Natural History Read online

  ‘Home, James, and don’t spare the horses.’

  Pulling away, Patrick said, ‘How many ears does Captain Kirk have?’

  ‘I don’t know. How many ears does Captain Kirk have?’

  ‘Three. A left ear, a right ear—and a final, front ear.’

  She pinched his arm. It was an old joke, because Jo liked Star Trek.

  On the way, Patrick flicked the indicator lever, paused at a junction, turned, and said, ‘Did you know Charlie’s back?’

  ‘What? For Christmas?’

  ‘For good, apparently.’

  Jo turned cold with betrayal and fury. Now she was the only Bowman not to live at the draughty old house, a few miles from Monkeyland.

  Patrick told Jo how well Charlie was doing, how much he was enjoying his new job. He looked at her sideways, hands on the steering wheel.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  She folded her arms, because the car was always cold. Patrick had never got round to having the heater fixed. He drove with woolly gloves on, the kind with the fingers cut out of them.

  She felt bad when they arrived at the Higgledy House, because Charlie was waiting there to greet her. He ambled over and took her bags.

  He said, ‘I like how you took the best room.’

  ‘Best room for the best person,’ she said back, but her heart wasn’t in it. She felt sick. She followed Charlie inside.

  And then, about two days later, Jane drove her all the way back to Bath, to go Christmas shopping. It was because she knew the shops there; it would be easier. Jane was a bad, impatient shopper.

  They wandered round Bath, cold in the crowds. Before they’d bought a thing, Jane took her daughter for a cup of tea and a jam doughnut.

  The café was full of Christmas shoppers, their carrier bags spreading like compost on the wet floor. Jo and Jane took a seat in the far corner, near the fire exit. The teapots were those stupid metal ones: Jane poured, and spilled tea over the table.

  Jane took some Handie Andies from her bag and dabbed at the wet patch, then scrunched up the tissues and dumped them in the ashtray. They unfolded in jerks, like flowers blooming in time-lapse.

  Jane said, ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Jane lifted the teapot and looked underneath it; Jo didn’t know why. Then she said, ‘It’s so lovely, having you home.’

  Jo smiled, although she wanted to cry. She remembered lying in a cot, or something like a cot, looking at high, thin clouds. Birds slow-circling in the sky. And her mother’s celestial face, bright as the bright sun. The sandbar creases in her forehead, etched there by worry and love.

  Now she was saying, ‘So how’s school?’

  Jo poured milk into her tea. She stirred. Watched a galaxy revolve. The Milky Way.

  ‘You’re not enjoying it, are you?’

  Jo was still stirring, watching the vortex; imagining it was a tornado seen from low Earth orbit.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say?’

  ‘I didn’t think you wanted me to.’

  Jane pressed her lips together, and Jo saw that she was working hard not to cry. She took the wet Handie Andies from the ashtray and began, meticulously, to rip them into scraps.

  ‘Do you want to come home?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I mean, to live.’

  ‘Yes!’

  Jane encased Jo’s hands in her own.

  ‘Come home, then,’ she said, ‘silly fool,’ and Jo did.

  4

  Every time Jo saw Monkeyland, it looked worse—ramshackle and peeling, like a wintry ghost-town inhabited by clusters of baffled Cro-Magnons.

  She looked around. ‘Wow,’ she said.

  There were no paying visitors, just men in hard-hats, pushing wheelbarrows, carrying bricks, lengths of thick rope, fireman’s hose, chains, timber, mugs of tea and cigarettes.

  The A Troup were being confined to quarters while the contractors erected their new jungle gym. Their enclosure was built into a natural slope, so the far side was slightly elevated. And up there, Jo saw Patrick and Meredith. They had their arms folded and they were looking down at the jungle gym, nodding like boys pretending to be men in deep agreement.

  Meredith had a long face and little rimless glasses. He wore his hair in a pony tail, and a Peruvian waistcoat under his workman’s kagoul. He was an architect who’d worked in zoos all over the world. He’d been friends with Jo’s parents for a long time.

  Patrick looked over at Jo and waved. Then he tapped Meredith’s shoulder and pointed, and Meredith grinned and waved, too.

  Jo liked Meredith. Once, when he was staying with them in Bath—he was doing some work for the safari park—she had asked him to explain his project. He told her to wait, went to get his blueprints and when he came back, he unrolled them on the kitchen table and spoke to her for more than an hour. He explained the nature of the contract, the decisions he’d taken and why, the cost of materials and labour. He taught her some interesting words that, so far, had proved completely useless—words like imbrex and tegula.

  But he’d used these words in a broader context—to show that zoos didn’t have to be pretty, or noble. What they had to be was brute-proof. And that term had come in useful many times.

  She hadn’t seen Meredith since, so now she wandered up the slope, towards him and Patrick.

  Meredith said, ‘Hello, chicken.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Back from school, then.’

  ‘Yes.’ She pointed into the compound. ‘Did you do this one?’

  ‘I had a hand in it, yeah.’

  ‘Is it brute-proof?’

  The new jungle gym was a series of higgledy-piggledy walkways and gangplanks and tyres swinging on heavy chains. It was designed, she knew, to maximize what Meredith called environmental stimulation.

  Wild chimps had large territories to roam and borders to patrol. Their habitat changed, day by day and season by season. But few of these chimps had even glimpsed a rainforest, that alien, humid universe of fruiting trees and termites and occasional monkey meat.

  Monkeyland was an unnatural environment, but it was intended as a sanctuary, an asylum, a place where they could behave like real chimpanzees—even though real chimpanzees isn’t quite what they were any more, except genetically. So Jo felt weirdly happy, watching the jungle gym going up, because it was people putting right bad things done by other people.

  Content, she mumbled goodbye and walked down the slope.

  Richard was at the lower end of the compound, interviewing Steve the Builder. Jane was there, too, watching. She had her arms crossed against the cold.

  On Christmas day, Steve the Builder had become a father, so he made for what Richard called solid human interest. And Richard was asking—how did it feel?

  Steve was sipping from a mug of tea, embarrassed to be on camera, talking about it. Jo stood at Jane’s side and watched.

  Richard was very handsome, with his glossy hair, his easy smile. He was winding up the interview, shaking Steve’s hand and congratulating him, and Steve raised his empty mug in salute and wandered off.

  And now Richard turned and said, ‘Hello, sweetheart,’ and kissed Jo’s cheek. She had to stoop a bit, for him to reach.

  The kiss burned, and Jo blushed. Turning, she saw Patrick and Meredith again. Meredith was pointing at something, but Patrick wasn’t paying attention. He was looking at Jane and Richard.

  Jo waved, once, and Patrick—surprised—jerked, then grinned and waved back. Then he turned in the direction Meredith was pointing. He buried his hands in his pockets and nodded, to show how carefully he was listening.

  Richard was saying something to Jo. She turned back to him, still frowning.

  He was saying, ‘… h
ome for Christmas?’

  School was all anyone ever talked about. It worried most adults that, if Jo talked about something that actually interested her, she’d make them look stupid.

  An adult’s willingness to look stupid, she had noticed, decreased inversely to their actual intelligence. Patrick, for example, didn’t mind looking stupid at all. He spent half his day wearing an ignorant, frustrated scowl; his monkey face. And when Jo told him something exciting, he crossed his arms and tucked in his jaw and closed his eyes and concentrated.

  Sometimes, when he was almost getting it, he nodded along, as if to a song in his head. That made Patrick seem powerful. She thought of him, eyes closed, concentrating; his shaggy hair, his raggedy-sleeved sweaters, the hard muscles in his arms and shoulders.

  And suddenly Jo felt sorry for Richard, with his worked-on handsomeness, the drudgery of his excellent grooming.

  Avoiding his question, she said, ‘How’s the filming?’

  ‘It’s going well.’

  ‘They filmed me driving up to the door in a Land-Rover,’ said Jane. ‘And getting out, as if it was my first day.’

  ‘The first episode establishes the drama of Monkeyland,’ Richard said; it was a recitation. ‘We’ll show how rundown it is, the size of the job your mum’s got to do.’

  ‘And Dad.’

  ‘Absolutely. And then we’ll introduce some of the characters, human and monkey—’

  ‘Ape.’

  ‘Human and ape. Which will all lead up to the grand reopening.’

  There was a silence. Richard folded his arms and scratched at the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Tell you what …’ he said.

  Jo had a funny feeling inside. She didn’t even know if it was nice or horrible.

  ‘What?’

  ‘How would you feel, if we talked to you? For the programme.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know: everything—living here, your mum, your brother, your dad. Monkeyland.’

  ‘Space?’

  ‘Quite possibly, yes.’

  She shrugged and ran her tongue over her braces. When she was speaking to Richard, they always felt oversized and conspicuous—her mouth crammed like an urban canal, with old wire shopping trolleys.

  Her eyes flitted to Patrick, up there on the high side of the compound. He wasn’t looking at them, but he knew they were there. Jo could tell, by the quality of his movements.

  Then she looked at Jane, standing next to Richard.

  Behind them all, the contractors worked away on erecting the jungle gym.

  She said, ‘If you like.’

  The film crew arrived, in their puffy anoraks and faded jeans and big, muddy boots, and began setting up in the kitchen. Jane was in the corner, programming numbers into her new mobile phone.

  The cameraman was called Camra Dave. He had fuzzy gingerish hair, balding at the crown, and a red beard. Sound Mick was very tall. He had a deep, slow voice with a Bristol accent. He spoke like a Somerset mountain god.

  When the stuff had been set up—the bright light, the reflective umbrella balanced in the corner—the crew had a cup of tea and then Richard arrived. He took off his rainy coat and said hello to everyone, then he hung the coat over the back of a kitchen chair and made himself a cup of tea. He brought it to the table and sat down, opposite Jo.

  ‘How we doing?’ he said.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Outstanding.’ He looked at Sound Mick and Camra Dave. ‘Ready to go?’

  They were.

  Jo became aware of how she was sitting. She shifted, and it felt wrong. She cupped her mug, half-full of cold tea.

  Richard said, ‘So, Jo, tell us a bit about yourself.’

  She made a panicky face, and Richard told her, ‘Relax. You can’t do it wrong. We’ll edit out any mistakes, or any bits you don’t like.’

  Jo glanced at Jane. Jane nodded her encouragement.

  ‘Well,’ said Jo. ‘I’m thirteen years old. I used to go to school in Bath, but then Mum and Dad moved here. My favourite subjects are maths and reading. My favourite books are books about space. My favourite writers are Douglas Adams and Arthur C. Clarke, who was born in Minehead which is near here.’

  ‘And what do you think of Monkeyland?’

  Again, her eyes shifted to Jane. Jane shrugged with one shoulder, still programming numbers but watching Jo, too. The shrug meant, Go on.

  ‘It’s nice,’ said Jo.

  ‘And are you animal bonkers, like the rest of the family?’ She looked at the table, feeling caught out. ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘Not even about the chimps? Everyone loves chimps.’

  ‘They’re all right.’

  Jo felt guilty and exposed for not caring that much about chimps. She could feel every centimetre of her giraffe neck, every strand of Afro hair, every freckle on her forearm and every pulpy, chewed fingernail.

  She took her hands off the table and sat on them.

  She said, ‘Chimps are just a bit noisy, really. And a bit smelly.’

  She smiled, not because what she said had been funny, but because she regretted doing this, grinning like a halfwit on camera, and looking like a freak with her horrible hair and her horrible nails and being thirteen with no boobs to speak of, talking about smelly chimps like she was some kind of idiot.

  She could have looked directly into the lens and recited Pi to 50 decimal places (with a few days’ practice). She could have articulated some of the apparent paradoxes within the theory of relativity. She could have explained how NASA calculated the flight-path of a Space Shuttle, or how much fuel was required to launch a kilogram, or a tonne, or 100 tonnes of matter into low Earth orbit. She could have recited the names of every NASA astronaut who had ever flown, in what order, and a good many cosmonauts (although she was not confident about the pronunciation of their names, never having heard them spoken aloud). She could have told them about the Rings of Saturn or the surface of the sun. She could have described in a way that made them fall silent the unspeakable distance to the very nearest star. She could have told them about the night sky in such a way, they would never be able to look up at it again without a shiver of awe.

  Instead, she squirmed and said, ‘And a bit smelly,’ and everyone had hysterics and Richard clapped his hands and said, ‘Excellent!’ because Jo making a twat of herself was good human interest.

  And later, the crew disassembled the equipment and everyone seemed happy. And Jane slipped her mobile phone into a pocket, with all the numbers programmed in, and Jo sat there with it all going on around her.

  The end of January 1996.

  All day, Sound Mick and Camra Dave had been following Charlie. They took footage as he played with some of the apes in the A Compound. (The ropes he swung on were fireman’s hoses, heavy-duty rubber and canvas.)

  And always—as Charlie played, pant-grunted, hooted, slapped the ground—Rue watched, serene and good-humoured. It was great for the camera, this relationship between the quiet, pretty young man and the sage old ape; the way she offered him food and groomed his hair.

  In the afternoon, Charlie sipped from a bottle of Evian and talked straight to the camera. As he spoke, Rue tugged at his ear-lobes, his necklace. She ruffled his hair, chucked away his baseball cap. A greying, infirm old coquette hungry for the boy’s attention.

  Ducking and flinching, Charlie said: ‘The bachelors can get scary. I wouldn’t go in there alone, not even if I was allowed.’

  He nuzzled the coarse hair on the back of the gentle chimp’s flat skull. And she pulled her lips back from her teeth, in a clacky, half-mad yellow grin, soft-grunting and smacking her lips. Her merry, coffee-bean eyes.

  After the interview, Charlie sneaked out of the sanctuary to have a quiet cup of tea and a roll-up beneath one of the oak trees overhanging the car park.
>
  In their shadow sat a dozen contractor’s vehicles—beaten-up vans and painty flat-bed trucks. In the north corner were the staff cars and mopeds. And that’s where he saw Jane and Richard. They were standing head to head, outside Jane’s white Land-Rover Defender. Richard was holding a sheet of paper—perhaps it was a plan of Monkeyland, or a printed-out spreadsheet.

  Their conversation was brief, muttered, intense. Then they stepped back and away from one other, and Richard rolled up the paper. Jane said something and turned away. And as she did, Richard reached out a hand and patted her twice on the arse.

  She glanced over her shoulder and said, ‘Idiot.’

  It was the only word Charlie heard—

  Idiot.

  —before Jane saw him. A squatting figure in the blue shadow of the oak, rolling a cigarette. Watching Richard pat his mother on her arse.

  She called his name—‘Charlie?’—and made it a question.

  He finished making his cigarette, then took his time to light it, because his hand was shaking. Then he exhaled and raised a hand in careless hello.

  Jane shaded her eyes—the sun was low in a clear sky—and muttered something else to Richard. He stood at the door of his car, holding the handle. He seemed to be looking at Charlie, but he was too far away for Charlie to see the expression on his face.

  Charlie exhaled through his nostrils, the horsey smell of fresh tobacco. He squatted, heel to haunch, his back to Monkeyland’s exterior wall.

  Jane walked up to him. ‘I didn’t know you smoked.’

  ‘Two or three a day. Just to chill.’

  ‘Just to chill,’ she said, trying on his words. She toyed with her necklace. It was a chunk of meteoric iron, set in silver. Jock had given it to her. The meteor had punched into their land, in 1968.

  ‘Well, don’t be chilling with one of those in the house.’

  He took a defiant, squinty drag. ‘Whatever.’

  She was still toying with the necklace. ‘So—you okay?’

  By now, Richard was at the wheel of. the stationary Land Cruiser, reading something. But he kept looking up.

  Charlie said, ‘Are you?’

  She tucked hair behind her ear. ‘I’m fine. I spent all our money on a monkey-house that’s got approximately sod-all chance of survival. And if I fail, I’m going to do it on television. Who wouldn’t be fine?’