2
Feeding time was Jimmy’s favourite moment of the day at the park – sacks of cauliflower plopping into the hippo pool, the dainty-toed river horses huffing. Until Sebastian had fallen sick, Jimmy had helped the handlers in the feeding tasks: crashing meaty hunks against the carnivores’ cages and forking in bales of grass and leaves for the others. These times became the fulcrum of his weeks, defining his priorities and spirit more than his mother’s war with the doors of the small Kileleshwa flat they now lived in; her daily conflicts with the cheap dishes which she had to wash herself as they could no longer afford a maid; their strange and sometimes psychotic neighbours; her boyfriends.
Week after week, year after year, he listened to the screeching conversations of vervets devouring tangerines, peel and all; the responding calls of parrot, ibis, egret: the magenta, indigo and turquoise noises fluttering in their throats like angry telephones going off at the same time.
It took him away from real life. Real life was Evelyn’s College for Air Stewards and Stewardesses which he had attended for a year. Real life was the thin couch he slept on at home. Real life was his mother screaming that he needed to face Real Life. Waking up on Sunday morning and staring at the thin torn curtains of the sitting room, the stained ceiling that sagged and fell a few inches every week and smelt of rat urine, Jimmy often felt he needed to leave the house before his mother asked him to join her and her latest boyfriend for breakfast. Real life was the honey in her voice, the gospel singing in the kitchen as she played Happy Family for her new man.
Jimmy was more sensitive to light than most. When he was sixteen, a blood clot had blacked out his sight for months and he had spent most of that year in hospital. ‘Picture an ink stain under his scalp,’ the doctors had told his mother. ‘That’s what’s happening in your son’s head.’ The stain had eventually been sucked out, and the doctors triumphantly gave him large black X-ray sheets for his seventeenth birthday.
After fifteen months of seeing the world in partial eclipse, light came alive again for Jimmy in the Animal Orphanage – glinting off slithering green mambas and iridescent pythons, burning in the she-leopard’s eyes high up in her tree.
Every July he had watched the two kudu shrug off the cold with dismissive, bristling acceptance, standing like sentinels blowing smoky breaths in a far corner of the enclosure. When the sun travelled back north from the Tropic of Capricorn over November, the two hyenas’ hind legs unlocked and straightened, and they acquired a sort of grace. In August the thick-jawed zebras and black-bearded wildebeest, heeding the old migratory call, would tear from one side of their pen to the other and, finally exhausted, grind their bodies into the ground, raising dust.
Over the last year, as Sebastian became more subdued, Jimmy spent more of his Sunday keeping him company. He could sit for hours like Sebastian, rendering the world irrelevant. In the Animal Orphanage, everything outside became the watched. And Jimmy knew all about being watched. What his mum called love.