Skin

by Tobias Hill

  Anja is the last to leave. She puts together morning feed while the closing-time klaxon echoes over Albert Road and Regent’s Park. Eel and margarine for the otters, ox-hearts and carrots for the kiwis. She likes it when the others have all gone. She feels as if she has won something.

  When there is no work left to do she switches off the radio, locks up, turns out the lights. The dark is drawing in outside. She stands still and lets her eyes adjust until she can see Goat Hill, a derelict concrete hulk against the glow of London. When she walks, animals flutter around her in the gloom, eyes like road-studs. Nervous and vulnerable, on the edge of sleep.

  In Anja’s dream there are animals moving through the trees. Slow with inertia, the way big creatures move, and these are big enough that she is looking up at them through a wicker of branches. She can smell the white clouds of their breath, the whoosh of it like nightclub ventilators. Blood and pine, intimate as the scent of her own skin. She wonders if they can smell her. She flinches in the cold dark of her rented room.

  But they are almost past now, herded away between the cold pines. They’re moving towards something, a sound of – what? A voice? Like wind across a bottle’s mouth.

  It’s important to make it out. She pushes through the wings of firs. A glitter of feathers falls around her, fine as ice particles, itchy against her bare skin. There is a sound of cars, the slow sigh of distant traffic. And someone is crying through the trees.

  She can almost see him now, but she has to brush the feathers off her thighs, her skin is green and gummed with them. When she looks up again there is only stupendous sunlight, the sound of bells from St Mark’s Church, the birds of prey screaming for their six o’clock meat.

  The tank is full of dead branches and the green coils of ferns. Hanging from the branches are two household air-fresheners. A sticker on the glass in the public gallery says VENOMOUS SNAKE TEMPORARILY REMOVED.

  ‘Yes. Lovely new skin. You can hear it. Can you hear?’

  Anja turns round. The curator of reptiles is sitting on a swivel chair, too low for the laboratory table. He is skinning a dead snake lengthways. It sounds like a zip opening. ‘Yes. Can you find the cast-off in there?’ He smiles quickly up at her without seeing. ‘Good girl.’

  The ferns are dense, pushing condensation against the glass. Anja can see the undersides of fronds, stippled with seeds.

  ‘There are no more snakes in here?’

  She isn’t scared; she asks because people make mistakes. Especially people who look without seeing.

  He laughs, a dry hiss. Alexis says he eats screw-worm. Alexis says people can spend too long with the animals they love. ‘I should think not. Why not use long forceps? They’re around here somewhere, by the skins, possibly? Got them?’

  She pushes between the fractals of leaves. There is no old snakeskin in the tank, only odd arrangements of mouse bones, digested or disgorged. The smell of pine freshener reminds Anja of the dream. She pulls her head away, snaps the tank-top shut. ‘There is nothing in here.’

  The man at the workbench looks up again. Striplight catches off his glasses, glaring and surprised. ‘Not again. Are you sure, really? Oh well. Zoo gremlins.’ He is concentrating on the dissection, rambling. ‘It may turn up, that happens too, sometimes. For the moment we’ll blame it on the gremlins, shall we? Never mind.’

  He lifts the new skin away in his hand. The scales are burnished, graded from bottle-green to the blue of deep water along the scrolled length. Anja touches her fingers against its cool smoothness.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ she says, and the curator of reptiles nods, pleased. ‘It is, isn’t it? I’m so glad you like it. Yes.’ He sighs, takes off his glasses. His eyes are almost hidden under draping epicanthal folds. ‘It is a very beautiful thing.’ They smile together in the prison-grey laboratory. There is no sound except the chirr of locusts in their long, bright tanks.

  ‘Shamash. It’s a nice name.’

  The wind catches at her voice. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even look up at her from the half-open crates of sprats. The sunlit whitewash of the Penguin Pool hurts her eyes.

  ‘It’s not Arabic, is it? Is it Sanskrit?’ She feels a tug of feeling when he doesn’t speak. Just a little hurt.

  She leans her head back; the sky is cloudless. Airplanes wink in the high atmosphere. Seagulls criss-cross, closer in. They loiter in the trees and on the penguin slides. The breeze pushes at their feathers as they wail for feeding time.

  She sighs and looks back down. The wolf keeper is watching her; now he looks away. Scatters a handful of fish. ‘How do you like it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The zoo.’ She feels an easing in herself at the small irrelevance of his question. This is not simple for him either, this talking, she thinks.

  ‘I like it very much.’ She reaches into the crates. Cold fish the colour of tin slip between her fingers. She can’t think of anything else to say. Around the pool penguins waddle for fish-heads, clumsy on the walkways, streamlined in the murky water. Seagulls glide between them, lean and hungry.

  ‘I didn’t know you worked down here.’

  ‘Sometimes.’ He nods at the gulls. ‘Look at them.’ She leans on the wall and peers down. Two big herring gulls squabble in mid-air. The penguins wait, lazy and aloof. The wolf keeper leans beside her. She looks at him. ‘So?’

  ‘The whole zoo is like this. Seagulls eat the penguins’ food, herons steal what we give to the pelicans. Starlings steal everything and shit on the rest. The mice eat what’s left and the kestrels eat the mice.’ His voice is accented, a slight lilt. Anja thinks it is something Middle Eastern. ‘Foxes come in and kill newborns. Rats eat the eggs.’

  He smiles at her. Like the other night. His teeth are very white. ‘You see how it is. We think we’re here to keep the animals in, when all we do is try to keep them out.’ He looks away, breath clouding slightly in the cold air. ‘It’s ironic. If nature is outside trying to get in, what do we have locked up in the cages?’

  ‘Did you know someone steals snakeskins?’

  He looks at her without expression. Waiting. She turns right round to look at him. Keeps her voice down. ‘It’s you. Isn’t it?’

  ‘No. It’s the feather man.’ He doesn’t smile.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The feather man. He takes what he likes. Usually it has been feathers. Sometimes snakeskins. Nothing alive. Mostly at night. He never does any harm.’

  ‘Have you seen him?’ The wolf keeper shakes his head, no. ‘Is he real?’

  He smiles. ‘I think so. Or it could be the zoo gremlins. What do you think?’ She stands there, looking at him. He waits, smiling, while the seabirds wheel around them.

  ‘Truth, dare or promise?’

  ‘Truth, dare, kiss or promise. Duh.’ Through a mist of afternoon drizzle comes the grieving of a donkey from the Children’s Zoo. ‘Dare.’

  ‘I dare you to put your hand in there.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Chicken.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Chicken. Buk. Buk-buk-buk.’

  Laughter. Spider-monkeys hang upside-down from the cage roof, five-limbed, watching. The boy looks up at them through thick glasses and then away, wretched. Anja leans on her broom and smiles back when his eyes fall on her. But he doesn’t notice; she’s too far away. Or his eyes are too weak. She prefers to think that she is too far away. The second boy laughs again, high and cocky.

  Someone grabs her arm from behind. She twists out of the grip and round. Her fist is tight against her side, ready to hit out.

  It’s Alexis. She shrugs away from him. He snatches his hands back, jeering, like the boy. ‘Hey! Hey. It’s me, OK? I’m not going to eat you and I don’t want a shag.’ He holds out one hand again, palm up. ‘Smell: no blood, no pheromones.’

  She tries a smile. It’s not an apology. She has nothing to apologise for. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I want to show you something. Are you coming or not?’

 
; She goes with him. The character of the zoo changes as they move away from the public paths, back into the service areas and laboratory yards. Room-sized wooden boxes are piled against walls, airholes punched in their sides. There is a faint smell of incinerators. Behind the back of the Aquarium is a mountain of pale yellow sand, crusted with rain.

  ‘It’s in here. Anja.’ His voice is dull with hurt. She turns away from him and peers up through the drizzle at the squat, grey building. It looks like a weapons silo. There is a winch-hook on the third floor, heavy and rusted. The sign on the wall says HAZCHEM LABORATORY R1 (FELINES). Outside is a skip full of broken caging and orange plastic bottles.

  She sighs. ‘What are we doing here, Alexis?’ For a moment she feels like the boy by the monkey cage. Wretched with her own fear. Alexis touches her arm again and she lets him, relaxing as they go in. She is surprised that the door is unlocked. The corridor and then the room are full of people.

  There is a monster lying on the operating table. Anja can’t take her eyes off it. Its face hates her and loves her, like the wolves, massive and carnivorous.

  ‘God. God.’ She is talking to herself. Alexis is whispering in her ear, shrill and excited, but she can’t hear what he’s saying. She pushes gently through the crowd, wanting to get near.

  The feline body is too long for the table, more than ten feet, so that the bearded, maned head is lolled back towards Anja. Upside-down the jaws leer open, fangs stained lurid kidney-reds and arterial blues. The smell of half-digested meat and formalin makes her want to retch. She turns away, voices whispering around her.

  ‘Look at it. Head like a bloody dustbin lid.’

  ‘What happens now? What? But something has to happen. Animals don’t just die –’

  Another voice, the head keeper, unfamiliar with stress. ‘Well for Christ’s sake, I can’t see a thing wrong. This morning she was behaving perfectly, she looked wonderful. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.’

  ‘It won’t now, anyway. She’s been dead for almost four hours.’

  Anja looks up. The lab zoologist is walking round the table, hands moving across the liger’s barred fur. Pushing against internal organs. She stops in front of Anja and stands back, next to the head keeper.

  ‘They want her back at Jo’burg for analysis. We may be liable or not. She’s not young, she’s zoo-born, and she’s a crossbreed with reduced life expectancy. But I can’t find out for certain without opening her up. What do you want me to do?’

  They go on talking, quiet and urgent. Anja can recognise faces in the crowd now; the white-faced man from the Insect House, the volunteer with the gold neck-chain, bulky in a hooded parka. The whole zoo is here, she thinks. Everyone except the animals. Then the head keeper is shouting into her face. Ordering them all out.

  She stays as long as she can, a matter of seconds, just to look. To keep it in her mind. The eyes are almost closed, orange crescents set deep into the lids and fur and sockets. She feels a tug of greed, a wanting to possess. The fur is banded with diffused lights and shadows.

  Then the crowd is pushing, pulling her along. Alexis is waiting outside. It’s already getting dark and the rain has stopped. They walk back towards the Monkey Houses.

  ‘What do you think happened?’

  He shrugs. ‘Animals die. It’s no big deal. This time next week no one will give a toss.’ His voice is dull, hoarse with too many cigarettes. Macaws scream at them for attention from beyond the dried-out Seal Pool.

  ‘So why did you show me?’

  He sighs in the dark. She can’t tell if he sounds angry. She can’t see his face. ‘I thought you’d like it.’ In the far distance now is the sound of cars, the shudder of lorries.

  She takes his hand. ‘I liked it.’ They walk on as the closing-time klaxon begins to sound.

  Her room is full of books – dictionaries of Faroese and state Norwegian, a Dutch East Indies guide to river-fish, some poetry but little fiction. They are her vice, that is how she thinks of them. There are too many volumes, they are too heavy and mismatched. The way she carries them from one rented room to the next makes no sense. Most of them she will never read again. But she will not let them go. Therefore they are a physical addiction. She is happy to admit it. She loves them more than alcohol.

  Her favourites are stacked neatly in one corner, by the kettle. She sits down on the floor, waiting for the water to boil. Grey morning light comes in through the window opposite. The sky outside looks like concrete.

  The wall is hard and cold against her back and head. Anja yawns, picks up a volume from the top of the pile. Opens it, cradling the spine.

  It is Knut Hamsun’s Mysteries, the first English translation. On the flyleaf is the loping handwriting of her father: To Anja my daughter on her university entrance. Good luck with the animals and all their mysteries – Dad.

  The message always seems unfinished to her. Broken off. She turns the pages, not reading, wondering what he was trying to say with the halting words; with the book. Maybe there was nothing else to buy in the offshore stores. She remembers Edith, flicking through pages, snarling Such a fool he is, the stories of a Norwegian Nazi, what has this to do with you? But Anja liked it, this tense, self-obsessed writing. She imagined her father in the glare and dark of the oil-rig, reading by naval warning-lights. The hollow, white noise of the sea.

  She closes the book. Her father is dead, her mother is dead. In thirty years she will be older than them both. It will never get easier, the remembering of them. She feels the sadness coming across her in a long, slow wave that darkens the room.

  She leans forward, kneading the heels of her hands into her eyes, then drags hard fingers back through her hair. The skin pulls taut against her scalp, forcing her eyes open. She stares out at the sky. When she is ready she breathes out, stands up, gets ready to go.

  ‘Good morning. You look tired.’

  ‘Yes.’ She sits stiffly by the fence, wanting to hear him talk. She can smell snow coming, a sourness in the air. Wind catches on the cage-links.

  He holds out raw meat in his hands. The wolves snap at it, worry it apart, lick his fingers clean. He talks to her over their eager, narrow faces.

  ‘You know a lot about animals. You studied them, maybe.’

  ‘I dropped out.’ Her teeth chatter and she shuts her mouth tight, leans forward against the cold.

  ‘You’re Finnish. Karelian blood?’

  ‘Some.’ She keeps the surprise out of her voice. She remembers her mother’s father, small and almost Mongol-featured. His endless, halting stories of Karelia, Finland’s lost eastern isthmus; the taste of Karelian salmon, the Russian soldiers with their farmyard uniforms, easy to kill but numerous, overrunning the land, stubbornly cruel. Anja remembers the slant of his eyes and the way he cried when he drank. She touches the braid of her black hair, pushes it away from her face.

  The sadness comes at her again, slow and quiet. She looks round for anything, anything she can do. An action which will take her out of herself. Her leg muscles tense with the need to run.

  The largest wolf barks for attention. Once, twice. The keeper hushes him, whispers instructions.

  ‘I worked up in Oulu for a few months. At the university. They were counting the wildlife – these.’ He slaps the animals back with a handful of offal, grins up at her.

  ‘Why did you come here?’

  He shrugs. ‘I got lonely for the big towns.’ She laughs; the lie is blatant to both of them. He has no love of people. She understands that. Love of people is something she can only imagine or remember.

  ‘How about you?’

  She doesn’t answer for a long time. He goes on feeding the wolves, not looking round at her. After a while they trot away towards the trees and sit, tall on their haunches.

  ‘I had to get away. No more people. I just had to get away.’

  Her voice is quiet. He stands watching her. When she doesn’t move he comes over to the cage fence, puts his hand through, touches it against her ch
eek.

  She reaches up without thinking, holds the warmth of his palm against her. His fingers are rusted with blood from the meat. He smells like iron. She closes her eyes and leans against him. He is cradling her head. No one says anything. She can hear his breathing, wind in the park trees, the distant city chorus of sirens.

  The sirens come closer, a rising panic, joining up discordantly in the network of approach streets. Anja opens her eyes. Her pupils have contracted in a moment, hard and small. She pulls back. Looks up at the wolf keeper.

  ‘The police. You didn’t know?’

  She stands up, folds her arms tightly across her chest. ‘Didn’t know what?’

  He frowns and moves his hands, a clumsy gesture of embarrassment. ‘Then I should have told you. Something happened. Maybe last night. The liger is gone.’

  It begins to snow, light and bitter. She brushes its cold feathers away from her face.

  ‘Close the door, please. Sit down.’

  She sits down. The chair and the voice make her think of prison; hard, cold, plastic. She feels a wave of claustrophobia and leans back against it, requiring herself to relax.

  ‘And your name is –?’

  ‘Anja Kivinen.’ The policewoman is over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, masculine. She frowns down at her checklist, makes a tick. Smiles back up. Her eyes are very beautiful, the irises almost grey.

  ‘How is your English, Ms Kivinen?’

  ‘My English is well, thank you.’ It’s dark in the small zoo-keepers’ room, the police haven’t turned on the lights. Snow flurries against the window and funnels away. Anja wonders if the dimness is intentional.

  She flinches at a noise outside in the corridors; metal falling, laughter. The policewoman is still smiling, a tension of facial muscles. ‘Great. Do you know why you’re here?’

  ‘The Johannesburg liger. The body has gone missing.’