by Kevin Brooks
I hadn’t expected her to get so excited, so it was a bit of a surprise at first—in fact, it was a lot of a surprise. I suppose I’d assumed she’d be really cool about everything—strolling around, calm as you like, chatting quietly to me, casting occasional curious glances at the animals…
I don’t know why I’d thought that.
It was a pretty stupid assumption to make.
But, even so, it was kind of odd that she wasn’t chatting away to me. Every time I tried to talk to her, she’d listen for a second and then suddenly shoot off in another direction to look at some more animals, or she’d start jabbering again—
“…I came here once on a school trip and we had to fill in all these forms with questions about the animals, like where they lived and what they ate and everything, and everyone just copied it all down from the information signs on the cages…Where’s the penguins? Have they still got penguins? What’s that over there…?”
It was unsettling, and also a bit disappointing. I didn’t just want her to be with me, I wanted her to be with me. I wanted us to walk together, talk together, be together…I wanted to be part of her excitement, not just a spectator. Not that I minded being a spectator. I mean, although I felt a bit detached from her excitement, there was still something exhilarating about it, something that gave me a strange little kick, as if it was me she was getting excited about, even though I knew that it wasn’t.
And that was OK.
It wasn’t perfect, but I could live with it.
So after a while, that’s what I did. I gave up trying to make conversation and just wandered along behind her, watching her every move. At first I tried to be subtle about it—disguising my glances, pretending to look elsewhere—but, as far as I could tell, she wasn’t aware of my attention, so in the end I stopped trying to be subtle and just watched her quite openly instead. I knew in my heart that I shouldn’t be doing it, and my conscience kept nagging away at me—you ought to be ashamed of yourself, watching her without her knowing, ogling her like some kind of sicko—but I just couldn’t help it. My eyes had a life of their own, zapping back and forth between her face, her body, her legs, her breasts…and my thoughts were running wild—Where does she come from? What does she do? Is she really a prostitute? What does that mean? How old is she? Sixteen? Seventeen? Fifteen? Fourteen? Does it matter…?
Did it matter?
I couldn’t convince myself that it didn’t.
And I knew I had to talk to her. No matter how much I wanted to ignore all the questions and just enjoy the thrill of being with her, I knew it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t spend all day just gawping at her, for God’s sake. She was a person, not a photograph in a magazine. She was real.
We were heading toward the penguin pool now. I was walking along on my own, struggling with my guilty thoughts, when I looked up and saw Candy waiting for me at the end of the pathway. She was leaning against a signpost, smoking a cigarette, studying me closely. I got the feeling she knew exactly what I was thinking.
“Hey,” she said as I approached. “It’s good, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“The zoo.”
“Oh, yeah…”
She rubbed her arms and pulled down her sleeves.
I said, “Aren’t you cold without a coat?”
“Never feel the cold,” she said. “I’ve got hot blood.”
Her skin looked cold to me—pale and white and prickled with goose bumps—but I didn’t say anything.
“Do you want to get a coffee or something?” she said. “There’s a little café over there.”
“OK.”
She dropped her cigarette to the ground and stepped on it, then looped her arm through mine and started leading me up the path. “I’ll buy you that doughnut I promised you,” she said, leaning against me. “And then you can tell me all about yourself.”
Now I was the one with goose bumps.
It wasn’t much of a café, just a medium-sized room with a dozen or so tables and a serving counter at the front. It was empty and quiet, though, and it had a pretty nice view, and I didn’t really care what it was like, anyway. They didn’t have any doughnuts, so we got ourselves two Jungle Platters and two mugs of coffee, and Candy insisted on paying.
“My treat,” she said.
“But you paid for us to get in—”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, pushing my money away and pulling a wad of notes from her purse. “See? I’m loaded.”
As we took our trays to a window table, my mind drifted back to the time in McDonald’s when she’d shown Iggy a handful of notes and said, See? I wouldn’t lie to you, Iggy, you know I wouldn’t… and he’d just sat there staring at her—staring his stare—and she’d shrunk back into her seat, cowering in silence…
I looked at her now—putting her tray on the table, sorting out the cutlery, her face flushed bright with the warmth of the café—and it was hard to imagine that Iggy even existed.
I knew he did, though, and I knew I had to find out about him. But I also knew I had to be careful. If I said the wrong thing, if I got too pushy…I didn’t know what might happen.
“So,” Candy said, tucking into her chips, “where do you want to start?”
“Start what?”
“I want to know everything about you—where you were born, who you are, what you like doing…What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Am I being too nosy?”
“No, it’s not that—”
“All right,” she said. “How about if I tell you what I think you are, and you tell me if I’m right or wrong? Is that any better?”
“I don’t mind…”
“Right—OK…let’s see. Your dad’s a gynecologist—”
“I already told you that.”
“I know—I’m just getting started. It’s no good just guessing, is it? You’ve got to start with the facts and work up from there. Fact number one: Your dad’s a gynecologist. Correct?”
“Correct.”
She dipped a forkful of chips into her egg, then paused, the fork in midair, looking thoughtfully at me. “That’s got to be hard work,” she said.
“What?”
“Being a gynecologist…I mean, you get up in the morning and go to work, and the first thing you do is start poking around inside someone’s fanny. That can’t be easy…especially if you’ve had a few drinks the night before.”
I tried to look composed, as if I wasn’t shocked or embarrassed or anything, which I wasn’t really, but I somehow felt as if I ought to be, and I couldn’t keep the feeling from my face.
“What?” she said, looking at me. “I was only saying—”
“I know…it’s all right. It’s nothing.”
I thought for a moment she was going to say something else about Dad or about gynecologists in general or about me getting embarrassed, but she didn’t. She just smiled for a second, then popped the eggy chips into her mouth and started talking again. “OK,” she said. “Facts number two and number three: You live in Heystone and you’re in Year Ten at Heystone High.”
My mouth dropped open in dumb surprise.
“Am I right?” She grinned.
“How do you know that?” I said.
She laughed, wiggling her fingers at her head. “I’m psychic…I can fe-e-el your thoughts…I know everything there is to know…”
“Did you follow me?”
Her face went still. “Of course I didn’t follow you. What do you think I am?”
“So how do you know where I live?”
“Because…” she said, starting to eat again, “…because…I used to see you at the skateboard park.”
“What? When?”
“Years ago, when it first opened. You used to hang around there after school, you and your skateboard friends, falling off your boards all the time.”
“How do you know?”
“I was there.”
“Where?”
“At the pa
rk.”
“I don’t get it. What were you doing there?”
“Sneaking around bumming cigarettes most of the time.” She laughed. “It’s no great mystery or anything—I used to live in Heystone, that’s all. I went to St. Mary’s—”
“The convent school?”
“Yeah. I wasn’t there for long, though…”
I looked at her, trying to imagine how she’d look in a St. Mary’s School uniform—the long blue dress, the stupid little hat, the short white socks—but I couldn’t picture it.
“Whereabouts in Heystone did you live?”
“Otley,” she said.
I nodded. Otley’s on the posh side of town—or the posher side, to be more exact. Heystone doesn’t do poor, it only does varying degrees of rich, and Otley’s about as rich as it gets.
“Surprised?” Candy said.
“Well, yeah…I mean, not about Otley…just the whole thing. You know, the coincidence.”
“What coincidence?”
“Us…you and me…both of us coming from Heystone…”
“You think that’s a coincidence?”
“Well, yeah…”
She shook her head. “Why do you think I called out to you at the station?”
“Why?”
“Yeah. D’you think I make a habit of calling out to any old strangers on the street?”
“Well, no…I suppose not…”
“I recognized you. I just told you that…I remembered you from the park.” She angled her head and looked at me. “You haven’t changed much, you know. Not that it was that long ago—only a couple of years.”
“You recognized me?”
“Yes.”
I didn’t know how I felt about that. It was nice, in a way. Nice to be recognized. Nice to know she remembered me. Nice to think I must have had something worth remembering. But I wasn’t sure I wanted nice. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be recognized or remembered.
I wasn’t sure what I wanted.
“Are you going to eat that?” Candy said, nodding at my bread.
“Help yourself,” I told her.
As she folded the bread and mopped up the egg yolk from her plate, I gazed out through the café window. The patio outside was deserted. Across the zoo I could see the pathways winding up and down through a landscape of trees and rocks and make-believe animal worlds. Man-made mountains stood glowering in the distance, as pale and gray as poster-painted papier-mâché, and I wondered if the animals knew the mountains weren’t real and, if they did know, whether they cared.
“Why do you have to think so much about everything?” Candy said through a mouthful of eggy bread.
I shook my head. I didn’t mean to look irritated, but Candy’s reaction showed that I did.
“I was only asking,” she said sulkily. “I don’t care what you do.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I was just thinking, that’s all.”
She lit a cigarette and breathed out her irritation in a stream of smoke. “Thinking about what?”
“You.”
It came out before I knew what I was saying, and I think it shocked her a bit. I know it shocked me. She didn’t say anything for a while, just looked at me for a moment, then started tidying the table, piling the plates and the cutlery on the tray. When that was done, she sat back, patted her belly, and burped contentedly, like an old man after dinner at his club. Then she took another long drag on her cigarette and looked at me again.
“You’ve got egg on the side of your mouth,” I told her.
“Where?”
I pointed to the corner of my mouth.
She touched the other side of her mouth. “Here?”
“No…the other side.”
“Show me,” she said, sucking the end of a paper napkin and passing it to me. I hesitated a moment, then reached across and touched the napkin to her mouth. Without meaning to, I brushed her cheek with the back of my fingers…Her skin was delicate and smooth. The bones of her face felt small and unknown.
“Thanks,” she said, licking her lips.
I nodded quietly, crumpling the napkin and placing it carefully on the tray. The ball of white tissue paper sat there for a moment, then slowly uncrumpled, revealing an inkblot pattern of lipstick-pink and yellow. I stared at it for a while, looking for hidden meanings in the pattern, but there was nothing there—it was just a smudge of lipstick and egg.
“Joe?” said Candy.
I looked up. Her face was pale and drawn, making her eyes seem even darker than usual.
She said, “You don’t want to know about me.”
“Why not?”
“It’s just best if you don’t.”
“Best for who?”
“You…me…I don’t know.”
She seemed tense—fiddling with her cigarette lighter, blinking her eyes, tapping her finger on the table. It was as if she was desperate to go somewhere or do something, but equally desperate not to.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I don’t mind—”
“Sorry,” she interrupted, starting to get up. “I need to go to the loo.” She picked up her handbag from the table and looked around the café, looking for the lavatory.
“It’s over there,” I said, pointing to a doorway across the room.
“Thanks,” she said, walking off quickly. “I won’t be a minute.”
I watched her go, remembering the last time she’d walked away from me, when I’d first seen her at the station. Then she’d walked with a sway of her hips and a quick smile over her shoulder, as if she knew that she was being watched and wanted to make the most of it, but now she was walking without any vanity at all—no swaying hips, no pretense, no frivolity. She was walking with a purpose. Either not knowing or not caring that I was watching her.
As she went through the doorway, I wondered briefly if she was running out on me. I imagined her going down the corridor, slipping into the kitchen, then sneaking out the back door and legging it across the zoo…
Yeah, right, I thought to myself. She’s going to do that, isn’t she? She’s going to go to all that trouble just to get away from you.
I sat there for a while, staring through the window, thinking about things, listening to the steamy hiss of tea urns and the clatter of plates and cutlery, then I got up and went to wait outside.
It was early afternoon now and the temperature was starting to drop. The sun was still shining, though, still brightening the sky, and the grounds of the zoo were bathed in a crisp wintry light. The air was crystal clear. I could see for miles. I could see brightly colored birds, goats on hills, zebras and llamas, capuchin monkeys playing in the tops of trees…
I looked back inside the café.
Candy was taking a long time.
I wondered what she was doing—washing her hands, fixing her makeup, making a phone call…? I didn’t have a clue. What girls get up to in restrooms is a complete mystery to me. Gina sometimes disappears for hours. I’ve often been tempted to ask her what she does in there, but it’s a tricky subject to talk about. There’s always the chance of stumbling into the kinds of areas that shouldn’t embarrass me but do, and that’s the worst kind of embarrassment there is. Because when you feel embarrassed about something that you know you shouldn’t feel embarrassed about, you end up in the vicious circle of being embarrassed by your embarrassment…and that’s really embarrassing.
I looked over at the café again, willing Candy to appear: Come on…please…If you take any longer, I’ll have to do something. I’ll have to go and ask someone to check the Ladies for me…that woman behind the counter…the one in the apron, with the grease-smeared glasses…I’ll have to go up to her and explain what’s happened…
A door slammed inside the café. I leaned to one side to get a better view. For a second or two, I couldn’t see anything…and then Candy was there, a vision in turquoise, walking through the doorway and adjusting her bag over her shoulder.
I let out a sigh and looked away, doing my best to look
casual. Hands in pockets, gazing around, just taking in the view, waiting happily—no worries at all. I was so cool and casual that even when the café door opened, I waited a moment before turning around.
“Sorry I took so long,” Candy said.
“That’s all right,” I told her, shrugging very slightly, just to let her know that I’d hardly even noticed.
She stopped in front of me, looking down at the ground, and I could sense something different about her. It’s hard to describe, but she somehow seemed looser. The way she was standing, hanging her head…the strange little smile on her lips…
“I was…uh…” she mumbled.
“Sorry?”
She raised her head and looked at me, struggling to focus on my face. “I’m all right,” she said. “It’s all right…Do you wanna…?” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, then giggled. “Sorry…” she said. “Sorry…I didn’t mean…Do you wanna, you know…?” She waved her hand, indicating the zoo, then looked back at me again, covering her mouth to stifle a yawn. Her eyes were enormous, like pools of obsidian, but her pupils had shrunk to dim black dots, almost invisible within the darkness.
“Come on,” she said, taking my arm. “I wanna show you something.”
chapter six
Whatever Candy had taken, it didn’t seem to affect her too much…not outwardly, anyway. I mean, she wasn’t stumbling or staggering around, she wasn’t singing or shouting or laughing like a lunatic…she wasn’t doing anything. She was just walking along quite normally, leading me across to the other side of the zoo, as calm and steady and cool as you like. Apart from her eyes and a slight flush to her face, it was hard to tell any difference. Her pace was a little slow, perhaps, but at least she wasn’t rushing around like a maniac anymore. In fact, if anything, she seemed more normal now than she had been before. Her speech was a bit slurred, but it wasn’t too bad, just a bit sleepy-sounding, and after the initial bout of mumbling and giggling she soon settled down and got back to being herself again.
Whatever that was.
I didn’t know.
As we walked along the pathways, I didn’t know anything—what to think, how to feel, how to react. I mean, when you’re with someone you really like and you haven’t known them that long and they start sneaking off to take drugs…what the hell are you supposed to do? Ignore it? Say something? Run away?
