“You seemed to have your hands full.”
“I’m in charge around here,” I reassured him. “If there’s any problems, you can always come to me.”
“I don’t know what they want,” Colin said, and he gave a tired sigh, his shoulders sagging. “But I can’t do this anymore. This has completely taken away all my joy out of being here. I can’t be dealing with this level of hostility. This is just supposed to be some beer money until next semester.”
“Come on, kid,” I said. “Don’t let that bunch of idiots get you down. I assure you, it hasn’t always been like this. This is some recent thing because they have nothing better to do. I’ve seen it before. They’ll get bored soon enough.”
“Maybe, but I’m already bored. I’ve had a total rethink about my future. I’m just thinking this is not for me anymore. I’m really not feeling it.”
“Get off home,” I said. “Don’t make any rash decisions. Think it over with a clear head. I’m not letting some halfwits sap the joy out of your future.”
He walked off solemnly, while I began to work through the night procedures, thankful that I was left alone with the variety of animals, all of which we way more pleasant to be around than Shabby and her fellow knuckle-draggers.
The next few days were a struggle, with us having to deal with being short-staffed and keeping a handle on things. We braced ourselves, expecting Shabby and her cheerleaders to go quiet after their slap on the wrist, but to swiftly re-emerge and bother us once more. It literally made no sense to me why they were so persistent with us as a target, as in the grand scheme of things, we were hardly causing that much of a bother, were we? There were huge, global companies that were plundering rainforests and drilling holes in the seabed, but Shabby, in all her wisdom, had decided to focus on myself and my employees. I’d chewed the ear off the zoo owners to pursue her in court, and they’d sympathetically agree, but nothing ever seemed to come of it.
When a week passed by, and then another, and then a whole month, I crossed my fingers and hoped that Shabby had finally received the message. Her protests, whatever merit they may have had at their core, were ill-thought out and nothing but a nuisance. She was really targeting the wrong audience since the majority of our guests were parents with their children. We even had a bunch of schools come a couple of months back with the whole point of the visit being educational, which we’d had to bring to a premature end when Shabby and her fellow half-wits had gate-crashed the amphibian exhibit and flung glitter everywhere. The kids had at first found it amusing, until the girls had begun waving around their usual placards with unsightly images that swiftly left the kiddos bawling their eyes out. To make it worse, some of the glitter had got into the tanks, clogging up the filters, which meant everything had to be drained and replaced.
Trying to explain how ironic this was to Shabby back then, as she’d held a sign criticising the amount of micro-plastics in the oceans, was like banging my head against a brick wall.
“It’s symbolic,” she’d said, as I’d pointed at the glitter floating around the tanks. “It’s meant to show how badly we’re polluting the oceans.” Even as Hank had led her away, she still hadn’t understood the hypocrisy in her choice of protestation techniques.
“We’re going to have to drain those tanks,” I’d called out to her. “Are you proud of yourself?”
“Imagine we had to drain the oceans,” she’d said while shaking her annoying head, her punk-like green hair splaying out everywhere in an imitation of the sparkling glitter she’d tossed.
I’d merely shaken my own head and rolled my eyes, before rounding up some employees to deal with the mess she’d made. That was just one of the many occasions that Shabby had been an irritation in my life. I’d pleaded with the zoo’s owners multiple times to permanently ban her and to press charges against her, but they always dithered and said they’d looked into it. Obviously, they must have been busy with other stuff because it was like she had free rein to irritate us. It made no sense, because didn’t the owners care about the opinions of their customers? It was almost like they were walking on egg shells around the topic of actually dishing out some real consequences towards Shabby.
Thankfully, in the ensuing weeks, there was no sign of her, and I figured that the owners had actually grown a backbone and ridden us of Shabby once and for all.
However, it was a full two months later when a chill ran up my spine. I spotted Shabby and her ridiculous hair-do loitering by the entrance to the butterfly house.
“For God’s sake, Hank,” I muttered beneath my breath. We had a new, younger security guard working on the gate alongside the cashiers, however, I’d been explicit with Hank in the need to brief him about our problem intruder. We even had a grainy print out from one of the CCTV images where Shabby’s green hair was clearly visible. It was pinned on the wall at the front desk. “How the hell has she got in again?”
She stood out so obscenely compared to everyone else, especially since she was wearing some scruffy, oversized dungarees over a scraggly, loose t-shirt. It honestly looked as if she’d fallen into a thrift store bargain cart and decided to wear whatever hand-me-downs in which she’d become entangled. Even from my vantage point, it was almost like I could smell her. She just had this way of always looking as if she hadn’t showered, like her natural skin tone was perhaps a sheen of dirt. She was also wearing a back-pack, which was kind of woollen and shaped like a sheep; the animal’s legs dangling down and bouncing against Shabby’s butt with each step. One of the eyes was missing, which fit her whole vagrant, peasant-like look appropriately.
I took a sniff of fresh air and braced myself as I approached, figuring that the homeless-like outfit she was wearing likely ponged as much as the squat she’d taken residence in. In a final grimace, I noted she was wearing these old, tatty platform sandals that had fraying straps of leather wrapped around her ankles. They were so beaten up and near putting out of their misery, that I could see the brownish leather had been stained in places, especially on the insole beneath her toes. I lingered my eyes on her toes for a second, noting that her nails had been freshly painted in a neon green that matched her vulgar hair dye. That only caused me to scoff. I mean, it just gave the game away, didn’t it? She painted herself as a squatting, animal activist, refusing to pay rent and stick it to the man, but she still had time to get a pedicure? I wanted to query whether the leather sandals and artificial polish were vegan approved, just to mock her, tongue in cheek, but she turned and screwed her face up when recognising me.
“Please,” I said as I held my hands up. “In what way have you come here to make me miserable today?” I dropped a hand, and was already braced to press the button on my walkie-talkie. “I thought you’d decided to move on to someone else since we have not seen you in months.”
“Actually,” Shabby said rather smugly, and she dipped her hand into the pocket of her dungarees. “I have a ticket. So, I have every right to be here.”
She held it up, and I squinted before reading the information stamped in fresh ink. “You actually bought a ticket?” I asked in surprise, before I curled my lip in a smirk. “Doesn’t that go against your principles or whatever? You know, funding the kind of place you apparently loathe?”
“It does,” she said, dropping her hands into her pockets before she bounced her chin while looking around. “But, you got me in some real shit last time, so I’m having to rethink my strategies.” She scowled once more, her thick eyebrows looking menacing beneath her lime hair, almost as if she was a cartoon sketched and comprised of scribbled highlighters. “Do you know my parents threatened to cut me off? That officer made it out to be way worse than it actually was. We were only trying to make a difference.” She bit her lip, almost as if she was trying to pout. “The stupid owner of this place tried to get me in real trouble. Thankfully, my father smoothed it over, but still, it’s put me in his bad books and it’s all your fault. Do you even know the bother you caused me?” She waved a hand around. “And here you are, acting like you have nothing to be sorry for.”
I wasn’t having any of it though. “Well, if it isn’t the consequence of your own actions,” I chirped rather smugly. “How about some accountability? If you hadn’t shown up here and caused a nuisance, then you wouldn’t have been carted away in the patrol car, would you? I’m not sorry, because I have absolutely nothing to be sorry for.”
“I’m a public citizen,” she said. “And I have the right to protest.”
For a moment I pursed my lips. It was so annoying to be goaded by her while she was acting all self-righteous. “Are you proud of yourself?” I asked. “I know the kind of family you come from.” I waved my hand at her in disgust. “You act like you’ve been hard-done by, but you’ve had way more opportunities than most people. You choose to live in a squat, and you choose to constantly make a nuisance of yourself, jumping on whatever bandwagon is the current trend. I bet you used to eat meat when you were younger, right?”
Shabby appeared slightly aggrieved, but then she narrowed her eyes. “Are you trying to get under my skin, or something?” she said. “What’s this? Last stand of the zookeeper or what? You think you’re going to do a psyche study on my motives or something? I have every right to be here and you won’t shame me. Besides, I paid the fee at the gate, so quit bothering me.” She grunted, then made a show of turning away.
I gazed at the strap of her backpack. “What’s in the bag?”
“None of your business,” she said with a tut.
“It’s my business if you have some tools or something in there. If you’re planning to throw paint all over the place again then I’m not going to let that stand. Open the bag and let me have a look.”
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