Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [67]
Not so clever, Alva and Irva.
IT WASN’T anyone’s fault, not really. Something extraordinary was beginning to happen, something had begun to fill everyone in Entralla with discomfort. When Mr Irt had told us in school that humans are insensitive to earthquakes we think now that he was telling lies. The day before, when the edginess was just beginning, I had witnessed Louis in his café in Market Square, smashing all his glasses and his cups, one after the other, hurling them onto the floor, and then pummelling the body and the face of Kurt Laudus. And from there, or so it seemed to me, the discomfort grew worse, it spread, multiplied, filled every street and home until everyone could feel it, but most people put it down to tiredness or nerves, or drinking too much coffee or the humid weather. But they were wrong, it was 15 July and no one realised then exactly what that meant. The animals knew though.
All round the city that early morning before Mother had moved the boxes, the hair on the body of every cat began to rise. Their backs arched and they started hissing. There was nothing that any human eye could see to make them so tense. But everywhere in Entralla domestic cats began to leave their homes. There were reports the next day that not a single cat could be found in the entire city.
In St Lekk’s monastery on the outskirts of our city, in the monastery garden, lived five pigs. Happy, bloated, contented things. But on the morning of that 15 July the swine began to grunt and snort and squeal louder than ever before. The monks rushed out to discover why the beasts were so noisily disturbing their devotions, and when they returned with ashen faces the abbot was called for. The abbot was a gentle and sensible man not usually given to speculation, but what he saw that morning turned his stomach and his brains. What he saw he termed an omen of ill luck, a sign from above, a warning. The pigs had begun to eat each other.
On the evening of 15 July, while we yelled and screamed at our tearful mother, the animals in Ventis Park Zoo were panicking. The tigers were circling their cages, and leaping at the bars. The gorillas had taken hold of their cage walls and were trying to shake them apart. Monkeys moved with urgent rapidity, up and down, left and right, shrieking as if they were on fire. By nightfall even the most docile of creatures, the sloth, was active, shifting up and down its branches as quickly as its thick body would allow. The giraffes—usually such calm and graceful beasts—were sprinting, running at their tall cages, bruising and bloodying their chests. Lions roared, elephants trumpeted, sea lions honked, snakes spat, orangutans thrashed, zebras whinnied, camels hissed; a swelling cacophony of misery was the zoo that night, with all the creatures in their own ways uttering the same frantic plea, ‘Let us out. Let us out! LET US OUT!’ They would not be calmed. The noises that night would have frightened the bravest of hardened soldiers; plug up your ears, run away, do not listen to those ugly sounds, for who could bear such unhappiness, it would break your heart. The keepers didn’t know what to do, they could not open the cages and let the animals out, to shriek and charge down our city streets, so instead they fetched their rifles and loaded some with tranquilliser darts and some with real bullets. They put a lion to sleep, and a polar bear and a hysterical penguin, and they shot and killed one tiger who was scratching his mate apart.
And that will have to do for plasticine building for ever because, oh God, hold tight, here goes.
13TREASURES OF