The Secret Life of the Panda

by Nick Jackson

  *

  On Friday nights after work it was a habit they had adopted to watch the TV together, to slump on the settee and gorge themselves on meaningless television. They considered it was their due after the stresses of the week.

  “Denis?” It was that small voice she used, which he doubted she ever used with the primary school kids. “There’s something I want to talk about.”

  He stopped chewing. They were having microwaved chilli in front of the TV. A man on the screen was explaining the desperate situation of pandas in the wild; reduced to subsisting on ever smaller patches of bamboo; breeding programmes were frustrating everyone, including the pandas.

  “Yes? Shall I switch off the telly?”

  “Turn the sound down, if you like.” She tucked up her knees as Denis floundered for the remote control. “Thank goodness it’s nearly the end of term.”

  “Yes, you need some free time.”

  “There’s stuff we need to get sorted out. Things we need to decide.”

  “Uh, huh?”

  “I missed a period.”

  “It could be stress. You’ve been working very hard.”

  “No, it’s more than that. I did a home test.”

  “So, you think you may be pregnant?” He paused and watched her as she huddled into the opposite corner of the settee. “That’s…wonderful, love!” He felt he ought to give her a hug, but something kept him in his seat; a sensation of coldness that ran through the marrow of his leg bones, pricking out into the skin of his inner thighs. The corners of his mouth felt stiff as he tried a smile.

  “You don’t want me to have it do you?” There were angry tears bursting from the seams of her eyes.

  “How can you tell that?”

  “Well, I just know what you’re going to say.”

  “Oh yes?” He couldn’t help his eyes sliding back to the TV screen for a split second.

  In the panda enclosure at Berlin zoo several white-coated humans observed a pair of pandas. One of the pandas had climbed to the topmost branches of a tree and was looking down at its mate with an expression of panda inscrutability. The scene cut to a petri dish in which panda eggs were suspended. A lab worker was poised with a glass pipette.

  “I don’t know what you expect me to say.” He slipped a forkful of rice between his numbed lips.

  “I suppose I wanted you to be happy.”

  “I am happy.”

  “You’re not.”

  “How can you know what’s going on inside my head?” He bit resentfully into a sliver of red pepper. Either it was the chilli making his stomach churn or some indefinable sense of momentum, as though he were being propelled at speed in an unknown trajectory. “Can’t we lighten up a bit? What’s for pudding?”

  “A meringue thing and there’s a tin of raspberries. That light enough? It’s me who’s got to go through with this pregnancy.”

  “It’s just that it seems so sudden. I mean, if I don’t get through the next round of promotions we can forget about the extension.”

  “We could always find excuses.”

  “And you’re up to your ears in work. You wouldn’t be happy at home with a child. You’re always saying how much teaching means to you.”

  “You don’t understand, do you?” She switched channels. A man stood, braced in a hurricane.

  “Understand what? You’re not making sense. Would you be happy stuck at home with a kid?”

  On the TV palm trees were blown horizontal with the force of the wind. A low building had lost its roof. A man staggered past leaning into the wind. Pieces of unidentifiable debris flew across the screen.

  “Would I be happy? I don’t know. It’s a risk.”

  “I’m trying really hard to understand but I need time.”

  “You need time.” Laura delivered the last few words tonelessly. She switched channels again. A panda lay comatose on an operating table swathed with white sheeting. A figure approached, extending a steel implement towards the panda’s belly.

  “Would you be fulfilled if you did have a baby?”

  “Probably not.”

  “There you are then. Meringue?” Denis stood up, piled the plates together and took them out. “Where are the raspberries?” he called.

  She followed him into the kitchenette and slammed about in a cupboard. She banged the tin down on the kitchen surface.

  “I’ll get rid of it then, shall I?”

  He was slotting plates into the dishwasher. “We don’t have to decide instantly, do we?”

  “I’ve got an appointment at the clinic on Thursday.” She had the edge of the can gripped with the can opener and began to turn the little silver handle. The opener was doing nothing; it was turning but not cutting. She grabbed an opener which she hadn’t used in years: the one with the solid handle that just needed brute force. The handle, when she hefted it, felt right—chunky in her hand. She brought it down, several times onto the lid and holes opened up. She worked the can opener round the lid and prised up the flap, jagged round the edges.

  “Careful, love. You’ll cut yourself.”

  “Who cares?” She went back into the living room and turned up the volume.

  Denis woke in the night, aware of the familiar yellow glow from the street lamps and the headlights of cars sweeping across the ceiling. The curve of Laura’s body rose and fell, her hair lay tangled on the pillow and her face in profile looked remote. For a moment, gazing at her, he almost wondered if this was a different person, not the Laura he thought he knew.

  *

  There were two women in front of Denis in the queue with a man in a wheelchair. The man poked out his long mobile tongue and tested the air like an anteater. When he closed his mouth he looked strikingly like everyone else, with his crew-cut. One of the women, in a black lycra top, stroked his short hair and he twisted his head round. The veins in his neck stretched taught, as though they would twang if you touched them.

  “Only four tills open, look,” she said to her friend. “We’ll be here ages.”

  Does he know what an age is, that man? thought Denis. Does he sit in his chair and look at the clouds for hours and think: “I’ve been waiting ages here in my chair”?

  The man stretched his legs and waved his shoeless feet. One arm was extended, the veins blue-white inside the membrane of skin; it gestured, almost touching the backside of another lady in front of them in the queue. He made a little noise, a feral utterance.

  “Yes, you’ve had a lovely day today, haven’t you?” said the woman with the black top, stroking his shoulders.

  They inched closer to the bank tellers in their glass boxes. Was his finger going to touch her bottom? Denis wondered. Did he know what an absolute age this was taking? Stuck in that chair, endlessly with no opportunity to escape from his contorted body, jerking uncontrollably. But suppose that he did know everything that was happening to him; that he sensed that his life was like an hourglass—translucent, rigid, constrained—with the sand rushing through it.

  *

  When his grandfather was very old Denis had gone to visit him in the nursing home outside Hinkley. The corridors were painted in shining bleached magnolia and he found himself skating along on opalescent lino. The door to the room where his grandfather sat was thick and solid like something out of a nuclear power station. The TV was on. A noisy cartoon was showing: Tex Avery shooting out Bugs Bunny.

  The old man was fast asleep in a chair, legs covered with a knitted quilt. Denis could see his grey flannel trousers in the lozenges of space between the coloured strands of wool. His grandfather’s hair was very white and fluffy, moving gently in the breeze. As the Loony Toons’ signature tune came up, he stirred a little, like a small helpless animal. His eyes, when he opened them, were very blue, bluer than the technicolour background to the MGM logo.

  Denis had wheeled him out into the hot, dry garden to look at the parched grass and the sticks of shrubs. His grandfather spoke in a voice that faded and came strong in waves like a radio
commentary. “You’ve come to take me home Jack,” he said, Jack being his elder brother who had died on a French battlefield in his teens, “I knew there were moves afoot to get me out of here.”

  *

  Behind him in the queue, a woman with her hair all over the place was trying to control two toddlers. A small girl was strapped into a pushchair but this didn’t prevent her from pushing her brother who fell forward onto his face and set up a bawl.

  “Courtney, leave your brother alone, for Christ’s sake.”

  Eventually the boy stopped crying, sat up and, reaching out, pulled himself up by the nearest support. Denis felt the small fingers clutching at his freshly-pressed flannels.

  He ignored the child as best he could until he noticed that he’d left stains on his trousers that looked very much like pulped breakfast cereal.

  “Sorry,” the mother gave Denis a hopeless smile. “Jason, look what you’ve done to that man’s suit.”

  Jason did not look in the least apologetic. His outsized head wobbled back on his thin neck and he gazed up at Denis with a grin full of the tiny stumps of teeth. He gurgled inanely and sucked on the white plastic end of his anorak cord, sucking and grinning.

  Denis read the leaflets: “Save more”, “Get more from your flex-account”. He reeled off the slogans. It was like reciting a catechism.

  The child coughed. If he’s not careful, thought Denis, he’ll choke. “Spend and save”, “Plan your future”, he read.

  “Please go to cashier number seven.” The recorded voice was oddly compelling. Denis stepped forward, drawn to the flickering orange light.

  Suddenly he was aware of a high-pitched retching sound just behind his back.

  “He’s choking. Oh my god, he’s choking!” The woman gasped, pale under her fake suntan.

  The people in the queue froze and there was a sudden startled silence.

  “Is there a doctor?” someone shouted.

  The boy had turned a strange ivory colour with blue patches on his cheeks, like an alien child. He lolled in his mother’s arms—a thin trickle of saliva snaking from his mouth.

  “Where’s Mr Hudson?” asked one of the cashiers. “He’s the first-aider, isn’t he?”

  “He’s at lunch,” someone else whispered in a tone of desperation.

  “Oh God!” a voice behind Denis in the queue breathed, almost inaudibly.

  Denis had never before used his first-aid training. He’d studied the manuals with a kind of horrified detachment and had never understood how he had gained his certificate, though the trainer had praised his ‘cool-headed approach’. Now, he saw himself, as if from a distance, taking off his jacket and hanging it over the rail.

  “Let me,” he said, sounding more determined than he felt. As if the child were one of the plastic mannequins in a demonstration, he laid him across his knee. The first tentative pat accomplished nothing: the child hung limp, a dead weight. He tried a firmer slap and again there was silence and stillness. He became vaguely aware of a collective holding of breath around him, that he was the focus of everyone’s attention, he and his burden. He raised his hand for a third time; the whack he delivered was too hard, he thought. Then, miraculously, something shot out of the child’s mouth, a small glistening white object that pinged off the panelling. The child took an agonised breath and was sick on Denis’s shoes.

  The woman, her hair falling down over the face of her son, grasped him and shook his small body.

  “Stupid kid,” she moaned, hugging him so hard that her knuckles whitened. The child indulged in a gruff sounding bellow that echoed through the bank.

  Denis was kneeling on all fours looking at the ugly black and grey design on the carpet, diagonal lines stretching off beyond his field of vision. The sense of the child’s body—its compact solidity and weightiness—was still present. The sickly sweetness of fruit-flavoured chewing gum and the scent of talcum powder clogged his nostrils. His heart walloped the cage of his ribs and he was aware of the throb of blood. His hand tingled from the slap he had given to the boy’s back, that small compactness. According to a Chinese proverb, the thought swam vaguely into his mind, a man who saves the life of another becomes responsible for his future happiness. He felt a sob growing in his throat and was relieved when he found he could turn it into a dry cough.

  “You see what happens when you swallow things? How many times do I have to tell you?” the mother kneaded the child in her arms, pressing his face into her breast. He grizzled, muffled against her coat. Denis stood up and the woman glanced at him—“Thanks.” She couldn’t look at him directly but clutched the boy.

  Denis, with a feeling of invisibility, as though suddenly he was of no importance to this drama, looked down at his hands. They trembled and he stuffed them into his pockets, absently jingling loose change. He resumed his place in the queue. People moved aside to let him pass, stepping back in slight fear of the man who had intervened in the slow torpor of their lives.

  “Please go to cashier number seven,” the same automated voice delivered.

  “How can I help you?” She was young, younger than Laura, with fresh cheeks, too young to be cooped up in this place under the artificial lighting. They grinned at each other foolishly.

  “I’d like to pay this cheque in,” Denis said, as he handed over the cheque. While she scanned it, he wondered whether she had a boyfriend, whether she was planning a family, dreaming of babies.

  The note Laura left him that morning, the reason for the marmalade stain, was unlike any note she had ever left, it was terse; as distant as the cold impression her head had left in the pillow which he woke up to. It tied a small hard knot in his gut.

  “My appointment at the clinic is at 4.30. Get your own dinner.” The note was scrawled on a post-it which was stuck to the waste-disposal unit.

  The automatic doors opened but his way was blocked by a pushchair. As he squeezed past he glanced down into a small face; the eyes, a brittle frosted blue, expressed surprise and, he understood it now, wonderment: the intense wonderment of the very young.

  *

  When he arrived back after work, Laura was already at home, sitting on the settee in the lounge in the semi-darkness.

  “Why don’t you switch the light on?”

  “I didn’t feel like it.”

  “Isn’t there anything on telly?” Denis sat down heavily. “What about the news?”

  He flicked on the table lamp and caught sight of the two of them, seated at opposite ends of the settee, reflected in the blank TV screen. Their eyes were not visible, just an impression of the dark sockets, huge and melancholy.

  Slowly, as if moving with a great effort of will, Laura turned to look at him: “I went to the clinic,” she said, “it was a false alarm.”

  Denis looked down at the white seat covers, slowly smoothing out the wrinkles in a cushion cover.

  “False alarm,” he repeated. “Perhaps it’s just as well, eh?” He thought he should reach out to Laura, and offer some kind of consolation, but the expanse of upholstery stretched between them; a barrier of impenetrable softness.

  Paper Wraps Rock

  He went to visit them again. They remained, as usual, quite silent. He tried to imagine what they were thinking, so tight-lipped with their staring eyes, but they were impossible to fathom, as impenetrable as if they were enclosed deep in the permafrost or carved out of polished malachite.

  It began with a lesson in mathematics. He had no idea what age he was at the time. Memories slithered away from him, drawn by invisible threads.

  *

  “It’s simple,” the master said, as a fly buzzed in the topmost leaded lozenge of the tall gothic window. “Two times four is the same as four plus four.”

  He bent at the knee and brought his head level with the top of the desk. The irises of his eyes were of such a pale hazel that they looked yellow, like those of a dog. “It’s not a difficult sum, is it? It’s the same as one times eight. You just have to learn the four times tabl
e.”

  Mistakes were marked with slashes of red on the blue criss-cross of the exercise book. Stephen had written out the sums carefully, neatly copying the mysterious symbols. He wondered what he was expected to do with these figures. His mouth was filled with a ferrous bitterness from the rusty nib of a fountain pen.

  It was as he made his way home from school along a path bordered by bracken that he first made their acquaintance. They were shy of each other and fled at the first meeting. He with a pounding of pumps on the dusty path, they with no more than a whisper of dry fronds, a curving broken shadow disappearing with a shiver of grass blades.

  It was only later, when faced with the unbending grid of the maths page, that he was able to consider the effect of their sinuous shapes on the harsh lines of his figures, that he began to appreciate the beauty of their forms. Narrowing his eyes he saw a forest of Japanese trees in a snowy landscape. Two was a swan, four a yacht on a calm sea, three was a hinged circle, six—the whiplash of a spermatozoid tail. But it was 8 that coiled onto the page simulating perfectly their graceful departure.

  He was anxious to incorporate that understanding of the symmetry or asymmetry of figures into his mathematical studies and used coloured pencils to good effect. However, the improvements were met with red slashes.

  “I can’t make it any simpler than that: one times eight, four times two, four plus four. It’s all the same thing.”

  The master had a single rogue hair on his cheek that grew out of a tobacco-brown mole. It twitched as he beat out his words on the desk with an ink-stained ruler.

  “You’ll just have to stay behind until you’ve grasped it.” He stood by the desk and Stephen caught the acidic tang of tweed trousers. At that moment a pigeon chose to smash itself against the glass, leaving the dusty imprint of its wings on the window pane.

  The afternoon was fading to dusk when he reached the bracken path. They were waiting, but this time the encounter crackled with anticipation. For a tense moment they grew aware of his danger and he of theirs. After a furtive flickering investigation they seemed content for him to cautiously watch them from a distance. Later he considered their sullen stares, their faint reek of musk and decided to leave his homework undone, attempting instead to reproduce their watchful stillness in the mirror.