The Secret Life of the Panda

by Nick Jackson

  They coiled in on themselves—compact, purposeful, precise. Their focus was as sharp as a pin-prick of light. He wondered what it was that they were poised for, heads slightly raised, occasionally tasting the air with a swift tongue.

  He tried to tell Daryl Kittle about them, as they were changing for sport.

  “They’re really beautiful. It’s incredible to watch them.”

  Daryl was busy picking minute clods of earth off his boot-laces.

  “You should come and see.”

  “See what?”

  “The adders on the heath. I know a place.”

  “They’re poisonous, aren’t they?” He shrugged off his shirt exposing a pale blue-white chest.

  “Maybe, but they don’t bite.”

  “Our dog got bitten by an adder.” Daryl sucked in his stomach so that the line of the ribs stood out above his hollowed belly.

  Stephen struggled into a pair of shorts that were too small round the waist and the elastic dug into his flesh. He stole a sidelong glance at the other boy.

  “What are you looking at, lard face?” Daryl frowned.

  “Come and see. I’ll show you where they are.”

  “You’re obsessed with those snakes, aren’t you?”

  “What’s ‘obsessed’?”

  *

  Dear Mrs Goldberry

  As you may be aware, Stephen has been having some problems at school, particularly in maths. He appears to have no grasp of quite basic concepts which I am afraid may hold him back in academic terms. We feel some remedial assistance may be appropriate and hope we can count on your encouragement in the home setting.

  Yours sincerely

  J Stork

  *

  As he sat at his desk, Stephen found that it was impossible to focus on the times tables. He could see no point in the sequence of numbers and no purpose in memorising them. He tried closing his eyes in an effort to visualise the sequence, to fix it in his mind, but the image imprinted on his retina was a monochrome coil that unwound itself with the mechanical fluidity of a well-oiled bicycle chain.

  “When I set homework I expect it to be done.”

  Stephen got a whiff of smoky tweed.

  “In a few years time you’ll be going to secondary school. You have to know how to do simple sums otherwise you’ll be punished—made to stand in the corner all day with your feet in the sand bucket.

  “Well,” he sighed at the hopelessness of the case, “I’ve done my best. Perhaps Mrs Bister will be able to sort out your problems.”

  *

  Dear Mrs Goldberry

  I am sorry to say that, in addition to his lack of involvement in class activities, Stephen is displaying a marked tendency to become withdrawn. I cannot emphasise too strongly the importance of co-operating and engaging with other children in the school environment. We consider that too much time on his own could lead Stephen into unhealthy practices and wish to have your approval and support in limiting his solitary behaviour. I have written to the school psychologist, Fiona Bister, with a view to carrying out a programme of psychometric testing to see if we can get to the bottom of Stephen’s difficulties. Could you also please ensure that Stephen remembers to bring his sports’ kit on Wednesday afternoons.

  Yours sincerely

  J Stork

  *

  Mrs Bister showed him a series of ink-blots and asked him to describe what he saw. Her softly probing questions seemed to go with the sickly smell of lavender and the fluffy angora of her pastel cardigan. She marked responses to the ink-blots on a grid that reminded him of the maths book. She wrote spidery figures in boxes, and scribbled comments.

  “What do you see in this picture?”

  “A man with a tall hat.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No, only there’s a hole in his face.”

  “And this one?”

  “A horse’s head.”

  He did not try to define the expression of sadness or the tears that were slowly melting the face away. The flesh was pouring off the face, but he didn’t think Mrs Bister would be able to do much with this information so he kept his mouth shut.

  “What about this one?”

  He stared at the image and felt the blood rush to his face. Mrs Bister watched him closely.

  *

  They sat in a field that perhaps had once been a wood or a heath. The meadow was full of ragwort and poppies and lumpy with chunks of concrete. It was now surrounded by new houses in pale red brick which all had the same identical white porches with frosted glass and little black bell pushes. As well as Daryl Kittle there was his sister, whom Stephen had only seen once before behind the banisters of the Kittle’s new hallway.

  “This means scissors,” said Daryl. “And this is a stone.” He punched the dry grass down. “And stone beats scissors because it blunts them. Paper wraps stone and fire burns paper.”

  In no time Stephen was down to his vest and pants. He had a rancid taste in his mouth like old dock leaves and his heart thumped.

  Daryl, who seemed to be in charge of the rules, still had his shirt and trousers on while his sister squirmed in her knickers, trying to avoid the stinging nettles.

  “OK, paper wraps stone,” said Daryl and took off his tie.

  His sister put her pink fists behind her back and squeezed her eyes closed.

  “One…two…three… Fire burns paper.”

  “It’s not paper it’s scissors,” she said and burst into tears.

  “You’re lying and you have to take off your knickers.”

  *

  “And here?” Mrs Bister was on to the next image.

  “A blob.”

  As he watched, he saw that it was evolving into a thing with clinkered flanks, a long tail and a gaze in which flecks of fire quivered and the pupils contracted to pin-points.

  It was a creature that knew nothing of time. Hours and minutes were the same as days and weeks; months the same as years. Children and trees grew; houses tumbled and people became old and died.

  Over hundreds of years it had basked in the sun’s light. As volcanoes erupted, it lifted its pointed head and maybe shifted a coil. As the earth cracked open, it slithered aside a little and carried on staring blankly at the sky.

  *

  She showed him pictures: a woman’s head with no mouth; a pig without a tail. “Can you draw the mouth, the tail?”

  A smiling face had no eyes; another had no nose; a rabbit was missing an ear; a child had no spoon. Kettles poured with no handles, penknives had no rivets. And numbers: “Draw the symbol that matches the number. Now continue the sequence: two, four, six…

  “Write the answer in this box, no, no, this box.”

  He slowly began to trace a seven in the box and looked up for confirmation but Mrs Bister’s expression was blank, unreadable.

  “Here you need to see the pattern,” she said. “Tell me which is different.”

  The boxes contained smatterings of dots. Were they figures? His sight was becoming blurred and he began to feel a heavy sleepiness weighing his limbs down.

  “Now look at this sequence. What number should I put here?”

  All he could see was a trail of ant-like forms, curiously mobile hieroglyphs, that trailed across the white page.

  “They’re small.”

  She scrutinised the face in front of her. She was not unkind, not especially impatient, but it was a long drive to the next school and it would be nice to be back home early as she was expecting a parcel. She glanced down at her watch.

  “Time’s up.”

  She scribbled a score on the form which reflected—she couldn’t help the thought as it flashed across her mind—the slightly vacant look in his eyes; the occupants of this house had decamped to another planet.

  *

  In the boys’ lavatories it was cold. The entrance was along a passageway that turned a sharp right angle so that what was beyond could not be seen from the playground. The smell was acidic: a sharp stab of uri
ne and ammonia crystals into the sinuses. Three boys turned towards him as he sidled in. He fought the urge to turn and run; the need to pee was too strong. He faced the blinding white wall of porcelain. It impressed dark blurs on his retina.

  “Are you a bender?”

  He tried to pee quickly, to get it over with.

  “Hey, lard face, I’m talking to you.” Daryl Kittle had become very beautiful since the last time they had met. His hair was very black and glossy and his teeth were whiter than the porcelain.

  The smell of bleach jabbed his nostrils, sending needles of pain into his eyes.

  “Are you circumcised? Because we can arrange it for you, cheap; it’ll be a quick job, nice and tidy.”

  Stephen’s eye caught the quick dull gleam of a knife. Three bodies jostled for position behind him. Someone kicked him in the back of the knees. He collapsed forwards, his feet slipping into the trough, palms flat against the slippery wall. With one arm twisted behind his back, he craned round. They made eye contact. Daryl’s face was a mask, behind which the eyes swivelled. When he blinked, blood pulsed through the delicate capillaries of his eyelids; expressionless grey eyes, each iris a simulacrum of the broken pattern of dots in a chronometric test.

  “Oi!” The caretaker stood there in a brown coat that came down to his knees. “What are you up to?”

  “Nothing, mister.” Daryl surreptitiously dropped the knife and kicked it into a dark corner.

  “Well get lost then, the lot of you.”

  As he followed the others out, Stephen bent to pick up the knife, slipping it into his pocket as he left the lavatories.

  *

  As he approached their usual territory, he sensed that something was not right. The snakes weaved a restless path between the fronds of bracken. It took a minute or two to absorb the details of the scene: broken in three places, fixed with thick galvanised nails to a fence post, the corpse dangled, head down, limp like an oily rag. The prismatic brilliance of its belly washed to a pale ash grey.

  Footsteps crunched behind him.

  “Oh, look what someone’s done to one of your precious little friends. Shame isn’t it?” Daryl’s grin was a sliver of white between tight lips as he strutted towards Stephen, his brown fists solid as rocks, as though he knew the rules to this game too.

  “It was you?”

  “Nasty, slithering, twisted things if you ask me. They should be exterminated. If I catch any more of the little buggers…”

  Stephen’s ears roared softly. He moved as slowly as a machine, aware only of the weight in his pocket.

  *

  Dear Mrs Goldberry

  I am, of course, concerned about your son’s lack of progress in the classroom. We have tried to help, given his obvious need for remedial assistance and his disturbed mental state, but we feel we are unable to justify his inclusion in normal school activities after his unprovoked knife attack on another pupil. I enclose a detailed assessment of Stephen’s psychological condition as prepared by Fiona Bister which I hope will help you in exploring the options for your son’s future.

  Yours sincerely

  J Stork

  *

  In ten thousand years, he thought, all that will have happened is that the rocks will have eroded away a little more. Flints, the grey-white nodules of igneous rock, will have been pounded by the tides, broken down into the smallest grains of sand. When the land masses shift, the fields will be a beach once again, washed by salt water. Perhaps, a hundred thousand years after that, the earth will explode and the fragments will be burned up in the molten core of the sun.

  In some part of his mind that he had ceased to pay significant attention to, a small voice was repeating a sequence of numbers. It stumbled over them, sometimes repeating or skipping like a badly-learned catechism. He felt a deep sense of pity for the small voice, at the same time as he despised it.

  He lay in bed with the light off, listening to the sound of the TV from downstairs. The low murmur of voices was soothing. He took the knife and made a small cut on each wrist, surprised at the warm slick flow of stickiness over the bedclothes. In the light of the streetlamps he watched the way the tiny flaps of skin opened and closed as if revealing a new shiny skin beneath. He pressed deeper with the knife, wondering at the lack of pain, as in a dream. His head throbbed with the pressure of blood and his skin seemed tight, as if he could release himself into a new form, a more fluid existence.

  *

  When Mrs Goldberry went to her son’s room the following morning, she found the bed-clothes tangled around something sinuous and slippery: a greyish discarded knot that she couldn’t bring herself to examine too closely. “What has he been doing?” she wondered aloud. Her son Stephen was not in his room nor in any other place they searched.

  Boys’ Games

  Clavel looks up at a line of three stars. Orion’s belt? He isn’t sure. If only he’d studied the stars when he had the chance.

  The hard ferrous bitterness dries his tongue, sucking out the moisture. The metallic edge on his teeth sets them vibrating. The thrust of the metal shaft, if it were to advance by another millimetre, would make him want to retch.

  It reminds him of a spoon: a small sharp-edged spoon, once silver-plated but worn down by generations of infants taking medicine. The spoon, containing foul lemon-flavoured liquid was thrust into his mouth: “Swallow!” And with that his mother slapped him between the shoulder blades. The demands of six other children made her brisk, unsympathetic. But he knew he was loved; her hair showered over his face as she tucked him into his blankets, “My Rubén, Rubencito.”

  “Sweet dreams.” She always left a light burning to save him from his nightmares.

  *

  Down in the river a group of boys were playing in the shade of the trees. The branches dipped into the current, a constant movement of leaves and water. The boys were engaged with something beneath the surface of the water, something by which they were both attracted and repelled. They approached it, peering into the water to see beyond the broken reflections of clouds to the dim silted bottom where something moved. They jumped backwards with a hoarse shout, slapping the water and kicking out, churning the mud, then slowly they returned to the object of their fascination.

  Captain Bordón watched as they played, wondering what it was that fascinated them. He would have gone to see but he was afraid, afraid that they’d look at him with blank, hostile eyes. Strange that he should be able to issue orders to his men and command them, but that he should feel so shy with these boys. He wondered whether it was because with the men he had a duty to perform, a reason for communicating. Even so, if the men were relaxing, playing cards or sharing a cigarette, he blushed if they looked at him. No, he couldn’t investigate the small occupation of the boys.

  He caught the odour of rotting fruit mingling with the fainter pungency of excrement. At the back of the guard hut was the latrine used by all of the men except Bordón, who thrashed his way into a thicket of bamboo whenever he felt the urge. The two aspects of army life he had never been able to adapt to were the latrines and the communal bathing. Some part of him was jealous of the men for their joy in each other’s company and acceptance of each other’s bodies; Bordón bathed by himself after dark.

  He turned his attention to the prisoner who had been shackled in the shade of a mango tree. He had been detained the night before as he tried to cross the checkpoint. Now he lounged in the shade, his long legs stretched before him, brushing away the flies that crawled on his face and clustered at his lips.

  Of course, Bordón thought, the man was not a peasant labourer, despite his ragged clothes. He’d been wearing a straw hat, coming apart at the edges, a loose shirt of sisal fibre and a July 26 armband. He had raised a deferential arm against the harsh glare of the jeep’s headlamps. They could smell the pigs and goats on his sandals. But it wasn’t the man’s true smell; it wasn’t ingrained in his skin, part of the substance of his sweat. Bordón could sniff out a bourgeois intellectual a
lright.

  The man’s hands, with their delicate fingers, could never have wielded a machete in the bush. His size alone, forced into the tight peasant shirt and pants, betrayed his origins.

  Bordón ran a finger inside his collar to loosen it and advanced on the prisoner.

  *

  At the village school they called him Chino because of the narrow ovals of his eyes like the glittering carapaces of beetles, so dark that they seemed opaque. When Rubén and the other boys went to swim in the river after school, he stood on the bank watching or crouched in a tree over the water, looking down. “I’m not allowed to swim,” he’d said once and so they teased him: “El Chino can’t swim, his mother won’t let him.”

  He affected interest in some small creature he had found crawling on the branch of a tree but out of the corner of his eye he observed Rubén and his friends—hung around in the background, his hair damp in the humid heat, his crumpled shirt buttoned at the neck. It seemed that he was always there, but just as he couldn’t swim he couldn’t play football, so he was never part of the ‘gang’.

  They always ate lunch—the packages of food prepared by their mothers—in the schoolyard: rice and beans, chicken livers or fried plantain. Chino always had a plain grey glob of steamed maize dough or ‘masa’ wrapped in a banana leaf which he tried to hide, unwrapping it stealthily in a corner and cramming it into his mouth so that his eyes bulged as he chewed.

  One hot afternoon Chino in his sweat-stained shirt with his doughy smell sat close-by, but not so close that it looked as though he was part of the gang.

  “What are you eating, Chino?” Pato asked him suddenly.