Fiction

Pacing

At first, the zoo seemed like a place of freedom. The woman drove with the infant in the car – liberation, leaving their suburb – when the autumn mornings were crisp, melting to summer-like noons. She’d purchased a membership on that first visit. Now she’d been four times – got her money’s worth, she told herself with an inflated feeling of achievement.

On the first visit, her son did not seem to see anything. She pointed out the giraffes, from a distance, and some wallabies. He’d stared with expectation at a tree or the sky or at her pointing finger. Only the fish tanks, appearing like technicolour screens, and the pigeons stalking the cafe, interested him. She sent a photo to her sister: $7 coffee and pigeons, hello zoo!

It was on the second visit that they saw the tiger. The woman called the beast “she”, sure it was female, but she didn’t know for sure. The viewing platform was undercover, dim. A small group watched the tiger in silence. She was pacing. Laps and laps along the glass border of her home, past the audience. Her son squealed, kicked his legs, shimmying both socks off in seconds. Sometimes it looked as though she might stop or divert to another course, but then she wouldn’t.

Her son had just started daycare two days a week. In two more weeks, she would return to work. She felt that on the other days, “her” days, she had to take him to places such as the zoo, the library “rhyme time”, the pool. She felt a compulsion, a necessity, to shower him with experiences. A counter to her guilt. Those two days a week rang with quiet – oppressive, peaceful, frightening, adored; yes, she could feel all this at once. What did she once do with all her time?

At the tiger’s enclosure they shuffled along, caught in a crowd of high-schoolers. From a second viewing platform further around, you could see back to the first one, but from the tiger’s perspective. Where a crowd stood looking through glass, all the tiger could see was a mirror. The woman looked towards the mirror window, at the tiger’s restless, beautiful, enormous body undertaking her ceaseless walk in the enclosure, the endlessness replicated, oblivious to onlookers.

Her muscled shoulders rolled, her tail moved like a metronome keeping time to her monotonous journey. The woman was struck by how similar the body was to her old housebound cat, who mostly slept but occasionally released something wild in frantic, youthful movements, a canter on the floorboards. A teenage girl standing behind them held up her phone and read to her friend: A tiger pacing is usually a sign of boredom or psychological distress. It can be a sign of zoochosis. Another woman said to her child, She must be hungry, she’s looking for her lunch. The woman watched her son’s excitement as he beat his legs against the pram. She could only feel a sickly kind of discomfort.

Her friend had once said, It’s okay to be bored, you know. The activity that seemed to characterise the past 12 months was walking. Cutting more laps today? asked a local at the cafe, who was clearly off to work. The woman walked everywhere with the baby in the pram or strapped to her body in the carrier. During that first winter, she could zip the baby inside her puffer jacket. Repetitive days of brilliant sun and aching, sharp frosts. She walked no matter how cold it was. She wore her good black runners and went increasingly longer distances.

In the first weeks the distances had become somehow warped, shrunken, different. What was usually an easy stroll to the shops caused her postpartum bleeding to flow forcefully – she’d overdone it. One thousand steps a day instead of 10,000. A few months in she clocked 12,000 and felt sore everywhere. She told herself to stop looking at the step-tracker automatically installed on her phone, but as she slumped against the pillows at the end of each vast, seemingly weeks-long day, she compulsively checked the total.

She watched as her local friends, other new parents, had gradually returned to work in the past year. She was in the lucky minority, working for a university that had partially paid leave for the whole year. Those parents had seemed more refreshed than she felt and it gave her an uncomfortable idea about the nature of freedom. She was so lucky – she kept saying this to other people, to herself. The freedom to stay home for this long. It wasn’t a big deal, she told herself. Just going back to work. She followed parenting forums online, read the accounts of birth mothers in America back at work after a week or two of unpaid leave.

They took a last trip to the zoo before her return to work. The woman eagerly marched the pram to the tiger’s enclosure. There was something reassuring about the tiger’s constant presence, her pacing and repetition, despite her captivity. The word zoochosis rang in the woman’s mind as she struggled through the early spring crowds, yet another pram in the throng. At the entrance to the tiger enclosure a sign read: “Animal not on view. Thanks for your patience as we carry out routine conservation or animal welfare work.” They would make do at the lion’s enclosure but the two males were immobile, asleep in the sun. She felt irrationally emotional.

That evening, she walked one last time around the block, the baby in the pram. The light faded, she kept walking. In her mind she rehearsed responses to questions like, How are you? How have you been? I’m pacing, she would like to say, I’m getting through. She imagined the tiger, prowling her enclosure perhaps at that very moment. She imagined falling in step with her, a creature to match the wildness and isolation, the beauty of this time. They paced together, the woman and the tiger, steps crunching the footpath, birds shrieking away to their nests, as the day closed off in a gentle, cool darkness.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 23, 2025 as "Pacing".

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