Natural History

by Neil Cross

  Patrick growled, ‘Go to Greece, France. Whatever. Go where kids go. Get a job. Stay away.’

  Charlie touched the wad of folded, dirty cash. ‘When can I come home?’

  Patrick barked, and flecks of his spittle wet his son’s face, his eyelashes.

  ‘If I ever see your face again, I’ll smash it with a fucking rock.’

  Charlie burned with resentment and self-pity. He hoisted his rucksack.

  Patrick said, ‘I made you.’

  But Charlie didn’t understand. With watering eyes, he dumped his rucksack on the back seat of the orange Volkswagen estate, with its Greenpeace and WWF decals, and drove away. He left the car at Heathrow airport.

  Now it was two weeks later. Jo was still at Mr Nately’s. Patrick was at his desk, putting his paperwork together. He was preparing to sell Monkeyland, and with it the house. It would bankrupt them.

  Mrs de Frietas put through a call. It was Don Caraway. The line was bad: thin, with loud bursts of white noise.

  Caraway said, ‘Patrick?’

  Patrick was distracted; he was shuffling papers, leaving them in a neat pile for Mrs de Frietas to file.

  ‘Yup?’

  ‘You’ll never guess where I’m calling from.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Minehead.’

  ‘That’s lovely for you, Don.’

  Patrick’s flatness dimmed Caraway’s excitement for a moment; then it flared again.

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask what I’m doing here?’

  ‘What are you doing there?’

  ‘Attending an autopsy.’

  Patrick stood up. There was no paperwork to knock from the desk. He looked at the clean corner where it should be.

  ‘What autopsy?’

  ‘A body.’

  ‘Whose body?’

  ‘Some suicide.’

  ‘Man? Woman?’

  ‘Woman. Can I get to the point?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘She’s not a drowner, apparently. She’s all smashed up. A jumper.’

  ‘Definitely suicide?’

  ‘Looks like. Can I actually finish?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Well. Guess where they found her?’

  ‘Where did they find her?’

  ‘In the woods—back of your house.’

  Patrick dropped the phone. It lay, meaningless, on the floor, buzzing like an insect.

  He sat and opened the lower desk drawer. But his hand was shaking too much to open the bottle he found there.

  He walked to the centre of the office. He replaced the phone on the desk.

  When it rang, he cried out in terror. Then he snatched it up.

  ‘Something happened,’ said Don. ‘We got cut off.’

  ‘Yeah. Sorry.’

  ‘Anyway. Don’t you think it’s amazing?’

  ‘Yes. How did she get there? To the woods. Did she crawl? Walk? What?’

  There was a silence.

  Don said, ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Fine. Why?’

  ‘Have you heard a word I’m saying?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How could she walk? She’s a jumper. Dead as you get. Dead as a dodo. All smashed up.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So how did she get into the woods?’

  ‘I don’t know, Don. That’s what I’m asking. How did she get to the woods?’

  ‘Something dragged her there. She jumped, got pulled in by the tide. Washed up on the beach—fresh meat—and something dragged her off the beach and up into the trees.’ Patrick sat down. He was slipping out of his body.

  ‘And whatever dragged her into the trees, it ate her.’

  Feedback squealed on the line.

  ‘They called me out,’ said Don, ‘to examine the bite radius and whatnot. Bit icky, but I wasn’t even thinking about what lay on the slab—what there was of it. I was thinking—what could’ve eaten her?’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It’s out there,’ said Don Caraway. ‘You’re not mad, Patrick. It’s definitely out there.’

  Patrick thanked him and hung up.

  He placed his hands on his clean desk. He felt that he was floating to the ceiling; spreading like a gas. His body was there, below him.

  16

  On 1 May 1997, Britain elected a new government. Just over two weeks later, Laurent Kabila declared himself president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the former Zaire.

  He was sworn in before 35,000 people who had gathered in the dreadful, wet heat of a Kinshasa sports stadium.

  Kabila wore a dark safari suit, and took his oath before twenty-two justices, all of them adorned in scarlet robes trimmed with leopardskin.

  The oath of office was administered by Mungulu Tamaigane, Mobutu’s former Chief Justice. Perhaps dazed by the appalling heat, Tamaigne confused Kabila with the deposed dictator, and the old country with the new. He referred to Kabila as Joseph: once, that had been Mobutu Sese Seke’s name.

  Together with Camra Dave, Sound Mick and Richard, Patrick hitched a ride to Congo on a UN Hercules. They were in the company of print journalists and aid workers.

  They arrived in steaming darkness. They struggled and argued through customs, then met an old minibus that drove through the hive of Kinshasa—the stink of burning garbage, the glow of fires, the presence of soldiers.

  And later, in the early hours, Patrick sat at a table. He was in the bar of the Hotel Internationale.

  His shirt was open. He was sweating. Beads of it gathered in his softening crew-cut, his greying beard.

  Richard was with him. Patrick had demanded it; had growled it as an order.

  And Richard waited, not speaking, while Patrick worked his way through most of a bottle of Johnny Walker. He was surly, drunk and—Richard thought—dangerous.

  Now Patrick sighed. Rubbed his face. Richard heard it; the scrape of palm on bristle.

  Patrick leaned over the table, towards him. His eyes were hooded, lazy, raptorial.

  Richard leaned back; far from the whisky breath, the sleepy hatred in the eyes. It occurred to Richard that Patrick might be dying.

  Patrick said, ‘You and Jane.’

  ‘What about me and Jane?’

  ‘It’s all right. I just want to know, when and where?’

  But it wasn’t all right, not really. Richard knew when to be scared; and he knew when to back off from a growling dog and when to stand your ground. Sometimes, if you moved too quickly, or in the wrong direction, a dog would have your throat.

  Richard began very slowly. He said, ‘Okay.’ And then he said, ‘A long time ago.’

  Patrick didn’t move. He looked at Richard from under his brow.

  ‘A long time ago. After we’d grown close. Jane and me.’ He stopped, to draw a shaky breath. ‘She’s an amazing woman.’

  Patrick’s face and head were overgrown with greasy, sweaty, silvery stubble. He’d lost a great deal of weight. His chest was bony, glistening. He looked like a convict.

  ‘We were in a hotel. Greece. Filming the bear programme.’

  ‘Koukla.’

  ‘Koukla. Exactly. It was a nice hotel. And we knew we had a good show: we knew we were going places. As a business.’

  Richard’s throat was dry. He had to take a drink. He lifted his glass and sipped, swilled, like a man in a dentist’s chair.

  ‘We drank some champagne. Quite a lot of champagne. And we were laughing, and she was looking good. Very beautiful. Very happy. And we were drunk.’

  Patrick blinked, slowly.

  ‘We said good night.’ And now, as Richard lifted and tilted his glass, his hand was shaking. ‘I went back to my room. I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘You were horny. You had an itch.’

&
nbsp; ‘So I got dressed, got another bottle of champagne and knocked on her door. She asked who it was, and I said, Who do you think? and she opened the door.’

  ‘Go on. Finish.’

  ‘She was wearing … she was wearing underwear. She was a bit drunk. But she didn’t seem, you know—to object. She just said, What do you want? and I walked in and closed the door, and she said Richard, and I put down the champagne, and I kissed her.’

  Richard’s breath came in a shudder. He ran his hands through his hair. The hair fell back into place. Well cut.

  ‘She pushed me off, and she said, What are you doing? And I said, What do you think? And she said, Richard, don’t be so fucking silly. And she sent me back to my room with my tail between my legs.

  ‘I tried once more, a few days later—and, if you want to know the truth, once again about a year after that. But she didn’t want to know, Patrick. She didn’t want to know—about me, or about anyone else. Only you.’

  Patrick stared at him through those newly dead, convict’s eyes. And then he guffawed.

  And then he hid his face in his hands, his elbows on the table. He was making a noise; he was laughing or he was crying.

  When Patrick took the hands away, his eyes were wet, red-rimmed, swollen. He craned back his head on his neck and bared his teeth at the ceiling.

  Then he composed himself. He looked Richard in the eye.

  Richard said, ‘So what now? Where does this leave us?’

  Patrick topped up their glasses. He touched the rim of Richard’s glass with the base of his own.

  Clink of glass. Bright, clean, in the humidity.

  Patrick said, ‘To my wife.’

  He first emptied his glass in a single swig, then raised it in salute.

  Her hotel was on a side street. On the pavement outside were spilling heaps of garbage. He walked through the high stink of it.

  He slipped the receptionist five American dollars, and then he walked upstairs, alone. He came out of the stairwell, and walked along the hallway, counting doors.

  He stopped and straightened his shirt. He blew through his mouth, like a preparing athlete, then knocked.

  From inside, a sense of sudden stillness.

  Her voice.

  ‘Who is it?’

  He looked down at his chest. Ran his tongue over his teeth.

  ‘Room service.’

  There was no room service. Not in this hotel.

  And now there was movement inside. Coming close on bare feet. She hesitated behind the door. He measured the quality of it, the shape and intention of the pause.

  He knew she was cocking her head. Frowning.

  Curious.

  And then, the door. Opening.

  17

  Jane and Patrick spent a year in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They worked hard, and successfully, to arrange the evacuation of many animals from Kinshasa zoo.

  Richard, Camra Dave and Sound Mick were there to record most of it. It made a good show.

  Patrick dreamed of Charlie, sometimes. He dreamed of Beacon Batch, the day he learned of Charlie’s existence. And he dreamed of 1 April 1997, the day of the perihelion, when he understood for the first time what Charlie was.

  Sometimes I get pressure in my head, Charlie said, and Patrick woke.

  And in those dreams he must have mewled and reached out for his wife, because Jane was always awake when he opened his eyes. And Patrick folded into the warmth of her neck and arms and breasts and belly, and she wrapped around him, and he breathed her in, and sometimes—although she did not see—he wept.

  Patrick never returned to England. But, in the years that followed­—always in the company of Richard, Camra Dave and Sound Mick—he and Jane visited every continent.

  As a team, Patrick and Jane worked well on camera. They had good chemistry.

  Usually, the shows they made were shown by one of the satellite channels. But even this was enough to make them passably wealthy; wealthy enough to absorb the fabulous loss they suffered when Monkeyland finally closed its doors, late in 1999, having never found a buyer.

  Patrick is buried in Australia.

  He and Jane were there hoping to track down and possibly film a cryptid known locally as the Yowie.

  Jane was at the wheel of a white jeep, open-topped. Patrick came sauntering up. He was suntanned, grinning, wearing khaki shorts and a bush hat; from beneath it curled his long hair.

  He stood, under the Australian sun, grinning—as he had grinned at her once, long before, when they were strangers meeting at Bristol Zoo.

  Then something in his brain burst. He whispered, ‘Oh Christ,’ and touched his eye.

  He sat down on the red earth, blinking. And then he was gone.

  I stayed in England, with John Nately. I took my A-levels early. Then I took some more, because I wanted to stay with him a little bit longer. At eighteen, I went up to Cambridge.

  Occasionally I flew out to visit my parents, wherever in the world they happened to be. But not too often. I liked it in England.

  John Nately made a good in loco parentis, and a better friend. The day I passed my first A-levels, he bought me a bottle of Asti spumante and we drank it together in deckchairs, in the garden.

  People wonder about him. They always want to ask the same question, although they never do. But John Nately never laid a hand on me; didn’t even look at me that way, not once. To tell the truth, I don’t even think he was gay. I think he was asexual, like angels are supposed to be. Or aliens.

  He cried when I left for Cambridge. I think he hated the idea of being alone in the cottage again. In all the years I lived there, the aliens never came for him—and sometimes that convinced him they’d been hallucinations all along. And sometimes, of course, it convinced him of just the opposite.

  Because Mum and Dad paid for a flat, I never had much cause to visit Devon. But, during my undergraduate years, John and I wrote frequently; never by email. Thinking about it, he only faded away when David came on the scene, which was—what?—early 2004?

  He still writes, of course. But not so often.

  It makes me sad, to think that. It makes me wonder why.

  Although Don Caraway was eager to testify that the bites on the unidentified woman’s remains were felid, the coroner disagreed. Officially, the animal that gorged on her was canid; a dog, a fox, a combination of the two. As to how her corpse got itself into the fork of a tree—that remained open.

  Maybe kids did it.

  For a while, Stu Redman and Don Caraway dined out on the story—but it became embellished, year on year and telling on telling, until nobody believed it any more.

  Once, during a morning jog (I kept it up, and got better) I thought I heard a low growling from under the hedge. But I thought then, and I think now, that it was the wind, whistling in off the Bristol Channel.

  Jane visits me twice a year. I am older now, she often takes care to remind me, than she was, when she met my dad.

  We never mention Charlie.

  He wrote to her, for a few years—from Greece, India, America. He married at twenty-two, divorced at twenty-five. Married again a year later. He was living in England then; Manchester. After that, the letters stopped.

  Sometimes I read a newspaper, and see that this woman has disappeared, or that girl was found dead, and I wonder. But really, there’s no point. There’s no point thinking about it.

  Two years ago, on the anniversary of Patrick’s death, Jane drove me to Monkeyland.

  It’s empty now, of course, and more desolate than it ever was, with that bright signage faded almost to white and pocked with airgun pellets.

  We sneaked in—through the hole in the fence round the back of the adventure playground—and trod past the glue bags and the cider bottles.

  We passed all the empty compounds, the p
lace where the A Group had been, the Bachelor Group, the capuchins; all of them since moved to other zoos. Some of the chimps might live another twenty years.

  The empty enclosures are defaced by graffiti; stupid, obscene, childish scrawls. Every window has been smashed. Inside Patrick’s old office, a fire had been lit. The spoor of the indigenous wildlife.

  Jane stood where she’d once stood, supervising the construction of a new jungle gym.

  She said, ‘Just look at it.’

  I looked at it.

  Then we sneaked back out, through the same hole in the fence, and she drove me home.

  The last naked-eye observation of the Hale Bopp comet was made in December 1997. It had been visible without aid for 569 days. It’s still being tracked by astronomers. I’m one of them.

  It’ll be visible with large telescopes until perhaps 2020, by which time it’ll be nearing 30th magnitude. By then, it’ll be difficult to distinguish it from a very large number of distant galaxies of similar brightness.

  Around the year 4380, it’ll be back.

  I kept a single souvenir of Monkeyland: a painting. It was Patrick’s, bought for him as a gift—although Jane neglected ever to tell him that. He only looked at it once, and briefly. He saw a woman with a storm behind her, then he turned the canvas and propped it against the office wall, promising to hang it when Jane returned.

  But he never did. Patrick never hung a painting in his life. So he never knew that Sarah Lime had written, in very small script, bottom left of the canvas, the painting’s name. It was called Natural History.

  I took the painting from his office, and I hung it for him. I hung it on the wall of my little bedroom in John Nately’s house. Then I hung it on the wall of my student digs; my first flat; my house. Now I am in Houston and it hangs above my desk, above my laptop.

  I think of Patrick when I look at it. I remember him, how he was, midway through our morning jogs in Devon. He was wincing, out of breath. And holding on to that signpost.

  Clutching it, like a captain at the mast.