Utterly Monkey

by Nick Laird

  ‘Thirteen pounds?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘For one person? Not for a family?’

  ‘Yes sir. One adult ticket costs thirteen pounds.’ The young Asian man with bad skin and very white teeth leaned forward and tapped on the piece of paper listing the prices, which was Sellotaped to the glass partition of the booth.

  ‘Okay.’ Ian took his wallet out of the top pocket of his denim jacket and extracted a twenty pound note.

  ‘Thank you.’ There was a click and whirr and a white slip of card appeared from a slit on the metal counter. ‘Your ticket…and your change sir.’

  All in pound coins. Was he winding him up? He swept them into his palm, made a show of looking at the handful of coins and dropped them into his jeans.

  The zoo was cluttered with families out for the day. The saddest were the divorced fathers trying hard to smile and think of things to say to the blank-faced children trailing behind them. When two of these groupings met on the paths, the fathers would raise their eyebrows and nod at each other, as if they’d noticed they were wearing football shirts for the same, recently relegated, team. Ian walked past the birdhouses, not noticing the bloody plumage of the Scarlet Ibis or the Stanley Crane’s oriental serenity. He was looking for the big cats, those huge bruisers lounging in their sleekly muscled fur, watching everything with narrowed, passive eyes. The warm day was turning limply grey again. Ian spotted a sign by the camel enclosure as two disdainful dromedaries tried to stare him down.

  The tiger cage was outdoors and sizeable but surrounded by a wall that featured several large windows. The two tigers were slumped in front of separate ones. Both had their backs to the onlookers crowding the glass. One little boy with shaggy blond hair and a rucksack shaped like a koala bear tapped at the window and was lifted up by his dad, who started whispering how tigers didn’t like to be tapped at. In fact everyone was whispering, even though the glass was two-inch solid Perspex and, in any event, the tiger looked like it could have used a little distraction. But it was nice all the same, Ian thought, that people respected these magnificent beasts enough to lower their voices. It was only the strong that commanded respect. Ian stood at the side of one of the windows and wished he’d a camera. Each tiger had chosen a view that didn’t contain either people or walls. Smart cats. The one at Ian’s window suddenly sat up and the little crowd groaned. The tiger turned towards the glass. Yellow eyes peered out from a face both intelligent and utterly bored. It yawned and unleashed a pink tongue the size of a chamois over its jagged incisors before turning again, away from the glass, and slumping back onto the decking.

  Seeing the cats hadn’t been that good, Ian thought, as he set off back to the entrance. They shouldn’t be in here. He walked past the penguin pool, where it was feeding time. The little blighters would totter over to the man kneeling down with a bucket, and jostle and nudge until a fish had been placed in their beak, which they’d then immediately toss away. The ground was flecked with these shiny lifeless sardines. It seemed the penguins just wanted attention. A serious one with a scrawny neck and freckles all over his chest set off for a walk around the rim of the pond and was followed by another, and then another, until a whole column of twelve or so penguins were marching purposefully round and arriving back at the group they’d just left. Two pushed a third one off the pond’s rim and into the water. He swam around for a bit and then hopped out, baffled but freshly interested in the big man with the bucket.

  A young hand-holding couple, cooing over the penguins as if they had reared them, chanced upon another young couple they knew. The girls spoke loudly in estuary accents.

  ‘Oh my god! Susan! How weird!’

  ‘Frannie! How was Glastonbury? Is this Tim?’

  ‘Tom. Yes, this is him.’ Frannie, a sturdy blonde, simultaneously pulled one boyfriend forward and, leaning round Susan, said, a little coyly, ‘Hello Michael.’ The other boyfriend hung back but nodded seriously at Frannie and gave a tiny wave. ‘God, Glastonbury was mad. We were up for like forty hours or something and then Liz was sick all over the…’

  The girls moved away from Ian and the two men stood looking at each other.

  ‘Tom. How are you?’ Tom said, and extended his hand.

  ‘Mike. Nice to meet you.’

  ‘Enjoying the zoo?’ Tom said cheerily.

  ‘Actually, I was just saying how depressing it is. You just look around and around, and see all these animals that shouldn’t be here–and you end up thinking, God, humans are just this rapacious, horrific species that have colonized the world. It’s just awful. What about you two? How are you finding it?’ Michael thrust his head forward in a little jab of sincerity. He blinked several times as if he’d just put in lenses.

  Tom nodded thoughtfully, ‘I don’t think there’s really enough animals, and the ones that are here don’t really do that much.’

  Ian sloped off. People were odd. Always talking and talking about nothing. He walked past two humourless pacing hyenas and then stopped at a bird enclosure to examine its signs: Black-cheeked Lovebirds, Pin-tailed Whydahs, Lilac-breasted Rollers, Red-billed Queleas. The cage was a speaker box of throaty creaks and shrill whistles but none of the birds were moving.

  He stopped at a large exhibit which claimed to hold two Sulawesi Macaques, although he couldn’t see any sign of life. He edged around it and found them in a corner, eleemosynary, watching, their black palms stretched out through the chainlink fence. One began pulling leaves off a bush growing in front of the enclosure and folding them into his mouth. They had tiny black nails on their tiny black hands. They were pitiful. As he reached the Ape House Ian glimpsed the dense black mass of a gorilla slumped in a corner beneath a netting of wooden beams and ropes. It was like a huge puzzle, a Gordian knot, which the gorilla sitting below it just couldn’t be bothered to solve. The only other visitors at the window were the father and his son with the koala rucksack. The boy had a camera and took a flash photo through the glass. His father squatted down beside him, obviously his paternal pose, and patiently, poshly, began to explain, ‘The thing is, Oscar, the window bounces the light back and that means that when we go home–’ Oscar started picking his nose. Without missing a beat, his dad pulled the hooked finger down, ‘and Dora sets up the computer so you can see all your animal pictures, there will probably just be a photo of a flash of light instead of a gorilla.’

  Oscar was making a face that suggested a photo of a flash of lightning cooking a gorilla would not sustain his interest. He turned away towards the glass, in order to pick his nose again without his dad seeing. The man straightened up, and tousled Oscar’s girlish hair, ‘Or what might even happen would be that you’ll think you’ve taken a photo of a gorilla and it will actually be a photo of you holding your camera up, taking a picture, or even one of me reflected in the glass.’ The father laughed, but only for the benefit of Ian, who coolly ignored him and watched the gorilla pick something off the shiny black sole of his foot.

  At the airport, when Danny went off to get a trolley, Janice said to Ellen, ‘So Geordie was saying that you two are an item?’

  ‘Not even vaguely. We had a huge argument last night.’

  Janice sympathetically tutted. ‘I thought something like that must have gone on. Everyone was very quiet in the car. Sorry for…Just that Geordie mentioned it…Anyway it’ll be all right. You look great together.’ Danny was heading back towards them, negotiating with a mutinous trolley. There was a solidarity between the two women, founded, as all solidarities are, on excluding someone else.

  After neatly stacking their bags, Danny said, in his best game show voice, ‘Ladies, shall we fly?’

  Janice felt a flush of nerves. She hadn’t really thought about it, about taking off and being held in the air by who knew what. As they made their way out of the hire car park and over to the terminal, she turned to Ellen.

  ‘Have you flown a lot then?’ Janice asked, trying to sound blasé.

  ‘Not loads but a few time
s. I’ve been to America a couple of…Are you nervous about flying?’

  Janice nodded, grateful to Ellen for catching her meaning.

  ‘A little bit, yeah. Mum said I need to suck on a boiled sweet when we take off so that my ears pop. She saw it on some travel programme.’ Janice laughed a little, to show that she thought her mum was being overly protective but wanting Ellen to confirm it.

  ‘You’ll be fine. Honestly.’

  They joined the check-in queue while Danny returned the car keys to the Avis desk. Jackie, the fat lady from yesterday, was missing and only the thin bald man sat there, looking a little adrift untied from the huge buoy of his partner.

  ‘Here you go squire. The keys to our Ford Focus. The guy in the car park checked it and gave me this form.’ Danny was doing his deferent Ulsterman.

  ‘Okay, thanks. Here’s your receipt and deposit slip.’ He seemed very low.

  ‘You on your own today then?’

  ‘I am. Jackie, the lady usually on with me, the one who looked after you yesterday, she’s been taken ill.’ He was slightly breathless, and his tone made Danny stop bustling with his documents wallet and look up. The man’s face was narrow and unshaven, and his light-blue liquid eyes were kind but also weak and cowardly. The bumpy dome of his bald head was pallid and shiny under the airport’s striplights. A few hairs wafted, as if underwater, on its crown as he leaned in across the counter to Danny. He must have been fifty-something, but looked somehow inexperienced, like a man who finds himself frequently surprised.

  ‘Nothing serious I hope,’ Danny said lightly.

  ‘She’d a heart attack last night. Forty-three years of age…Just goes to show.’

  ‘That’s awful. Awful.’ Danny didn’t know what else to say. ‘Will she be all right?’

  ‘We don’t know.’ The man looked like he wanted Danny to do something.

  ‘Has she a family to look after her?’

  ‘Lives with her sister. They’re very close.’

  Walking across to the check-in queue Danny was thinking Goes to show what? What does it show? That she should have lost ten stone? That she should have got her cholesterol checked? That she should have used margarine and not butter on her scones? He reached the queue. Janice was pointing out a Northern Irish television personality to Ellen. The man with orange skin was standing two lines over with several friends and three trolleys’ worth of skiing equipment. It goes to show, you blethering fool, that your body might just give up at any moment. The thought took root in his head and stopped him from moving. It was as if he’d looked down and noticed that it wasn’t grey linoleum he was walking across but thin ice. He felt suddenly winded and rocked on the balls of his feet. This is it, my friend, this is all that you get. No next time round, no trial runs or second laps, no sequels or prequels or reprints. You’ve just one go and it’s your turn now.

  On the plane, even though it was just after noon, Danny drank two small bottles of Chenin Blanc. He felt dizzy, damp-palmed and anxious. Should he be working on Ulster Water, trying to get a bid through which would get people sacked? Should it make any difference if those people were Northern Irish? And how the hell was he ever going to work for that slimy fucker Vyse again? Ellen was sitting in front with Janice beside her. The seat to his right was empty. He gazed out at the acres of endless blue nothing.

  Janice couldn’t help but stare. Ellen was the first black person she had seen up close and on the plane, when they had talked, she’d been silently marvelling at her hair and complexion. It was so clear and soft-looking. She was dying to ask what her skin routine was but thought it might come across as forward or rude. Her skin was so different. But when they arrived into Heathrow’s Terminal One, Janice suddenly felt that she was the exception. It was like what you’d expect at the UN or something: people-herds of different shapes and colours and outfits rushing around. Four tall black men walked past in full African dress, great patterned sheets wrapped round them, and she saw one woman, at least she assumed it was a woman, who was tented from head to toe in black, with only a rectangular muslin patch to look out through. It was like something from Star Wars. Janice saw more shades of skin in those hurried thirty minutes than she ever had before. She’d love to try putting the same eye shadow on all the different colours of women.

  They took a separate taxi from Ellen. Danny kissed her goodbye rather formally on the cheek and, smiling, told her that, as she didn’t need to come in to the office that evening, she should give him the files. Ellen nodded, unsure if he was being generous or continuing the argument. As soon as they’d sat back in the seats in the taxi, and the driver was pulling away, Janice turned to Danny and said, ‘She likes you, you know.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because she does.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Girls can tell. And anyway, she said so.’ Janice nodded and winked at him. Danny raised his eyebrows, as if to say these things happen to me all the time.

  After a pause he said, ‘Did she really say so?’ It was easier, pretending things worked in the way Janice thought they did. Boys and girls. Mars and Venus. Black and white.

  ‘Maybe not in so many words. But we were talking and she likes you. Though she thinks you’re a bit mental.’

  Danny said nothing for a minute or two, and then asked, ‘So what’s been happening in Ballyglass?’

  ‘Same-old, same-old.’ Janice smoothed out the lap of her red skirt as if to read something off it. ‘What’s the news?…Do you know Margery Elliot?’

  ‘Not sure. Who’s she?’

  ‘Works in the Post Office on the main street. Wee wiry thing with big glasses. Fuzzy black hair.’

  ‘Oh aye.’

  ‘Did you hear what happened?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘It turns out Jimmy, her husband–drives for Cuddys’ Coaches–was leaving her for some woman he took on a bus tour down south, and then Margery and him rowed and she stabbed him with a breadknife. Just last week. Last Monday I think. She went in under the rib cage.’ Janice’s fingertips pointed at her stomach. ‘Upwards. Three children. And the youngest only a toddler.’

  ‘Fucking hell.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Completely.’

  Danny watched the back of the driver’s head. There was a talk show on the radio and the driver was mumbling and disputing the caller’s point. Danny couldn’t make out the topic.

  ‘And there’s a new shop opened up on the Burn Road. It sells mobiles.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘It’s called Phones For You but spelt with the number 4 and just the letter U.’ Janice described a horseshoe in the air with her index finger and then paused. She was babbling. She should ask him a question.

  ‘So what’s London like? Do you like it?’

  ‘Ach well it’s all right. I’m not so fond of my job.’ Janice nodded, looked concerned. ‘And it’s dirty and expensive. But there’s lots to do. And my friends are all here.’

  ‘And now Geordie too I s’pose.’

  Danny was thinking Query definition of Geordie as friend but said, ‘Right, right.’

  They looked dully out their windows. The traffic was light. Danny started reading the notes for the report he would have to draft in the office that evening and Janice closed her eyes. They reached Dalston in just over an hour and a half.

  Geordie had returned from his wander and cleaned the flat. It had been a proper operation, involving hot water, the ravenous Hoover and a yellow duster, although he had restricted the action to the living room and kitchen. To demonstrate the enormity of the task, he had left all the drying crockery and glasses arrayed upside down on a tea towel beside the sink. When he heard the key scratch into the lock he lunged towards the door and opened it.

  ‘All right mate,’ Danny said, and clapped him quickly on the shoulder before pushing by.

  ‘Big man,’ Geordie replied, nodding deferentially and leaning back to let him pas
t.

  Janice was on the doorstep, head dipped, smiling at him. The slight squint of her left eye made it seem like she was looking into sunlight.

  ‘Hey sexy,’ Geordie said, and stepped down to her level. They were the same height, pretty much, although Janice’s heels usually made her appear an inch taller.

  ‘Hello stranger,’ she said and hugged him. He felt so skinny, stringily muscled like a twelve-year-old boy. ‘You miss me then? Long four days?’

  ‘I never said that. I just got bored.’

  Still embracing him, Janice traced the nail of her index finger in a light circle on the back of his neck. He shivered before steering her inside and showing her round the flat. Danny was setting his satchel on the kitchen table when they appeared in the doorway. Geordie had his hands on her hips and his dark little head poked round her shoulder. ‘Here, Dan, there’ll be things found tonight that were never lost.’

  EVENING

  After a quick bath Danny’d put on a fresh T-shirt and the same jeans he’d been wearing. He had left Janice and Geordie in the living room, on the sofa, engrossed in the Antiques Roadshow. Geordie was arguing that no painting of a horse could ever be worth the ten thousand pounds some berk in a bow tie claimed it was. And anyway its head’s all wrong. Looks more like a greyhound. Janice had already made Geordie two cups of tea since she’d arrived. They were tactile and easy with each other, and Danny noticed that Geordie fidgeted less when she was around, as though in order to balance her femininity he had to be calmer.