by Mark Morris
And for the first time as a resident in the house, Jason stood still, without fidgeting or looking at his watch or breaking away to make phone calls that he did not need to make, and he listened to Gerald.
* * *
“Hi.” Electra’s eyes smiled with a warmth he’d not known them capable of.
Questions he wanted to ask her tripped over each other in his mind like clowns wearing long shoes. His thoughts were enshrouded by a fog of both confusion and desire that refused to lift. But there was no doubt that this was a date. The realisation made him shiver.
A young woman would not have worn boots with spike heels and tights so shimmery that they appeared wet, or a stretchy miniskirt and that much make-up, unless she intended to impress. She must have spent hours on her hair too.
“How do I get in?” He followed this with, “Why here?” when the girl he was now struggling to recognise as his colleague showed him a gap between a metal pole and the tented security wire attached to the upright. Electra didn’t answer Jason’s question, but smiled and dipped eyes, made entrancing by a pair of false eyelashes, when he said, “You look amazing, by the way.”
One turnstile of the four attached to the ticket booths soon turned with a loud metallic knocking as they each passed through the original entrance. A long wooden frontage bore faded depictions of animals with humanlike faces. The mildly unpleasant notion of the turnstile’s sound echoing far out to what lay beyond the gates, like a curious door bell, was dispelled when Jason was confronted with what stretched around him.
He found himself on a wide tarmac forecourt once designed to receive large crowds. Opposite the turnstiles was a boarded-up gift shop and a shuttered Go-Ape café. Facades of animal-themed sideshows stretched to a disused toddlers’ fairground. In there, the gaudy plastic reds and yellows of the little fairground rides remained bright within the encroaching treeline. In the distance, a small train intended for children slumped on punctured tyres against a miniature platform that was embellished with gingerbread filigree ironwork. A toilet block with a flat roof had mostly been engulfed by moss and dead tree branches. Tall, busy weeds erupted through the footpaths. Food wrappers faded enough to appear bleached covered most of the ground.
But above the concessions, a steep hill, reminiscent of a small alpine mountain, rose into low grey cloud. Peering toward the mist-enshrouded summit, he glimpsed concrete enclosures, rusty metal poles and tatters of wire hanging from them, a decaying cable car ride, and signs of footpaths cutting through the wild deciduous foliage. The zoological gardens had been built into tiers around the hill, all connected by a winding path that began on their left.
The bizarre and exotic surroundings excited Jason as if he were a child. He wondered if he’d underestimated the girl at his side. Had she a sensitivity to the strange beauty of dereliction? An empathy, unfettered by intellectualism, to past grandeur? An interest, at the very least, in local history? He wanted to take her in his arms and kiss her pretty mouth hard and move his hands over her diminutive curves. She seemed to read his ardour and not be appalled by it. She smiled.
“This might be the only interesting thing about Sully.” His remark also pleased her. Amidst such ruin her sudden laugh was melodic, magical. He’d never heard her laugh before.
“There’s nothing like this anywhere else.” She raised her face to the hill as if in adoration. “Never makes me want to see it when it was open.”
Jason wasn’t sure he entirely grasped the sentiment but wanted to agree with her. Though there was something about Electra’s enthusiasm that also made him suspect that she might be mad. Mad but beautiful, like the Sisters of the White Cross, according to Gerald. One of them had been a local beauty, who’d once been crowned Miss Great Britain. She’d taken the veil for the sect after succumbing to its obsession with the Garden of Eden before the fall of man.
“Why here? Why do you come here?”
Electra’s face adopted the half-concealed smile he knew too well. He hoped it was merely playful. “Cus it makes me happy. Peaceful, like.”
“You come here a lot?”
“Loads.”
“On your own?”
“Mostly. Sometimes I meet friends.”
The idea should have been reassuring, but such was his greed for the girl he preferred the idea of her being alone here, a place she would only share with him.
“They might be here later. We can meet up.”
“Your friends are coming?” He hoped his disappointment wasn’t obvious.
Electra set off up the path on their left, as much to cut off his interrogation, he sensed, as to show him more. Her face betrayed an eagerness to get higher more quickly than his new shoes would allow him to. Her posture also seemed looser, more limber, while her face remained angled upwards as if to catch the sun’s rays. He was seeing a side to the girl he had never glimpsed at work and she was becoming harder to recognise as every minute passed. He tried to combat this estrangement by talking to her.
“You know what happened here, in the seventies, before you were even born?” He found himself in danger of reciting parts of Gerald’s monologue that had lasted for over an hour the previous evening; a discourse that had been rich with details about the cult who’d destroyed the zoo’s complement of animals incrementally, embellished with council politics that had subsequently kept the place shut. More than the breathlessness caused by the ascent, a sudden horror at the insidious influence of Gerald in his companionless existence made him stop talking.
“Oh, you know about that?” There was a spine of sarcasm in Electra’s tone. She stopped by a vast canopy constructed from steel poles and netting. Great rents and holes gaped in the overgrown enclosure’s covering. Rotten logs and a deep lake of dead leaves consumed the floor. The middle of the area was a thicket of unmanaged tree growth. High on the rear cement wall were the unappealing mouths of two artificial caves. Electra grinned at the abandoned enclosure as if she had spotted a rare and shy animal inside.
Jason cleared the signage with one hand: a steel placard upon which a map of Africa was embossed. With a finger he traced the species of the former occupants: GELADA BABOONS. “How did they get in, I wonder. The women. The nutters who poisoned the animals.”
Electra chose to remain mute. It irritated Jason. He filled the uncomfortable silence again. “One of the women was killed. But not by the lions or the tiger they had here, back then, like you’d think. An elephant got her. Can you imagine that?” According to Gerald, an ancient and blind pachyderm called Dolly had used its head to press one of the Sisters of the White Cross against the floor of its pen. She had been the beauty queen. She’d crept in to soak the straw with arsenic but had the life crushed out of her. The elephant had also placed its knees upon her legs and held its position, while pressing her with its vast skull, until she was dead.
Concluding her silent communication with the stained rocks and dead wood where primates had once scampered, Electra turned away from the railings and moved further up the hill. “They always get things wrong,” she said, though Jason was confused as to who “they” signified. “People don’t know what happened here,” she added.
“Oh, they do. Nutters killed every animal except the reptiles. Apparently they bludgeoned the smaller ones they could corner. Doesn’t surprise me at all that the… town”— he’d nearly said “council” and that would just not do on a date—“wants to keep the place quiet. Makes it all a bit eerie, don’t you think, once you know the story? I think the surviving women were committed.”
Jason was aware his comments were displeasing Electra; perhaps it was their morbidity, a tone that he could not shake from his thoughts now that he was inside the zoo.
“People don’t know why it happened. They weren’t there.” She said this sharply, but with a sly look in her lovely eyes, as if she were privy to a need-to-know secret that she could not disclose. It made her seem simple and immature. “You shouldn’t have opinions if you don’t know the facts,” she ad
ded. “Horrible things happen for good reasons. Don’t you know that?”
“Yes, of course,” he said too quickly, desperate to return her mood to what it had been.
He followed her in silence, was led past horribly small, overgrown cages for owls, kookaburras, macaques, scarlet macaws and amazon parrots. The ascent made Jason sweat and wheeze, which he tried to conceal by dropping just behind her line of sight. Electra clipped on, her small and lovely legs sheening in the thin metal light and effortlessly sending her ahead to the foot of a long cement staircase that led to another level.
A sign beside the worn metal handrail at the foot of the stairs indicated that orangutans, gibbons, chimpanzees and lemurs once whiled away their captivity somewhere above. Dense branches of small trees arched over the steep passage, sealing out most of the natural light. Jason would have to bend over to get through.
“You coming or what?” Electra said.
He was almost too winded to speak. “Is there another way…” The heel of his left foot was now smitten with a hot and painful blister.
From the hilltop, from out of the fog-wreathed trees, came a sharp cry that he wanted to believe was human. And into his mind came suggestions of yellow teeth, of dust being kicked up in clouds by clawed black feet. He imagined thin, hairy limbs racing up tree branches in enraged pursuit of other furred shapes.
Electra giggled. And for a moment, before she slipped up into the dark tunnel that surrounded the staircase, her expression had seemed especially salacious. Wanton though cruel, and much older than it should have appeared on such a young face.
So quickly did he turn to where he guessed the noise had issued from, Jason fell against the railings at the mouth of the staircase. His sight groped about the dark, wet trees above. He peered into the distance, at the pointed cement roofs, vaguely alien in the way they poked through the mist and treetops nearer the summit. And where the mist hung about the peak he was also struck by the unappealing suggestion of a ruined temple returned to some steaming jungle on an Asian mountain range. The shriek, the fog, the wildness of the trees, all conspired in his mind to make him suspect that he had passed beyond the margins of Sullet-upon-Trent, a town not really belonging anywhere either.
Further up the stone staircase, Electra’s tipped heels clicked through the shadows.
Jason followed. Her called her name twice and said, “Hang on!” She laughed, sweetly, from a greater distance than seemed feasible.
Within the smothering canopy of tree branches, Jason soon struggled to see where he was placing his feet. His breath was loud about his head, his heartbeat inside his skull. Stumbling forward, one hand flailed to where he hoped the railing might be. But amidst the scents of leaf mulch and wet earth, a trace of her perfume lingered. He chased the fragrance.
Daylight eventually formed a coin of white gold when he rounded a corner on the cement staircase. As he neared the top, Electra’s lovely blonde head appeared and joyfully cried, “Keep up!” before vanishing. The comment made Jason feel twice his age.
He only stopped struggling upwards when startled by a second shriek, a cry at the side of the staircase, mere feet away from where he laboured. An animal scream followed by a boisterous scampering toward his position, which swiftly evolved into a determined progress of a presence that he could not see, passing over his head. It was aware of him below, though, of that he was certain, as much as he was certain of the speed and strength of whatever thrashed through the darkness above.
When Jason eventually made the top of the staircase he was near insensible with exhaustion and fear. But Electra was not waiting for him on the wide and greening concrete path.
He peered back into the narrow tunnel he had emerged crouching from, with the taste of blood and panic in his mouth. Down there, all was quiet again. But he was now certain that the Sisters of the White Cross had failed to destroy every animal that had been kept in captivity here, four decades earlier. Some kind of ape must have survived and bred descendants. Indigenous British wildlife included nothing that could have made such an infernal cry. Nor anything capable of such agility so high above the ground.
This must form part of the appeal to Electra and her trespassing friends; they knew that the zoological gardens were not quite as empty as the town thought. She’d wanted to surprise him with something special and secret that he could not see anywhere else. Her cryptic comments made more sense to Jason.
But where was she? He feared their date had degenerated into a childish game of hide and seek. He was too tired and shaken to ever get into the spirit of something like that now. Even if the taste of her mouth was waiting as a reward for his being a good sport, Jason wanted to go home.
Enclosures for animals lined each side of the only possible route onwards, fronted by raised viewing platforms. His repeated cries of “Electra!” were greeted with a misty silence that he mistook for anticipation in the verdure around him.
The only tolerable way out of here for him was forward and up to eventually get down again. The original design of the zoo was much clearer; visitors would move to the summit, circling the sides, while viewing the animal attractions on ascent. Other features must await on descent.
He was now flanked by the orangutan and chimpanzee houses. He worked this out from the badly painted depiction of an orange ape on a viewing platform. In the opposite pen, chains still suspended a complex arrangement of logs from which chimpanzees once capered. To his dismay, and a dread that he now tried to swallow like a lump in the throat, he noticed that some of the hanging logs were gently swaying as if from recent use. He expected to see a black face peer out from one of the lightless doorways that were burrowed into the cement wall of the chimps’ old home. The detritus of tree stumps and dead tree branches littered the broad discoloured basin.
Behind him, in the orangutan area, there came a sound of a heavy object flopping into water.
Wide-eyed and breathing like an asthmatic, Jason rushed to the railings closest to the sound, eschewing the viewing platform that looked structurally unsafe.
There was a moat twenty feet below. It must have once kept the apes inside their pen or provided recreation. It now brimmed with a thick soup of dirty rainwater, upon which bobbed a carpet of dead leaves, the mulch of ages, and woody flotsam. One portion of the surface had been disturbed. A circle of expanding ripples had stirred to lap greasily against the greening cement banks on either side of the moat. Whatever had just submerged did not resurface.
Beyond the moat stood a half-rotten tree house and two large and rusticated stone figures of apes. To Jason, they appeared like the crude effigies of imbecilic gods, forgotten and left behind in their polluted grotto.
A rich and bestial spore—sulphurous, fresh, nitrate rich, reaching brain-deep and in danger of turning his stomach— assailed Jason from each side of the path.
He moved away, quickly, and to a junction offering three new pathways: one down, one up, one straight ahead.
“Electra!” he roared in fear as much as anger, though his voice sounded feeble and broken amongst the damp trees. If he wasn’t mistaken the air was now much warmer too, and odiferous with the scent of a wet forest floor.
A response seemed to come from high up. A horrible cry that whoop-whoop-whooped and then croaked into what could have been demented laughter. Another descendent of escaped apes he hoped. But what could they have found to eat in here?
Jason was closer to the summit now, about halfway up in fact, and had a better view of what waited up there, if he were to venture any higher. A series of domed cement roofs, like a miniature Sydney Opera House, poked between two large oaks. Perhaps this was one of the stylistic features that Gerald had attributed historical value to.
The head of a dirty penguin statue was also visible. The chipped stone beak was open beneath the blank and indifferent sky. The cement bird was forever poised to call out a lament of solitude and imprisonment, a shriek from the accursed place in which it had been abandoned.
Ja
son’s imagination began to chatter like a frightened monkey in floodwater.
On the very summit, part of a red tiled roof was visible. Directly below that, where the tops of the trees parted, Electra walked into view. She was not alone. Electra was talking to at least three other people. Women, Jason thought, and all wearing dark clothing. But against a background of discoloured cement, the faces of her companions appeared especially pale.
They all turned and looked down at him. Electra waved enthusiastically. Her friends remained still and were content to stare.
At a trot, Jason rounded a walled paddock for giraffes, now filled with broken bricks and masonry. Where tapir, capybara, and Barbary sheep once paced back and forth, their fiefdoms had long been given over to choking bracken, blackberry vines and long grasses.
Hobbling past on blistered feet, he intuited an atmosphere pregnant with apprehension, or perhaps one even tense with animosity because he was intruding upon a territory in which he was unwelcome. Ridiculous to feel this way, or so he tried to persuade himself. A few feral descendants of the original apes had given him a turn. That was all. Once he reached Electra he’d make her explain the strange cries. But what could she offer as an explanation of what had slipped into that oily moat about the orangutan enclosure?
Steeling himself not to look beyond the iron bars he rushed past, so as not to allow the rubbish-strewn and increasingly smelly dereliction to affect him, Jason finally arrived, out of breath and wet through with perspiration, at the place he had last seen Electra.
Once again, he found himself alone and overlooking a lagoon of miserly proportions. A dirty cement cavity, cramped with dead verdure, where sea lions had once glided for a bit before being forced to make a turn. Impossibly, despite four decades of dereliction, the stagnant concrete bowl still issued the scent of decaying marine life.