Soon Con had established a routine. Each day he was at work early to do an hour or so of emailing and to listen for the lioness’s first groans and rumbles. Then he’d go out to the refrigerated shed, where a bloody bucket had been set aside by the nightshift. It would be heavy with meat: a big beef bone, two whole plucked chickens. The corridor to the den would still be in shadow, cool and pungent.
He’d pause at the exterior bars, smelling, watching. Unlike Isak with his whistles and bangs, Con didn’t have to make a sound. She knew he was there.
Movement in the shadowy back of the cage – nothing dramatic, just a kind of lolling, side to side. She could be very silent when she wanted to be, almost delicate. Then two large lemon-yellow eyes, pale moons, materialising in the gloom. The suggestion of a massive head, lowered from the shoulders. Bigger, much bigger than the lion statues at the memorial; she might take his whole skull in her mouth. A guttural rumble filled the air between them and vibrated through his flesh – in his throat, in his eyeballs, in his groin. His heart sped up, pumping a rich new mixture. He could feel his pupils expanding, the hairs standing up on his arms and the back of his neck. Not a purr: a lush, continuous growl.
“Hello, girl,” he’d say, although he couldn’t hear his own words; the lion’s voice enveloped any other sound. It made the bars tremble like tuning forks. Beyond them, one layer of wire mesh, as thin as skin, separating the human from its ancient enemy. The animal on that side of the wire was designed to do one thing: demolish the animal on this, on his side. Con wasn’t brave enough to touch the bars. He took out the big key and tapped it once on the metal: a formal click of greeting. Now, the next part of the game.
He hauled the bucket up to the ramparts and cranked open the gate, whistled softly through his teeth, and tossed the meat down into the arena. He didn’t bother with the gloves these days, and his arms were red to the elbow and chilled by the time he’d cleaned out the pail. Above him on the slope he could hear the groan of the first tour bus pulling up. Although there was only one uncooperative lion left to pull the punters, still they came.
His communion with the lioness was unpredictable. Sometimes, he was allowed to glimpse only significant parts: a paw, a flank, an eye; as with the elephant in the fable, he could never see the whole. She’d wait for him to look away, then slip out and snag the meat, pulling it inside or into the shelter of a rock or bush. Often, though, she’d let him watch her eat through the observation window. Sometimes she’d lift her eyes momentarily from her bloody meal to meet his gaze through the glass.
Dreams no longer troubled his nights, although at times he felt awake and dreaming. Unwilling to go home, some evenings, he worked long past dark in his cubicle, conscious of how light streamed out of the office window, signalling beyond the fence. He’d read, or just switch off the computer and the lamp and sit blinking as the room settled. Sheets of paper on the desk glowed softly blue. When the moon was bright, he’d walk the grounds, letting himself quietly into the lion enclosure by the hidden side-gate. The walls of the den would loom above him, black against a blue-ink sky. He’d put one palm against the stone and feel his way around the curve, finding the iron grille, pulling back. The grass was soft and he’d stretch out on it, a few feet away from the bars. Inside, impenetrable darkness, smelling of straw and urine. It was warm here, as it would be at the mouth of a dragon’s cave. He couldn’t tell if she was close, or if she heard him breathing.
The shock of their first meeting hadn’t subsided. Since that first day, when Sekhmet’s slamming body sent a jolt through the cage bars and into his blood, Con had felt a kind of clarity. Walking home along the highway late at night, or sometimes after a drink at the restaurant, he felt sharply alert to light and shade, to things hidden, hiding, looking down from the dark mountain. The streetlamps burnt clear, like torches on a windless planet. Small sounds reached him from miles away: rustles, murmurs. He could smell the people dreaming in their homes below.
These days, it was frequently Con who came home to find Elyse asleep. Their schedules never coincided. He would slide in under the sheets, still cool and gilded from his moonlit walks, and press his nose to her shoulder, her armpit, her crotch, questing for scent, for something warm and animal. But here his senses were defeated. Snuffle though he might, he could trace nothing on her skin. Just the glassy odours of her perfumes, her waxen make-up and the astringent chemicals she used to take it off. She’d sleepily roll away from his seeking hands, rubbing her eyes and nose crossly, and muttering, “God, you stink.” Con knew it; he smelt like a zoo. He just didn’t notice it himself any more. “Go shower, please.” Then he’d go and scrub himself in the shower and apply one of her ointments or scents – something designed, he supposed, to make her more appealing to him – before returning to bed.
But on one warm night he came home hot inside from a drink with Thandiswa; there was alcohol and lion-purring in his blood. Instead of joining Elyse, he went out onto the balcony to sit and smoke and listen to the faintly luminous ocean hushing and shifting.
When he reached into his pockets for his cigarettes, he brought out instead the folded piece of paper that Mossie had given him. It unfolded like origami to show, on one side, an address in the suburbs, a time and the date. Beneath this information was a familiar picture: the rampant green lion, clamping in its jaws a yellow sun. On the back of the leaflet was a kind of verse. It read:
Welcome to the Green Lion.
In the wisdom of the alchemists
“The Green Lion eats the sun”:
Vitriol dissolves gold
In the Great Work
Illness is healed
Withered plants are revived
The dead brought back to life.
So do we seek to devour the energies
of the wild.
Con shook his head in irritation. Hippies. Animal nutters. The next Green Lion meeting, he saw without surprise, was the following evening. Underneath the picture, a handwritten phone number. Call me, said the scrawl next to it.
Mossie. Something inchoate, slippery, unfinished. She bothered him like a loose thread that needs to be snipped. A stack of papers that begs to be pushed straight. A little messy thing.