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Love - and cooking - in the Zoo!
Buy from the publisher.
After a year at the Cook’s Academy, Sally is handed a certificate of competence and slung out onto the job market. At 35, she wonders who will employ someone so overqualified and under-experienced, so jumps at the chance of a job in the Zoo, where she quickly finds that the chefs are more dangerous than the animals! Sweating in the intense heat of one of the hottest summers on record, Sal develops muscles as she rolls pastry for pies that would gladden the heart of Desperate Dan. Inevitably, the kids Cleo and Alex manage to escape their grandmother's clutches and turn up at the zoo, posing Sal a problem, not least in the romance department, Cleo now an extremely beautiful fifteen year old, knocking her mother into the shade, and throwing the monkeys into fits of jealousy when their keeper gets the hots for her. Add the Entertainers - re-enacting a bizarre 17th Century hanging every night, and you have a mix that is hotter than dynamite!
Excerpt
I still insisted we wait, only such a little time to wait, but oh! it seemed an eternity when we were dying to tear each other to pieces.
“Please let’s go somewhere we can be more together,” he begged, and I couldn’t refuse him. I remembered the shavings shed where Cleo says the keepers go to have it off and took him there.
I pushed the door open cautiously, wondering if anybody was inside, but it was empty. It was warm, dry and light, the light coming from the loft above where the chickens luxuriate in infra-red light, until they meet their doom at the hands (or teeth) of the tigers. It was full of wood shavings which are used for animal bedding.
He wasn’t too keen at first, he thought the shavings dirty, he is so clean himself, that’s one of the things I like about him – Jack was a bit of a grubby little boy. But I said how can wood shavings be dirty? They smell so sweet.
He laughed then and pushed me down into them. I loved it, they were heavenly sweet and clean though a bit scratchy. We got all steamed up again and he insisted he doesn’t care about the infection –
“Anyway it should be all cleared up now if you finished them on Sunday – it’s Tuesday now” – and I gave in, I wanted him as much as he wanted me, and he removed with difficulty my jeans from among the wood shavings, and his own, though he was nervous with the constant scratchings from above, which I assured him were only the chickens.
In the end he couldn’t manage it. He was too nervous. I lay and held him in my arms till he got over his disappointment.
“You still want me, don’t you?” he asked, afraid I would have gone off him when he couldn’t perform.
“Of course, of course,” I reassured him, fighting back my own frustration! I thought how strange that Steve, Conqueror of Women, Perpetrator of Lists – brash, confident Steve – should have this trouble, when Jack, thick as two short planks, crying and shaking and saying it was little, had no trouble getting it up and going like a machine all night. It brought a smile to my face in the soft darkness.
Outside in the yard, with pumas caged and pacing a few feet from us, we picked the shavings and sawdust off each other. Then Steve went to meet Roy, who was waiting, and I went in.
To make sure I’d got rid of every bit of wood I went in the bathroom and took off all my clothes – well I only wear tee shirt, knickers and jeans – shook them, brushed my hair well with my hands, looking in the mirror. When I was sure I had removed all evidence I went into our room. Cleo was reading in bed. She took one look at me and said,
“You’ve been having it off with Bastard Steve in the shavings shed.” I looked at her in horror.
“How do you know?”
“The back of your head is covered in shavings.” Goddamit! I never thought of looking at the back!
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