The bus moved slowly along Riddiford Street, and the mid-morning sun slanted through the windows on the left-hand side, spilling over the seats and scattered passengers. Ollie and Nana sat near the front of the bus, Ollie on the aisle side of the seat and Nana next to him by the window.
“Have they got elephants at the zoo, Nana?” asked Ollie.
Nana had been gazing out the window at the passing streets and buildings. She moved her head slowly towards Ollie, and her watery blue eyes looked distant for a moment, as though under the sea, then sparkled with familiar warmth.
“Oh yes, dear. And they have monkeys, lions and tigers, too. Have you ever seen a tiger before?”
“No,” said Ollie, but the way Nana asked the question made him think he might find one in the bush behind the city if he looked hard enough. His little brow lowered, and he pushed his lips forward, thinking.
“Nana,” he said.
“Yes, dear.”
“Where do they get the animals from?”
“All around the world. They come in big ships from places like Africa and India and America.”
“So not from the bush?”
“No, except for a few of them.”
“Not the tiger?”
“No, not the tiger, dear. The ones from New Zealand. The kiwi and the … ” she paused. She must have been trying to think of another animal from the bush. She looked out the window as the streets of Newtown slipped by, like she was looking for an animal out there among the old shops and houses.
“What else, Nana?”
“What’s that, dear?”
“What other animals do they get from the bush?”
She thought about this for a few seconds.
“Wood pigeons, I suppose.”
Ollie had hoped she was going to say monkeys or wolves or something cool like that. You never saw anything interesting in the bush – no monkeys or wolves or tigers – just tui and fantails, and wood pigeons that flew away noisily if you got near them.
“My school was up that street,” said Nana, pointing her thin finger towards a street that climbed the hill from the main road, “… where I went when I was just a little girl. I remember walking along here.”
Ollie looked where Nana had pointed and tried to see the school, but there was just a sloping grass bank with some trees at the top.
“In the olden days?” asked Ollie, looking up at Nana. She chuckled and the lines on her face were thrown into different patterns. She was so white, Nana. Her skin was pale, and her thin white hair was set in wispy curls that puffed out above her face like clouds in summer.
“Well, it didn’t feel like the olden days to us. Some of these houses were there even then,” said Nana, waving her hand at the old weatherboard houses that slipped past the windows of the bus. “But there weren’t so many trees.”
She looked down at Ollie, her eyes searching for something in his face.
“That navy blue’s very smart on you, isn’t it?” she said at last.
Ollie murmured in distracted agreement as the bus continued along the street, and he leaned forward to look out the window, trying to imagine Nana as a little girl walking along the pavement. It was difficult because things were always black and white in the olden days, and Ollie struggled to picture the place without any trees. They were so hard to ignore now, with their branches waving in the northerly breeze and refusing to stay still, like naughty kids on the mat at school.
“We’re nearly there,” said Nana, as the bus turned into a wide street with big old houses on either side. Ollie had never been to this part of the city before, and the houses looked strange here – different from the suburb where he lived with Mum and Dad. The old houses here all looked the same, with two-storied bay windows and front doors surrounded by frosted-glass panes. They reminded Ollie of the houses in old photographs at his new school. There was a photo on the wall of a sports day from a hundred years ago, with houses just like these in the background. The people in the photo were dressed in funny clothes – men in dark trousers and blazers; women in full-length dresses – standing in groups in the black-and-white sunshine. It seemed like these people with their fancy clothes and straight lines were following the rules, and people today somehow weren’t. But then there were so many different olden times – knights and castles, pirates on the sea, settler times – which was the right one?
The bus came to the end of the street and made a sweeping turn towards the zoo, stopping outside a dairy.
“Here we are, Graham. Got your backpack?” asked Nana.
Ollie looked at Nana in silence.
“Ready to go, dear?”
“I’m Ollie, Nana.”
“I’m sorry, Ollie. You just looked so much like little Graham then.”
That was funny because Ollie didn’t look anything like his dad; his dad was a big man with a beard. Ollie laughed and picked up his backpack, looping his arm through the strap.
“Good boy, up you get then,” said Nana.
Ollie got up from the seat, swung the backpack round and slid his other arm through the free strap. He walked down the aisle of the bus, and Nana followed.
“Thank you, driver,” she said as they reached the door. Ollie leapt down to the pavement and had to wait a moment for Nana as she steadied herself on the handrail and clambered down from the step.
The sun felt warm on Ollie’s neck as he stood there waiting for Nana. His hair was bright blond, almost white. Nana reached down and touched his head gently once she stood on the pavement. Ollie lifted his eyes. Nana was looking at him and smiling.
“Are you ready to go to the zoo?”
Ollie nodded. The entrance to the zoo was across a zebra crossing and up a curving, red-brick path. Nana took Ollie’s hand as they crossed the road.
Mum and Dad had said that maybe Ollie shouldn’t go to the zoo with Nana; she didn’t know things any more. But as they walked across the road, his hand in Nana’s, off to see the elephants and lions and monkeys, he knew that wasn’t true. Nana knew all about the buses and the streets and the animals at the zoo. And she bought him sweets.
“Graham, your mother …” Ollie’s mum had said to his dad, talking about Nana. It was funny when she said that, it didn’t sound right: Nana was a nana, not a mother.
They reached the ticket office, and Nana gave some money to the man. They walked into the zoo and up to a big sign with a map on it. There were pictures of animals and different paths you could take to find them. It looked like a treasure map from a cartoon.
“Well, where do we start?” said Nana. She stood looking at the map as though it was a puzzle, and she was missing some of the pieces.
Ollie looked around. The wide concrete path led gently uphill towards a fence. Behind the fence, a plastic shield rose up behind a small sign describing the animals. There was a pool of water behind the screen and suddenly Ollie noticed some movement. A sleek little creature was playing on its back, its brown fur smoothed down by the water.
“Look, Nana,” said Ollie and ran across to the fence.
Nana followed slowly after him.
“It’s like a little dog.”
Nana looked at the sign.
“This is an otter, dear. They like to live in the water.”
Ollie watched the little creature paddle along and then flip over. Another one appeared from a small hole in the concrete and swam out to join its companion. They looked like little people, playing a game where only they knew the rules. Ollie tried to imagine what they might be thinking about and whether he could join in the game.
Next they followed the path up the hill and around the back of the pond. A little man with white fur and a dark face sat in a tree. He looked at Ollie with startled eyes and darted along the branch flicking his long tail. Ollie waved at him, hoping he might smile or come over but he just stared and then went away.
“What a funny monkey,” said Nana.
Ollie was disappointed. He thought the monkey would like him, would come towards him to smile and play, but he’d just scurried away. There was something he didn’t like about the monkey, the dark look it gave him before it ran off.
“If we go up here, there are more monkeys,” said Nana, “then we can go around and see the elephant.”
Ollie’s eyes widened.
“How big is he?”
“Oh, very big. The biggest animal in the zoo.”
Ollie tried to imagine the elephant, swinging its trunk and stamping its big grey feet. He couldn’t wait to see it. They walked along to the next enclosure.
These monkeys were just like the other ones. They ran around doing monkey things and showing their little white teeth at each other, but they hardly even looked at Ollie. It was strange really, the whole reason the monkeys were there was because of the people, but they weren’t even interested.
Ollie’s feet grew tired as he walked along the path past the different animals. The sun was still shining on his neck, and he wanted to stop. The wind was picking up too. It rustled the leaves of the trees and made a hissing sound that chased them along the path. Ollie looked ahead at where the hill rose behind the zoo. There were some houses on the hill and tall pine trees near the top. They were dense and dark, and he imagined the animals from the zoo sneaking out at night to roam through the trees, looking into the bedrooms of the houses closest to the bush, with their strange animal eyes. He shivered. It was lucky his house wasn’t close to the zoo, he thought.
Nana was walking slowly. She looked ahead without really focussing on anything, and her mouth moved gently as she walked. Ollie wondered what she was saying. Then he saw something up ahead. A glimpse of orange fur and black stripes moving behind a plastic screen. The tigers. He ran ahead, eager to see these strange creatures that Nana said you couldn’t find in the bush. They came from some other place across the sea. When he reached the cage there were some other kids there looking at the tigers with their parents. The tigers were much bigger than any animals he’d seen so far. One of them was lying down beside a log in the enclosure, but the other one stalked up and down close to the barrier, swishing its tail and looking at the people on the other side. It seemed more clever than the monkeys, and its big eyes looked straight at Ollie as though it was about to speak. But the tiger’s mouth stayed closed and curved in a kind of half-smile, like it knew something Ollie didn’t. The tiger stopped, still looking at Ollie with those huge eyes that gleamed like gold with pupils as black as the bush at night. The wind breathed cold on the back of Ollie’s neck and then swept past him and on to the trees that surrounded the enclosures, shaking their branches before racing up the hill and over the ridge.
Ollie looked around for Nana, but she wasn’t there. He thought she was coming up the path behind him, but he couldn’t see her when he looked back along it. He turned back to the tiger. It continued to stare at him and then opened its mouth in a sneer, somehow saying it knew he’d lost Nana and didn’t care. Ollie ran.
He ran away from the sneering tiger, along the path and up the hill. There were wire fences and plastic barriers everywhere, and strangely shaped eyes staring at him from behind fences. These animals had all come from somewhere else, but now they were here, lurking in a crook of the Wellington hills and hidden behind strange houses and olden-day streets, and Nana’s old school and the places where people in funny hats and coats held sports days in the treeless sun. He had to find Nana, because she knew the way back to the bus and out through the streets and home to Mum and Dad, but he couldn’t see her anywhere along the path. Its edges were now blurring into the waving green leaves of the plants as tears burned on his face.
“Have you lost your mum?” said a lady’s voice above him.
Ollie looked up and saw a lady wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a green shirt with what looked like a squiggle and two little eyes on it. He gulped helplessly like a fish, but nothing came out. The lady crouched down.
“It’s okay. I’ll help you find her. Which way did you come?” she asked.
Ollie looked around but wasn’t sure where he’d been. It all looked the same, with a concrete path, green trees and animal enclosures, but he pointed to a path that led down the hill.
“Okay, I’ll hold your hand,” said the lady.
Ollie reached up and took her hand, and they walked along the path. They were up at the top of the zoo. He could see across to the city, where he and Nana had caught the bus that morning. The streets were long and straight in the sun, and the houses were all lined up neatly along them. He hoped Nana was waiting for him at the bottom so they could get back out to the safety of the streets where there were no tigers and monkeys, only little birds and cats and dogs.
“Have you seen the lion yet?” asked the lady, pointing to an enclosure on their right. There was a big sleeping yellow thing lying there, but Ollie didn’t want to look. He shook his head.
They continued down the hill, passing groups of people on the way. Children holding hands with their parents and eating ice creams. Ollie rubbed his eyes. He wasn’t crying any more, but they still felt puffed up and itchy.
The lady stopped outside a funny old building with windows along one side and big round doorways jutting out from two of its corners. On top of these corners were two small domes, sticking up like scoops of ice cream from the roof of the building.
The lady stopped there and spoke to a man wearing the same type of shirt. They were talking about Ollie.
“Yes, found him up the top. Lost his mum.”
The man looked confused.
“Could be his grandma, I suppose. There’s an old lady at the office,” said the man.
“Okay, good,” said the lady to the man. She looked down at Ollie, “Who did you come to the zoo with?”
“Nana,” said Ollie. The lady smiled at the man.
“Okay. Then we’d better get you back to Nana.”
“So you must be Graham,” said the man.
“No, I’m Ollie.” It was strange that the man knew his dad’s name, but Ollie was now more interested in the ice-cream-shaped building.
The man looked puzzled and was about to ask another question, but Ollie spoke first, asking dreamily, “What’s in that place?” and pointing at the building.
“That’s the old elephant house,” said the man.
“Can I see the elephant before we go?” asked Ollie.
The man grinned and looked at the lady.
“We don’t have an elephant anymore. There used to be an elephant, but that was thirty years ago. Just a café in there now,” he said, waving his hand at the building. “Let’s go and see your nana.”