So there I was, charging out the lift doors on a Friday night, off home for a dinner, a couple beers and a good kip. Burger was already ordered, R. and the girls waiting in the car a couple blocks away.
Someone giggled nervously. A woman was looking at something on the floor, wriggling across the polished tiles. A lizard. A gecko, in fact. Lost in urbia, just like another wild life some time back.
I thought I’d better do something this time. I got the Kathmandu sale catalogue out of my bag, opened it up, and encouraged the gecko to hop on. I rolled it up gently inside, so it would be firmly held (and also hoping this would accord with its natural instinct to find some narrow place to hide in), and then went out the sliding glass doors.
Where to take it? The mean plantings up the side of the pathway to The Terrace would not sustain a lizard’s life for long. And it would too easily get lost again, far (in small animal terms) from a decent sized habitat.
I’d have to go for a little walk.
And so over the Terrace, down the side of the motorway off-ramp and under the motorway to the other side, where a steep scrubby bank lay. There, perhaps, the gecko could find a place to live.
I gently unrolled the catalogue and let the lizard out onto a steeply inclined wall of stones. It lay there. I remembered my cameraphone:
It sluggishly moved away, up a little. I thought I’d better leave it alone. I turned and walked away, people looking at me strangely on the way to their cars.
It was a nice way to end the week.
