Breaking and Entering by Don Gillmor

Author:Don Gillmor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2023-07-03T00:00:00+00:00

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There were paw prints in different colours that guided you to the animals. Bea hadn’t been to the zoo in a decade. She pushed her mother along the sidewalk that had large blue cat paws on it, past an empty giraffe compound and an empty orangutan cage.

How is Mrs Wheeler? Bea asked. Still biting people?

They had to have her put down.

Bea looked at her mother, not sure if she was making a joke or was getting Mrs Wheeler confused with their dog Shepherd whom they’d had put down when Bea was nine. Also a biter.

A bit harsh, Bea said.

Nature, her mother said pleasantly.

Bea had worn a Lycra jogging top underneath her linen blouse and she took off the blouse and folded it carefully and put it in the compartment in the back of the wheelchair. The path undulated over small rises and pushing the wheelchair uphill triggered rivers of perspiration.

They stopped in front of the lion enclosure and gazed into it. Bea scanned the dry grass, empty of lions. There were flat-bottomed clouds moving slowly, almost African-looking. There weren’t a lot of people. A few exhausted-looking mothers with toddlers. Peacocks wandered. The smells were layered and vivid, a mix of dung and rotting vegetation, the musk of stale sex, stagnant water.

I guess the lions are all sleeping inside, Bea said. The heat.

They keep themselves to themselves, her mother said.

They walked past zebras bunched in the distance, past a pacing cheetah, some antelopy-looking things. The sun flickered out of the clouds, making it hotter.

Are you thirsty? Bea asked. She looked in the wheelchair compartment for the water bottle she’d brought and realized she’d left it in the car. We could get a cold drink, she said. Or an ice cream. Bea suddenly felt like one. And she needed to get water for both of them.

They stopped in front of the hyena cage because it was in the shade. She took off her mother’s straw hat to adjust it. That grey, vulnerable head. Inside, thoughts rolling like lottery balls. There were no hyenas. The cage was dark, spartan, and smelled of bleach. The smell reminded her of the Dickensian rest home her grandmother used to live in. Her mother’s taciturn mother, Beryl Compton, was from Liverpool when it was cheerless and grey, before the Beatles rescued it. She’d lived through the Depression and two wars and lost her husband and lived to ninety-four, thirty of those years spent believing each was her last, and the sixty previous years spent in privation. A sharp tongue made sharper by gin. Her middle years had been an oppressive lull, her husband gone, two children, no money, old at thirty. She came to Canada and saw those first sunny suburbs and was never able to forgive the people who lived there. Certainties stored inside her like nuggets of coal. They saw her one Sunday a month, going into the dimly lit, musty home with a sense of dread to hear a lecture on how suffering was good for people.

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