The Moonlight Menagerie
“The Moonlight Menagerie,” my primary school magnum opus, a story I’d written about a collection of animal statues that could come to life at night. I had accompanied it with a drawing of purple flamingos and blue elephants because it was only moonlight that roused them. I sat there with my hands clasped in my lap, stiff with rage, as Miss Handley brought in another teacher to laugh at the title. A proper throaty Silk Cut laugh. I knew “menagerie” was a word because I’d stolen it from Aladdin so didn’t understand what she thought was so funny.
In hindsight, an intense eight-year-old presenting a teacher with what they thought was the next Booker Prize winner would probably be, yes, quite funny. If I had been at a Steiner school I bet they’d have thought I was a fucking genius. I remember going home apoplectic and resented her till the day she left suddenly after some kind of meltdown.
We had four cats by then, despite the financial burden of them, two bought to annoy my mum, the next two acquired during some sort of manic episode from a pregnant stray in a barn off the North Orbital Road. I decided to give all of them middle “moon” names from a book on “lunar spells” I’d become fixated with. I was moon mad. If one or both mum and dad were on night shift, we could get our duvets in front of late-night TV and sit in the dark waiting for that weird witching hour cats have, when they freak out over shadows and imaginary sprites.
I always used to love the opening credits to this series Arena that would come on at exactly the point I knew I’d stayed up too late on nights like that. It was of a neon sign in a glass bottle, floating in water in front of a full moon to this lilting music. Much later on, cornered at a house party, a man would inform me the “track” was by Brian Eno and it was a documentary series about art or theater or some shit. And I’d wish I was floating away in a bottle towards the moon rather than nodding politely.
I often have dreamscapes that are similar but, usually, the moon becomes so big and ghostly that it ripples the water as it skims the top of a lake or it brushes trees out of the way like an enormous hot air balloon coming to land in the thick of a forest. I used to think, illuminated by this giant orb and as the adults slept, anything could happen during moonlight. All the stories I enjoyed or imagined hinged on the mystery of nighttime.
Fittingly now, I find it excruciating to write at any time other than through the night. But this would be something that proved to be a challenge living in Montezuma. Obnoxiously dramatic thunderstorms that bypassed rumbles into ear-piercing cracks came every other day and would knock out the electricity. And if the interruptions were not in the sky they came from underground. A family of spotted skunks had decided to nest beneath my room and you could track their movements under the floorboards from the sulfurous wafts of their buttholes. One night, I woke up with a start sensing I was not alone to find one calmly swinging from a grocery bag hung on my door handle, anal glands gently glistening in the light of my alarm clock. Then the mornings arrived with that equatorial slap in the face. Here is night and here is day, there’s no in-between. Wake up, wake up, wake up.
Despite the drama of the nature, Montezuma itself is a notoriously laid back beach town in the Nicoya Peninsula, one of five blue zones in the world where you live longer and happier. It’s made up of incredibly steep dirt roads that curve around mountainous jungle that just suddenly drops into an oceanfront. If you follow one road there’s the next town of Cabuya, famous for an island you can only reach at low tide with a sunken cemetery. And further on there’s Cabo Blanco, the tip of the peninsula laden with gnarled trees you can’t see the top of and secret waterfalls. It all sounds very spooky and dappled with mysticism because it is. Even more so when a global pandemic has rendered the region a ghost town. Only the quaint hand-painted signs in English asking tourists not to feed wild animals or leave their trash on the beaches reminded you it’d normally be overrun with chatter and selfie sticks.
Exactly the kind of expats you’d think Montezuma would attract had washed up there. Shoeless Europeans who flogged crystal healing sessions and bee pollen on Facebook. People you’d have very intense conversations with deep into the night and then ignore the next day out of mutually acknowledged embarrassment. I’d catch myself being mean-spirited then have to be reminded I was no better. There is no point asking someone who is travelling why they decided to travel because the answer is always the same, it’s always running away from yourself in one way or another. What an ungrateful little monster I was being, I thought, moaning about ostensibly being in paradise because it impinged on my need for uninterrupted high-speed broadband. The novelty of being awed by nature to the point where all your worries feel trivial had worn off faster than I liked. Annoyingly, your problems still remain your problems wherever you go.
Before what would be my last week in Costa Rica, the Tico guy who’d patiently been trying to teach me the Spanish ‘to be’ became insistent that we had to meet at night, on the beach, on a specific day. Nobody meets up in the dark for small talk so what was it? Enlistment into a cult? Romantic? Death pact? I find it more awkward breaking social convention to firmly decline invitations than I do to just go, so I agreed. As I stepped out, for some reason, in jeans and a nice top with a clutch bag, I remembered I wasn’t going on a large one down Watford town centre but entering into the night in the middle of Central America and became filled with dread. How would I ruin this encounter, I wonder? An accidental roundhouse kick to his head trying to get on the motorbike gracefully? Or maybe I’d be one of those tourists that gets stranded and has to be choppered to safety after surviving off drinking my own piss in the jungle. All I wanted to do was go back to my air-conditioned bunker, even if it did smell of skunk anus. But the nighttime itself felt different.
In the day, the relentless sunshine ferments various tropical roadkill, from fallen mangoes to flattened iguanas, producing this faint baby sick smell. But this evening, however, we trundled down the dirt road passing patches of night-blooming jasmine that enveloped your nose in the best way, to a beach where the entrance to the sea was flanked by rocks. The water is a deep jade colour but perfectly clear, the clarity of which kind of tricks you into believing it isn’t treacherous. Again, in the day at high tide, the water can become so aggressive that it laps the edge of the road. One morning I’d waded in for my daily scream at the horizon and was surprised at the force of a rip current that pulled me out far enough for a fisherman to start shouting at me to float. So surprised that I ended up avoiding going back to that beach like a hurt puppy.
But this evening as we pulled up I was astonished at what appeared. The moon, the biggest I’d ever seen it, nestled over an uncharacteristically calm sea. Frothing at the edges of the rocks were faint sparkles of bioluminescence and our faces were now lit by that unmistakable lilac glow. It wasn’t the massive dream moon I’d imagined many times before but it was pretty fucking close. He looked at me, with a stifled smugness, as I thought “OK, bitch, I get it now” and relaxed the crunch that had been in my shoulders for the last six months as I laid back and buried my elbows into the sand. Tenderness, whether it’s sincere or not, has a habit of making my brain short circuit but for some reason, I talked for a few hours that night without any jokes as armour, and with a candidness I’ve only started to learn in writing these letters. Back and forth about love and purpose and ambitions, and about the moral dilemma of being in flux when a world circumstance is imploring you to stay still.
Right before things got a little too How Stella Got Her Groove Back another light appeared behind us. Bright white, then blue and then red. “La playa esta cerrada.” It was the police snapping on medical gloves for a patdown on the sand, punishment for breaking lockdown rules, and a pointed jerk back to reality. They rifled through my bag and jean pockets before sending us on our way. An abrupt end to the evening but it was time to go. And not only to leave the beach but Costa Rica. Just like the darkness needs the light, I had to slow down to grasp why I’d been running at full pelt.
Eventually, I won’t remember the rude interruption of the law or the confrontationally shoeless expats or the skunks or the gnawing in my stomach knowing I had to move. I’ll just have that unforgettable gleam emerging from behind the palm trees to hold onto. And, besides, tomorrow is another full moon after all.
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