The Secret Life of the Panda

by Nick Jackson

  “Can I have a whisky?”

  The man’s smile faded. “Whisky? You can get your own,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “One lager-and-lime coming up.”

  Kelvin felt sweat break out in his armpits. He thought he heard the two ladies in the corner start whispering: “He didn’t, did he?” “He did!”

  He ploughed his way through to the counter: “Whisky!” he shouted at the woman.

  “Eh?”

  Kelvin couldn’t speak.

  “Spit it out!” she yelled at him.

  Gary was laughing too. He winked at the two old ladies in the corner and they raised their sherry glasses.

  “I’ll have an orange juice,” said Kelvin to the barmaid.

  Gary and Martina seemed to be such good friends that Kelvin wondered whether they’d be happier if he wasn’t there. After the drinks Gary invited Martina back to his flat. He scarcely glanced at Kelvin: “You can come too, if you want.”

  They climbed up the stairs of a guest house which had been converted into flats with paper-thin partitions and soaring ceilings. There was no heating in the flat and barely any furniture except the remains of an old bus seat which served as a couch. Cigarette ends littered the floor.

  “I can’t offer you tea,” he said. “Unless you’ve got fifty pence for the meter.”

  They sat, watching their breath form clouds in the middle of the room.

  “Well, fancy a smoke?” Gary licked his lips and looked round the room as if it was crowded and he was addressing several people and not just the two of them.

  “I don’t smoke, thanks,” said Kelvin. “We might not stay long.”

  “A smoke would be nice,” said Martina, as she wriggled herself into the corner of the bus seat.

  Gary unsteadily rolled a cigarette on the grubby knee of his jeans, crumbling a tiny brown lump into it which looked like an Oxo cube.

  Martina took a long slow drag on the cigarette and breathed out into Kelvin’s face. “Try it, Kelvin, go on. Live dangerously!” and she began to laugh.

  Kelvin stood up and a book fell from his pocket onto the bare floorboards.

  “What’s this?” Gary scooped up the tattered green and white paperback.

  “It’s Madame Bovary,” said Kelvin, “by Flaubert.”

  “Flo-who?”

  “Flaubert. He’s a very famous French novelist of the nineteenth century.”

  “Oh yeah?” there was a long pause. “Very famous is he? What’s it about?”

  “It’s about a girl who dreams of living a luxurious life and marrying into the aristocracy.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “It’s very good actually. She ends up in a terrible…”

  “Oh, it’s actually very good, is it?” Gary gave Martina a sidelong glance.

  “It has a tragic ending. She kills herself by swallowing arsenic.”

  There was a silence, then Martina and Gary burst into fits of laughter, throwing themselves back onto the bus seat and waving their legs in the air. Gary ended up sliding off the seat altogether.

  “Another smoke, Martina?” Gary picked himself up off the floor

  “Yeah, go on.” Martina sank back into the corner of the settee and looked at Kelvin through narrowed eyes. “He likes reading, don’t you, Kelvin?”

  “I do as a matter of fact. I don’t want to be working at the fish labs all my life.”

  “Like me, you mean?”

  “I’ll go, then,” he said. Martina and Gary watched him getting his things together and carried on smoking.

  “Will you be alright getting home?” he said to Martina.

  “I ’spect so.”

  “I’ll be off then.”

  “Bye.”

  Gary didn’t say anything except, “Watch out for the milk bottles,” as Kelvin tripped over a line of them by the door.

  *

  There was an envelope sitting on the breakfast table when Kelvin came downstairs the following morning.

  “It’s a university place,” he said to his mother, “An unconditional offer.”

  “Oh, that’s nice dear.”

  Kelvin took his rucksack into work with him, filled with wet towels. During the morning coffee break, when there was no one around in the tank room or the annex, he used a fisherman’s landing net to scoop one of the cod out of the tank and into his rucksack. He dunked the rest of the towels in the tank water and threw them on top of the fish.

  It took him about fifteen minutes to get down to the edge of the promenade where a high tide was washing at the sea wall. From the steps, he released the fish into the waves where it lay, twitching feebly for a few minutes, before it gave a flick of its tail and disappeared into the murky depths. Kelvin felt a rush of relief as he watched the fish go. It was almost as if something inside him had been released. He looked up at the laboratory buildings. It was going to be a long job to release all of the fish.

  The Island

  The bleeding chunks slid on the white plate. Judith pushed the meat around with a fork before abandoning it.

  “What a waste,” Duncan complained, “of good meat.”

  “I wasn’t hungry.”

  She was inclined to wonder at her life these days; to view its strange twists and turns with a sense of detachment. It might have been someone else’s life that she was appraising with a faintly critical air. And this feeling that she had of being outside of reality was made more acute when she was on holiday with Duncan, just the two of them. Perhaps, she wondered, children would have made a difference but, then again, maybe not.

  *

  Click, click, click. Trying to locate the source of the sound, Judith turned her head from side to side on the pillow. It was one of those peculiar little French bolsters that slid from under her head. Duncan’s knees brushed the backs of her thighs. The clicking continued in the grey stillness of the room. Judith raised her head and peered round at the unfamiliar hulks of furniture. The dressing table mirror cast a steely triangle of light across the quilt. The clicking was, at times, almost as loud as someone snapping their fingers. She got up and went to the bathroom, feeling the tiles cool under her feet. A tap dripped softly in the sink but it wasn’t that that was making the noise. She filled a glass with water and gulped it, standing in the bathroom.

  Back under the quilt she still could not sleep. The clicking, she supposed, was one of those beetles, buried somewhere in the timbers of the old hotel.

  If I don’t do anything, Judith said to herself, if I just lie here very quietly, perhaps it will go away. Then the thought came. She couldn’t stop it. The thought just grew in her head, as if the seed of it had been waiting to burst open, and in a flash she saw her life, every scene of her life since she had married Duncan and closed the door on experience. What am I to do? she whispered into the darkness. At last, unable to sleep, she went to the window and opened the casement. The island showed its dark hump against the pale horizon. It loomed, massive, and Judith felt as if there was a spring coiled tightly inside her, fighting against her natural inertia, impelling her towards something. A bird called softly, an eerie cry in the night.

  *

  The following morning, Judith took out her binoculars to look at the distant panorama of the island. It shimmered in the heat haze, yet she saw that the cliffs rose sheer from the waves. The tiny white flecks of birds whirled above the island.

  Duncan knew that there was nothing there but grey rocks and spiny plants and boredom. The boat trip was an indulgence to Judith’s romantic view of the Mediterranean.

  The boat attendant, a boy of sixteen or seventeen, was asleep in the bottom of his boat. He slept in the shade cast by a carefully positioned square of canvas draped over the bow. Judith couldn’t bear to wake him up—he was sleeping so peacefully.

  She’d seen the boy before, hanging around the entrance to the hotel. He had one of those closed faces, his hair flopping forwards over his eyes, so that just the glitter of them was visible. The sort of boy who is engrossed in
his own world—a world which Judith would never be able to enter.

  “Don’t wake him,” she said to Duncan, “We can come back later.”

  “Nonsense.” Duncan’s lips tightened. “We booked this trip for nine in the morning. If we have to spend the morning messing about in the village, the whole day’ll be gone.”

  “Hey, you! I booked this boat. Remember?”

  The boy’s eyes flickered.

  “Go to island? Nine o’clock? Yes?” Duncan jabbed at his watch, “Nine, nine!”

  Then the boy was sulkily awake. He moved slowly around the boat, tidying a coil of rope, spreading cushions on the seats. Judith watched the shadows of the water rippling on his brown arms.

  How impatient Duncan could be sometimes, she thought. His sharp tones intruded on the blue and gold of the morning light. But it was a voice that smoothed the way in so many daily transactions. It was so familiar and comforting to her. She couldn’t imagine life without it. Once, when Duncan had gone abroad for a sports’ event, she had looked forward to being on her own for a few weeks. But she found the loneliness had been too much. The silence had sucked her up.

  The boy pushed off from the quayside and the sudden violent motion made Judith’s stomach turn.

  “What is it?” said Duncan. “Are you OK?”

  “Nothing, just the rocking of the boat makes me feel a bit sick.”

  “Poor Judith.” Duncan reached out to touch her bare shoulder. She wished he hadn’t because the boy noticed it. His quick eyes saw everything and his nostrils twitched; Duncan was a large man who smelt of sweat even after a shower. The smell of the changing rooms hung about him; the faint cheesy odour that could never quite be masked by deodorant and charcoal in-soles.

  Judith sat on a piece of folded sail, trailing an arm in the warm sea, watching the boy rowing. Through her green-tinted glasses, she saw that his forearms were quite smooth and caught the silvery effect of the ripples. She imagined catching his eye, and smiling. The tiny muscles in her lips twitched, in sympathy with the idea. She was shocked by the sudden desire to be ravished, on the faded biscuit-coloured canvas, by the boy.

  Duncan sat frowning at the view, eager as a spaniel. Judith felt hot with shame; she pressed her legs together and narrowed her lips to a thin steely line, so that the boy wouldn’t catch her looking at him.

  The island loomed above them. Duncan was out of the boat in a flash, oblivious to wet shoes and trousers. He took hold of the rope and began to haul the boat towards the shore.

  “Five thirty, half past five, yes?” Duncan was saying to the boy as he helped Judith out of the boat, “You come back five thirty.”

  The boy was nodding and smiling. “Yes, yes.”

  Judith smoothed her skirt down. The way the boy’s gaze flicked away when she looked round amused her—such a young boy. Then, at the last minute, he gave her a sudden brilliant smile. Judith blushed and rushed away up the path that wound up the cliff out of the bay.

  “Why do you think he’ll understand better if you speak to him in pidgin English, Duncan?” she said as they struggled upwards. “I’m sure he understands quite well enough.” As they climbed they dislodged stones that fell with a sharp crack like pistol shots.

  “I was just making sure he understood.” Duncan poked at a tuft of pale grass clinging to a rock.

  The boy still stood on the beach looking up at them, shading his eyes.

  “Hasn’t he gone yet?” Duncan stopped and eased his back for a moment.

  “Maybe he’s going to wait for us.”

  “But I just explained—that wasn’t the arrangement.”

  “No.”

  They arrived at an arid plateau at the top of the cliff and saw that the boat had disappeared from the bay.

  “We need some shade,” said Duncan with hateful practicality, but there were no trees, only a few stunted shrubs with leaves that rattled in the breeze.

  The sea was all around them, Judith saw. As if she was a bird soaring overhead, part of her could see the pair of them stumbling across a barren rock, watching them wander along a narrow path.

  “I don’t like this place,” murmured Judith at last. “It smells of death…”

  “It’s probably a dead goat or something.” Duncan sounded husky in the dry heat. “Or the last boatload of nature-lovers abandoned with no food or water.”

  A tiny lizard ran across the path and paused, turning its eye on her, a nondescript woman struggling through the tangle of bushes. It lives here—she said to herself—and we are just passing through. She considered the creature’s ageless presence; it was, like the rocks, intimately connected with the island, with the harshness of existence. It made her feel silly and pointless.

  “Oh,” said Judith suddenly standing dead still.

  The crust of ashen rock fell steeply away. Below them the sea shivered, as unreal as a great cut gem of aquamarine with shifting purple depths. The path led down to a bay of grey pebbles.

  “Be careful,” said Duncan. “It’s steep!” But Judith was already stumbling down the path, clinging to the bare branches of plants as she went. She didn’t care that the twigs scratched her shins; she was so desperate to reach the shore.

  It was easy to forget about the grey plateau, smelling of goat carcasses, once you were by the sea. There was no sound in the bay except for the soft slippery sound of the waves and the frail piping of a bird from somewhere among the rocks. Judith spread her towel on a patch of sand and set up her sunshade—a thin jacket draped over two sticks. She unpacked a cushion and the book she’d been carting around.

  Duncan wandered off along the shore. On the way down the path he’d seen in the sea a shape, moving in the depths, which he thought he might see better from the spit of sand that thrust out from the far side of the bay. It was such a small inlet that he thought it would be no more than a fifteen-minute walk, but, as he picked his way along the shore, the boulders which had looked small from above, now proved almost as big as houses and it was hard to find a way through.

  For an hour, Judith struggled with her book. It was a clever book; almost, Judith suspected, a little too clever. In the heat, the words trailed off like insects and she found her eyelids drooping. If only she could get to the next line—but the letters clustered together. She didn’t like to feel defeated, but the grey details were exhausting on such a hot day. She let the book rest on her stomach, just for a moment, and adjusted the cushion. A warm salty breeze blew softly across the sand, and Judith slept.

  *

  At the end of the sand spit, Duncan climbed up onto a rock to look down at the shape—whatever it was. The water lapped glassily at the rock. The dark form seemed to wave fins and he wondered whether it might be a turtle browsing on the algae. He peered closer. The formless thing seemed to swell and shrink in the depths as if it had its own pulsating life. It could have been no more than the effect of light falling through the water giving the illusion of movement but Duncan was sure he could make out the ridges and grooves of a turtle’s shell.

  A turtle browsing on the seaweed—his mind leapt at the idea.

  The object wavered, it seemed to recede, to grow smaller and less dense, almost as if it was transparent and he could see the pebbly depths through it. Then it surged towards the surface, flecked with silver. He thought there might have been glimmering eyes to it. Then he saw what it was: a large sheet of black plastic with ragged edges. It had been caught on the rocks and drifted to and fro with the current. A breeze ruffled the surface of the water and Duncan shuddered in spite of the heat and raised his eyes to the sky. Clouds smeared the horizon; strips of cirrus cloud were drawn out like ribs across the haze of blue and suddenly the smell was there again—the rancid smell of something long dead and festering in a ravine.

  *

  Judith opened her eyes with a faint sense of nausea. Something had woken her: the sharp echo of a sliding pebble. She sat up and looked up at the cliffs but there was no one. The bird was still piping somewhere am
ong the rocks.

  “Hello? Duncan, is that you?”

  The bird called again, more urgently. Judith stood up to see if she could catch sight of it. She thought she saw a flutter of wings and was reaching for the binoculars when pebbles crunched behind her and she span round. The boy stood a few yards away, shading his eyes with one hand.

  “Oh, it’s you. I thought you were Duncan.” Judith laughed. It was funny to be alone on the beach with the handsome boy.

  “Look!” He held out his closed hand to her. When he opened it, she saw on the palm a tiny quivering insect. What was it? A grasshopper, she thought. It wasn’t something you did: show people such things as grasshoppers. It made her giggle; a helpless gulping in her throat when he reached out to touch her breast.

  There was something opaque about the eyes that were fixed on her breasts. He was very tall and older than she’d thought. His jaw had a prickling of stubble.

  The boy drew back his arm suddenly and she flinched, closing her eyes for a moment.

  “Please, no,” she said.

  He flung the insect he’d held high into the air and it buzzed away towards the cliffs.

  *

  The bay curved slightly and Duncan picked his way over boulders so that soon he was out of sight of Judith and her towel. He was drawn on by the irresistible impulse to see what was round the next headland. He clambered on for an hour or more, aware that time was passing but unable to turn back.

  He stumbled over a lip of rock and was brought up hard. The thing was laid out on the shore. At first he only saw the alien bulk of it: the gravid curves, the streaks of paler, bluer flesh; the belly as taut as a barrel. Then there was the head, with two grinning rows of tiny pointed teeth.

  Something had gouged out the eyes; only the snout was left untouched. A fin stretched, paddle-like, onto the sand as if it had tried, perversely, to haul itself out of its element. Flies whirled—a vortex of tiny devils—clustering and settling back on their sumptuous feast. It was the pale belly that he couldn’t drag his eyes from, and the grin. The tail with its sweeping flukes waved in the water, surging back and forth with the bottle tops and polystyrene chips.