Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks. Alan Coren
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‘I didn’t want to do it,’ said George again.
‘I hate it when you kill females.’ She looked at the bronze horizon. ‘I hate it when you take it out on them.’
‘Don’t pity me,’ he said, ‘for Christ’s sake.’
‘She just calved. Is that why?’
‘I didn’t know she had cubs, I swear. When she came at us, I thought she was just one of the mean ones.’
‘I hope it was a clean shot.’
He pumped a used shell out of the Remington.
‘Some things you just don’t lose.’
‘You’re so damned clever,’ she said.
Two boys came up, grinning, with a basket between them.
‘I brought you a present,’ said George. He flipped open the lid. Inside there were three lion cubs; their eyes were still closed. There was something terrifying about their innocence.
‘You and your goddamned metaphors,’ she said.
He turned and walked into the tent. He pulled his bed a little further away from hers and sat down. He looked at the typewriter. Someday he would write about it, he thought. You can get rid of it when you write about it. He would write with symbols, so that when he was dead they would know he had been one of the big ones all the time. Turgenev was one of the big ones. And Flaubert. And Jack Dempsey. He was one of the big ones, too. And Ludwig von Beethoven. Turgenev and Flaubert and Dempsey and Beethoven and Peter Abelard and that old man in Key West who caught the biggest goddamned sailfish he’d ever seen in his life with a two-dollar rod. They were the great ones.
The next day he went up-country on a Government weevil survey. He did not get back for five months, and when he walked out of the bush, waving and calling the way he always did, it took six houseboys to get the lion off him.
‘You didn’t have to do that,’ he said. He lay on his back in the tent, his one good eye bright among the bandages. ‘You didn’t have to alienate her.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She smiled. She was looking better than she had for a long time. ‘Elsa’s funny with strangers. I had to send the other two away. I hope you don’t mind?’
The eye glittered.
‘As it turns out,’ he said, ‘you did the right thing.’ He paused. ‘How come you kept the third one?’
She did not answer. In the stillness, a baboon vomited. Elsa came in silently, lapped from a basin of pink gin, and padded out again.
‘You got her pretty damned well trained.’
‘We understand one another,’ she said. ‘That’s all it takes. Understanding. And a little love.’
‘That’s fine,’ he said. He tried to laugh, but the stitches dragged, and he fell back writhing. After a time, he said: ‘You girls have to stick together. That’s the way it is.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘That’s the way it is.’
That evening, they were closer than they had been since the time she worked the epidiascope at the Royal Geographic. They hand-wrestled, and laughed about the time he had smashed in the French ambassador’s face with a bottle of Pernod on the train to Pamplona, and they went through the Book of Job together, looking for a title for that short story he planned to write some day; he felt good, with the old, half-familiar thing. At ten o’clock, he put his arm round her, and as he did, Elsa came in out of the dark and looked at him in a way that made him put his arm down again.
‘What the hell,’ he said. ‘The stitches still hurt, anyway. I guess I’ll just take a walk before we turn in.’
When he got back, the tent was dark. He sat down on his bed to take off his boots. There was a sudden roar of thunder in his ears, and a stench of stale caviare, and something heavy struck him in the back. He fell across his wife’s bunk.
‘What happened?’ she said.
‘There’s something damned funny about my bed,’ he said.
‘Whose bed?’
He paused. ‘You’re not serious?’
‘I took your mattress out into the open,’ she said. ‘It’s a fine night. There are shooting stars. You’ll be happier there.’
At three a.m., the monsoon broke. It was a good monsoon, as monsoons go, but the thunder was loud, and nobody heard the shouting. The boys found George three days later, after the flood went down. He was stuck in a gau-gau tree eight miles away. After four months, the hospital in Dar-es-Salaam sent him home.
‘How was it?’ she said.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘They said plenty of people go around with one lung.’
‘It’s good for a man to know suffering,’ she said. A locust flew past, and she drew the Luger he always kept under his bed for medicinal purposes, and hit it three times. ‘Animals suffer,’ she said. ‘The strong survive. That is the law. That is the only law that counts.’
He looked at her.
‘I did a lot of thinking while I was in there,’ he said. ‘It isn’t good for Elsa to be brought up with human beings. She is a lioness. She is being deprived of her natural inheritance.’
‘I thought of that,’ she said.
They had raw okapi meat for lunch, but he let Elsa have his share, because she was a year old now, and had a way of crunching bones that put him off his food. After the meal, Elsa and his wife sat around roaring at one another.
‘I wish you’d teach me that,’ he said.
‘It’d only make Elsa more jealous,’ she said.
He did not see much of them after that. They went out hunting at dawn, and did not return until sunset. Once, he wanted to go with them, but they would not let him take his rifle or his trousers, so he stayed behind and thought about the good time before the war and the time Dominguin got both ears and a tail and the time before that when he was a zoology student in Camden Town and he knocked a policeman’s helmet off in Regent’s Park Road. That was one story he had saved to write. He looked across the dung-coloured scrub to the dead tree where the vultures waited, cleaning their beaks. Somewhere it had gone wrong, he thought. Something had come and it had waited a while, and then it had gone and it would not ever come back any more. And he was no nearer to knowing what it was than he had been on those pale mornings in Edgware in the days when his father had done that thing they did not talk about.
One evening, his wife came back alone. He saw her loping across the twilit scrub, growling. She stopped in front of him, and he saw the blood on her, and the bad marks, and the bald patch.
‘It is over,’ she said.
‘Over?’
‘She has found a mate.’
‘That’s how it is with kids,’ he said. ‘You bring them up, teach them everything you know, and they turn round and go off with the first creep who whistles at them.’
She laughed once, very high, and the vultures flew off in a rattle of black wings. She looked at him with eyes tinted yellow by the dying sun.
‘Is that the way it is?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s the way it is.’
‘I’m glad you told me,’ she said.