Natural History (3 page)

And there was an old trunk. It had belonged to Jock's father; it was a dead man's chest, manufactured in 1919 by Oshkosh of Wisconsin, and it was scaly with travel stickers. Patrick liked to sit on her messy bed and stare at them; they were sun-faded and half-peeled—
Hotel Richemond, Genève. Cook's Nile Service. Saigon Palace Hotel. Cunard White Star Lines Cruises. Train-Bleu.

In Patrick's favourite adventure stories, there was always a sidekick. And now he knew that's what he was—not Alan Breck Stuart but David Balfour; not Holmes but Watson. It was heady, finally to learn this. Sidekicks never instigated adventures. They were drawn into them. And here was his; after all those years of waiting.

They'd climbed this hill together in silence. Jane had worn a secret on her face which Patrick pretended not to notice, it was a happy look and he'd been happy too, to think he might be the cause of it.

But now he knew what she'd really been thinking. Before they even reached the foot of the hill, Jane had known that he'd go with her, to Africa.

Charlie and Jo were born in Kenya.

They were fine years. Patrick used the Underwood to type Jane's research notes, and his unpublished adventure novels. And when the kids were old enough, he home-schooled them.

At first, he spent time chasing down books which followed the English curriculum—buying them from the English schools in Kenya, ordering them in from London. Then he gave up and made up their education as he went along. It was a good way to teach, and a good way to learn: Jo and Charlie spent time with each other, with their parents, and with all the people around them; and everyone they met contributed in some way to their schooling—the PhDs from Europe and America, the Kenyan men and women who worked with them.

Patrick was proud of his kids, and proud of the life they were leading. He liked to watch his barefoot son kick round a soccer ball with barefoot black boys and ginger-bearded zoologists—and he liked to sit with his daughter, outside, and watch the vast and uninterrupted night sky.

In 1984, Jane secured funding to study the Tsavo lions. Patrick suspected she did it to please her father, but he said nothing, and went with her.

But the post didn't last long, because Jane, Patrick and the kids had to move to Lion Manor.

Jane's father had been leading tourists on horseback bush tour when he suffered a God-almighty stroke and died at the edge of a dried-out water-hole, propped by a panicking tourist against a fever tree.

Lion Manor was Jane's inheritance; they stayed for three years, preparing it for sale. They leased one of the Manor's several islands to a chimpanzee rescue charity, then sold the Safari Park as a going concern and, eager to be free, spent the money part-funding a palaeo-anthropological dig on the coast of Kenya. But all the dig proved was their inability to handle finance. And so, eleven years after leaving, they returned to Britain.

By now, Jane had acquired a small reputation for unusual field projects, which was how she secured a position studying a colony of Tuatara living in freakish isolation off the North Welsh coast. Tuatara were a lizard species unique to New Zealand. Nobody had the first idea how they'd come to be on the wrong side of the world.

The family lived in a coastal, whitewashed cottage. Patrick loved to be near the sea, and at least Wales wasn't England. The kids went to the local school. In spring and summer, they walked or cycled. In winter, he drove them in the old VW estate—leprous with Greenpeace and WWF and surfing decals, rusted round the wheel-rims, orange as a lollipop.

Jo wanted to be an astronaut, and because astronauts had to be fit, she and Patrick went on after-school rambles and beachfront sprints.

Patrick kept house, wrote books, sent them to publishers, kept the rejections. He grew vegetables. He compiled and typed-up Jane's notes, first with the old Underwood, then with a computer bought second-hand from the local Classifieds. He kept on top of Jane's correspondence. He travelled to local libraries, historical societies, document collections, searching out mention of some local traveller's return from New Zealand with a basket of exotic lizards. But he found nothing.

While they were living at this very cottage, in something not far from poverty, Jane took a call from a man called Bob Todd.

Todd worked for a West Country safari park that had just been taken over—and he knew what Jane had achieved, turning round Lion Manor. So he drove his shiny Rover all the way to the little whitewashed cottage on the Welsh coast, just to meet her. Bob Todd was just about as keen as mustard.

He and Jane sat in the little kitchen and talked. Bob Todd showed her a folder, full of glossy photographs and bullet points. And he offered her a proper job, with hours and a salary and sick leave and holiday entitlement—her first, ever. Then Bob Todd drove away again, with a cheery toot of his horn.

Jane took the job. They needed the money; it wouldn't be for long.

Patrick wanted to go back to Africa. He missed the light. He wanted to write a novel about pirates. Instead, they moved to Bath, where the light came in weaker, dissipated, at an English slant, and it was impossible for him to write much of anything.

Bob Todd had permitted a fly-on-the-wall documentary crew to film the park's management takeover: they'd record the slumberous boardroom combat, the behind-the-scenes crises, the ear-tugging, the glance-averting.

The Park
was a moderate hit, at best; four half-hour episodes tucked away on BBC 2. But Jane was bigger than it. Viewers liked her; they liked her unsentimental devotion to her animals, and they liked her khaki shorts and Caterpillar boots.

In episode four, during a marketing meeting, the camera lingered on her face as she struggled with her contempt. All around her, fat men with five o'clock shadows and cufflinks pronounced balderdash and bullshit, their nervous eyes flitting sideways to the single recording lens.

The episode faded out on that same face, stoic as the vet administered a lethal injection to a sick lion. Jane's jaw was clamped and her eyes didn't waver from the table. Intended as an arch editorial comment on the state of the safari park, this was the moment that made her television career.

That Christmas, she appeared in a popular woman's magazine—the kind you buy at the supermarket checkout. She was wearing a party dress, smiling for the camera.
TV's Jane Bowman says LOOK AT ME NOW!
She was laughing and twirling; showing some leg, some teeth.

She said to Patrick, ‘Why not?'

‘Why not?' said Patrick.

In 1991, she was invited by
The Park'
s
producer to co-present a series of wildlife documentaries. The producer's name was Richard.

Jane resigned her post at the safari park; it was doomed anyway. She said, ‘What the hell.'

‘What the hell,' said Patrick.

So he and the kids remained in cultured, decorous Bath while Jane and Richard—and his two-man crew—went to Morocco, Gibraltar, Spain, Greece, Turkey, filming hungry donkeys, sad-eyed spider-monkeys, traumatized baby chimps—and Koukla the bear.

Jane and Richard had the kind of on-screen rapport that cannot be faked. They wandered, side by side, affecting to ignore the camera. It was called
chemistry;
the show was called
Zoo Undercover,
and it was a big hit.

More was to come.

3

Three years later, because Jane's celebrity had given rise to some difficulty in their marriage, they decided on the move to Monkeyland. This was 1995. They wondered how to tell the kids.

At thirteen, Jo was conscientious, scruffy, unpopular and by far the tallest girl in her year, or the year above that, or the year above that. She was skinny and knobby, her long body full of corners, and she had sulky eyes and big feet—that, and a dandelion clock of frizzy hair.

At ten years old, she had exceeded Patrick's ability to teach her. Now she spent time showing him patterns and symmetries and mysteries.

‘Take a river, right? Any river.'

He imagined a river.

‘Now take a point, any point. And measure along the curves of the river until you meet the sea. Okay?'

Cunningly, he said, ‘But where exactly
does
a river meet the sea?'

‘That's an arbitrary decision. Go on—pick a point.'

‘Done it.'

‘Okay. Now—starting from the same point, draw a straight line to the sea.'

‘Yup.'

‘Now, divide the second number by the first. And what do you get?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Pi!'

‘No!'

‘Yes!'

He sat back in the chair. ‘How?'

‘Nobody knows!'

Like much that interested her, this seemed more than a mystery—it hummed with the magical. It re-entered Patrick's mind when he found himself walking beside the river. But it was slippery as a fish, too. He understood it for a moment, and then it was gone.

The walls of Jo's room were hung with clippings of crew-cut men in black and white, smiling out of unhelmeted space-suits with neckpieces wide as jam jars. Patrick could name Yuri Gagarin, Neil Armstrong, perhaps Buzz Aldrin—but there were many more. The crew of the Space Shuttle
Challenger,
smiling in blue jumpsuits, ready to die.

And there was a long poster mapping out the solar system as a neat arrangement of planets; Patrick had bought it for her. Its scale, she told him, even as she Blu-Tacked it to the wall, was
greatly misleading.

There were pictures taken by the Hubble Space telescope; a poster of Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue. Books on the birth of the universe, the formation of stars, the theory of relativity, and wormholes and black holes.

On clear nights, she pointed to the stars with a twiggy finger and named them for him. He was hypnotized by her wonder.

One night, she informed him that he wasn't standing on the surface of the planet looking up, but hanging off the planet like a bat; looking down into a limitless abyss.

Overcome with a sudden and terrible vertigo, he reached for Jo's hand. He sat heavily in the grass. He looked at his knees because he was scared, for a moment, to look up; she'd turned looking up into looking down.

Up the downs, he thought.

Patrick and Jane argued about Jo. Jane won: Jo was thirteen. Old enough to be boarder.

She could come home at weekends and holidays. Compared to being in low Earth orbit, boarding school would be a doddle.

Jo said, ‘Whatever. Excellent,' and Patrick worried she wouldn't miss them; that he and Jane were superannuated curiosities, like clunky old computers—admirable in context, but laughable too, for their limitations and design flaws.

So Jo didn't come to Devon, and neither did Charlie: Charlie didn't want to go
anywhere,
or do anything but see his friends. They smoked dope round each other's houses, went to Bath pubs and nightclubs.

Patrick supposed he should be happy that Charlie's friends were unthreatening and knowable. But he wasn't; it irritated the crap out of him.

Charlie took a job on a Bristol building site, hauling into skips half-bricks and broken tiles, stained old toilets, useless piping. He wore a baseball cap to keep the hair from his face. He came home in the back of a white van, and he refused to come to Devon.

‘I'm just sick of moving.'

Patrick said: ‘I thought you hated Bath.'

But Charlie's world had contracted to a few friends' houses, a building site, half a dozen pubs, a few nightclubs—and the ghost of a girl on a bridge.

Patrick had seen them together, once; an early summer evening, not long before.

He was sitting outside the pub, surrounded by much younger people, nursing his third or fourth pint and reading
The Man in the Iron Mask.
And over the road, heading up from Pulteney weir, Charlie passed by. He was with the girl. She was tall, skinny, bleached blonde, in army boots and ripped jeans.

Patrick laid down his book and watched them, greatly moved by something in his son's countenance.

They were
sixteen,
this boy and this girl, and it was
summer.
Bath was pink-washed in the sunset, and they were headed to a nightclub, where they would listen to loud music and maybe dance, and spend time with their friends, and maybe have sex and wake hungover and happy. And they were wasting it, walking with solemn distance between them.

The girl paused and dug out a pack of cigarettes—a green pack, menthols—and offered one to his boy.

Charlie took it, and offered the girl a light. She tilted her head, brushed aside her limp fringe and stooped to the flame. And as she did, Charlie took a secret, heartbroken scent of her.

Charlie closed his eyes. His delicate eyelids. His girlish lashes.

Then the girl straightened, puffing, and they walked on together, without exchanging a word.

And now Charlie packed his stuff—some clothes, some records, not much else—and left, to live in a squat.

It would be a genteel kind of squat, Patrick supposed; it was in Bath.

Early autumn 1995, they moved to Monkeyland.

Biddie Powys's old house was big, ramshackle, higgledy as gingerbread—it would've been too big, even filled with the noisy motion of the four of them. Now it drummed out its emptiness like a slow-beating heart. Patrick and Jane had never lived together without children.

On a cool September night, they waded out into the wild acre behind the house. Jane was barefoot, barelegged in his parka.

He unzipped the parka and she lay down and they fucked in a flattened patch of grass, the ice-twinkling universe upended above them.

Richard's two-man camera crew was there to record the first, faltering days at Monkeyland—the strained meetings, the worried staff, the flexing stress commas at the corners of Jane's mouth.

They took many shots of Patrick, in his frayed sweater, stirring mugs of milky tea.

Patrick liked the camera crew—Sound Mick and Camra Dave. They were disinterested and professional and jovial; and they told sniggering jokes about Richard, about his perfect hair, his clothes, his background as a quiz-show presenter. They made Patrick snicker, like a schoolboy at a resented teacher.

Sometimes, Patrick joined them as they ranged Monkeyland, collecting shots to portray it in the bleakest possible light. They called it
Going Ukrainian.
They told Patrick that Going Ukrainian had never been such a doddle, and clapped him fraternally on the back.

They shot lonely chimps wandering through cold compounds, wall-eyed gibbons and sad-eyed orangs, munching away. The empty cafeteria, the windblown gift shop. And just the sheeting, grey rain, blowing across the deserted public spaces. The picnic area, the adventure playground.

Patrick stood with them on a grassy mound that overlooked the Bachelor Group, watching as they filmed weather billowing in from the west, soaking the skinny, miserable donkeys.

He laced his hands behind his head and said, ‘Fucking hell.'

Camra Dave shifted the unit on his shoulder.

He said, ‘I don't envy you, mate.'

Patrick slept six hours a night and woke energized and refreshed. Sometimes in the morning, he did an hour's writing. More often, he went out; he fished, did some running, pounding along muddy tracks in shorts and hooded top. His suburban headaches cleared up.

Then he drove over to Monkeyland and the despondency returned like toothache.

He began every morning with a staff meeting. The staff were unhappy; they feared for their jobs. Patrick feared for their jobs too. He, Jane and the senior keepers spent many hours in planning meetings—detailing the cost and logistics of refitting the enclosures; discussing how to enrich the chimps' environment without bankrupting the operation.

The Head Keeper was Harriet. She was from London. She called moving to Monkeyland a
lifestyle choice,
and she squinted one eye balefully at Patrick when she said it, as if anticipating a challenge.

Harriet was short, five foot one in her DMs, thirty-five, blonde, florid, and good at being Head Keeper. She knew what she was doing, and Patrick didn't. And yet he was her boss. The first time he met her, he made a joke about her job title. ‘You're the Head Keeper? Great! Where do you keep the heads?'

She did not respond, and now Patrick was slightly scared of her.

Sam had been Charlie's girlfriend for three months.

She was American, from Washington DC, and she'd been living in England for three years. So she understood what it was like, to speak the same language but not quite understand the jokes—to miss the undercurrent of astute cultural reference: quips about TV shows he'd never seen and songs he'd never heard, because he'd been living in Lion Manor, or in some research camp, or on the north coast of fucking Wales.

She was older than him—eighteen. And they liked the same music. Not just the same bands, or the same albums, but the same
songs.
Sometimes, they just sat in her room, not moving or speaking; just hugging their knees, listening to the songs.

Now she was going out with a bloke called Robin, who was the singer in a band called Quadrophobia.

The first band Charlie liked—the first band he'd been in a position to like—was Nirvana. He was still wearing the checked shirts, the tired jeans, the haphazardly laced, fucked-up old Chuck Taylors. But already, those clothes were out of time.

In the squat were some Goths and a couple of misplaced hippies; but Goths and hippies, like cockroaches, would probably survive a nuclear war. Mostly, everyone was listening to different stuff now. All of it was English—Pulp, Blur, Elastica. It was possible to go on a pub crawl, drink one pint in each, and hear nothing on the various jukeboxes but Oasis.

People scoffed at the John Major's desperate evocation of a counterfeit England—a country of long shadows on country grounds, warm beer, old maids bicycling to Holy Communion. It was Tory sentimentalism, reactionary floundering—because a change was coming.

But everyone Charlie knew was indulging in the same phoney patriotism. They said it was ironic, but it didn't
feel
ironic, not in the late summer of 1995, when people in the pubs and clubs in their Fred Perrys and Adidas were pogo-ing and swaggering home together, football-chanting ‘Some Might Say' or ‘Champagne Supernova'.

Charlie couldn't yearn for a lie he'd never been raised to cherish—Patrick was always muttering about how much he loathed England. And anyway, Kurt Cobain had schooled him in how to despise such dangerous fables.

But—of course—Kurt was dead. He put a shotgun to his beautiful face, because he couldn't stand it any more.

Most weekends, Quadrophobia was playing a shitty support slot in some London pay-to-play toilet; there was talk of them signing to Island Records. But, on occasion, Sam and Robin could still be observed at their old habitats, like exotic birds on dreary salt flats.

Entering any pub, any nightclub, Charlie scanned the crowd looking for her, and his insides always dropped away when she wasn't there. He'd spend another evening drinking and talking; one eye always on the door. He didn't want to see her, and he didn't want to speak to her—but he phoned her three times a night, from the call box on the corner. Usually he hung up when someone, anyone, answered. Then he dialled again.

Other nights, he walked past her house. You couldn't see her bedroom window from the road; it was round the back, overlooking the long garden. But he walked past anyway; went miles out of his way, alone, at night, to brush the furthest edge of her force-field.

And one night, in December, Charlie saw her. She'd changed. She wore very new trainers and smart, tight, indigo jeans. Her hair was much shorter—an asymmetric bob that hung over one eye, like Twiggy. She was wearing make-up.

Robin was there, too. He wore hair like John Lennon and circular sunglasses with blue lenses. He walked with an affected proletarian swagger; three years before, he'd been playing prop forward in the university's first fifteen. People crowded round him because he was the singer in a band that might get signed, that might be on
Top of the Pops.

He stood with his beefy arm around Sam. She dug him with a bony hip.

Charlie had always been careful not to be
clingy.
He knew girls hated that. And there she was, clinging away, nuzzling Robin's neck and laughing too loudly at his boorish jokes. And when she looked away to light a cigarette, her face became sad.

Charlie couldn't bear to look at her. He ignored her.

He went to get a drink, a fiver clutched like a flower in his skinny fist. And Sam didn't look at him—not even a furtive, sidelong glance in the long mirror that ran behind the bar. Charlie knew, because he kept checking.

In the toilets, he scored some speed and stirred the wormwood powder into the last quarter of his pint. Drank it down.

Back in the noisy club, Jake said, ‘Mate, she's not worth it.'

Jake was Charlie's best mate. They lived in the squat together. Like almost everyone else in the club, Jake had recently changed the way he dressed. He wore a crushed velvet smoking jacket and lank hair and Chelsea boots and heavy-rimmed geek glasses. But Jake was overweight, always had been. He was squashed and shoved and rolled into his clothes, and the effect of all this effort was comical, and tragic.