The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise Read Online Free PDF Page B

Jones returned to the Tower, having left work early on account of her headache. The sky remained an obstinate shade of used bathwater, ready to disgorge a second filthy load at any moment. She nodded at the Yeoman Gaoler, the Chief Yeoman Warder’s deputy, who was sitting in a black hut at the entrance to the Tower, a three-bar electric fire preventing the damp from decomposing his toes. When he enquired about the visit from the man from the Palace, Hebe Jones replied that there had been no such thing, or her husband would have called to inform her. But the Beefeater backed up the sighting with a further nine eyewitnesses, each of whom he named while unfurling a plump finger.
    “Don’t sprout where you haven’t been planted,” Hebe Jones snapped, and continued through the gates. Her passage was soon thwarted by a suffocation of tourists staring at the Beefeaters’ terrace houses along Mint Street. Feeling more than ever the weight of her supermarket shopping in each hand, she squeezed her way sideways up Water Lane, wishing that the visitors would indulge their lunatic weakness for British history elsewhere. As she passed Cradle Tower, she was struck sharply in the chest by a rucksack whose owner had turned to see the window from which two prisoners had escaped on a rope stretched across the moat in the sixteenth century. Once she had caught her breath, she continued on her journey, seeing nothing but the Greek cottage of her fantasies.
    Arriving at the Salt Tower, she searched for the key thatfailed to fit into a pocket, and discovered that it had already torn the lining of her new handbag. After turning it in the lock, a feat that required both of her doll-sized hands, she made her way up the steps with half her bags, the narrowness of the spiral stairs preventing her from carrying them all up in one go. As she started her descent for the second load, gripping the filthy rope handrail that still bore the sweat of the condemned, she wondered, as she often did, how many of them had kept their heads.
    She put away the shopping and started to wash the breakfast dishes, remembering the argument that morning with her husband. After losing Milo, instead of clinging to each other cheek to cheek as they had throughout their marriage, the couple had found themselves swimming in opposite directions as they battled to survive. When one needed to talk about the tragedy, the other wanted to experience a few fleeting seconds of tranquillity. They eventually ended up collapsed on distant shores, marooned by their grief and aiming their anger over losing him at each other.
    As she scrubbed, she looked up at the picture on the wall in front of her depicting the Salt Tower in wobbly pencil strokes, coloured in with felt tip. Great care had been taken, but not always achieved, to keep within the lines. Next to the Tower stood three smiling figures, two tall, one short. Only the artist’s parents had recognised the small object next to them, which was also smiling, as that of the oldest tortoise in the world. And she peered, with mounting distress, at the colours that had started to fade.
    Suddenly she heard the thud of the Salt Tower door. Not long afterwards, her husband appeared in the kitchen andsilently presented her with a warm, flat cardboard box. Hebe Jones, unable to admit that she still detested pizza, set the table and forced down the white flag in small mouthfuls that threatened to choke her. And for the rest of the evening the air in the Salt Tower was so fragile that they spoke to each other as if the place were filled with a million fluttering butterflies that neither dared disturb.

CHAPTER THREE

    H EBE JONES UNBUTTONED HER COAT next to the drawer containing one hundred and fifty-seven pairs of false teeth. It was a ritual she performed every morning upon arrival at London Underground’s Lost Property Office, even during the summer, a season she vehemently distrusted in England. She hung it on the stand next to the