The Lion Tamer Who Lost

by Louise Beech

  The Lion Tamer Who Lost

  Louise Beech

  This is dedicated to my husband, my friend, my one and only Joe.

  And to my dear friend Michael Mann, who said when I went to him for research help that I should change nothing because ‘love is love, no matter who it’s between’.

  Destiny has two ways of crushing us – by refusing

  our wishes and by fulfilling them.

  Henri Frederic Amiel

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART ONE BEN

  1 ZIMBABWE: Home Is Always Near

  2 ZIMBABWE: Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

  3 ZIMBABWE: A Name that Won’t Be Forgotten

  4 ZIMBABWE: I’m Going To Lie Here

  5 ENGLAND: Somehow Right

  6 ZIMBABWE: Cutting Chains

  7 ENGLAND: The Train that Happened

  8 ZIMBABWE: A Lion Will Chase

  9 ENGLAND: The Nine Lives of a Cat

  10 ZIMBABWE: The Seductive Spell of Darkness

  11 ENGLAND: How Wishing Works

  PART TWO ANDREW

  12 Trophies of Bravado

  13 A Private Place

  14 A Nothing Father

  15 The House of Things that Don’t Belong Together

  16 Nothing

  PART THREE BEN

  17 ZIMBABWE: Something Must Die So Something Can Live

  18 ZIMBABWE: A Hello So Very Far Away

  19 ENGLAND: A Suitcase Full of Truth

  20 ZIMBABWE: A Letter from Home

  21 ENGLAND: Three Things

  22 ZIMBABWE: Here We Are

  PART FOUR ANDREW

  23 A Story of Forty-Three Peas

  24 Running through Nettles

  25 You Should Have Wished

  26 Dancing on Feet Bigger than Ours

  27 The Second Thing

  28 The Butterfly Effect

  29 The Biggest Mis-Word

  PART FIVE BEN

  30 ZIMBABWE: A Missed Sunrise

  31 ENGLAND: Turn

  32 ZIMBABWE: Goodbye Lucy

  33 ENGLAND: An Ideal and Restriction-Free Candidate

  34 ZIMBABWE: Will’s Letter

  35 ENGLAND: A Lifetime of Letters

  PART SIX ANDREW

  36 No More Questions

  37 Two Phone Calls

  38 The Lyrical Chambermaid

  39 The Lion Tamer Who Lost

  40 Dark

  41 This Isn’t Nothing

  PART SEVEN WILL

  42 The Woman Who Cried

  PART EIGHT BEN

  43 ENGLAND: Putting the Numbers in the Right Squares

  44 Love Needs No Passport

  45 Three Brothers

  46 Happiness

  47 Three Words

  48 Sempiternal

  49 Love Goes with Us

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Bruises

  Make a wish

  on my latest bruise.

  Boys like us

  have nothing to lose.

  Kiss them please,

  every last one.

  Will you still love me

  when they are gone?

  I’m not religious,

  but if I were,

  I’d kneel at your feet

  and say a little prayer.

  Here comes another,

  to add to all the rest.

  Count them please and choose

  the one that suits me best.

  Dean Wilson

  PART ONE

  BEN

  1

  ZIMBABWE

  Home Is Always Near

  Ben’s Grandma said she had never forgotten Jenny, her best friend at school, even though she disowned her in favour of Linda Palmer. She said the friends who turned you away are often the most irreplaceable.

  Andrew Fitzgerald, The Lion Tamer Who Lost

  Morning is Ben’s favourite time in Zimbabwe.

  He has been here five days. Each of the mornings so far, he wakes before the other volunteers and stands on his hut’s wooden decking in shorts, surveying what he secretly calls his: his sunrise, his land, his refuge. With only the hum of his roommate Simon’s snoring, and the buzz of insects, at this moment it is his. No one else rises this early to watch the colours come to life; no one else witnesses the sky turning from ash into flame, or the trees from shadow into textured browns, like a tray of different flavoured toffees.

  Ben enjoys the solitude of dawn more than the merriment of evening, when the volunteers prepare food and discuss the day’s events around a roaring campfire pit, eyes orange in the glow. He enjoys it more than the two walks he has done with the lions in the enclosures.

  The lions here look nothing like those he has seen in the circus or watched on TV documentaries. The first time Ben saw one pacing the enclosure fence five days ago – when he was dropped off with other new volunteers in a rickety bus – he thought it must have been the sun that lit his orangey fur with fire, or that the deep shadows had somehow inflated his size. But as he warily approached the high fence for the first time to look more closely, he realised that it was probably contentment that so increased him; being in a more natural environment than a circus ring gave him beauty.

  Now Ben stretches, offers his skin to this new day, scaring a skittish split-lipped hare loitering by a thorny scrub. He laughs. The hare freezes for a second and then lollops off. Beyond them both, black against the dawn, tepee-shaped lodges zigzag like teeth. Behind it are the fenced grassy enclosures where cubs live before they are moved to the surrounding ten-thousand-acre park to learn how to hunt and return to the wild.

  This is the Liberty Lion Rehabilitation Project. It is the kind of place Ben has wanted to visit since he was eleven. The kind of place about which he read endlessly before signing up. Just forty miles from Victoria Falls, the project site is parallel to the Zambezi River. The area was a hunting ground once, where warthogs and wildebeest were shot by cross-border trophy hunters. Now a national park, its riverbanks are a catwalk for elephant, buffalo herds, and lone antelope, which amble in the heat and dust, safe now from those guns.

  This land is a temporary asylum for Ben.

  He closes his eyes. The musky smell of hot animal fur drifts on the air. The muggy morning breeze seems to whisper something to him. He won’t listen. He didn’t come here to listen. Or to think. Or to remember. But the breeze tugs at his shorts, whispers in his ear. It sounds like home, home, home.

  Suddenly the smells of England that have faded since he got here come alive in the air, merging with lion shit and heat. His father’s cigarette smoke seems to rise from the parched ground. The stench of old beer has Ben opening his eyes again, sure there will be a pint sitting in front of him. He lets it in, just for a moment. He pictures the tiny bedroom; he sees the kitchen sink where he and his dad often argued; where they occasionally stood looking at the garden quietly; where Ben once dried dishes and talked about a future.

  No. Shut it out.

  He came here for the now. For this. He surveys again the new and beautiful land. Every day, every moment, he tries so hard not to think about…

  The door creaks and Ben turns.

  Simon emerges from the hut. Sniffing the air, he says, ‘I slept like a corpse,’ just as he has every morning since their arrival, and then breaks wind heartily. A solicitor from Essex, he’s on a break from his tricky divorce. He said on the first day that he would stay here until the mess was sorted out.

  Ben’s ownership of the dawn is over.

  ‘How long you been up?’ Simon asks.

  ‘A while. It’s so hot I just toss and turn.’
<
br />   ‘I noticed.’ Simon breaks wind again. ‘You’re bloody lucky I don’t knock you out of your bed, all the noise you make.’

  ‘What do you mean? Do I snore?’ Ben never has before.

  ‘No. You shout out all kinds of crap.’

  ‘Do I?’ Ben’s heart feels tight. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Can’t tell. Doesn’t make any bloody sense.’

  Ben exhales.

  Simon narrows his eyes at him. ‘Might be something about…’ he whispers, ‘…bury the bodies … hide the evidence…’

  Ben tuts. ‘Yeah, right.’

  Simon laughs. ‘I’m off for a shower.’

  Ben is sure he has never cried out in his sleep before. Certainly no one has ever told him he does. Shit. Time to eat. Time to forget the dawn. Time to start the day.

  By the time he arrives for breakfast in the communal lodge, the thermometer reads twenty-five degrees and flies have begun their constant climb. Breakfast is cold meats, fruit, and muesli, and will precede the daily enclosure cleaning, the bottle-feeding of cubs, and lion walking. Volunteers groggily exchange pleasantries at long, bare tables and, as is now habit, bemoan the early hour.

  Esther Snelling carries a plate of fruit and a mug of the thick coffee served from metal jugs and joins Ben where he sits alone at the far end of a table. A Newcastle NHS nurse who arrived two months earlier, she tells anyone who asks that she has come to care for animals instead of people, who swear at her and expect antibiotics for every ailment.

  She nods at Ben and starts to eat her melon.

  ‘Can’t get used to this,’ she says, hair unbrushed around her face, lips glossy with the juice, one hand fanning her face. ‘They said December would be about twenty-five, but it’s been thirty-five most days. A freak heatwave or something.’

  ‘I can’t imagine it not being hot now.’ Ben stirs his muesli.

  ‘To think I grumbled about the weather in England.’

  ‘I bet you’ll do the same again.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Esther pauses. ‘I guess I’m a bit homesick today.’

  ‘Understandable. You’ve been here…?’

  ‘Twelve weeks.’ Esther shrugs. ‘Isn’t it weird how quickly you forget home, though? I mean, when you first get here and it’s all really mental and new, you just don’t have room in your head for it. And then … you have one of those days…’

  ‘You do.’

  It is as though, for the first few days, Ben has closed the door on England, but now it’s open just a crack. He can see his dad’s house today. And now – suddenly acutely vivid – the place he lived before he came here. The place that smelt of bread on Wednesdays and had a 365-new-words-a-year calendar on the fridge and books in the living room. He squeezes his eyes shut, tries to push it away, but sees a flash of silver, rusted slightly. A box. A lid. Too big.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘Huh?’ Ben realises Esther is talking to him.

  ‘You were miles away.’

  ‘Tired,’ admits Ben.

  ‘That all?’

  He nods.

  On the first night, while relaxing by the campfire, most new volunteers share their reasons for being here. It’s almost a rite of passage. Esther admitted to Ben that she had said it was to escape a nursing job she’d come to hate, but that really there was a boyfriend she had left at home. Greg. ‘A knobhead’ was her description. Most volunteers came out with clichés about wanting to make a difference. Some, like her, were more honest, and admitted they were getting over a break-up or escaping a tedious job.

  When project leader Stig looked Ben’s way that night, asking the question, Ben said, ‘This place means freedom to me.’

  Then he cringed. How fucking corny. Sounded like Braveheart or something. But he wanted to give a vague enough answer to avoid the truth. Maybe he should have just said that he’d promised his mum when she died twelve years before that he would do this one day. That was the truth, just not the full truth.

  Stig had held his gaze, waiting perhaps for more.

  No one knows Stig’s real name. He has been Liberty’s course leader for ten years and lost most of his left hand to a lion called Bertram. When he speaks, it is always as though he is addressing a full room, even when there’s only you and him. It is like he sees himself as a lion when he puffs up his chest, shakes his long hair, and bellows facts.

  He turned to the circle of new volunteers that night and asked them, ‘What does freedom really mean?’

  No one spoke, possibly not wanting to give a wrong answer on the first day.

  ‘Freedom here,’ said Stig dramatically, flinging out his arms as though to emphasise the vastness, ‘is the lions being able to hunt and mate so that the next generation of lions don’t need us at all. Some have said we’re interfering with nature. And they’re right. We are. I won’t deny that. But the lion population has dropped by fifty percent in the last two decades, and we want to rectify that.’

  ‘Even though we caused it,’ someone near Ben murmured.

  ‘As you probably all know, in the wild most lions don’t live much longer than fourteen years due to injuries from territorial fights and a lack of prey. With our help, however, they often reach twenty.’

  The new volunteers nodded and applauded this.

  ‘So the lions know we’re their friends?’ asked a volunteer.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Stig. ‘They are predators, not your friends. Never let down your guard. You’ll have to establish your position as leader of the pride; draw out the lion’s natural survival instincts while suppressing their desire to savage you. Tame them without changing what they are.’

  Ben shook his head at that; surely that meant changing them.

  ‘You’re nodding but you don’t look sure,’ Esther is saying now.

  Ben snaps back into the present.

  ‘I’m just tired,’ he repeats more gruffly then he means to.

  She finishes her fruit wordlessly. Ben tries to think of something funny to say to lighten the mood.

  ‘This muesli is pure shit,’ he says after a while. ‘I reckon they use the sawdust from the enclosures.’

  Esther doesn’t say anything. Ben stares at the remaining mush, glad they are no longer dry flakes that he’ll feel compelled to count.

  ‘I read once,’ he says, ‘that lions used to roam the entire globe.’

  Esther looks thoughtful. ‘Even Newcastle?’

  ‘Even Hull.’

  ‘Jesus,’ says Esther.

  ‘There are a few pubs near me that they’d definitely liven up.’

  Esther smiles. ‘A few near me too.’

  Stig arrives and plonks himself opposite them with coffee and a plate of ham, and says, ‘Morning’, in his voice that can be heard by all. Soon he is joined by sixty-year-old Arthur, on his tenth voluntary trip, and a young florist called Jenny, who cries at night for her mum. Then John, the project vet, slides onto one of the benches.

  ‘We’ve had a call,’ Stig booms, his voice quietening the room. ‘One of our ex-volunteers lives not far from here and got word of two lion cubs chained inside a shack in a small village.’

  A chorus of sympathetic ahhhs fill the air.

  ‘He’s been to investigate, and says they’re being tormented by local village children. No one has anywhere to keep them safe, or any idea where their mother is. They’re a brother and sister apparently.’

  More ahhhs.

  ‘The female is particularly vulnerable and won’t let anyone near her.’

  ‘So,’ interrupts John, the vet, ‘we need two volunteers who are up for a fifteen-hour round trip to rescue the cubs and bring them back here. We’re gonna leave in an hour. Anyone?’

  Somehow right, Ben thinks.

  The words surprise him. They take him back to a library. To a mirror. A reflection. To a tapping foot. To the moment his life changed forever.

  ‘Anyone?’ repeats Stig.

  The large room is surprisingly quiet. Perhaps volunteers prefer the relative sa
fety of the project site and its daily routine. Tentatively Ben puts up his hand. This is the kind of adventure he has travelled here for, after all.

  ‘Great,’ booms Stig. ‘Who else?’

  Esther immediately attaches her own bravery with a raised arm.

  ‘Nice one,’ says Stig. ‘Get a good breakfast inside you – you’ll need it.’

  In silence, Esther and Ben finish their meal.

  ‘If this doesn’t get me right in the thick of it, nothing will,’ he says, as they carry their empty plates to the stacking area afterwards.

  She nods. ‘I’m nervous though. Never left the site.’

  ‘Yeah. Me too.’

  ‘We’ll meet at the front gates in an hour,’ calls Stig, on his way out. ‘Pack whatever you might need for such a journey. We’ll bring the camping gear and food and stuff, don’t worry about that. We’ll sleep a few hours there and return in the early hours.’

  ‘This is it then,’ says Esther.

  This is it, thinks Ben.

  2

  ZIMBABWE

  Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

  Ben could turn rubber balls into snow and frogs into rainbows, all from his wheelchair – but lion taming proved much more of a test.

  Andrew Fitzgerald, The Lion Tamer Who Lost

  Ben returns to his hut. For a moment, he regrets agreeing to go on the expedition. Is it too soon, after only five days, to be involved in such a huge endeavor? No. It isn’t. It is exactly what he came here for. Beneath the trepidation, his excitement grows.

  But what to take. A book? He didn’t bring one, and anyway he will be too distracted to read. How about a pen and paper? Should he use the time to write his first letter home? No. He isn’t ready for that, not by a long margin. But maybe he will want to record some of his thoughts on the journey; write up what he sees and experiences.