Night of the Animals(20)
“But I’m not indifferent,” he said. “Look at me!”
These lions could cleverly walk a line between sounding confident and subtly mistreated at the same time, thought Cuthbert. Arfur made him think back to long ago, to the pushy assurance of the once-fresh “New Labour” party chap, Tony Blair, but a version of him like the statue he’d seen during his first zoo visit—elderly, wizened, skin burnished like a body from a peat bog.
“Taking Britain forward is really the only choice, and lions simply must lead the way!” Arfur said to Cuthbert, groaning slightly, and goading, goading, goading. Panthera leo had given more to Britons than any other species, Arfur claimed, and “never once” complained or demanded reward.
Cuthbert countered: “Well, what . . . what about, say, England’s field voles? They’re far more common than you, these days. They’re millions and millions of souls. And they’re not mithering at me like dying ducks in a thunderstorm—no, not that lot. The voles ’ave no, like, program as you lot’ve got.”
Arfur retorted: “You make our point, actually, Cuddy. You can’t be tiny and common and very well stay regal, can you? The English aristocracy do things—obstinately. A field vole sounds like something from Siberia.” But to Cuthbert, Arfur seemed less obstinate than pigheaded.
A few nights before, Cuthbert had admitted to the lions that he feared them. The aggrieved tone of their thoughts had unsettled him. Gravel-voiced and glottal, they were among the first creatures (perhaps because Cuthbert feared them most) to send messages to him, no matter where he went in London, no matter the time. They seemed to be able to reach out and finger him.
“You’re really not much of a being, are you?” Arfur once observed. “We could master a whole country of Cuddies.”
Cuthbert didn’t like that. “You canna even master your cage. I’m the free one, aren’t I?”
“Ha!” said Arfur. “Thus speaks the Solunaut. You wait. You haven’t even visited us, have you? Let us out first, Cuthbert.”
“I was preoccupied. There were otters . . . I . . . I needed to see.”
“Nonetheless, we require immediate release, my friend. Otters! Who cares about otters?”
Cuthbert sighed. “I do.”
“But mark my words, we lions are going places—you’ll see.” Arfur added, “I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if we”—he cleared his mucky voice—“if we reclaim Alexandria someday.” Arfur coughed, clearing his throat with a rumbling grunt. “Soon. And we’re not really in a cage, are we? Just undo our enclosure. It’s more a kind of moated theater of sorts.”
“It’s still a cage. And you’re in one because you’re dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” Arfur whined. “We’re the last lions in the last zoo on earth.”
As bedraggled and amusingly haughty as Arfur could sound, lions nonetheless, as a group, still terrified Cuthbert. In childhood, he would see David Attenborough on the telly, explaining how lions used group-hunting tactics. He still recalled one program in which a lioness plunged its entire head into the open skull of an elephant. When it pulled out, Cuthbert recalled, it bore the wet-haired, sated look of a swimmer who’d just swum a dozen laps.
“You’re bloody war beasts,” Cuthbert said to Arfur at one point. “You’re walking terror. I think it’s best to let the jackals out first.”
“No . . . first!” Arfur spat. “We’ve kept this island safe. We’re ‘lionhearted,’” he added with a soup?on of mockery. “Don’t blame us for defending national interests.”
For a moment, Cuthbert pictured his father, swilling lager in the old sitting room, raising his battered Spode mug from the queen’s coronation, and belting out the words never never never never shall be slaves as the Proms blared on television. So much for lionhearted.
Still, Cuthbert felt a serious sympathy for the lions. Their images still ennobled pound coins, chocolate bars, passports, treacle tins. He himself knew every detail of the three Plantagenet lions passant on England’s football jersey. Then there were Landseer’s pigeon-shite-speckled quartet of bronze males at Trafalgar Square, supporting Great Britain’s public imperial phallus. A thousand drainage-spigots shot through lion mouths on churches. Countless misericords, crests, hallmarks on wedding bands—the country was overrun by an animal which had not been native to its soil since the Pleistocene. Dar es Salaam, Johannesburg, and even Tehran, one might argue, held legitimate claims on the image. Rome could offer a certain logic for leophilia, perhaps. But London? Since Henry Plantagenet had housed his lions in Tower Menagerie, in 1235, the lions had lent England muscle it could not find in itself, at least not until the massive remilitarization under Harry9. And in the country’s last zoological project, its lions lived in a cramped, bewildering terrace covered in dirt. The case for change was strong.
“In one way or another, we have been the clawed scepter of all your kings and queens, and surely, with the great King Henry, our time has come.”
“Oi’m mulling it,” Cuthbert had told them. “If it’s good for the king and country, and all that. You do sound like you’ve been . . . in the wars,” he said, echoing his doctor, whose ministrations seemed so far away now. It was all he knew to say. The lions just seemed too large a problem to deal with, for now.