Drowned Sprat and Other Stories (10 page)

They knew about one another now. So what?

The Marine Mammals Keeper. Canadian. Almost good-looking. Blond and blue-eyed. Perhaps he was the best of them all. At least he talked about permanency, even if it was on the day he left. She’d rung her friend to tell her about him.

‘He asked me to marry him,’ she said.

‘Really?’ said her friend.

‘Well, he asked if I’d like to go to Newfoundland with him.’

‘That’s not the same thing,’ said her friend, who was married with a baby.

The Ungulates Keeper. Australian. Definitely the worst. He’d never smelt clean, even after a shower. Perhaps it was because the animals he worked with were so huge. A tonne of manure a day, he’d said.

The Reptile Keeper. Pommy, like her. Extremely fat. She supposed he occupied a middle ground. At first he’d made her feel safe and desirable. She remembered he’d been surprised by her, the night after the pub when she’d … never mind. Best to forget it. Perhaps he was a mistake. At least the other three were educative. She’d learned a lot about animals. Educative. Yes. That’s what they were.

The Ungulates Keeper came with the first ring. His long skinny dick gave one uncomfortable jab just as she reached for the phone. It was the zoo.

‘Come quickly,’ they said.

‘How did they know where to find you?’ she asked as they dressed. It wouldn’t be too good if the staff had found out already. Especially the Marine Mammals Keeper. He was dishy, but could be moral enough not to step on the Ungulates Keeper’s turf.

‘I left your phone number with my flatmate,’ he said, his hair falling forward in greasy lanks while he pulled on his foul socks.

She caught the ferry to work in the mornings. No matter what the night before had been like, she always arrived at the zoo in a calm mood. Even if the ride had been rough.

The Marine Mammals Keeper showed her a picture of himself riding a whale. ‘Killer whales,’ he said, ‘are gentle.’ It was a black and white photograph and very grainy. Taken in the rain, he’d said. But she could pick him out, his big nose above the massive head, gasping for air. Sometimes on the ferry a strange image floated into her mind — the Marine Mammals Keeper deep below the boat, clinging to a huge fish, his pale eyes open and smarting with the salt.

Small men, she thought, sometimes took advantage of their size. They went to sleep on top of you. The Ungulates Keeper did this the second night and she threw him off with the first snore. He landed on his back, his thin arms flung out.

‘Do you like going to the beach? asked the Marine Mammals Keeper.

‘Yes,’ she said, bending her head over the computer keyboard. She was useless and she imagined that sooner or later they’d find her out. Her references were false. She spent more time reading the ‘Help’ pop-ups than she did typing.

‘I’ll pick you up on Saturday, then,’ he said, handing her a piece of paper to write her address on. ‘About ten.’

The other girl in the office was jealous, she could tell. The Marine Mammals Keeper had the kind of body you used to see in
Cleo
magazine, in the days they had the centrefold.

One night with the Reptile Keeper was enough. She woke in the morning to find him up on his elbow, his plump hand under his chin, staring at her.

‘You and I,’ he said, ‘fit. We’re the male and female of the same type.’

Perhaps he was thinking to himself: She’d be safe with the cobras. They couldn’t get their jaws around her.

‘How about some breakfast?’ he said.

He sat at the table with his towel around him and she filled him up with bacon and eggs. Her flatmate was impressed by his corpulence, agog over her cornflakes at his hairy belly.

‘Must be off,’ he said, and at the door, ‘Thanks.’

‘Where is he off to?’ asked her flatmate.

‘To pick up his wife from the interstate bus.’

Jemoona’s baby lay grey and wrinkled in the straw like a giant used condom. The Ungulates Keeper stood in an attitude of homage, his wet arms glistening and clasped in front of him. Jemoona nudged the baby with her trunk and made a strange noise.

No, it wasn’t Jemoona. It was the Ungulates Keeper. He was crying.

‘Sorry,’ he said later, in the car. ‘It always gets to me, you know?’

The street-lights were going off.

‘Mind if I don’t come in?’ he said, outside her place.

As they looked for a place to lay their towels she yawned.

‘Late night?’ asked the Marine Mammals Keeper.

‘Mmm,’ she said.

He wore a pair of very brief black togs and spent most of the day in the water.

‘Come for a swim?’ he said, still damp from his last one.

‘I’m not swimming in that crap,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you heard about the pollution?’

‘Good enough for the fish,’ he said, ‘good enough for me.’
And he ran for the waves. She went to sleep and got burnt. ‘I worked for a private zoo when I was in the States,’ she had told her prospective employer.

‘Really? Where?’ he asked.

‘Lydia Mills, South Carolina,’ she’d said.

Actually it was a private hospital. Hospital. Zoo. What’s the difference?

The Reptile Keeper filled the door and signalled to her. She went to him.

‘I’ve got a room at the back of the Snake House,’ he whispered. ‘With a bed in it. When’s your lunch break?’

‘Sorry. No go,’ she said, going back to her desk. Sometimes — not often — it paid to be blunt.

‘This’ll help,’ said the Marine Mammals Keeper, rubbing in coconut oil. He steadied himself on the back of the sofa, leaving a greasy mark.

‘God, you’re so soft. Not like the seals. They’re kind of … kind of turgid.’

‘Mmm,’ she said, wishing he’d stop. It hurt.

‘Roll over,’ he said.

‘I’m not burnt there,’ she said, but turned over. She was glad she did.

‘Dolphins,’ he said later, ‘make love all day long.’

After a while it fell into a kind of pattern. The Ungulates Keeper during the week, one or two nights, but the weekends reserved for the Marine Mammals Keeper.

‘I work part time in a restaurant in the weekends,’ she told the Ungulates Keeper. ‘And sleep in whatever time I have left.’

‘I need my energy for the big fish during the week,’ said the Marine Mammals Keeper. ‘But the weekends are for you, my little fish, my donut.’

The Ungulates Keeper got quite good at it after a while.

‘You’ll have to tell me what to do,’ he said. ‘I’m not used to it.’

‘Don’t elephants have clitorises?’ she asked.

He shrugged.

‘They like it, though,’ he said. ‘Next time we put the bull in I’ll let you watch.’

The Marine Mammals Keeper was no fool. He had a Master’s in Zoology.

‘I’ve been offered a job,’ he said, ‘in the Antarctic on a research programme. I think I’ll take it.’

The Carnivores Keeper caught her eye. It was her hair. Thick and red, to the waist.

‘When do you leave?’ she asked.

‘A fortnight,’ he said. ‘Can’t wait.’

‘What is it?’ she asked, her ice-cream melting into the sand. ‘The research?’

‘Environmental impact study,’ he said. ‘The French have built a runway, everybody else is building bases and blasting for minerals. Already thousands of animals have died.’

‘I like to think,’ she said, ‘of the poles as these pure twin places at either end of the earth.’

‘No longer,’ said the Marine Mammals Keeper. ‘They’re being fucked over like everywhere else.’

‘But I insist on thinking of them like that,’ she said. ‘They
won’t be ruined, will they? Nobody would want to live there. It’s too cold.’

The Carnivores Keeper passed her on the way out the gates to the ferry. Her hair flamed and leapt. Inside her eyes, which suddenly engulfed her, there were glittering girders like the Harbour Bridge with the sun behind it. All the Carnivores Keeper did was look at her and she felt as though she had been kissed.

It was time, perhaps, to give the Ungulates Keeper the flick. She was tired of him. He’d told her all his stories and they were as sad as the Antarctic.

‘If the African elephant is killed at the same rate for very much longer,’ he said, ‘it will be extinct in the wild in twenty years.’

‘Mmm,’ she said, examining her arm, now as white as before. ‘But how do you kill something with skin as thick as an elephant’s?’

‘Shoot it,’ he said. ‘Or poison the water holes. That way the babies die too, the ones without the ivory.’

She leaned out of bed for her hand cream.

‘Is that what they want them for?’ she asked. ‘The ivory?’

She rubbed cream into her elbows.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Just the ivory.’

‘Ivory is beautiful though, isn’t it?’

She was remembering in England, in her grandmother’s house, the old piano with real ivory keys. And how her grandmother’s plump hands slid over the keys without much feeling, but how it was quite nice and tinkly from out in the garden where you could play in a sun that didn’t burn.

‘Ivory is only beautiful on an elephant,’ said the Ungulates Keeper.

‘Ivory can be beautiful on its own,’ she said. ‘Carved into tiny worlds.’

She was remembering Singapore, where she’d seen the carvers at work. The Ungulates Keeper sighed and rolled over heavily. Quite often, at the end of affairs, she let the bloke finish it. She’d done this in Lydia Mills. First the General Surgeon and last the Gynaecologist. It demanded a fair amount of careful engineering, to be somehow infinitesimally more ‘herself’ than she already was.

‘I’ve seen the Chinese carvers at work,’ she persisted. ‘With tiny knives and eyepieces.’ She held her thumb and forefinger in a circle. ‘Inside a piece of ivory this big they could make a paddyfield, with buffalo and workers in conical hats and individual spears of rice.’ The Ungulates Keeper was silent, but awake. She squirted some more hand cream into her palm and began rubbing it into her thighs.

‘Surely a little piece of ivory like that wouldn’t make any difference?’ she said.

And the Ungulates Keeper, on cue, got out of bed and left.

The Marine Mammals Keeper loved her arse. Sometimes he rubbed himself between her buttocks until he spouted like a whale. She didn’t mind him doing it, although she was irritated by his requests for her to move. Why should she move? There was nothing in it for her. You only moved like that for men you loved. She’d never loved any man, not properly. Men loved her, though, she knew. She was soft and white and, they thought, sort of helpless.

The Marine Mammals Keeper loved her. He took handfuls of her buttocks and kneaded them, willing her to arch her back and wriggle, wriggle, wriggle just a little bit.

‘I’ve never been to the Antarctic,’ she said, as he nose-dived into the pillow.

‘Ah,’ he puffed. ‘Is that what you were thinking about?’

He needed an explanation for her lack of interest. She didn’t answer.

‘Of course you haven’t,’ he said, rolling off. ‘Why should you go to the Antarctic?’

‘I’ve been nearly everywhere else.’

‘Have you been to Canada?’

‘Yes. When I was little. With my father. He’s a nomad, like me.’

‘What about your mother?’ asked the Marine Mammals Keeper.

‘Dead,’ she said. ‘I lived with my grandmother and went on holidays with my father.’

She counted on her fingers. Five days until he left.

‘The first country I went to my own,’ she said carefully, ‘was Japan. I worked in a factory where they processed minke whales.’

The Marine Mammals Keeper yawned. ‘You’ve got a funny little sense of humour,’ he said.

‘Then I went to Iceland where I worked in a fish factory. The nets would come in filled with drowned seals and porpoises.’

The Marine Mammals Keeper sprang out of bed.

‘You’re joking, surely,’ he said.

‘No, I really went to those places on my own.’ She handed him a tissue to wipe her back.

‘Have a shower,’ he said. It’s easier.’

‘Easier for you,’ she said, getting up.

When she came back there was a note on the pillow.

‘Suddenly remembered something I had to do,’ it said. ‘Will take you out on Wednesday — my last night.’

‘Look,’ she said to the Carnivores Keeper, ‘he’s limping.’

Inside his tiny cage the lion paced on three paws.

‘He had a piece of glass removed,’ said the Carnivores Keeper. ‘It’s still sore.’

‘A piece of glass?’

‘Someone threw a bottle at him,’ said the Carnivores Keeper. ‘It hit the back wall.’

The lion, now she looked at him, did have a tragic aspect to the hang of his head.

And the Carnivores Keeper, sensing her empathy, slid her warm arm around her waist.

The Reptile Keeper came into the office with a sick snake in a box. It was not zoo policy to carry sick snakes in boxes.

‘I’d carry him around in my pocket if my trousers weren’t so tight,’ he said. ‘He needs to be kept warm.’

‘Put him in an incubator, then,’ said the Marine Mammals Keeper, who was seated, casually, on her desk.

‘It’s not the same. He needs personal contact,’ said the Reptiles Keeper, then pointedly: ‘I know somewhere ideal. Very warm and wet.’

‘Where’s that?’ asked the Marine Mammals Keeper.

‘Did you know,’ asked the Reptile Keeper of all assembled, ‘that my wife has left me?’

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she said. They were in a crowded pseudo-Spanish restaurant, brightly lit. Looks like that should be reserved for the dark, so that the one being looked at couldn’t see the look, she thought. ‘It’s as if you want to eat me.’