Contents

MEGAN

GOES TO

THE ZOO

OWEN JONES

DEDICATION

INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

1 THE PUBLIC HOLIDAY

2 THE TRIP

3 THE ZOO

4 PETS

5 WACINHINSHA

GLOSSARY

THE DISALLOWED

Owen Jones

1 MR. LEE’S PREDICAMENT

MEGAN

GOES TO

THE ZOO

A Spirit Guide, A Ghost Tiger and One Scary Mother!

by

OWEN JONES

Copyright © September 2023 Owen Jones

Megan Goes to the Zoo

by Owen Jones

Published by

Megan Publishing Services

http://meganthemisconception.com

∞ ∞ ∞

The right of Owen Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. The moral right of the author has been asserted.

∞ ∞ ∞

In this work of fiction, the characters, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or they are used entirely fictitiously.

∞ ∞ ∞

All rights reserved.

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Other novelettes in the same series:

The Psychic Megan Series

A Spirit Guide, A Ghost Tiger and One Scary Mother!

The Misconception

Megan’s Thirteenth

Megan’s School Trip

Megan’s School Exams

Megan’s Followers

Megan and the Lost Cat

Megan and the Mayoress

Megan Faces Derision

Megan’s Grandparents Visit

Megan’s Father Falls Ill

Megan Goes on Holiday

Megan and the Burglar

Megan and the Cyclist

Megan and the Old Lady

Megan’s Garden

Megan Goes To the Zoo

Megan Goes Hiking

Megan and the Cookery Competition

Megan Goes Riding

Megan Goes Yachting

Megan at Carnival

Megan at Christmas

Megan Catches Covid-19

DEDICATION

This edition is dedicated to my wife, Pranom Jones, for making my life as easy as she can. She does a great job of it.

Karma will repay everyone in just kind.

INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

Believe not in anything simply because you have heard it,

Believe not in anything simply because it was spoken and rumoured by many,

Believe not in anything simply because it was found written in your religious texts,

Believe not in anything merely on the authority of teachers and elders,

Believe not in traditions because they have been handed down for generations,

But after observation and analysis, if anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, accept it and live up to it.

Gautama Buddha

∞ ∞ ∞

Great Spirit, whose voice is on the wind, hear me.

Let me grow in strength and knowledge.

Make me ever behold the red and purple sunset.

May my hands respect the things you have given me.

Teach me the secrets hidden under every leaf and stone, as you have taught people for ages past.

Let me use my strength, not to be greater than my brother, but to fight my greatest enemy – myself.

Let me always come before you with clean hands and an open heart, that as my Earthly span fades like the sunset, my Spirit shall return to you without shame.

(Based on a traditional Sioux prayer)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

1 The Public Holiday

2 The Trip

3 The Zoo

4 Pets

5 Wacinhinsha

Glossary

The Disallowed: Chapter One

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

My thanks to the artist who did the cover for me,

Jacqueline Chavarria.

If you want her contact details, just let me know.

1 THE PUBLIC HOLIDAY

Megan’s garden was coming on spectacularly well as a result of the constant care and attention she showered upon it. She and Jane liked to take advantage of the privacy provided by the honeysuckle, jasmine, sweet peas and passion flower by sunbathing in their swimming costumes on the grass. This felt perfectly natural to Jane who didn’t mind whether anyone saw her or not, but it was a completely new experience to Megan. She thought they were being very daring not sunbathing at the seaside, where she would have felt much less inhibited.

This was a result of her mother’s strict moral code. Suzanne had no objection to sunbathing and swimming in public places like the beach or municipal pool, but considered it overly exhibitionist to do the same in the privacy of one’s own back garden. However, what annoyed Megan the most was that she could see what her mother meant, although she didn’t want to and certainly didn’t agree with her. She both envied her friend’s freedom and wondered whether it was a good thing at one and the same time

She found it perplexing and frustrating. Megan was just about to open her eyes and prop herself up on one elbow to discuss the matter with Jane, when Jane remarked:

“You never seem to suffer from spots, do you? What’s your secret?” She opened her eyes and turned to her right to find Jane studying her face from less than a foot away. “Your skin is beautiful, there’s not a mark on it you weren’t born with, whereas I get spots all the time. Come on, what’s your secret?”

“No secret. I think I do what every other girl does. I do all that stuff we all talk about: creams, antiseptic alcohol washes, every morning and every night. If you do all that as well, then I don’t know why you get them and I don’t.”

“I do do it all and I give my skin plenty of sunlight – and they say that that kills bacteria too.”

“Yes, I believe it does, but I spend a lot of time outdoors too, working or sitting here in the garden, walking with Grrr or cycling. Perhaps it’s because I’m physically active most of the time I’m in the sun and you’re usually almost asleep. Perhaps perspiration clears my pores, I mean. I’m not trying to say you’re lazy.”

“I suppose it could be that, but my body gets more sun than yours because I wear a bikini.”

“Yes, but you aren’t getting spots on your tummy, are you?”

“No, why, are you?” she asked almost hopefully.

“No, not yet. Why, do you think I will? I’m certainly not expecting to get any there.”

“No, neither am I, but still, there must be some reason why.”

“Perhaps my body and my skin are not as advanced as yours… you are more mature than I am. I still have the skin of a child, whereas yours is becoming adult.”

Jane liked that idea and gave it some credence. “Yes, that sounds quite feasible… I imagine that’s the reason. We all grow up at different rates and I am just a bit more grown up than you are… When you reach my stage of development, you’ll probably be covered in spots from head to foot.”

They looked at each other straight-faced and then burst out laughing. Megan slapped Jane’s shoulder in jest. “Thank you very much. Do you fancy cooling off? Dad fixed up a new gadget for me, I’ll show you. Stay there a moment.”

Megan went to the garden tap under the kitchen window and turned it on. A few seconds later, Jane was squealing as Megan rushed back to join her under the cool shower from the sprinkler that was attached to the pine end apex of the shed roof. “Dad set it up for me. Great, isn’t it? Just a few seconds and the whole place is nice and cool.”

“Yeah, lovely, turn it off now, please. I’m cool enough. I was before.”

“Ah, come on. It’s refreshing, but I will turn it off. Any more than a few minutes and the grass becomes waterlogged and you can’t walk on it. I love it though.”

“Mmm, very good.”

“The only problem is, you can’t use it when you need it most, in the heat of the midday sun, or you’ll boil the plants, Dad says, but before ten and after three is all right.”

“Yes, it makes a lot of difference. I like it now the water’s off. Is it after three already then?”

“Yes, about ten past. Why? Do you have to be anywhere nice?”

“No, I said I’d do some shopping for my mother and get it home by four. She needs some things for my Dad’s tea. Er, a frozen, pre-made quiche flan, six eggs, a packet of sliced ham and a packet of sliced cheese squares to put on top. I love quiche and salad, don’t you?”

“Yes,” replied Megan, but she was thinking that she had never seen her mother using those ingredients to make it. The thought crossed her mind that one of the reasons Jane had spots was all the processed food she ate, although she did exaggerate so, she never had more than two or three spots, though just one was too many for a girl who cared about her appearance, as they both knew very well.

“OK, if you’re going, I’ll get a book to read.” Jane pulled on a skirt and a blouse, slipped into her flip-flops and stood ready to leave by the lane gate, not ever wanting to encounter Megan’s mother unless she had to. The two didn’t see eye to eye on many issues, but especially on the way Jane dressed. Suzanne thought that it was too provocative, especially for a young teenage girl and she hoped desperately that Megan wouldn’t be influenced by her. Megan pulled on her own shorts, showed her friend out and then went to her room for her book, ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Quantum Physics’, which she had borrowed from the library and was enjoying immensely.

She took the damp towel from the lawn, threw it over the back of a chair to dry and sat at the garden table to read with a can of Coke. She loved the fact that scientists were cottoning on to the idea that something could be in two places at the same time, but thought they were missing the point slightly. She could be on the beach with her gramps while her body was asleep in bed, which made it look as if she were in two places at the same time, but in reality, she and her body were not the same thing. It was only her temporary home, just as a hermit crab changed shells. It would be wrong to say that the shell was part of the crab.

Physicists were also saying that it was probably possible to affect an item in one place and have that effect immediately copied somewhere else to its counterpart. However, she had long known that doing something to her physical body would have an effect on her Spiritual Body wherever she was in the universe, because while she was using that physical body they were connected. The stories sounded too similar to be coincidence, but as usual, she had no-one to discuss her ideas with.

Megan was so engrossed in her book, that she felt her mother watching her from the kitchen rather than saw her. She turned her head quickly to look over her shoulder. “Hi, Mam, you startled me, everything all right?”

“Yes, dear, everything’s fine. I was just watching you reading. You seemed to be concentrating so much that I didn’t like to disturb you. Something for school, is it?”

“Yes, it’s related to schoolwork, but we didn’t cover it in depth this year. I hope we will next year though.” She turned the cover to face her mother so she could read it.

“Yes, dear, looks interesting, I’d better get your father’s tea started, he’ll be back in an hour.” When he did get in, he found Megan still reading in the garden, so he sat with her. Suzanne brought them all a cup of tea.

“You carry on, Megan, don’t let me disturb you… What are you reading?” he craned to see. “Ah, I don’t quite get all that stuff myself. I’m glad someone in the family does though. Perhaps you can explain it to your mother and me one day. Quantum Physics, eh? Who’d have guessed it? Excellent! Excellent!”

Megan put the book down. She could follow it when she was allowed to concentrate, but that was not going to be at that moment. She was glad that her parents were talking to each other though, because her head was still full of the concepts in the book and she knew from previous experience that it often took a while to be able to mix again when she had been studying.

“… of that then, Megan? Megan?” She felt her mother push her shoulder.

“What? Er, sorry?”

“Your father’s talking to you, don’t be so rude.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude, I was thinking about something. I thought you were both talking to each other. Sorry, what did you say, Dad?”

“Don’t worry about it. You’ve inherited that from me. I get lost in thought when I’ve got something to work out as well. Your mother has suggested a family trip to the zoo, and I was asking what you thought about it. You like animals, don’t you?”

“Yes, Dad. Sounds great, Mam. When do you want to go?”

“As I was just saying, the Summer Bank Holiday is coming up and I just saw an ad in the local paper for a coach trip to Whispervale, the biggest zoo in the country. If we go by coach, your father won’t have to drive. It leaves at six a.m. gets there by nine when it opens and will be back by around six p.m. That’s the plan, anyway, but Bank Holiday traffic is so unpredictable, you just can’t tell.

“It was always predictably bad, but a lot of people stopped going anywhere because of it, so it’s starting to become acceptable again. Right then, yes or no?” Robert and Megan voted yes, so Suzanne rang the tour operator on her mobile and booked three places.

Megan wasn’t quite sure that she fully approved of zoos, but she had seen that her parents had wanted to go, so she had said yes too. She hadn’t been since she was a toddler, and couldn’t remember much about it except that her maternal grandmother had fussed too much. She wasn’t sure whether her ambivalence towards zoos stemmed from the zoo itself or the people she had gone with, but she was prepared to give it another try.

“Right, so that’s a week today, yeah?” confirmed Megan.

“Yes, it is,” repeated her mother pointedly, stressing the word ‘yes’. “This time next week, we’ll either be stuck in a traffic jam on the motorway, or it will all be over and we’ll be sitting back here, having had a free day. By ‘free’, I mean, I won’t have had to cook and your Dad won’t have had to drive. We will all have a lovely day out together and let other people take care of us for a change. It sounds like Heaven!”

“Yes, I’m looking forward to it too. Do you mind if I go up to my room and read my book?”

“No, not at all, you go on up. I’ll give your Mam a hand with the tea things and call you when it’s ready.”

“About forty-five minutes,” added Suzanne.

Megan ran up to her room and sat on the edge of her bed to watch the bird boxes in her garden. There still hadn’t been any interest from any of the many birds that visited their garden. She stroked Grrr’s head. “Is that your story, Grrr? Were you in a zoo or a circus? Is that where you learned to love and want to be with humans? I’d never thought of that before. I’d always imagined you roaming wild over the Tundra and the snowy mountains of the Urals and Siberia. Am I just being romantic? Were you a captive, or domesticated as a kitten?

“I guess I’ll never know, because you’re the only one who does, and you can’t tell me, can you, girl? You probably don’t even know that I’m interested in your past. There may not even be any past for you, only the present – the now, or perhaps you live in the past and the present at the same time, and if you are, then so are we all.”

2 THE TRIP

When the day of the trip arrived, the Evans family had to get up much earlier than usual, but they had done all the preparation the night before, so all they had to do was shower, dress, have breakfast and get themselves down to the meeting point outside the travel agent’s in the Crescent to await the coach. Suzanne carried a large trendy bag on her shoulder which contained her more usual handbag and purse and some sandwiches and Megan carried something similar. Robert only carried his wallet.

The bags weren’t heavy though and once the fifteen double ham and cheese sandwiches, three apples and three oranges intended for the journey had been eaten, they could be left on the bus. The itinerary included a stop at a motorway service station at seven thirty, but they knew from experience that they would prefer to eat their own sandwiches than anything that could be purchased in one of those. Once empty, the bags would be useful for carrying gifts back to Feyton, if they saw anything that caught their eye.

As they approached the travel agent’s they could see six or seven people already there by the dim orange light of the rising sun. They vaguely recognised them all from the local community, but Megan was the only child, not that that bothered her. By six o’clock, they were about twenty at their pick-up point and quite a buzz of excitement had developed. When the coach arrived they piled in according to who had arrived first and sat where they pleased as the seats had not been allocated.

The Evanses took the back bench seat with two of their friends, Robert sat in the middle so he could stretch his long legs in the aisle before him and Megan sat by the window so she could watch the scenery, and the adults could pass the journey chatting. When they had visited the other four rendezvous points in Feyton, the coach headed for the motorway. The atmosphere on the coach was as good as any school trip she had ever been on, she thought, and wondered how much people ever really grew up, or whether it was just that they thought they had to pretend they had changed since being children. The happiness and joyous Auras of her fellow passengers was certainly indistinguishable from those on her school coach outings, although the people were on average three or four times older.

She rested her head on her hand and her elbow on the narrow window cill and gazed out, while soaking up the atmosphere too. This was an example of adults at play, she realised, at least in one form and she would never have expected it. It would not have surprised her if they had started singing ‘Ten Green Bottles’.

She was happy for them, and happy to be with them, but somehow she didn’t feel a part of them. Something to do with the age gap, she wondered, although she would not have called herself ageist, racist, or anti any other section of society. Perhaps the reason was as her mother often said, ‘Birds of a feather flock together’ and they were not of exactly the same plumage as herself – she wasn’t wrinkly enough, she joked with herself, but felt guilty for having that random thought because it didn’t express her true feelings.

By seven o’clock, she could feel herself drifting off to sleep, already tired because she had got up early and rocked by the coach’s gentle swaying in the motorway traffic and she couldn’t find a good enough reason to resist the temptation. However, sleep was short-lived because she was awoken thirty minutes later by her mother’s elbow.

“Megan, we’re at the service station, do you need the toilets?”

“What? Er, no, Mam, I’m OK, thanks.”

“Well we’re all going in for twenty minutes and the driver wants to lock up the bus, so are you coming in or staying here?”

“Oh, all right, I’m awake now anyway. I’ll come in to have a look around and keep our merry band together.”

“What? Merry band? Of what? Are you still dreaming?”

“No, Mam, just thinking.”

“Well stop it, come on, shake a leg, we’re the last to get off.”

Most people used the toilets, many had an English breakfast, some regretted it and everyone had a cup of tea. Megan looked around the bookshop but didn’t want anything, so rejoined her parents and their friends just in time to drink a stone-cold cup of tea and be herded back onto the bus. She was listening to her group discussing the pro’s and cons of food stops on motorways as she fell asleep again.

Her dreams were short and frequent, punctuated by the bus route and the traffic. One dream she was very pleased to wake up from when the driver was forced to brake quickly, involved her being covered in acne. Another was about a visit to the hairdresser’s where they cut off half her ponytail by mistake, apologised, but refused to cut the other half off to match unless she paid again and she had run out of money. In yet another, she was sitting talking with Grrr in English on the roof of the coach as it sped on its way to the zoo. She was aware that she was dreaming the whole time and was proud of it.

She had been trying to tell whether she was awake or asleep for quite a while, it was one of her exercises, and she found that the unpredictable movements of the bus kept her in a state of semi-wakefulness, which made knowing when she was dreaming that much easier. She wondered whether she could adapt the peculiarities of a moving bus to her bed, so that it woke her up at random intervals, but she couldn’t see how, unless she slept with marbles in the bed, but didn’t fancy that. She was soon asleep again.

“Come on, Megan,” she heard before she was elbow-jabbed again, “we’ve arrived!” She was raring to go, because she had only dozed, not slept – she’d had forty winks, as her grandparents called it. When she and her mother got outside on the tarmac, almost every one of her fellow passengers was yawning and either stretching or bending, trying to wake their bodies up for the forthcoming walk around the zoo. The driver waited for them all to prepare themselves and then led them over to the turnstiles at the entry point.

“This way, ladies and gentlemen,” then, “Miss, if you please,” he added seeing Megan. “All right, hush now, please. Listen, because this is important. We do not have individual tickets, we have a block booking, which is cheaper. Therefore, if you leave the zoo, for whatever reason, and then want to re-enter,