Free Brown Skin Blue by Belinda Jeffrey Page B

tourist. I want to look at everything as if it’s a fuckin’ mystery and I’m in wonder to behold it. I want to buy some expensive souvenir and put it on the fridge in my room. I want to look at something and say, ‘I’ve been there’ without having to hide it under my pillow or the back of my mind. I want to have something I can show people other than just being able to hypnotise a bloody chook. It occurs to me with all this stupid thinkin’ that I want something. But I’ve really got no bloody clue what that is, so I just want something I can have. And it doesn’t much matter what.
    Great. I’ve missed the tour. The woman, who takes my money at the checkout, says I can just wander through myself.
    â€˜There’s signs all around the place,’ she says. ‘It’s all there in black and white. Take as much time as you like.’ She’s chewing gum and her skin looks like my own mum’s. Turning to leather in the sun. Her hair is orange on the ends and a yellowy-grey at the roots. Women show their age that way like ring barks on tree. Peel away the colour and you can’t hide exactly how old you are.
    I take a quick glance at the souvenir shop behind the café counter. Lots of shit I could buy. In fact, I could decorate my entire room. Hats, boomerangs, mugs, stubby holders, squeaky toys, stuffed toys, fridge magnets, wallets, key chains and tea towels. I decide to leave my shopping for the end and visit the zoo first.
    Through the turnstiles, there’s a long walkway that sits high up over the rest of the park. Grey metal railings line the path. It’s long and I can see a ramp leading down to the rest of the park at the other end. But this is where it all starts. With the crocs.
    Crocodile Zoo has a lot to interest the tourist. Tigers, monkeys, turtles, birds, snakes – the usual assortment of caged zoo animals – but the main thing people come to see here are the crocs. It might be called a ‘zoo’, but this place is a farm. A crocodile farm. Leather and meat. Crocs are now an international market boom-trade.
    The male crocs are below me. There’s heaps of them in little rectangular pens side by side. The first croc I see is huge. Fat and slovenly. The males are kept separate and let into the mating pools when the farm needs a new batch. I’m walking slowly, and there’s croc after croc after croc. A numbing, grotesque feeling creeps over me. None of them have moved. At all. Not even a paw, a claw, a jaw. Crocs can slow their heart rates down to survive. Like a reptilian hibernation. They look like that now, not real. They don’t even look scary. They look sad. They look more fake than Shelby in his orange boxing gloves.
    I’m suddenly heavy in my guts. This isn’t what I came for. It’s not what I wanted or expected. I wanted the horror and the shock. I wanted to be one of those tourists on our boats that can’t keep their eyes from bulging out of their heads. I want to feel my heart beating so fast I know I’m alive. I want to be surprised.
    I keep walking with my eyes fixed on every croc. I walk down the ramp and there are different pens. There aregiant turtles. Slow and ploddy. There’s a keeper in with them, cleaning out their pen. He lifts the turtles up one at a time by gripping them under the top parts of their shells. He puts them close together in one pen while the water drains out of the concrete bath through a large drain in the middle. Further along, another pen is slowly filling with clean water. It’s amazing how much looking after animals require when you take them out of their natural habitat. There’d be no one to change their water out in the wild. They’d have to make do or move somewhere else.
    Further along the path are more enclosures with small pools in the centres and concrete rims around the edges for the crocs at different stages of growth.
    There must be five