Duke kept staring back. Like the pause in a movie, before they kiss.

‘Getting achy,’ Julius said, knee buckling as he shot to his feet. ‘Better walk it off.’

‘We could go see the snow leopards,’ Duke suggested.

They left shirts and boards and strode along more overgrown paths, uphill towards the tower. Julius was fascinated by a faded billboard above the restaurant entrance. It showed a family eating fancy food from an orange tablecloth. Dad smoked a cigar, the kids wore shirts with giant collars and a bow-tied waiter carved meat from a rib joint: Dine with us at Antarctica Revolving Restaurant – Akure’s best views and finest food.

‘Views of what?’ Julius joked as Duke kept strolling. ‘The army barracks? Slum fires? Moonlight twinkling on that big lake of turds?

‘Such a cynic!’ Duke said, laughing. ‘Where is your Sunshine State pride?’

The next stretch was down the other side of the hill, through a huge abandoned enclosure. Its zinc roof panels had been stolen for scrap, and clumps of fungi had spawned on the exposed beams.

Julius thought he saw something move in a cage to one side.

‘That’s Eddie,’ Duke explained, as Julius squinted between rusted bars. ‘He was born here, just after the zoo opened.’

The aroma was urine and bleach and a perished tyre swung from frayed rope. Julius sighted the scrawny polar bear in deep shadow. Trying to cool himself by lying in a puddle drizzling from a green hose.

When Eddie moved into a triangle of sunlight, Julius noticed bloody sores around his feet and a mound where his right eye should have been.

‘They sold the other polar bears to a zoo in the Middle East,’ Duke said. ‘Nobody wanted Eddie, because his gammy eye scares kids.’

The big cats were further downhill. After so much decay, Julius was surprised to find a row of small but clean pens, with fresh paint on the bars and security cameras in the ceiling. The boys stopped by a cage with five pointy-eared lynx cubs, so tiny they’d yet to open their eyes.

‘Cute,’ Julius said, catching a wary glance from the cubs’ mother as he dropped down on haunches for a closer look. ‘What would one of these cost?’

Duke shrugged. ‘Not cheap, that’s for sure. With big cats, most owners want cubs. When they get big, the zoo takes them back and zaps them. White lynx and leopard fur is big money. Teeth, balls and claws go for Chinese medicine. The best cuts are sold as bushmeat, and Eddie eats whatever’s left over.’

‘That’s messed up,’ Julius said, shaking his head as he imagined this future for a baby lynx breaking into a super-cute yawn.

‘How’s it worse than eating cow or pig?’ Duke asked.

Further down, Julius looked in cages wriggling with snow leopard cubs and a single adult Siberian tiger.