs lavatory—a clutter of coats and piled, muddy shoes that always smelled unaired—and stepped out into the morning.

  The house stood alone in its two acres, the colour of biscuit, in need of repair and paint. It was old, ridiculously big, and not well-maintained—its limestone was darkening with green lichen and damp and weathering. Two bats, pipistrelles, drew lightning loops and low dives over its crooked chimney-pots.

  Patrick didn’t feel like its owner, nor even its custodian. He just lived there.

  He tramped across the overgrown acre of rear garden, the wild grass wetting him to the knees. Then he stood on the rotting stile and craned his neck. He couldn’t see it—not over the hedge and through the bracken and past the oak trees—but he could feel the ocean.

  He crossed the stile into the oak woods, through which ran the South-west Coastal Footpath.

  Dawn gave the air a blue-cathode light. Low mist clutched at his knees; it caught like gauze in branches and pooled in moss-draped roots. He walked the squelching topsoil, the leaf humus. Low branches, cold with dew, whipped his face. Then he passed through the trees and walked along the open clifftop, the Bristol Channel calm far below. He hiked down to the salt flats, on and into Innsmouth.

  Nearest the harbour, the houses were small, lime-washed; many were now holiday homes and weekend cottages which hugged the narrow belt of the cobbled main street. He followed its bends to the harbour.

  The boat was at the weir, bobbing softly on the swell, and Captain Harry was already on board, smoking a roll-up and listening to Motörhead on a tinny portable stereo.

  Patrick clambered on board and paid Harry in cash, up front. The boat chugged out on the pewter water, luminous with sunrise, and Patrick smelled the salt and the fuel and the fish and oily, half-rotten wood.

  They fished for a while, their silence broken by the occasional muttered comment. Patrick caught some skinny mackerel. He gutted them, and Captain Harry cooked them over a Primus stove; the blue flame whipping in the wind.

  As he ate, Patrick noticed a disturbance in the water, a wake that moved against the waves. He followed it, and saw two fur seals, swimming by.

  He knew seals were closely related to dogs. And that’s how he thought of them in the fizzing instant before the water closed over their sleek wet heads: as dogs, swimming home. Because that’s where dogs always went, in the end: dogs went home.

  2

  In the summer of 1979, Patrick was twenty-five years old and a junior reporter on the Bristol Evening Post. His Editor had told him to chase up a story on the white tigers of Bristol Zoo. Seventeen of them had been born since 1963, but most of them had died of a disease yet to be identified. Bristol was sentimental about its dying white tigers—so now and again, they made for an uncomplicated, effective bit of weekend copy.

  So Patrick did as instructed. He picked up the phone and—after some waiting, some transferred calls, sitting at his desk making paper aeroplanes—he was put through to a zoo volunteer who might be able to help. She was a PhD student called Jane Campbell, and she sounded busy—but she agreed to meet him at noon tomorrow, by the polar bears.

  That was a hot day. He’d wandered in shirt-sleeves through the ice-cream crowds, towards the fishy bleach stink of the polar bear enclosure. His dad’s old briefcase hung by its long strap over one shoulder.

  He found the enclosure and looked around, craned his neck, stood on tiptoes. Then he saw a young woman sitting alone on a bench, arms tightly folded and ankles crossed before her. She’d been watching him. He approached her, a little flustered, breathless in the heat.

  ‘Is it …?’

  She stood. She was as tall as him. Tanned. Taut muscles under the skin of her forearm. When she shook his hand, good and firm, her skin was rough as pumice.

  ‘Jane Campbell.’ She spoke like a soldier; clipped, no-nonsense­, with a trace of accent he couldn’t place.

  He followed her through the crowds. She had a soldier’s walk, too—brisk, erect.

  They stopped at the tiger enclosure. Patrick had to speak up, over the noise of the punters and the low growl of the exhibits. ‘So,’ he said. ‘Imagine I don’t know anything about tigers. Why exactly are they white? Are they mutants or something?’

  There were deep lines at the corners of her eyes—years of squinting in fierce sunlight. She was twenty-four, but seemed older. She’d tied her hair back in a pony tail, frizzy with split ends, like a fistful of wheat. She wore a T-shirt and jeans, Adidas trainers.

  ‘Or something,’ she said. ‘True albinos have no coloration at all. But if you look closely …’

  He looked closely. The pale tigers were circling on lazy, padding paws; they braided slowly through one another, like cats against chair legs.

  ‘… you can see they have blue eyes. And the stripes are chocolatey. So what you’re looking at is chinchilla albinism.’

  ‘Spell, please?’

  She spelled.

  ‘And how long have you been working with animals?’

  She turned away from the tigers. Stood in the English sun, with the English crowds behind her. She didn’t belong there, and Patrick remembered that he didn’t belong there either. He thought of sitting near the docks, kicking his legs, watching the ships cast off.

  She said, ‘Why?’

  ‘Background,’ he said. ‘For the story.’

  But it wasn’t.

  He took her to a pub on King Street, the Llandoger Trow. In the Llandoger, Daniel Defoe met Alexander Selkirk, whom he later recreated as Robinson Crusoe. And it was in the Llandoger­—fictionalized­ as the Admiral Benbow—that Jim Hawkins unlocked Billy Bones’s chest, thus discovering a fateful map of Treasure Island. The Llandoger was part of the mythology that clustered and barnacled to this city, these docks.

  Patrick had read Treasure Island many times. He’d grown up reading such stories—and Bulldog Drummond and Biggies and Doc Savage, too. A child, he dreamed of going to sea—working a passage to the West Indies, or to South America—an innocent­ among roustabouts and criminals, but a quick learner and a canny fighter.

  Instead, he was a junior reporter who wore curly hair longer and shaggier than fashionable young men wore it in 1979—partly to hide the hoop of gold earring punched through his left earlobe. He wore a navy-blue suit with narrow lapels and carried his dad’s old briefcase, brass buckled and scuffed.

  And he drank in this pub, which had been bombed by the Germans, then turned into a Berni Inn. It was itself again, now, though. It had been rescued from the twentieth century.

  He bought her a pint of cloudy cider and set it down on the table. Then he set down his Dictaphone and pressed RECORD.

  Their eyes locked. Hers narrowed, playfully.

  He looked away, at his reporter’s notebook; spiral bound. Blank. A biro alongside it, chewed at the end.

  He said, ‘So. Back to basics. Where did you grow up?’

  ‘Good question.’ She leaned back in her chair and knitted her hands behind her head. Stretched. Then she leaned forward again.

  ‘Nepal and Malaysia. Fiji, for a bit. But Kenya, mostly.’

  ‘Why Kenya?’

  ‘My dad.’

  ‘He was Kenyan?’

  ‘Nope. He was obsessed by the Tsavo lions.’

  In surprise, Patrick spilled the head from his pint. He cursed and lifted his Dictaphone from the wet. He passed it to Jane, then hurried to the bar for a cloth to mop up the pooling bitter.

  She said, ‘Are you quite done?’ and he nodded meekly, cloth in hand. Jane deposited the Dictaphone back on the table, shining now with drying loops and smears, while Patrick took the cloth back to the bar.

  He knew all about the Tsavo lions. He’d read and re-read a book about them, rooted out from a junk shop in Merthyr Tydfil. In 1898, two lions had killed—and sometime
s eaten—one hundred and forty men retained by the British East India Company to build a railway bridge. The lions were eerily prodigious predators. Many thought them agents of supernatural vengeance.

  And now, before Patrick could think to restrain himself, he rattled off aloud the first passage of that musty, remembered old book:

  ‘It was towards noon on March the first, 1898, that I first found myself entering the narrow and somewhat dangerous harbour of Mombasa, on the east coast of Africa …’

  Reciting it evoked sense memories, of being trapped in the wrong era, in the wrong country: longing to travel backwards in time, across oceans.

  And now he was embarrassed, to hunger like a child for the kind of adventure this young woman took for granted. Her life was different, bigger than his.

  He wanted a bigger life, too. And thinking it, he blushed. She saw, and acknowledged his discomfort with a tiny candle-flicker at the edge of her lips. ‘They’re strange-looking beasts,’ she said. ‘Huge things. Much bigger than normal lions. Longer. And they’ve got no mane.’

  She sipped cider.

  ‘My dad’s had a lifetime of obsessions,’ she told him. ‘The Tsavo lions are just the latest and the longest. So far.’

  To be close to the lions’ descendants her father—Jock—had acquired a facsimile Georgian manor, erected years before by some nostalgic expatriate. Two years later, he owned and was running a safari park. He named it ‘Lion Manor’. And that was where, since she was twelve, Jane had grown up.

  A number of famous people had stayed at Lion Manor, but Jane couldn’t remember their names. There’d been an American news anchor, some English actors. Perhaps a James Bond.

  Patrick drank off his bitter and set down his glass. Then he turned off the Dictaphone.

  She said, ‘Enough?’

  He said, ‘Of course not.’

  Saturday night, he went to dinner at her Redland flat. The walls were hung with tie-dye wraps and cheap Hindu trinkets; they belonged to Jane’s flatmate, a woman for whom time had evidently stopped when the Beatles split up.

  Later, they went for a walk.

  On the street, Jane took his arm. The night-time breeze, summer scented with diesel, blew in her hair. He’d known her for a thousand years. They’d been lovers, spouses, parents, in a previous life.

  It was dark. The streets were all but deserted. They walked up to Clifton Downs, an area of high open grassland that overlooked the city. Bristolians would speak—wonderfully, he thought—of going up the Downs.

  On one side, the Downs plunged into the craggy fissure of the Avon Gorge. A suspension bridge had been strung across it, hung with fairylights like dew on a web.

  Here, they were close to the zoo. If they were lucky, they might hear the low rumble of the white tigers, growling.

  They stopped and faced each other. They were a little drunk.

  Patrick said, ‘How long will you stay?’

  ‘Not long.’

  He blinked it away. He wished he hadn’t met her yet, that she was still in his future, instead of receding already into the past.

  He wanted to reach out and grab her, fold her into him. But instead, he worked his hands into his pockets and blew the fringe from his eyes.

  She reached out. Touched his brow.

  ‘All those curls.’

  He needed to piss. There was nowhere to go but the bushes, and that was no good. You couldn’t piss in front of a woman before you’d kissed her; not if you wanted to kiss her.

  ‘So what, exactly, takes you back to Africa?’

  She crossed her arms and kicked at the grass. ‘Well, most female field-workers are primatologists. Actually, it’s the only research field where women outnumber men.’

  He nodded and frowned, wanting to look interested, needing to piss.

  ‘These women, they’re brilliant. They spend years watching the interaction of chimps, orangs, gorillas. But the data, the long-term observation, it doesn’t seem to be the point. It just makes for good publicity—these good-looking white women devoting themselves to their apes. And there’s a kind of racist undercurrent to it, a sex thing. It pisses me off, actually.’

  ‘So what are you studying?’

  ‘Hyenas.’

  ‘As in laughing?’

  ‘As in clitorises.’ She considered him sideways.

  He said, ‘So what is it, with hyenas and their clitorises?’

  ‘She’s got this huge clitoris. I mean, it’s enormous—a real schlong—at least as long as the male’s. And she can erect it at will. Imagine that.’

  ‘Imagine.’

  ‘And she’s got a sack of fibrous tissue that dangles down—y’know, there.’ She nodded vaguely at his crotch; he erupted inside like an upended snowglobe. ‘It looks like, it feels like, testicles.’

  ‘Fibrous tissue?’ He thought about it. ‘Why?’

  She clapped her hands. Someone—a stage-hand—had turned the arc-lights on behind her eyes.

  ‘Nobody knows! Not for sure. They’re used in greeting ceremonies. A hyena erects its dick or its clitoris—it’s difficult to tell which is which, even up close—and they have a good old sniff and a good old lick.’

  ‘For some reason, I was unaware of this.’

  ‘Most people are. But they shouldn’t be, don’t you think?’

  ‘Oh, definitely not.’

  So they stood there, knowing it, until he muttered, ‘No wonder they laugh.’

  She nudged him with her elbow—it was sharp, and she was strong. And then Patrick said, ‘Excuse me,’ and walked off to piss in the bushes; it was probably okay to piss in front of a woman who’d said clitoris, and dick and testicles, and schlong.

  She stood with her back to him, unembarrassed, rocking on the balls of her feet, humming a tune he didn’t recognize and looking at the shining bridge, until he was finished. And then she unbuttoned her jeans and went for a piss too. She squatted in the bushes; the epicentre of a hiss, a rising cloud of steam, a whisper of relief.

  On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, they went for a walk in the Mendips, a range of limestone hills south of the city.

  They wore bright kagouls and hiked through a low, milky mist to the flat summit of Beacon Batch, carpeted in damp heather, and set down by the cairn. Patrick had a flask of tea in his knapsack, and they passed it between them. He told her about the ancient barrows and forts littered around the grasslands below—the burial places of forgotten kings. He pointed to where Weston super Mare would be, were it not so foggy.

  He knew she wouldn’t care about Weston super Mare; who would? But he wanted to show her things about England she didn’t know.

  In his pocket, he had tickets to that year’s pantomime at the Bristol Hippodrome. It was Babes in the Wood, starring Jim Davidson and the Krankies.

  Patrick believed Pantomime to be a window onto his nation’s soul; he was explaining this as she passed him back the tea and said, ‘I’m pregnant, by the way.’

  He jerked his head—shocked and birdlike—to look at her. She lurched away, as if to avoid a head-butt.

  ‘Sorry?’

  She excavated a pack of barley sugars from her kagoul pocket, popped one into her mouth and crunched it to shrapnel. ‘I’m keeping it. And blah blah blah.’

  ‘What about your field study?’

  ‘No change. I leave in February.’

  There was a noise in his head like a vacuum cleaner.

  ‘You’re having the baby in Africa?’

  ‘People do.’

  He laughed out loud, because she was better than him. It was a glorious feeling. Liberating and exhilarating. She finished her barley sugar, pleased.

  He said, ‘You’re unbelievable.’

  ‘If I want a baby, I’ll have one.’

  ‘Do you want one?’

  She hugged
her knees. ‘Actually.’

  ‘Wow.’

  She touched the back of his hand. ‘This isn’t your problem.’

  ‘Is it a problem?’

  ‘I don’t know. Is it a problem?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s a problem.’

  They had their backs to the cold stone of the cairn; England was spread below them.

  He thought about Jane’s bedroom.

  Its walls were bare, and she had thrown away the dank old carpet to expose the floorboards. There were bookshelves, an ugly Oxfam table on which sat a beautiful, beetle-green Underwood typewriter.

  And there was an old trunk. It had belonged to Jock’s father; it was a dead man’s chest, manufactured in 1919 by Oshkosh of Wisconsin, and it was scaly with travel stickers. Patrick liked to sit on her messy bed and stare at them; they were sun-faded and half-peeled—Hotel Richemond, Genève. Cook’s Nile Service. Saigon Palace Hotel. Cunard White Star Lines Cruises. Train-Bleu.

  In Patrick’s favourite adventure stories, there was always a sidekick. And now he knew that’s what he was—not Alan Breck Stuart but David Balfour; not Holmes but Watson. It was heady, finally to learn this. Sidekicks never instigated adventures. They were drawn into them. And here was his; after all those years of waiting.

  They’d climbed this hill together in silence. Jane had worn a secret on her face which Patrick pretended not to notice, it was a happy look and he’d been happy too, to think he might be the cause of it.

  But now he knew what she’d really been thinking. Before they even reached the foot of the hill, Jane had known that he’d go with her, to Africa.

  Charlie and Jo were born in Kenya.

  They were fine years. Patrick used the Underwood to type Jane’s research notes, and his unpublished adventure novels. And when the kids were old enough, he home-schooled them.

  At first, he spent time chasing down books which followed the English curriculum—buying them from the English schools in Kenya, ordering them in from London. Then he gave up and made up their education as he went along. It was a good way to teach, and a good way to learn: Jo and Charlie spent time with each other, with their parents, and with all the people around them; and everyone they met contributed in some way to their schooling—the PhDs from Europe and America, the Kenyan men and women who worked with them.