Natural History by Neil Cross

stopped having sex. They argued about that, too.
    Sometimes, Patrick hated to be in the same house as her, the same enclosure. He sat in the pub, reading novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard—novels Jane loathed for their racism and colonial presumption; novels Jane loathed because they had been written for children in knickerbockers and stiff collars; children who were dead long before Patrick was born. She hated Patrick for hating England, and for falling back upon childhood romance—dreams of hazard and deliverance; tales where the villain, in the end, could always be confronted and destroyed.
    To break the impasse, Jane booked a family holiday; the first they’d ever taken.
    They spent a month on the coast of Barbados. The ocean crashed and boiled on jagged black rocks. They laid towels on spiny grass in the midday heat. They hired a car and drove round the island; Patrick stopped to join a game of cricket on a parched village green. Jane bought a flowing, tie-dyed cloth to wear knotted at her hip. They lunched on flying fish sandwiches with hot sauce. When the kids were asleep, Patrick and Jane played Scrabble, got drunk, made love.
    They visited a wildlife reserve, and were surrounded by slow, convulsing tangles of copulating tortoises. Occasionally, a male would stretch his sinewed neck and groan in the tectonic agony of orgasm.
    Patrick laughed, looking sideways at his kids: Charlie said, ‘ Gross, man,’ and Jo mimicked him and tickled him under the armpits and he said ‘Oi !’ and tickled her back and they ran, chasing each other through the mating tortoises.
    They flew home, and Patrick hated Bath and he hated their house. It felt like a pair of shoes a stranger had been wearing. He’d never liked it: now it made him cooped up and furious.
    He tore open his suitcase and stuffed clothes, dirty and clean, into drawers. He kicked open internal doors; jammed on taps with a savage twist of the wrist.
    And then—as she’d been planning in Barbados, but could never find the right time—Jane told him about Monkeyland.
    She took him to Beacon Batch. It was a hazy spring day, and at the same flat summit she stopped and slipped her arm through his. With her other hand, she pointed.
    She said, ‘There’s Weston super Mare.’
    He chuckled, because that conversation had been sixteen years ago. He’d never thought she might remember it—or at least that part of it. So much had happened since then.
    He felt there were four of them up here: the people they had been, and the people they had become. They were breaking like clouds and passing through one another and merging.
    She rooted in her daypack and took out a flask. Flasks had come on in sixteen years; this one was silver, and tough—you could drop it from a high cupboard and it wouldn’t smash.
    She poured a cup of tea and they passed it back and forth. Above their heads, two kestrels hovered on the muscular updraught. Patrick could see their power and control; how they corrected first in one direction, then the other.
    He looked at the pale blue dab of Weston, at Bristol Airport, at Bristol itself; and at the other walkers, ascending the hill. The last time Patrick and Jane were here, they came alone—except for Charlie, and he was still a secret inside her. And they had been very young.
    Patrick wondered if the closing of this circle meant their marriage was over, and he thought of it spiralling up on the thermals, disrupting the balance of the predating kestrels.
    Jane said, ‘We need a change.’
    It was true.
    â€˜Look at you. You’re caged.’
    That was true, too.
    â€˜You’ll go mad. Like one of the polar bears.’
    Since the day they met, Bristol Zoo’s polar bears had been diagnosed as psychotic. Their compound was too small. They wandered up and down all day, vanilla yellow, waving their heads like dead geraniums.
    â€˜You’re trying hard. But