Episode 2 — Organic Mud

By eleven the sun was up and the class had loosened, an hour into the trip, and Della understood that a tour lead had to hold them or lose them.

Her collar was still damp from the swan. She had decided, on the walk over, to treat the damp as a badge rather than a stain, and had said, when Ritika pointed at it with a worried face, that water was the oldest cleanser and she was glad of it. Ritika had not looked convinced, but Ritika worried about everything, and Della had a mammal enclosure to reach.

The hippopotamus lived at the low end of Greenwood, where the paths ran downhill to a broad enclosure fenced with a single steel rail, and below the rail the ground fell away into a wide brown wallow of mud and standing water, and in the wallow, mostly submerged, lay the hippo, which from the path looked less like an animal than like a wet grey boulder that breathed.

The class arranged itself along the rail. Della arranged herself at the centre of it, where a lead should be, and she saw that she had a problem, which was that she had used up most of what she knew about calm authoritative presence on the swan, and the hippo was not doing anything, and a lead cannot stand at a rail saying nothing while a class gets bored and starts looking at a rival’s phone instead.

So she decided to look casual. Deep people, she had observed, were casual around nature, because nature was their living room. She would lean on the rail the way a person leans on their own furniture, and she would say something settled and true about the hippopotamus, and the class would see a girl entirely at home.

She put her weight on the rail.

The rail, at Greenwood, was held to its posts by municipal bolts of great age, and it had held many students in its time, but it had never held a student who leaned on it as a performance of ease, with her full weight and her whole future behind it, and it turned in its sockets with a long, slow, iron sound, and the top rail swung down and out over the wallow, and Della went with it.

She had a moment in the air. In the moment she thought several things very fast, and the fastest was that everyone was watching.

Then she landed in the wallow face-first, and the mud took her to the elbows, and the smell arrived, and the hippo, three metres away, opened one eye.

There was a silence along the rail. It was the particular silence of thirty-one people who have just watched their tour lead go into a hippo wallow and are waiting to be told how to feel about it. Above her, at the broken rail, Siddharth’s phone was up and steady and he was not saying a word, because he did not have to, because the footage was saying it for him. Della, on her hands and knees in the mud of Greenwood Municipal Zoo, understood that this was the moment. This was where the costume came off. A girl covered to the chest in hippo wallow, in ruined white, could not be the girl in Mrs. Vance’s letter. She could get up and cry, or she could get up and laugh at herself and become, forever, the girl who fell in the mud.

She got up slowly. She wiped the mud from her eyes with the back of a muddy hand, which did not help. She looked, for one second, at Mrs. Vance, who was standing very still at the rail with her hand at her throat.

“People pay for this,” Della said.

The silence changed shape.

“In the cities,” Della went on, climbing back up the bank toward the broken rail, unhurried, as though climbing out of a hippo wallow were the second half of a plan whose first half had been falling into one, “there are places that charge a great deal of money for exactly this. A mud immersion. They call it a treatment.” She reached the rail and stood, dripping, grey-brown from the ribbon to the shoes, and she faced the class with the calm, deep look she had been building all morning. “This is not dirt. This is mineral. The wallow is where the hippopotamus keeps its skin from cracking in the sun. It is natural skin insulation. I did not fall. I have simply chosen to learn from the animal.”

Nobody said anything. Then Farhan said, “Is that true?”

“It is the oldest cooling system on earth,” said Della, who did not know if it was, and had passed some hours ago the point where knowing mattered.

Farhan looked at the wallow. Then he looked at his own white uniform, which was clean, and which suddenly seemed to him like a missed opportunity. He climbed over the broken rail before Ritika could get a hand on his sleeve, and he sat down in the mud with the deliberate care of a person taking a treatment, and he said, “Oh,” in a voice of real discovery, and then two more of them went over the rail after him.

Ritika turned to Della with the face of someone watching a small thing become a large thing. “You have to stop them,” she said.

Della looked at three classmates sitting in a hippo wallow in the white uniforms of St. Jude’s Senior Secondary, applying natural skin insulation to their forearms with the seriousness of people at a spa, while the hippo watched them with its one open eye and declined to move.

“They are learning,” Della said.

Mrs. Vance came along the rail. Her shoes stopped just short of Della’s dripping ones. For a long moment she looked at Della, from the ribbon to the shoes, at all of it, and Della held the look the way she had held the swan, without moving, waiting to see which way the teacher would fall.

“I have been teaching for nineteen years,” Mrs. Vance said quietly. “I have never once managed to get a child into that wallow.”

She was looking at the three in the mud, and there was something on her face that Della had not budgeted for, which was wonder.

“You have a gift,” Mrs. Vance said. “You make them unafraid of it.”

Down in the wallow, Farhan lay back in the mud and looked up at the sky with the peace of a boy who had been told this was good for him and had decided to believe it, and above them all, at the broken rail, the phone kept filming, and Della stood in her ruined white and understood that she had not been caught. She had been believed. It was worse.

“Shall we move on,” she said, “before they insulate themselves entirely.”