The Lion Tamer Who Lost

by Louise Beech

  On Christmas Eve, while lying next to Lucy, he can’t avoid thinking of home. Will his dad eat his Christmas dinner alone? Ben can’t face this image, no matter how angry he is with him, and pushes it away.

  Ben turns over in his straw to find Lucy staring at him, her eyes bright gold in the dimness.

  ‘Merry Christmas,’ he whispers, as his watch reaches midnight.

  Now that Lucy no longer responds to Ben so savagely, and her chains have ceased their endless clanking, he talks aloud to her during their long nights together. He says the things that he just can’t say to Esther, or to anyone. In a cracked voice, Ben describes his early moments with Andrew. Describes how each time they saw each other it was as though some hand bigger than his had guided them together.

  ‘I never used to buy into that kind of fate stuff,’ Ben says in the dark. ‘I still don’t know if I do.’ He pauses. ‘But Andrew always followed an accident. That was how it seemed.’

  On their final night together – after eighteen days – Ben inches closer to where Lucy lounges. She is half asleep, in that in between place where dreams are close to reality. He moves so close that her breath, soft and uneven, tickles his ear. So close that he can smell the warm, furry heat of her tawny body. So close that she could tear open his throat if she chose to.

  But she doesn’t.

  He has made good progress.

  Then they both sleep for a few hours, undisturbed by slamming doors and mewling, hungry newborns. Ben wishes he might wake in the morning and find her rubbing her golden head against his. It doesn’t happen. She just stretches and views him with sleepy, half-lidded eyes. Ben’s disappointment fades; to have slept at her side and not be scratched to bits by dawn is enough.

  In the morning he goes straight to Stig.

  ‘I really think Lucy trusts me,’ he says.

  ‘That’s bloody incredible, Ben. I have to admit, I didn’t think it would happen. I’ve seen these things fail so badly.’

  ‘Can we remove those chains now?’ Ben asks.

  ‘Of course. That’s the easy part.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Now you have to let her go.’

  Stig picks up his empty plate and leaves. Esther joins Ben with her usual fruit and coffee. They nod at one another, but Ben is suddenly so tired he can’t speak. He knows Esther is shattered too, that she has been spending her nights with Chuma.

  ‘I got a letter from Greg,’ she says after a while.

  ‘Really? First one?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s actually quite well written. I was surprised. He’s only semi-literate.’

  ‘Esther!’ Ben laughs.

  Smiling, she says, ‘I know. But you’ve never met him.’

  ‘Why would someone like you be with someone like that though?’ he asks seriously.

  ‘Someone like me?’

  ‘Yeah. Intelligent. Funny. Kind.’

  ‘Oh, tell me more, Ben Roberts.’

  ‘Well?’

  Esther appears to think. ‘You can’t help who you love,’ she concedes, sipping her coffee. ‘I reckon you have to hope you get lucky and end up loving someone who’s half decent. Anyway, it’s definitely over between us. Me and Greg. I mean, I knew it was. It has been on my part for a while. I guess leaving in the middle of the night and going to another continent shows how I felt. But now he’s accepted it too. Even admitted what a dick he was.’

  Ben laughs. ‘“Dear Esther, I’m a dick.”’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘And you’re happy?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says softly. ‘What you gonna do today?’

  ‘I dunno. Sleep. Go see some of the bigger lions. I feel like I’ve missed a lot while being with Lucy. You?’

  ‘Same.’ Esther pauses. ‘I’m glad we did it though.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m glad we were the ones who rescued Lucy and Chuma.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Esther shakes her head at Ben. ‘Cheer up, gloomy face. It might never happen.’

  But if it’s meant to, he thinks. It will. It really will. Even if it takes a mis-written phone number. Even if it takes a derailed train. Even if it takes a car accident.

  7

  ENGLAND

  The Train that Happened

  Ben’s dad came in dreams and whispered, ‘Drop your toys on the floor and I’ll always come.’ And even though he had to travel such a long way, and in very snowy weather, he always did.

  Andrew Fitzgerald, The Lion Tamer Who Lost

  The nine forty-five train from York to Hull was fortunately travelling at low speed when it derailed near Doncaster. The impact damaged the buffet car roof, and one carriage overturned. Hand luggage, plastic cups and laptops got thrown around, and bags tore open, spilling out underwear.

  Ben missed this train.

  It was because of the black felt-tip pen with which he had defaced Andrew’s library book. Halfway to the station he realised that he had left it in his room. It meant something to him now; so he had to go back and get it. When he finally got to the station a throng of discontented commuters were pacing the platform, peering over the yellow danger stripe as though contemplating suicide. A man in a leatherette jacket said he hoped they would reinstate a schedule quickly; in Ben’s head the word aggregate replaced the word reinstate.

  That’s really aggregating.

  He blushed; Andrew must have thought him an idiot.

  He squeezed through the ticket gate, but an attendant stopped him, saying Ben couldn’t use his ticket on the next train. ‘It’s non-transferable,’ he insisted.

  Ben stared at his left nostril, which sprouted eleven grey hairs. ‘But that train crashed, so it didn’t really happen,’ he said.

  The attendant narrowed his eyes. ‘Didn’t really happen?’ He pulled a face like he’d tasted Marmite when he wanted jam. ‘Look, you’d best take a chance with the next one to Doncaster and go from there.’

  Ben didn’t believe in chance. He boarded the ten-thirty to Doncaster, found a seat near poorly maintained toilets, and chucked his bag in the overhead rack. This train really happened; it left on time.

  He checked his phone for the tenth time, just in case Andrew had called. Nothing. He put it back in his pocket; the disappointment stayed in his hand. His only escape was sleep. The train rocked and swayed and juddered and he shut his eyes and thought about Andrew, seeing the half-moon bruise on his arm, revealed as his sleeve moved, then hiding. He had awoken in the early hours to an image of Andrew’s foot pounding the chair leg. There was a thud-thud-thud of music from some other student’s room.

  That’s really aggregating.

  I’m writing about legs.

  Ben wondered how it would feel to touch Andrew’s thigh, to trace a finger along its inner flesh. Was Andrew thinking about him? Had he smiled at the phone number scrawled across the library book or had he closed it and never looked back?

  The train clattered and Ben opened his eyes. Looked down. Damn. The felt-tip pen had leaked black all over his pocket, forming a kidney-shaped stain. Damn. He stood, banging his skull on the overhead rack with a crack. Muffled within his jacket pocket, his phone started ringing. Ben scrambled for it. It might statistically be Andrew because no one else ever rang, and he had his number.

  It wasn’t.

  ‘What do you want?’ Ben asked his dad, dabbing at the ink with a tissue.

  ‘Just checking you’re not dead, lad.’ Ben could tell by his unruffled voice that he’d had his first morning drink. Though he had not been home in months, Ben could picture him at the sink, whisky in a World’s Greatest Dad mug and cigarette in hand. ‘Heard there’d been an accident.’

  ‘I’m still here.’ Ben gave up on the now-shredded tissue.

  ‘They said on the news it was a saturated track bed,’ said his dad.

  ‘What was?’

  ‘What caused the accident.’

  ‘I would have been on that train if it wasn’t for this pen.’
r />   ‘What pen?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’ Ben dropped the pen in a bin and resumed his seat.

  ‘So, you’re okay.’ Ben’s dad’s concern was rare.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Okay,’ said his dad, ‘I’ll see you later.’

  Ben put the phone in his pocket. Why had he rushed to answer it? Andrew wouldn’t call, and Ben couldn’t believe he’d thought, even statistically, he would. Of maybe ten girls that his friend Brandon had given Ben’s number to, only one had ever called him: Steph from Cardiff. Ben had endured her drunken groping, and then she had rung him. Thankfully she was involved with a tutor, so he got out of anything more.

  During a lecture once, Steph told Ben that while he could technically be defined as good-looking, something in the organisation of each feature on his face ruined it. She had whispered that his eyes were interesting, his mouth kind of childish, his nose robust, but that when combined, something didn’t quite work. Ben never went to another lecture with Steph. But he did spend a lot of time analysing his face in his small mirror.

  The train stopped in Doncaster. Ben waited for the stream of passengers to pass him, so he could escape and find a train home. He glanced out of the window. There, on a platform bench next to a kiosk, sat Andrew. Andrew from the library.

  Ben tried to get closer to the glass. Squashed between a mother with two babies in a buggy and an elderly man smoking a pipe, Andrew had a brown satchel on his knee, and was staring into space. For a moment Ben wondered if he was imagining him; surely the odds were stacked against him appearing in this station at precisely this moment. But Andrew’s soft hair lifted in the station’s draught as though waving.

  Ben pushed past the other passengers and stepped onto the platform. He was too late. Andrew had gone. Smoke curled from the old man’s pipe and one of the babies in the buggy waved fat hands to reach it. Ben’s thigh felt sticky where the ink had bled. Because of the pen he had missed a train that derailed and then got on one that stopped where Andrew was.

  Where had Andrew been going? Had he seen Ben, too? Could there actually be such a thing as fate? No. Ben didn’t believe in such stuff. And, anyway, what kind of fate brought two people so close to seeing one another again and then stopped it happening? A truly twisted kind.

  Ben sat on the bench to wait for a train. Andrew was the first person he had ever given his number to. The first man. But what had been the point? He would never ring and if he did he would probably just cruelly analyse the features of Ben’s face like Steph had.

  But Ben wasn’t good at forgetting people. He had tried to forget his mum. Forget the pain. She was just a statistic now anyway. One of those one-in-three. He thought of her in privacy, in the dark, where no one might observe his distorted face.

  It would not be easy to hide Andrew there, but he would if he had to.

  8

  ZIMBABWE

  A Lion Will Chase

  Really, the lion is doomed to lose.

  Andrew Fitzgerald, The Lion Tamer Who Lost

  One morning Ben wakes late and misses his sunrise. The exhaustion of nights on a cement floor with a restless lioness has caught up with him.

  Simon is shoving him, saying, ‘Come on, lazy arse. Not like you.’

  ‘What time is it?’ Ben asks, groggily.

  ‘Time you got a watch.’

  He swings his legs over the hammock edge, feeling drugged because he has slept so deeply. Then he remembers. Today is a huge day. After a month of bonding, Ben and Esther are going to lead their now sixty-pound golden wards from The Nursery to the long-grassed enclosures, where they will meet the other lions for the first time. Last night Stig finally severed their metal umbilical cords. Ben stepped away as he did, but Lucy just padded around the brick room, curious about the parts she couldn’t explore before.

  Ben showers and meets Esther for breakfast and then they head to The Nursery where Stig is waiting.

  ‘Ready?’ he asks them, handing them each a stick. Volunteers use them when walking with the older lions.

  ‘I guess,’ says Esther, taking one.

  ‘Not sure,’ says Ben, taking his.

  They go to their young lions’ rooms. Ben opens the door, glad it will be the last time. Lucy studies him. She neither growls nor backs away, but is still wary. She eyes his stick.

  ‘Come on, girl.’ Ben’s stomach turns at the thought that she could likely do him some serious damage now. ‘Don’t you want to explore the rest of this place?’

  She ambles through the open door. Ben follows her down the corridor. It’s best to walk slightly behind her so he doesn’t appear to be a threat. Lucy makes several detours to run into the other rooms and then back out again.

  Once outside, she is a new lioness. Her fur changes colour in the sun, from tawny to pure gold, and it is as if this affects her mood. She rolls and bounds and sniffs. When Chuma joins them, the two siblings rub heads. The cubs don’t look back at the straw-covered rooms they have been in for five weeks.

  The group can only walk so far together. As Lucy and Chuma enter their new high-fenced home, where they will hopefully attach to a pride, Ben and Esther must desert them. They watch with Stig from the other side of the fence, hoping these new members integrate. Ben wants to be at Lucy’s side, but this is not a moment for him to share. This must be what it’s like when a mother lets her firstborn child run into the school playground alone, he thinks.

  But Ben still half hopes Lucy will turn and look back at him in her new freedom. Acknowledge their bond. Instead her tail swings with a dismissive flick and she views the new land with curiosity. She does not belong to him.

  ‘She’ll likely stick by her brother for now,’ says Stig.

  ‘I’m glad she has him,’ says Esther.

  The siblings rub rippled fur and play-fight a moment in the grass. Then they head for a soily mound in the field’s corner, away from where the other lions group, each looking warily at the pride.

  Ben has only walked in the enclosure with the older lions a few times; Esther has far more, having been here longer. The first time he went in with Stig and three volunteers, Ben wore the necessary padded jacket and assumed the erect stance of a ringmaster, hoping his abject fear would not betray him, and that his stick would deter them. Stig insists every day that, although they are accustomed to humans, these lions are still territorial predators. He told Ben when he first entered the enclosure that he must stand tall and that whatever happened he must never, ever, turn and run; a lion will chase and will always win such a race.

  ‘Be aware of ankle-tapping,’ Stig reminded him too.

  Ankle-tapping is when lions try to trip up the volunteers. Stig insists it must be disciplined with a slap to the side of the face. It feels cruel to do this, but it is something a lioness will do to her naughty cub. Gabrielle, a frisky lioness, brought Joan, one of the more timid volunteers, to the ground last week and bit deeply into her thigh. It highlighted to the others the ever-present risk, but it upset Joan so much she left the sanctuary two days later.

  Once the lions reach eighteen months they leave the fenced enclosure to roam the outer reserve. It is then unsafe for humans to walk with them at all. To witness their progress, the volunteers have to travel in the protection of a truck. Though Ben hopes this freedom will come to Lucy one day, he also dreads the moment when he has to let her go completely.

  ‘Their bond will still be strong,’ Stig preaches now, as they all watch the siblings sitting together. ‘They won’t have forgotten one another in the separation. But Lucy must seek out other females in the enclosure now and hope they accept her. Lionesses learn from their mothers, remember. They learn to hunt with them from as young as three months. Obviously, Lucy is just past four months now, so the sooner she bonds with the other females, the sooner she can join them on a hunt, or else…’

  ‘Or what?’ asks Ben.

  ‘She might die when released.’

  ‘Why?’ asks Ben. ‘Can’t she learn to hunt alo
ne?’

  ‘Females hunt together,’ explains Stig

  ‘Why can’t Chuma be Lucy’s hunting complacent?’ asks Ben.

  ‘I think you mean companion,’ says Esther.

  ‘I said that.’

  ‘Chuma will join his own pride,’ explains Stig. ‘I hope the lionesses that have already formed attachments let Lucy in. See, she’s sniffing them out now. She knows what she has to do.’

  Lucy has run up to the group, leaping playfully around them, brazen, insistent. Look at me, she says. Accept me. None of the lionesses acknowledge her. Ben holds his breath.

  ‘Chuma will have to fight another male to assert his dominance,’ says Stig. ‘That’s his challenge.’

  ‘But he’s so timid.’ Esther purses her lips, swats a fly that lands on her forehead. She has tied her hair up and it swings like a tail. It is not dismissive though; one curl seems to beckon Ben. ‘What a shame he can’t just stay with Lucy. They don’t have parents, so they need each other.’

  ‘Siblings have to be separated before they’re two and reach sexual maturity.’ Stig walks the perimeter as they follow, poking the grass with his stick. ‘Otherwise they’ll mate. And this is best done outside their own family to avoid inbreeding depression.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asks Esther.

  Ben falls behind while Stig explains that it is reduced fitness in animals because of breeding with relatives. ‘In some parts of Zimbabwe, the cheetahs are so inbred that a skin graft taken from one can be put on another with virtually no chance of rejection.’

  Esther looks enthralled.

  A rare cloud drifts in front of the sun and Ben thinks of saying that maybe this is a good thing. Maybe it means lives can be saved; such donations are sometimes necessary. Instead he watches Lucy. She gives up vying for the attention of the other lionesses and sits next to her brother on the hillock, rubbing her face against his, their coats now as glossy as blood-soaked grass.