*** Coffee or tea ***
Inspired by "Wild West End", written by Mark Knopfler.
.
It wasn't long for the zoo to open its doors to visits. The penguins were revising their daily routine.
"Kowalski, any news today in the zoo?" Skipper asked.
Kowalski raised his eyes from his notepad. "Only one: today Roger is expected to come back."
"Roger!" Private shouted in joy. "We'll have to go and welcome him!"
Skipper looked at him annoyed. Private noticed the gesture.
"Is there any problem, Skipper?"
"Only one: Roger is tiresome." Skipper noticed disappointment in Private's stare. "Don't get me wrong, but that's it. He's so nice and all you may think, but as a neighbour he's a bore."
Private lowered his stare. He remembered perfectly the time when they transferred Roger to their own habitat from Alice's computer. No, that didn't work as he expected. Nor some months ago, when Roger was about to ruin one of the penguins' missions and they had to look for another temporary location for him. They hadn't seen him since then.
"Do you think he's mad at us?" Private asked.
"At you, maybe," Skipper answered laughing. "After all, you're the one who decided to send him to that island in the middle of nowhere."
"Skipper," Kowalski interrupted. "You know perfectly that Great Britain's not an island in the middle of nowhere. It's next to Ireland and, a few miles away, it's continental Europe connected by the Eurotunnel, so it's really very near to the biggest land mass on the planet's surface. And, around it, it has a total amount of -"
"Really, Kowalski? Are you going to tell me the number of islands around it?"
"I have the intel, yes," Kowalski answered annoyed by the comment.
"Spare it."
Kowalski sighed. It was always the same. Rico patted his back. It had its own meaning: "don't pay attention to that, you know him, but he appreciates you."
"We'll visit Roger then, right?" Private insisted with a big smile.
"After the visits and for a short time," Skipper yielded.
.
It was the moment. The four penguins arrived at Roger's habitat and found him swimming calmly.
"Hi, Roger!" Private greeted him.
"Private! It's nice to see you! I'm so happy to see you four!" It wasn't a formality, Roger considered them their friends. "You look great, your feathers shine a lot!"
Rico felt flattered by the comment and smiled.
"How were things in London?" Skipper asked without much interest. "I guess there was fog, it was boring and you didn't see Sherlock Holmes."
"Of course he didn't see Sherlock Holmes," Kowalski intervened. "Because he's a fictional character!"
"Do you think I don't know it?" Skipper replied.
Rico breathed deeply. Seriously, what happened to both? He pushed them outside the habitat, muttered a "see you" and took them away. Skipper thanked the gesture.
Private and Roger were alone.
"Roger... are you mad at us for having sent you to London?"
Roger smiled. "On the contrary! I'm happy you did it! I love London!"
Private smiled too, at ease.
"Would you like coffee or tea? I've brought them from there."
"Coffee?" Private asked surprised.
"Yes... I've brought a sack from Angelucci for Skipper. I think he'll like it." Roger gave him the sack. "I still prefer tea, but I recognize this coffee is very good."
"Oh... thank you, I'll give him later. I want you to tell me things about your journey."
"As you like it," Roger replied while putting some water to heat.
"How were you at the zoo?"
"Well... to tell you the truth, I wasn't there much. But... do you know where I was?"
"Where?"
"In Wild West End."
"Seeing a musical?"
"No!" Roger laughed out loud. "Singing!"
Private opened his eyes in astonishment. He didn't know what to say. An alligator at London's great theatres? His dream was to sing at Broadway, and he had done it... for just a minute.
"And... what happened?" Private was expecting the worst.
"Don't you know it? I appeared on newspapers, magazines..." Roger remembered then that the penguins couldn't read. "Didn't Phil and Mason tell you anything?"
Private shook his head.
"Okay, maybe news haven't arrived here. There I didn't know a lot about what happened here, sincerely," Roger said pouring some tea for Private.
"The tea is good too," Private said after his first sip. "Let me guess... you sang in a musical."
"Exactly. As the main voice."
Private stared at Roger and smiled again. Roger interpreted that as an invitation to go on talking. He wanted to talk.
"The atmosphere was incredible there. We were like a family, I was always with the musicians... I even used to accompany them to buy spare parts for their instruments. And do you know what? We were the first animal company that has performed successfully in front of humans."
"How did you do that?" Private asked. "Humans don't understand what we say."
"With Kowalski's mini-equalizer, of course," Roger answered giving Private an electronic appliance assembled on a backgammon board.
"Then... such a fuss for letting everybody know it?"
The poor communication between Europe and America was a problem, definitively. And it was a mystery how Roger hadn't ended pursued by all the human intelligence agencies on Earth. Well, maybe due to that... because they were human.
"Everybody knows this invention. We gave it a fun use," Roger just said. "And the conductress..." Roger named her as if he was daydreaming, "well, she said on a press conference that it had been made by a human."
"If Kowalski only knew it..."
"He can still patent it." Roger was thoughtful. "But it could be safer if he didn't do it, of course."
Roger was right. The patent would allow to make more mini-equalizers and communication between animals and humans would become real. But... did they really want that? That would make easier to discover the penguins' secret mission.
Well... they would handle that later. Private had a question.
"Hey... and the conductress?"
"Well... she was a crocodile. So beautiful, so feminine, so special. For the others, just another one. For me, an angel fallen from heaven. We weren't very different, but that couldn't work. She was in charge and I was just like the rest, even being the main voice."
Private nodded. He understood that their story would have a bad ending. He let Roger continue.
"We had our things... well, a gentleman must never talk too much." Even less in front of someone young and impressionable, he thought. "It was as if I was young again. One day I asked her to get married... and that's why I'm here. She didn't like the idea."
"I'm so sorry," Private replied patting his scaly back.
"Well... there's nothing left to do." Roger sighed resigned. "She didn't want me to go back, and everybody in the company already knows it. I was accused of having become the main voice for being her lover. I don't have a place in the company."
"But that's unfair," was all that Private could say.
"I could have done as many other mates. They used to go to Chinatown, they never said what for... but we all knew it. They asked me to go with them, they said that I just needed money... and we earned quite a lot. My mates always came back with empty pockets. They used to say that it was a men's world and that this is how things are."
"And... did you go with them?" Private asked. He was surprised with what Roger was telling him, and it was difficult to assimilate it.
"I went one day, and I'm not proud of that. A friend who played the trumpet told me that I was a wild animal, and that it couldn't be that the only wild thing in my life was the name of the place where I worked. He brought me to a cabaret and a dancer got near me. It seemed that she liked me, and I liked to see her dancing. But I imagined what would happen... and I left."
Private was glad to hear that.
"In that world, close ups are hard and dangerous," Roger concluded.
Private said nothing. He looked towards the horizon: it was getting dark. He took the coffee sack and the mini-equalizer.
"I suppose it'll be better if I don't tell them what you have told me."
"Except about the conductress and the dancer, do as you like." Roger pointed at the mini-equalizer. "Yes, we'll have to talk about that. But about them two... the three of them would laugh at me."
Private thought that they wouldn't, and that they would understand him better than he thought. But he preferred to say nothing. He said goodbye to Roger and headed for his habitat. The sack weighed as age. Tasting its contents could be okay, tasting the rest of what means to be an adult... better not.
