The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise (16 page)

“Is this London Underground Lost Property Office?” he asked.

Hebe Jones raised her eyes to the sign above the counter.

He followed her gaze. “Has anyone handed in a small green case in the last fifteen minutes? It’s an emergency,” he asked.

“What does it look like?” she asked.

“A bit bigger than a child’s lunch box.”

“Was there anything identifiable inside?” she asked.

“A kidney,” he replied.

“As in steak and kidney pie?”

“As in organ donation.”

Hebe Jones turned the corner and called: “Valerie! Has anyone brought in a green case in the last fifteen minutes?”

“No!” came the muffled reply.

Hebe Jones came swiftly back to the counter. “Where did you leave it?” she asked.

“Nowhere,” the man said. “It was by my feet as I was standing by the carriage doors. The next moment I looked down it was gone.”

Suddenly the phone started ringing in the office. When it failed to stop Hebe Jones called: “Valerie, can you get that?”

But there was no reply. When she looked round the corner, she was confronted by the sight of Valerie Jennings bending over her desk, trying to knock the receiver off its cradle with threadbare nostrils. Hebe Jones picked up the phone. After a while she replied: “I’ve got the owner with me now. We’ll come for it immediately.”

Grabbing her turquoise coat from the stand, she called: “Valerie, I’ve got to go out. There’s a man at the counter who’s lost a kidney and it’s just been handed in at Edgware Road. I’m going with him to make sure he finds it.”

There was an equine nod.

Once Hebe Jones had left, Valerie Jennings sat down and looked around the office through the gauze. She peered up at the cuckoo clock and wondered how long it would be before her colleague returned to release her. Just as she was about to
attempt opening the fridge door again, the cowbell sounded. She ignored it at first, but it continued clanking. Unable to bear it any longer, she got to her hoofed feet and headed to the counter with the reluctance of a beast on its way to the knacker’s yard.

When she turned the corner, Arthur Catnip returned the bell to the counter without a word, and looked into the horse’s eyes. “Is that Valerie Jennings?” he asked.

“It is indeed,” came the buried reply.

“I was just wondering whether you’d like to go out for lunch sometime,” he said.

“That would be fine.”

Arthur Catnip hesitated. “Today?” he ventured.

“I’m a bit tied up.”

“What about Thursday?”

“That would be lovely.”

“One o’clock?”

“I’ll see you then.”

Arthur Catnip watched as the horse seemed to momentarily lose sense of direction, went cross-eyed, and then disappeared from view.

HEBE JONES MOVED ASIDE
a discarded newspaper and sat down in the carriage, relieved that the organ courier had finally been reunited with his case. As the train began to rattle its way out of the station, she looked up and inspected the passengers opposite. It was the boy who immediately drew her attention. “He must be around eleven or twelve,” she calculated.
Though he looked nothing like Milo, the sight of him wounded her just the same. She studied his mother sitting next to him absorbed in a magazine, and doubted she would ignore him if she knew how easy it was to lose a child. She closed her eyes, regretting yet again all the occasions she could have spent with Milo: the times when she had told him to go and play with the other children when she was trying to find a talent for painting on the Salt Tower roof; the times when she and her husband had left him with Rev. Septimus Drew so that they could go out to dinner; and the times when she had sent him out of the kitchen after finding plastic soldiers bobbing in the casserole.

The boy got up and offered his seat to an elderly lady who had been looking at him hopefully since the journey began. “Milo would have done that,” Hebe Jones thought. She looked at the boy’s hand holding the rail next to her. Suddenly she remembered the last time she had seen her son’s hand, cold, white, and perfect as he lay on the hospital bed. And she thought what a neglectful mother she had been for not knowing there had been something so terribly wrong with him.

It had taken far longer than Hebe Jones had wished to become a mother. A year into the marriage, when there was still no grandchild, her mother had presented her with a small wooden statue of Demeter with the solemnity usually reserved for a holy relic. Hebe Jones put it into her handbag and carried it with her wherever she went. But it seemed that not even the Greek goddess of fertility could make anything grow inside her. Medical tests failed to find a reason for the couple’s inability to conceive. By then her three sisters had produced so
many offspring, the oldest was obliged to lock her husband out of the bedroom at night for fear of yet another nine months of craving ice.

The blood eventually stopped after twenty years of monthly disappointment. During that time, Hebe and Balthazar Jones had refused to let the thorns of infertility shred their marriage, and the roots of their love had wound round each other even more tightly. Convinced she had entered the black hole of menopause, Hebe Jones wept with joy when she discovered she was pregnant. And that night in bed Balthazar Jones laid his head on his wife’s soft stomach, and started a conversation with Milo that continued for nearly twelve years.

While Hebe Jones escaped the horror of morning sickness, she found herself gripped by an even more pernicious compulsion than her sister’s. Balthazar Jones would return home to find his wife sitting on the floor by the fire, her swollen belly resting on her thighs, helping herself to the coals. “I’m not doing anything,” she would reply, her teeth blackened with soot. Her husband, convinced that she was lacking a vital mineral, searched through the dusty shelves of the local grocer’s for something to satisfy the yearning. He brought back one hundred and fourteen tins of squid in black ink, and presented them to his wife with the pride of a hunter. And, for a while, the Spanish delicacy seemed to work. But one evening he caught her walking out of the living room with a telltale smut on her cheek. It was then that he took irrevocable action. And Hebe Jones greeted the man who came to trade the coal fire for gas with silent tears in her eyes.

She spent her pregnancy in a state of bliss interspersed with bouts of terror that she would not be able to love anyone else
as much as her husband. But her fears were unfounded. When the baby was born, she soaked him with an outpouring of affection that rained just as heavily on his father.

Balthazar Jones, who was equally lost in the madness of newborn love, thought his son so beautiful he suggested calling him Adonis. Still flushed with the effort of expelling the child, Hebe Jones, who had always wanted a Greek name, welcomed her husband’s capitulation. But while her baby’s allure was beyond doubt, she feared taunts in the playground and reminded her husband of the misery he had suffered being named after one of the Three Wise Men, particularly one who had turned up with such a lousy gift as frankincense.

When Hebe Jones’s mother arrived at the ward to meet her eleventh grandchild, Idola Grammatikos looked at the baby and announced: “The old chicken makes good broth.” Unable to take her eyes off her grandson for a moment, she declared him so delicious she could eat him. Milo, the Greek word for apple, was then suggested, and the boy left the hospital named after a fruit. But when Balthazar Jones eventually came round from his delirium, he denied any botanical influence and insisted that his son had been named in honour of Milo of Croton, the ancient Greek six-time Olympic wrestling champion.

O
PENING THE SALT TOWER DOOR,
Balthazar Jones peered out at the silent fortress, glistening with a stubble of frost. He stood for several minutes listening for the Ravenmaster, who always rose early to feed his odious birds. But nothing could be heard. He closed the door swiftly behind him and headed to the Develin Tower clutching a grapefruit.

The Beefeater slipped a hand into his trouser pocket and withdrew the key. After a quick glance behind him to make sure that he wouldn’t be seen, he put it into the lock and turned it. Once he had closed the front door behind him, he pressed down on the latch to his right. The bearded pig immediately turned its head at the noise. The moment Balthazar Jones saw its marvellous hirsute cheeks, his guilt at having made off with the animal instantly vanished. Bending down, he held out the grapefruit, the only thing he had been able to find in the kitchen in his haste to check on the animals after their first night at the Tower. The pig, which had been in the middle of an orgy of scratching, instantly gave up pleasuring itself against the fireplace and scampered across the straw to
inspect the yellow gift with its hairy snout. Instead of sinking its teeth into the fruit, the creature promptly knocked it to the floor, flicked it across the room with its nose, and charged after it. After another butt, the pig continued the pursuit with undiminished enthusiasm, its tasselled tail flying like a flag over its fulsome buttocks. The Beefeater was entranced, and after more than ten minutes, neither man nor beast had shown any sign of tiring from either performing or watching the grapefruit spectacle.

Vowing to return with an alternative breakfast, Balthazar Jones locked the door behind him and headed down Water Lane to see whether the delivery of fish for the rockhopper penguins had arrived. Suddenly it dawned on him that he hadn’t seen the creatures since the van passed him on its way out of the zoo, a solitary bird standing on the passenger seat looking at him.

Balthazar Jones stopped running when he reached the bridge overlooking the moat. As he stood with both hands on the wall, firing hot clouds of desperate breath into the cold morning air, he saw that the penguin enclosure was empty. He opened the gate and clattered along the boardwalk erected to prevent the tourists’ feet from turning the grass into mud. Standing at the window of the next enclosure, he looked for a huddle of short-sighted birds with magnificent yellow eyebrows. But all he saw was the reclined glutton, feeding itself another fresh egg with the self-indulgence of a Roman emperor. Moving to the next pen, he hunted between the knobbly knees of the giraffes, but there wasn’t a hint of a beak.

He ran back inside the fortress, climbed the steps of the Devereux Tower, and opened the door to the monkey house.
But his sudden appearance set off the howler monkeys, and he was forced to retreat after a quick glance through the bars of the cage. Standing in front of the zorilla, he encouraged it to get to its feet, but his frantic arm movements produced from the animal a particularly pungent aroma, and he backed out as soon as he saw that the creature was alone. As he stood staring at the Komodo dragon, which refused to move, he realised that the birds would have stood no chance in its company anyway, and he rushed off to the enclosure next to the White Tower, hoping they had been herded inside. He then hunted between the reclusive ringtail possums sleeping on a tree branch, their tails coiled neatly below them. But never once did he glimpse a pair of beady black eyes.