Small men, she thought, sometimes took advantage of their size. They went to sleep on top of you. The Ungulates Keeper did this the second night and she threw him off with the first snore. He landed on his back, his thin arms flung out.
‘Do you like going to the beach? asked the Marine Mammals Keeper.
‘Yes,’ she said, bending her head over the computer keyboard. She was useless and she imagined that sooner or later they’d find her out. Her references were false. She spent more time reading the ‘Help’ pop-ups than she did typing.
‘I’ll pick you up on Saturday, then,’ he said, handing her a piece of paper to write her address on. ‘About ten.’
The other girl in the office was jealous, she could tell. The Marine Mammals Keeper had the kind of body you used to see in Cleo magazine, in the days they had the centrefold.
One night with the Reptile Keeper was enough. She woke in the morning to find him up on his elbow, his plump hand under his chin, staring at her.
‘You and I,’ he said, ‘fit. We’re the male and female of the same type.’
Perhaps he was thinking to himself: She’d be safe with the cobras. They couldn’t get their jaws around her.
‘How about some breakfast?’ he said.
He sat at the table with his towel around him and she filled him up with bacon and eggs. Her flatmate was impressed by his corpulence, agog over her cornflakes at his hairy belly.
‘Must be off,’ he said, and at the door, ‘Thanks.’
‘Where is he off to?’ asked her flatmate.
‘To pick up his wife from the interstate bus.’
Jemoona’s baby lay grey and wrinkled in the straw like a giant used condom. The Ungulates Keeper stood in an attitude of homage, his wet arms glistening and clasped in front of him. Jemoona nudged the baby with her trunk and made a strange noise.
No, it wasn’t Jemoona. It was the Ungulates Keeper. He was crying.
‘Sorry,’ he said later, in the car. ‘It always gets to me, you know?’
The street-lights were going off.
‘Mind if I don’t come in?’ he said, outside her place.
As they looked for a place to lay their towels she yawned.
‘Late night?’ asked the Marine Mammals Keeper.
‘Mmm,’ she said.
He wore a pair of very brief black togs and spent most of the day in the water.
‘Come for a swim?’ he said, still damp from his last one.
‘I’m not swimming in that crap,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you heard about the pollution?’
‘Good enough for the fish,’ he said, ‘good enough for me.’ And he ran for the waves. She went to sleep and got burnt. ‘I worked for a private zoo when I was in the States,’ she had told her prospective employer.
‘Really? Where?’ he asked.
‘Lydia Mills, South Carolina,’ she’d said.
Actually it was a private hospital. Hospital. Zoo. What’s the difference?
The Reptile Keeper filled the door and signalled to her. She went to him.
‘I’ve got a room at the back of the Snake House,’ he whispered. ‘With a bed in it. When’s your lunch break?’
‘Sorry. No go,’ she said, going back to her desk. Sometimes — not often — it paid to be blunt.
‘This’ll help,’ said the Marine Mammals Keeper, rubbing in coconut oil. He steadied himself on the back of the sofa, leaving a greasy mark.
‘God, you’re so soft. Not like the seals. They’re kind of … kind of turgid.’
‘Mmm,’ she said, wishing he’d stop. It hurt.
‘Roll over,’ he said.
‘I’m not burnt there,’ she said, but turned over. She was glad she did.
‘Dolphins,’ he said later, ‘make love all day long.’
After a while it fell into a kind of pattern. The Ungulates Keeper during the week, one or two nights, but the weekends reserved for the Marine Mammals Keeper.
‘I work part time in a restaurant in the weekends,’ she told the Ungulates Keeper. ‘And sleep in whatever time I have left.’
‘I need my energy for the big fish during the week,’ said the Marine Mammals Keeper. ‘But the weekends are for you, my little fish, my donut.’
The Ungulates Keeper got quite good at it after a while.
‘You’ll have to tell me what to do,’ he said. ‘I’m not used to it.’
‘Don’t elephants have clitorises?’ she asked.
He shrugged.
‘They like it, though,’ he said. ‘Next time we put the bull in I’ll let you watch.’
The Marine Mammals Keeper was no fool. He had a Master’s in Zoology.
‘I’ve been offered a job,’ he said, ‘in the Antarctic on a research programme. I think I’ll take it.’
The Carnivores Keeper caught her eye. It was her hair. Thick and red, to the waist.
‘When do you leave?’ she asked.
‘A fortnight,’ he said. ‘Can’t wait.’
‘What is it?’ she asked, her icecream melting into the sand. ‘The research?’
‘Environmental impact study,’ he said. ‘The French have built a runway, everybody else is building bases and blasting for minerals. Already thousands of animals have died.’
‘I like to think,’ she said, ‘of the poles as these pure twin places at either end of the earth.’
‘No longer,’ said the Marine Mammals Keeper. ‘They’re being fucked over like everywhere else.’
‘But I insist on thinking of them like that,’ she said. ‘They won’t be ruined, will they? Nobody would want to live there. It’s too cold.’
The Carnivores Keeper passed her on the way out the gates to the ferry. Her hair flamed and leapt. Inside her eyes, which suddenly engulfed her, there were glittering girders like the Harbour Bridge with the sun behind it. All the Carnivores Keeper did was look at her and she felt as though she had been kissed.
It was time, perhaps, to give the Ungulates Keeper the flick. She was tired of him. He’d told her all his stories and they were as sad as the Antarctic.
‘If the African elephant is killed at the same rate for very much longer,’ he said, ‘it will be extinct in the wild in twenty years.’
‘Mmm,’ she said, examining her arm, now as white as before. ‘But how do you kill something with skin as thick as an elephant’s?’
‘Shoot it,’ he said. ‘Or poison the water holes. That way the babies die too, the ones without the ivory.’
She leaned out of bed for her hand cream.
‘Is that what they want them for?’ she asked. ‘The ivory?’
She rubbed cream into her elbows.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Just the ivory.’
‘Ivory is beautiful though, isn’t it?’
She was remembering in England, in her grandmother’s house, the old piano with real ivory keys. And how her grandmother’s plump hands slid over the keys without much feeling, but how it was quite nice and tinkly from out in the garden where you could play in a sun that didn’t burn.
‘Ivory is only beautiful on an elephant,’ said the Ungulates Keeper.
‘Ivory can be beautiful on its own,’ she said. ‘Carved into tiny worlds.’
She was remembering Singapore, where she’d seen the carvers at work. The Ungulates Keeper sighed and rolled over heavily. Quite often, at the end of affairs, she let the bloke finish it. She’d done this in Lydia Mills. First the General Surgeon and last the Gynaecologist. It demanded a fair amount of careful engineering, to be somehow infinitesimally more ‘herself’ than she already was.
‘I’ve seen the Chinese carvers at work,’ she persisted. ‘With tiny knives and eyepieces.’ She held her thumb and forefinger in a circle. ‘Inside a piece of ivory this big they could make a paddyfield, with buffalo and workers in conical hats and individual spears of rice.’ The Ungulates Keeper was silent, but awake. She squirted some more hand cream into her palm and began rubbing it into her thighs.
‘Surely a little pie
ce of ivory like that wouldn’t make any difference?’ she said.
And the Ungulates Keeper, on cue, got out of bed and left.
The Marine Mammals Keeper loved her arse. Sometimes he rubbed himself between her buttocks until he spouted like a whale. She didn’t mind him doing it, although she was irritated by his requests for her to move. Why should she move? There was nothing in it for her. You only moved like that for men you loved. She’d never loved any man, not properly. Men loved her, though, she knew. She was soft and white and, they thought, sort of helpless.
The Marine Mammals Keeper loved her. He took handfuls of her buttocks and kneaded them, willing her to arch her back and wriggle, wriggle, wriggle just a little bit.
‘I’ve never been to the Antarctic,’ she said, as he nose-dived into the pillow.
‘Ah,’ he puffed. ‘Is that what you were thinking about?’
He needed an explanation for her lack of interest. She didn’t answer.
‘Of course you haven’t,’ he said, rolling off. ‘Why should you go to the Antarctic?’
‘I’ve been nearly everywhere else.’
‘Have you been to Canada?’
‘Yes. When I was little. With my father. He’s a nomad, like me.’
‘What about your mother?’ asked the Marine Mammals Keeper.
‘Dead,’ she said. ‘I lived with my grandmother and went on holidays with my father.’
She counted on her fingers. Five days until he left.
‘The first country I went to my own,’ she said carefully, ‘was Japan. I worked in a factory where they processed minke whales.’
The Marine Mammals Keeper yawned. ‘You’ve got a funny little sense of humour,’ he said.
‘Then I went to Iceland where I worked in a fish factory. The nets would come in filled with drowned seals and porpoises.’
The Marine Mammals Keeper sprang out of bed.
‘You’re joking, surely,’ he said.
‘No, I really went to those places on my own.’ She handed him a tissue to wipe her back.
‘Have a shower,’ he said. It’s easier.’
‘Easier for you,’ she said, getting up.
When she came back there was a note on the pillow.
‘Suddenly remembered something I had to do,’ it said. ‘Will take you out on Wednesday — my last night.’
‘Look,’ she said to the Carnivores Keeper, ‘he’s limping.’
Inside his tiny cage the lion paced on three paws.
‘He had a piece of glass removed,’ said the Carnivores Keeper. ‘It’s still sore.’
‘A piece of glass?’
‘Someone threw a bottle at him,’ said the Carnivores Keeper. ‘It hit the back wall.’
The lion, now she looked at him, did have a tragic aspect to the hang of his head.
And the Carnivores Keeper, sensing her empathy, slid her warm arm around her waist.
The Reptile Keeper came into the office with a sick snake in a box. It was not zoo policy to carry sick snakes in boxes.
‘I’d carry him around in my pocket if my trousers weren’t so tight,’ he said. ‘He needs to be kept warm.’
‘Put him in an incubator, then,’ said the Marine Mammals Keeper, who was seated, casually, on her desk.
‘It’s not the same. He needs personal contact,’ said the Reptiles Keeper, then pointedly: ‘I know somewhere ideal. Very warm and wet.’
‘Where’s that?’ asked the Marine Mammals Keeper.
‘Did you know,’ asked the Reptile Keeper of all assembled, ‘that my wife has left me?’
‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she said. They were in a crowded pseudo-Spanish restaurant, brightly lit. Looks like that should be reserved for the dark, so that the one being looked at couldn’t see the look, she thought. ‘It’s as if you want to eat me.’
‘I want to go to bed with you,’ said the Carnivores Keeper, a long strand of red hair floating in her wine.
‘All right,’ she said.
It was the taste of the sea and warmth of all mammals.
It was the embrace of like to like.
It was the release of something caged to the wild.
‘Tonight?’ asked the Carnivores Keeper, her hair still wet from the bath.
She shook her head. It was Wednesday.
She met the Marine Mammals Keeper by the seal pool. He was lying on his tummy, stroking their heads.
‘Goodbye, my lovelies,’ he said.
‘Do you mind if we don’t?’ he asked her. ‘I’m exhausted and I’ve got a long journey tomorrow.’
But he couldn’t help himself, his suitcases by the door and a rare yearning for permanence. Out of habit, she addressed him with her buttocks.
‘As white,’ he said between them, ‘as the Poles.’
They woke early.
‘I’ll be two months in the Antarctic,’ he said, ‘and after that it’s home to Newfoundland. Will you meet me there?’
‘I’ll think about it,’ she said.
After he’d gone, she rang her friend.
‘He asked me to marry him,’ she said.
The Carnivores Keeper loved her. They hardly slept. It was a new country. And the Carnivores Keeper was so proud. Everybody at the zoo knew. She sat on her desk at lunchtime and fed her tidbits between kisses.
One day the Carnivores Keeper said, ‘I’m tired of all this travelling. I spend half my life on trains. Let’s live together.’
‘That’s not a good idea,’ she said. ‘I’m leaving soon.’ It was necessary to tell her before any plans were made.
‘When?’ whispered the Carnivores Keeper.
‘In a month. My grandmother is ill.’
It seemed necessary to lie.
The Carnivores Keeper sulked. She hid at lunchtime. She turned away at night. She had roaring tantrums. She stopped eating.
On her last night they went to the same restaurant they’d been to before. The Carnivores Keeper’s hair was rough and dull, her eyes were puffy and she refused to order.
‘Do you love me?’ asked the Carnivores Keeper.
‘I don’t know.’
The Carnivores Keeper’s eyes were dirty brown bits of ice. The restaurant was filling up and the jukebox had gone quiet.
She finished the bottle of wine and realised she’d have to make the Carnivores Keeper hate her. From her purse she fished forty cents and handed it to her.
‘Go and put a song on,’ she said. ‘Something for me.’
The Carnivores Keeper squeezed her fingers as she took the money, but she wouldn’t meet her eyes.
There was a brick wall, the wrought iron bars, the long mane. There was a bottle.
And then she was standing, taking it by the neck and hurling it at a spot just above the Carnivores Keeper’s head. Pieces of green glass glittered in the Carnivores Keeper’s hands and face and dregs of red wine slipped from the wall to her prostrate body.
Thousands of feet above the earth she thought of them all below her, going about their daily business, thinking of her, missing her. She decided it was the community aspect of life in hospitals and zoos that she liked. It was the effort everybody made for the common good that made them such friendly places. However, to find work in either type of institution in England would be like reliving history. She had to branch out into something else.
A flight attendant handed her a copy of Time with a photograph of Tony Blair on the front cover. Of course. Politics. Why hadn’t it occurred to her before? She imagined that politicians with their sedentary and mostly interior lifestyles would be softer and paler than their zoo-keeper counterparts. Possibly, despite the relative distance from animal manure, they would be sourer smelling. People who had stressful jobs often stank, she’d noticed. Bad smells were something she could live with, though. Hospitals and zoos abounded with them. Politicians were generally older than zoo-keepers, though, and perhaps she would benefit, therefore, by having more highly skilled lovers.
She smiled, a tremor
of anticipation running through her body. As soon as she disembarked she would take the train to visit an old friend of her grandmother’s. He was sure to wield some influence, after his thirty years in the House of Lords. All she needed was a little job, perhaps as a receptionist in the foyer. Somewhere she would be noticed by the men and women who held the steering wheel and gear-stick of the nation.
Parliament! What havoc she would wreak! What a challenge, somehow to be infinitesimally more herself, and this time with global consequences.
Clumsy Machine
Sometimes he wondered what the medical profession was coming to. Things had certainly changed since he was a youngster, seething with an anguished mixture of self-doubt and self-righteousness, straight out of medical school. Now, disgust rose in him like bile. That young chap over there, with the great mound of hair and tie-dyed shirt — how could he instil confidence in patients dressed like that? He was probably one of those turncoat GPs who favoured small bottles of pretend medicine and home-births.
Since the early sixties, twenty years ago, when he’d taken up his Remuera rooms, Mr Kitchener had favoured three-piece suits, hair-cream and bifocals. A stern-faced, white-starched receptionist, polished mahogany furniture and the odd false bone lying about seemed to instil in Kitchener’s patients the kind of respect a doctor needed to survive. A respect verging on awe — awe that in some of the more nervous types spilled over into terror. The most nervous types were usually young mothers visiting him for the first time with babies sporting some kind of deformity. Their clear eyes would widen and pop as he outlined the surgery required, using the longest possible medical words. He was quite aware that most of the mothers had no idea what he was talking about, that he had lost them in the first few minutes. He’d perfected the technique of not letting them know he knew of their confusion, by turning his face to the light and allowing it to glare on his bifocals. That way his eyes, which might give something of this away, were concealed. He could get on with it. By the time he’d finished the women would be so baffled he could just shunt them out the door with no questions asked. Twenty minutes maximum per patient. It was an economical rule in terms of both financial return and his own energy. By its nature, its uniquely impersonal intimacy, surgery made for professional distance.
Drowned Sprat and Other Stories Page 11