In the sunny courtyard, the animals are arranged in tableaux, in naturalistic postures. They are sheltered from the sky by awnings, but are open to the air; you can go up close. One mother rests her toddler on the back of a springbok, and Con asks her not to do that, for fear of damaging the antique model. But generally, the mood is relaxed. The children are encouraged to touch and experience: stroke the fur, put their fingers in glass eyes, pass their hands between the rows of teeth. Things have changed around here, since the Lion House became the Green Lion Centre, devoted to the interdisciplinary conjunction of Arts and Natural Sciences, under the joint auspices of the Departments of Environment, Recreation and Culture. As part of the rebranding, the golden lion at the entrance has been given a tasteful green tarnish. Dmitri, beautifully mounted in a reclining pose, has pride of place at the entrance, next to Elmien’s ticket booth.
Generally, the development has been a success with the public. The cafeteria is open again, and families are sitting in the sun under parasols, sipping milkshakes. The crowd is cheerful, diverse. Some have t-shirts featuring the faces of kittens or wolves. They are young and old, from all walks of life, but all clearly animal people.
The new focus has been good for staff morale, too. The money crisis is over now. The work is light; these animals don’t need swilling out or bloody feeds. Most of the old cleaning staff got their jobs back, the cafeteria waiters are busy, and there are even some new volunteers. Thandiswa has moved on, of course – she’s working at the Transfrontier Park now. Amina’s had her hair cut, and taken out the greys.
Everybody seems rejuvenated. Even Gerard’s poor animals have been given a lick of paint: they are brighter, friendlier, less macabre, their spots and stripes definitely more vivid. This was the work of Elyse and her friends. With that theatrical energy he still finds alarming, they’d taken up needles and thread, paint and latex, and knocked Gerard’s stuffy old trophies into some more appealing, kid-friendly shape. And why not? It is, after all, a Centre for Arts and Science now, and taxidermied animals are its perfect emblems. Never particularly rigorous scientific documents, these ones are now almost wholly imaginary creations.
The only specimen not to have found a place here is the young lion with its tragic green fur. Con keeps that in his office, to remember. He is growing accustomed to it, and often spends time staring into its one button eye. Speechless, it offers him the tennis ball, a game of catch that can never begin or end.
A figure appears up on the battlements of the den, looking down on the crowd. Hybrid: a muscular human fitted with a tail and a swept-back pair of spiralling horns. His skin is spotted with eyes of black paint. He lifts some kind of trumpet – no, it’s a kudu horn – and winds it. It is only when he speaks, summoning them inside to the performance, that he is recognisable as Musa, of the resonant voice and wandering hands. The crowd gets to their feet and makes their way out of the sun and into the den.
Inside, the space is as dark as ever, but filled now with neat ranks of chairs. They’ve taken down the glass viewing pane; the grass enclosure, opened up, functions as a stage. Ramps allow access to seating around its edge, so the faces of the audience ring the space. Small children race down the aisle to sit at the very front. Con stays back, though, taking his place at the rear of the dim auditorium.
Another sounding of the horn, and in the subsequent silence Elyse’s friends come stalking out, each in creaturely form, in striped leotards and fake-fur manes and hooflike shoes that dangle from their limbs like weights and clop to the ground. But the costume cannot conceal the humanity of the bodies, naked beneath the paint: lithe, hairless, clever.
They dance instructively; they dance the fables. He watches the figures stretch and swivel on the stage and Con is filled once more with a kind of uncomprehending wonder. They dance in a row, the stork dance, the frog dance, the dog dance; it’s hard to make out which one is Elyse, but he identifies her by her long stork-legs, the stork bill that sways before her face. They do this every Friday and Saturday evening, with a Sunday matinee. It is a good gig, regular work. In the dark he’s never sure if Elyse can see him; he keeps very still.
All around him the children breathe and smile. They are decked in their mascots, their familiars. They all have little metallic robots dangling off their bags now; the fashion for furry animals is gone. Their faces are lit by the glamour on the stage.
Elyse has now shed her animal form and is dressed as a little girl, with pigtails. Despite her tallness, she seems plausibly childlike, her movements unformed, her face limpid. He is enthralled as ever by her transformations. He likes to watch her like this, with no way to speak or be spoken to.
Musa is sonorously narrating a story about a lion who came to a little girl and held out his paw to be healed. Elyse walks through a field of waving grasses, artfully created by banners of silk held by actors on either side of the stage. At the sound of a recorded roar she throws up her arms in surprise, dropping her bunch of wild flowers. The children scream with delight.
When the lion enters stage left, the effect is gorgeously achieved: the animal is amazingly realistic, its limbs manipulated by four silent black-clad players with sticks. The lion pauses, bows, roars, attacks – and limps. First it does a rolling circuit of the front of the stage. The puppeteers are excellent. They have observed the movements of a lion’s walk so well – not too fluid; there is the suggestion of heft and muscle there, and the pain of a wounded paw. The unwillingness of a heavy creature, trapped. Con sees a zoo animal, wearing a track along the front of a cage. At the limit of the stage, the lion lurches, its giant head swinging out, almost far enough for the kids in the front row to touch or imagine being touched by a string of lion spittle. Again, they squeal on cue.
It is close enough for Con to see how the lion has been made – a cunning articulated frame of canvas and wood. Its jaw is hinged, its eyes substituted with brown glass orbs that are too big, cartoon style. As the great head sways past, its big blank eyes meet his for a second, but there’s nothing there except his own reflection, caught in a too-small chair among the rows of human young. The glass eyes reflect the light from a camera-phone flash and the image is dissolved. The lion turns away.
On stage, the play takes a turn for the charming; the lion goes to the girl and lays his head in her lap. The children are enthralled. One of the littlest rises involuntarily from his seat and goes forward to be close to the stage. “It’s so nice for them to see the animals,” murmurs one of the parents next to him.
Con rises and goes out the back of the auditorium, into the courtyard grown cool and dim. Behind him, the den fills with a deep recorded purr.
He sits at the edge of the courtyard, where there is a view of the city below, and lights a cigarette. It is on evenings like these that he feels the need. When he turns away from the view, he sees a small woman on her own, standing before the great eland, staring up at it with hands folded before her. “Oh, but he is beautiful,” she says softly to no one in particular. She moves on to the zebra, the oryx. She does not let a single one pass by without her notice. At last she circles back to the eland, and lays a hand briefly on its enormous muzzle. Then she leaves to go back to wherever her home may be. Turning, before she vanishes into the dark, to give Con a little wave, which he returns. It is not Mossie, but one of these days it might be. Con can easily see her here with the members of the Green Lion Club, greeting the animals, performing their stations of the cross. He’ll be glad to see her.
Although Sekhmet is gone, she still features regularly in newspaper reports. She is sighted now and then in ever more fantastical circumstances: scaring off muggers in an alley off Long Street, or leaving her footprints at the tomb of the Muslim saint in Faure. She is held captive in a backyard shack in Lavender Hill and used in dogfights. Further afield, a group of boys at initiation school in the Transkei reported that she came strolling past their huts in the middle of the night. She is kept by a famous playboy in his Sandton penthouse, brought out at parties wearing a jewelled collar. There was one sighting of Sekhmet in Durban, walking down the beachfront at sunrise. She has never been photographed.
There have been no further confirmed attacks. A small bronze plaque in the courtyard, close to where Con sits now looking out at the city, commemorates the short life of Nadja Baard, the child who died. Con makes sure to keep it polished. Often there are wild flowers laid on the stone, although he has never seen who puts them there.
For Con, the lioness is everywhere. He sees her form slipping around every corner, her eye peering from every window, her growl behind the traffic rumble. Right now, she’s watching him from the mountainside, hidden by the leaves; he feels the weight of her gaze upon his back. At other times, it’s as if he himself is looking through her eyes, viewing the world through a lens of golden fluid. He can see for leagues. Sometimes, on the other side of the fence, he glimpses things from the corner of his eye – a swaying branch, a child in the leaves, a tawny flank. An eye, a wing. But he doesn’t look up, much, at the mountain any more. There is no need.
He likes it here best late at night, after the actors have left, when the crowds have gone as well, when Amina has taken the funders round the corner to the restaurant and it is just him alone. There are paths to patrol, exhibits to clean. He is responsible for these old animals. He moves from one to the other, dusting, touching, stroking the wounded pelts, noting which pieces need repair. It is important to preserve things. Many of the species in the collection have vanished from the world, lost completely now. A few hundred years, Con thinks, looking at the eland, who is staring out onto the Flats with a melancholy to rival Rhodes’. That’s how long it takes. In another hundred years, how many more creatures will have attained this desiccated calm? Imaginary beasts, existing only in museums of lost and impossible things.
He sits in his office and works into the night, the lamp throwing its small circle of heat around him. He may be here for a long time. He may grow old at this desk, may grow a long beard like the saint. But one day, there will be a lioness in the corridor, her footfalls soft. He will not hear her coming. Already perhaps she is outside, approaching, still small in the background of the picture; but soon she will be here. Much larger, much closer than she appears.