Bull

When I was twelve and I climbed over the fence of the crocodile enclosure, I thought about my dad who’d left us the previous week for three rugby sons and their meek and skinny mother, always cooking feasts to keep their shoulders broad for scrums and patting. As I dropped onto the damp bark, stirring up the scent of fishy faeces and feeling my tender breast buds ripple, I didn’t listen to the screeching zoo-goers because I was wrapped in the fuzzy memory of what my teacher had said about crocodiles being good parents and what the dads do to protect their babies.

I went to the biggest one who was basking, mouth wide under a heat lamp, his tongue and teeth desert-red from the bulb’s glow, and I lay on his back, my cheek on the rocky skin behind his eyes, my legs entwined with his tail. He shifted as the other crocodiles approached, and I linked my arms around his smooth torso as we glided into the warm pool, his growl an earthquake beneath my belly as the others swam near before he jerked us away from their hisses and my sister’s torpedoing trainers, both missing and splashing. Then my sister phoned our swollen mum who didn’t answer because she was sat beneath the café’s humming air conditioning to quell a flush, so my sister filmed us, tugging a man’s shirt, commanding him to save me, the man never letting go of his takeaway coffee and zoo map.

As we submerged into the murky water, I thought about my dad again, how he also wouldn’t have come to my rescue, afraid of bites, of being dragged to where he couldn’t breathe, of the dark, of being outnumbered. Afraid of something so much scarier and wilder than crocodiles.