We Are Animals

by Tim Ewins

  On the way to the next boat Hylad suggested that Michael go back to the hotel, but Michael refused. He wanted to find Jan, and that wouldn’t happen in the hotel. The next boat had a man with an impressive moustache and curly dark hair sitting on a deckchair facing the harbour. He was sitting next to a beautiful, long-haired petite girl. He was either drinking a neat transparent spirit at an impressive rate or finding it hard to drink a very small amount of water slowly.

  ‘Yeah, we saw him,’ the curly-haired man said. ‘Taught him a little something about romance, I reckon.’ He slapped the thigh of his new wife and shook her leg.

  ‘I wanted to help him didn’t I, Jerry?’ the girl said. ‘We’re leaving today, I thought we could take him with us.’ Moustachioed Jerry gave her a sharp look. ‘Jerry thought it’d be much more romantic if it was just the two of us. He’s right. We’re on our honeymoon.’

  Hylad told them that Jan was lost and asked if either of them knew where he’d gone. The girl hit Jerry’s arm with the back of her hand. ‘I knew we should have taken him,’ she said, ‘I hope he’s OK.’

  ‘Will you shut up about that boy,’ Jerry shouted, knocking the girl’s hand away and spilling his drink, ‘and just enjoy yourself.’

  Then he let out a long line of swearwords that no one in the harbour wanted to hear but everyone in the harbour had to. The girl didn’t cower; instead she stood taller than it looked like she should be able to.

  ‘Shut up, Jerry,’ she screamed. ‘Just shut your stupid mouth up.’

  Jerry looked shocked and he raised his hand.

  ‘In front of all these people?’ the girl asked.

  Under his breath, Jerry mumbled, ‘I swear to god, Connie, don’t cause a scene.’

  Then Connie let out a long line of swearwords. This time everyone in the harbour did want to hear; some even cheered. She was about to walk off the boat when Michael lunged forward, held on to Jerry’s arm and threw-up down his shirt, leaving traces of pickled herring in his drink.

  At the very moment that Michael’s breakfast became Jerry’s cocktail, Manjan and Ladyjan’s boat left the harbour. Manjan and Ladyjan had heard the commotion but they couldn’t see anything from the empty room they’d found to stow away in. Ladyjan was excited; this could be a new life for her. She held on tight to Manjan’s hand. Full of nerves, Manjan looked at Ladyjan and the excitement in Ladyjan’s eyes somehow made his nerves disappear. He was already lost in a foreign country. This boat would either take him home to England or to the same situation that he was already in, but in a different country. They both laughed quietly to each other, before they heard a woman’s voice from upstairs on the boat.

  ‘We’re finally doing it,’ she said, ‘I can’t believe we’re actually going to India.’

  Part 3

  15

  A cow

  Goa, India, 2016.

  The sun had set, and the sea was resting. The light from the bar behind Shakey and Manjan was creating blurry them-shaped shadows on the sand at their feet. The COCK-tail bar down the beach was still thudding and now there were multi-coloured disco lights flooding the beach in front of it. Every now and again a green neon laser would shoot into the sky and a group of vests would cheer.

  Shakey was torn. On the one hand, Manjan’s story was interesting – Shakey wanted to know how Manjan and Ladyjan had parted. He wanted to know why they had parted. He wanted to know why Manjan cared so much for Ladyjan. So far in his story they’d only just met. What about Manjan’s parents? Had Manjan gone home? Shakey wanted to know if Hylad and Michael were still together. He hoped they were. What had happened to them after Manjan had left for India? He cared. It might have had something to do with the small plastic buckets of vodka and Red Bull, but he really did care.

  On the other hand – multi-coloured disco lights and green neon lasers shooting into the sky.

  Manjan was completely lost in his own story. He liked telling it to people and he’d made the right decision to tell this vest, who, despite visible disco lights, was still listening. It may have been the red wine, but Manjan felt humbled by Shakey and offered to buy him another drink.

  That was enough to make up Shakey’s mind. He’d stay with Manjan, at least for now, and hear out his story. Lasers were great (there was no question about that) but it seemed unlikely that Shakey was going to get paid for handing out five silent disco flyers and then drinking with a stranger. He wasn’t going to pass up a free drink.

  While Manjan was at the bar, feeling stupid for ordering a small plastic bucket of vodka and Red Bull, Shakey looked up and down the beach. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for exactly. Maybe a Swedish-looking thief? Perhaps she’d be wearing a mask.

  ‘I get what you were saying about sunset,’ Shakey said as Manjan placed the drinks on the table. ‘I mean, we’ve just watched the sunset over Palolem but I didn’t care. It wasn’t that great.’

  Manjan sighed. ‘I think you’ve missed the point,’ he said, but Shakey was pretty sure he hadn’t. Manjan had been quite clear in his story – sunsets were stupid.

  ‘Me and Jan, Ladyjan that is, we liked sunsets. But we also liked places when the sun wasn’t setting.’

  ‘Yeah I guess sunsets are pretty cool,’ Shakey replied, and Manjan looked at him in disbelief.

  ‘Look,’ Manjan said, ‘sunsets are nice, but Palolem is nice in the day too. It used to be nice at night as well but…’ He gestured with his chin towards a thin green neon light in the sky, ‘Well, things change.’ He took a sip of his wine, tickling the rim of his wine glass with his moustache as he did.

  ‘When I first met Ladyjan, she had other things to think about than the sun setting. Sunsets are for people who are already happy.’ Manjan looked down the beach to where the cow was standing. ‘Let’s put it this way,’ he said, ‘that cow over there. That cow will have had a hard life. Do you think she cares about, or even sees, the sunset?’

  * * *

  Prisha, the cow, had been born in a field not too far from Palolem. Her childhood had been a happy one, living with her cow-mother in a relatively grassy field. She could see her bull-father two fields along, and although he didn’t pay much attention to her, she loved him. Most days Prisha would eat the yellowing grass in her and her mother’s field and when the sun got too hot, she’d lie down next to the fence parallel to her bull-father’s fence.

  Prisha couldn’t remember ever having any physical contact with her father but she watched him from her field every day. She knew everything you could know about a bull just from observing his daily routine, his movements and his expressions. She felt certain that he was a good bull, and if they were able to share a field, he would be a good father.

  On one particularly hot day, when Prisha was watching her father sleep, a thin old man attached a large sign around him with two thick black rubber harnesses. Prisha couldn’t read, but if she could, she would have read the words ‘FIT FOR SLAUGHTER’ on her father.

  The sign remained on the bull for a week. Prisha watched as the sign rubbed against her father’s back and left sores on his underside. By the third day her father couldn’t walk without discomfort and by the fourth he didn’t try. When the thin man came back to the bull’s field, Prisha’s father was completely motionless.

  Prisha didn’t know that her family, and indeed all bulls and cows, had holy status where she lived. She also didn’t know that her father had apparently lost his holy status when he became too old and quite ill. This was when the thin old man had requested a ‘fit for slaughter’ certificate from the authorities. The old beast had become too expensive to keep alive.

  Prisha knew the thin old man. He gave her and her mother water every few days – water which they needed. Nevertheless, the thin old man had killed her father. The next time he brought water to the field Prisha charged at him. She knocked the thin old man over and ran out of the gate in a panic. Her mother did n
ot follow.

  The next few years offered a lonely existence for Prisha. She’d stand by the roadside, eating what little grass could muster the energy to grow in the scorching heat, and she’d try to moo at the occasional motorbike. She normally managed nothing more than a dusty breath.

  It was her own holy status that kept Prisha alive. People she’d never seen before would stop and empty their own water supplies for her. She ate all kinds of strange foods on her journey – jelabis, curried goat and lamb samosa. Despite this, grass was not easy to come by and life was hard. Never – not once – did Prisha notice the sunset.

  It was seven years before Prisha found Palolem. When she first arrived in 2007 the beach had been surrounded by green fields with palm trees leaning out towards the sea. There were a few beach bars and maybe two dozen foreigners wandering the sands and waters. Although the people, trees and bars did not interest Prisha, the fields were her Mecca.

  Every morning she would chew up some lovely fresh grass before being shooed away from the field by one of the farmers. She’d spend her afternoons eating unsatisfying dry sticks and driftwood on the beach.

  Over the next few years more foreigners came to the beach. Not many stayed for more than a week, and almost none (bar one particular moustachioed man) stayed for longer than a month. A funny thing happened, though – as the population of foreigners increased, so did the number of beach bars and little shacks for sleeping. At the same time as beach bars and little shacks for sleeping increased, the number of farmers decreased, and as the number of farmers decreased the amount of time Prisha could spend eating their fields increased. It wasn’t long before she was eating her fill every day without being shooed away.

  After Prisha had spent a week comfortably filling her now quite skinny body with nutritious grass, she returned to the beach. This time she visited the beach out of habit rather than necessity. She wasn’t hungry, and she felt no need to search for dry driftwood. Looking around her, she finally saw what the tourists were seeing – the beach was very pretty. The people she’d previously ignored were all smiling, and the bars were colourful. This was the first day that Prisha noticed the sunset, and it was glorious.

  * * *

  ‘How do you know that cow’s had a hard life?’ Shakey asked.

  ‘Well I don’t know for sure,’ Manjan replied, ‘but she’s a cow on a beach and she looks pretty malnourished, although not as bad as the cows in Delhi.’ Shakey had no idea what the cows in Delhi looked like, but India was India to him, so he assumed they were pretty much the same. ‘My point is,’ Manjan continued, ‘that the cow is just trying to survive. She doesn’t care about the sunset. Ladyjan was the same; she was too busy surviving.’ Manjan had no idea how wrong he was about Prisha. Moustaches rarely do.

  ‘She robbed people at sunset,’ Shakey said.

  ‘She survived,’ Manjan said again, taking a sip of wine. ‘On that boat Ladyjan told me that life wasn’t romantic like it is in the films,’ Manjan chuckled, ‘and she hadn’t even seen the Bollywood films then.’ Shakey had never seen a Bollywood film either but laughed along anyway. ‘Me, on the other hand, I was stowed away on a boat set for India with a beautiful girl. Life seemed like a film to me’.

  There was a silence between them while Manjan thought to himself. It was true that Ladyjan’s life had been hard, and it was a long time until she’d appreciated the beauty of a sunset, but he wondered why he himself had never cared for sunsets in his youth. They used to just pass him by, in the same way they seemed to now for Shakey.

  The silence turned into a sort of grumbling sound from below Manjan’s dark grey bristles.

  ‘What about your parents?’ Shakey asked, interrupting Manjan from what was now nothing more than a sleepy low growl.

  ‘What about my parents?’ Manjan snapped out of his trance.

  ‘Well you sort of abandoned them, right,’ Shakey asked, but with no question mark in his tone. ‘Mine know I’m in India and I still call them every few days to let them know I’m OK. What about yours?’ Manjan wasn’t offended, but he was slightly surprised at being asked if his parents knew where he was, given his age.

  ‘Oh, I see. I called them from Poland,’ he said, waving his hand dismissively. ‘I told them not to be cross with Hylad and Michael, that I was fine and that I’d come home soon. I didn’t tell them about Ladyjan.’

  ‘Poland?!’ Shakey interrupted, spitting out a little vodka and Red Bull, catching it with his hand and then putting it back in his mouth. He’d assumed that Manjan and Ladyjan had travelled to India together, and that they’d both lived in this country since then. ‘Is Ladyjan in Poland?’ he asked.

  Manjan said that she might well be. They’d travelled through several countries, including Poland, to get to India. Ladyjan could be in any one of them. They’d visited lots of countries after that journey too – Ladyjan could be in any one of those as well. Indeed, she could be in any of the countries that they hadn’t visited. Then Manjan stood up. He looked to his right and then he looked to his left, just in case she was in this country, on this beach, right now.

  Shakey got up too.

  ‘If you do find Ladyjan,’ he said.

  ‘You mean when Ladyjan finds me,’ Manjan corrected him. Shakey laughed but then instantly felt bad for doing so.

  ‘Sorry, when Ladyjan finds you, can I give you some advice?’ Manjan agreed that he could, but looked and felt uncomfortable about receiving advice from a vest.

  ‘Don’t compare her to a cow.’

  Manjan thought for a second then agreed that he wouldn’t.

  16

  Wild boar

  Across Poland. 1971.

  Manjan hung up the phone. He had just explained where he was, where he’d been and where he was going to his tearful mother. It had taken a long time to persuade her to pass the phone to his father and Manjan had no doubt that his father would now be having difficulty calming his mother down. Importantly, his father had understood and agreed not to be too hard on Hylad.

  Back on the train, Manjan re-found Ladyjan, who was in a carriage with Saga and Valter. Neither Manjan nor Ladyjan had quite understood how far away India was. After only half a day of hiding on the boat, Saga and Valter had found them, greeted them and offered them food. It was a much better reception than expected.

  Saga and Valter were a married couple who were both fearing their impending thirtieth birthdays. It had been Saga’s dream to travel to India, and Valter, being quite the romantic, made it his duty to help Saga live her dream. They had made the plan together. First, they would travel to Poland by water, then on to Russia by train via Ukraine, then fly to Nepal from Moscow, and finally they would cross over the Nepal/India border on foot. They didn’t know how long it would take and they hadn’t planned their way home.

  Once the four of them had arrived in Poland, a member of Valter’s extended family had taken the boat and they had gone through some very unsecure security. It was so unsecure in fact, that none of them were required even to give their names. Apparently, Valter was someone important.

  The train clunked loudly, as it had done every time it had left one of the large mounds of grass masquerading as a station. Most of the journey had been through light green hills scattered with colourless wooden houses. There seemed to be a great deal of land per house, especially when compared to the rickety streets of Fishton. This was their second day travelling on a Polish train, and although they’d already seen three buildings that had been demolished and seemingly abandoned, overall the impression was of a pleasant country. They often spotted stalks flying over the horizon or shy wild boar running from the train and hiding.

  The train itself was big but basic, with a single toilet and vending machine at the end of the seemingly endless trail of carriages.

  ‘Prince Polo, anyone?’ Manjan asked, after the train had been moving for about thirteen minutes.

&nbs
p; ‘Please,’ answered Ladyjan. Saga shook her head and Valter waved a dismissive hand. All this travelling had made them tired. Manjan wearily started the long walk to the vending machine.

  Much to Saga’s disapproval, Manjan and Ladyjan had been practically living on Prince Polo chocolate bars since they’d boarded the train. Manjan felt he was experiencing Polish culture by doing so, and Ladyjan, well, she really liked chocolate.

  ‘I can’t believe we still don’t know how you two met,’ Ladyjan said with a cheeky smile. ‘With an adventure like this, I bet it was romantic.’

  Like Manjan, Ladyjan was full of questions and Valter, whose happiness was infectious, was eager to answer them. He held onto Saga’s hands lovingly and looked at Ladyjan.

  ‘It was fate,’ he said in the same whimsical tone as a trained musical actor on a Broadway stage. Ladyjan’s eyebrows raised in the middle while her lips made an ‘aw’ shape.

  Valter told Ladyjan how he’d grown up as an only child in a wealthy family that owned a large estate. He’d received the best education that money could buy, wore the finest clothing and eaten a rich diet. He’d had acres of land to play on (albeit mainly by himself) and family staff who would fetch him what he wanted when he wanted. He told Ladyjan all of this in a sad voice, but then said: ‘It was a great life. I was lucky. Saga on the other hand…’

  And then he explained how Saga had grown up in a poor neighbourhood, how she was raised by her dad and how she’d worn the same five outfits for seven of her teenage years. Saga scowled at him when he said this last bit. Now she was dressed in a lovely bright red coat and she’d changed her outfit daily since they’d set off for India.

  They’d met in their mid-twenties. Saga had been feeling out of place in a posh restaurant that she’d grossly misjudged from the exterior. Valter had been feeling bored at yet another boozy lunch with the same investment professionals that he had known since university.