When I first heard this I thought the job was going to be a cinch. It was only when we did it that I realised how far from being an easy ride it was. I had to be out there kangarooing eight times a day, no letup, because I had to eat and drink a lot and use the loo and wash the sweat off (I needed two or three changes of underwear every day) and generally get my strength back during my forty minutes’ ‘rest’.
If you don’t believe how difficult it is, try this. Dress yourself in three pairs of long johns and a winter puffer jacket with two blankets wrapped tightly round you, and then run about in the garden for twenty minutes on a hot day, and do it a few times with the required forty minutes off after every twenty, and then tell me if it isn’t a version of torture.
But that wasn’t all there was to it.
I had to hop like a kangaroo. I was ‘coached’ in this by the Ozzy sergeant major all of the first of the two days of ‘training’; in the morning without the costume, in the afternoon with it on, which is when I began to suspect all would not be as fine and dandy as I had at first supposed. Hopping puts great strain on your leg muscles, especially those you don’t usually employ in everyday human life. I was in need of physiotherapy after an hour of ‘training’. I doubt I need report that none was on offer, the sergeant major’s only comment when I complained being that I’d soon get used to it, no pain without gain ha-ha-ha.
Apart from hopping, I also had to learn a basic sign language. Why? Because there was a strict rule, enforced by dismissal from the job if you broke it. The rule was: on no account must you ever speak to anyone while performing in public. You could not even make noises appropriate to your animal. Why? Because attention of the paying customers, and especially the children, must not be drawn to the fact that a human being is inside the animal costume. It would spoil the illusion, explained the aforementioned pin-striped human resources manager.
This would have seemed like a load of kangaroo dollop but for one fact. I remembered visiting this very theme park when I was little and being greeted by a cuddly animal as big as my dad and not only believing it, but loving it. And thinking back, I remembered that the animals never made a sound, but did wave their animal limbs about in ways that made perfect sense to me and did not seem in the slightest ridiculous. Rather, I suppose, like babies seem to understand baby-babble when to me now it is just a lot of twaddle. (Am I suited to motherhood? Perhaps not. It is a moot question yet to be addressed. Though on kangaroo evidence, probably not.)
Which is why the morning of the second day was spent practising how to say in your animal’s sign language such simple messages as ‘Hello!’ ‘Welcome to our wonderful park,’ ‘I’m so happy to see you,’ ‘No thank you’ (for use when offered already licked ice creams, half-chewed sweets, bits of squashy fruit, weary sandwiches, and—as I soon learned when on the job—such an astonishing variety of other similar gifts as boggles the mind, including now and then a besotted little child’s favourite toy, all of the aforelisted offered in tribute to your animal attraction). Finally there was ‘Good-bye,’ and if in dire need ‘I have to go to sleep now’—necessary in order to extract yourself from difficult situations, as when a child hangs on to you, won’t let go, and is about to explode into hysterics because you won’t go home with him/her.
There was no sign language for such requests as ‘Let go, you nasty little creep,’ or for use with parents, ‘Why don’t you take your hideous offspring and bog off?’ One of our major occupations during ‘rest’ periods was recounting to our fellow resting animals the most hilarious events and the worst of the horrors encountered during our previous twenty minutes on the job. If it hadn’t been for this outlet I think we would all have gone bananas before the third day’s work was over. (Except the chimpanzee animals, who of course pretended to eat bananas all the time, and were therefore already bananas. [Sorry! Bad joke.])
Not only did we have to keep silent, and in my case hop about ‘in character’, we also had to distribute leaflets to as many of the paying customers and their progeny as possible. The leaflets advertised events—such as rides on the big roller coaster, trips through the tunnel of love and on the ghost train, and the major screamer called the Drop Tower. In other words, the gallimaufry of enticements usually on offer in these places of fun and games, all of which cost extra. Needless to point out, our main job wasn’t really entertaining the ‘guests’ (as pinstriped management insisted on calling them) but was advertising those ‘attractions’ that made the most money for the owners.
Because I was an animal of the marsupial variety, I had a pocket over my padded stomach, out of which poked the head of a ‘baby roo’, and in which I soon found it convenient to keep my stock of leaflets, one of which I would pull from my marsupial pouch with a grand gesture of generosity when saying good-bye to a juvenile ‘guest’ after going through my ritual of ‘Hello. Lovely to see you. How wonderful you look. And now here’s a nice gift for you . . .’ Leaflet produced as from a conjuror’s magic hat and presented as if a gift from the gods.
Though I say it myself, I very quickly became rather good at this performance, and though I do say it myself I wasn’t the only one to say it. So did our ‘coach’, the aforementioned Ozzy sergeant major, who barked out at me as I came in for my required forty-minute rest on the second afternoon of work, ‘Now then, girl, I can tell you a real live roo couldn’t do a better job with those leaflets than you do.’ I was aware that this was praise indeed, which encouraged me to develop my ‘act’ all the more. (How easily we are seduced by praise into doing that which, without it, we would despise and abandon.)
Not that praise alone was the only spur. More true to say it was the fact that we were assessed by how many ‘guests’ we ‘welcomed’ and how many leaflets we got rid of during each twenty-minute shift. If we dispensed above a certain number we notched up a ‘star’ (!infant school here we come!), which in turn, if sufficient stars were collected, qualified you for a bonus at the end of the week. (By the way, despite valiant efforts from one and all, not least yours truly, I never heard of anyone actually achieving such reward. It took us two weeks to realise that the target was set so high, you’d have to be super animal to reach it.)
Well, dear friends, I have to report that pride does indeed cometh before a fall, as the wise old saying warns.
And in my case it cometh about in this wise.
The Tuesday of my third week as a kangaroo. Very hot. Big crowds. Busy busy busy.
Afternoon. My sixth stint of the day. My twenty minutes were up. I knew because there was a big clock on the wall above the door to the offices and the room where we rested. No sign of Laura, the girl who was meant to take over from me. So I kept going, expecting her to turn up at any minute. But the minutes went by and she didn’t. (Learned later she had been sick. The heat had got to her, and she was too weak to come out. The other girl, who could have stood in for her, had gone for a sandwich.)
I was sweating pretty heavily by the time I’d done thirty minutes, and was feeling cross with Laura, which didn’t help. I’d done very well during my allotted time. So well that I ran out of leaflets. Gave the last one to a little girl who had followed me around but had been too shy to come up to me.
As I handed her my last leaflet, I thought, OK, that’s it, I’m going in whether Laura comes out or not.
I gave the little girl the leaflet and did my sign language stuff on the lines of ‘Isn’t that terrific! What a pretty girl you are! Good-bye, I’m going now.’ At which moment a large boy, who had been watching me for most of my stint, started taking the mickey by exaggeratedly copying my movements.
I tried to ignore him. Turned to start my kangaroo hopping to the office door. But he blocked the way.
I stopped and gave him the usual ‘Hello. Lovely to see you’ routine. But he just stood there and glared. He was almost as tall as me and far too old to be cuddling up with a stuffed kangaroo. Mostly, the older kids didn’t bother with us, or just stood by and watched with a knowing smile a
s their much younger brothers and sisters enjoyed themselves.
But this boy was trouble. That was obvious from the glassy look in his eyes.
‘Give us me leaflet,’ he said in a voice that made it clear he wasn’t playing.
I did my ‘Oh, look! None left!’ routine, which I’d used before when I’d run out. ‘I’ll go and get you one. Wait here!’
The boy didn’t move.
‘Give us me leaflet and give us it now,’ he said in tones as unyielding as granite. ‘You’ve given everybody else one. I want mine.’ Quite clearly a major thug in the making.
‘Sorry,’ I signed. ‘None left. Now I must go to sleep.’
‘Give us me leaflet,’ the boy said, ‘or it’s the casualty ward for you.’
‘I have to go now,’ I signed, and started to hop round him.
But he dodged sideways, never taking his glassy eyes off me, and blocked my way again. This way and that. Whichever way I tried to go.
A crowd had gathered by now. From the look on
their faces, it was clear they supposed this was all part of the entertainment.
‘Box his ears!’ a man shouted.
‘Yeah!’ another added. ‘Let’s see you give him the kangaroo kick.’
After the fourth or fifth—I forget which—attempt to get past him, I’d had enough. Sweat was pouring off me, I thought I’d faint inside my costume before long, so I gave up, stood four square on my kangaroo legs and in plain human-being language said, ‘Get out of the way, please.’
‘Yar! See!’ the boy shouted, addressing the assembled throng. ‘See, it isn’t a kangaroo at all.’
The crowd, or at least the adults and older kids, laughed. This was of course not news to them but, as I have learned is the case with people, they just loved the pretence being broken, the actuality revealed, the play-acting undone.
The little girl I’d given the last leaflet to, who was still watching, said something to her mother, who replied, at which the little girl burst into tears, broke free of her mother, ran up to me, threw the leaflet on the ground at my feet, and ran back to her mother, who she grabbed round the legs, hiding her face, crying profusely.
No doubt the truth had been revealed and had not been well received.
‘Now look what you’ve done!’ the boy shouted. ‘You’re a phony, that’s what you are. You’re not a kangaroo. You’re just a dressed-up idiot.’
By now he was quite clearly enjoying himself and the attention he was receiving, not to mention the encouragement from the assembled throng.
‘Push off, you nasty little creep!’ I said to him.
‘What did you call me?’ he shouted. ‘She called me a nasty little creep,’ he yelled at the crowd.
The crowd hissed and booed.
‘Go home, you little thug!’
’What! Did you hear? She called me a little thug. Well, that’s it!’
And he launched a no-holds-barred attack, punching and kicking and generally giving a convincing impression of a determination to keep his promise to consign me to hospital.
As my costume was well padded, especially round the middle, and my legs were also padded to make the shape of a kangaroo’s big thighs, his punches and kicks were cushioned. But they were still strong enough to knock me back.
I tried to hold him off, but I was half-hearted and he was full-hearted. I was only trying to keep him off me. He was on a mission to reduce me to a pile of—let’s say effluent, rather than the words he was yelling at me.
I stumbled backwards a few steps. But a stuffed kangaroo costume is not designed either for full frontal attack, nor for retreating. My tail got tangled with my kangaroo legs, tied them up and prevented me taking any more steps, while the boy’s battering pushed my top half backwards.
The inevitable result was that I tumbled to the ground.
This was not sufficient to satisfy the boy. He piled on top of me, belabouring me with a rain of blows that my costume—which was thin at the shoulders and on the head—did little to protect me from.
By now I was screaming a string of epithets I’d rather not record here. I used words I didn’t know I knew.
Then the last straw, he got hold of my kangaroo head and pulled it off, revealing my screaming head to view.
The crowd gasped.
‘There! Ya see!’ the boy yelled. ‘It’s just a stupid girl!’
Heaven knows what would have happened if at that moment the boy hadn’t been hauled off me by two burly security guards.
At the same time two of their colleagues lifted me to my feet and frog-marched me into the office.
There I was undressed, first aid applied to my bruised face and body, water offered and consumed. It was only then I realised what had happened, the shock of which caused me to tremble so badly I couldn’t hold anything or move for at least fifteen minutes.
Apparently, some people in the crowd had at last understood that the spectacle they were finding so amusing was not part of the official entertainment but was a real act of assault and someone had run to get help.
And the result?
The boy was given a telling off by one of the ‘security personnel’ and accompanied to the entrance of the theme park and told to go home or charges of assault would be laid against him. Apparently his response to this was to tell the security personnel to go and have sexual intercourse with themselves, before he ran off laughing.
I was given the sack.
Reasons enumerated by the pin-striped ‘human resources manager’:
1. I had broken the twenty-minute rule.
2. I had committed the unpardonable sin of speaking to a ‘guest’.
3. I had used ‘inappropriate language’.
4. My ‘child management skills’ had been shown to be wanting.
No explanation or reason was accepted.
‘I’m afraid we cannot turn a blind eye to such behaviour or other members of staff might break the rules also, thinking them immune from reprimand. I do understand you were provoked and the boy behaved disgracefully. But we are a business and our reputation for responsible behaviour and the safety of our guests whatever the provocation are of the highest priority. So I’m afraid we’ll have to let you go, despite your otherwise exemplary record.’
I was paid the full week’s wage, though I had worked only two days of the week, and asked not to return to the park, even as a ‘guest’, for at least a year.
But that wasn’t the end of it.
I was with Bret a few nights after I was let go—or, to use the proper word, sacked. We were walking from the movies when I saw the boy who attacked me hanging about on the other side of the street, and pointed him out to Bret, just as a matter of interest.
Before you could say ‘Clint Eastwood’, Bret strode across the road, grabbed the boy by the ear, and hauled him back to me, the boy stumbling and squawking fit to give you a headache. Not that I was silent myself. As soon as I realised what Bret was up to, I shouted, ‘No, Bret, leave it!’ But neither the boy’s squealing nor my pleading had the slightest effect.
When they reached me, Bret flicked the boy’s feet from under him so that he fell onto his knees in front of me, like a sinner confessing his sins. Only he didn’t confess, he started swearing and cursing. Honestly, the words that boy knew! There were some I didn’t even know myself.
‘Shut it, punk,’ Bret said.
The boy didn’t.
Bret bent down and said something into the boy’s ear.
This had an instant effect. The boy shut up.
(Afterwards, I asked Bret what he’d said. He replied, ‘Man stuff. Don’t ask.’)
Then he said to the boy, ‘I’ll give you a choice, punk. You can apologise to my girl for what you did to her.’
‘Or what?’ said the boy, giving Bret a defiant look.
‘Or you can make my day,’ Bret said, with a broad grin.
Would you believe it! I mean, honestly! It was all I could do to keep a straight face. But I knew
better than to laugh. I don’t think men have much of a sense of humour when they go on like that.
I managed to say seriously and very firmly, ‘Leave it, Bret, please. It won’t mean anything even if he does.’
‘You sure?’ Bret said.
‘He’d only lie, just to get away.’
‘You hear that, punk?’ Bret said. ‘You hear what my girl says? You should thank her as well as apologise. But let me make myself clear. If you ever come near her again, I will make it my business, and it will be my pleasure, to seriously rearrange the contours of your face. Comprendy, punk? Now scat!’
Which, after only a brief check of Bret’s face to make sure, is what the boy did, with scrambling speed.
When I told what happened to my friend Sharon, who is mad about biology and so clever it makes you sick, she said with a knowing smile, ‘A perfect example of mate guarding.’
I didn’t need to Google ‘mate guarding’ to know what she meant.
Sharon says it’s a mistake to forget that we human beings are animals first and whatever else second. But whether evolution will ever screen out from our animal nature the drive that causes a boy to attack a girl pretending to be a kangaroo, or the drive that causes a male to guard his mate just as violently, who knows?
All I know is I will never pretend to be a kangaroo again, or any other kind of animal, come to that.
The animal I am is quite enough to be going on with, thank you.
As for my Bret and what he did that day. Men! What more can I say.
You instructed me to write a letter of apology for not attending compulsory sport every Wednesday afternoon for the past six weeks. You also instructed me to explain in detail what I did with the time. You said that if I did not explain you would recommend my expulsion from school.
The Kissing Game: Stories of Defiance and Flash Fictions Page 5