Skin

by Tobias Hill

  Alia crumples up her napkin, stands up. ‘Forget it. This isn’t working is it? Why not? All that bloody work and you all look like you’re sitting in – in Pizza Hut.’ She spits words at them, angry and scared. What happens next? she thinks, but she pushes the thought back.

  ‘Anyway.’ She drops the napkin on her plate. ‘I’m going to have a fag. Someone else can do the washing-up.’

  Alan calls after her. ‘You don’t smoke.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about me,’ she shouts back. Later they make love in her single bed and she bites his shoulders and cries at the taste of it.

  *

  The invitations arrive two weeks later, one for each of them: Professor Hayter invites you to THE LAST WORLD FEAST (Melanesia). Nine o’clock, Leap Day, evening dress. Lorna collects them up and tucks them next to the sitting-room clock.

  ‘Oh God, I can’t wait. Especially after last time – sorry, Alia. You know what I mean. I haven’t been able to think about revision, have you? What is Melanesian cuisine?’

  Alan stands up, wipes the palms of his hands against his cotton trousers. None of them say anything. After a while Lorna sits down, the breath going out of her in a long sigh.

  ‘I knew really.’ She picks a piece of hair off her cardigan. Smiles wanly. ‘Actually, I’ve been thinking about it for a while. Dreaming, sometimes. Are we going to go?’

  Alia drags on her cigarette. Waits. Kozo is sitting beside her on the rug, legs crossed, light catching off his glasses. They watch Lorna. She shivers and nods.

  ‘I’m afraid the main hors-d’oeuvre has failed to materialise. Dancing fish, Kozo, specially for you. But they died en route. Which leaves us with the three main roasts. Do you know the story of Vaté, who cooked the royal French banquet in 1671? Killed himself when the fish didn’t arrive on time. Imagine. I suggest red wine, but white is not unsympathetic. Alan?’

  ‘Red. Thanks.’ His voice is tight but under control. The ovens are still on and Angus’s kitchen is hot and wet. The four students sit tight in their seats, coats on. Kozo takes off his glasses and puts them down. They clatter against the dark lacquer of the table.

  ‘Professor Hayter? Where are they from? These roasts?’

  ‘Where are they from?’ Angus comes back to the table with an uncorked bottle, begins to pour, pauses. ‘Are you sure you want to know? You’re not worried about it, are you?’ Kozo stares.

  Alan shakes his head. ‘No. Not really. Should we be?’

  He smiles. ‘Of course not! We’re breaking down taboos, remember? Why on earth should we stop short of this one? How can we stop short now? Besides, it’s a very fine meat. When it’s properly basted. People tend to eat it rather plain. As if it were sacred. But there’s no shortage, eh? I’m not even sure where these were from, but probably somewhere on the Indian subcontinent, I hope that won’t offend Alia.’

  He begins to carve. ‘And do you know?’ He looks up, red-cheeked. ‘They have the most marvellous wishbones.’ Alia sits back, smoothes the linen napkin across her knees. Her stomach growls.

  Lorna still writes to her sometimes. Alia can hear her shrill laughter in the letters from airports and airplanes. She writes back short letters about small things. Once she saw a photo of Alan on a paper left in a train. It was the Financial Times, his face heavily lined but pink and grainy, so she can’t be sure if he looks old or if the photo is just bad. He was one in a group of company directors, shaking hands. The only one not smiling.

  Kozo went back to Japan two days after the last World Feast. She never saw him again. She wants to know what happened to him. She would like to know if any of them have ever talked, if they have found someone to listen. Because she never has. She misses them.

  And when they are both older, Alia meets Angus on a business trip to Prague. She sees the alcohol before she recognises him, the green wink of absinthe catching the bar lights. He is jealous of her success.

  ‘You look splendid, Alia. Oozing life. Like in the song, remember? No. What do you remember?’

  She shrugs. Feels the silk of her dress drag against her skin. ‘The feasts. Then you left. They didn’t like your teaching methods.’

  He leans forward, across the table, until she leans back. ‘Oh no. They could sweep my teaching under the carpet, that was all right. It was the kids, you see? They didn’t mind my wife disappearing. But they wouldn’t stop asking about the kids. Pig-ignorant, porky little piggies. I lied, Alia.’

  She stands back, away from the small glitter of his eyes. ‘What did you lie about, Angus?’ He tips his head sideways, grins.

  ‘What does it matter? One little white porkie pie. Meat’s meat. Christ!’ He looks at the bar clock. ‘Lunchtime already. I must go. The world awaits, eh?’

  She moves away from his kiss. She doesn’t shake his hand. They have nothing in common. He walks to the bar door and waves. She watches the sunlight rose-pink through his fingers and holds her arms together tight.

  Zoo

  ‘Anja? We have to go now.’

  However hard she tries, she can never get the smell of animals off her body. She likes that. It’s what she takes out with her from the cages and enclosures, into the city where the people are. Today it’s the scent of night mammals, the amazed eyes of lemurs and bush-babies. She trusts their closeness. Like an address sewn into a child’s clothes.

  But she must be clean. Her skin is ruddy with the water’s heat. She scrubs at pores and scar-tissues. For a moment the water goes slack and cold and she thinks of prisons, the smell of trapped sweat and cheap soap. Then the warmth comes back. She takes her time. Wrings her hair out into a long, dark rope.

  ‘Anja, we have to go.’

  The extractor-fan is jammed open, and through it she can see a crack of evening skyline, canal mist hanging over the squat green turrets of the Elephant House. This is still new to her, the sense of the zoo around her, a place without people. It helps her breathe. There is the sound of gulls scavenging, their drawl and mewl. The distant bellow of the bull oryx near Snowdon’s Aviary. Someone calling up for her, calling her name.

  She leans out from the shower’s spray to see. Alexis is down by the laboratories, a lanky figure in zoo overalls, his voice still echoing along the concrete walls. The wolf keeper is with him, a larger outline, standing back in the half-dark. Anja tries to remember his name. She turns off the water and buries her face in a towel, requiring herself to be ready. Breathing into the smell of furs.

  ‘Hello beautiful girl. Wanna dance?’

  She shakes her head, hair still wet against her neck. The music is getting louder. She can feel the beat against her ribcage. There are men in the crowd, watching her, moving towards her and away. It reminds her of shark cages. The brickwork arches of the club shake as a train goes over, east towards Caledonian Road.

  She drinks tonic without gin. Next to her at the chrome-topped bar a boy in yellow jeans orders frozen vodka. She can smell it as it melts. Bitter, like traffic fumes. Against her neck she can feel the pendant of her mother’s wedding-ring. She is still cold from the streets outside and the plain gold is warmer than her skin. She sits, hands resting on knees, watching the crowd.

  The wolf keeper is dancing, she can see his bulk and the way space opens around him. He smiles at her, teeth white through the beard. His name is Shamash. Alexis introduced them in the car: Anja, Shamash, Shamash, Anja. She knows nothing else about him. He looks different outside the zoo, less animal, more like someone who has come from somewhere, a family, a place of birth. She looks round for Alexis but he has been taken in by the crush of bodies and voices.

  Anja looks away from the crowd. A draught of air passes over her and she feels a quick wave of nausea at the smell of spilt lager and marijuana. Her muscles shiver with the vibrations of bass music. She wonders how long it would take to get out, if she had to. The crowd is thickest by the entrance, where two bouncers in puffa-jackets frisk down the men one by one. A woman with blonde dreadlocks opens out her pockets onto a s
ide-table. Anja looks round for a fire-escape, but she can see nothing beyond the slow mosh of people. She gags once and then breathes in slowly, holding the bar to keep herself still until the claustrophobia passes.

  The boy with yellow jeans isn’t drinking. His vodka is almost melted, the last ice like flaws in quartz. She looks down at the glass wrapped in her own hands. The cold hurts her palms.

  She makes herself finish the tonic water. Then she pushes gently through to the door and goes outside. From the club entrance she can see Camden Lock, late-night traffic hooting at the junctions and the blue light of the Telecom Tower above them, in towards the centre of London. When she looks up there are no clouds. The sky is dark and she can make out stars. She stands there with her head back, smelling the sour autumn cold. It makes her think of Helsinki, the city she no longer thinks of as home, only the place she came from. Her mother’s voice, worrying holes in the dark with its intelligence:

  Come on, be more precise, Anja. It’s not just rain. What is it? Don’t they teach you anything now?

  Mother, please. I don’t need to know about rain. It’s so cold. Can’t we watch from inside?

  Five minutes. Well. Serein: a fine rain falling from a cloudless sky after sunset. So now you know, yes? Next time you won’t get wet guessing.

  It starts to rain. Her bladder hurts. There are toilet cabins off towards the road, white trailer cabins on an unlit stretch of carpark. Anja trudges over to them, but the Women’s is locked and unlit. The smell of chemicals and human sewage disgusts her. She waits until she’s sure the Men’s is empty, drizzle cold against her cheeks, then goes in. She sits and reads the graffiti, male and slightly alien: SUPERFLY ARE COMING, SPURS KICK HAMMERS, SCREWDRIVER RULES. She’s on the way back out when she catches a glitter of green from the corners of her eyes. Like sequins.

  She goes back in, past the urinals. By the wall is a sprinkling of particles, smaller than sequins. Anja picks one up, then another, turning them on the tips of her fingers. The particles are iridescent, finely ribbed, and familiar to her. It takes her a moment to recognise them in this alien place. The feathers of green hummingbirds. She screws up her eyes at the hairline shafts, the texture of vanes. They fall away from the movement of her breath and the passage of air across her hands.

  The wolves are watching her. Three of them, like Alsatians but not smiling like Alsatians. Meat-eaters looking at meat. Their eyes are the colour of urine. Anja works with her back to them.

  ‘Look at them,’ says Alexis. ‘They’re bloody watching us. Sleekit creatures.’ He leans on his rake and huffs at them, body-warmth condensing in a cloud of white breath.

  ‘Wolves do not attack healthy adult humans. This is a rural myth. There is no proof of it.’

  She distrusts her English. Not her competence, but what it reveals. Emotion and accent, the guttural vowels which make people ask questions. Alexis asks few questions. It makes them close in a way that isn’t friendship but something less permanent, a relationship defined by privacies.

  ‘Is that a fact?’ Alexis is lighting a cigarette, cupping it in his hands. Not really listening. The electric motor of a zookeeper’s buggy whines in the distance.

  They’re up by the end of Wolf Wood, clearing leaves off a steep path down to the Bird Houses. Anja has never seen anyone up here except the pensioners, who come to fall asleep in the warmth and birdsong of the buildings. And the wolf keeper. She looks up for his animals but they’ve gone, back into the trees, she can’t even see their eyes. Parrots scream and tussle on the far side of the incubation rooms.

  She concentrates on scraping leaves off the tarmac. The ground is slippery with impacted mulch. Anja keeps her feet spread, leaning into the gradient for support. It’s easier than ice, and she is used to ice, her body remembers it. She is sure she won’t fall.

  ‘Bird House next.’ Alexis talks while she works. She doesn’t mind. This is their routine. She is the new girl, so she does the work. ‘I never did like the birds, you know? They’re a bit ghostly. The way they, you know, fly. God, what a fag-end, arse-end of a day. Did you like it last night, though? What a rave, eh?’

  She nods. There is a pattern in the leaves. A serrated heart, repeated again and again. She rakes it apart and piles it up against the wooden fence.

  ‘So. You liked the Wolfman?’

  Anja looks up, surprised. Alexis squats on his lanky haunches, watching her through screwed-up eyes, pulling on his cigarette. She shakes her head.

  ‘You know, his bird and my bird are best pals.’

  She can’t help smiling. ‘I think the only birds you have are waiting for you to clean their shit off the floor.’ Alexis gets up, stretches. The path is cleared, wet macadam grey with reflections of cloud.

  Alexis slips as they walk down the slope. Anja catches him as he falls. She has never touched him before. He’s thin enough that she can pull him up, his arm bony and hot inside the damp overalls. They wait in the Bird House while he catches his breath.

  ‘I’ll be OK.’ Behind them hornbills creak and hoot in the undergrowth of their cages. ‘I think I’m coming down with something, though.’

  She sits back, hands in coat pockets. It’s not something they’ve talked about, his illness. Anja only knows what she has noticed. The bruised skin, the way he boils tapwater before drinking. Five weeks ago, the day she arrived, Alexis closed the heel of his hand in a cage-hinge. Anja watched the way he reared away from his own blood, forcing the fist into his pocket to clot. Hiding it from her. Now she doesn’t know what to say. She has never been good with people.

  The incessance of the birds makes her tired. She closes her eyes, resting them.

  ‘What happens to the feathers?’

  Alexis shifts beside her. She can feel him, warm and slight against her side. ‘What, hen?’

  ‘From the birds. Condors and ostriches and hummingbirds. Mountains of feathers. Do we burn them? Or do they go to the gift shop?’

  ‘No. I don’t know. Who cares?’

  He leans against her to push himself upright. She listens to the clank of his bucket and the flutter of panicked birds.

  ‘Aw, shite. What a waste.’

  Anja opens her eyes, goes over to him. There is a dead bird on the cage floor, still huddled against the bars. Alexis opens the aviary, lifts the small body out. Anja holds it in both hands while he locks up. She can hardly feel it through her gloves. Its plumage is brilliant as red neon in the half-light.

  ‘Deaths?’

  The big zoo kitchen smells of screw-worm, sweet like shrimp. On a chipped blackboard the head keeper is writing 4/11 pelican juv. on Sarah’s not foxes. Through the crowd Anja can see only the back of his head, strands of hair gelled across pale, freckled skin.

  ‘One black widow. Male, healthy, nine months old.’

  ‘Cause?’

  ‘Cannibalism.’

  ‘Sexual?’

  ‘Stress. I think stress.’

  Chalk clacks against the board like a typewriter. It’s not a crowd, thinks Anja. These are people like me. They are not at home with one another. They hate the hard intelligence of this language. They want to be out of here. With the animals.

  The man who talks about spiders is smiling down at his Doc Marten’s. He has a point of red high on each cheekbone; otherwise his skin is the colour of egg-whites. He lounges against a steel cutting surface, hands folded tight across his chest. Anja knows what he is thinking: he is blaming them. In some way it is their fault, and he would like them to know it. If it brought the spider back, he would make them pay. Anja can see it in the way he stares away from them.

  She moves back against the window. The glass is crammed with stickers: WORLD WILDLIFE FUND, BELIZE JAGUAR RESERVATION, ANCHORAGE ZOO.

  There are children outside, two Japanese girls and a boy. They stare in at the keepers, pointing and laughing. Anja waves back, pulls a face.

  ‘There was a bird died too. Up in the Bird House.’

  She turns back at the sound of Alex
is’s voice. Someone laughs, an overweight volunteer with a gold neck-chain and grizzled throat.

  ‘Details.’

  ‘A red bird. About so long. Tropical.’

  ‘Order? Genus? Species?’

  Anja can see the head keeper’s face now. The blood is building up around the dissolved-blue of his eyes. It feels like a crowd around her now, she can feel the bright eyes on Alexis. Like a classroom. She is not good with crowds, and she has never liked classrooms.

  She puts up her hand. ‘Sir.’ In front of her a tall girl in a green army sweater moves away.

  ‘Sex, Alexis? Or were you confused about its sex?’ The laughter spreads. An illicit, anxious excitement.

  She raises her voice. ‘Sir.’

  Now he sees her. His irises look like they have been in water for a long time, thin and blue against the blood. ‘Yes? You’re new. What’s your name?’

  ‘Anja Kivinen.’

  He nods once. ‘The live-in volunteer. From Finland.’

  ‘Yes. It was a King Bird of Paradise. I found it, in fact. Alexis was also working in the Tropical Bird House.’

  He is frowning at her. As if he can’t understand why she is talking. Then he shrugs and turns back to the board. ‘Cause of death?’

  ‘Age. Lots of the birds in there are old.’ The others are quiet now. Anja can hear a radio on in the background, the manic chatter of airtime advertising. ‘The indoor cages are a kind of retirement home for them.’

  ‘Good.’ Something roars outside. The hot-mouthed boredom of a lion. The head keeper stops writing and looks round. His voice is deadpan.

  ‘Tomorrow will be busy. The sea-water tankers have already left Dover, we’ll need people at the Aquarium first thing tomorrow. I want two volunteers on hand up at the Lion Enclosure for the delivery of our first liger, her name is Salar, she’ll be on loan for six months from Johannesburg. And the Chinese alligators are going home, the curator of reptiles will need four helpers with that. Night keepers should be ready in five minutes. The rest of you have a good evening.’