“Wait, where’s Josh?” Carmen reappeared with a bag of donuts, and boy did I need the carbs.
“Bradley took him to the gift shop.”
“And you let him?”
“I didn’t think it would hurt. Neither of them’ll want to carry stuff around the park all day.”
“You didn’t think it would hurt?” Carmen stared daggers at me. “Have you met Bradley?”
Five minutes later, I found myself lugging two bags of assorted shite towards the rainforest as Josh waddled along beside Carmen in his dinosaur costume. Every so often, Carmen gave me a sideways glare, and worse, Race had told Josh about the honking and he’d decided to try it out. And people wondered why I didn’t want kids? If this carried on, I might be tempted to use the Walther CCP nestled in the small of my back on myself.
“Isn’t this fun?” Bradley asked.
“Do you want an honest answer to that?”
He ignored me completely. “I loooove amusement parks. Next time, we should come for the whole weekend.”
Next time, I’d be joining Black in Barcelona. Or perhaps I could fly home to London and visit a few old friends? Bradley could take his chances with Ana. Even the debacle at the health farm had been more fun than this.
Although I had to admit that the rainforest was cooler than I thought it would be, and do you know why? Fake rainforests in Virginia didn’t have mosquitos. Or poisonous spiders or bullet ants or giant centipedes. The caterpillars were safely locked up in a glass case, as were the titan beetles, and nobody needed to worry about getting dive-bombed by bees. As with the dinosaur collection, the background noises were piped in, albeit a little more realistic this time.
The long, curved glasshouse took up half of the park’s second ring, heated by solar panels that doubled as part of the “Manmade Miracles” exhibit in the next circle. The boys clambered up a wooden staircase to view the “forest” from above while the rest of us meandered along a brick path that wound through the trees below. Having visited the jungle many, many times before, I’d smoothed my hair down with plenty of anti-frizz serum and worn it in a French plait. The other girls had followed suit with sensible styles and plenty of bobby pins. Bradley, on the other hand, looked like the silver-and-turquoise love child of a Q-tip and a cotton candy machine by the time we got to the animal section, and none of us dared to look at each other because we’d have collapsed into giggles.
A girl holding a tame monkey in a lime-green harness seemed to be having a similar reaction. She approached with a smile, but every few seconds, her gaze strayed to Bradley’s hair and the corners of her mouth twitched.
“Would you like to meet Jimbo?” she asked. “He’s a capuchin monkey. Please don’t touch him, though.”
“Should he be out with people like that?” Dan asked. “This isn’t a circus.”
“He only comes out for fifteen minutes twice a day,” the girl explained. “The rest of the time, he lives with his friends in the enclosure over there. In an ideal world, the animals here wouldn’t be in captivity, but they’ve all been rescued from bad situations and none of them are suitable for release. Jimbo belonged to a pop star until the guy got sick of having to change his diaper and dumped him at a pseudo-sanctuary.”
“A pseudo-sanctuary?”
“One that claims to be a rescue operation, but really they’re breeding the animals and selling them. Jimbo’s cage hadn’t been cleaned for months, and he was just sitting in the corner, rocking. He gets lonely.” The girl offered Jimbo a finger, and he held onto it. “See? He seems to identify more with humans than with other monkeys. We tried all sorts of enrichment ideas, but he’d just stand at the bars trying to touch people the whole day. So we’re experimenting with outings, and now he seems to be happier.”
I guess I understood that. After all, I had a pet jaguar at home. When I first rescued Kitty from a drug lord, I’d consulted various experts, and the final consensus was that he couldn’t go back to the Amazon. And also he thought he was a dog. We’d built him a huge cat house at the back of Riverley Hall, but he spent most of his time curled up in the kitchen with my elderly Doberman.
Bradley lined up for a selfie, but the shriek when he activated the front-facing camera on his iPhone made everyone in the glasshouse freeze. Everyone except Jimbo, that was. The monkey jerked the leash out of the keeper’s hands, made a grab for Bradley’s sunglasses, and ran straight to the nearest tree.
On second thoughts, I preferred the venomous centipedes.
“I’m so sorry!” the keeper gasped. “Jimbo’s never done anything like this before.”
Of course he hadn’t, but he’d also never met Bradley. And I had to hand it to the monkey—he looked good in Gucci.
Bradley made a grab for the leash, missed, then stumbled backwards with his arms windmilling as a caiman leapt towards the glass at the front of its tank and snapped. Jimbo bolted into the upper branches as Bradley landed in something squishy. Please say that was just mud. If it was monkey poop, he could get a cab back home.
Carmen snapped a picture, laughing, and Bradley turned on her, all indignant.
“Don’t just stand there taking photos! Do something.”
“What do you want me to do? Shoot it down?”
Everybody within earshot gasped, and Carmen raised her hands.
“I was joking.”
I mostly believed that. Mostly.
Jimbo leapt to the next tree, swung on a vine Tarzan-style, and landed on the railing of the upper walkway. A group of people who’d been watching the drama unfold screamed and scattered, but not before Jimbo managed to grab a baseball cap and a gold necklace to go with his shades. I was going to hazard a wild guess and say his previous owner had been a rapper rather
