Natural History

by Neil Cross

  ‘All right, Dad?’

  He glanced at the window and felt himself furtive and hunted.

  ‘Good, yeah.’

  ‘Do you want to go for a run?’

  He had to think about that for a while. He doubted the cat was active during full daylight. But this was his daughter. He imagined her, hauled into the fork of a tree.

  ‘Not this morning.’

  She put some bread in the toaster.

  Patrick was still looking out of the window. He looked away only when she brought the toast to the table, to spread it with butter and jam.

  He picked up the jam jar. There was no label on it, just a sticky square where one had been removed. He thumbed it, absently.

  ‘Where does this come from?’

  ‘Mr Nately.’

  ‘He makes jam?’

  ‘It’s really nice. You can taste the fruit. Plums. He’s won prizes.’

  He said, ‘Have you got any plans for today?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Do me a favour, then …’

  She was chewing toast, half-listening, flicking through the local freesheet.

  ‘I have to go out later, for an hour,’ he said.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘When I’m gone, I’d like you to stay inside. Inside the house, please.’

  She stopped chewing, and stopped reading, and looked at him. There was a smear of jam in the corner of her mouth.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. But just for today, okay? Read a book. Watch TV.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just do me a favour and do it.’

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Whatever.’ And took another bite of toast, and pretended not to be curious.

  He drove to Monkeyland and picked up a flat-folded cage. Erected, it would be large enough for an adult male chimp. He made two junior keepers load the car with it.

  On the way home, he stopped off at Greg Woods’s farm.

  Perhaps because it was Sunday, or perhaps because of Patrick’s harried air, Greg forced him to haggle at vexatious length. The ewe was mutton, no good to anyone, and Patrick’s voice grew higher and more exasperated with each of Greg’s lethargic counteroffers.

  But once a deal was agreed, Greg was quick enough to help Patrick manipulate the sheep into the back of the Land-Rover. It didn’t want to go. It bleated and kicked and twisted. Patrick fell over a couple of times—flat on his arse in the dried-out mud, the old ewe leaping him like a hummock.

  Greg hauled Patrick to his feet, but wasn’t shy about his amusement—and eventually, Patrick laughed, too.

  But in the end, the sheep went in.

  At home, Patrick tethered the ewe on a long rope which he pegged to the centre of the garden. She was an elderly creature. Her eyes were moist and her fleece was yellow and tangled. Eventually she began, with an air of bewildered preoccupation, to mow Patrick’s long grass into a crop circle.

  He stood with the munching sheep, trying not to think of names for it.

  He stripped to the waist, sweltering in his impatience, and erected the cage inside the shade of the oak trees that bordered his land.

  Then he went inside, for a long glass of water.

  Jo had been watching from the bedroom window. Patrick had an air she recognized—distraction, impatience, excitement: fear. She wondered why. Obviously, it had to do with an animal; she knew a trap when she saw one. But Patrick and Jane were always so relaxed around animals, even vermin.

  Once—this was in their house in Wales, when Jo was smaller—Jane had tracked a rat by sprinkling Johnson’s Baby Talc onto the kitchen floor. Next morning, she followed the ratty footprints in the powder and pulled back the old fridge. That way, she found the hole through which the rat was getting in.

  She laid out a big, vicious old trap and baited it with peanut butter, and the next morning (or at least, Jo remembered it as the next morning) the rat was captured. It was still alive. Its fur was black with blood. Paler blood was smeared on the floor and the wall. The rat was trying to gnaw off its hind leg. It looked like a cat, cleaning itself.

  When it saw Jane, it grew frantic. It gnawed faster.

  Jane moved young Jo back into a corner and then knelt a few inches from the rat. She rifled the kitchen drawers, examining potential weapons—knives, a claw hammer (whose weight she tested once, before laying it aside) and finally, in the lowest drawer, an old wooden rolling pin, stained and swollen and cracked. She crushed the rat’s skull with a single, precise blow.

  Then she slipped on a pair of Marigolds and picked up the corpse. The rat separated from its leg like slow-cooked meat from the bone.

  Jane dangled the corpse. Apparently delighted, she said, ‘Look—it bit all the way through.’

  Later, as Jane tucked her up, Jo wondered why people were so scared of rats. They didn’t look so frightening to her.

  And Jane told her this: human beings are naturally scared of things that, long, long ago, were dangerous to us. Things like spiders and snakes and rats.

  She sat on the edge of the bed and stroked Jo’s hair and told her about an experiment with monkeys.

  These monkeys were raised in isolation, in a protected, very safe environment. Then scientists took them to a special room and tried to make them scared of things. They did it by delivering electric shocks whenever a certain picture appeared on screen. That way, they could make a monkey scared of pretty much anything they wanted—a flower, or beach ball, or Bob Monkhouse. But it took a long time, and the monkey that learned to be scared of (say) a feather-duster couldn’t make other monkeys scared of it. The other monkeys just thought him mad, a loony monkey, screaming in terror at a red bucket, or a handful of tulips, or a yo-yo.

  It was much, much easier to make the monkeys scared of something that resembled, for example, a snake—something they’d evolved to fear. A length of garden hose would do, or a piece of rope.

  But what was really interesting: it was also much, much easier for the monkey who was scared of garden hoses to spread that fear among his troop. They didn’t think he was a loony; show them a hose and the whole group erupted into mad panic.

  And now Jo watched Patrick, coming out of the house again, stripped to the waist, erecting the cage.

  Unloading it, he’d told her a lie—he told her it was a kennel for the sheep. Jo didn’t know much about animals, but she wasn’t completely stupid. And when Patrick warned her not to go out alone, he had a strange look in his eye; a crazed look, like someone who’s just woken up from a terrible dream.

  Bored of watching from the window, she walked downstairs, through the cool kitchen and into the bright garden.

  It was a hot day. She winced in the abrupt sunlight. She went to the sheep. It looked at her with trusting eyes. It had a mouth full of dandelions. Absently, she rubbed its head.

  She said, ‘Dad, what did you see?’

  Patrick put his hands on his hips. He was sweating, grubby, shirtless.

  ‘Nothing. Go back inside.’

  That night, Patrick carried a kitchen chair upstairs and set it before the bedroom window. On the windowsill, he’d already set out his field-glasses and a 35 mm camera with flash.

  He opened the window—he didn’t want condensed breath to obscure his view. He wrapped himself in a blanket and watched the sheep, a bone-yellow glow in the darkness.

  Sometime after dawn, his head nodded onto his chest. He was woken by the sound of the flush. Jo getting up.

  Out there in the sunrise, the sheep was still alive. It was looking up at him.

  Patrick remembered it was Monday morning. So he took Jo to Nately’s, and went to work.

  Patrick and Jo became fond of the sheep. During the day, they tethered it. Each evening, getting home, Patrick was consoled and discouraged to find it still alive. And each night, as
he herded the sheep into its cage (to which it quickly became habituated) he felt villainous and full of shame. The sheep trusted him: he was a bad shepherd.

  Often, in the early morning, he went out, carrying a heavy stick and the camera. And he sat in a deckchair, waiting. The silence amplified all the noises around him, the sounds of the nearby, invisible ocean, and he was scared.

  But the cat did not return.

  9

  Charlie learned how to maintain the Anchorage as if he were a nurse and it were his patient. He learned how to take reservations, how to clean and prepare the rooms, making the blankets army-taut, the carpets free of dust. He bleached the shit-stained lavatories and emptied bins full of waxy cotton buds and tampon applicators and balls of gummy toilet paper. He learned to wait tables of diffident guests and, in the sweaty and hellish kitchen, to scrub out the gigantic aluminium pots in which their potatoes were boiled.

  The nearest he got to a friend was Mad Mervin in the laundry room. Mervin was griping, possibly East European; hook-nosed, vulture-shouldered, wearing a Budweiser cap. He claimed to have been caught in the Anchorage Hotel for twelve years. He never called Charlie any name but Boy, which creeped him out: Come here, boy.

  Other than Mervin and Clive, the staff were mostly temporary and seasonal. The men in the kitchen were skinny, and tattooed. The women spoke only when they formed a smoking gaggle round the back, by the bins—where they were invisible, both to the guests and to Clive.

  Charlie liked best to work the bar on a quiet night. It hadn’t been decorated for years. The wood was dark; the flock wallpaper was scarlet and blood-red, and the lights were low. Sometimes, he was pestered by only half a dozen customers, nursing their drinks, murmuring across tables, touching knees, playing footsie. Sometimes there were no customers at all, and he was free to read the paper in a cone of light until Clive stomped in and told him to close up.

  Charlie liked the Anchorage. He liked to work double shifts—for the money, and also because there was no point leaving. At home, there was only Patrick and Jo, and the house stultified him with its routine and its silence. It was easier to take one of the vacant, inferior single rooms near the back of the ground floor, overlooking the car park and the giant metal bins, and lay down his head.

  And so, because he slept there and ate there and worked there, the Anchorage soon began to feel like Charlie’s natural habitat.

  FROM JANE’S NOTEBOOKS

  We talked to the hunters of the Bili Forest. They described two indigenous ape species: tree-beaters and lion-killers. These apes resemble one another, but lion-killers are much the larger; gorilla-sized.

  Threatened by a hunter, a male gorilla will usually charge. It’s a stupefying display, absolutely terrifying, and usually it works. Any hunter who wishes to live will back away. I’d consider myself fortunate to maintain bowel control.

  But gorillas aren’t belligerent, aren’t warlike. They charge only to protect, and then move on.

  For all their reported gorilla size, lion-killers don’t behave like that. Sometimes, the hunters are startled by these giant apes, which fade in like ghosts from the dense foliage. And sometimes, this hushed apparition is followed by an attack.

  If these were bluff charges, the apes would be screaming, displaying, shrieking. But the lion-killers are quite silent, utterly purposeful. And very, very big.

  Only when they see the hunters’ weapons do they stop. Then they just fade back into the forest, like ink onto blotting paper.

  This approximates chimp behaviour. Chimp war-parties move quietly. So perhaps these apes are simply chimps: very big, very intelligent, very aggressive chimps.

  Several unusual skulls have been taken from the area. The first went to the Trevuren Museum in Brussels, in 1898. So this ape is not a newcomer.

  The Bili skulls have a prominent sagittal crest—a bony, arrow-shaped ridge that runs the length of the skull; it attaches to the temporalis, which in turn attaches the skull to the jaw of certain mammals.

  Sagittal crests can be found in numerous human populations—the Inuit, for example—and in many of our ancestors. They are also found in male gorillas.

  But they are not found in chimpanzees.

  On the first day, we found nothing.

  We hadn’t expected to, but it was still a disappointment—it’s human nature to let hope outweigh expectation. In fact, we had to wait until day five before we found anything at all: not the ape, but evidence of where it sleeps. We discovered a number of large, well-worn ground nests.

  Chimps usually bed down in trees—it’s gorillas who make nests, but they tend to construct a new one every night. And, they hate water.

  These nests were on swampy ground, and they showed signs of multiple use. They were abandoned now, though. We took some faecal samples, but they were degraded and old. There was no fresh shit. Whatever had slept here (and kept coming back to sleep here) was long gone.

  But it was the first real sign of their existence. I could feel them—feel them in the forest with their flat gorilla faces and their quick, brown, human eyes.

  We filmed the nests: even filmed the stool samples we took back with us for analysis. And none of us spoke, not even Claude.

  I caught him, staring into the trees as if he felt it, too—the intelligent eyes, wondering who we are and what we’re doing, prodding at their beds and their two-week-old turds, averting our eyes and nodding now and again, and sometimes gently vocalizing: the soft, wordless grunts that to a chimpanzee, as to a person, are sounds of reassurance and fellowship.

  Perhaps all we’re looking for is an isolated chimp population with certain unusual physical characteristics—size, facial physiognomy—and unique behaviour patterns. Chimps have culture. Such an isolated group would undoubtedly develop unique strategies.

  Or perhaps the Bili Ape is a hybrid—a descendant of mated gorillas and chimps. Although no one has ever seen this or to my knowledge tried it, in theory the two species are close enough to breed and produce fertile offspring.

  If, long, long ago, the Congo Basin had lowered, perhaps ancient gorilla and chimp populations intermingled, both geographically and (somehow) genetically. And, when the Congo rose again, it left behind an isolated, hybrid species in an island of jungle.

  Perhaps.

  Near the end of our second week, we found some footprints. They looked to come from perhaps eight individuals. The largest was 35 centimetres—bigger than the biggest gorilla footprint. Most of the prints were spoiled—there were too many of them and the mud was churned up. We took casts where we could. We got two or three really good ones.

  But we didn’t find these footprints in the forest, or in a nesting site.

  We found them at the edge of our camp.

  They had gathered here, during the night, quite silently. And we don’t know why. Perhaps they’re threatened by us. Perhaps they’re just curious.

  Perhaps they were a hunting-party.

  Chimpanzee war-parties will patrol territorial borders, and they will beat to death any individual unlucky enough to come into contact with them. It’s a bonding experience for them. They enjoy it.

  We made funny faces, because we were scared. We have only one gun, Claude’s, and anyway only one of us knows how to use it. Richard joked about buying a few grenades, back at the refugee camp.

  I thought, We’ve come here to find this thing—but what if it’s the last thing we see? That gorilla face, that chimp body; those human eyes.

  At night, Patrick kept vigil at his bedroom window and tried not to sleep. But when he did, he dreamed of Jane.

  He talked to her. He said nothing of importance or interest. I broke a shoelace, he said, and dangled it to show her.

  The dreams were memories of a life they had never lived. They were in a supermarket, pushing a squeaky trolley down a bright white aisle; picking up tins of beans and loaves
of bread. Or they were in a cinema, sharing a bucket of salty popcorn.

  Or they were having sex. There was no phantasmagoria, no role play. They were simply in bed—any one of the beds which, over the years, they had shared—and they were naked and kissing.

  But in the dreams he couldn’t come and she stroked his face (the rough pads of her fingertips!) and she told him shhhh, and he woke frustrated—upright in the hard-backed chair, wrapped in a blanket, and he was ashamed and frightened and unable to remember his name.

  He was stiff, from sitting up all night. He stood, and his legs and arms and back hurt. He rolled his head on his shoulders and threw off the blanket and turned on the radio and waited for bad news from Zaire.

  But there was no bad news from Zaire: there was no news from Zaire at all. For that, he had to burrow deep into the dreary centre pages of The Times. And what little news he got, none of it was good.

  The interahamwe were using refugee camps in the east of Zaire as a base from which to launch attacks into Rwanda. And also to kill Zaireans; Banyamulenge Tutsis.

  Siding with the refugee génocidaires, President Mobuto had threatened to expel all Tutsis from Zaire.

  Meanwhile, the Rwanda Patriotic Army had entered into coalition with Uganda and Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Liberation du Congo-Zaire. Kabila was a Tutsi, of course.

  First, this vengeful coalition would deal with the camps, which meant probable massacre. Then they’d move west, towards Kinshasa.

  For all Patrick knew, Jane was far from all this. But was she far enough? Chaos sends out great backwashes, riptides, tsunamis. How could she be safe?

  Charlie and Jo never talked about her, and became monosyllabic if Patrick tried to do so. He supposed they were having bad dreams of their own.

  And anyway, what was he supposed to say? Their mother was in Africa with a war billowing out behind her like bread in an oven. What could he say, that wasn’t a lie?

  So Patrick understood the dreams. They were a function of his unarticulated anxiety.