Inducted

She had been at a sleepover. I collected her, pointed the car in a direction I already knew, and said nothing about where we were going.

I had a plan. This was unusual enough to be worth mentioning.

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The plan was this: I had been to the Zoo de la Boissière du Doré a number of times when Killian was small, and I had always meant to bring Kate. The fact that several years had passed between the intention and the execution is not something I am particularly proud of. But here we were. A Wednesday in July. A car going somewhere she hadn’t worked out yet.

She started asking questions somewhere around Vallet. Pointed questions. The kind that suggest the person asking them already has a theory. She didn’t give anything away, and neither did I. When we pulled up to the car park, she got out, looked at the zoo entrance, and did her best to appear thoroughly unmoved.

I had been looking forward to her reaction. I had not anticipated that she would put quite so much effort into not having one.

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We paid. We went in. Kate took the map. Quickly. For someone who wasn’t especially bothered.

At this point I should clarify that the temperature was somewhere that made thinking difficult. “Hot day” would be an understatement of the sort that deserves its own medal. The kind of July heat that makes the animals sensible for not moving and makes the humans look foolish for having come out at all.

Kate did not seem to notice. She had the map, she had a route, and she had decided I was coming with her. I followed. This is, I’ve come to understand, simply what happens when you take Kate somewhere new. She assumes navigational authority immediately, and the most dignified thing to do is accept it.

She spotted everything before I did. She pointed out what was cute — every animal in turn, not one of them overlooked — and moved us along at a pace she considered appropriate. The performance of indifference had not survived the entrance gate. I did not mention this. I was, not for the first time, essentially her assistant.

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The giraffes were in a wide open enclosure that looked more like the Serengeti than the Loire-Atlantique. Three or four of them had gathered under a dead tree in the middle distance. It was the kind of scene that stops you for a moment: the scale of it, the flatness, the way that bare tree sat against a white sky. I took a photograph with all of this in mind and then spent the walk to the next enclosure wondering if it had worked.

My father was once attacked by a giraffe. Here, in fact, though the enclosure has since been redesigned specifically so that this cannot happen anymore. Progress. These ones behaved themselves, and we had a perfectly civilised conversation about their tongues, which are enormous and blue. Oo er missus.

In the parrot aviary the light came through the leaves in long strips of green. The lorikeets sat in a row and ignored us with the confidence of birds that have been looked at too many times to find it interesting.

The boa constrictor had its mouth wide open when we found it. I reached for the camera. It closed its mouth. There is, I think, a version of wildlife photography that goes very smoothly, and a version that goes like this.

The anaconda was in the next enclosure and prompted Kate to begin singing. For a brief moment I almost impressed her by recognising the reference. Then I suggested it was Cardi B. It was not Cardi B. Kate was kind enough to correct me. The moment passed.

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We walked through the lemur enclosure. The lemurs move around you, up in the trees, sometimes closer than you expect. I told Kate about the time one of them had climbed into Killian’s pushchair when he was small. Just sat there, quite at home, while Killian looked at it and it looked back.

Kate made the King Julien connection before I could. Looking at the photograph, she had a point. He did not, however, want to move it, move it. He wanted to sit exactly where he was and eat whatever that was. Which is, on reflection, entirely understandable given the heat.

She listened. She didn’t say much. But she had stopped trying to look unmoved.

The orangutans were something else entirely. Kate didn’t particularly want to look at them. Something about their eyes, she said; the way they looked straight into you. I took a photograph. Looking back at it, I think she had a point.

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There was a birds of prey show in the afternoon.

A barn owl came in low over the audience and banked away before anyone had properly decided how to feel about it.

A vulture crossed the open sky above us, wide and unhurried, the kind of wingspan you see and then have to recalibrate the size of everything else around it.

A hawk came to rest on the bleachers, a foot from a baby who looked at it with the same philosophical calm Kate had brought to the car park.

What I did not fully account for was that we were sitting in open bleachers in the kind of heat that the animals had the good sense to stay out of. We were there for the best part of an hour. Somewhere during the show Kate got insolation. The zoo staff were on it quickly; a young medical student who happened to be nearby came over to help. I found her having a lie down in the shade. I told her it wasn’t her fault, that it was just a tad warm, which felt like the right thing to say and also happened to be true. They gave us water. It was free. I was grateful for both the water and the fact that I did not have to go through it myself.

I’m not saying she was a drama queen. But. She is not as good with the heat as I am. This is not a boast so much as a quirk acquired years ago: during a military exercise, on a brutally hot day in full NBC kit, someone told me not to think about the heat. Absurdly, it worked. I did not share this wisdom with Kate while she was lying down in the shade, and as a member of Generation X I am also aware that someone older is already preparing to mention the summer of 1976.

I got the owl in flight. I did not get the boa constrictor. You take what the day offers.

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We waited in the cool of the room just off the gift shop until Kate was ready to go back out. When she was, we went.

I had spotted a petting zoo on the way in, and I have a great fondness for goats. We found them. They were, as goats tend to be, completely unimpressed by the distinction between things that belong to you and things that do not. They discovered my walking stick and used it as a scratching post. I considered this an entirely reasonable arrangement and let them get on with it.

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On the way back to the car, Kate led. The map was folded under her arm, soft at the creases from being opened all day. She had done this all day, and there was no reason to change the arrangement now.

I had come back to induct her, which sounds more ceremonial than it was. I had taken her brother here when he was in a pushchair, and somewhere along the way I had decided she deserved the same. The heat, the map, the parrot aviary, the soul-reading orangutans, all of it. That’s what it was.

There are just some things I will never fully understand: a rather rotund man in a panama hat, following his daughter around a zoo in the Loire-Atlantique while she leads the way and he wonders if the giraffe photograph worked. Must be my age.

She hadn’t given much away. But she had held the map all day, and she had not given it back. Which, from Kate, is more than enough.