Natural History

by Neil Cross

  One day I’ll cum on you and in you and over you I’ll roll you in cum I’ll stuff your fucking mouth with it.

  Now Jane and Patrick shouted at the police, but there was still nothing the police could do; not until a crime had been committed.

  Britain had no anti-stalking laws, and no privacy laws either.

  Jane contacted the National Anti-Stalking and Harassment Campaign. They told her that most people assumed ‘anti-stalking’ had something to do with animal rights activism. Jane laughed down the line, and hung up. And then the letters stopped.

  There was a tentative, hopeful month. Perhaps the writer had moved to another target, one that was easier to terrorize. Perhaps he was in prison for something else, or in hospital. Perhaps he was dead.

  It was easy to say all that, and to say it all again and again, murmuring it over breakfast, and over the telephone, and in bed, and in the bathroom, as Jane pissed and Patrick cleaned his teeth. But it wasn’t so easy to believe it.

  It was preposterous, after those years spent researching real beasts, to be so disturbed by an inadequate man with a word-processor­ and an erection—someone who probably still lived with his mother. And after that, to be equally terrified by his silence.

  For many months, being afraid had made them unhappy. They squabbled, and squabbles became arguments. They stopped having sex. They argued about that, too.

  Sometimes, Patrick hated to be in the same house as her, the same enclosure. He sat in the pub, reading novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard—novels Jane loathed for their racism and colonial presumption; novels Jane loathed because they had been written for children in knickerbockers and stiff collars; children who were dead long before Patrick was born. She hated Patrick for hating England, and for falling back upon childhood romance—dreams of hazard and deliverance; tales where the villain, in the end, could always be confronted and destroyed.

  To break the impasse, Jane booked a family holiday; the first they’d ever taken.

  They spent a month on the coast of Barbados. The ocean crashed and boiled on jagged black rocks. They laid towels on spiny grass in the midday heat. They hired a car and drove round the island; Patrick stopped to join a game of cricket on a parched village green. Jane bought a flowing, tie-dyed cloth to wear knotted at her hip. They lunched on flying fish sandwiches with hot sauce. When the kids were asleep, Patrick and Jane played Scrabble, got drunk, made love.

  They visited a wildlife reserve, and were surrounded by slow, convulsing tangles of copulating tortoises. Occasionally, a male would stretch his sinewed neck and groan in the tectonic agony of orgasm.

  Patrick laughed, looking sideways at his kids: Charlie said, ‘Gross, man,’ and Jo mimicked him and tickled him under the armpits and he said ‘Oi!’ and tickled her back and they ran, chasing each other through the mating tortoises.

  They flew home, and Patrick hated Bath and he hated their house. It felt like a pair of shoes a stranger had been wearing. He’d never liked it: now it made him cooped up and furious.

  He tore open his suitcase and stuffed clothes, dirty and clean, into drawers. He kicked open internal doors; jammed on taps with a savage twist of the wrist.

  And then—as she’d been planning in Barbados, but could never find the right time—Jane told him about Monkeyland.

  She took him to Beacon Batch. It was a hazy spring day, and at the same flat summit she stopped and slipped her arm through his. With her other hand, she pointed.

  She said, ‘There’s Weston super Mare.’

  He chuckled, because that conversation had been sixteen years ago. He’d never thought she might remember it—or at least that part of it. So much had happened since then.

  He felt there were four of them up here: the people they had been, and the people they had become. They were breaking like clouds and passing through one another and merging.

  She rooted in her daypack and took out a flask. Flasks had come on in sixteen years; this one was silver, and tough—you could drop it from a high cupboard and it wouldn’t smash.

  She poured a cup of tea and they passed it back and forth. Above their heads, two kestrels hovered on the muscular updraught. Patrick could see their power and control; how they corrected first in one direction, then the other.

  He looked at the pale blue dab of Weston, at Bristol Airport, at Bristol itself; and at the other walkers, ascending the hill. The last time Patrick and Jane were here, they came alone—except for Charlie, and he was still a secret inside her. And they had been very young.

  Patrick wondered if the closing of this circle meant their marriage was over, and he thought of it spiralling up on the thermals, disrupting the balance of the predating kestrels.

  Jane said, ‘We need a change.’

  It was true.

  ‘Look at you. You’re caged.’

  That was true, too.

  ‘You’ll go mad. Like one of the polar bears.’

  Since the day they met, Bristol Zoo’s polar bears had been diagnosed as psychotic. Their compound was too small. They wandered up and down all day, vanilla yellow, waving their heads like dead geraniums.

  ‘You’re trying hard. But look at you.’

  He nodded, too scared to speak.

  ‘There’s a chimp sanctuary. In Devon.’

  He looked at her.

  ‘It’s miles from anywhere. It’s on the edge of Exmoor. It’s peaceful. Next to the ocean. You could walk, dive, cycle. Burn some of it off.’

  All that pent-up energy, she meant.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘It’ll be an adventure.’

  5

  Late in the evening of 24 March 1996, Jo and Patrick stood at the far end of their wild garden in North Devon, knee-deep in grass and early dandelions, and she showed him Hyakutake—the first of that year’s two great comets. By now, it was among the brightest objects in the sky.

  Emission of diatomic carbon made it shine blue-green, but Patrick’s colour vision was poor and, when he looked up—following­ her pointing finger and her instructions—he could see only another bright, white dot. But he cried out, ‘I see it!’

  Behind the comet followed a haze of tail which, she told him, stretched across thirty-five degrees of night sky.

  ‘Thirty-five degrees,’ he said, whistling.

  There was a silence. They watched the sky.

  Then, without looking at him, Jo reached out and took Patrick’s hand. She held on for a second. Her hand was thin and long and dry. She squeezed once, hard, and let go.

  Patrick realized that soon he would lose his daughter. She would grow up and away and love someone else.

  The dark stadium of sky curved overhead. He could still feel the warmth of her hand. This was their last moment, he thought—watching the great comet in the back garden.

  He wished he could see the blue-green of it.

  As he blinked, a white line arced across his field of vision.

  He said, ‘Did you see that?’

  ‘I saw it.’

  ‘Shooting star,’ said Patrick and, next to him, Jo nodded.

  ‘Shooting star,’ she said.

  The next day, she was allowed to stay late and observe the comet through Mr Nately’s telescope.

  Hyakutake would be moving very rapidly—about the diameter of a full moon every half-hour. That was fast enough for its motion to be detected by the patient but unassisted human eye.

  In the dark kitchen, woolly hat on his head, Nately said, ‘Shall we?’

  Jo pulled on her own hat, knitted wool, striped like a bee; it made her hair stick out like a clown’s. She followed Mr Nately into the garden, the universe wheeling overhead, spattered like milk. It was cold enough to see her breath.

  Mr Nately unlocked the heavy brass padlock on his shed and stepped inside. Then there was a loud noise, amplified by the silen
ce, as he rolled back the roll-off roof. Jo thought of a cafeteria opening for business, rolling up its vandalized metal shutters.

  Inside the shed was a reflecting telescope, wide as a barrel—a Dobsonian mount that Mr Nately had made himself, right down to grinding out the primary mirror. Shoved in behind it, there was room for a single office chair, and Mr Nately let Jo take it.

  She sat and put her eye to the viewer. Mr Nately placed a pale hand between her shoulders. She could feel it there. Now and again he murmured an instruction, his voice quiet in her ear, but he allowed her to make the adjustments herself, to familiarize herself with the equipment. It took some time to locate Hyakutake, and to get it in focus, and to learn how to follow its fizzing trajectory.

  As she did this, he spoke to her: ‘Ancient people knew the heavens much better than most of us today. And something changing up there was scary. Eclipses, meteor showers, comets—they were always met with dread.’

  ‘Well …’ Jo was squinting like Popeye ‘… they were primitive.’

  ‘But when Halley’s Comet swung by in 1910, the press reported that Earth would actually pass through its tail. This was not long before the First World War, remember; there was a lot of anxiety about poison gas. So newspapers caught hold of the story, just like modern newspapers latch on to health scares, or Satanic abuse. What they didn’t print is what the astronomers said, that the tail was too vaporous to be harmful. So newspapers got sold and conmen sold anti-comet pills. People boarded up doors and windows.’

  ‘People are silly, though.’

  ‘Well, yes. But at the same time, every few million years a comet actually does hit the Earth. Perhaps it was a comet that brought us water. No water, no life. Or maybe a comet brought life in the first place. And maybe it was a comet that wiped out the dinosaurs.’

  Jo screwed up her eye, even tighter. It helped her to concentrate. Hyakutake was very bright, and moving so quickly. It was so close. It would never be closer.

  Mr Nately said, ‘I think our fear of them is coded right down in our DNA. Just like the fear of serpents.’

  Later, she dozed on Mr Nately’s sofa. He laid a scratchy, clean blanket over her—it smelled faintly of lavender. Almost asleep, she listened as he pottered around, locking and double-locking the windows and doors, hiding the keys from sight in drawers and cupboards.

  Perhaps, she thought, Mr Nately was protecting her from the werewolves and witches that nightly sprang up like mushrooms in the ripe darkness of the forest.

  Perhaps it was simply a habit, because he lived alone, far from anybody, overlooking a creepy orchard on one side and a lonely lane on the other. Perhaps he did it every night; locking the doors against the woods. And perhaps he slept safely under wool and lavender blankets, overlooked by his ranked and silent books—his histories, his textbooks, his science.

  Jo was asleep when Patrick came to collect her. He lifted her, still asleep, into his arms and carried her to the Land-Rover. She had half a memory of it, a broken dream of being taken from the cottage in the arms of a great, slow giant, and carried to the thin, cold air at the top of a distant mountain. And that was Jo’s best day, ever.

  6

  Jane wasn’t good in the morning. She was furiously disorganized and irritable—and every day, being late took her by surprise.

  She stomped round the house, turning off or re-tuning or stealing radios. When it was Charlie’s turn in the shower, she hogged the bathroom mirror, scowling, yanking her hair into a pony tail. When Patrick needed his morning dump, she sat on the closed lavatory, tweezing ingrown hairs from the blade of her shin. When Jo wanted to make muesli and yoghurt, she used up the entire kitchen, trying to find a clean butter-knife to excavate her burned toast from the toaster.

  And every morning she stood, exasperated, at the door, yelling for them to for God’s sake hurry up.

  And then, as they filed out, she remembered something she’d forgotten—her keys, her wallet—and ran inside to find them.

  Patrick and Jo and Charlie waited in the car in defeated silence, knowing she was ransacking the already ransacked house, cursing whatever eluded her and knowing that, whatever it was, it was probably in her bag or on top of the fridge.

  Eventually, Patrick said, ‘Look. I’ve been thinking. It might be easier if you took the VW in the mornings.’

  She frowned at him over her reading spectacles. ‘Why? Don’t you want me with you?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘It’s time together.’

  ‘I know.’

  But she kept frowning and he grew uncomfortable. So he said, ‘It’s just that, sometimes, I get the impression we’re in the way. That we’re—you know—annoying you.’

  She put down her book. ‘What do you mean, annoying me?’

  ‘Well. You’re busy. In the morning. You’ve got—y’know—a lot on your plate at the moment.’

  She removed her spectacles and placed them, upended, on the book. ‘Jesus Christ, Patrick.’

  He thought she was about to cry, and he didn’t know what to do. In nearly twenty years, he’d cried far more than her; he cried at the end of blockbuster movies and sentimental advertisements for disposable handkerchiefs. Once, he had boasted that he would never trust anyone who failed to weep at Bambi—but Jane had not wept at Bambi.

  She was about to weep now, though. She was in the sitting room, legs curled beneath her, while their teenage children slept upstairs, and she was beginning to cry.

  He said, ‘Hey, hey. Come on.’

  She sniffed and wiped her nose on her sleeve and said, ‘I’m fine,’ and next morning, she took the old VW estate to work.

  Patrick and the kids said nothing. But, as he turned the ignition in the too-quiet Land-Rover, Patrick already wished things were back the way they’d been. Their chaotic, snappy mornings seemed lost and precious, and that evening, over the dinner table, he said: ‘The VW.’

  ‘What about it?’

  He tore off a chunk of bread. Dipped it in his soup. Said, ‘I think Charlie should have it.’

  The kids looked at him. Jane didn’t.

  ‘He needs his own car. Living out here, in the sticks and whatnot.’

  Charlie nodded solemn agreement, and the car became his moral property.

  Next morning, they returned to the routine. Jane, harried and bad-tempered, made them all late. Nobody said anything about it. They were frustrated and bickering. On the way to work, Jane touched Patrick’s knee and squeezed.

  Monkeyland opened on Easter Sunday, 1996.

  Camra Dave and Sound Mick were waiting at the gates, in their jeans and kagouls and knackered trainers, to film the family’s arrival—and later, the stiff, nervous speech that Jane delivered to the staff.

  Off camera, Patrick started the applause. It splattered like the first spots of heavy rain on a windscreen, and then caught.

  For the cameras, Jane opened the gates on the stroke of 9 a.m. to admit a small rubbernecking gaggle of local pensioners who entered cautiously, as if unsure of their welcome, and visibly conscious of the recording camera.

  Patrick took Jane’s hand. ‘They’ll come,’ he said.

  She stood looking at the gate, the geese-like pensioners.

  He said, ‘Come on, let’s get on with the day.’

  ‘You go.’

  He lingered.

  She said, ‘Honestly. I’ll be along in a minute.’

  He wandered off to the office, to run through his day’s itinerary. But first, he kissed his wife. He knew Camra Dave wouldn’t fail to capture the moment, and he didn’t mind; not really. Camra Dave wasn’t morally responsible, any more than a Spider-Hunting­ Wasp, which paralysed its prey before allowing its larvae to eat them alive from the inside out. Camra Dave and the Spider-Hunting Wasp just did what they did, and that was that.

  Jane went to the gift shop, newl
y supplied with Monkeyland branded pencils and plastic rulers and mugs and T-shirts and posters and key-rings and embossed key-wallets. She took a fluffy lemur from the shelf, inspecting it. The shop assistants looked silently and anxiously on. Camra Dave recorded their skittishness. It would be intercut with Jane’s frowning inspection.

  Then Jane went outside, to check the weather. She walked to the A Compound, where Rue had lived, and looked down at her animals.

  They were lazily knuckle-walking and climbing and playing and grooming in the fine English drizzle, and the wind caught a rag of her hair, trapped it in the corner of her mouth—and the clouds broke and the sun came out. And within the hour, the punters began to arrive.

  At the end of the day, the staff gathered to toast their success with inexpensive champagne. Jane poured. The mousse fizzed and ran over her hands. And they stood in a circle and raised their glasses and said, ‘Cheers!’

  Patrick watched, enjoying her relief, and knew that tomorrow they all had to get up for work, and do it again, and the day after that too. And one day the camera crew wouldn’t be there; it would just be the staff, the apes, and the visitors, if the visitors kept coming.

  But he said nothing, and in the evening Jane curled up in the armchair, reading a novel, a glass of wine on the table beside her.

  She said, ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  She fiddled with the front of the shapeless cardigan she wore against the night chill—the house was always cold. Then she put down her book, took off her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘I was talking to Richard.’

  Patrick’s good mood left him. ‘And what did Richard have to say?’

  ‘He’s had an idea. A good one, I think.’