The Secret Life of the Panda

by Nick Jackson

  The Secret Life of the Panda

  The Secret Life of the Panda

  Nick Jackson

  Chômu Press

  The Secret Life of the Panda

  by Nick Jackson

  Published by Chômu Press, MMXI

  The Secret Life of the Panda copyright © Nick Jackson 2011

  The right of Nick Jackson to be identified as Author of this

  Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Published in December 2011 by Chômu Press.

  by arrangement with the author.

  All rights reserved by the author.

  First Kindle Edition

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Design and layout by: Bigeyebrow and Chômu Press

  Cover artwork by: Suzanne Norris

  E-mail: info@chomupress.com

  Internet: chomupress.com

  “Every man is an abyss, and you get

  dizzy looking into it.” – Woyzeck

  Georg Büchner

  Contents

  Anton’s Discovery

  Lady with an Ermine

  The City in Flames

  The Secret Life of the Panda

  Paper Wraps Rock

  Boys’ Games

  Cut Short

  The Rabbit Keeper

  Flaubert’s Poison

  The Island

  Spadework

  The Rope

  Shell Fire

  Made of Glass

  Acknowledgements

  Anton’s Discovery

  The bird beat its wings against the walls of the trap Anton had set. He felt the ribs crack as he reached in to grasp it. His heart was pounding and he was light-headed just to be holding it—this elusive creature, so familiar and yet unreachable. Now he had it in his hand. The feathers brushed against his skin and the scrabbling feet pricked his fingers. The bird’s beak jabbed—once, twice—at his palm and drew blood and it turned its head to look at him with its button-black eye. He felt the throb of its body and marvelled at the strength of a thing so small. Then, quite abruptly, it gave a shudder and became a limp corpse in his hand. He was so shocked he dropped it.

  Anton looked round then to see if anyone had seen what he’d done. The windows of the house were empty. The servants were rattling pans and brushes in the kitchen but no one was looking out and the garden was deserted.

  He squatted down to look at the bird’s body. The eyes were clouded with a faint grey-white sheen; just moments before they had glared up at him. Now, because of him, they were glazing over. The beak that had attacked his hand was lifeless; he noticed a single bead of dark blood oozing out. Again he looked round to see if he was alone. It occurred to him that he should bury it, but he had no shovel. He thought of scraping out a hollow with his hands and burying it amongst the weeds. Then he felt a pang at the thought of the glossy feathers covered in soil, the eyes coated with grit and dust.

  Finally he lifted it up and gently pushed it under the fern fronds. Only the feet, the yellow grasping claws, were visible, and he hid them with a piece of moss.

  Gradually he became aware that his mother’s voice was calling him.

  “What have you been doing, Anton?” she asked, as he passed her on the stairs.

  “Nothing. I was in the garden.”

  “Look at the state of your clothes! Come here. How did you get in such a mess?”

  From the way she looked at him, he thought she must have seen what he had done but she only said: “Your father wants you.” She was breathless from reaching to clean a window ledge. Her hands clutched the cloth, wringing the wetness from it.

  “I’m going there now,” he said.

  But he didn’t go to his father’s room. He shut himself in his own room and thought of the corpse outside in the garden under the ferns. It would have been better to bury it. There was a knock at his door and his sister Johanna put her head round with that look she had, the formal pursing of the lips she copied from her mother.

  “Father wants you.” She smiled, exposing the stumps of her teeth, and advanced into the room swishing her gown. “You’re in trouble again.”

  “Leave me alone.” How he loathed Johanna’s smile: the crooked shards of teeth and the glistening film of saliva covering them. She had pulled her hair back off her domed forehead. A few greasy strands hung against her cheeks. He wanted to hack at them. They swung forwards as she peered round the room, her head jutting on the thin neck.

  “Anton.” She was so close that he could smell her sweat and the dank smell of cabbages. “I’ll tell you a secret.” He could see how desperate she was to tell. Her eyes bulged with the effort of containing the words.

  “Let me be!” He lurched out of the door and down the stairs, kicking out at the banisters as though they were Johanna’s bony shins.

  “Father wants to see you!” she called, but he was out in the garden again. Everything was the same under the fern fronds. The bird was so peaceful, he couldn’t believe it was not just sleeping with its head close to its chest and the wings folded. He picked it up to examine it again. The feathers were flecked with silver. He fanned one of the wings. The translucent plumes would never carry the bird up again. He lay it down with the wings folded back. He heard the door to the garden being opened so he shoved it back under the ferns with his toe.

  “What are you doing?”

  She would have liked to torture him or to be tortured herself. Her piggy eyes glittered in the puffed cheeks. She was chewing something, a hunk of bread. He saw the grey dough moving between her lips.

  “What is it?” She craned to see, but he pushed her back.

  “Nothing, it’s nothing. Let’s go and eat; it must be dinner time.”

  “But there is something, a …” she began, but he dragged her with him along the path.

  “Anton’s hidden something in the garden and he won’t tell me what it is. It must be something evil he’s doing, otherwise he wouldn’t try to hide it.”

  “There are no secrets from God, Johanna. Anton knows that God will know.” Barentje smoothed her shining coils of hair and touched the bread and potatoes, as if they were relics…

  Anton couldn’t get the food down quickly enough, though the gobs of potato stuck in his throat. The mouthfuls were interfering with the idea that was forming in his mind. He was afraid that the thread of reason, once lost, would be gone forever, or that some invisible hand would pull him back just as he was about to discover…

  “Eat,” his mother insisted. She heaped pickled herrings and shredded cabbage on his plate.

  Johanna was chewing with her eyes closed, as if she needed all her senses concentrated on the taste. She ate and ate: a whole plate of sauerkraut, the pink wurst, the oozing ox-cheek. While Anton sat, dry as a stick.

  He went back to the garden after their meal. He stared at the body, now stiff and cold. He had killed the bird for nothing, hadn’t he? No, it was because he needed to know how it worked and he would have to look inside it, if he was ever going to understand. He knew stuffed birds from his father’s natural history collection but here was a real one.

  His hand quivered as he held the knife and he wondered what would happen if there was an evil spirit inside the bird. Starlings looked at you as if they had something of the devil in them. They were in the painting he’d seen, herding the human souls into the mouth of Hell with a pronged spear.

  He fretted that he would open it up and discover nothing but a
chaos of liquid gore. He hoped for symmetry. The organisation of the world depended on the smallest of things; he didn’t know, but sensed, this.

  He grasped the knife, an old kitchen knife that he’d honed with a whetstone.

  Under the skin were the threads of silver like a net worked by a careful hand. He imagined his mother’s needle flashing though the stuff she embroidered. He gasped to see the rosy flesh; the fibres of muscles parted by the knife, falling apart, the welling crimson from a blood vessel, its tiny mouth working; then the deeper forms, the petals or roundels, the ivory sticks of ribs; the surprising metallic green of the gizzard and everything perfectly symmetrical, no random chaos of rancid fluids but a secret world of concentrated light and colour.

  He opened the body cavity and slit the creature’s throat from the breast to the tip of the beak, peeling back the skin from the pale arches of muscle. The eyes glistened in the sockets: deep mauve and indigo.

  He stepped back to ease his aching shoulders and saw Johanna’s face peering from behind the curling spikes of a plant. She pushed forward and gazed at what he had done, dropped to her knees on the soil.

  “What is it?” she asked, because her eyes couldn’t make sense of it.

  “A starling,” he said and blushed.

  “What?” she gaped stupidly, “a bird?” She would have liked to understand what was engrossing about it. The light was intensifying the colours. They stood silently before the tiny corpse and she put out her finger delicately, but Anton lashed out.

  “Leave it alone! You don’t understand.”

  “I do,” she whined. “Let me touch!” The jellied surface of the eyeballs had a lovely sheen. She could almost have licked it up. Her belly was grinding on a void.

  He grabbed her arm and twisted it and she, with her nails, scratched a long satisfying gouge in his cheek. They grappled and Johanna, the stronger, pushed him down among the prickling weeds, putting her hot mouth against his ear, she whispered: “He says you’re the Devil’s spawn and he’s going to send you away.” She lay on top of him and smeared spittle on his cheeks. Then, she hoisted herself on her heavy legs and scampered off to the kitchen to stuff herself with pudding or at any rate to try and fill the void she had experienced.

  Since he was sure she would go straight to her mother, he picked up the carcass just as it was and folded it up in his jacket and took it to his room where he had the space to lay it out and work more on it. He whispered his prayers as he worked, to distract himself from his sister’s insinuating words: “You’re the Devil’s spawn.” He said the Lord’s Prayer as he slid the tiny bones from their sockets and the sun splattered on the pools of clotting russet.

  The wings of flesh he peeled back to reveal the insides reminded him of the angular frames of a rood screen and it seemed that he peeled the layers to reveal a painting, a Byzantine miniature, perhaps.

  He drew it, the crayon scribbling like a frantic insect over the precious scraps of vellum, to try and preserve the image that was fading, because if he failed to keep the image he would lose something of ineffable value. Finally he had it, recorded as accurately as he could make it.

  He stood back to admire his work but already he felt the urgency of his discovery fading. Almost before he was aware of it he found his hands sliding down, pulling at the strings of his breeches. The image of symmetry he had glimpsed began to form again in his mind as a different ecstasy took possession of him.

  The pearly fluid spilled from his erection onto the velvet bed coverings. Anton still had his breeches round his knees but couldn’t keep himself from kneeling to examine the congealing liquid. At that moment the door swung open. His father stood there. The older man opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. He gazed round and his eyes swivelled from the table to the bed, taking in the remains of the bird, the drawing next to it and the boy kneeling by the bed.

  In the first moments of his panic, Anton rushed to try and hide his nakedness but slipped and sprawled headlong across the polished floor. A glass decanter crashed to the floor and smashed as his father’s sleeve swept across the table. Anton, on his knees in the corner, found himself in a position to closely examine those shards of glass.

  “Have I been too lenient?” His father’s black coat loomed behind the boy who did not lift his head from the floorboards but lay still as a bird when the hawk swoops. The base of the decanter, a thick wedge of glass, was by his nose, and through its green translucency he watched a beetle creeping.

  “It’s unnatural.” His father was talking quickly in his light musical tones but Anton was struck by the high pitch of his voice. “And the time has come for you to be taken in hand.”

  Anton noticed that the beetle, as it emerged from beneath the glass base of the decanter appeared much smaller than it had seemed when seen through the glass. His mind flashed with new possibilities: glass, light, and the intricate workings of tiny bodies. His hand closed on the rough gobbet of glass.

  The older man spent his rage: threw the remaining contents of Anton’s table out of the window, wrenched the covers from the bed, aimed a substantial boot at Anton’s rear end and threatened to dispatch him to a seminary where they would beat the evil out of him.

  Anton waited; a small smile curled his lip. The light falling on his sparse blond hair made him seem inhumanly pale, yet failed to illuminate the deep-set eyes with their enormous pupils. His father’s voice reached a crescendo:

  “You will never defile this house...”

  He was going to say more, much more, but the quick glance his son directed at him stopped him in his tracks. As his voice trailed off he saw himself reflected in his son’s eyes: his petty blundering insignificance. The chill look of disdain made the father catch his breath. It was the point, he remembered in later years, when he’d first sensed a fear of those dark eyes and sought ways to avoid his son or place him at a convenient distance.

  As for Anton, he felt the rough edges of that lump of glass in the palm of his hand; it was important not to lose it.

  Lady with an Ermine

  Darkness, suddenly a flash of light, revealing a chamber. The blood vessels spin round—again a flash of brilliant light. Is God there somewhere, or something worse, some dreadful shadow lurking in the depths of the unknown, beyond the reach of the light?

  “Nothing obvious.” He snaps off the torch. I blink and the surgery returns: books, the leaves of a prayer plant, a photograph of two blond children in red pullovers.

  “You’ve been working too hard, have you?” Dr Vincent balances the torch on his knee. “Zigzag patterns in the periphery of your vision, you say. These are all quite common phenomena.” He’s very courteous as he shows me to the door of the consulting room. “Do come back if there’s a recurrence. But try and rest; try to keep things in perspective.”

  The bus drops me at the entrance to the complex of buildings. I squeeze past the lowered vehicle security barrier, amble along a muddy path to the rear of a portakabin and let myself in through a shabby door. A smell of damp plaster-board and old shoes hangs in the air. There is the usual faint hum from the bank of computers along one wall. Fluorescent yellow hard hats hang in a row above a line of grubby boiler suits like a comic line-up of invisible workmen.

  I open the fridge and take out a carton of milk, take a sniff and pour it down the sink with a sigh. I flick the switch of the kettle and listen to the hiss. All the mugs have a brown scum inside; I select the cleanest. People imagine our research takes place in a rarefied atmosphere of glass and steel: the soft trickle of a fountain in the background accompanied by the rustle of bank notes, freshly ironed by an army of android technicians. I clear a space among the cardboard boxes and old wiring circuits. The desk top is tea-stained and gritty with biscuit crumbs (Swiss creams?) that someone has been eating.

  Arriving on the scene before anyone else gives me a sense of satisfaction. I do some of my best thinking at this time of day, before the others start to arrive, bringing their own trails of conseq
uence, their own collisions. Arriving early gives me time to adjust my buffering zones, to establish my points of impact with the thousand tiny shocks I know the day will bring.

  It is our job to check the raw data: to sift the results and decide if they will be of interest to future analysts; to look inwards at the precise nature of the matter.

  Last night I dreamt of going back to the museum. The building itself was unchanged but I was aware that behind the building, the countryside had been swept away by a motorway. The woods and fields, where I’d walked as a boy, were gone in this dream, and this knowledge oppressed me.

  I could smell the honeysuckle perfume my mother used to wear; I catch it now, a faint scent that lingers on the edge of my awareness. She turns to look at me over her shoulder. And suddenly I am back in the dream running to keep up. With my small sweating hand held tightly in my father’s, I stumble up the steps of the museum.

  Is this a dream, or is it true and happening to me now? I find it more and more difficult to tell the difference. Dr Vincent tells me that this is not unusual—that many people find it hard to make the distinction.

  The museum attendant was one of those shrivelled men, so tiny that the cashier’s stool had been specially designed to place him at the right height to receive money and dispense little violet-coloured tickets. I never once saw him off that stool. I doubted whether he ever left it, except for mealtimes and to go for a wash-and-brush-up, for he was always impeccably presented.

  It was my father who first took me to the museum, after the death of my mother. I think the museum was my father’s attempt to help me begin to forget, or at least to lessen the pain of loss.