The Belgian pet shop where we found Julius wasn’t a good place. You could get anything: puppies, wallabies – owls, even. It smelled wrong in there: of excrement and fear. Your vestigial hackles were raised.
I knew we shouldn’t buy a pet from that shop. It was no better than buying a pangolin from a Vietnamese market to “save” it, really, but walking around, between sphynx cats, chinchillas, geckos and chameleons, we spotted a large tortoise in a glass case that was far too small. My husband and I had had tortoises as kids and loved the idea of them. Plus, he was so beautiful: big – probably 40cm long – with a yellow and black head and ruby-red spots, like jewels, on his legs. Impassively munching a stalk, he seemed like a grounded dragon, stuck in a box in a Brussels suburb. We exchanged a quick glance, then called over one of the sales assistants.
He was called John Paul II, the chap said, because he looked a bit like Karol Wojtyła. He cost us €500 – a fortune – and the only paperwork he came with was a receipt that read “Miscellaneous”. We travelled home, box on my knees, in a state of disbelief.
We renamed him Julius after Julius II; if he had to be a pope, I thought he should be a more extravagant Renaissance one. Red-footed tortoises are tropical, so they don’t hibernate, we discovered, as we rapidly became red-foot experts, sourcing heat lamps and studying his diet, grating cuttlefish bone over his greens and fruit, and offering him snails.
Julius spent summers in our small back garden and roamed the house in winter – all the vivariums we could find were far too small for him. He was a winning presence: curious and fearless, often getting improbably lost for such a big creature. We would sometimes find him dozing in a cupboard, like an exceptionally decorative rock. When anyone sat in the garden, he would lumber over to investigate. Reptile brains are supposed to be primitive, so I suppose it wasn’t affection, but something drew him to us. In return, we adored our mysterious housemate.
It would be nice if this were a happy-ending story; it isn’t. A few years later, we came home to the horrifying sight of Julius with his large penis sticking out. We took him to the vet, who was baffled, describing it as “an erection gone wrong”, but also excited. Manual reinsertion failed, so he decided to amputate: a first for Belgium. We waited anxiously for a call, which eventually came: Julius had survived. He came home to recuperate, but he wasn’t his old self: he seemed listless, disinclined to rumble around the house, and off his greens. My husband was travelling, so it fell to me to rub iodine on the amputation stump, upside down over the sink, grimly massaging as he struggled to escape. He continued to decline and a few weeks later he died, probably of a post-operative infection, or shock.
I used to tell this story for laughs – the receipt, John Paul II, the penis stump! – but it doesn’t feel so funny now. Julius’s death was the moment that I let go of my Gerald Durrell fantasy of having a house full of exotic creatures and started to think that mostly those kinds of animals have no place with us and keeping them isn’t a kindness. We still have tortoises – little European ones, who happily stomp around the garden and hibernate all winter.
I think of Julius like one of my son’s needy, always-ailing tropical houseplants: beautiful, extraordinary, wondrous, but not really meant for our grey, rainy lands.
